Battling for Hearts and Minds

Insofar as we allow the enemy to define the battleground, the advantage is his. Our enemy is the Qutb/Salafi/Wahhabi Muslims who believe us a Satanic threat to Islam (this is exact and not hyperbole: Satan is the deceiver/seducer). Their philosophy has 2 main thrusts as far as we are concerned:

1. a critique of the West as secular/atheist (or Christian; it doesn't matter much to Qutb) and therefore intrinsically deranged; and
2. a claim that only through adherence to God's law as codified in sharia is there true happiness and nobility.

We cannot persuade our committed foes, and shouldn't bother trying. We may be able reduce their recruiting rate, though.

If we take their challenges as our battlefield, and attempt to deny them directly, we're apt to lose. For example, consider Qutb's first front. Our culture very plainly has deranged aspects, and atheism has a very prominent place in it. You may try to say that every society has problems--but Johnny Abdul will be more scandalized by alien faults than familiar ones. The local problems (government corruption, etc) may hurt him more, but they don't shock him as much as the unfamiliar ones.

You may try to point out that a secular government doesn't require secularism--but that subtle point is apt to elude him: It has escaped attention here in the West as well. In short, Johnny Abdul is likely to agree with Qutb that we're a lot of deranged atheists.

Johnny Abdul is not an atheist; he despises them. He does like the goodies we offer, and for a lot of people, in peacetime, that's enough to reconcile them to us. But even in peacetime, and more certainly in war, sophisticated Muslims will warn that the goodies are a trap to snare good Muslims into materialism and vice. Which of course they certainly can be.

To make matters worse, Johnny Abdul may want the goodies, but he can't have them. He doesn't make enough money. He can't, not without fairly dramatic political and economic restructuring--which won't happen. The political poles in these societies are the entrenched interests (and factions thereof) and the revolutionaries--who have coalesced around radical Islam. Not much hope for useful change there... If it were possible to improve Johnny Abdul's economic life, he'd be more likely to go along with the great Satan in order to get medicine, etc. But he is simultaneously more likely to become more sophisticated and realize the trap of materialism.

One school of thought holds that if we can make the Muslims middle class, they'll exclude religion from their calculations--like Sunday-only Christians. But Marx was wrong, and not all motives are economic. How many of the suicide bombers are poor? How many of the 911 killers were poor?

In any event, we can't change the economic conditions of Mideast countries without taking control of them--the reforms required are too radical. They need new political systems, changed economic structures, different educational priorities, different social attitudes towards corruption and nepotism--not just better roads.

The other front--that sharia is the way of joy--is hard to counter directly, since Johnny's imam will point out that we (being infidels) have no standing to judge such things. We can publicize the horrors of the Iranian mullahs or the Saudi custodians of virtue or the Taliban soccer field mayhem. It won't get very far coming from us. I see that we've finally gotten a satellite station up, but I don't know much about it yet.

Iraq is a great place to plant radio/TV stations for the whole Middle East--and we haven't moved on that yet. Even so, we can't expect that anyone will accept our critiques of Islam.

Publicizing our virtues

So on what fronts can we fight Qutb et al? I've mentioned the seductions of materialism already. Materialism is a two-edged sword, and I think more likely to cause us problems. Our advertisers are too good, stirring up desires for ever-more stuff. And who gets blamed for the inevitable frustration? Not the imam...

We can try to publicize ways our society is qualitatively morally superior to any Muslim state. Don't laugh--you can almost always find a virtue in one society that is ill-developed in others. (The MidEast is famous for hospitality, for instance.) We can try to publicize our extreme care for the lives of innocents, and our generosity in Iraq, etc. Unfortunately we've already lost the first PR campaign about care for innocent lives--Al Jazeera saw to that. It is now yesterday's news, and the Arabs "know" how deadly we were. True, they also know that Al Jazeera lied, but the bloody images will stick with them.

In any event, as the war continues, I worry about the depth of our commitment to careful warfare. Most especially when (not if) we lose one of our cities, I expect our patience to run thin and more thorough warfare become standard again. In some cases that might be more effective--but I'm not expert enough to be sure. Suffice it to say I don't think we'll prove ourselves superior in motives.

Generosity is tricky. To actually win hearts and minds the largess needs to

1. get to the people and not be sidetracked by corrupt governments;
2. be seen as a gift and not an entitlement; and
3. actually make a difference in people's lives.

Point 3 means that largish chunks of very targeted money are involved, with part going into infrastructure and part into goodies. It takes a lot of thought, a lot of local input, and cooperation from the authorities. Except in Iraq, point 1 is not easy to arrange in any Muslim country. Because giving alms is one of the pillars of Islam, receiving them ranks as an entitlement, and point 2 does not obtain either. Except in Iraq, we're stuck.

(Correction) It was pointed out that some countries are much less corrupt than others, which is true. It is also quite true that arranging for point 1 is hard in any country (or state or county or city or school board . ..), thanks to national pride and Not Invented Here issues.

Of course standard operating procedure has been to give military funding on the assumption that inevitable military coups will bring American-trained and hopefully American-friendly officers to the top. So far this hasn't helped a lot--some, perhaps. Turkey has its own traditions going back to Ataturk. Pakistan is resolutely two-faced. Egypt? The militaries are part of the corrupt establishment too.

"Search for knowledge, even in China"

We need to get into the media in a big way throughout the Muslim world--not just in the Mideast. We start with broadcasting unbiased news, and include music and other attractive features. Then we have to add the extra features that bring our message across.

