Saturday, September 30, 2006

A few thoughts

Some words from my sidebar:

We cannot defend freedom abroad by abandoning it at home.
—Edward R. Murrow

Constitutions are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy.
—Sen. John Stockton

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
—Thomas Paine

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
—James Madison

I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.
—Abraham Lincoln

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Not quite too late...

I pointed you at Coturnix's blog yesterday; today I'm sending you to archy, who is even more pessimistic, if possible, than Coturnix.
I have always hoped that America would outlive me, but I have always carried a nagging dread that it would not. Over the last five years we have taken a number of steps away from being America. Yesterday was the worst of all.

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Science and Religion

There has been a lot written lately - at least on the blogs I frequent - about the tension between science and religion. We get scientists apparently converting to creationism, scientists denouncing all forms of religion as insanity, and scientists doing just about everything in between. The golden mean, the position a lot of people argue for - Stephen Jay Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria position (and see the link for Rob Knopp's meditation on the problem which prompted this) - is that science and religion try to answer different questions, and that as long as religion doesn't claim real-world effects and science doesn't claim to prove god's non-existence, they should be able to get along just fine.

Is this true? Probably - oh, definitely - as it stands. (Therein, of course, lies the rub; more on that later.) If scientists don't talk about proving god, if the religious don't claim they can prove god answers their prayers or that the Bible is 100% true (or even 50%, for that matter), then they can rub along together very well. I've seen it happen all my life. In fact, if you are able to keep them separate, you can be a religious scientist. I don't think you can be a scientific religious person - note that "scientist" is a noun, but there is no corresponding noun from "religious" - and applying to science to religion usually leads to losing it, while it seems quite easy to be a scientist who applies some religious teachings to his life and work.

In fact, as a kid I never doubted you could be both. After all, I grew up in a church that had a physicist as priest emeritus - Dr William Grosvenor Pollard. He was a fine and fairly prolific writer (here's a source for his books, including Man on a Spaceship and Physicist and Christian). In Oct 13 1961 issue of Time, the latter was reviewed:

Few physicists would hazard a location for heaven, but one who does is exceptionally well qualified. He is William Grosvenor Pollard, 50, executive director of the Institute of Nuclear Studies at Oak Ridge, Tenn. He is also the Rev. William Grosvenor Pollard, associate rector of Oak Ridge's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.

...

"The key to this approach," he writes, "lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions." The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: "Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it."

Dimensional Status Seeking. If space as man experiences it is only a limited field in a space of higher dimension, the supernatural is just a question of one's dimensional status. For a two-dimensional body, a three-dimensional one would be supernatural, and the same logic applies to steps into the fourth, fifth and any other dimensions. In this context, says Pollard, "even the supernatural domains of heaven and hell, which have been so universally acknowledged in human experience, have as much claim on reality as does the restricted spaciotemporal domain which constitutes nature. The only difference is that the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is then rather differently drawn, and in a manner much more agreeable to modern views of the natural universe."

Dr Pollard was my model for the scientist who can be religious. But he falls far short of the sort of religiosity is the great threat of today. He did not believe the Bible should be taken literally, as inerrant fact in all of its verses. He wrote a pair of books called "The Hebrew Iliad" and "The Hebrew Odyssey" which, essentially, argued that the great formative story of Israel - Moses and the journey through the wilderness - was a myth, meaning the word in the sense of a great moral story which illuminates our understanding. No, Dr Pollard was no literalist.

Nor, as far as I can tell, are any scientists who actually work at science. How could they be? The Bible is problematic from the first chapter for anyone who works with facts, and it doesn't get much better. The only way to reconcile them is to posit a god who actively attempts to lie and deceive - creating the fossil record and the apparent age of the universe to trick us into choosing the evidence we can see and comprehend instead of the revealed word which contradicts - flatly and even violently - that evidence. That god, I think, is a piece of work, but I must admit he fits nicely into the Bible.

But it's perfectly possible to reject the factual claims of the Bible - which are easily disproved - and still think that there is a god; that he created the universe and set its laws; that he is interested in us, even loves us; even that he sent (whatever you mean by that word) Jesus, to teach us how to treat each other. It's even possible to believe in something called a soul, which exists in some dimension beyond our own, interacting with this world only in the nebulous realm of thought and emotion. Many people do that every day.

The problem, as I see it, is that those people are not the problem. It's their co-religionists whose concept of their religion is antithetical to that common-sense mysticism, if I may so call it. (Let me dispose of the objection that "they aren't real Christians (or whatever)" - whoever says it. I don't care if you both are Christians, or if one set of you should pick a different name. You both call yourselves Christians, whatever you call each other.)

These people do in fact make real-world claims about their god. They say he created the world some 6000 years ago. They say the waters of the Flood covered the entire world and destroyed everything living that was not on a single boat. They say the earth did in fact stand still for an hour. They say their god intervenes to answer prayers and create miracles, and that angels roam the world today breaking the laws of physics right and left. And they say that any science which says otherwise is a lie, designed by Satan to destroy their faith and damn them to hell.

They cannot live peacefully with science, no matter how peacefully scientists offer to avoid talking about Whys and Reasons and Souls. And if science doesn't fight back, these people will drag us all back to a time when only religion - this kind of relentless, literal, actively anti-knowledge religion - could tell us what to think.

It may be that the other religious will feel themselves under attack if scientists fight these believers. But those people need to take a long hard look at the believers, because the two groups don't really mesh all that well. And "Christians" who believe the Bible is errant will fare no better than scientists who believe the Bible is fiction, once the final conflict arrives.

Can religion and science coexist? I suppose it depends on how you define "religion". And that forces me, just now, to say that no, they can't. Because "religion" is currently determined to destroy science before science destroys it. It's futile for scientists to argue, as Gould did, that they have no interest in trespassing upon religion's sacred ground (so to speak) as long as religion refuses to define that ground in the same way.

While religion makes claims that venture out of the numinous into the disprovable science cannot keep silent. The world is not 6000 years old, and all the good will in the world cannot let science pretend otherwise. And if your religion insists that it is, you can muster no good will for silence, either.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the lines are drawn. And as long as the other side insists on forcing their counter-factual religious claims on the rest of us, we cannot coexist in peace.

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4 Comments:

At 7:15 AM, October 02, 2006 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

You seem, well, confused to me. The number of religious people who believe/claim the bible is 100% literally true is awfully small in comparison to the total number of religious people in this country - probably comparable to the percentage of people who believe that the scientific method is the One, True Way.
Further, you claim that there is no 'noun' for a religious person like scientist for sccience... just before speaking of a priest you admire. 'Priest', 'Monk', 'Nun', 'Minister', 'Theologian'... all are pretty noun-ish, all have professions in religion, all are what is called 'religious' (a noun, in this case)
You are also giving short shrift for generations of religious who have (are are) applying science to religion. The Catholic support of astronomy led to the changes in theological cosmology of the 17th century.
As much as aggressive creationists dominate the news (and the thinking of many biologists, etc.) they are a small, rather fringe group within religion. To point to them as say 'Look! Look! See the violence inherent in the system!' is akin to me pointing to perpetual motion inventors, or crypto=zoologists and doing the same in return.

 
At 12:39 PM, October 02, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

I don't think I'm confused. I'll grant you that my claim about the lack of a noun equivalent to 'scientist' might be iffy: clergyman or theologian seems more exclusive to me, but so be it. Religious may be a nominal, but it's not really a noun; that may be splitting hairs, though, so I'll let you have that, too.

But then you immediately ignore my statement that many people are able to do both and accuse me of focussing on "a small fringe". That's you missing my point. Completely.

I don't care if they are few in number. They are the ones bringing the lawsuits and trying to rewrite the curricula. They are the ones pushing legislation than affects us all. They are the ones who are active. And as for the generations before this - they are irrelevant to the current political situation, are they not, no matter how zealous they may have been in either direction.

And if religious moderates (I assume you consider yourself one) insist on upbraiding anyone who points out that these fanatics act that way because of their religion, well then, what are we supposed to do? Ignore them?

Not even you will like what happens then.

 
At 6:06 AM, October 03, 2006 Blogger Jarlsberg's Chosen had this to say...

"Fringe minority"? Huh? What planet are you on? What is it, something like 46% of the American public who believe the Earth came into existence within the last 10,000 years?

 
At 8:15 AM, October 03, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Jarlsberg's Chosen: You are, of course, correct. Anonymous is in denial, probably because he interprets any criticism of any Christians as criticism of himself and his religion.

Which is why I ceded that point to him for the argument's sake, and why, I'm afraid, there's no rational discussion of this point even with self-identified moderates.

They'd rather claim that we are unfairly picking on them, ignoring all their noble deeds and thoughts, than admit that some Christians are out to remake this country in their own narrow-minded image. Propitiating them, the moderates, leads to a stifling lack of debate and a general paralysis.

 

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God's Own Party?

Well, it's more like the Church (Roman Catholic, I mean) than you might have thought.

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) - co-chair of the US House Missing and Exploited Children Caucus, no less - has resigned. Why? Because he sexually propositioned a sixteen year-old congressional page. Or, more accurately, because it has become public that he propositioned the page, thanks to ABC News, who broke the story.

Yes. The House Republican leadership apparently knew about it months ago - and the only thing they did was warn the pages "to stay away from Foley." Granted, that's better than the Church usually manages - no bishop ever warned the altar boys to stay away from Fr. Whosis - but it's not really enough, is it?

