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Saturday, February 05, 2005The Partial MuseCharlotte Smith The partial Muse has from my earliest hours Smiled on the ruggéd path I'm doomed to tread, And still, with sportive hand, has snatched wild flowers To weave fantastic garlands for my head; But far, far happier is the lot of those Who never learned her dear delusive art, Which, while it decks the head with many a rose, Reserves the thorn to fester in the heart. For still she bids soft Pity's melting eye Stream o'er the hills she knows not to remove - Points every pang, and deepens every sigh Of mourning friendship, or unhappy love. Ah, then how dear the Muse's favours cost If those paint sorrow best, who feel it most! 
posted by gbarto at 9:35 PM Friday, February 04, 2005from UlyssesAlfred, Lord Tennyson I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,- And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.
posted by gbarto at 11:03 PM 'CRAZY' TEDDIES DISCONTINUED To the relief of advocates for the mentally ill, the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. said Thursday that its straitjacketed Crazy For You bears are sold out and that it will not make any more.The TurkeyBlog is not the home of PC, but we still doubt the wisdom of hawking this sort of bear. If you've ever actually seen a person being hauled along in a straitjacket, it's not a very pretty or amusing sight. Pretty distressing, actually, to see someone in that state. We hope that should your beloved be crazy for you, it takes a cheerier form. In lieu of straitjacketing, we suggest attire in the spirit of the wild and crazy Steve Martin, for example:  Should the Vermont Teddy Bear Company be interested, I'm willing to license the design - cheap.
posted by gbarto at 10:42 PM Thursday, February 03, 2005On first looking into Chapman's HomerJohn Keats Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
posted by gbarto at 10:16 PM Wednesday, February 02, 2005Good speech, but ditch the laundry listDid not see the President's speech, but I did read it. Pretty nice, but too long. Which could be said of just about every State of the Union. I understand that the laundry list has become a fundamental part of the SOTU, but I don't see why. More to the point, I don't see why a guy like Bush couldn't break with tradition and crown his rhetoric about trimming government with a matched trimming of the address. Let's face it, Bush is at his best when he's talking big picture, earth-shaking stuff. If he'd stuck to 1) the changing world, 2) Social Security in transition and 3) America's committment to freedom in the world, it would have been even better. It would have been best, of course, if he'd just done the 3rd part. But that's the word from a libertarian hawk. I'd much rather hear about how we're changing the world than about the great things government is doing for us. But someone must like the laundry list. I just can't imagine who. Presumably, there are newspaper editorialists who'll write off the big stuff if there's no plug for solar energy. Otherwise, I can't see the point of the laundry list. Laundry list fans, whoever you are, I hope you enjoyed. I'm just glad a little substance followed.
posted by gbarto at 10:23 PM Religion of Peace, wo0h wooh! The headline is linked to a piece on Muslim "honor killings" in Eurabia. What's the scoop? Some Muslims are shipping their daughters off to Muslim lands like Pakistan where relatives can, with impunity, murder them for staining family honor. Others just rely on European nervousness about offending sensibilities and do the killing in the verylands that gave birth to the Enlightenment. A particularly poignant example of the quaint and curious culture of Eurabia involves a Turkish man who killed his 14 year-old daughter: she had stained the family honor by being abducted and raped. Islamic apologists always tell us this isn't the "real Islam." And they condemn the killings as a terrible thing. But they can't quite manage to condemn the killers for blaspheming against their good and peaceful faith. The infamy of Barbary Islam must be condemned, belittled and driven from the land of Europe. And step by step from the world. Muslims capable of abiding by the laws of European civil society, of course, ought be welcomed. As with Buddhists, Hindus, etc. Hell, they can probably even find space for a few believing Christians, if pressed. But there ought be no place for Barbary Islam in the cradle of the Enlightenment. When Muslims murder their daughters in the name of the honor of their families, it's barbaric When Europeans excuse it in the name of the honor of Islam and multiculturalism, is there any difference? Écrasez l'infâme!