I see we have a brand-new station called Al Hurra. According to the NY Times article they only broadcast 14 hours a day, and some of the material doesn't seem terribly relevant--a documentary about Anthony Hopkins?

Making news unbiased is a very difficult task. Merely reporting accurately what reporters see around the world results in a horribly biased picture--because of what reporters are not allowed to see. Think of the news organs that sold their souls to be allowed to report from Hussain's Iraq, or the wild disparity in what you can report in Israel vs what the PA allows to be reported. Tyrants insist on whitewashing, and one way or another, they get it. Either you report what you are shown and nothing else, or you don't get to report anything. (And no news is good news, right?)

To make matters worse, most reporters prefer a comfortable life in the US or the EU, and so we get an avalanche of stories from the US and EU, and a trickle from everywhere else. The bulk of the world doesn't much care who J.Lo. marries, nor who wins the New Hampshire primaries, nor how long the New York garbagemen have been on strike.

Since we can report more scandal from the free world than from dictatorships, if you just report the stories you have on hand it sounds like Belgium is a more corrupt place than North Korea. You're not going to get a lot of stories out of North Korea, so if you want an unbiased presentation of the situation in the world you have to select fewer of the horror stories from the free nations. One way to do this is to allot a certain amount of time to each section of the world. The BBC news web site does this.

Setting aside the often rather striking biases in reporting, the BBC model actually works pretty well. We want to report local news, regional news, and world news--pretty much in that order. Getting local news means hiring reporters for every relevant local region, and cultivating local stringers. If we just rely on official press releases we might as well not bother. Is it worth while to carefully distinguish on-air between stories from reporters and official statements? We've got to devote enough resources and talent (and translators) to keep from looking like asses. This is going to be quite expensive, and while a satellite station is a good start, we need local stations too.

We don't want to make the mistake VOA made, of quoting jihadi conspiracy theorists to "balance" against honest reporting. Granted, this is hard to do in regions like Egypt where lunatic conspiracy theories about Israel and the US are the norm. To even report rumors and official statements about "Zionist mind control rays," even to deny them, gives them more credibility than they deserve. I'm afraid I have no hard-and-fast rules to propose.

Of course, regional news comes from culled local news, and world news comes from culled regional news and the big world news feeds.

When I say that most of the world doesn't care who Jennifer Lopez marries, I don't mean to say that they don't know who she is. Entertainment is a big industry that gets a lot of attention; and we've got to make sure that the appropriate entertainment news is part of the feed. "Appropriate" is key: give Bollywood info where Indian movies are big, leave out lurid details where these are apt to give offense, and so on. Reporting on local musicians is important, but fraught with traps. Some entertainers go in for political attacks in battles we don't care to take sides in; and some (like Sha'ban Abd Al-Rahim in Egypt with his vile songs claiming that 911 was a US plot) we don't want to give air time to.

The alert reader will have noted that this requires a corps of reporters and cultural specialists in hundreds of places around the world, which we don't seem to have right now. We've got to train a pool of people to draw from, for starters. The next problem is getting them to stay in the often less-than-enticing spots. If you pay large salaries as a motivator, the cultural and economic gap between the citizens and the wealthy and insulated reporters makes the reporting much less useful. I don't see any easy ways to make a military specialist "reporter" who won't be given skewed news. Maybe we could have a "Peace Corps" analog: a "News Corps."

It has been pointed out that in countries that do not tolerate a free press foreign reporters are subject to expulsion, and local reporters can be intimidated. So we don't have a clear way to get timely local news; and accurate, timely local news would be a big draw. We could rely on semi-anonymous sources, but that's no substitute for reporters able to go around and ask questions. Clearly this needs work.

The astute reader will also be insisting that a propaganda network cannot be unbiased, and suspecting that I am talking through my hat.

I mean, of course, that we avoid certain existing methodological biases and try to tell the truth.

Correction: The entertainment news requires a lot of review for cultural sensitivity. I may as well call it censorship, though it has nothing to do with politics.

• "If it bleeds, it leads" automatically introduces a bias that depicts the world as more dangerous than it really is. I remember watching the local news in Chicago and in New Orleans--both big cities with similar crime rates. In Chicago the crime report was a couple of minutes, while in New Orleans the crime report was ten minutes long and dominated by dramatic murder scenes. It made New Orleans sound dreadfully dangerous. If you aren't careful, the dramatic stories drown out the rest of the news.

  Sit-coms are situated in houses or apartments that are far larger than that of the average American; a single hour of a crime show can have more murders than a policeman will see in a lifetime; and Baywatch to the contrary most American women aren't inflated with silicone. Would you blame someone overseas who watched the last SuperBowl for suspecting that Americans have a tendency to rip off women's blouses?

  In scientific research we have to make corrections all the time. You have to understand your "sampling bias." We oversample dramatic stories in the US/EU and undersample dramatic stories in Africa. So you either must toss most of the US/EU scandals or dig deeper for stories in Africa.

• We have a tendency to quote as serious things that are said only for effect. When a lawyer claims his client is innocent, that isn't front page news. Politicians notoriously overstate issues, and we go along with the soundbite charade. We shouldn't, especially when we're trying to give the world an unbiased look at us.

There are some tricky points, as the New York Times story on Al Hurra mentioned: do we call Palestinian terrorists terrorists, or martyrs, or something bland? I'm not an expert on Arabic, but I suspect we can find some language that gets the point across. "Martyr" is absolutely the wrong word, but "suicide" emphasizes the crime--that sort of thing. And, after all, the bombers want to inspire terror--so why not mention that and call them terrorists?