Now, I want to make it very clear that I'm not claiming that no Democrat has ever propositioned a sixteen-year-old. But the GOP runs on being the "Family Values Party". If you can't walk the walk, as they say...

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Happy Birthday Movable Type!


Yes - today is the anniversary of the first volume of the most influential Bible ever published: the one printed with Johan Gutenberg's moveable type - in 1542.

It was the beginning of a new age - an age of widespread information and literacy, and an end to the Church's monopoly on knowledge. The new printing process fueled the Renaissance and was a major catalyst for the scientific revolution. It may even have midwifed the Reformation. In short, it facilitated, if not outright produced, the end of the Middle Ages.

It is estimated that more books were produced in the 50 years after Gutenberg's invention than scribes had been able to produce in the 1,000 years before that.

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Friday, September 29, 2006

A hint of Dictator in the air...

You think I'm pessimistic about the last couple of days?

You should read Coturnix's take on it.

No, seriously. You should read it.

He brings his unique perspective ("Many of my friends and neighbors have not experienced, like I did in Yugoslavia of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the gradual transformation from a nice, sweet, proseprous, freedom-loving country into a bunch of thugs duking it out over land and religion.") to the events of the last week, and he's not happy.

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Crappy Congressional Decisions

As Bob Parks said, the nation must have been distracted.
"That allowed the House to quietly pass H.R. 2679, the "Public Expressions of Religion Protection Act of 2006," with scarcely a mention in the media. The bill would prevent plaintiffs from recovering legal costs in any lawsuit based on the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment, which of course only happens when the court finds the plaintiff's Constitutional rights have been denied. The Senate is expected to pass a companion bill, S. 3696."
I certainly hope it's just because the country was distracted. Otherwise it means we want a theocratic authoritarian regime. (Hey - no wonder "we" like Pakistan so much!) Not only do we want to undercut The Great Writ (see yesterday's bill), but now we apparently want to punish people who have actually had their Constitutional rights taken away for daring to fight to get them back.

This last bill can't work. It's unconstitutional on the face of it - it's abridging the Bill of Rights, for crying out loud. All I can imagine is that it's pre-election posturing for the Republican base. Who does, after all, believe that non-Christians shouldn't be citizens no matter what those rebels who founded the country might have thought.

Someone tell me that those moronic Democrats who believed Alito and Roberts would be fair and unbiased weren't as stupid as I fear they were.

Please.

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Back Where He Belongs

Well, okay, not "back". But John Gianetti, who was trounced in our local primary for State Senate two weeks ago, has quit the Democratic Party to join the GOP. He's exploiting a loophole in Maryland's sore-loser law that will allow him to run as the GOP candidate in he's appointed by the local party committee. Since the original candidate has already dropped out of the election, it's a safe bet that Gianetti will be on the ballot in November.

He always was an uneasy Democrat - anti-abortion, pro-deregulation, pro-assault weapons - and he was an embarrassment to the party, serving underage drinkers liquor at UMd games and offering to change his vote on a schoolboard issue in return for votes for slot machines... He's something I grew up knowing about back home: a Democrat who was secretly a Republican, only he wanted to get elected more than he wanted to be honest.

The Democratic voters in the 21st District dumped his sorry ass in the primary, so now he has no reason to stick around. Can't say I'm sorry to see him go to the other side; he was really there all along.

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Thursday, September 28, 2006

A dark day


We've done it. Eliminated - not suspended, mind you, but elminated - the 'great right' - the most basic right, that of habeas corpus. Not for everyone, no, not yet - but if you think American citizens haven't lost their rights, you're wrong. Read the damn bill; it authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States.

We've handed the president the power to decide who gets the right (the option?) and who doesn't. I'm sure Republicans are congratulating themselves on making us safer, but what they've made us is less American. Less worth being safe. And it's a power that any president will have... Perhaps if they'd ask themselves if they'd be happy if Clinton had had this power - or Hilary - they too will have some sleepless nights.
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
—Thomas Paine

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
—James Madison

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve liberty nor safety.
—Benjamin Franklin

We have handed the president the power to not even need to charge someone in order to arrest him and lock him up for the rest of his life, answering to no one in any way. No court will ever be asked why, no one will ever be held accountable.

Even if they are innocent.

And we have made the president immune for war crimes he committed in the past - and frankly, I can see no reason for him to even ask for that unless he knows he actually did commit some.

This is a very dark day for my country, and I am ashamed to be an American.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Lord Byron passes

Byron Nelson, last of his generation of giants, passed away today at 94.

His elegant swing was the standard; his low iron shots remain unparalleled; his 52 tournament victories place him No. 6 on the PGA Tour career list; his 18 tournament victories in 1945 remain a single-season record. That year, beyond his wins, he finished second 7 times, was never out of the top 10, and at one point played 19 consecutive rounds under 70. During a seven-year stretch in the 1940’s he made 113 consecutive tournament cuts, a string not beaten until Tiger Woods in 2003 passed him on his way to 142. His crowning achievement is one that no golfer has ever approached: 11 straight tournament victories in 1945 (his closest competition, Woods and Ben Hogan, have 6). Some say his victories that year are diminished because other greats were in the service, but his stroke average was 68.34 - a record that stood until, again, Woods. In PGA golf, it's strokes that count, not match play - how many you make, not who else is on the course; you play the course, not the others. And anyway, both Snead and Hogan played against Nelson many times that year.

The bridge at Augusta over Rae's Creek is named for him. Along with Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead, he was an honorary starter at the Masters; he was the last one to go, making his final ceremonial shot in 2001.

Nelson played golf to earn money: he wanted a ranch. He played for 14 years, bought that ranch, and then retired in 1946, leaving a legacy of records for others to aim at. Who knows how many more he would have set, how many would still be his, if he had kept playing?

Will we see his like again?

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Carnival of the Liberals

COTL badgeOver at Writings on the Wall it's springtime in Tasmania and anything seems possible - that's what Martin said when he called for posts. Now he says, "There are a few things on the minds of liberal bloggers this fortnight. Political, social, and environmental problems facing the world, and what we should be doing about them. One thing that's abundantly clear is that they're a compassionate and moral bunch, and they see very clearly that we're all in this together." Again, there are some blogs I haven't seen before (and a post of mine) - looks like a lot of good reading. Why don't you head down under and check out the carnival!

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In rebuttal - a "Republican living in London"

Okaaaaay... The BBC put a foot massively wrong this morning.

After interviewing Richard Branson on his proposals to change the way airports operate in order to cut back on greenhouse emissions, they offered an opposing viewpoint. Sort of. I had to fire off an email to them...
Why did we listen to Charlie Wolf? "A Republican living in London" has some expertise on greenhouse gasses? All he could do was appeal to the God of the Market - a god notorious for not caring about anything except tomorrow's profit margin. I wouldn't have minded hearing someone's take about Richard Branson's suggestion based on knowledge of airports or some other facet of the problem, but that man offered us nothing worth hearing.
In fact, he opened up by telling us that, although he "respected" Branson, the man "isn't so much trying to save the planet as save airplane fuel." "Who wouldn't?" he repeated several times, and didn't seem able to grasp that it might in fact be possible to want to save both. He then said that if he were Branson, working with Schwarzenegger (whom he, of course, "also respect[s]"), he'd have to ask why the governor was trying to drive business out of California.

Business. Bottom line. Profit. That's what Mr Wolf sees no matter where he looks. And they not only see only that, and care about only that, they think everyone either is like them, or should be.

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3 Comments:

At 12:21 PM, September 27, 2006 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

And let me see, Mr. Branson runs a non for profit company?

If greenhouse gasses, or global warming is a problem, and no there is no consensus on this issue, ultimately it is the market that will solve it.

As Mr. Wolf said, there are no free rides -- every choice has a consequence and a cost.

 
At 3:55 PM, September 27, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

But Mr Wolf scoffed at the very thought of trying to solve the problem.

Of course there are no free rides, but profit isn't the only thing to consider. Less profit isn't the same as no profit, after all.

 
At 4:01 PM, September 27, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Plus - the market often "solves" problems by waiting until there is only one solution, and that solution far from the best. If all I care about is making as much money as I can as fast as I can, then that's all I care about. Putting things off because you want to maximize your profits only shifts the problem to later down the line, when it will be harder to deal with because the options have narrowed and, many times, disappeared. Sneering at people who are content to make less profit than they could if they put nothing back isn't constructive.

 

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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Iranian letter

So, we find out that in May 2003 the Iranians wrote us a letter. They sent it to us via the Swiss, who dutifully delivered it. In it, they pretty much put everything on the table, offering everything we wanted (including being completely open about its nuclear programme, helping to stabilise Iraq, ending its support for Palestinian militant groups and help in disarming Hezbollah) if only we would stop being agressively hostile to them take them off the "axis of evil" list. After all, Iran had just - a month previous to that speech - been helping us against the Taleban in Afghanistan. (Like the rest of world, or most of it, the Iranians were on our side after Sept 11th.)

But, as the BBC's security analysit Gordon Curera said, that was when the US was at "its most triumphalist." The letter was rejected with disdain. Larry Wilkerson, at the time Chief of Staff for Powell, (who said "I can only guess, but my guess is going to be pretty good") surmises that Cheney said 'We don't talk to evil.' After all, we were on the way to an easy victory in Iraq, after which we could dictate to Iran - and everyone else in the Mid East.

So we turned down the offer to talk, treated Iran like an enemy - and last year Ahmadinejad was elected.

