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Friday, March 04, 2005A Different UniverseRobert Laughlin Laughlin is one of the three Nobel laureates for 1998 for physics. And he addresses an interesting puzzle: While quantum theorists look for the super-tiniest particles whose properties will explain life, the universe and everything, other physicists are trying to decide what to do about atoms that behave differently in groups than alone. To wit, if you've got enough water and you make it cold enough, it will freeze. In fact, it will freeze in 11 slightly different states. We don't know why those (at least) 11 states occur, or how. We do know that if you take a single molecule of water, you can't do it. You need lots of water molecules - though it's not clear how many - but once you've got enough, they form a superstructure, a crystalline lattice work, that is so remarkable you can drive trucks across it to go ice fishing. But what's really cool is that even if one molecule in the structure is out of place, the others will stay enough in the right place enough that it holds and appears uniform. Laughlin's essential premise is that universal laws will have to include universal laws of organization. He shows that some laws (pertaining especially to gases and liquids) work great in large volumes, poorly if at all in small volumes. What does that mean? It means that finding the Grand Unified Theory can't be done just by investigating particle physics, that there's something that goes on where for everything from crystallizing water to molten metal you need a sort of critical mass before there are enough molecules with enough electron shells for the mass of the thing to behave as a uniform thing. While Laughlin is not Richard Feynman, he's one of the entertaining variety of physicist with lots of cool stuff to talk about regarding his research and what it reminds him of in real life. For an fun read that will open your eyes to all sorts of stuff happening around you that you might not have noticed before, Laughlin's is a fine book. 
posted by gbarto at 10:23 PM Thursday, March 03, 2005Here's a bit from the CNET interview with FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith on efforts to apply McCain-Feingold to net commentary, including e-mail lists.Worries Smith: It's going to be a battle, and if nobody in Congress is willing to stand up and say, "Keep your hands off of this, and we'll change the statute to make it clear," then I think grassroots Internet activity is in danger. The impact would affect e-mail lists, especially if there's any sense that they're done in coordination with the campaign. If I forward something from the campaign to my personal list of several hundred people, which is a great grassroots activity, that's what we're talking about having to look at.Hmm. I'm less worried for bloggers than I am for the pols. Iraqis, Iranis and Chinese risk their lives in posting their opinions on weblogs. American bloggers are in much better shape. We're in a freer society, one were the ridiculousness of this is pretty apparent. The only way these threats will work is if we, the bloggers, stop commenting. If the courts ever actually make stick the idea that blogs aren't opinion journals, we should all immediately put links to the major parties on our weblogs, run google searches for sites with the links and forward the searches - all of us - to the FEC as potential complaints. Swamp 'em. If they're going after ten or fifteen sites, they can play hardball, perhaps, but if the thousands of political and quasi-political weblogs all show up in violation, what are they going to do? And do you want to be the politician who's defending McCain-Feingold while a thousand online journals a night post comments wondering when the FEC's gonna get them? The answer to the speech question is always more speech. If the FEC doesn't shut this down, we should give them more speech than they can handle. Btw: if the day comes, be sure to also forward your complaints to McCain and Kollar-Kotelly and encourage your readers to play along. We don't just want the FEC and co. getting letters from a couple thousand bloggers. We want John McCain's internet guy greeting him in the morning with a worried look and news that he has 70,000 e-mails waiting. Update: I see commenter Maximos at Redstate.org is way ahead of me on this: Yes, and if they are actually so foolish as to ignore us, then we ought to "crash the system" during the next election cycle: generate so many links to campaign sites and literature that it will be impossible to enforce the law in any but a token number of cases.
posted by gbarto at 7:27 PM Those poor, confused Muslim men Remember this? (from the NYT): According to the prosecution, the Meerwala council ordered the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai, then 30, as punishment for the alleged illicit sexual relations of her brother Shakoor with a woman from the rival Mastoi tribe.In case you think you read it wrong, yes, a grown woman was gang raped to punish her brother on the orders of a Muslim council. This, of course, is no shocker from the religion of peace. That those poor Pakistani men were sentenced to death for something as trifling as raping a woman or ordering her rape, though, was unusual. Not to worry. They've been let off the hook. Wouldn't want to send the wrong message about what Islamic law's all about, after all.