Reframe the Debate

To undercut the Qutb appeal, we must try to show that we are a religion-friendly culture.

One approach is to implicitly offer an alternative: not the House of War or House of Submission, but the "House of Fruit."

This we can do with programs of religious good news: 5 minute TV/radio pieces on how some religious group or other group has been helping other people. Keep religious groups prominent, but throw in the Shriners or community efforts from time to time; and make sure the philanthropy is uncontroversial, and not likely to excite envy. (No stories of aid to Israel or the Palestinians, or of buying Cadillacs for the preacher) It is true that all the good actions of an infidel won't make him as good as the worst believer, but the point is to frame the debate in terms of actions and judgment of whether actions are good or not. Title it "By Their Fruits You Will Know Them."

The impression we want to leave is that just as the hearer can judge the generous spirits of people of different faiths, so can we. The secular society gives good people a chance to prove themselves, and bad people a chance to be discovered. The deeds are the proof, and not the invisible belief. As far as I can tell it is perfectly orthodox to say that "Even in lands of ignorance good people demonstrate their goodness, and presumably will be rewarded by God. Likewise even in lands of submission you find evil people whose disobedience will be punished by God."

Other broadcast squibs should acknowledge the holy days of Islam, Judaism, Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity (both calendars), with mentions and brief explanations through the day.

Another program would be "The Voice of the Prophets;" reading without commentary in the local vernacular from the Old Testament, New Testament, and Koran. Precede each reading with a quick who-and-where, but no more; and call the program an aid to devotions. No Hadiths, no commentaries. Cycle back to the beginning as each book ends. Offer cassettes/CDs of the mix or of each work separately. (Use Egyptian Arabic rather than classical Arabic for broadcast in Egypt, Farsi in Iran, etc.)

This will infuriate some Muslims who'll take it as an insult to the Koran to be read on the same program as the Bible, and also those for whom it is blasphemy to translate the Koran. (Of course it is translated anyway, and offered as a devotional aid but not as the Koran itself.) Insofar the Koran is studied in the local dialect instead of Arabic, to that degree the dominance of Arabia decreases. Non-Arabic Muslims are currently second-class Muslims (see Among the Believers).

Just as the "By Their Fruits" show allows Johnny Abdul to judge by deeds, this allows him to judge ideas, and see that other prophets (esteemed by Islam) praised God well too, and deserve respect for that. He can't object too strongly to such readings of the writings of honored prophets--unless the Koran suffers by comparison, as I suspect it might.

I would hardly look for conversions from Islam with such a program. (I judge that such conversions would be a good thing, but don't think this program will do it.) But you can hope that a little of the respect Muslims hold for the ancient prophets may start to be accorded to those who quote them, and try to follow them.

Israel

Most of the Muslim world seems to be convinced that the uppity Jews have seized possession of a very holy site in the heartland of ancient Islam's glory days and are persecuting and murdering innocent Palestinian Muslims in order to hold it.

• Perhaps Jerusalem is a very holy site, but you couldn't prove it from Muslim behavior (see Bat Ye'or, or even Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad). They seem not to care particularly about Jerusalem unless somebody else has possession. It won't help to point this out, though.
• I hear a lot of claims of support for the innocent Palestinians and their noble martyrs. I also notice that nobody wants them for neighbors. Nobody. Once again, it won't help to point this out.

  The persecution does exist at some level, though it seems milder than (for instance) the standard operating procedures of the Egyptian government for dealing with Copts. Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem) describes Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian laborers that must be humiliating. Even if this changed, I doubt that non-Palestinian Muslims would care.

• The uppity Jews, by refusing to keep to their proper place as humble dhimmis, are a severe challenge to the common versions of sharia. Interpretations of the Treaty of Umar that are now enshrined in sharia as divine law state that Jews are required to have second-class status when under Muslim rule, and are enemies when not under Muslim rule. These same provisions apply to Christians (pagans and atheists get less respect). Muslim religious objections to Israel are tightly tied to enmity to all infidels--namely us.

  Officially sharia is fixed and firm, but in practice you'll find numerous variations. Can we hope for a more benign sharia?

  Even if versions of sharia appear which re-interpret the precedents set by the early caliphs (and I've heard rumors of a few), we've no guarantee these will survive competition with the rest--especially when the Guardians of the Holy Cities oppose them. And spreading new versions will take time. It took decades to spread Wahhabism, and it'll take decades to undo the damage.

It seems that we don't have many ways to soothe Muslim ire over Israel short of nuking Tel Aviv. Given the coupling between attitudes towards Jews and attitudes towards Christians, betraying Israel would not only fail to buy us peace, it would harden Muslim resolve and increase their confidence in defeating the rest of us infidels. I'm not sure we can afford that.

Suppose one could arrange for a real peace agreement between the Jews and the Arabs, and the two groups actually succeeded in getting along as well as two neighboring countries ever do. I grant that this is unlikely now and will remain unlikely until after radical and undoubtedly violent changes in Palestinian society. A substantial fraction of the Palestinians would have a vested interest in compromising on the rules about infidels. That helps build peace. You might think that "No harm, no foul" would mean that remoter Muslims might be mollified if the Palestinians weren't complaining. But I don't think so. Recall apartheid South Africa. The loudest complainers and saber-rattlers weren't the front-line (neighbor) countries, but the countries farther away who couldn't be called on to suffer for the cause.