Perhaps Bush should look at that line in his Bible which promises that whosoever soweth the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

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Monday, September 25, 2006

The Week in Entertainment

Film: House of Sand - both Fernandas - Montenegro and Torres - are brilliant in their multiple roles; after the first disconcerting moment you have no difficulty accepting them as totally different people, and Montenegro's portrayal of Torres after 25 years is stunning, while Torres plays her own daughter grown up almost equally well. Almost, meaning only brilliantly. The movie is stunning as well - the landscape is not just a character but the dominant one... A gorgeous, gorgeous film.

TV: House and the Stargates, of course. I do like the concept of SG-1 having to put up with one of the Baals (I haven't forgotten he said he knows the dragon's name). Atlantis is a bit reminiscent of the end of SG-1's first season. It'll be a long wait... grrr. Also, of course, the Ryder Cup - well, the last two days of it. (Nice that it was in Europe and thus over in time for me to go out to the cinema without missing any...)

DVD: Watched a British series called Rebus ... the box says "If you like your detective stories served with plenty of seedy mean streets atmosphere, you won't be disappointed." This is true, though what I like my detective stories served with isn't seedy mean streets atmosphere, it's just John Hannah.

Read: I forgot to take Follies of the Wise with me Monday, so I read what was in my bag, which was the Trollope... and got sucked into the story of The American Senator - or, rather, of Arabella Trefoil - so I ended up finishing that one. I then started Follies..., and then my books came from amazon.co.uk and I put down the essay collection to read Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller, which I enjoyed very much indeed, and have started Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry, who I already know to be a very gifted fiction writer; this is autobiography and very engaging so far (one chapter).

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Sunday, September 24, 2006

Beauty

I went to the movies this afternoon - House of Sand - and it was a little after five when we got out, too early to eat. Plus, I'd had Vietnamese Thursday, Chinese Friday, and left-over Chinese Saturday... so instead of eating at that nice Chinese place a block from the theater we drove up to the Bombay Peacock, about forty minutes away. It looked like it was going to rain - if it hadn't, it would have missed a good chance, as they say - but from inside the restaurant we didn't think it had. Some deer - a doe and her fawn - came out of the trees and browsed along the woods' edge, their thin legs graceful along the thick dark green in the dusk, which was nice, and the wind kept picking up and dying down.

When we left the restaurant, it was nearly seven. The sky was gorgeous - I haven't seen anything like it in years (though, to be fair, I'm not often out at sunset). Still, it was breath-taking. Bright blue sky was still showing in parts, through white clouds just touched with pale grey, and on the other side of the sky it was all dark clouds, slate and pearl and nearly black. The sky itself was shading down to that lovely pale aqua and near yellow of the end of the day, and there were great huge smooth billows of clouds gone all golden, while the dark clouds had streaks and billows of pink and red, parts of them a bright nearly neon red. And arching over the dark clouds was the most brilliant rainbow I've seen in I can't think when, bright and perfect and accompanied by a fainter double bow - red on the inside of that one, like a mirror of the first. It had rained a bit - the ground was wet and the windshield spattered - and the night came up and the colors in the sky shifted and blended together in darkening gray and red until the sky was black...

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At 6:53 PM, September 25, 2006 Blogger Wonder had this to say...

more

 

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Ryder Cup - Europe by a Lot

Clarke gets a hug from WoosnamNine full points - 18½ to 9½.

Sunday singles were a stunning landslide by the Euros - Verplank and Cink won theirs 4 & 3 (over Harrington and Sergio), and Woods (over Karlsson) his 2 & 3. Mickelson went down to Olazábal, DiMarco to Westwood, Furyk to Casey, and Toms to Montie. And that was it. Oh, yes - Henry got a half after it was all over and McGinley conceded a birdie putt ... could easily have been 19 to 9.

Of course, only 5 of the top 20 in the world are Americans now, but a lot of those big guns aren't European, either, so that's not the answer. (Seven Americans and eight Europeans are in the top 25. Ten are from other countries: four South Africans, three Australians, and one each from Fiji, New Zealand, and Argentina. But the top three are Americans, and Europe's first is Sergio García at #8.) Mickelson is world #2 and he couldn't win in this Ryder Cup at all - ½ point in four matches. Furyk is world #3; 2-2-0 this year.

About the best thing you can say this year is that no American went without making at least a half point. On the other hand, only two got 2 points - and on the European side, four made 2 points, one 3, and one 4. Sergio made more points than Tiger or Lefty. Than Tiger and Lefty? So did Lee Westwood!?

Every couple of years we get our hats handed to us by Europe. This year, too. What it comes down to is simple: they want it more than we do.

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Richard Dawkins has a web site!

Here's a new web site for you - thanks to Number 80 for bringing it to my attention. It's The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science - run by the man himself.
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity. But it must be a positive attack, for science and reason have so much to give. They are not just useful, they enrich our lives in the same kind of way as the arts do. Promoting science as poetry was one of the things that Carl Sagan did so well, and I aspire to continue his tradition.
Need I say it? Check it out - sign up for the newsletter - and get involved in the mission!

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Saturday, September 23, 2006

Ryder Cup - again, it's Europe

Sergio and Olazábal
Yes, it's that time again - the Ryder Cup. And once again, the great American players are losing.

I don't know what it is about this event. But I think there's a definite element of camaderie among the Europeans that the Americans just can't quite muster. Our champions-at-individual-play can't manage to play on a team. Tiger- great player that he definitely is - is lousy at team play - his lifetime record in team play is 7-12-1 (and his singles record, so far, is only (2-1-1); Lefty isn't much better (9-11-4 lifetime. 3-2-0 in singles). Jim Furyk (6-11-2) isn't any better (Furyk this year is 2-2-0); DiMarco, who was 2-1-1 last year is, so far this year, only 0-2-1; . These four have combined for 4 ½ points total. Meanwhile Sergio, who has never won a major, is 14-3-2 lifetime and 4-0 so far this year; Montie is 19-8-5, Olazábal 16-8-5, Lee Westwood 13-8-3, Luke Donald 4-1-1, and Darren Clarke 9-7-3

That Ryder Cup back at Valderama - Seve's Cup - served the notice, I think. When it comes to being a team, Europe has us beat from the get-go.

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Euripides

This is the day we celebrate the birth of one of ancient Greece's greatest dramatists, Euripides. He reshaped Attic drama by featuring petty gods, flawed heroes, strong women, and smart slaves.

Of his more than 90 plays, 19 survive (more than Aeschylus and Sophocles together), among them Alcestis, The Bacchae, Elektra, Iphigenia At Aulis, Iphegenia in Tauris, Medea, and The Trojan Women.

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Happy Birthday, John, Ray, and Bruce!

John ColtraneRay Charles

The Boss
Today was a good day for music! John Coltrane (1926), Ray Charles (1930), and Bruce Springsteen (1946), all!

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Friday, September 22, 2006

Good and Evil

Tom Raum, of the Associated Press, wrote yesterday (in the Sacramento Bee), that "President Bush sees the world as a struggle between good and evil," and that at the UN Bush "depicted the U.S. as leading the charge to defeat the forces of darkness and to spread freedom and democracy".

And today the White House denounced the coup in Thailand, saying "It is a step backward for democracy" and "The most important thing is to see a restoration of constitutional rule as soon as possible".

But this is an odd sort of good vs evil, an odd sort of spreading of democracy. After all, if the people have the nerve to elect someone unacceptable, we denounce them - witness Hamas, for instance. And remember back in 2000, when Bush was unable to remember the leader of a recent coup in Pakistan General Musharraf's name ... but he did know that he was a general, and he did say that the important thing was that he'd bring stability to Pakistan - and in 2002 he said that "General Musharraf is a leader of great vision and courage." Democratically elected governments, who needs 'em? - at least when the strong man is on our side. Perhaps if General Sondhi Boonyaratkalin takes a page from Musharraf's book, he too can be lauded as bringing 'stability' to the region.

In the struggle between good and evil, good always faces the temptation to become evil - to believe that you can do good by doing bad things and that the ends justify the means. But the means shape the ends. In Serenity, the Operative told Mal that he would not live in the new world he was creating out of the blood of Mal's friends, that there would be no room for him in a good world because he was a monster. He acknowledged the bitter truth that his horrific deeds were no less horrific because the cause he committed them for was noble. It's an interesting philosophical dilemma: can one indeed build Paradise on the bodies of those who disagree with your definitions? Or does one only pave the road to Hell that way?

Bush, however, doesn't engage in this debate. Instead, he redefines good and evil: good is what we do, and evil is what they do, even if the actions are the same, because we are good and they are not. In Bush's mind, good people cannot do evil things, by definition.

This is a genuinely scary belief. It absolves you of any and all guilt connected with what you do. If you define yourself as "good" and then further say that good people can't do evil things - that anything they do is good - how do you distinguish the good from the evil at the end of the day?

Yes, I agree that there is good, and evil. I just don't think there's some sort of by-definition, impermeable boundary between the two.

I know. Liberals are often accused of not believing in evil. Atheists are always accused of it, near as makes no difference. I don't know how representative I am, but I am a liberal. In Europe, I might vote Social Democrat, and in fact I am a democratic socialist ... not that they're a political party, but you get the point. And I do believe in evil.

Oh, not Capital-E Evil, existing in dual tension with Good, either as an equal or doomed to lose. For that matter, I don't believe in Capital-G Good. But I do believe in evil.

Evil is doing deliberate harm to others. It's minimizing happiness - lowering the net happiness, the net comfort, the net good. That means it requires a certain amount of self-awareness to do evil - just as it does to do the reverse. You have to know what you're doing - you have to understand the concepts of good and evil to be able to do them. (Sound Biblical? Nope. The reverse. Think about it.)

