I like it

The Jerusalem Post has a logical suggestion which would have lots of good consequences. Funny thing is, I thought we already used Israel as a staging area and base for our operations in the Mideast. Guess not. The only possible objection I can see is that Israel has made a lot of compromises with fundamentalist Judaism which would not be allowed to any US state. But the overall point is great. If we're being blamed for siding with Israel all the time, why not go all the way and get all the benefits as well as all the harm from such an association?

Vote?

I sent the following email to "yourvotecounts.org":


How can you say my vote counts? When was an election last decided by one vote? If this ever happens, then one vote will count. In every election decided by more than one vote, a single vote does NOT count. Do I have to spell this out? It makes no difference to the outcome. Whether I vote or not changes nothing. Nobody gets into office, no referenda are passed or defeated based on whether I vote or not. I have no reason, whatever, then, to vote. Why should I?

Do I hear you saying, "But what if everyone thought like that?"? Well, what if they did? Each would be right, with reference to his own vote. The illusion that one vote counts has only one consequence: it gives power to politicians who make their living by swaying more than one vote, that is, by "making other people's decisions for them." But, hey, didn't your intro say we didn't want people to do that?

The site has a slick flash intro obviously aimed at the younger set. I worry about being so anti-voting. I don't really have any other system to suggest to replace voting, but that doesn't allow me to ignore its irrationalities. Maybe the best point I can make is that, because voting is so irrational, a government selected by such a system should have as little power as possible.

Somebody's not paying attention

This NYT article (via Jane Galt) chides the administration for not forcing the Turks to "address undemocratic practices" when we are enforcing a "democracy agenda" on Iraq by military means. Did the editorial writer ever hear of the "war on terror"? I could have sworn I'd seen it mentioned, even in the Times, that we were primarily interested in changing the Iraqi regime because they might attack us with WMD and could hand off these weapons to Al Qaeda, who we know would have no compunctions about using them on us. Reforming their political system is a definite minor objective of this long-delayed war. And however democratic Turkey might be, if it were threatening to use WMD on us, we would attack it as well. The idiotarians are blinded by their hallucination that America is only out to build an "empire" by imposing its version of democracy on everyone who opposes them. If they admitted for a moment that Iraq might actually pose a threat, their vision would evaporate.

And for the editor to say that 9/11 underscored for Americans the dangers of embracing pro-Western autocrats in the Islamic world without regard for how they rule at home makes no sense at all. Does this mean if we had invaded Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria et al., and converted them to democracy earlier, 9/11 would never have happened? Can anyone actually believe such nonsense? Was our big mistake after the Gulf War not failing to continue to Baghdad but failing to force the Kuwaitis to change to a real democracy? Does bin Laden have ANY respect at all for democracy? Who writes this stuff?

Aggresseur Musulman

LeMonde is reporting that the guy who stabbed the gay Socialist Mayor of Paris was a Muslim who didn't like "politicians" or "homosexuals". Gee, I've heard of people being anti-gay but, hating politicians?? Weird. Of course everyone jumped to the conclusion the "attentat" was carried out by one of those "LePen rightists". You don't think there could be some reason to think that Islam had something against gays, do you? Certainly they would never, for instance, kill them by pushing walls over on them or anything. It'll be interesting to see how Chomsky, Sontag, Fisk and Said blame this on the US. Oh, and that little matter of blowing up an oil tanker in Yemen. I'm sure C,S,F &S will come up with a perfectly good reason why terrorists should target a FRENCH tanker. Time to crank up the appeasement machine, Chirac. You must have been slacking. Remember, don't make them mad! Say, wasn't Chirac also shot at during the Bastille Day parade and weren't eight - EIGHT - city councilmen killed in Nanterre recently? Time to pass another gun law!!

Nepal PM overturned makes political chaos

No, that isn't a puzzle clue, it's a headline (sort of). Which reminds me, this blog was originally supposed to be about puzzles. Some day I'll get back to them. I've got about a dozen of them backlogged on my clipboard.

I thought it was odd, though, that a full-fledged political crisis can go by the American media so completely. What if Queen Elizabeth had dismissed Tony Blair? She can't, you say? Well, what if she did anyway? What would happen? Crisis, that's what. And lots of reportage all over.

Darn GenX commercial

I heard that idiot commercial for Lee or Wrangler or whatever jeans again. It's the one that uses a few bars from the CCR song "Fortunate Son" for the exact opposite effect that the song had originally. It's made to seem patriotic, although the real song went on from the commercial's "Some people wave the flag, ooh that red, white and blue" to say "It ain't me, it ain't me" and to criticize the deferments and political influence that kept rich college kids and politicians' sons from being drafted. I keep thinking, how can they be so stupid as to think that's really a patriotic song? It's worse than the usual commercialization, such as, to name some hypotheticals, the makers of Viagra might use the bars from Bob Dylan's song "Hard Rain's gonna Fall" where Dylan says "it's a hard, it's a hard .." and stop right there. Or the makers of Miracle Gro might use "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" as a lead in to introducing their product to bring the flowers back. Those would be just philistines picking up on a popular line. The makers of the jeans commercial know exactly what they're doing. And as a member of the '60s generation, boy am I ticked off about it!

The GenXers have grown up their whole lives listening to the myth of the '60s, how wild and free everyone was and how we resisted the war machine, man. They're tired of it. So how better to appeal to the generation now in its thirties than to diss their parents' pretentions by robbing the '60s music of all its tiresome political meaning? All the GenXers are about is a good beat anyway, that's all they've got the brains to understand. So just find a good beat and smuggle in the subliminal message that "all that stuff your parents are always squawking about is crap, anyway". What generation doesn't like to hear that? Of course, you have to be careful. You can't attack someone like Bob Dylan or Peter, Paul and Mary head on. They have too much mythic power. So you choose a less well known song from a less well known band and just trash it. That'll show those ex-hippie losers!

Camel'sback-breaking straw

Silent Running (formerly War Now) had a post about the California jury's 28 Billion dollar liability verdict against tobacco companies. So I had to reassure them with the following comment:

I wouldn't worry about it. The award will be reduced substantially, if not set aside completely and remanded. And even if it goes through, most of it will probably go to - you guessed it! - subsidies for tobacco farmers, like in North Carolina!! But this idiotic verdict may be the straw that breaks the camel's (ha!) back by letting people know that not only is it dangerous to drive tobacco companies bankrupt - which is what would happen. It's at least as dangerous to give billions of dollars to the scumbag lawyers who would litigate such a fraud. Next they'll be coming after anything you can name - obsessive TV watching - overeating (already happened) - sex compulsion ( sue the makers of Viagra!) - alcohol, of course - sugar - hey, how about reading comic books - that's addictive and rots the brain?! I even know a lot of people who are addicted to politics. Take away their midterm elections and they'll watch races for dogcatcher in Grand Forks, North Dakota. That can't be good. And - and - WATER!! yes !!! Too much of it and you can't even breathe! How many people died last year from water poisoning? Thousands. We even have a separate word for it - "drowning". People are even selling water in grocery stores, profiting from the addiction they have foisted on the people. And it's really the same water that comes out of the tap. So having "Water Companies" supplying water to everyone - you don't even have to go out on the street and look for anyone to buy it from - addicts everyone to this product that they then sell for megabucks. Priced Perrier lately??? But the thing we all crave most and MUST have and will do anything to get is ... wait for it ... AIR!! Yep, AIR ADDICTION is on us like a plague. We have to breathe every second and who knows if that's really good for us? After all, everybody who breathes air eventually dies!! SO IT'S FATAL!!! The makers of air must be brought to account, must pay for this murderous substance they have loosed on the Earth!!

The Real Reason

I knew there had to be more going on in the Torricelli mess. The national Democrats would never have insisted that he leave simply because of bribe-taking. He hadn't actually been indicted or convicted, after all. And his poll numbers weren't all THAT low. I believe Peggy Noonan, in this Wall Street Journal article, has hit upon the problem:

Why was he leaving now? Because he had concluded staying might hand the Republicans a new Senate seat. But it was immediately clear that the timing was related to new allegations that he had attempted to get a pardon from the Clinton White House for a supporter who'd given him $20,000 in illegal contributions. He asserted that withdrawal was his idea, but it quickly appeared to be more largely the result of decisions by national Democratic leaders. He suggested his mistakes were small ones when they were essential ones: the gross peddling of political influence. He suggested the people of New Jersey had been ungenerous in not forgiving him. And there were embarrassing moments such as his apology to Bill Clinton "for not having his strength." ( my bold)

The Clintons could not afford to have another hashing over of their pardon fiasco so close to a national election. And who knows? There might have been some smoking gun in the situation that would have damaged Hillary's chances for national office. If I were a Republican strategist, I'd be looking very closely at this situation. And if I were the Clintons, I'd remember that Torricelli has something on them forever. If, God forbid, a Hillary administration ever happens, look for the grant of an ambassadorship to Torricelli to some country that appreciates his talents for double-dealing, like Pakistan. I don't think we've heard the last squeal of this weasel.