Remote Muslim countries would still have the same motive for inciting hatred of Israel--to distract their citizens and focus their anger away from the corrupt authorities. (Just like Africa in the 60's and 70's) Not all Palestinians will go along with a peace treaty, so there'll be no shortage of handy 'martyrs,' and there'll be a money stream to fund them.

I think the best we can hope for is some decline in unrest about Israel, and a little 'looking the other way.'

Women rating women

I commented on this group's earlier report that women preferred rugged men's faces when fertile, and more "kindly" faces the rest of the time.

This time they find that fertile women rate other women uglier than they do when not fertile. The first paragraph of the report is:

Women judge the attractiveness other women more harshly when at their most fertile, suggests a new study. The phenomenon could be a strategy to devalue potential rivals, says the psychologist behind the work - being bitchy about others could help a woman win the attention of a desirable man.

Umm, speaking as a man, I'm not sure that's a good winning strategy for a woman to try.

What strikes me as more important about this study was this:

Perrett's group previously found that women preferred more feminine, caring looking men for most of the month, but preferred more rugged, dominant looking types during the most fertile phase of their cycle.

In contrast, the women's attitudes towards male faces did not appear to vary with the menstrual cycle in this new study.

In other words they could not reproduce their earlier result .

I wonder if this is due to differences in the way researchers react to women in the fertile part of their cycle. Pheromones anyone?

Spheres on Mars

Obviously the spheres are fallen shotgun pellets. "There's another probe, RYllx! Get it!"

OK, seriously, these things do look rather odd. Of the 23 spheres (not counting one partly out of the picture), 11 have pretty clear boundaries between hemispheres--and several of the irregular ones may also, but I can't tell without turning them over to see. That sounds a lot like droplets hardening as they fly. 5 of them have divots--maybe expanding gas explosions?

I'd expect droplets to be squashed more by air pressure, but then the Martian atmosphere is thinner, so maybe this is OK. But in that case do the drops cool fast enough?

And what would be the ratio of melted to blasted material? If this was from a volcanic eruption, I'd expect the rubble of the old hardened cap to be blasted away as well. But I remember pictures of Pompeii showing 10 meter layers of volcanic ash, so maybe we can neglect the old crud. But a lot of that was hot ash, which I was given to understand forms when dissolved gases in the magma expand as the pressure is released. The difference in pressure between subterranean magma and earth's air vs vacuum seems pretty trivial (200-300 MPa or so). So maybe the Martian magma has less dissolved gas? That could be because the pressure is lower (75-120 MPa) or because the chemistry is different. On Earth dissolved gases include SO2, H2O, and CO2 (SO2 is easier to measure than the others, natch). The rovers are seeing rocks with sulfer...

Suppose the beads are from a meteor impact. Then I expect most of the material to be shattered but unmelted rock: if you have enough energy to melt rock, nearby you have enough energy to shatter it, and there's more matter around the melted zone than in it. So unless the melted rock beads travel farther than ordinary gravel, there should be more gravel than beads lying around. I don't see that. So I'd guess this isn't from meteor impacts. Unless . . .

Correction Oops. I forgot that the hotter central stuff will also have more KE, and has a better chance of travelling a long distance.

Is there a systematic bias due to the blowing soil? Will irregular gravel tend to be buried and smoother stuff remain uncovered? It does appear that the more irregular stuff is both smaller and more buried, but I'd want to look at a few more samples, and try a wind tunnel test or two.

Nail tearing

I'm rather surprised nobody has studied fingernail structure before. Dr. Ennos calls it "ingenious," as the layers of keratin (parallel to the "moon") in the middle layer mean that it has substantial ("almost at tough as horses' hooves") strength along the axis of the finger, but can be easily torn off in strips for reliable trimming.

My own experience in tear-trimming nails is that most of the time (8 times out of 10 or so) the nail tears off more or less cleanly, but the rest of the time the strip widens as it tears, sometimes reaching the nail bed. Not 100% reliable . . .

I wonder what it was carrying

Nigeria quashes air crash rumour

The Nigerian authorities have called off the search for a plane alleged to have crashed near the commercial capital, Lagos, last week.

Aviation minister Malam Isa Yuguda said no evidence of a crash had been found.

Mr Yuguda said investigations showed that neither Nigeria nor any other country had declared a plane missing.

Do you believe the eyewitnesses didn't actually see the plane crash? Me either. I wonder who's covering up what. Smuggling, probably.

Chasing away desireables

So we'll be shipping back to Cuba the folks who rebuilt a 1959 V8 Buick into a boat. Unless they were on some terrorist/criminal watch list, why? We can always use people like this. Don't we have a special category for immigrants with special skills/training? (I know, I know--we don't want to encourage more people to drown themselves trying to imitate him. Still. . . )

Massachusetts Supreme Court

I think Scrappleface has the kindest take on this usurpation. The scope of their arrogance is truly sweeping: they redefine law, language, religion, and even history to suit their whims. (Sorry, the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's is not ethically equivalent to the "gay rights movement," that's rewriting history.)

Through Liberia

by Lady Dorothy Mills

When I went to the library to find Land of the Magic Soldiers another title jumped out at me from a frail volume: Through Liberia by Lady Dorothy Mills. From its publication date of 1926 you can guess how patronizing Lady Mills could be. Her trip (Monrovia to Saniquelle to Sinoe) was at the time when the government was starting to coordinate a crackdown on Leopard Societies, and cannibalism wound up as a major theme of the book; with the Mano and Gio tribes indicted. (I remember Harley writing that each tribe accused its neighbors of it, but said their tribe never indulged--or at least not since very long ago.)