posted by gbarto at 1:49 PM Written yesterday, February 1st, after reading through the Times Science section: Scribble the first The New York Times Science section is taking the opportunity to bemoan the decline of evolution in the American classroom. The Times could use a little homework on the matter itself. Much of their story is sociological in nature, which is fair enough. This is about how people act about evolution, not what it is. However, a close reading of the article lays the groundwork for another sociological investigation: how people who "believe" in evolution treat the matter. The Times asserts, There is no credible challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors...True. But through much of Western history, there was no "credible" - believed and believable - challenge to the idea that we were creations of a terrible God who ruled us according to His whims, down to the last flickering of a gnat's eyebrow. Evolution as a theory doesn't hang together too badly. But to read the Times article, you'd get the impression it was simple fact and that fundamentalists were going around saying "stop" meant "avocado." It might be better to say that they keep seeing blue-green where everyone else seems aqua: They're looking at the same thing and seeing something different. And they may be off the mark. But it's hard to say for sure, or, if so, how far. What I find curious about the Times article is it certainly doesn't seem to favor the phrase "Theory of Evolution." They can't say, this is science's best guess and enough of it checks out that yeah, it's worth assuming it's true unless or until something better comes along. For people who want us to leave behind superstition and see "the truth," some scientists and particularly evolutionists seem awfully wary of highlighting the fact of science that is its truest source of power: Its willingness to doubt. For hundreds of years, we lived in a Newtonian universe. Then Einstein gave us the Theory of Relativity and Newtonian physics started becoming a great tool for guessing at macro events, but not the final word. What enabled science to survive the discovery that matter only behaved like matter if it wasn't too small to be confused with a wave is that it was only science. That is, what was and is known. If we knew something different, well, it was science too. That's what the word's all about. Unfortunately, the New York Times doesn't seem to know what science is and isn't. If they did, they wouldn't give us this quote: " In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution."That's from Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern. Big deal. In 1942, something like 96 percent of Japanese believed they'd win the war. And if 70% of Iranians think you should stone prostitutes, should we? If the Times is cataloguing the willingness of the Japanese to be brainwashed by scientists in contrast with the willingness of Americans to be brainwashed by preachers, they're onto something interesting. But the feeling one gets is that Dr. Miller and the Times reporter don't want to highlight a difference in belief system but to suggest we should be more like the Japanese. I really hate it when the Times does these little pieces, because they are part of the problem, part of the reason so many Americans are so stridently against the teaching of evolution. The Times, their commenters and too many evolutionists are in the Richard Dawkins school, wearing a man-disdaining atheistic belief in evolution as a badge of honor. But Dawkins worships his own cleverness as much as any Bible-thumper worships Jesus. The end result is that science degrades into politics. Bottom line: Evolution should be taught as what it is: a theory. A damn good one. An idea that seems to account for existing evidence, but isn't enabling us to predict future events, else it would be a law. If we talked about the "Theory of Evolution" as a tool that scientists use to make sense of what they've seen and develop new ideas to explore, we'd be telling the truth about how science really works. But to present science as having all the answers and the local preacher as being an idiot who doesn't know anything is bound to stir hurt feelings without promoting "enlightenment". It is my view that evolution should be taught. And not just as one theory among many, but as the best we have. It would be judicious to mention I.D. and other creationisms, of course, but it would also be fine to mention that there's a lot less evidence for them. But at the end of this would come the important part: An explanation of what it means to do science, starting with the realization that if a better theory comes along, yours is gone. I think it would go a long way with the creationists if the evolutionists simply conceded that Newton was right until he wasn't and that they, too, could later be proved wrong. Telling children that they're monkeys, not creations of God, and that science says so is not good science, because science doesn't know so. It suggests evolution as a way of understanding the similarities and differences among life forms. Where God does or doesn't fit is beyond the scope of science. On the other hand, telling children that the idea of evolution provides a way of understanding what all creatures have in common but that what we understand may very well change the more we learn would be fair, reasonable and right. An example, in fact, of the open-mindedness that makes science work, in contrast to the close-mindedness of evolutionists who worship science but plainly don't understand it. Scribble the second Birdbrains and Evolution The same NY Times Science section that is in a snit about not enough evolution being taught also features a marvelous article on our understanding of... birdbrains. It used to be thought that birds didn't really have cognition, that their behavior was largely instinctual. Here's why: Avian brains got their bad reputation a century ago from the German neurobiologist Ludwig Edinger, known as the father of comparative anatomy. Edinger believed that evolution was linear, Dr. Jarvis [of Duke University] said. Brains evolved like geologic strata. Layer upon layer, the brains evolved from old to new, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals. By Edinger's standards, fish were the least intelligent. Humans, created in God's image, were the most intelligent... Looking at the physical structure of brains, Edinger saw sophistication among mammals but only centers for instinctual processing among birds. Notes the Times: This view persisted through the 20th century and is still found in most biology textbooks, said Dr. Harvey Karten, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the consortium [of avian brain researchers] whose research has long challenged the classic view. You'll notice what we have here: honest to God scientists discussing differing understandings of how evolution works and suggesting that a faulty understanding led to a major part of the animal kingdom's cognitive function being mischaracterized. When we touched on evolution in my science classes (lightly, I'm from a rural area), I detected little of this debate. To the contrary, our textbook offered evolution as essentially settled. I believe there was a disclaimer about it being a theory and not proved. But there were not warnings that scientists disagreed on how it worked, why it worked or where humans fit in. (There were certainly no allusions to the mighty Darwin's beliefs about which races and societies were most evolved, though this was a big preoccupation in the unpublished version of his journals.) If science teachers wanted to do their classes a major service, they would cut out the Times articles on evolution and on birdbrains. They could then show their students the difference between science and ideology. Science, their students would learn, is exciting, with its vibrant debate about how the world works. They would see how a group of scientists are disproving what was taken as "fact" 30 or 40 years ago. From this, they could learn that the best of science is rooted not in "belief" that you "know," but in attempts to learn, understand and learn anew, always waiting - eagerly - to discover something you'd missed. The teacher could then take the article on evolution to show that science, like any other human activity, is peopled not with immortals but with mere humans. That even human scientists, when put on the defensive, retreat from thought and blindly defend against outsiders. The evolutionist response to creationism tells you all you need to know about why racism, ethnocentrism and sexism are so insidious. Even logical scientists freak out and close ranks when facing the "other." It also tells you why scientists need to stop using evolution as a litmus test for deciding who is serious and return to using it for what it is - a tool for broadening our understanding of how life works until we can refine it into a law (which may still be disproved in time) or discard it favor of a new tool.