posted by gbarto at 6:51 PM Puppies! At A Dog's Life
posted by gbarto at 1:30 AM Cicero has some interesting questions for Pat Buchanan.
posted by gbarto at 1:25 AM Whaddya know? Stephen Green summarized my philosophy for domestic governance in one fairly short sentence: Keep the Democrats out of my wallet and the Republicans out of my entertainment.
posted by gbarto at 1:10 AM For the record: The TurkeyBlog is fairly open-minded about religion. He is more than open to the suspicion once expressed by a Scott Adams character (the Avatar) that the multiplicity of religions represent a multiplicity of plausible roadmaps to a contented existence in a civilized society. I even think Islam has a lot to offer. In my younger days, I even learned a bit of Arabic so I could work through the words of the Prophet in the original. I don't remember much, but it's hard to forget this bit: b-ism allahi ar-rahmani ar-rahimi... In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate... Voltaire had trouble with the idea of a loving God on account of a nasty earthquake in Lisbon. I have trouble with the idea of a loving Muslim God on account of too many girls and young women slaughtered in the name of "family honor." I don't think Allah, if He is Merciful and Compassionate, could possibly smile on the barbaric behavior of so-called believers who claim their misogynistic behavior is at God's bidding but who are really acting on pre-Hejira customs. They aren't (as some assert) trying to recapture the Muslim heyday of five or six centuries back. In fact, they're trying to go back before the time of the Prophet and pretend that customs they still haven't outgrown are Islamic because they are believers. This is like Andrea Yates drowning her children to keep them from danger. It is equally awful and destructive. And equally deranged. In the Holy Books of the Christians and Jews, we are sometimes offered some pretty barbaric notions. We learn of prostitutes saved from stoning because of the connections of their johns. We learn of little children rent to bits because God's messenger had a short temper and no perspective. We see one of God's finest offering his daughters to a rape mob to cool things down while he chats with some bigwigs. Somehow, somehow, we manage not to emphasize these passages too strongly. Yeah, we think, they meant something then. Maybe they mean something now. But what? If we can't find a meaning that coheres with the advances brought by 2,000 years of civilization, we focus on other passages that offer better guidance. Even Jerry Falwell isn't calling for us to stone homosexuals and adultresses. Will the Muslims, likewise, grow up? In some places, they have. The Black men I've known who converted to Islam, for example, never seemed to know that much about their obligation to turn into sexually repressed freaks. The Turks, by and large, seem to have a handle on things. So wassup with the Middle East? I don't think it's Islam. Because if you're going to swear by the Koran, you have to start with that opening book and those opening words. The nutjobs who go in for honor killings may have their favored passages, but they've missed that every last book starts with "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..." I say this so that you'll know, when you get to the next posting, that I am not blasting Islam. Am not blasting the religion that has brought prison inmates in America and wandering souls the world over a sense of solace and a sense of purpose. I am blasting a fifth century tribalism that has grafted Islam onto its culture the way that voodoo grafts Catholicism onto a pre-existing animism. I am blasting a backward, vulgar abuse of Islam that has nothing to do with submission to God and everything to do with submission to pride and paranoia.
posted by gbarto at 12:04 AM Wednesday, March 02, 2005Hmm...The TurkeyBlog, of course, opposes the death penalty. So he naturally opposes the death penalty for minors. But... Der Spiegel (via Instapundit) reports today on "honor killings" in Germany, which is where Muslim fundamentalists kill the women who leave them in an effort to pretend that they (the fundamentalists) aren't impotent and repressed but in control. Just to show what big cojones these wankers have, here's an interesting detail: In many cases, fathers -- and sometimes even mothers -- single out their youngest son to do the killing, Boehmecke said, "because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges."Isn't that just like those Muslim fundamentalists, sending out the mama's boys to do what Papa Abu's wrists are too limp for him to do himself? And a legal system that pretends that knocking off little sis 'cause papa got a bug up his *** is okay 'cause Jr. couldn't mean it just creates a system for these jerk-offs (How do you spell "Muslim fundamentalist"? b-a-r-b-a-r-i-a... that's enough, now!) to carry on like the hysterics they are at little cost to themselves. Now, I'm not suggesting that the death penalty for Jr. would make papa any less likely to ask his little boy to do a "man's work," given that families that go in for the honor killing thing don't exactly have any real men around. After all, the Palestinian version of these people had no problem sending Jr. to get his *** shot for the evening news. But maybe Jr. would think twice. Maybe if Jr. knew he was facing real hard time, he'd go with his sister to the discotheque instead of sitting home with the old man pretending that once he grew a beard he'd have all the women, sheep and goats he desired for whatever uses he might put them.