Her journey was without roads and without much in the way of maps, and her relations with the ever-changing roster of bearers ranged from the amusing to the vexed. Because the government would requisition unpaid labor for various projects, villagers tended to take to the bush when word came of somebody needing bearers--unless they had solid assurance of getting paid.

If you can get past some of the cringe-making generalizations (about coarseness or musical talent) it is an interesting snapshot of an era. It looks like the claim that Masonic and Poro mysteries are similar must come from before 1926. I remember that the Masons were big in Liberia, and The Mask of Anarchy claimed that many AmericoLiberian bigwigs also ranked high in the Poro. I wonder if they really are similar, and if that made it easier for the "civilized" bigwigs to join the Poro.

I'd not heard before of the old Departmental Regulations that allowed pawning relatives but not selling them as slaves. The distinction revolved around the presence or absence of a special token of jewelry or some such item of domestic value.

A pity her camera didn't work on closeups--or perhaps she always wanted to put her subjects within a setting. I'd have liked to see the people a little closer.

You probably won't be able to find this book, but it is interesting.

Silicon Valley vs NASA

Dennis Wingo writes in SpaceRef that in his judgment we can go to the moon with better and cheaper systems than before: calling the previous hardware "stone knives and bearskins." As examples he mentions the far faster and smaller computers available now, the much better alignment and positioning and inertial guidance systems.

All true. But he forgets four big problems.

1. Reliability. Just because a computer works fine here on earth doesn't mean it is radiation-hard enough to work in space. How do you know if it works in space? You have to test it. Testing takes time and lots of money. Dennis says "1969 the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) sported the most advanced and compact computer built up to that time. " I'll bet it didn't--in fact I've heard the exact opposite. It was undoubtedly the best when it was built, but by the time the testing was done, the hardware would be behind the curve. Thing is, it was known to work, and the bleeding edge stuff wasn't.

   At some point the ever-smaller size of transistor gates starts to make them very sensitive to transitions or damage due to cosmic rays. (Our atmosphere blocks a lot of that.) If you want to use them in space you have to design for redundancy or for error checking to a degree not required for earthbound consumer electronics.

2. Systems engineering. OK, you've got the parts. They have to fit together. If you get a newer/faster/cheaper part, it doesn't save you anything if you can't fit it in the old position. If chip A doesn't fit anymore, you've got a redesign problem on hand: maybe a big expensive one.
3. Spare parts. Oops, maybe you don't have the parts. By the time you're done with systems engineering and testing, a few years have gone by. Where are you in the life cycle of the product? We've several boards we can't find components for anymore--and they're not very old... There are new products out there that do almost the same job, but their characteristics are slightly different, and they won't work.
4. Where's the beef? Ok, so you can save a few hundred pounds in designing a new Apollo capsule. Very good, you can use that capacity for lofting the tools you need for digging a moon shelter. But how does the decrease in the price of an Ethernet card change the price of a rocket motor, or the price of the liquid oxygen tank? Some things are still quite expensive: engineering, testing, and the beef needed to put the gadgets in orbit.

Sure, I'd like to go to the moon. But I think Dennis is overoptimistic about the cost.

In the Land of Magic Soldiers

by Daniel Bergner

My mother recommended this to me. Bergner tells the stories of several people, white and black, who love Sierra Leone and stayed with it through the horrors of the civil war. The Kortenhovens came to Foria from Grand Rapids as missionaries of the Christian Reformed Church. Neall came as a mercenary from South Africa ("He's a bit of a nutter," Captain Smith, the British spokesman said, . . . "But he single-handedly saved Freetown.") Lamin Jusu Jarka saw friends burned alive by RUF fighters, and C.O. Cut Hands chopped off Lamin's hands. Michael Josiah studied medicine at what was left of the national university, learned microbiology and physiology and wears a magic bullet-repelling belt from a Kamajor priest: his goal is to unite modern medicine with traditional magic and make Sierra Leone a center of healing for the world.

Race matters here. Many Sierra Leoneans wanted the British to recolonize them. But even the proud Lamin, eager to see the British gone and natives ruling themselves again answered "what made you fall in love with your wife?" with

"Well," he said, sounding almost surprised that I should need to ask, "you can see her color. She resembles as if she is a white woman. So I love her for that."

And yet race isn't really the issue. Bergner gets all the pieces together, but doesn't make the connection. On the one hand you have the discouraged British officers, whose initial enthusiasm eroded to almost racist defeatism ("They have the attention span of goldfish." "I'm not saying they're subhuman, but . . . "). On the other you have devotion to family, and the amazing way Joseph was able to rebuild a wreck into a school in three months.

The difference isn't racial, but cultural. To make Western machinery work you need a hierarchy of obedience. (To put down a prison uprising, the commander calls on a local officer to go get gas masks and other gear from storage. He goes off, finds a project more important to him, and never comes back.) You need a kind of abstract group-think, in which principles are more important than comfort.

The tribal attitudes are different, and in some ways more individualistic. The net of group obligations is different, more "personal." Magic and the spirits of things play a very large role as well. I am not expert enough to give a complete explanation, or to tell an accurate enough story; but if your life centers around placation of unknowable powers you won't ask a lot of questions or even assume you'll completely understand when faced with apparently unknowable powers centered in human beings: white men.

