Ralf Goergens

Mark Steyn has company

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As a defendant before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, that is.

Clive Davis links to an opinion piece by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald writes that hate speech laws are ‘oppressive and dangerous’ and quotes, among other sources, an article by David Bernstein at NRO:

…University of British Columbia Prof. Sunera Thobani, a native of Tanzania, faced a hate-crimes investigation after she launched into a vicious diatribe against American foreign policy. Thobani, a Marxist feminist and multiculturalism activist, had remarked that Americans are “bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood.” The Canadian hate-crimes law was created to protect minority groups from hate speech. But in this case, it was invoked to protect Americans.

Now see what you did? You just had to keep calling for blood and get the nice professor lady into trouble. Tsk, tsk.

By the way, Mark Steyn himself reports that some of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s investigators are acting as agents provocateur, at websites such as Stormfront, among some others.

‘Tis the season… …to beat up on each other

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Or since Christmas is over, it ‘Twas: Two men had to be evacuated from an Antarctic research facility after a Christmas brawl.

Polar medivac flights are rare occurrences, one of the most dramatic being a midwinter flight in 1999 for a woman doctor who developed breast cancer and needed urgent treatment.

And those two geniuses needed one because they couldn’t hold their liquor. Hard to live down, and it looks just great on the resume.

Terrestrial chemistry is an anomaly in the Solar System

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We take too much for granted when we are looking at terrestrial materials such as rocks and then assume that they are representative for those on other bodies within our solar system in general:

Conditions on Earth scarcely resemble those elsewhere in our own solar system. We live on a wet and tepid exception to the chemical and physical norms of the planets that contain most of the solar sysytems mass. Being made largely of water like the rest of the life on Earth, we think nothing of life’s inorganic substrate being the product of wet chemistry…
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Earthly quartz and feldspars, micas and clays, all contain water and have been re-arranged by it. Likewise, compounds that are decomposed by water and elements that react vigorously with it are largely alien to the surface of the Earth. Not only have we never seen them in the state of nature, but they scarcely figure in our imagined view of the chemistry that gave rise to life…

To plug the gaps in our knowledge and to overcome our (understandable) failure of imagination, we would have to send out a fleet of robotic spacecraft to collect samples from the various rocky bodies in the solar system. A systematic analysis of those samples would offer some important insights in how materials develop and self-organize in and on rocky planets and moons that are solid like the Earth but unlike it are non-aqueous. These results would in turn provide some clues on how emergent and autocatalytic processes can lead from inorganic to organic chemistry and maybe even to life, under conditions that are radically different from those on Earth.