posted by gbarto at 11:47 PM  Please put litter in its place.That's what the swirly type at the side has to say. Wonders the TurkeyGal, "Isn't it only litter if you throw it on the ground?" Says Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: litter 4 a: trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about (trying to clean up the roadside ~)Endeavoring to follow the injunctions of ecologically sensitive McDonald's, then, the picture at right is where you wind up. The TurkeyBlog, for the record, subsequently decided to dispose of used container in appropriate receptacle. After I told the litter that its mother wears combat boots.
posted by gbarto at 11:13 PM John Stewart and Why the UN Doesn't Work Opinion Journal picks up on a Daily Show interview with a Democrat who accidentally wishes out loud that all this freedom stuff would stop before Bush becomes the next Reagan. What's really interesting, though, is John Stewart's grudging credit. He doesn't like Bush, but finds it hard to root against half the Middle East suddenly deciding it wants more freedom. But here's the important quote from Stewart, because it goes to the heart of what we've been up against in this fight: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.This is, of course, how John Stewart feels. It's also how I felt. Those who read the TurkeyBlog back in the day know that we harped on gassed Kurds and the attempted assassination of George H.W. Bush far more than WMD. In fact, if Stewart's wondering, WMD's were a red herring. John Stewart cares about cleaning up the Middle East. I care about cleaning up the Middle East. George W. cares about cleaning up the Middle East. The UN? The UN doesn't give a flying you know what. To the contrary, it's appalled by the idea of cleaning up the Middle East. Some of its most outspoken members, lest we forget, are part of the swamp we're draining. At the U.N., the Lebanese people don't get a vote. Assad's puppet does. At the UN, the gassed Kurds didn't even get 1/4 vote. Saddam voted for them. At the UN, the families of the girls who died in a dormitory fire because they weren't allowed to leave without hair scarves don't get a vote. The Saudi ruling family that sponsors the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice votes for them. At the United Nations, the good but oppressed citizens of Chile never got to vote under Pinochet. Pinochet voted for them. And at the UN, the oppressed Palestinians in Israel don't get a vote. Sharon votes for them. I hope by now, everybody has found at least one group worthy of representation that goes unheard because of what the UN values most - sovereignty for those who have the guns to enforce it. Why the "nuclear cloud"? Syria, Saudi, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya - do any of these nations care if Saddam threatens his own people? Hell no. They threaten their own people too. They only care if Saddam threatens them, that is, the notion that their sovereignty is not inviolable. Saddam gassing the Kurds is fine by the UN, just so long as he doesn't threaten Kuwait, Saudi, Syria or any of the other tyrants in the neighborhood. And so we pushed a red herring, a nuclear cloud, to have a pretext for doing the right thing in an international community where doing the right thing counts for little but minimizing the need to change nameplates at the UN counts for all. I think a lot of us knew this in the run-up to the Iraq war. I know I harped on the need to emphasize rape videos, murders abroad and the gassing of the Kurds, so the American people would know this wasn't just about WMD, it was about destroying a culture in need of destruction. I think the American people caught the wink and the nod, which is why they have grudgingly supported Bush, even reelected him at a time when they were decidedly mixed in their feelings about him. Guess what, though? There's more fun ahead. At this crucial moment, we owe great thanks to Chirac, to Schroeder, to Putin, to all the naysayers. We've read about the European superstate for a long time. About the powerhouse it's going to be, etc. But when Chirac and Schroeder tried to shut down the Iraq effort, and then to shut down Eastern European support for it, they gave us a twofer. Eastern Europe is already wary. For forty years, the US called for their freedom and the "leaders" of the EU coughed after, "if it's not too inconvenient, of course." The Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Bulgarians and all the others... they remember. And now, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iranis and all the others... they'll remember too. Remember 241 dead American Marines in Beirut, remember 1400 dead American soldiers in Iraq, remember how George W. Bush said we were with them and how, it turned out, we were. Not that the EU will be cut off, of course. They'll get their trade, they'll get their exchanges. But they'll also get the wary glance that makes it clear that the Europeans are folks with whom one does business, not people you trust. Which is the real reason why for all the prattle about economics, multilateralism, joint ventures, etc, the United States-Britain-Australia axis is a superpower and Europe never will be. Europe purports to stand for a lot, but it will fight for very little. When the history is finally written, this moment, like the Cold War, will be remembered as a time when the United States and her allies stood firm for their ideals - freedom, liberty and democracy - and triumphed, remaking the world for the better. History will have little to say for wiser, more nuanced nations, however, for even the glorious EU cannot be a superpower if it lacks the will to effect positive change.