So, for instance, viruses aren't evil, no matter how many hosts they kill. How about a chicken-killing dog, slaughtering for the fun of it? I don't think so. The dog may know it's doing something you, its owner, don't want, but evil? That's a stretch. The chimpanzee that murders a member of its group? Yes, I think so.

People? Oh, yes.

Oh, we can do good as well as evil. That's a given. If we couldn't do both, we couldn't do either.

But we can do - we do do - evil. We're doing evil now.

We have to! We're under attack. Our way of life - our country - is threatened! We have to fight back, do everything necessary, anything we can. Anything at all...

Anything at all?

Is it just about survival, then? That's a brute instinct - anything to survive, to just stay alive. Viruses do that, stay alive. Survive.

Throughout history, is that what we've venerated - mere survival?

Who do we praise: the man who stands on the shore watching a drowning child, or the one who jumps in to try to save it, risking death himself, even dying? How about the one who throws the child overboard to save himself?

I used to watch "Rescue 911". One of the things I loved was its celebration of what we might call the masculine virtues - strength, courage, self-sacrifice, the willingness to die to save others. Pretty much every week featured some man doing that. Some hero.

It's not just survival.

And yet survival - mere survival - is being held up as the reason for us to do whatever it takes. We have to be as bad as they are, if not worse, so we can survive this epic struggle.

At what point is that not enough? At what point do we not deserve to survive? When our president goes to Congress to demand the right to torture in secret? When we become what we're fighting? When the hypothetical Man from Alpha Centauri couldn't find a difference between us except the name of our god, and maybe the way we dress?

But we're not evil - we just have to do evil things. (Is that it? Is that what we're telling ourselves?)Once we've defeated our enemies, we'll be good again - no, we're good now, we'll be able to show it again. We'll do good again. This is temporary.

It's an argument, I'll give it that. I'm not at all sure it's valid, but it's an attempt to address the issue. "Yes," it says, "yes, we are doing evil, but the ends do justify the means. This is the only way we can win. If they win, it will be worse. We may be evil, but we're the lesser of two evils." It's not a good argument, perhaps, but it does look the problem in the eye. It doesn't answer the question of how much evil we can commit before we are evil, but it admits the deeds, at least, are. But it does presuppose that our survival is by definition good, even if we no longer are...

And even if we accept that premise, the argument is undercut by two things. The first is the ease with which we humans fall into doing evil. It's not just fun or exciting, it's worse than that - it's banal. It's trite. It becomes commonplace. Remember those soldiers - the ones at Abu Ghraib and others? They got found out because for them evil had become commonplace - so usual, so acceptable, so accepted that they took pictures of themselves having fun and sent them around the world. They didn't understand how anyone could look at those pictures and react with repulsion. They still don't seem to understand. See, that's the problem: evil isn't that easy to stop doing.

And the other thing is that, as I said earlier, we don't want to admit we are doing evil.

We have redefined evil as good.

Once you do that, you can't go back.

We can't stop doing it, because that would involve admitting what we were doing. Bush and his crowd don't offer that rationale, because in their minds we genuinely are not doing evil. We can't. We are Good in this clash for civilization, this epic battle with the forces of darkness, and it's impossible, by definition, that we do evil. There's no danger of us being seduced by the Dark Side - there's no way for it to happen. No matter what we do.

Bush retains a certain amount of sensitivity. He knows he has to use euphemisms. But he, and Cheney, and Rice, and Rumsfeld, and Gonzales - all of them - also know what those fine or those vague words are hiding. And they don't care.

Because this is a fight between Us and Them, and We are Good and They are Evil.

And Good and Evil are just another set of euphemisms.

Edited on Oct 18 to add this link to a speech by Hilary Clinton, which I've only just seen... an eloquent defense of a position that lost.

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At 11:56 AM, September 23, 2006 Blogger Wonder had this to say...

My cat is evil, she eats the legs, tails and ears off mice, leaving them alive. Frogs she just eats the back legs, while their alive. The evil nature of cats, maybe Ashcroft saw this too when he said cats were evil. But I love my cat, and she is mostly good most the time. Do you think cats will be safe from this foggy 'evil' label?

 
At 12:13 PM, September 23, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

I don't think cats are evil. When well-fed, they do the sort of things you describe, because it's their nature. And if they haven't been taught by their mother how to kill, they don't know how. But good and evil are beyond them. That's my opinion, anyway.

 

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Happy Birthday, Michael

Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday, discoverer of electromagnetism and thus father of so much - practically speaking, everything that uses electricity - was born today in 1791.

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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Ideal Pet

Your Ideal Pet is a Cat

You're both aloof, introverted, and moody.
And your friends secretly wish that you were declawed!


Hey! This one actually works ... thought I don't think my friends wish that!

And here she is: Gwen (Arianwen, pure silver, for formal occasions) (and she's certainly not declawed, though I trim them with fingernail clippers!):

Gwen













Though I'm very fond of my sister's old Peke, Squeaky (shown here with my greatnephew last Christmas). But I'm gone too long at a time for dog these days ...

Ryan and Squeak

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History!

Hey! Somebody submitted an entry of mine to The History Carnival XXXIX! It's my post September Then and Now. I don't know who did it, but thanks! (And I enjoyed the carnival, too - found some excellent posts, and new blogs, there.)

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Giles Corey ... More weight

Giles Corey died this week (September 19) in 1692. His death strikes several familiar notes.

Accused of being a warlock and finding his conviction highly likely, he refused to enter a plea. Under the standards of English common law in use at the time, the court could not try him unless he formally requested its judgement on the case by entering a plea. If he was convicted and executed, ownership of his property would revert to the state. The law provided that those who refused to plead should be pressed until they decided to plead.

Corey died after having increasing numbers of rocks laid on him for two days, during which time he still refused to enter a plea. It is traditionally held that all throughout the trial he did not speak, except for his last words before his death: "More weight". A contemporary report indicates that "About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press'd to death for standing mute." Since he had not actually been convicted of any crime, his property did not revert to the state upon his death.

So ... seems to me a certain amount of this wasn't just thinking he was a warlock, eh? A little bit of "if we find you guilty, the state gets your property" goes a long way - as many have discovered in our own time.

And you have to admire a law that says "If you don't plead, we'll torture you until you do."

Let's hope Gonzalez doesn't take note of this.

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Happy Birthday, Allen!


Born today in 1902, the man who gave us paperback books - Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Looking Homeward

Cassini is orbiting Saturn, taking stunning photographs of that planet's complex and beautiful system. But on Sunday, Saturn was between Cassini and the sun - and Cassini could aim its camera back at Earth. Here's the picture - a "pale blue dot" from the outer solar system. That's it, a little more than a third of the way down from the top, towards the right-hand side of the picture, the side with the rings. The inset is a blow-up - that "bulge" is the Moon.

How small. How far away - the Moon looks like it's part of us. How humbling.

The JPL site says:

Not since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft saw our home as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system. Now, Cassini casts powerful eyes on our home planet, and captures Earth, a pale blue orb -- and a faint suggestion of our moon -- among the glories of the Saturn system.

Earth is captured here in a natural color portrait made possible by the passing of Saturn directly in front of the sun from Cassini's point of view. At the distance of Saturn's orbit, Earth is too narrowly separated from the sun for the spacecraft to safely point its cameras and other instruments toward its birthplace without protection from the sun's glare.

The Earth-and-moon system is visible as a bright blue point on the right side of the image above center. Here, Cassini is looking down on the Atlantic Ocean and the western coast of north Africa. The phase angle of Earth, seen from Cassini is about 30 degrees.

A magnified view of the image (see figure 1) taken through the clear filter (monochrome) shows the moon as a dim protrusion to the upper left of Earth. Seen from the outer solar system through Cassini's cameras, the entire expanse of direct human experience, so far, is nothing more than a few pixels across.

A few pixels ... holding all of us. We'd better learn to take care of it.

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Not much, but more than nothing

So, African Union peacekeepers will be staying in Darfur for three months more, not just another week. And the UN will be providing them with support - not troops, which the Sudanese government refuses, but equipment and supplies.

It's not much. The 7,000 troops and monitors are far fewer than are needed to curb the killing. Sometimes I wonder if the 22,500 troops the UN is ready to send - if the Sudanese government would accept them - would be enough.

But at least it's not no troops. With no troops, the NGOs would have to pull out. And then the janjaweed would have it all their own way. The problem would disappear - because the people would. (To those who say 'violence never solves anything' I offer the acerbic response of the civics teacher in Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers: Tell it to the city fathers of Carthage. Violence can be very good at solving things - it's just that too often the solution sucks.)

So this is, if not good news, at least not bad news.

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Really stupid

Thomas Friedman writes in today's New York Times (payment required for this article; I pay, so I'm posting the salient part of it here for those who aren't members):

I asked Dr. José Goldemberg, secretary for the environment for São Paulo State and a pioneer of Brazil’s ethanol industry, the obvious question: Is the fact that the U.S. has imposed a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff to prevent Americans from importing sugar ethanol from Brazil “just stupid or really stupid.”

Thanks to pressure from Midwest farmers and agribusinesses, who want to protect the U.S. corn ethanol industry from competition from Brazilian sugar ethanol, we have imposed a stiff tariff to keep it out. We do this even though Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it. We do this even though sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol. And we do this even though sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Yes, you read all this right. We tax imported sugar ethanol, which could finance our poor friends, but we don’t tax imported crude oil, which definitely finances our rich enemies. We’d rather power anti-Americans with our energy purchases than promote antipoverty.