posted by gbarto at 1:12 PM from Oh Bid Me Not to Wander Susanna Blamire Oh urge me not to wander, And quitmy pleasant native shore; Oh let me still meander On those sweet banks I loved before! The heart when filled with sorrow Can find no joy in change of scene, Nor can that cheat, tomorrow, Be aught but what today has been.
posted by gbarto at 1:18 AM Tuesday, February 01, 2005from I Remember, I RememberThomas Hood I remember, I remember The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heaven Than when I was a boy.
posted by gbarto at 11:55 PM Monday, January 31, 2005from The Mouse's Petition to Dr. Priestley...Anna Laetitia Barbauld Oh, hear a pensive captive's prayer, For liberty that sighs, And never let thine heart be shut Against the prisoner's cries! For here forlorn and sad I sit, Within the wiry grate, And tremble at the approaching morn Which brings impending fate. If e' er thy breast with freedom glowed, And spurned a tyrant's chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain!
posted by gbarto at 8:57 PM In his MSNBC column, the mighty Instapundit mentions a man who should get more credit for events in Iraq this week: Bill Clinton. Now, I'm about as far from Clinton lover as they come, but, he's right. While the Clinton years were, in ways, "a sabbatical," as President Bush said, a sabbatical can be used to gather one's thoughts about what's next. Clinton's holding actions in Iraq, and his signing of the Iraq Liberation Act may not have changed the world overnight, but they stood as reminders to the world that America had not forgotten about Iraq and had not stopped paying attention to the dangers posed by Saddam. And when the time came to act, Clinton's record was sitting right there, a reminder that Saddam was not a bugbear of presidents named Bush but a universally acknowledged threat to the stability of his region and as a scourge upon humanity. We can argue about whether Clinton could have or should have done more. In rebuttal, one might suggest that before 9/11 it would have been next to impossible to galvanize the public behind an undertaking like our Iraq effort. After all, even post-9/11 a certain percentage of the country regards terrorism as a nasty trick to justify contracts for Halliburton and power for Bush. If 3,000 bodies aren't enough to convince some that there's an enemy we need to oppose, what chance did Clinton have? In signing the Iraq Liberation Act and launching the occasional cruise missile, Clinton may have done less than was needed, in hindsight. But at least he was on the right side. Which leaves this Republican shaking his head and wondering: How did the Democrats, after 8 years of Clinton, drag up such a cast of people who were a step down?
posted by gbarto at 8:19 PM Sunday, January 30, 2005Be sure to visit Day by Day (link at top right) for the picture of the day - a smiling Iraqi voter.The other day, finishing Chopra's book, he made the comment that the President's language justifying war was filled with the ideals of peace. Some on the left scorn this. He said it made sense for things to run together in a time of transition. Reading the comments of Iraqi voters all over the web, I think W has pulled off something big here. Tons of Iraqi voters were showing up to announce that the war was over. They were voting, in their own words, for peace. And so we have the oddity of our times, a war for peace. It's a paradox, but that happens. While we're a ways off, from Sharon's giving Abbas room to make peace to events in Iraq to the realization by various Middle East governments that history is now going against them... we're on the right track. Peace in my lifetime or yours? I don't think it's likely. But are we moving to an era where peace breaks out and war becomes less and less the norm. Let's hope so. In any case, when you check out Day by Day, you'll see the world changing action of the moment. It ain't blowing up towers or soldiers. It's the simple act of standing up and being counted in a society becoming free. Magnificent.
posted by gbarto at 1:38 PM from America: A Prophecy |
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