posted by gbarto at 10:41 AM Congratulations to No Name of Radio Alice @ 97.3, whose long suffering wife delivered a 9lb, 4 oz baby boy. Bay Area commuters will be spending their mornings with director Kevin Smith till Papa No Name comes back from paternity leave.
posted by gbarto at 9:51 AM Tuesday, March 01, 2005Gratuitous swipes at Krugman from the banner above. Enjoy. Hopefully, Krugman will give us a column to tear apart soon, at which point the banner will come down.
posted by gbarto at 10:37 AM Monday, February 28, 2005I Never Saw a MoorEmily Dickinson I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, Nor visited in heaven; Yet certain am I of the spot As if the chart were given.
posted by gbarto at 11:17 PM Hugh Hewitt is among the many noting Howard Dean's assertion that the struggle for the Democratic party to retake power is "a struggle of good and evil." Hugh thinks this is over the top. Hugh apparently didn't get the memo. Talking about the 19 men who murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 as evil is over the top. Talking about the Taliban that reduced women to beneath livestock in the social pecking order as evil is over the top. Talking about the person who murdered 100 Iraqis with a car bomb earlier today as evil is over the top. We know this, because the Europeans worried about our tendance simpliste to see the world en noir et en blanc when the president described the 9/11 hijackers as evildoers and the Democrats piped up about the need to listen to our European betters about nuance and to the gauche sensible about how much pain the Islamists must be in to act thusly. The War on Terror as a struggle of good against evil is gauche - though certainly not gauchiste. But Republicans as evil? Why they're practically Nazis, don't ya know. No language is harsh enough.
posted by gbarto at 3:46 PM I see we've have THE DEADLIEST BOMBING IN IRAQ SINCE THE FALL OF SADDAM, and the media is saying, Thank God. A week of Bush doing well with the Europeans was beginning to wear thin with them. The insurgents needed it too, with everyone in sight questioning if they really mattered in the long run, even HRC. Something interesting though, I thought. This is, of course, the sort of thing anti-big media paranoids notice: When I saw the headline on AOL, my first thought was "inside or outside the Sunni triangle?" So I clicked on the link, which took me to the news page. Again, bombing in "Iraq." It took three mouse clicks to confirm that, yeah, it was Baghdad again. Not that it's any less painful or tragic for those involved, but for the outside world, it makes a difference. Not to give the bad guys any ideas, but when this happens in Basra I'll start biting my nails. When it happens in the heart of Baathist territory, I'm not so worried about the future of Iraq because in this one area eventually either the locals will rise up and slaughter any foreigners and known Baathists in an effort to make the attacks go away or they'll accept their own slaughter for the good of the cause till Baghdad and a few other cities have been so reduced as to no longer matter - troubled ghettoes of sorts. Neither is pretty, but both will allow the eventual flowering of democracy in larger Iraq.
posted by gbarto at 7:08 AM Sunday, February 27, 2005Tonight's poem is in memory of R.W. Ayers, my grandfather, who could be counted on to know these lines even when he did not remember where he'd put his wallet, if it was with his car keys and, for that matter, where he'd parked the car. Love to stumble across them now and again, just to recapture the voice.
posted by gbarto at 9:48 PM from Evangeline Henry Wadsworth Longfellow This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
posted by gbarto at 9:38 PM |
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