Gout Chronicles

I don't usually blog about my personal experiences, but I've been living with gout for about ten years now and I was thinking today how strange a disorder it is. You never know when you wake up in the morning whether you're going to be pain-free or, if you have a pain, whether it's going to be in your knee or your ankle or your big toe or even the cartilage of your ear. Combine this with the fact that my gout medicine puts me to sleep and the syndrome poses some interesting psychological and physical challenges. I can be springing around like a young lamb one morning and by afternoon be limping with my knee feeling like it's got a nail stuck through it. Then I take a pill and in a few hours the pain is gone and I can't stay awake at six o'clock in the afternoon. The sheer randomness and intensity of the pains puts me constantly on my guard and grateful for any pain-free hours I am granted. I only wish I could make better use of them. Sometimes, however, the best use of "normal" time is to enjoy yourself to the max. That's what I want to do when I'm afflicted. It would be a betrayal of my suffering self to drone and drudge when I could be gamboling. So that's what I shall continue to do.

Deja vu

Why does this article remind me so strongly of the 2000 election? Why do I feel that the Democrats are grinning broadly at seeing the Republicans going to the US Supreme Court again after an adverse ruling from a state Supreme Court? Is it because they got so much mileage out of the last time, by claiming that the voters of Florida had been disfranchised by the "conservative" "unelected" Supreme Court? I don't know that's true, but they certainly have been whining about the election having been "stolen" for years. Now, if the USSC rules against them, and if they lose the NJ seat (probable) and if that loss means they lose control of the Senate, they'll be able to whine for more years about the "undemocratic" Court. Their party line now is that they voters in NJ "deserve" to have a "choice". Like the third parties don't offer a real choice. Or like Torricelli's name on the ballot wouldn't offer a choice. And if it doesn't, like it's anybody's fault other than the Democratic Party high muckamucks who kept him in the running and then forced him to drop off the ballot. Oh, well, there's no point in anticipating what idiocies liberals are going to be mouthing to convince themselves of their pain, as Dylan says. That way lies madness.

Daschle and Biden fade away

Why does this article seem to me to signal the end of Democratic dominance in the Senate and relevance in the national debate, at least about the war? Maybe because Daschle and Biden cancelling press conferences and hiding hardly seems like the act of politicians who have any faith at all in their ability to get their point of view out to the public. Maybe without the Torch all the fire's gone out of their knee-jerk oppositionism to whatever Bush wants. Can we now call Lieberman the party leader? And where does this leave Clintoon? He's hardly Lieberman's favorite pal.

Update

Mark Steyn agrees with me in this column (via Andrew Sullivan) from a couple of days ago.

Mulligan II

Former New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg is apparently going to run in place of Torricelli if the legal pretzels can be untwisted. But I just heard a sound bite or two from Lautenberg on Rush's radio show. He's incoherent. He's practically senile. I know, it's New Jersey, but what if he flames out? All Forrester has to do is challenge him to a debate. It's not impossible that the Democrat smoke-filled room boys will realize in a few days that Lautenberg has a sponge for a brain. But of course, then, by the Torricelli logic, they can just ask him to step down and appoint someone else onto the ballot. Right? It sure is easier to get things done when you don't have to worry about those stupid primary voters. Heck, the voters couldn't even figure out that Torricelli was the world's biggest sleaze and didn't have a chance. That's right. It's the voters' fault! They had their chance and they blew it. Imagine, nominating someone that unelectable! Why, you would think someone in the Democratic party gave them the impression that Torricelli was a good candidate and a splendid representative of the Democratic party by campaigning for him:
Reports are circulating that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (who recently campaigned for Robert Torricelli in Trenton, telling voters that, "You can't possibly appreciate the job Torricelli does") and New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine (who at the same time declared that he had "never been prouder to be on a dais as I have this afternoon with the leadership you've got in the state of New Jersey") will jointly propose a novel tribute to the career-end of New Jersey's now-departing senior Senator.
Or by, for instance, having him give the Democratic response to Bush's Saturday radio address to the nation, or something!

Rand and Enron

USAToday has an article (via The Objectivist Center) about business executives returning to "Atlas Shrugged" for a philosophical boost because of the corporate scandals bringing down the wrath of government on all businessmen. It's the clearest exposition of the dangers of cooperation between business and government that I've ever seen in big media. I had to laugh at the cavilling from the advertising industry and academia (No!!! I'm shocked!):

Others see it as pie in the sky. "Ayn Rand creates a perfect capitalism, which in my mind relies too heavily on individual integrity to work," says Nicolas Boillot, president of ad agency Hart-Boillot. "There are those who are looking for a quick buck and willing to compromise their integrity for a price. Perfect capitalism is as attractive and impossible as perfect communism. The greedy and lazy will ruin either system for the rest."

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Leadership Institute at Yale University, said executives who take refuge in the capitalist utopia of Atlas Shrugged are "reading themselves into a trance of defensive self-delusion."

To say Ayn Rand thinks that capitalism relies on individual integrity is like saying that Ignatius Loyola figured that the spread of Catholicism should be left to individual piety. Perfect capitalism is working capitalism. If it doesn't work by depending on each man following his own self-interest, it isn't capitalism. But even such mistaken and ignorant criticism is better than the vicious unsupported insults that were the only contribution of the Yale "Leadership Institute". Such self-proclaimed "leaders" will lead all of us into oblivion.

Foiled again

Darn! So much for my plan to get a little spending money and pay off a couple of credit cards by selling a kidney. But then, if all those Hindus read this article and stop offering their kidneys on the open market, that just makes mine all the more valuable! It's an ill wind .....

Interbalance

This predictably snarky story from the Independent Online insists on the idiotic link between spray cans and air conditioning and the "ozone hole" but at least admits a link they may not have wanted to:

This year, mammoth weather patterns pumped ozone into the south polar region and warmed it up.
"The warm air actually shuts down ozone loss."

Oh, I see. So if global warming does occur, then we at least won't have to worry about the "ozone hole". Can we quote you on that in the debate about ratifying the Kyoto treaty? Also, the article mentions that the "ozone hole" was first observed "in the 1970s". Hmm. So, do you mean, we have no idea whether the ozone "hole" existed or not before then? We just assumed it didn't exist before Man started using CFCs so we could ban those nasty spray cans and auto air conditioners that make life far too convenient for the peasants. After all, there's no such thing as a core sample of the ozone layer. Has any actual rational being with scientific training ever looked at these claims?

Thwap!

I don't usually link to the Big Few bloggers, but Lileks has nailed the Torch and the NJ Democrats so solidly this time that I couldn't bear to think that any visitor to my site might miss it. Go. Read. Now. Oh, OK, I'll paste in the money quote:

After all, Toricelli didn’t quit because he discovered an eight-pound neoplasm in his small intestine, or had his brain turned into a fine red mist when a marble-sized meteorite from the Oort cloud struck him in a 7-11 parking lot. He’s not even under indictment. He resigned because there was such a bad odor coming from him and his campaign that actual wavy cartoon stink lines were coming off him, and the cameras were starting to pick it up. He was going to lose. So he quit.

And don't worry about his misspelling of Torricelli's name. Great artists get some leeway. Is there any chance at all that some grownup in the Democratic Party, if that's not a contradiction in terms, might look at this mess and see a potential for enormous damage to the national image of the party and call it off and tell the Torch to run and take his beating like a man?

Update

Mickey Kaus appears to agree with my analysis. He doesn't seem to place any value at all, however, on the votes that the party faithful cast in the primary. To allow the machine hacks to replace faltering candidates at any time goes directly against the primary system. It's just weird to say that the primary winners can go ahead and be on the ballot unless there's actually a chance they'll lose. Say, couldn't primary voters get together and sue? That's the American way. Of course, then, Republican voters would be sure to vote in the Democratic primary so that, if a sure loser tries to back out, they can go to court to keep him in. My head hurts. Can't we just excise New Jersey from the continent and give Pennsylvania a lot more shoreline?

Magic, Miracle or Myth?

Now that the Vatican has confirmed a miracle by Mother Teresa, James Randi must be shivering in his boots. His million-dollar prize is obviously going to be claimed by the Pope on behalf of the deceased prospective saint Teresa. I mean, how could anyone dispute the evidence that the Roman Church hierarchy must certainly have amassed in order to conclude that a miracle had occurred? And if they need further evidence from Mother Teresa, I'm sure John Edward can provide a clear channel for whatever information may be needed.

Update

This headline mistakes "beatification" for "beautification", a Freudian slip if ever there was one! And the "beautification" of Mother Teresa would be a bigger miracle than the tumor-healing she's credited with!

Who could have imagined?

With all the articles on the Torricelli mess, I was interested to see this one from the Times of India. Looks like the Torch got on the wrong side of the Hindus as well as the Republicans. But why? The article clears up that question:

One New Jersey Indian-American Democrat said Torricelli became blatantly partisan after Pakistanis began raising money for him. The Senator’s one-sided stand on subcontinental issues also put Indian-American Democrats like New Jersey lawmaker Upendra Chivakula and party Vice-Chairman Kiran Desai in a tough position of having to ignore ethnic considerations and back him despite his antipathy towards India. At a recent meeting, some prominent Indian-American Democrats had incurred his wrath after they asked him to “at least tone down his rhetoric (against India) if he could not change his vote.”


Apparently asking the Torch not to burn people is like asking Clinton not to lie. He just can't do it, won't do it and gets insulted that you even asked. The article also called New Jersey a Democratic "pocketborough". That's cool. And who knew there was an "Indian-American" caucus in the United States Congress? Is this the greatest country in the world or what?

