Sci-fi Right

Card posted his summer reading list on the National Review blog.  No surprise to find him there; lately his books are treading Jack Ryan-Meets-Rush Limbaugh ground.

I wonder what the rub is??

To beat that pesky Priest.    This a story I heard tidbits about on NPR so I had to check out.

http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_bank-that-loans-money-for-soul_1271140

So what is your soul worth?  Is the devil in Latvia?  Is this for some lost unknown obscure Pagan god that needs to be reborn?  And does one end up becoming a star in Hollywood if you don’t pay up.

lim(anecdote)=data as n->10

Education is for chumps.

Liberal Guilt

Now that I’ve installed Wi-Fi a worry is setting in.  I’ve stopped using entirely the desktop computer in favor of the laptop at home, which means that I’m consuming less coal and more tantalum.  I’d rather it were the other way around, since I’m far more bothered by the exploitation of men than of minerals.

It occurs to me that society at large is always making decisions of this kind: shutter a polluting mill and drive families out of work, boycott a product from an unsavory foreign regime and put its peasants to ruin, ban a chemical pesticide to save a handful of cancer cases and watch a million contract malaria.  I wonder if there’s a circle in hell labeled “Incorrect Moral Calculus”?

Update: Bloggingheads has long explanation.

Aside: I don’t like the term “coltan.”  I wish the media would use scientific terminology instead of picking up and spreading local jargon.

Not fun

Book clubs have made the jump to on-line bores.  I suppose this makes sense for people who dislike reading and want to talk about it with strangers.

Let the Ants Try

Yesterday I read this.  Today I read this.  We’re always worrying about the wrong things.

Stay the Course

Kaplan’s conclusions drawn from the Lankan Tamil-Sinhalese dust-up:

So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods. Could they have won without terrorizing the media and killing large numbers of civilians? Perhaps, but probably not without help from the Chinese, who, in addition to their military aid, gave the Sri Lankan government diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.

These are methods the U.S. should never use. But the fact that this is what it took for the Sri Lankan government to subdue the Tamil Tigers makes clear just what a hard grind lies ahead for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

What’s the lesson here?  Maybe the Melians had it coming.

Independence Day

So Iraq is celebrating… what?  America’s victory over Iraq?  That can’t be right.  Iraq’s victory over America?  Implausible.  But every nation needs a day to parade its army.  Live it up, friends.  The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

I can’t tell from the story how we’re supposed to feel about this.  Not proud, certainly.  Putting down an Arab rabble doesn’t quite swell the breast like smashing the Kaiser’s legions.  Nor could I plausibly feel relieved, since the bad news from the Levant had already slowed to a trickle.  Numb?  Yes, that’s about right.  The Iraq engagement ended for me years ago when I began resolutely changing the channel whenever the topic intruded.

Fighting the Last War

A convention of Paleontologists met in Ohio recently, and when a few dozen of them crossed into Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum the New York Times was on-hand to report.  Among the highlights:

Near the entrance to the exhibits is an animatronic display that includes a girl feeding a carrot to a squirrel as two dinosaurs stand nearby, a stark departure from natural history museums that say the first humans lived 65 million years after the last dinosaurs.

Dr. Bengtson noted that to explain how the few species aboard the ark could have diversified to the multitude of animals alive today in only a few thousand years, the museum said simply, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.”

About 50 kinds of dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, the museum explains, but later went extinct for unknown reasons.

That last bit is my favorite.

Long-time followers of this blog know all about the Creation Museum, of course, so the only news lead-in is the visit by the bone-collectors.  One wonders: did the Times put them up to it?  This is just the sort of ploy they might use to sell a few more papers in Indianapolis or Boulder.  If so, I don’t think it will work; my sense is that Darwinism as a theater in the Culture Wars has played out for now.  Middle America is going to find all new ways of exhasperating the Guardians in the years to come, but Creationism won’t be chief among them.

Putin-khamen

Before the Temprance Movement, Americans drank like fishes.  Could Russians undergo a similar transformation?  Perhaps.  Peter civilized Russians (too soon, thought Rousseau) by ordering them to shave.  Now Putin hopes to finish the job by turning them from Vodka and dice.  Until now he’s ruled as a popular dictator.  Will his popularity go up, or down?  No betting either way.