He spotted the 14.5 and 12.7 machine guns on trucks along the road. "Target visual," he told his crew. He rolled tight, banked hard, dived down, dozens of rebel soldiers running, scattering, looking from the air like "long swastikas," he thought, one arm and one leg bent and raised. He touched the black button. The gunship trembled, volcanic. Shrapnel dropped bodies without drama; the soldiers appeared simply to fall, as if tripped. "It's actually a bit of an anti-climax," Neall explained. He destroyed the trucks with their mounted guns. "It's not like the movies. When the rocket hits the vehicle there's no flash or cloud of smoke. Nothing shoots hundreds of feet into the air. I suppose if you hit the petrol tank it would be quite nice, but I've never had that privilege. You get a slight fire because there is some fuel around. And pieces start falling off the vehicle."

"If you can't take a joke," Neall muttered triumphantly in the cockpit, veering away from the rebel maimed, the rebel dead, "don't join the army."

And there's Komba:

Komba didn't show a great deal of remorse with me. He told me of a raid he and his boys had carried out for food-finding. There had been a man caring for a small child, and Komba had spared him, setting him free from the line of villagers who would be marched away at gunpoint, bearing looted goods to the West Side Boys' encampment. Later Komba and his crew had raided the same village. The man had launched himself at Komba, trying to wrestle away his gun. This Komba felt as a betrayal. When his boys finally pinned the man down, Komba told them not to shoot. "I operate on him with me ax," recalled the opening, the eating, as vindication.

. . . . (half the book later)

But now, if you needed your car fixed in the King Tom area of Freetown, you might easily have turned into a particular garage, and seen Komba leaning under a hood.

You couldn't have seen anything of his past. You wouldn't have seen anything out of the ordinary, only a young man, perhaps nineteen, among six or seven other apprentices, without tools, gazing longingly at engine parts, wishing they had the equipment and knowledge to fix them. The garage boss had little incentive to train them. . . . But the boss offered his teaching, and the chance to practice with his wrenches, at rare intervals. The education had the pace of a spiritual journey, led by a charlatan. Once each month, maybe, he imparted the workings of a single component. At this rate, Komba could declare himself a mechanic in about a decade. So far, he was sticking with it. More than a year had passed, and most days I went to look for him, he was there, waiting to learn.

Frustration, determination, and horror. This isn't a book for everybody.

Tinfoil

Thanks to a battery check all the radio settings in my car are gone, so I tuned in a station I don't generally listen to. A woman who just wrote an article for The Nation (didn't catch the name) was answering softball questions about the No Child Left Behind act and its effects.

Claim: The act asserts that every child will be reading at grade level by 2014, regardless of recent immigration status or handicap. Ummm. Not a good way to start an argument.

Claim: The act requires the use of a Reading First curriculum, which scripts what a teacher is required to say. Umm. This sounds like overstatement, but isn't beyond the realm of possibility. One size fits all is bad. Very bad.

Claim: The act is a one-size fits all. I can believe bureaucrats can be that dumb. Not individually (usually), but certainly collectively.

Claim: The act "cannot be blamed on Texas and the Republicans," because it was created by a corporate/political committee in 1989 by Bush 1 and Arkansas governor Clinton. And everyone knows that Republicans are demons and Texas is hell :-)

Claim: One bad thing about the act is that Corporations (TM) supported it to make schools look bad so they could use vouchers and private schools and tutoring services to make lots of money. Even worse, by making people feel bad about themselves and their education, they won't complain as much when you ship their jobs overseas.

No, this wasn't Scrapleface; she meant it. Corporations to her are a magic monolith, all run from the same boardroom. That all the corporations I've heard of are desperate for well-educated workers means nothing to her; "Corporations" have a wicked agenda by definition, and what any good particular instance of a corporation may do doesn't matter--it must be a coverup.

Well, this is Madison.

Some wonderful ideas

India is sponsoring a foundation for innovations--the "small" inventions that don't get a lot of press but often get a lot of use. Hurray for the hackers!

Safety kills Hubble?

NASA claims that safety concerns mean no new Hubble missions. It sounds more like budget hardball: If you cut our shuttle funds, we'll kill the Hubble.

Hidden Gospels

How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way by Philip Jenkins

Has anybody not heard of the Gospel of Thomas? Or Q?

Q is for Quelle, the hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus from which Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew much of their common material. Maybe it was a document or set of documents, maybe a set of oral traditions, or maybe Q is one of the existing gospels (just my wild idea).

A warning first: I found Jenkins' writing style a bit heavy. The way he organizes material doesn't always make it clear who the speaker is: whether it is him or one of the various groups of scholars he references.

That said, this book is badly needed. Reporters and publishers are more interested in novelty and shock and the resulting sales than they are in boring old accuracy. The Jesus Seminar is quite good at getting press coverage, despite their tiny numbers and extreme positions. This book helps show up the lies.

An example of how the Jesus Seminar works: to find out which sayings of Jesus are authentic, first they chucked anything supernatural. Then they chucked anything Jewish, on the grounds that these were background material, and not new--and Jesus would only be saying new things. Never mind that Jesus was a Jew, and almost every one of his listeners were Jews, so you'd expect Jewish ideas and idioms. As a result, they deprecated everything Jesus said in the Gospel of John, and almost everything in the other gospels as well. But they love Thomas . . .