Update with cheese!

Guess who Cynthia McKinney is now blaming
(via Instapundit) for her defeat? The "Indian-American lobby"!! Is this my first scoop? And I suppose it's just a coincidence that all these bloggers appeared over the last year or so with names like "Instapundit", "Pejmanpundit" and "Vodkapundit". Like no one knew that "pundit" means "wise, all-knowing sage" in one of those languages from - you guessed it! - India!! Now tell me Cynthia McKinney's paranoid!

Hollywood and Viet Nam

What is it about Hollywood people, even Mel Gibson, that makes it impossible for them to realize that Communist governments aren't interested in the truth? I opposed the Viet Nam war in my youth but never was under any misapprehension about the nature of the North Vietnamese Communist regime. I just thought anything Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in favor of I had to be opposed to. Any illusions I might have had were destroyed by Viet Nam's 1979 war with China, the first full-fledged war between two Communist powers. Then the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Did Hollywood miss that one? How about the fall of the Berlin Wall? Did that slip by unnoticed? The state of Cuba's economy and laughable pretensions to "social justice" have been exposed effectively and often. It takes willful blindness to think that Viet Nam is any different. But, as with Iraq, the constant preoccupation in Hollywood is "Give them another chance. They're really nice people." Perhaps the problem is that if they start thinking any other way, they would have to stop thinking that America is always to blame.

It's a legal matter, baby

Why are so many of the alpha bloggers lawyers, even law professors? It's the nature of blogging. Every few words, you've got to have a reference, even if the point you're making is perfectly obvious. Maybe someone can come up with a way to Shepardize the web so when a story has been totally destroyed by everyone in blogdom, it acquires a notation stating that it is no longer to be used for anything but mockery. That way, future bloggers, especially our European brethren, can have some warning that bringing up anything with, say, Robert Fisk's name on it is an open invitation to immediate decortication, not to mention terminal blushing. In the not-too-distant future, lawyers looking for points to fill out a "Brandeis brief" may be rummaging around on line. We owe them a system of guideposts to help them navigate around the sunken wrecks of collectivist idiocy, such as the Independent, the Guardian and the Arab News.

All veggies, all the time!

I knew vegetarians were getting more aggressive and touchy:
The tenants had offended their landlord by insisting on cooking non-vegetarian food. The landlord had put up a to-let sign and had wanted the `Hindus' to vacate the house by October 1.

And perhaps it was wrong for them to pretend to a religious affiliation they did not practice:

Police had learned that the group was living in the neighbourhood as tonsured Hindus. Posing as vegetable vendors, they identified the house. The next day, a `couple' visited the house as prospective tenants and ascertained the group's identity. Two days later, police raided the house.

But this:
Ali and his four companions were killed on the spot when the police began firing at their rented house at 2 am.

seems a little over the top.

I'm so glad we live in a country where we can eat what we want without being cut down in a hail of gunfire at 2AM. For now. Oh, OK, they were really Islamic terrorists and the whole story doesn't justify my paranoia. But I'm going to be careful from now on just who smells my cooking.

Fisking Fisk Fisking Kinzer

I was watching Stephen Kinzer on BookTV on Cspan2 earlier today talking about his book, "The Crescent and the Star", about Turkey. It sounds pretty good. I googled Kinzer to see what else he had written and came across this article in a Pakistani newspaper accusing him of writing an article for the New York Times that was "offensive" and a "suppression of historical truth", because it denied the Turkish attempt at genocide against the Armenians in 1915. It sounded unlikely to me that the NY Times would be getting into that. They love genocide and victimization. I looked at the byline, and whose name should I see but Robert Fisk's. Now I really had to check out the story.

This Turkish woman gives Kinzer mega-accolades on his work with and for Turkey. The original Kinzer article is, unfortunately, available only from the New York Times archive, for a price. The abstract, though, makes it clear that Kinzer was just giving both sides of the story. The article itself states that the "genocide" is still a matter of "intense debate". The article quotes from Turks and Armenians and doesn't really take sides. The point of the article is not at all "historical revision" as Fisk implies. The standard figures and stories are given full credit. He is a reporter, merely trying to use the opening of a new museum to make the humdrum but hardly controversial point that museums are often used to make partisan political statements. Keeping an open mind on this point seems to be utterly foreign to Fisk's way of thinking about things. And he's not even Armenian. What is his dog in this fight? Fisk goes on to tie this article to, hey, guess what, the Arab-Israeli unpleasantness. What a surprise! He cites the Holocaust museum in Washington and the "Jewish lobby", now to be joined in his pandemonium by the "Turkish lobby", presumably outfitted with better carpets. Fisk sees the fine Zionist hand at the bottom of every threat to his world of pathetic but noble victims and dastardly oppressors. His one virtue is consistency. He's consistently sloppy, vicious and wrong.

Scary

Now this is scary. Weapons-grade uranium on the Syrian-Turkish border? I can just hear the paranoids saying "How convenient! What a coincidence! weapons-grade uranium shows up just when Bush needs some credibility on Saddam's progress towards nuke-u-lar weapons." Sure. They're right, in a way. It's all a matter of whom you believe, an American president whose every word and deed is scrutinized by a manic and cynical free press, a frustrated opposition party and masses of intellectuals trying to make a name for themselves or a mad dictator who answers to no one. Let's see, which choice makes more sense? And which one is going to blow up my city - OK, Tallahassee's far down the list, but it's on it - if he gets a nuke in play?

Also, I wonder if that cabbie's had a radiation check lately? Next time I'm taking a cab in eastern Anatolia, I'll make sure to ask the cabbie, "Oh, by the way, you don't happen to have any weapons grade uranium under this seat, do you?" Better safe than sorry.

Update

A comment on the News Forum points out that the picture of the uranium cylinder at the Drudgereport has "Made in W. Germany" on it. Can I say I'm surprised? Haven't heard anything from the Green party former spokesmoron about this. Yet. And it weighs 33 pounds. Maybe someone will tell us how much of Germany a bomb made from that amount of uranium could blow up.

Adding site meter and comments

OK, I've breathlessly added a sitemeter and comments, now people have to start coming around and commenting or I'll feel like I've put on my Sunday best and washed my hair and have been left sitting on the sofa in the front parlor waiting for the phone to ring.

Quibble

OK, some relative of mine is questioning my recall of the movie "The Graduate" in my "clever" essay on "Paper and Plastic" some posts back. Did the old relative really say "plastics" on his deathbed or at a party by a pool? How would I know, I've never seen the movie. I've not felt any need to see it for, what?, thirty-three years now, it's a bit late to start. Bits from the movie are now cultural history and myth, suitable for distorting and improving to fit one's needs. So that's what I did. I admit it. But I can still see the scene, the guy on his deathbed, Dustin Hoffman bending over him to hear his last words. OK, maybe not. But it's better than at a darn undramatic pool party. Come on, cut me some slack here! Artist at work!

Instapundit afterglow

Instapundit linked to my post about Islam and intoxicants. Ah, that feels good! Makes me wish I had a site counter or at least a comments section. How does one do that, anyway? I know I felt, mystically, an avalanche of eyeballs overwhelm my puny little blog.

God stuff

I've stumbled into a theology discussion on Dave Trowbridge's page that stimulated from me this comment:

D. Trowbridge says:

"I have no argument with people who have decided they can't believe in God, as long as they're willing to credit those of us who do believe with equal intelligence and good reason to believe."

If I were to credit you with "equal intelligence and good reason" on the subject of whether God exists, I would have to adopt your reasoning. Reason, by its nature, cannot, despite all the "quantum philosophy" mumbo-jumbo, lead you to two different conclusions on the same question. Any such reasoning is no better than believing in boogey-men under the bed because you are small and frightened.

So what is the evidence for the existence of God and what is the reasoning that leads from that evidence to the conclusion that he exists? More fundamentally, how can God "exist" in any sense that corresponds to what men mean when they use the word "exist"?

We'll see if I get any meaningful response. I'm not impressed by this argument: "Oh, you just haven't thought about this deeply enough like all of us deep thinkers who have been spending years pondering the question and obviously know better than you, besides which, our livelihood, self-respect and social acceptance all hinge on being perceived as Godly men."

Isn't the blogosphere wonderful?

Every concern gets addressed sooner or later. I've been hearing a really annoying ad misusing a CCR song to sell jeans for weeks now. And Ken Layne, via instapundit, links to a story about selling Sixties songs for commercials and how the Doors refuse to do that, while everyone else goes for the cash. That enabled me to submit to Ken Layne the following comment:

The debate on Sixties songs being sold for commercials caught my attention because I've been outraged lately by the use of a few bars from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Fortunate Son" to advertise Lee or Wrangler or some kind of jeans. The bars they use sound totally patriotic and flag-waving. But if you actually listen to the song, it's anything but. It's a classic and powerful protest against knee-jerk flag-waving. The ad is the most outrageous distortion of a song's message I've ever seen. Is John Fogerty nuts or dead or what?
It is nuts. Do they think we don't remember these songs? Or is anyone who actually remembers the songs too old to worry about? But if that's true, why are they using the songs at all? Don't they have anything newer that's better?

