Alan K. Henderson

Quote of the Day, Rathergate Edition

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Comment from Tony_Petroski, in this PowerLine Blog post that revisits the Rathergate affair and thoroughly discredits the Killian documents:

The Mapes Miasma. My what a miserable, manipulative. maddening, malignant, malodorous, mangled, maniacal, menacingly meddlesome mockery of a mendacious mockery of a misanthropic mendacious mockery it is. Her miasma has all the earmarks of Moldavian hacking.

If anyone ever gets around to writing a history of the war between peer review and open source, I hope this episode is included and Mapes lives to see it. 

The Reich Stuff

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Yesterday, Transterrestrial Musings contributed to the venerable April 1 tradition with the headline Pro-German Protesters Demand Ceasefire. That brought to mind something I’ve pondered recently: does the Third Reich seem so unique at least in part because we never had a chance to see what the Aztecs, Moghuls, ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, and other pre-industrial empires would do if they had mid-20th Century technology? I can imagine boxcars unloading people at Tenochtitlan…

Messages in the Original Star Trek

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For those of you who brought your copy of The Screwtape Letters, open to Chapter 1:

Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism [disbelief in the supernatural] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future.

This is relevant to discourse in general. Jargon means different things to different people; it is key to preventing meaningful communication. Social media is a gold mine of jargon, or a dilithium mine in the case of the original Star Trek. (Roddenberry hadn’t invented latinum yet.) Somebody will chastise the later spinoffs for being “woke” or “too political,” and someone else will claim that the show was that way from the start. Looking over the original series I find little in the way of allusion to real-world politics or ’60s liberalism, and nothing compatible with modern leftism.

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The Truthiness Is Out There

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Is the term “conspiracy theory” ever used in a nonpejorative sense, in context with the actual definition of “theory?” Whether or not that be the case, my attention is focused on two aspects of the decidedly unsound variety rooted in speculation and/or outright hoax. First is overestimating the human capacity for large-scale concealment, cooperation, competence, knowledge, and consistency, violating a set of principles which I will dub Henderson’s Laws of Organization:

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