Early church writers commented at length on various heresies they disputed with, so scholars have known all along that there were numerous documents which purported to be alternative gospels, and even had quotations from some of them. Most of these were written by one faction or another of the Gnostic movements.

Gnosticism apparently derived from mystical traditions of the Greeks and Egyptians, which were blended with Christian ideas to form Christian Gnosticisms. Their common central notion is that the world is evil, the soul is at least potentially pure, and can be liberated from bondage to the evil world and illusion by secret and sacred knowledge (gnosis, hence the name). They concocted chains of created creators to explain how an evil world could be created, and corresponding realms of existence and secret passwords to enter them. Because the world is evil, sex and childbearing were deprecated. They insisted on mystical interpretations of Jesus' life and sayings, rejecting a real crucifixion. They appeared rather late, with Gnostic schools flourishing from about 135 AD and later. Some sects were more successful than others--Valentinus' followers were still around at about 300 AD. Because they insisted on mystical interpretations, they had no compunctions about writing their own gospels--which they meant to be mystically true, albeit not literally true.

Discoveries over the past 150 years have recovered many of these documents. The largest of these seems to be that at Nag Hammadi. Not all of the documents are necessarily from Christian Gnosticism--"some have no words or names even loosely associated with Christianity," and there's part of Plato's Republic as well. Other texts include a Gospel of Mary, Thunder Perfect Mind, a Gospel of Philip, Pista Sophia [found and published a hundred years ago], and so on. Twenty of these are collected in The Complete Gospels.

The most famous of these 'gospels' is the Gospel of Thomas, known by fragments until its discovery sixty years ago. The Gospel of Thomas opens with the words "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." The obvious implication of the very first sentence is that the reader already knows of public sayings and stories of Jesus. Hence Thomas cannot be earlier than Q (in whatever form Q may have been). Thomas is a "sayings" book, and contains no history. It combines versions of known statements by Jesus (presumed to be from Q), statements that Jesus could have made consistently with orthodoxy, and gnostic parables and philosophy that are not only distinctly non-orthodox, but are plainly quite late--dating from at least AD 135 and probably much later. It has dialogs including Mary Magdalen or Salome, characteristic of "Gnostic texts of the late second and third centuries."

Yet the Jesus Seminar folks want it dated 50-70 AD and treated as an independent source, equal to Q (which nobody has seen, by the way) and superior to the canonical gospels. Somebody has an agenda here. They profess to discern "levels" in Q, some earlier or perhaps due to different witnesses.

I'd like to see their methods for unraveling the contributions to a text made by different writers at different dates tested in a double blind experiment. The fact that they often disagree with each other is strong evidence that textual criticism at that level is better classified as amusement than either art or science, but I'm willing to give them another chance. I can well believe that Thomas had several writers tinker with it, but that's a pretty dramatic case.

The Jesus Seminar group try to shoehorn various hypothetical gospels (Gospel of Signs) and fictional gospels (Gospel of Peter) and Gnostic gospels (Gospel of Thomas) into the first century, and push back the canonical ones as far (and farther) than they can--to give their pet theories about Christianity priority. And the theories they like say that early Christianity was non-doctrinal, non-liturgical, non-hierarchical, and woman-affirming. All but the last are known to be quite false.

The Nag Hammadi texts that caused such a great stir turn out, as Jenkins points out, to convey nothing revolutionary at all--merely more documents of types and nature already known. The speculative claims dressed up as scholarship about "many Christianities" and "egalitarian Christianities" are the same ones trotted out at the beginning of the last century. The newspapers and magazines cheerfully publicize noisy claims, but have no skill (or apparent interest) in putting them into scholarly context, or reporting when the claims are refuted. Old knowledge isn't news--fresh lies are. And so we have popularizations (From Jesus to Christ, The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Search for Jesus), all professing to be the voice of scholarship discovering a woman-centered Christianity with no hierarchy and no difficult doctrines or rules; but these popularizations actually represent the far fringes.

A sample: It is difficult to convey just how arcane the Gnostic scriptures are without quoting documents in full, particularly since they require knowledge of a whole mythological vocabulary, but here is a typical example from one of the Nag Hammadi texts, the Letter of Peter to Philip. The dialog begins when "the apostles answered and said, 'Lord, we would like to know the deficiency of the aeons and their pleroma.'" And: "How are we detained in this dwelling place?" Jesus replies,

First of all concerning the deficiency of the aeons, this is the deficiency, when the disobedience and the foolishness of the mother appeared without the commandment of the majesty of the Father. She wanted to raise up aeons. And when she spoke, the Arrogant One followed. And when she left behind a part, the Arrogant One laid hold of it, and it became a deficiency. This is the deficiency of the aeons. Now when the Arrogant One had taken a part, he sowed it. And he placed powers over it and authorities. And he enclosed it in the aeons which are dead. And all the powers of the world rejoiced that they had been begotten.

Yes, I've read the Gospel of Thomas. I've read the canonical four. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are tied to places and times. Thomas sails off into fantasy land. It doesn't take a genius to tell which is more reliable.

If you've been looking at some of these "alternative" gospels, or have friends who have, then get ahold of Hidden Gospels and find out some of the facts around the hype. If not: the executive summary is that the latest finds tell us a little more about second and third century Gnosticism, but nothing about first century Christianity--claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

UPDATE: The Jesus Seminar is run by an avowed atheist.

Signs of winning or losing

In Winds of Change Katzman asks for possible indicators that the WOT is going well, or going badly.