Al-Naqba

Catastrophe has come to Tallahassee. It's odd, though, the first Nole loss is almost a relief. It's as though now I can feel that the football season is over and relax until next year. And if there should be a revival in November, all the better.

Read this

Rachel Lucas takes Barbra Streisand apart, and, as afterthoughts, Alec Baldwin and Melanie Griffith. Read it, please, you'll like it! She appears to be committed, but Rachel could definitely lodge herself in my consciousness permanently. The comments are almost as good as the column.

Ramsey Clark is Satan

This article makes it clear that Ramsey Clark, who spoke to my class in prep school when he was sane, has lost touch with reality completely. Is there something in the water in Washington that turns government officials, like Scott Ritter, into total liars, freaks and traitors? Notice they call Clark "former Attorney General" even though he hasn't had any responsible post for thirty years. Thank God.

Rain

Duh. Tropical Storm Isidore (wasn't it better when they all had female names? And Anglo ones? Then there was a chance a really bad one would be named after your woman. And you could yell at her about it when you were drunk. But no. No more. Political correctness has taken away all the fun things) is coming ashore in Louisiana tonight. So it's raining here in Tallahassee, 400 miles to the east. Maybe this time New Orleans, Sin City, will join Sodom and Gomorrah on the list of those destroyed by the vengeance of God. It's only like 3 feet above sea level, so, hey, it could happen. And mega-surf should hit St. George Island any time soon. Maybe I'll take a run down there on Sunday, look for Spanish galleons in distress I can rob of their silver. Oh, you thought you could kill all the Incas in Potosi and use the silver to conquer England, did you? Well, I and Drake and Hawkins have a little something to say about that!

Four months of grilled seagulls?

I don't believe this article about a guy who got lost going to Catalina and spent three - other sources say four - months drifting around the Pacific. He survived, they say, on grilled seagulls and the occasional turtle. It smacks of Gilligan's Island, but reminded me more of Boon Island, a desolate islet off the coast of Maine just north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I used to live. Kenneth Roberts' book makes it clear how unlikely it is that a man could survive that long at sea without food. My antennae are up all the way on this one. Is he going through a bad divorce and took a side trip to some deserted isle to hide bonds and gold? How far could he have gone in that time? Probably not all the way to Hong Kong, but certainly to Mexico or South America. I'll keep watching this one.

Update

A few more details emerge. This guy is Vietnamese and was picked up off Costa Rica. He was living on his boat in Long Beach harbor, according to this story. I'd suspect the Coast Guard could figure out if his boat would have ended up where it did if it was unpowered, as he says it was, having lost its mast in a storm. He's now homeless, or, er, a new category, "boatless".

Gorebot self-destructs

What is Al Gore doing? He makes a speech criticizing Bush for not doing things he has done, denounces actions he, Gore, supported but did not take and now he, Clinton like, tries to rewrite history about his attitude toward whether he approved or not of Bush 41's decision not to carry on to Baghdad in 1991. Luckily, the blogosphere's tearing him apart, but so is the regular media. Even Joe Lieberman is coming out against his "new attitude", as is a prominent Democratic candidate for governor of a "swing state". Can anyone be more politically dead and still be the choice of a plurality of Democratic voters for 2004? Is this Paradise or what?

Hey, and is this blog looking more and more like Instapundit since I learned to link or what?

Direct election of senators

Gary Farber's site has a discussion about the direct election of senators and how that might affect federalism. I think there's more than that involved, as I mention in my comment to his post:

Transforming the state legislatures into mini-electoral colleges for senators would enhance their stature considerably. The staggering of Senate terms would mean at least two out of three legislative elections could affect which party a Senator came from. I don't seem to recall whether the Constitution dictates the mode of election of senators. Would all members of the Legislature vote and a majority decide? Or would a State Senator have more influence on the result than a state representative? Nebraska, with its unicameral legislature, wouldn't have to work that detail out. I like the idea.

Smack the Nominalist

Found a great site combining theological disputation with humor. I'm going to keep going back until I understand why God doesn't exist or I die laughing, whichever comes first.

I knew it!

Finally, an article has pointed out the nature of the Irish Travelers, one of the modern versions of the Gypsies, to which belonged Madelyne Toogood, who got caught on TV pummeling her four-year-old. I had wondered what was going on. These nomad gangs have been dubbing around for years, bilking the elderly and unwary, but keeping in general below law enforcement's radar. Now they even have their own website. The proprietor tries to play up the romantic side of the Gypsy life style, but the ignorance and brutality displayed by Miss or - maybe - Mrs. Toogood is more typical. It does show how powerless the system is, though, to enforce laws requiring schooling and cultural mores encouraging self-improvement, truth-telling and peacefulness. Outlaws are still with us, for which maybe some say we should be grateful, but I'm not sure the little Toogood girl would agree.

I see from this story that US troops have been sent to the Ivory Coast to rescue Americans and other foreigners, 200 in all. Some French troops have also gone. I wonder if there are any Germans among the foreigners. Funny, I didn't see anything about German troops being sent to their rescue. Oh, well, I'm sure the Green Party can make up an expedition of dowsers, crystal ball-gazers and radical vegetarians to save their countrymen. God knows not one American GI should exert any effort to save any Germans. And I'm sure their government would not want us to help, since we're just Nazis and are probably only doing it for the oil.

Jesse the Moral Arbiter

Darling of the left Jesse Jackson is actually calling for censorship of a hit movie on the grounds that he's offended by it. I thought all these lefties were against interfering with creative freedom?? Only when their ox is not being gored, I guess. At least they can't call for government censorship, as in those countries, like France, Germany and California, that have draconian hate-speech laws.

Speaking of goring, Andrew Sullivan takes Al Gore apart completely over his late speech about how much better he would be prosecuting the war on terror by not worrying about terrorists like Saddam Hussein who have whole countries and WMD and concentrating on Osama bin Laden, who's decomposing in a bombed-out cave in Afghanistan.

New Neighbors

Time for some real weblogging. New neighbors moved in to the next townhouse yesterday. The same people had been there since I moved in seven (can it be that long?) years ago. We never talked much with the departees. The new people I glimpsed here and there - a middle-aged guy, a boy maybe in his teens, moving furniture in from the big U-Haul. Then in the night I heard a muffled bark or two. Oh no, not a dog. Why would anyone have a dog in a little townhouse? If I do become acquainted with the new neighbors, I will look back on the day they first moved in and wonder why I didn't see them as I will have come to know them. People are walking question marks. Finding the answer can be the fun part. Or maybe they'll stay there ten years and I'll never speak to any of them. Maybe they'll ask me questions, like, "Hey, how come you don't have a dog?"

Sour Krauts

My admiration for the W administration keeps growing. The "new" German government backtracked on their anti-Bush stance by firing two ministers after they got safely reelected. If I know W, and I hope I do, that's not going to make a bit of difference. Rummy and Condi working together may even be able to give Colin Powell a backbone, unless he's been sandbagging all these months. I still haven't figured him out. All US troops should be out of Germany within a year, by the end of 2003. I'm old enough to remember, as a small boy in Germany, the devastation left by the war and how the only, and I mean the ONLY bright spot was the thousands of American kids like me, well-fed, well-scrubbed and looking forward, occupying forces, sure, but holding out a hand to the German people in their hour, heck, their decade of need and deprivation on a scale we today would find hard to believe. And now, nearly sixty years later they won't even help rid the world of a tyrant as odious as the one they produced, before he can do the same kind of damage. That's it. No more German nothing for me. Too bad. I used to like sauerkraut.

Paper vs. Plastic

I can’t believe people, when asked whether they want paper or plastic grocery bags, sometimes want paper. It’s nuts. The plastic bags are wonderful. You can hold twenty pounds of groceries in a soaking rainstorm with your little finger. They have a thousand uses around the house and can even serve as quick-lighting firestarters when the weather turns cool. Paper bags, however, turn soggy at the touch of rain or a leaky can or bottle, are difficult to hold with one arm, much less with one finger, and tear easily.

Oh, I know, the knee-jerk enviros say that plastic is awful and paper is more “natural” and efficient. Huh? That’s so dumb it’s hard to imagine anyone clinging to such a belief after any reflection at all. Which only shows that a lot of people don’t even start to reflect. They just emote. Brown, paper, from tree – good. But not too many, because there are only so many trees and they’ll all be gone soon. Right. Plastic – arggh – unnatural non-earth tones, from icky petroleum products raped from Mother Earth by right-wing conservative Texans. That’s about as far as their thinking goes. In truth, of course, the plastic bags are far more efficient than the paper ones. They weigh almost nothing, probably ten to a hundred times less than the paper ones. This means a tremendous savings in transport costs. Their strength means much less food is wasted from broken bottles and jars and dented cans and broccoli florets strewn across rain-soaked parking lots. And they even take up much less space in landfills and keep dyes and their other chemicals safely locked up instead of letting them leach into the soil, if you’re concerned about such nonsense. Not to mention that they’re cheaper, lowering food costs even more.