“It’s really stupid,” answered Dr. Goldemberg.

The good doctor's got that right.

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

A pox on both houses

While I think I'm going to start saying, "As Emperor Manuel II Palaeologos said..." and then refuse to admit I meant it, too, I have to say that there are plenty of Muslims out there are as irony challenged as Papa Ratzi is apology challenged.

Basically, religion's big draw is the way you can use its more obvious rituals and so on to clearly pick out of the crowd who is "Us" and who is "Them". And once you've done that, the next step is to attack Them, of course.

If the religious would stick to good works and preaching kindness and thinking to themselves (that part's important) how they're the only ones going to heaven, we'd all like them a lot better.

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The Virtues of the Passive Voice

I said I'd talk about the passive, so here I go.

First: what is the passive? It's one of three voices in English. English verbs have a lot of things that come in threes: three voices, three modes, three moods, three tenses*, three aspects**, and three auxiliary verbs to make the tenses and aspects with (also intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs, another triplet.) These things can combine with each other fairly freely to make up what is generally referred to as the English tense system, yielding things such as "I will have been being seen".

So, the passive is a voice; it contrasts with the active and the middle. ("The what?" I hear you cry. The middle, or middle intransitive - which is yet another attempt to make formal, Greco-Roman grammar terminology fit English. Short form: it's the voice which takes the object of a transitive and makes it the subject of that same verb used intransitively with a causative agent that cannot be expressed, as in "that bread slices easily" or "his novels read quickly" or "she doesn't frighten easily". But I digress. This post is about the passive.)

Second, how do we make a passive? Voice depends upon the assignment of the roles of 'agent', 'patient', and 'recipient'. Thus, in the active voice, a transitive verb has an agent, which is the subject, and a patient, which is the object. A ditransitive verb, which can also become passive, also has a recipient, or benefactor, which is the indirect object. To create a passive sentence, we take the patient and make it the subject, relegating the actor to a prepositional phrase or leaving it out altogether. As I noted above, in the middle voice, the patient is the subject, the agent cannot be expressed at all, and the verb is unaltered while some adverbial modification of manner is nearly always done. In the passive, the verb is altered by

(1) using the auxiliary verb "to be" in the proper tense, aspect, and number and
(2) changing the main verb to its -EN form.

(The -EN form is also called the past participle form; it may well not end in -EN, but that's the name of the form.)

Thus: active: I slice the bread.
middle: The bread slices easily.
passive: The bread is sliced by me.

So, various tenses of the passive:
I buy the books -> the books are bought (by me)
I take the books -> the books are taken (by me)
I read the books -> the books are read (by me)
I bought the books -> the books were bought (by me)
I took the books -> the books were taken (by me)
I read the books -> the books were read (by me)
and so on. Note that the passive can be used with perfect or progressive aspects, or with modal auxiliaries, or with all three:
I will have bought the books -> the books will have been bought (by me)
I had taken the books -> the books had been taken (by me)
I have been reading the books -> the books have been being read (by me)
I could have read the books -> the books could have been read (by me)
In all cases, the tense is on the first verb (unless it's a tenseless modal auxiliary), and the aspectual suffixes and forms follow normally.
progressive: BE + -ING = I am taking them = they are being taken
perfect: HAVE + -EN = I have taken them = they have been taken
perfect progressive: I have been taking them = they have been being taken
Third, then, is why do we use the passive? I will pause so you can shout out "weasel words! avoid responsibility! mistakes were made!"

Seriously. Why do we use the passive? There are a number of very good reasons.

1. When the actor is not known. It can be a stylistic flaw to use "somebody": Somebody shot the president! vs The president was shot. The first focuses far too much of the reader's attention on wondering who "somebody" is.

From Gould's essay:
Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended - that is, either supported or denied - by such a restricted approach.
Or this one:
Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be given tasks of value, and self-–esteem could be found for people on all steps of the IQ hierarchy...
Who will give out these tasks, and who will find this self-esteem?

2. When the actor is unimportant and the result is what counts. In this sentence from Gould's essay:
Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be explained to lay readers...
we begin with an active clause and then go to a passive one in which it is the topic, referring back to the immediately preceding clause, and there is no actor (who can explain it? Mathematicians? Gould himself? Does it matter?).

Another example I heard this morning on NPR:
Interviewer: Thailand has been suffering through a complicated situation. If he can sort it out in two weeks, won't that be a good thing?
Analyst: I doubt it can be sorted out that quickly.
The analyst didn't want to discuss whether the general could or could not sort the situation out; her doubts aren't about him but rather about the situation in general.

3. When the relative value of actor and patient are greatly different: A bus ran over Bob vs Bob was run over by a bus. Or Eddie's recurrent question in "To Have and Have Not": "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" How different that would be in active voice: "Did a dead bee ever bite you?" From Gould's essay:
if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers
Should this read
if only numbers did not frighten them
? Would that be any kind of improvement?

4. When the patient is part of the Topic, not the Comment (this is Information Structure - basically, Topic is old, given, known information - what we're talking about - and Comment is new information - what I have to say about it). Within longer structures such as paragraphs or essays, this sort of structuring makes following the discourse much easier. The passive sentences I quoted from Gould's essay were mainly of that sort:
The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph with an axis for each test.

This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner today.

And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that bias doesn't exist, which is the only issue analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve.
Note in each of these sentence the presence of a demonstrative pronoun (these tests, this theory, this crucial question), which indicates that the subject of this sentence was introduced in the preceding one. Classic Information Structure: Comment becoming Topic.

So - this has been a brief introduction to passive. I'll just close by saying all the sins imputed to the passive voice can be committed by the active, especially avoiding responsibility. But the virtues of the passive belong to it alone.

Don't condemn it just because many style manual writers, often not fully mastering what the passive even is, and just as often using it themselves in their own writing, do.


* three tenses if you stretch the definition and allow the 'future modality' of "will" to be a tense. I will so that I can maintain the symmetry :-)
** again, three if you stretch the definition a tiny bit to include the emphatic as an aspect

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5 Comments:

At 10:20 PM, September 21, 2006 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

Well said; thanks.

And since you digress, so shall I, in adding some, um, tense comments:

I find it interesting that in English we don't use the simple present indicative to indicate what's happening in the present — we use present progressive for that: I am eating lunch. (but not I eat lunch.)

Instead, we use the present tense to talk about habitual behaviour: I eat lunch at noon [most days].

Then we have my favourite tense, which I like to call the "present future tense": I am having lunch at 1:00 tomorrow, because I have a meeting at noon.
Do other languages do that?

 
At 10:34 PM, September 21, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Yes, the simple present tense is actually used for timeless statements - habitual or universal (the sun rises, birds fly).

I am aware of several languages that do something similar (Gaelic and Russian, for instance.) This may be because the real split in Indo-European languages is only two-way: past and non-past. English actually has no future tense; we use a modal auxilliary verb to make what we call future, and Russian distinguishes future from present by an aspect rather than a tense. This frees up the non-past tense to be used for anything that is, well, non-past.

 
At 1:16 PM, September 15, 2011 Blogger Mary had this to say...

Really excellent post. And it's cited again today in a comment to Mark Liberman's post at Language Log today.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

BTW, I do share your enthusiasm for the writing of Richard Dawkins and the music of Mozart and the three Bachs, as well as for wild birds.

 
At 12:37 PM, September 22, 2011 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

And by Stan Carey, too! How exciting!

Thanks.

 
At 7:55 AM, March 18, 2012 Anonymous Warsaw Will had this to say...

Sorry to be a bit critical but while I totally agree with your defence of the passive voice, I'm afraid I don't find that your examples do your argument justice - these don't sound natural to me, and in almost all cases the active would have been better.

This is because not only do they not seem to fit your own criteria but because we almost never use passive + by + pronoun. And we especially don't use it with a first person agent.

It's precisely for this reason that I've always thought Strunk's example of the passive being weak - My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me. - such an inappropriate one. Nobody would actually utter a sentence like that.

I'm a keen defender of the passive, but if we are to convince people of its benefits I think we need to use realistic examples. In my own post on constructing the passive I use all possible forms of the verb interview, which I think fits passive use quite well, eg - He has been interviewed twice this week already, He is being interviewed at this very moment, and if you want an agent you can add (by the BBC)

 

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Happy Birthday, David!

illya Kuryakin
Born today in 1933 - David McCallum (possibly my first tv crush, as Illya Kuryakin of course!) It's good to see he's still working.

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Monday, September 18, 2006

Worried about her

I read Baghdad Burning (I recommend it, either the blog or the book or both). Riverbend hasn't posted since August 5. Given how bad the last month was in Baghdad, I hope she's all right.

You know, when someone like Rivka or Bishop Rick stops posting, you wonder why. You hope all is well with them or their family, you wonder if a new job or something has taken up their time, you know how sometimes it's been tricky for you... When Riverbend doesn't post, you're scared for her.

We're thinking about you.

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Rings and Shadows


This moody true color portrait of Saturn shows a world that can, at times, seem as serene and peaceful as it is frigid and hostile. Saturn's unlit-side rings embrace the planet while their shadows caress the northern hemisphere.
Janus (181 kilometers, or 113 miles across) is a mere speck below the rings, just left of the terminator. The view was obtained from about 15 degrees above the ringplane as Cassini continued its climb to higher orbital inclinations.

