Author Archive

Again, from the usual source: with reference to this … TBN is a sewer, Crouch is a parasite, and Stein is upholding the finest tradition of Hollywood celebrities, and I mean that in the worst possible way.

Lots of other people, I hope, will be quoting Jacob Bronowski today, from the “Knowledge or Certainty” episode of The Ascent of Man:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
 
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.”
 
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

I’m not finished. I know PZ Myers. I’ve corresponded with him, spoken with him, and been a guest in his house. Nor was I there under false pretenses; he knows exactly what I am. I can think of few contrasts sharper than that between the way atheist liberal blue-state biology professor PZ Myers treated evangelical libertarian red-state corporate slug Jay Manifold and the way PZ is getting treated by these cretins.

It’s about time somebody started a “Christian Fans of PZ Myers” club, complete with WWPZD bracelets.

Did I mention that TBN is a sewer?

Via the usual source, why bright kids should, in many cases, drop out is thoroughly explained at America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree. It’s positively Freakonomics-worthy stuff. Turns out I knew what I was doing at age 19 … avoiding a s___load of debt and not compromising my future earning power much, if at all.

(Actually, in my case there is almost no doubt I would be both 1] making less money and 2] living somewhere more expensive right now if I’d somehow stayed in the academic world. Figure student debt into that and my net worth would be perhaps a quarter its present value, and that’s if I were lucky.)

Key passage: “You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound …”

The Talking Heads would agree.

(Related: lengthy six-month old post, Get Out the Hankies, with tons of comments, over on Transterrestrial Musings.)

UPDATE: More food for thought …

Olympic torch relay begins North Korea leg free of protest

Gosh, it’s like they have some secret recipe for domestic tranquillity or something …

Not a Chicago Boy exactly, but a towering presence in my inner life for many years. The only thing remotely resembling a writing voice I’ve ever had is a pale imitation of him. Requiescat In Pace.

Updates:

• added “FRSBIS” (thanks, Jim)
• from Wired, Video: Arthur C. Clarke’s Last Message to Earth
• from SomethingAwful forum goon “SirRobin”:

Tonight, when the sun has gone down, go outside to a place where you can see the stars. Look up. Watch for a point of light that moves fast enough that its motion is obvious … then take the phone out of your pocket and call someone on the other side of the planet.

• heh

Now he’s responsible for ignorant teenagers:

… President Bush’s education law, No Child Left Behind, has impoverished public school curriculums by holding schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and mathematics, but in no other subjects.

Really, what are these people going to do when Utopia fails to arrive next January 20th? What happens when you think all the world’s problems (and solutions) come from the White House?

We are drawn, ineluctably, to something that looks very, very much like required viewing for ChicagoBoyz … “greatness comes to those who take it.”
Previous members of series:

• The Boys From Ulan Bator
• KHANNNNN!
• KHANNNNN! (A Continuing Series)
• KHANNNNN! (another member of a continuing series)

The ice storm that clipped both KC and Chicago today, coming as it does after several days of nasty weather, has a lot of us holed up inside and thinking wintry thoughts. We might wonder how the natives of one of the climatically harshest places on Earth deal with it. Or, perhaps, deel with it. So, after considering for a moment whether any other blog can provide puns in Mongolian, graze (Midwesterners [and Mongolians] don’t surf) on over to NYCMongol.com for all your clothing and shelter needs for when you “steppe out.” For those Chicagoan, er, Siberian winters, there’s the cotton quilted deel for a mere C-note-and-a-half, and don’t forget to pick up a pair of (somewhat more steeply priced) boots. Shelter? Get yer yurt right here. You’ll fit right in when our horde (another Mongolian-derived word) of genetically-engineered Temujin-class warriors conquers the world.

Or just pick up a few books. Whatever.

Previous members of series:

• KHANNNNN!
• KHANNNNN! (A Continuing Series)

Jeez, guys, am I the only one who remembers?

• Seriousness, Indeed
• 61 Years Ago Today
• Chicago Anniversary

I can’t be the only one who likes to blow s*** up.