The worst way to bring home groceries is in your own canvas bag. Oh, I know, all the big chains are promoting them now, asking you to spend six or more dollars per bag. Now these things are heavy. You have to have ten dollars worth of groceries in them to equal the weight of the bag. I can’t imagine how heavy they get in the rain. But that’s not the worst part. They’re small. They don’t expand to hold very many groceries. You’d wind up spending thirty dollars just to have enough bags. The string bags we used to use when I was a boy in England make more sense. And, from an “ecological” point of view, these “reusable” bags are disasters. They cost far more resources to make than paper or plastic bags. And you can’t just blithely reuse them. The neo-Puritans’ horror of germs is even more severe than their hatred of plastic. Every time a bit of chicken guts gets onto the canvas bag, or meat juice or ketchup, you’re going to have to wash it. And let’s face it, that’s going to be every trip to the store. So if you go shopping more than once a week – and who doesn’t? – you’re going to be doing extra washloads to accommodate your idiot canvas shopping bags. Just think of the soap and water expended that wouldn’t be necessary if you weren’t scared stiff to be seen by the president of the local Sierra Club coming out of Publix with groceries in plastic bags. And do you really want to carry all those ultra-expensive “organic” vegetables home in a bag with detergent residue in it? How sanpaku!!

All in all, from every point of view, the old guy on his deathbed in “The Graduate” was right. It’s “Plastics, my boy, plastics...”

Paying the cost to be the boss

Ever thought you'd like to be a boss? Janis Ian has a great article about being a boss in the music industry. Makes you think twice, but she also makes it seem like, if she could do it, so could you. I enjoyed it, I think you will, too.

See Nessie! See Nessie swim!

Want to keep a lookout for the Loch Ness Monster (known to us of Scottish ancestry as Nessie)? The Scotsman has a webcam that will let you pass time scanning the grey loch for whatever secret its deep cold water may hold. Recommended as an activity while sipping single malt. Are you listening, Dr. Rines?

Google news and an evanescent poster

Google has a news service now, here. I've checked it out and I'm quite impressed. It could be quicker than Drudge or Lucianne. And it tells you how long ago the article it links to was posted on the Web. I mean, where else could you get instant New Zealand v. Bangladesh cricket results? Search engines are changing our world.

Wolfram was offering a free poster for anyone who wrote a review of "A New Kind of Science". I was going to use my posts from earlier this summer to cadge a copy. It features the entire book micro-reduced onto a wall poster. Cool. But too late, again!! I'll keep looking, in case it shows up again.

The German election seems like a good result, oddly enough. The Lefties' majority is way down and the coming victory over Iraq will make them look like idiots, especially when we find all the German products going into So damn Insane's WMD apparatus. Anyone for Zyklon B, left over from a certain regrettable era?

Don't smoke that stuff - you'll turn into an A-rab.

A lot of blogsters have been talking lately (Stephen den Beste, are you listening? And i flat refuse to capitalize the "d" in "den") about how different Arab Islamic cultures are from ours and how they must be defeated utterly in order to change. I have a different idea. Perhaps the real difference in our cultures stems from the choice of intoxicants. Mohammed forbade Muslims from using alcohol because he knew of the effects of alcohol on a civilization. But perhaps it is just those effects that makes modern Western society aggressive and forward-looking. Certainly alcohol is much more compatible with Western capitalist and Christian culture than is hashish or qat, the intoxicants allowed under Islam, by most interpretations.

Which reminds me, at the Cairo airport is a big sign "drug smuggling is punishable by death by hanging". Gets your attention. But then in the bazaars one sees old men sucking on hookahs and narjilahs, producing a smell that isn't tobacco. Like much of Arab culture, the reality differs from the public face. Rather than launching into a long discourse on the differential effects of alcohol and cannabis-like substances, I'll just suggest we try one experiment. Take an Arab state and introduce beer and whiskey big time, not just for the rich guys but for everyone. We can ban cannabinoids and qat if we want, but I don't think it will make much difference. In Western culture, even when cannabinoids were not illegal, alcohol dominated. I'd be willing to bet that within ten years that society would be optimistic, forward-looking, efficient and competitive. Perhaps the drug war in America is based on that insight. You smoke that ganja stuff, you turn into an A-rab, sitting around the hovel all day, listening to atonal music and casting longing glances at the camels. Drink beer and whiskey, you party, feel great for a few hours, wake up in the morning with a sore head and might as well go to work since you're going to be miserable until about five o'clock anyway.

If the combination of cheap booze, Baywatch and free love doesn't save the Arabs from their wretchedness, they're not worth worrying about. Just nuke 'em.

[9/17/2002 6:18:03 AM | Robert Speirs]
I haven't seen anything in any news about the pepper spray incident at the Eagles-Redskins football game last night. It was SO War on Terror! The pictures of people covering their mouths and noses, trying to get away from some "noxious substance" on the Eagles - away team - sideline sent shivers around the world of football. What if terror had struck home at the most sacred of American male ceremonies, Monday Night Football!? Or, perhaps worse, what if some sorehead Redskins fan, seeing the pounding his team was taking at the hands of Donovan McNabb and company, decided to overturn the chessboard and have the game called, by copycatting Osama? For a few minutes, no one knew quite what was going on, which is the worst thing that can happen these days. As it turned out, it was the cops. A fight had broken out in the stands behind the Eagles' bench and the cops had liberally doused the participants with pepper spray, some of which had drifted onto the field and around the stands. Like the cops don't have some better way to restrain drunken fools in the middle of a huge crowd other than dousing the whole crowd with noxious chemicals. Why do I sense the genesis of the problem in the politically correct presence of physically incompetent female cops here?

As to the Florida terrorist scare, set off by the boisterous idiocy of some wannabe Osamas in a diner in Georgia, I have to make one comparison. What would happen if I went into a restaurant in Saudi Arabia and started talking loudly about how those Arabs would regret September 11 when Mecca and Medina were vaporized? They wouldn't just close off a highway and explode my luggage. They'd bring out the sharpened scimitar immediately. If I insisted I was just joking, of course, they would apologize and let me go. Right.

The latest puzzle from Richard Maltby, called Triplets, is quite diverting. It features overlapping combinations of three solutions from three mixed-together definition clues. Not only is the location of each triplet unspecified, but so is the sequence of solutions within each triplet. These triple entries take up a large part of the puzzle, but leave just enough normal clues to pin down the location and sequence of the triple entries. I enjoyed this one more than most of my recent tries. Is that because I solved it fairly quickly? Is it a big surprise that you enjoy things more, from cooking to flying airplanes to romance, when they go well? The glow on this one, though, is such that I want to nominate it for Best Puzzle Ever. We?ll see how long that lasts.

Another football weekend brings a new term of art. Have you noticed how much bigger football linemen are getting these days? I don?t mean tall - they?ve all been tall for some time - but fat, downright, hanging-over-the-belt fat? Many are pushing 400 lbs now. I noticed one of the players referring to ?the Buddhas on the inside? and was thinking, ?How poetic! That?s better than anything Dennis Miller ever came up with?. Then I realized he was talking not about some inner peace that helps you concentrate on endzone nirvana, but the linemen. They do look like Buddhas! Line play is becoming more and more like sumo wrestling. It had to happen. The next development will be Japanese teams, cloned perhaps from the biggest sumo wrestlers. After all, football players have pushed speed and strength and aggressiveness to a maximum. There?s only one frontier left - heft!

New job. New JetStream Oven. New football season. Does life get any better? My observations of the blogosphere's delight at what looks to be George W.'s triumph at the UN, putting his critics in a bind make me wonder if I'm dreaming. Can he really have turned the tables so completely? One can only hope. The Iraq debate has shown the blog world at its most active and interesting. I no longer bother watching TV news or reading newspapers. Why should I, with Instapundit, Drudge, the News Forum and a dozen other sites ready and willing to serve me up news and spin that changes with the hour.

As to Wolfram, I've finished the main text and am struggling through the copious notes. I may skip a lot and go back to the main text. I may be reading this book for the rest of my life. Happy September!

D. Ultimate Models for the Universe.

Yes, I'm not kidding, that's what Wolfram titled this section. He explained that he is looking for and is pretty certain he has found a "complete and precise representation" of physical reality. Or, at the least he's pointing the way there. He points out once again that because the universe might be more complex than we thought doesn't necessarily mean that the automaton that compiled it is all that complex. Heck, it could get ten or a hundred or a million times more complex and still it could be based on a very simple rule.

In some of his simplest, clearest language, Wolfram asks how we could ever find the rule for the universe, even if it is simple and how we would know it once we had found it. He provides simple clear answers. But his thoughts brought to my mind a Biblical quotation:

Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto ye.

There are no short cuts. You may have to do a lot of searching and there's no guarantee you'll find what you're looking for. Hey, that sounds like the universe I recognize, the one I live in every day.

In the notes to this section, which are almost as long as the section, Wolfram provides a potted history of models of the universe. It's excellent. Then at the end of the note he addresses the concept of whether the universe has a meaning. Since his model is based on an abstract mathematical logical system, not unlike the system from which the digits of pi are derived, W concludes that the universe has no more meaning than can be found in the sequence of digits after the decimal point in pi. A bit deflating, but I think he's got more deflating in store. Beat me!! At least I'm still the most important guy in MY universe!