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God does what?

No kidding - I saw this on a church sign on my way into work this morning.

IF GOD HAD A FRIG
YOUR PICTURE
WOULD BE ON IT

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Happy Birthday, Samuel!


Born this day in 1709, that great lexicographer and writer, Dr Samuel Johnson, who was also the subject of the first great biography in English.

During a conversation with his biographer, Johnson became infuriated at the suggestion that Berkeley's idealism, the theory that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter", could not be refuted. In his anger, Johnson powerfully kicked a nearby stone and proclaimed "I refute it thus!"

A much quoted man, he also said:
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
And his Boswell (Boswell) reported this:
Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self- interest.

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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Carnival of the Godless

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Grounded in Reality. Some good posts here - check it our.

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The Week in Entertainment

TV: Again, the usual: House (I find Wilson's behavior inexplicable ... or at least, unexplained. The writers are doing a lousy job with him and Cuddy's recent decisions, and for that matter Cameron's too - unless Cuddy had some wonderful rationale (which I wish we'd have heard) - or just threatened to fire her), and the Stargates.

DVD: Total overdose: four seasons of You're Under Arrest! Also, Inspector Lewis, which I would totally watch if they made it a series.

Read: Finished Take the Cannoli and started The American Senator, but The Partly Cloudy Patriot and Follies of the Wise both arrived in the mail yesterday, so Trollope will probably end up waiting a few days.
edited 22 Sep to add: Argh. I forgot Practical Demonkeeping which was quite engaging! How could I have forgotten to list it?

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Saturday, September 16, 2006

And one more thing...

“It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50’s and 60’s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to our — to modern warfare. But it’s real.”

Ummm.... Mr President, do you recall a little place called Texas? No, back before the baseball and the oil and the governor's mansion... the Air National Guard? Remember that? Where you ran to get away from another little place called Vietnam?

I think those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s can envision such a conflict pretty easily, myself.

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Wrong Tense, Mr Powell

“...the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism”
Beginning?

Beginning?

I really, truly hate to say this - no, I mean it. I really, truly wish the last three years hadn't happened. - but the world began to doubt that a long time ago.

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Back to the Past

So now they're going to ring Baghdad with trenches and moats to keep people out. What next - a medieval wall?

Sure, we're making the place safer, day by deadly day.

(Mind you: I'm not commenting on the need for such a network of berms, trenches, and checkpoints; this may well be desperately needed. Nor am I criticizing it on feasibility - though I expect those who have to drive in and out of the city will be dreadfully inconvenienced by it (not high-level American/coalition types who fly from the airport to the Green Zone, of course). I'm only lamenting that need.)

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At 12:53 PM, September 16, 2006 Blogger Wonder had this to say...

not too awful long ago many troops were moved into Baghdad, now the trenches, like boarding up the fort. near a last stand stance.

 
At 3:33 PM, September 18, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Circle the wagons, boys...

 

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Disingenuous

When you select quotes to illustrate your point, it's because you think either (a) people will more easily or readily accept your point from someone 'higher' up in authority than you, or (b) someone else said it better - more eloquently or more concisely or more memorably - than you could.

So, sorry, Pope Benedict XVI - I'm not buying it when you say you "had absolutely no intention" of presenting Manuel II Palaeologus's words as reflecting your own ideas. If you hadn't, you wouldn't have used them in the first place.

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A Defining Moment for America...

Here's a Washington Post editorial. The headline really says it all, but the first paragraph lays it out even straighter.
A Defining Moment for America: The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Nothing else really to say here. ...

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We are neither angry nor afraid

So, now the Pope joins the list of those who attribute their own problems to others:
Only this can free us from being afraid of God - which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism.

Wrong. By definition, wrong. As my high-school chemistry used to say, "not just wrong: very wrong indeed."

Or, as Wolfgang Pauli remarked of something else, "it's not even wrong."

Atheists do not believe that God even exists. (Some believe that God does not exist. Same thing for this post.)

If something does not exist, how can you be afraid of it?

And, for that matter, how can you hate it?

Atheists may very well be afraid of, or hate, the Church, or churches, or the religious, or the Pope... those things exist and often enough threaten us. But God?

Nope. Sorry. It's not God - it's you.
Updated 19 Sep to provide a source link for the quote (Catholic World News, in case anyone is wondering)

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Friday, September 15, 2006

So What?

Well, the president set the record straight when he was interviewed by Matt Lauer.
Matt Lauer: "You admitted there were these secret CIA prisons--"

George W Bush: "So what?"
That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? How do you answer that?

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Thursday, September 14, 2006

Listen up, kid!

I've just seen a commercial for "the original Star Wars on dvd" - some father saying he grew up on Star Wars and is so happy his kids can see the same movie...

Okay, fine. I know people who won't look at the new version. This isn't the problem.

One kid says, "I love the characters". The next says, "The action is awesome." And the third says "I would love to have a pet Wookiee."

PET???!!!

Dad - sit that child down and tell her calmly, quietly, and firmly: People aren't pets. That's called slavery.

And it's bad.

Han Solo will get you for that.

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Carnival of the Liberals


The Carnival of the Liberals is up over at archy. Once again the ten best (or, as John McKay explains, the ten "posts that best reflect my mood at this moment—cranky and grumpy—and offer my compliments to those who were in too good a mood for me") posts in the liberal blogosphere are gathered up for your reading delight. Every time we have one of these, I find at least one new blog to go back to - check it out and maybe you'll do the same.

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Why voting 'for the man' is ... foolish

Every election someone says to me, usually in a smug and self-congratulatory tone, sometimes in an accusatory one, that they "don't vote for a party"; they "vote for the man".

That sounds quite reasonable, even to this yellow-dog Democrat. Weigh the merits of the individuals running and vote for the best one. What could be wrong with that?

What's wrong with it is that, for better or worse and like it or not, we live in a two-party state, not a multi-party one (and please, don't bring up Nader or Greens or any of the rest of them: they usually don't get themselves elected (two party - they'll never get an assigned percentage of seats) and occasionally siphon of enough votes to actually influence the election, and not in a good way, and Yes, Ralph Nader, I am talking to you). What am I going on about?

Well, let's take Rhode Island. Here's a typical assessment (this one's from the Washington Post) of the current GOP primary:

Rhode Island is a solidly Democratic state, but it does elect moderate Republicans such as Chafee and his late father, the veteran GOP Sen. John Chafee. During his seven-year tenure, "Linc" has distinguished himself as one of the Senate's least partisan members. Modest and soft-spoken, he has broken with his party on tax cuts, judicial nominations and environmental issues, and he was the only Republican senator to vote against the Iraq war.

Laffey calls Washington "the Cranston crossing guards on steroids." But beyond his calls for tougher, more effective leadership, he is difficult to typecast. He supports the war and opposes abortion and embryonic stem cell research, positions that place him to the right of most Rhode Islanders. He applauds all of President Bush's tax cuts, although he raised taxes to save Cranston from bankruptcy. But he savages the GOP on health care, education and energy policy. Of Bush, Laffey says, "I respect him, but I think he's failed in a number of aspects."

I can see why Laffey could irritate moderate Republicans, not to mention Democrats. And I can see that Chafee is a stand-up guy, a hard worker who has well thought out, carefully nuanced positions. So, "solidly Democratic" voters in Rhode Island send "moderate" Republican Chafee to the Senate, because they like the man and the positions. Fine... except.

Chafee may break with his party on some issues, but he clearly agrees with them on most, or he'd switch parties. But that's not my point. Even if Chafee disagreed with the GOP on every single issue and voted that belief, he's part of the Republican majority, and that means that the GOP gets all the committee chairmanships and deciding votes.

Is the occasional vote from an occasionally disaffected Republican worth leaving that party in power? If you're a "solid Democrat", why don't you want the GOP to be the minority party, regardless of how much you like "the man" personally?

I have voted for a Republican in my life - thirty years ago. It'll be a long time - if ever - that I vote for another, no matter how nice, honest, personable, or occasionally disaffected he is. I don't want to help that party stay in power.

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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Why It Matters

Sure, the first half of ABC's little GOP political advertisement was stomped into the ground by preseason football.

But, as Ruth Marcus writes in the Post:
The gripping final report of the Sept. 11 commission (budget: $13.5 million) became a surprise bestseller at 1.5 million copies. The not-so-gripping, not-so-accurate ABC production (budget: $40 million) was seen by about 13 million viewers on the first night.
And considering how many people still - despite Bush's having finally admitted that it just isn't true - believe that Saddam is connected to the Sept 11 attacks, it's not too hard to imagine that more than a few of those viewers will, despite the warnings about "fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression" and believe its metamessage.

What metamessage is that? Why, the same one this administration and its party have been harping on for 6 years, if not more: it's all Clinton's fault and Bush is a genuine hero, and if you don't agree you hate America.

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Staying up too late with Cassini

Last night I stayed up too late (till I had my second cup of coffee this morning I was draggy - unfair to my students, I know...). I had finished watching House and still had some stuff to do, so I was, too comfortably esconced with the laptop to get up and put on some music, channel surfing when I came upon Carl Sagan (oooooooooo) talking about - the Rosetta Stone! Sagan and language! How could I resist?

But then the Science Channel hooked me to stay up even later - a documentary on the Cassini-Huygens mission.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a major Cassini fangirl. Can't help myself...