Presuming the residual antipathies Lex quoted in I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot to be characteristic of UK media figures, we have one more reason to regard tasteless American ahistoricity as a feature rather than a bug, because endocrine-system reactions to “Roman Catholic” are, I believe, just about inconceivable here, and certainly not because we’ve all translated into a higher plane of flawlessly nontheistic rationality.

I was going to make this a comment on Lex’s post but then realized that I wanted to pile on the links, which would choke the comment-spam filter faster than a Greenpeace activist on a tour of a nuclear power plant. So away I go with a barrage of autobiographical details, which is the price of a post written by me that’s anything other than hopelessly abstract. Gosh, you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see this!
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3 Americans Awarded Nobel in Economics — and one of them is “Roger B. Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago …”

This makes, what, about 900 of our guys?

UPDATE: U of C News Office release here.

I’m on a mission from Lex. On Thu 12 Jul at 5:34 PM CDT, he wrote me:

> Are the Millennials Different?
>
> I know you are a fan. Any response must be cross-posted on CB!

I can think of nothing better to do on a fine Bastille Day evening — having missed the concert by virtue of being 400 miles to the southwest — than consume modest quantities of ethanol in the form of Boulevard Lunar Ale and compose a rambling post for infliction on the readership here. By way of my usual thinning out of my prospective audience, graze on over to Arcturus for what has become known as the Baby Boomer Apocalypse post, which will 1) impart what I think is the most important aspect of Strauss & Howe’s model and 2) very likely cause you to decide you’ve got better things to do than read the rest of this.
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This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.

Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.

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One of these guys is President and H5N1 becomes human-to-human transmissible? (Via the usual source.) As Jeff Goldstein likes to say, just askin’ …

Via the usual source … Rosie O’Donnell 9/11 Conspiracy Comments: Popular Mechanics Responds.

I don’t mean to claim originality here; there will always be people who can’t read the signs of the times. The interesting thing is to see how similar their illogic is across supposedly insurmountable political boundaries. Consider WTC conspiracy theorists and antievolutionists.

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But here’s a picture (click for full-size version):

Via a commenter over on Winds of Change, I found this post on The Spirit of Man, which in turn pointed to A Question of Numbers.

Short version: the Shah’s regime, odious as it was, killed a little over 3,000 people between the early ’60s and its fall in the late ’70s.

The mullahs have killed unknown but vastly greater numbers, by execution, incompetent defense during the Iran-Iraq war, and generalized misrule — many times the Shah’s entire toll, each year. The grand total may reach into seven figures.

Ironically, by suppressing the relatively timid elements of his opposition, the Shah all but guaranteed that he would be succeeded by the most unhesitating killers among them. See Daughter of Persia for a terrifying account of the revolution (there is also a website for the author, Sattareh Farman Farmaian).

Don’t forget to toast the Professor tomorrow (Wed 3 Jan) at 9 PM local time.

Annihilation from Within is Fred Charles Iklé’s attempt to draw attention toward, and thereby inspire management of, the true geopolitical risks of the 21st century – risks ultimately deriving from a great decoupling of science from the cultural constraints of politics and religion, a quarter of a millennium ago – risks portended by, but utterly eclipsing, the events of 9/11/2001 – risks almost entirely unrecognized by our current risk-management institutions, foremost among them the nation-state.

AfW is eminently worth reading and relatively likely to do some actual good in the world. But you haven’t grazed in here to read a blanket endorsement, and I’d be no blogger if I didn’t contend (with all-but-nonexistent credibility) with some portion of Iklé’s thesis; so for a thoroughgoingly unqualified critique, complete with annoyingly personal speculation and fuzzy intuition-laden commentary, read on!

(~2,700 words; approximate reading time 7-14 minutes, not counting lots of links.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Glenn for pointing to Genghis Khan: Law and order, an LATimes piece by none other than Jack Weatherford, whose Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World was reviewed by me in, uh, KHANNNNN!

Thanks to Glenn for pointing to Hypersonic Cruise Missile: America’s New Global Strike Weapon, in which we read that “[i]n 2001, Defense Department planners began searching for something that could hit a foe almost instantly without risking a nuclear holocaust.”

Exactly.

Add conventional SLBMs and X-51s to our arsenal. Heh.