More links

To get away from Wolfram for a minute, I've seen several stories linking Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and the Mideast terror web. The latest relates that the bomb - apparently set up by AlQaeda - that exploded outside the US consulate in Karachi was a diesel oil/fertilizer bomb like the one that half-destroyed the Federal Building in OK City. I know that's hardly proof, but combined with the fact that the missing OK City suspect's picture looks an awful lot like Jose Padilla/Muhajir and the fact that Terry Nichol's ex-wife's maiden name is Padilla and the discovery of messages between AlQaeda operatives just before April 19, 1995 talking about the destruction of American landmarks and specifically mentioning the Murrah Building - among others, to be sure - why you've got more than enough for a website, paperback and set of Congressional hearings.

By the way, the lack of American fatalities in the Karachi blast says good things about the lessons learned since Beirut and Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, Pakistani bystanders were not so lucky. If a 500-lb bomb can't even destroy a consulate, we've come a long way.

Chapter 9 of Wolfram - This is the BIG one, folks!

One hundred and twelve pages that will change my view of the universe. At least that's what I was hoping. It does build from section to section, though, with a chutzpah that amazes. My only problem is that I'm not sure whether he's delivering the goods or not. I started college as a physics major, but ended up as a hippie political scientist and then went to law school. So I can spot an argument, but I can't compare Wolfram's conclusions about quantum mechanics or gravitational waves to the standard theory because I don't know it. Maybe that's an advantage in a way, though.

Section A - Reversibility

It seemed a little odd for W to address "reversibility" as the first point of a chapter telling how fundamental physics is explained by his theory. But he does a good job of it, pointing out how cellular automata can produce reversible results, that is, patterns in which it is possible to run the rule backwards as well as forwards. And in doing so, the patterns lose none of the randomness he says is necessary to explain how they can produce everything we see around us.

B- Irreversibility and the Second Law

Once again, I wish I knew more about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I'm sure it's more complicated than: "Everything's falling apart and there's nothing anyone can do about it." But Wolfram's message here seems to be "it ain't necessarily so". His automata patterns show that the king's horses and men can occasionally produce something that looks like Humpty Dumpty out of all that eggshell and protoplasm. I guess that means I have to say "the yolk's not necessarily always on them". King's anything - especially "men" - are non-PC these days, but W apparently doesn't care. He's been holed up with his automata since before there was any such thing as PC. Some patterns show a different kind of order emerging from randomized chaos from that order which existed before the chaos was generated. With many "mights" and "perhaps", W also points out the structures that occur, some of them separated by what look like "membranes". Curiouser and curiouser. The treatise on reversibility in the first section of the chapter makes more sense now.

C - Conserved Quantities and Continuum Phenomena

Hmm. Some cellular automata exhibit conservation of the number of squares of any one color. Wolfram compares this to the law of conservation of matter and energy - and momentum. Every so often I flash on how bold and confident Wolfram is about his comparisons. I almost want to see him fall flat on his face. But somehow he makes it all seem reasonable, almost inevitable.

A new word (for me): Ergodicity. Google found me a note about it, in, of all things, a game theory context:

In particular, his models show ergodicity. Basically, this means that if you have a large number of such systems, and at any one time p percent of them are in a given state, then every single one
of them will spend about p percent of its time in that state. (Technically, there's a distribution over the states such that the state-space average of any well-behaved function equals its
time-average starting from almost any state, if you take the latter over a long enough interval.) Ergodicity is a very strong property, and one of the stronger predictions his models make; it goes
away if the agents are not perverse, or can remember unlimited stretches of the past, in which case each population will lock in to a single convention forever. It is also liable to be hard to test
empirically, because it can take a considerable time to converge on the ergodic distribution, and in the meanwhile the game people are playing is apt to have changed.

Now that that's clear, I think I'll actually post this. More on the way about Wolfram's Chapter 9. A lot more.

Responding to terror

The horrific massacre by a Palestinian mass murderer in Jerusalem requires a response. His house and all his family's possessions that can be traced should be destroyed or confiscated. The university in Nablus he went to and where he was apparently recruited should be razed to the ground. My God! The Euro-weenies call the Israelis Nazis. Do they have any idea what the SS would have done if the French resistance had exploded a bomb on a bus in Germany and the bomber's family had crowed about it in public? There wouldn't have been anything left of the area of France the bomber was from. And the French are an actual nation. And the Nazis were real monsters.

Soccer, Wolfram and even a puzzle

I've been absorbed in the twelfth chapter of Wolfram, which appears to be as complicated - and interesting - as the rest of the book so far, which is saying something. I've even been taking notes. I'll be posting summaries soon. I'm at school with professor Wolfram. It bothers me maybe a bit that he's ten + years younger than I am, but I'm not letting that stop me. My mornings have been obsessed with the latest soccer games from Korea and Japan, which, too bad, just was ousted by Turkey at about 4:30 Tallahassee time. Korea's fighting for its life against Turkey, down 1-0. I did, yes, get my copy of Maltby's latest puzzle from Harper's and am liking it. It's nearly as intricate this time as one of Wolfram's automata. Hey, wouldn't that be a discovery? Automata using cryptic clues! Ha! Sorry, too much coffee and enough Wolfram for now.

Another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. When are the Israelis going to get really mad and just resettle the Palestinians, to, oh, say, Madagascar? Judea and Samaria fully Jewish again would make it so much harder for Hamas and Hezbollah to operate there.

Too much cheese, too many surrenders!

Saw the end of the France-Denmark World Cup game today. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys surrendered once again, 2-0, and go home having not just failed to win but having failed even to score in three games. And they're the World Cup champions! Is it a coincidence that France has the euro and Denmark has resisted it? I think not! The French played abysmally. You could tell half-way through the second half that they would lose. The Danes were smiling, loose. The French looked lost, hypnotized. Now don't get me wrong. I love France. It's beautiful. If there just weren't so many darned Frenchmen in it! Fill it with Danes and send the French to keep the Palestinians company. They deserve each other.

Bugs

Found an astonishing article at the Atlantic online (theatlantic.com) about viruses and bacteria that may - probably do - cause - get ready - heart disease, cancers, schizophrenia, even - gasp! - homosexuality! Somewhat breathless but entertaining. I knew it wasn't the sausages and bacon I eat every morning that were the problem, or even Atkins' demons, starches. It's infection, I tell you! They're everywhere!! Get them off me!! ARRRRRRR .....

[6/9/2002 10:56:48 AM | Robert Speirs]
Snowflakes, flowers, seashells and the stock market - Wolfram as God

In Chapter 8, Wolfram tells how snowflakes are made, how flowers grow, how sea creatures form their shells and how stock traders determine when to buy or sell. Or, he tells why we can't tell when traders will sell. This chapter has rather a lot on evolutionary mechanisms, a la Stephen Jay Gould. I kept wondering how Gould would respond to the patterns Wolfram generates from quite simple rules. As a layman, I also wondered how experts in the various fields Wolfram looks at would respond. Would it be, "Oh, of course, everyone knows that," meaning everyone in the field, or "That can't possibly be and I'll show you why"? Or, more likely, would it be, "Well, that's interesting. I'll have to check that out."?

For me, in my state of half-education on all these topics, my reaction to the revelations matches my wonderment at being shown that the progressions of buds on a plant stem are spaced according to the Fibonacci sequence. Ah, so there IS a correspondence between numbers and nature! And, now, "Ah, maybe someday we will be able to grow a creature like none that ever lived on Earth before!"

Chapter 7 - Mechanisms in programs and nature - Stephen Wolfram

This chapter lays out the interesting bits about cellular automata as compared to all the other mechanisms one could use to understand the working of natural processes. You get quite a bit more on randomness. Wolfram clarifies that randomness in natural processes has always been seen to come from the environment or from imprecision in mechanisms. He gives an example of a beam of light spread by parabolic mirrors and then reflected off several flat mirrors. No matter how carefully you polish the mirrors, some imperfections will remain to distort the patterning of the beam’s reflections, whether after 10 or 100 or 1000 reflections. Or, the beam itself could be imperfect because of atmospheric particles or fluctuation in the light source. The randomness one sees in cellular automata, however, Wolfram says is an entirely different kind of randomness, one inherent in the process that would remain even if an apparatus could be made fault-free. This, he suggests, is the sort of randomness that Nature uses. Maybe next chapter I’ll find out a little more about how Nature uses randomness.

This chapter goes on to address continuity and discreteness in natural and cellular patterns and several other patterns. As it’s sixty-plus pages long, I’ll have to have another look at it to do it justice. It is, however, keeping my interest.

World Cup

Break from Wolfram today to take in the US-Portugal World Cup game at 5 AM. Just barely got up in time for the kickoff. It was just stunning to see the boys stuff in three goals with no response from the Portegees! Amazing, unreal, even the own goal deflection from Landon Donovan's cross. It was like they could do no wrong. Figo did not seem to be that much of a factor. Beasley and Donovan seemed to be able to attack at will. Then before half time Portugal scored and the US pulled its head into its shell and hung on for dear life in the second half. That was much less entertaining. Jeff Agoos's own goal was an "uh-oh" moment that seemed to foreshadow a collapse, but the cave-in never materialized. Portugal just didn't seem to be on their game. The US players seemed as active and motivated at the end of the game as at the beginning. Great effort, guys! On to the final rounds!! One gets dreams of an overall US victory to set the cheese-eating surrender monkeys on their heels, but I still realize intellectually that's vanishingly unlikely. If I had to bet right now, I'd say Germany v. Brazil in the final and Deutschland comes out uber alles. They were great in their shellacking of the Saud family team which at the moment controls part of Arabia. I got cable just for the World Cup and it seems to have been worth it. Looking forward to more tired but happy mornings.