Encke Gap as never seen beforeSo last night I was totally geeked out (as I imagine the kids might say) when they started showing us stuff like this, taken back in July 2004 right after Cassini slid through the rings for the first time ever, and talking about how they thought this sort of scalloped edge happens... because just last week Cassini sent us that movie of Prometheus shaping the F Ring, and another of Daphnis, doing the same thing with the A Ring - exactly like they thought might be happening!

I mean - o wow. How cool is that?

Seriously.

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Happy Birthday, Roald!


Born today in 1916, one of the great children's authors ever









There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining? Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing!

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At 7:50 PM, September 13, 2006 Blogger jeonjutarheel had this to say...

Just finished rereading that book :) Of course, this time it was with some Korean students of mine and I got to explain phrases like "no earthly way" and "grisly reaper".

Love your blog, btw, linked here from...actually, I can't remember where. But I was hooked by Russian-teacher status -- I studied it 4 years myself -- and have continued enjoying the content.

 

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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Happy Birthday, HL!

HL Mencken

Born today in 1880, the irascible and splendid Sage of Baltimore, HL Mencken.

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant."

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money."

"The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics
is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there
is no limit to oppression."

"The only way to reconcile science and religion is to create something which isn't science or something which isn't religion."

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Monday, September 11, 2006

Up Into The Building

up into the buildingWho am I, that anybody cares where I was or what I was doing? But here's what I think about:






A man describing making his way down the stairs from the 67th floor of the North Tower:

"And then when we got to around the 35th floor we had to move over for the firefighters. I mean, we were all trying to get out, and here they came, up into the building."

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Sunday, September 10, 2006

The Week in Entertainment

Film: Heading South (Vers le sud), an intriguing and lovely film with a dark side - very good - I'm a Charlotte Rampling fan, anyway.

TV: House! Yay! It's back - and it's on at 8, which means when Veronica Mars comes back I can watch it without having to wait till Sunday (assuming the local channel will still be doing that...) The Stargates, as always... you know, Vala is growing on me. But I wish the writers would stop thinking that humiliating McKay makes for funny scenes. Finally caught "Snow Falling on Cedars". (You know what I noticed about it right away? We got eight names - including the big "and Max von Sydow" before we got the first woman's name - despite how important Hatsue is to the story. Oh, well... it was pretty good, anyway.)

DVDs: I started Planetes a while back... things came up and I got sidetracked, but I went back and finished it. I enjoyed it; good show. Also, as Jacob recaps Farscape on Television Without Pity I've been rewatching the first season... Not for the first time, of course, but with a new viewpoint. Damn, that is an excellent program.

Read: Huxley's Man's Place in Nature. Started Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli (I love her writing).

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But only their news value

The following exchange took place in a Washington Post online chat August 15th:
"Medford, Mass.: Exactly how is it that our sitting Vice President can get away with saying basically that people who exercised their constitutional right to vote for change (i.e.: Conn. primary) are helping terrorists? How is this not the headline of a story, instead of a footnote?

"Jonathan Weisman: The vice president also said the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes, and that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. I'm afraid to say his utterances are losing their news value."
Say what?

We are talking about Dick Cheney - the eminence grise behind W's throne the entire time of his presidency, the man who, as New York Times writers David Sanger and Eric Schmitt write today, "the man who had returned to Washington that year [2001] to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable." Among his remakes:
the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain "enemy combatants" and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world, and the reshaping of the rules under which members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and would be tried by "military commissions" at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it," Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman.
Cheney shares W's goal (or is it W who shares Cheney's goal? That seems more likely, somehow)
of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.
Remember now? Yeah, it's that Dick Cheney. Lost his "news value?" WTF?

The Times article believes Cheney's star is in the descendent now:
Just this past Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee — controlled by Mr. Cheney’s Republican allies -- declared that there had been no basis for Mr. Cheney'’s repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had harbored an al Qaida leader and had ties to the group. But Mr. Cheney has never conceded that his statement was in error.

His prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Mr. Hussein would force radical extremists "to rethink their strategy of jihad" proved wrong, as Mr. Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney'’s friends and former aides said they were mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that "for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire" managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect.

Perhaps nowhere has Mr. Cheney'’s shifting influence been more visible than on Capitol Hill, where the vice president'’s ability to win his way without challenge -- a luxury he enjoyed through much of the first term — has evaporated...

At the height of his influence in the Bush White House two years ago, Mr. Cheney stepped into the Oval Office early one evening and raised an alarm about an agreement [about North Korea] that American negotiators were about to sign in Beijing. ... Mr. Cheney "declared this thing a loser," said a former senior official involved in the discussions that night. Mr. Bush sent new instructions to the negotiators — through the National Security Council rather than the State Department — that essentially killed the deal. "Powell and Armitage were not happy," one official said. "But it was too late."

But Cheney was still one of those who urged the US give Israel all the time possible to wipe out Hezbollah in the recent "unpleasantness" in Lebanon ... another brilliant move, wasn't it? Hezbollah joins al Qaida and Iraq as former-but-now-nonexistent power players in the Mid East... not.

So does it really matter that his influence is "waning"? If it is -- if he hasn't just learned another way to get it done, as the Israeli policy seems to indicate -- does it matter? His influence was all-pervasive for six years, and tainted our country to its core. His brand of "strong, robust executive authority" has led to warrantless wiretapping, invasions of privacy, detainment without arrest, preemptive war, torture, loss of national prestige and international goodwill, and worst of all, our sense of who we are and what we stand for. Has Condi edged Dick out for the President's ear? Maybe. But either she hasn't, or that's not such a huge step forward in the first place.

The White House is still pushing for a system under which we could try people in secret, without ever letting them see the evidence against them; under which testimony, extracted by torture (under whatever name) is admissible; under which they will have been grabbed without warrants and held without counsel. A system, in short, which we would never accept from any other country, but which we will insist on as our right in our need to fight this "war on terror"...

And a system that Cheney is, and has been for years, the strongest advocate of.

Some people might like to call Condi Rice and the State Department "more enlightened" than the Cheney gang, but this becomes a matter of relativity. "More enlightened" than "not at all" can still be "barely" -- more tolerable than completely intolerable isn't not, necessarily, tolerable in the least. When all is said and done, are Condi and State even thinking about anything except cosmetic changes? For instance, what's up with Pakistan, and their sudden, recent (like this week) decision to stop hunting bin Laden? Oh, yes, I know: Musharraf says the deal he made to keep militants out of Afghanistan doesn't include the "command structure", but please. Bin Laden has almost certainly been in Pakistan for a couple of years now. And what about Rice's statements on Friday? While admitting that "as far as we know" Saddam Hussein had nothing to with September 11, she insisted that
"there were ties between Iraq and al Qaida. Now, are we learning more now that we have access to people like Saddam Hussein's intelligence services? Of course we're going to learn more. ... If you think that 9/11 was just about al Qaida and the hijackers, then there's no connection to Iraq. But if you believe, as the president does and as I believe, that the problem is this ideology of hatred that has taken root, extremist ideology that has taken root in the Middle East, and that you have to go to the source and do something about the politics of that region. It is unimaginable that you could do something about the Middle East with Saddam Hussein sitting in the center of it, threatening his neighbors, threatening our allies, tying down American forces in Saudi Arabia."
Forget that American forces in Saudi Arabia are one of the main things that enrages al Qaida. Forget that Hussein was no extremist in his ideology, running his country thuggishly, yes, but without religion entering into it. Forget about who appointed us the ones to "do something about the Middle East". Or, rather, don't. Because it's all part of the same mindset that says Cheney's influence is far from gone.

In the final analysis, Cheney remains a (if no longer the) driving force behind this administrationn. The Lyndon LaRouche guys who set up outside the Post Office in town aren't trying to impeach Condi. They're loons, of course, but they know who's the power behind the throne. (Apropos of that, I've heard people mutter about impeaching Bush, and my immediate reaction is, "Yikes! Cheney in Charge!") What he says may go through an intermediary before reaching W's ear, or it may not, but it reaches the man regardless.

And yet, what he says -- no matter how inflammatory or irresponsible or insulting -- has "lost its news value."

How does that happen? Somebody tell me, how does that happen?

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Nothing new

On Friday, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, played down the reports, saying that they contained "“nothing new" and were "re-litigating things that happened three years ago."

What's he talking about? Oh, just the little, pesky, inconvenient but not important fact that Saddam Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with al Zarqawi or indeed any Qaida operative. Now, of course, Iraq is crawling with them, but back then...

Now, this report Snow is so dismissive of was completed last October. The White House hasn't stopped saying it though: just last month Bush said that Hussein "“had relations with Zarqawi."’

That this is a lie is "“nothing new"’, though, so let's just move on and pretend it never happened.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Nothing new, that is.

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Happy Birthday, Stephen!

Stephen Jay Gould
Born today in1941, one of the great popularizers and thinkers in evolutionary theory. I've taken him to task for not knowing what he was talking about when he talked about grammar, and I think he was a bit prone to constructing straw men which gave ID'ers an apparent foothold - apparent, I repeat - but Gould was a brilliant man and theoretician whose life's work was an immense contribution to the education of the public and refinement of the modern synthesis of evolution. He is missed.

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Saturday, September 09, 2006

This is just crazy

If this is true, then most people aren't nerdy at all!

I am nerdier than 72% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

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At 5:09 PM, September 09, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

I suppose not ... and then they don't get comments like this.

 

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When Everyone Can

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie won't be getting married any time soon, it looks like.

"Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able."

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Eyes, not belief...

Tip o' the hat to Pharyngula for pointing out this comic about knowledge vs. faith. Go check it out! And don't forget to check out the rest: xkcd is very funny.

