History

WWPZD?

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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?

“What The Clintons Did For Feminism”

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Rand Simberg has a good post on this topic.

The Clintons did a lot of damage to the country by their relentless personal attacks on their political adversaries. I don’t blame them for all of the nasty polarization that now exists, yet it seems to me that they bear significant blame. How much more civil and thoughtful might our public life now be if, instead of fanning and exploiting public divisions for their own ends, the Clintons had made some effort to buffer group animosities? To note that they were nice to some people and groups is to miss the point. The Clintons treated conservatives and libertarians as class enemies and abused the power of the State against individuals of all backgrounds who made trouble for them. We shouldn’t forget.

Just in Time for the Beijing Olympics

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibition about the 1936 Nazi Olympics:

In August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship scored a huge propaganda success as host of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Games were a brief, two-week interlude in Germany’s escalating campaign against its Jewish population and the country’s march toward war. This site explores the issues surrounding the 1936 Olympic Games—the Nazis’ use of propaganda, the intense boycott debate, the history of the torch run, the historic performance of Jesse Owens, and more.

Change a few names and nouns and the above description fits the 2008 Olympics rather closely, no? Congratulations to the USHMM on its fine sense of timing. Let’s hope that the Chinese government benefits less from the 2008 games than Hitler did from the ones in 1936.

Patriot’s Day

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Dancing Fast and Squinting Hard

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I don’t read Industrial Equipment News on a regular basis (who does?), but they printed a fascinating article by Mark Devlin that is worth checking out.

Mr. Devlin took umbrage at a recent paper written by two sociologist PhD’s in association with the University of Oxford. In the paper, the argument is made that there is something about engineers that causes them to become murderous, right wing radicals in greater numbers than other professions. This is due to the fact that most of the movers and shakers of international Islamic terrorist organizations were trained as engineers.

The 800 pound gorilla that the two sociologists are trying oh-so-hard to ignore is that an engineering degree might just be something sought after by people who are desperate to build bombs and place them where they will do the most damage. Terrorist wannabes will take classes that reveal the weak points in infrastructure and how to use explosives, as opposed to Texas Instruments turning normal college students into monsters with their mind-warping engineering calculators.

Or, as Mr. Devlin so pithily states, “Tough to overthrow much with an English degree.”

But I actually think there are two factors that both Mr. Devlin and the authors of the paper missed.

More than a few terrorist organizations of the Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s were started by, and heavily recruited, disgruntled college students and university professors. It worked back then, why wouldn’t it work now?

(As an aside, I would like to point out that the majority of those Leftist college students who turned to terrorism were enrolled in the soft sciences, mostly philosophy. I think the authors of the Oxford study would get bent out of shape if someone would suggest that the humanities warps the mind and turns people into violent terrorists. I would never do that myself for fear that Ginny, our resident expert on the humanities and former college student in the 1970’s, would decide to retire to her kitchen and assemble something volatile from common household cleaning products.)

It is also no secret that the Arab world is hardly a hotbed of growth and innovation. Seems to me that most of the families which can afford to pay for a modern Western style education would be pushing their spawn to get a degree in the hard sciences, if for no other reason than there is a real need for development through most of the Islamic world.

I corresponded very briefly with our fellow Chicago Boyz and resident engineer Steven den Beste about this article, and he had this to say about well educated terrorists….

“As to them being disproportionately engineers, I would suggest that observation of any large university will show that the vast majority of exchange students are to be found in departments who teach utilitarian subjects. Not too many Arabs are to be found studying postmodern literary theory or art history. And I don’t think you’ll find too many of them in the Women’s Studies department, let alone Queer Studies. Or any other “studies”, for that matter.”

That appears to be sound wisdom to me.

(Hat tip to Ace.)