Chapter 6 - Starting from Random

More and more about cellular automata in all their manifestations. Instead of starting with one black cell and filling up sheets of graph paper, this chapter investigates the variations that happen when the top line of the automaton contains a varied array of black and white squares. The big surprise? The results aren't all that different from "simple" automata. They tend to cluster in four types. In the course of the investigation, the concept of randomness itself comes in for a thorough grilling. I've come to trust Wolfram's elucidations as not just clear but interesting and innovative. One example: A certain simple cellular automaton produces a pattern which gives a line of random white and black squares if you run your finger right down the middle of it. As far as can be determined, this sequence is purely random, unpredictable. And yet if you run the pattern again from scratch, it produces the same pattern, still internally random. But if you know the pattern, how can you say it's random? This reminds me of the stage in a puzzle where you don't think you'll ever get it, but something inside you tells you that if you just keep on going,the solution will come clear. I'm looking forward to it. The next chapter promises some application of all this theorizing to real-world events.

Chapter 5 - Two Dimensions and beyond

This chapter of " A New Kind of Science" makes one point - if you look at higher dimensions to find greater or more common complexity, you're not going to find it. It's got neato illustrations and clear if somewhat lengthy expositions of why expanding the basic scheme of cellular automata from flat graph paper to wire grids does not produce any greater insights into how Reality produces the complexity we see all around us. Ha! And we all thought in college that "higher math" would get us closer to absolute truth! Give it up! At least I haven't been overwhelmed yet by the avalanche of incomprehensible equations I've been fearing. I'm getting in the back of my mind the feeling that the reaon it took life so long to emerge from the primordial ocean of chemical soup was that the gods were sitting around waiting for the mechanism to happen on the one or two combinations out of millions that would allow complexity to happen. Just think of all the graph paper and chicken wire they must have gone through. The same process must also have gone on within the gas clouds before the birth of the galaxy, solar system and Earth herself. Ah, I love speculating about the author's conclusions! It would be a waste of $44.95 plus shipping if I couldn't be proven fantabulously mistaken at least once.

Numbers

Finished Chapter 4 "Systems based on Numbers" of Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" before falling asleep for twelve hours or so. After failing differential equations three times in college I never thought I would want to have much to do with numbers again, or especially equations. This chapter was pretty painless, though, and clearly enough makes the author's point that systems based on numbers aren't different in kind from cellular automata that you can draw on graph paper without using any numbers. The distinctions between/among rational and irrational numbers are clearer to me now and the lesson that complexity resides everywhere under the surface if we just look hard enough has been hammered into my brain with the result that I will now be looking for it everywhere. On to dimensionality!

Chapter 3

Finished Chapter 3 of "A New Kind of Science". This is going to take more than one reading! I am enjoying the clarity of the presentation, though. Simple cellular automata give way to mobile ones and Turing Machines. I can see how he got so interested in the ideas. He must have liked graph paper when he was a kid, too. The generation of complexity from simple regularity fascinates. Let's hope I don't get too obsessed! When I read Mandelbrot's Fractals book I wanted to cover my walls with Julia sets and now I want to make wallpaper out of cellular automata patterns. I especially like the way he uses the binary system to number the rules for the automata. It makes me want to learn binary better. It would make it a lot easier to match patterns. That coding scheme in itself was quite a brainstorm. I'm beginning to think this fellow may be for real!

Spooky

OK, I'll admit it. It's a bit spooky. I just finished reading Chapter 2 of "A New Kind of Science". It lays out the complex, nay, random patterns that can be generated by simple rules operating on cellular automata. Why does it look so familiar? Something to do with generative grammar keeps popping up in my head. I like this book. It's stimulating, yet understandable to a lay lawyer such as I. I read Mandelbrot's book on fractals years ago, but couldn't keep up. So far, Wolfram hasn't lost me. He contains fractals and everything else, perhaps. Also, when I was a kid I used to love graph paper, doodling all the time. So maybe if I had done more of that, I would have discovered what Wolfram did.

Wolfram and infomercials

After reading the intro to "A New Kind of Science", I feel the way I do after reading the first part of a "get-rich-quick" ad or watching the intro to a multilevel marketing or real-estate infomercial.

"For years, I struggled, barely able to pay my rent or buy food for my dog. Then one day I stumbled on an amazing secret. That secret has changed my life"

Only, Wolfram says his secret will change not just your life but the way men think. It will not make you rich, just more wise than anyone else, and for only $44.95 plus shipping and handling. I can't wait for the secret to be revealed. I love the anticipation. The only problem is that in the dozens of get-rich-quick schemes I have fallen for over the years, after you found out the secret, you didn't get rich, quick or slowly.

The lesson of those scams, of course, was, "you are a greedy idiot". That was a lesson worth learning, but I hope Wolfram has a better lesson to teach.

Abiogenesis

Lots of activity over on Slashdot on the topic of the amount of oil left in the world. There were something like 600 posts to a story that Iceland is going to move its economy away from oil. Typical Icelandic iconoclasticism. Well, soon I'm sure they'll be sued for tapping too much of the earth's geothermal energy. Why, if they don't stop we'll all run out of steam!! No more steamboats or steam trains or hot steamy showers!! Stop the madness!!

Actually, though, most of the posts referred to the "refilling the oil fields" story in Newsday. I remember reading decades ago - probably in the mid '70s - about something called the Siljan Ring Hypothesis. The Siljan Ring is a granitic formation in central Sweden that is perhaps the oldest rock formation on Earth. Indications of hydrocarbons coming from wells drilled in that area cast doubt on the theory that oil came from biotic sources - dead dinosaurs and plants. The Siljan Ring is so old that it dates back to before there were animals or even plants. So oil didn't come from dinosaurs or even from plankton and algae in the ocean, but from methane left over from when the Earth was a ball of gas. That meant oil was essentially inexhaustible. The best thing about the theory was that it drove the typical environmentalist crazy. He would stop smoking his joint for a minute and get all wild-eyed. You could tell he was thinking, "Oh, no, what if that's true? The right-wing bastards will be able to drive their Cadillacs over the working classes forever! It can't be!!" Well, hey, guess what, here it is thirty years on. We've got plenty of petroleum, more being discovered every day. And the Siljan Ring Hypothesis, unlike the predictions of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, is alive and kicking.

Behavior is computation

I don't know what it means either, but I got it after reading the first chapter of Wolfram's book. The Principle of Computational Equivalence looks like the key idea I'm going to have to figure out. Wish me luck. Oh, and by the way, I did finish the NYT crostic. As usual, it fell apart after I spotted one longish repeated word. I'm starting to remember why I don't do crostics any more. Can't say I didn't enjoy it a little, though.

Wolfram

I received Stephen Wolfram's new book, "A New Kind of Science" yesterday. Despite being warned by another blogger that it may be "all hype", I was intrigued and hopeful. I will report my impressions. The introduction certainly sets up some large goals, nothing less than to revolutionize hard science, social science, even art and philosophy. An odd feature - Wolfram lays out the number of keystrokes he used in the twenty years since he conceived the idea for the book (billions) and the distance he drove his mouse, which came to about a hundred miles. How did he ever figure that last one out? And how does that make his product better? Some bloggers with bloggorhea (new word?!) probably exercised their metatarsals to a similar extent. Maybe the central question for me is: Does this "New Science" create opportunities for composing a new kind of word puzzle? I'll keep you posted.

Vultus est index animi

So, tell me, why is the above unexceptionable yet curiously cautionary sentiment posted on the message board of a gas station in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, yep, right there at the intersection of Tennessee and Monroe? And on the reverse was "Carpe diem", for which you can at least make the argument that it's familiar. Someone educated is reduced to being a cashier at a gas station, I would guess. Is this a cry for help or a manifesto of identification with the laboring masses? Who can say? Perhaps he now and then even pumps gas, joining a long line of penniless intellectuals. In the Paris of Abelard, poor but industrious students might have lowered themselves to feeding horses, one supposes, muttering Latinisms. It was a surprise, possibly as much of a surprise as seeing that Cox and Rathvon are now composing the crostic in the Sunday Times Magazine. They could have been doing it for years, since I haven't looked at crostics for, probably, fifteen years. But this one was hard! I haven't finished it yet, since it isn't in a NYT Magazine I personally possess. I have to sneak around these days to feed my puzzle jones. sic transit, gloria!

Here's a copy of a letter I sent to Pejmanpundit and to Jane Galt on Live from the WTC about the Second Amendment:

ear Pejman,

Great article in FoxNews. I thought you might be interested in my powers-based argument below. Why don't people argue from basic principles any more, or have I just not been looking in the right places?

About the wording of the Second Amendment: The possible
dependency of the second clause "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" on the existence or necessity of a "well-regulated militia" seems irrelevant to what, if any, powers the Amendment is reserving to the Federal government. That's of
course
one of the major stumbling blocks for interpretation. The Bill
of
Rights does not create or even define rights. It, like the rest
of
the Constitution, only defines the legitimate powers of the
Federal
government. The Amendment makes it clear that the right to keep
and
bear arms resides with the people, and that no state or Federal
government has the power to infringe that right. The definition
of what "keep and bear arms" means should depend on the original
Constitution, not the Second Amendment. Otherwise, why would this
amendment have been added?