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Prometheus shaping the F Ring

Prometheus and the inner F Ring
Check out this little movie - Cassini watches the shepherd moon Prometheus moving along and shaping the inner edge of the F ring.

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Happy Birthday, Lev Nikolaevich!

TolstoyTolstoy signature



Лев Николаевич Толстой

Or, as he's called in the West, Leo. Tolstoy, that is.

One of Russia's - and the world's - greatest authors, born this day in 1828.

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Friday, September 08, 2006

Incomprehensible? I think not

Tom McMahon just sent me an email - well, not me personally; everybody who's signed up at democrats.org. He's decrying (rightfully) the presentation of this 'docudrama' on "The Road to 9/11" as fact when it's well-spun GOP propaganda.

He says:
We should all be deeply concerned and disappointed that ABC would air a film that has been proven to have factual inaccuracies about one of the most important events in our nation's history. It's particularly disturbing given that the producer of the piece is a well known conservative. It's incomprehensible how something like this could even get on the air.
Deeply concerned? You bet. Disappointed? Yes, sir. Disturbed? Not a doubt.

Incomprehensible? Not so much. (He should've stuck with D's...)

It's just business as usual. The GOP pushes media dereg and monopolization ... sorry, I forget what they called it. Something about consumer choice, no doubt ... and the media responds with a nice attack ad timed for the election run-up (how nice for them that it's the actual anniversary; they don't have to work at all to make up a cover story).

I find it quite a few things that end in "ensible": reprehensible, indefensible, deprehensible, ostensible, offensible, possibly even subsensible. But incomprehensible?

I wish.

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At 9:51 AM, September 09, 2006 Blogger Wonder had this to say...

It didn't dawn on me till lunch time yesterday listening to Paul Harvey, 'they' are taking all we say about the inaccuracies, understandable as 'they' are as we have gotten to know them by now, and calling us (who point and say hey look) defenders of Clinton. Crying about ABC placing blame and fault with the previous administration. But that is typical of 'them', understanding them as we do, it is certainly not incomprehensive in the least. You are right, its a bad place for that word. Like we do not understand how, why or any clue as to understand 'them', but we do. Understand?

 
At 10:00 AM, September 09, 2006 Blogger Wonder had this to say...

What about Scholastic that had a classroom tie in with the program, frantically recutting the mini series, but still. Scholastic? so they really were hoping, maybe still this would paint the history story of 911? Well, I will have to watch it now, had better things to do besides keep watch out for lies. Waste all our time, keeping them honest shouldn't be our chore. It should be something we can take for granted, feel secure about honesty and integrity is sought by all that want to play. Just some can't play fair.

 

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Thursday, September 07, 2006

Dione and Rhea

Dione and Rhea in SaturnlightSoft Saturnlight illuminates most of Dione and Rhea. The faint crescent of brightness is sunlight - the rest comes from the planet.
How lovely they are, floating in the darkness...

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What W Said

What he said, when you boil it down, was this:
  • Torture works - not that we're torturing people, it's just "alternative methods of interrogation."
  • The CIA should, in future, be allowed to use "alternative methods of interrogation."
  • American interrogators who used "alternative methods of interrogation" should be granted immunity retroactively, even though we don't torture.
  • We can't close Guantánamo because we have 'real' terrorists there now. And we know they're real because they said so - under "alternative methods of interrogation."
  • We must allow the absolutely unprecedented admission of coerced evidence, gained by "alternative methods of interrogation," in an American legal proceeding.
  • And Congress should do all of this now, despite being denied any role in this matter for years.
And you know what?

It doesn't surprise me in the least.

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At 12:40 PM, September 19, 2006 Blogger Blader had this to say...

I hear you.

But look, it's not torture, it's "alternative interrogation procedures"

 
At 6:43 PM, September 19, 2006 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Yes...

And war is peace, and freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

And we have always been at war with Oceania...

 

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Some good reading

From Coturnix, some food for serious thought:

The best local newspaper is free. Independent Weekly is excellent every week, but today, you have to read these two articles:

Godfrey Cheshire: Five years later: We're defeating ourselves

Bob Geary: In America, terror goes both ways

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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Let's get some perspective

Joan Greenberg gave toddlers a lollipop, snatched it away, and took their picture. Then she gave it back. The parents were right there, approving in advance.

Is this art or is it mean? Your mileage may vary.

What it is not is child abuse.

Saying, as one social worker did, that "these children could be scarred for life" is ridiculous. A two-year-old who loses his lollipop for five minutes has not been abused, and saying he has is trivializing the very real and terrible problem of abused children. Comparing that lollilop-less kid with one who has been raped, beaten, burned, and abandoned is far, far more troubling than anything Greenberg did.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where the worst thing that could ever happen to a two-year-old was somebody snatching away his candy?

We should work to make that world, not get hysterical over something which is, essentially, a meaningless episode.

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Gould on Passives - Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

In his introduction to Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, Stephen Jay Gould writes, in the course of lamenting good prose style in scientific journals:
Moreover, and for some perverse reason that I have never understood, editors of scientific journals have adopted several conventions that stifle good prose, albeit unintentionally - particularly the unrelenting passive voice required in descriptive sections, and often used throughout. The desired goals are, presumably, modesty, brevity, and objectivity; but why don't these editors understand that the passive voice, a pretty barbarous literary mode in most cases, but especially in this unrelenting and list like form, offers no such guarantee? A person can be just as immodest thereby ("the discovery that was made will prove to be the greatest..."); moreover, the passive voice usually requires more words ("the work that was done showed...") than the far more eloquent direct statement ("I showed that...").

I don't wish to question the editors' motives here. Nor do I wish to go hunting through Gould's body of work to find the passives he almost certainly uses. (Well, okay - I did; see below.) Nor do I wish to get into knock-down argument over the uses of the passive, which are several and valuable. (Perhaps in a later post?) A quick glance at Gould's own sentences below may hint at them for you, though.

Instead, I wish to object to his stricture on the grounds that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Neither of the examples he provides are passive sentences. They both have a short passive relative clause (that was made, that was done), but the sentences are in active voice: The discovery will prove, The work showed.

It's true that "will prove to be" has that pesky "to be" in it, but that's not enough to make it a passive sentence. The passive voice is made with the AUX 'be' and the -N form of the main verb. As in his examples: to do -> PAST + be + do-N = was done; PAST + be + make-N = was made. The passive of "will prove to be" is "will be proved to be".

For that matter, "to be" has no passive, because only transitive verbs can be passive (including ditransitives when both objects are expressed). The form would be "is been" - and that's not English.

What Gould is complaining about here is a "relentless" depersonalization of the prose - the removal of the author. The difference between "The work showed" and "I showed" isn't grammatical voice; it's the presence (or absence) of the authorial voice - the I.

"The discovery which I made will prove to be" is completely in the active voice and it has exactly as many words as the version he objects to. The same goes for "The work which I did showed...” True, they're wordier than "My discovery will prove to be" or "I showed", but the much-maligned passive voice has nothing to do with that.

I do wish indeed that people who complain about the passive voice would take the trouble to discover what it actually is before they start. Maybe then they wouldn't, and would instead direct their ire towards their real target, whatever that may be. Gould's is bad, stilted prose - and the passive, as such, has nothing to do with that.

I said above I wasn't going to go hunting through his works, but then I decided perhaps I should. I just googled him and here's the first thing of his I found: 'Curveball', published in The New Yorker, November 28, 1994. Each of these sentences are either completely passive, or contain passive relative clauses, sometimes with the relativizer omitted, as English permits it to be. I've italicized those verb phrases for you.
The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within–group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but deserves a restatement by example.

Virtually all the analysis rests on a single technique applied to a single set of data—probably done in one computer run.

Still, claims as broad as those advanced in The Bell Curve simply cannot be properly defended—that is, either supported or denied—by such a restricted approach.

The blatant errors and inadequacies of The Bell Curve could be picked up by lay reviewers if only they would not let themselves be frightened by numbers—for Herrnstein and Murray do write clearly, and their mistakes are both patent and accessible.

But this issue cannot be decided, or even understood, without discussing the key and only rationale that has maintained g since Spearman invented it: factor analysis.

Admittedly, factor analysis is a difficult mathematical subject, but it can be explained to lay readers with a geometrical formulation developed by L. L. Thurstone, an American psychologist, in the 1930s and used by me in a full chapter on factor analysis in my 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man.

The results of these tests can be plotted on a multidimensional graph with an axis for each test.

This theory (which I support) has been advocated by many prominent psychometricians, including J. P. Guilford, in the 1950s, and Howard Gardner today.

And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that S–bias doesn't exist, which is the only issue analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve.

But, in violation of all statistical norms that I've ever learned, they plot only the regression curve and do not show the scatter of variation around the curve, so their graphs do not show anything about the strength of the relationships—that is, the amount of variation in social factors explained by IQ and socioeconomic status.

I am delighted that The Bell Curve was written–so that its errors could be exposed, for Herrnstein and Murray are right to point out the difference between public and private agendas on race, and we must struggle to make an impact on the private agendas as well.

Herrnstein and Murray yearn romantically for the good old days of towns and neighborhoods where all people could be given tasks of value, and self–esteem could be found for people on all steps of the IQ hierarchy...
Out of 4,314 words in this review, 432 of them - 10% - are in passive sentences. Heck, there’s an even a passive “I” clause! ("used by me", Steve? Why not "which I used"?) The conclusion? Gould was talking through his hat.

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