The Second Amendment grants no powers whatever to the Federal
government, especially and particularly not the power to infringe
the
people's right to keep and bear arms. The Ninth and Tenth
Amendments
nail that down. The only reason for the addition of this
amendment
can have been to clarify that the Federal government did not have
this power. The Founding Fathers must have feared that some other
section of the Constitution might have been interpreted to give
this
power to the Federal government.

It is absurd, therefore, to say that the amendment's restriction
of
the Federal government's power to control individual keeping and
bearing of arms was conditional on the need for a militia. The
Federal government had and has no such power, or at least
certainly not from the Second Amendment. The contention that it
does, and that with the withering away of the need for a militia
the
inherent power springs into existence full-grown, reflects the
mistaken view that the Federal government has every conceivable
power
unless the Bill of rights tells us it doesn't have that power.
It's
just the other way around. In order to give the Federal
government
the power to infringe the people's right to keep and bear arms,
the
Second Amendment would have to be repealed by another amendment
which
specifically gives the Federal government that power. That ain't
gonna happen.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

PS You might be interested to know that in a speech to the
Constitutional Convention on June 8, 1789, James Madison suggested
the Second Amendment, among others, but in this speech the
"militia"
clause came after the "shall not infringe" clause. Here's the
URL:

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/jm4/speeches/amend.htm

It's my personal opinion that the "militia" clause was thrown in
as
one possible justification for not meddling with the right of each
individual to keep arms. That makes it at most an explanation,
not
a condition. RS

It is the new millennium and I can't wait for the next big thing

How do I know it's a new era? At Wal-mart this morning I bought "Cheese Spam"! It's my two favorite things in one can! Not only that, but as all we spamophiles know, the opening of the can involves now only the pulling of a ring. That's too bad. It was fun to pry the little tool off the bottom and twirl the metal strip at the top. You could make bets with your friends on whether you'ld really need a transfusion or not. But then they'd just say the doctors were trying to get rich. You should have known better than to try and be friends with collectivists. But capitalism marches on, today cheese spam, tomorrow, what, macadamia beer?

Arab insecurity

Just finished "Paper Money" by Adam Smith, written in 1981, just after the oil crises of the Seventies had made some of the Arabs filthy rich. Smith (or Goodman or whatever his REAL name is) assumes in 1981 that by 2000 the Arabs will pretty much own the whole world. It struck me that the Arabs probably thought they would, too. That feeling must have produced some heavy-duty letdown when the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union broke up and prosperity, low interest rates and massive new oil discoveries broke the Arab near-monopoly. The Arabs in 1981 were really in the position that the DeBeers diamond monopoly may be in right now, if these stories ( I wish I had saved the link to them) about huge diamond discoveries in Canada are true. I suppose it would have made me go nuts with frustration if I were a twenty-something Saudi princeling named Bin Laden and I saw the power position my country had obtained go by the boards slowly but surely and the hated Americans gradually gather back into their hand all the good cards. Why, it might make me resort to fundamentalist Islam to compensate for my lost dream of bossing around the entire industrialized world. I might blame the Saudi hierarchy, as well as all the other not-sufficiently-fundamentalist regimes in the area. Now if I am alive at all, I'm hiding in a cold dirty cave somewhere in the mountains of southern Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, hunted like the dog I have turned into. Also, after thumbing my nose at the fool Clinton for eight years, bombing and murdering at will, this junior Bush has to come along and have the gall to declare all-out war not only on me but on my ideas and my lust for glory. Why, it's enough to make me fly a plane into a building!

Wolfram and Kamen

What is it about these guys, Stephen Wolfram and Dean Kamen, that enables them to get so much publicity, for very little? I am tempted to throw in Stephen Hawking, Bobby Fischer and Nietzsche, but no. I just ordered Wolfram's new book about a "New Science" - fifty dollars! Dean Kamen is selling his scooters that don't go any faster than a bicycle for $8,000. What is it? The press must be desperate for heroes. The word "genius" scatters itself liberally when any of these boys appear.

I should say, too, that I am extremely unlikely to buy a Segway, but since I've already plumped for Wolfram's book, I hope it has more substance to it. I've always been intrigued by cellular automata, fractals and all that. Maybe you could put the program that produced the universe on a 3.5" floppy. Making it produce anything would be the hard part, since everything is already deeply involved in becoming something else. As den Beste may have mentioned, at least one would hope that the program was well written. But that brings up another thought. What if it isn't all that good and can be easily improved? Would we be duty-bound to improve it and start the better version off with a little seed matter and step back and see what happens? This could be better than cloning.

[5/19/2002 7:13:22 AM | Robert Speirs]
Not us

Just finished listening to Fox News Sunday. Tony Snow got the whole war thing together in ten words: "We have met the enemy, and he is NOT us."! Take that, Pogo! What a great summary of the enlightenment that has - finally - come over this country after decades of self-loathing and guilt tripping. Makes me confident and happy. It also makes a fitting memorial to the thousands who died on Sept. 11.

OK, OK, I know, this blog is supposed to be about puzzles. I did finish the quasi-cryptic by Lewis in the Nation, dated May 20, number 2846. The Nation is a weekly, I guess. I wouldn't subscribe to it on a bet. But the weekly pressure does perhaps explain the sketchy nature of the cryptic puzzle. Lewis doesn't bother with any fancy "distort the solution before you enter it into the diagram" business. All the entries are the same as the clue solutions. Some other differences appear from the usual Cox/Rathvon and Maltby puzzles. Lewis is addicted to multi-word answers, therefore to very long answers, and to spilling entries over from one numbered slot to the next, sometimes to three or more. Every other letter is unchecked. That makes it difficult to guess words. The occasional obscure clue - this puzzle had one extreme obscurity - could remain unfilled-in even when all the cross-checked letters have been entered. Luckily, I knew enough about Ethiopia to figure out this one. Next time, who knows?

I enjoyed this one more than I expected to, but don't seem to be impelled to rush out and acquire each puzzle as it comes out, as I do for the other cryptics. Nevertheless, Lewis does offer a change of pace from the monthlies. Most entertaining clue? 6 down, but then I'm a sucker for - well - conundrums!
[edit]
[5/17/2002 2:59:19 PM | Robert Speirs]
Another good one

Yesterday, I finished the June 2002 Atlantic puzzle, "Layers" by Cox and Rathvon. It was one of the cleverest yet. The words are all entered conventionally into the diagram. The diagram, however, has two separate parts, an outside layer and a core, with one square in the middle. The clues are arranged so that some of the answers from the outside layer, when arranged according to the numbering scheme given, provide the clues for the core layer. Not only that, but the diagram entries from the core layer are entered in numbered squares. Then you enter each letter in a crostic-like row to give you one final clue, which tells you how to complete the final center box. So it is indeed "layered". Quite an achievement. The clues were challenging, although there was a good proportion of three and four-letter entries, which tend to be easier. This I find excusable, given the intricacy of the overall scheme. The cross-clues in the diagram were quite helpful, with the desirable balance pleasingly maintained.

As I went through this puzzle, I felt a keen sense of anticipation, thinking, "I wonder if they're really going to be able to carry it through?" They did not disappoint. This is a definite nine out of ten. That brings up an interesting point. How should puzzles be rated, for difficulty, cleverness, entertainment value? What should the standards be? I'll be pontificating on this in future posts and solicit any comments anyone may have.

Most entertaining clue: 12 Down. Yes, I know it's easy, but I found it fun anyway.
[edit]

[5/15/2002 7:02:58 PM | Robert Speirs]

Not us

Just finished listening to Fox News Sunday. Tony Snow got the whole war thing together in ten words: "We have met the enemy, and he is NOT us."! Take that, Pogo! What a great summary of the enlightenment that has - finally - come over this country after decades of self-loathing and guilt tripping. Makes me confident and happy. It also makes a fitting memorial to the thousands who died on Sept. 11.

OK, OK, I know, this blog is supposed to be about puzzles. I did finish the quasi-cryptic by Lewis in the Nation, dated May 20, number 2846. The Nation is a weekly, I guess. I wouldn't subscribe to it on a bet. But the weekly pressure does perhaps explain the sketchy nature of the cryptic puzzle. Lewis doesn't bother with any fancy "distort the solution before you enter it into the diagram" business. All the entries are the same as the clue solutions. Some other differences appear from the usual Cox/Rathvon and Maltby puzzles. Lewis is addicted to multi-word answers, therefore to very long answers, and to spilling entries over from one numbered slot to the next, sometimes to three or more. Every other letter is unchecked. That makes it difficult to guess words. The occasional obscure clue - this puzzle had one extreme obscurity - could remain unfilled-in even when all the cross-checked letters have been entered. Luckily, I knew enough about Ethiopia to figure out this one. Next time, who knows?

I enjoyed this one more than I expected to, but don't seem to be impelled to rush out and acquire each puzzle as it comes out, as I do for the other cryptics. Nevertheless, Lewis does offer a change of pace from the monthlies. Most entertaining clue? 6 down, but then I'm a sucker for - well - conundrums!