To clarify: When I refer to the War On Terror I mean the war against the AlQaida and allied groups with Salafi/Wahhabi goals. There are other terrorist groups and ideologies; and there are groups which could join forces with the Salafis against us, notably the Shiites. Recall that the current suicide bomber cult had its origins in Khomeini's Shiite theology. While it is true that the Wahhabis hate the Shiites, they both agree that we're infidels.

So, indicators that things are going well could include:

• Somebody comes up with an elegant reply to Qutb. (This is a big deal. Qutb is the theorist for the jihad-ites, and his influence seems to be substantial. Somebody is going to have to put together and publicise, under Muslim auspices {they'll not listen to infidels} a thorough rebuttal and alternative view of Islam in the world. Since Qutb seems to have been a good writer this may be hard. But it is critical.)
• More or less stable government in Kabul continuing to suppress Taleban forces. (I expect the occasional threat to secede, but so long as it doesn't last above a week or two it'll just be bluster for effect and not genuine revolt.)
• Unarmed Iraqi citizens voting in town meetings.
• A second set of national Iraqi elections without US oversight. (The first will be OK. After people have gotten together and done some serious arguing for a few years, we'll find out if they can actually get along.)
• Change in mullah's role in Iran: from oversight to advisory only. (I have no idea how likely this is. I suspect media reports have systematic bias.)
• Serious cooperation from the Saudis in tracing money flows. (Fat chance.)
• A systematic change in the theology of the people the Saudis finance and hire to spread Islam: away from Wahhabi and towards a "moderate" Islam; preferably firing the existing imams. (Snowball's chance in hell.)
• The Saudis disband and prosecute the muttawaa. (Back off from using religious police--a tangible moderation. If the royal family can agree that the clerics are too dangerous to support any longer, we might be able to make some long term peace with them.)
• The Saudis make royal money matters public.
• The Saudis official theological position asserts the nobility/sanctity of ordinary work. (If they can get ordinary Saudis to take entry level jobs, they can cut unemployment, and get rid of a lot of the foreign workers. This gives Saudi men something to look forward to besides 72 virgins, or perhaps a more peaceful way of arriving at those 72.)
• Syria implementing a phased withdrawal from Lebanon.
• A bloody civil war among Palestinian groups after Arafat's death. (Exhaust the proponents of the death cults and leave the average Palestinian tired of hateful and eager for some real builders.)
• Successful civil war in Saudi Arabia prosecuted by Shiites supported by Iraq (and the US) against the Wahhabis. (Preferred outcome is a quick war depriving the Wahhabis of the oil revenue they use to spread jihadism. Stripping the Wahhabis of control of the holy cities also strips them of clout around the world. Better if the Hashemites get control back...?)
• Local Muslim governments take up the slack for the madrassas which now lack funding from the Saudis; taking up oversight of the curiculum as well. (One hopes they'd add some non-religious courses, and cut out the jihadist elements.)
• Democrat party adapts a non-appeasement plank. (From the looks of things for this election, they will field a non-WOT candidate. If so, and if they lose big in November, they may decide that patriotism is a better plank, and we could have some continuity over the next 20 years.)

---

On the other hand, we'll know things are going badly if

• We continue to have no consistent philosophical opposition to Qutb. (Implicit materialism doesn't count--Qutb already addressed that.)
• Afganistan partitions, and the Pashtun section of PackAfgan has the Taleban running things again.
• The Iraqi Shiites want a mullah-ocracy like the Iranians.
• The triple "I divorce you" is legal in Iraq.
• The Saudis don't change anything substantial in their support for the ultra-hardline clerics.
• The Jordanian government is overthrown by Palestianian groups.
• Multiple coups in Egypt. (Chance of Muslim Brotherhood gaining power--very bad news.)
• A bloody civil war among Palestinian groups after Arafat's death. (Each group tries to prove its legitimacy by being more anti-Jew and anti-American than the rest. Factions supported by different countries mean proxy wars.) Yes, I know this indicator appears in both lists!
• Canada allows parallel sharia family courts for Muslims.
• The US continues to allow Muslim recruiting in prisons.
• The US allows Saudi money to fund Muslim enterprises of any kind in our borders.
• The Democrat party maintains an anti-war stance. (If we lose continuity in fighting the war, we can lose big. And I don't trust a single party to stay honest without a little competition.)
• American people start to lose focus on the war and its goals, and look only at casualties and costs. (We lose.)
• Pakistan has a civil war. (They lose absolute control of their nukes that way. Some of their factions are very bad news.)
• Nuclear war between India and Pakistan. (Chaos, precedent for using nukes on infidels, loss of allies in Pakistan.)
• Russian mafia successfully market leftover nukes.
• Non-Arab Muslim states start to supply more of the jihadis. (If we have the whole Muslim world against us, we have a very big problem.)
• Home-grown jihadis kill more than a hundred people one year. (Raises deep questions about the limits of freedom of religion. There is precedent for banning certain religions.)
• We lose a city to a nuke or bioweapon or shipload of ammonium nitrate (that's happened before). (In once sense that would be an obvious setback. But I worry that we'd go postal, and lose our souls the same way the Palestinians have.)

---

I could go on, but life is short.

For the Glory of God

by Rodney Stark

In this (second volume of a set) book Stark (who also wrote The Rise of Christianity) sets forth the claim that it was largely impetus from devout Christians trying to do God's work that caused the rise of science in the West, witch burning, and the abolition of slavery.

The skeptical Encylopediasts of the Enlightenment thought quite highly of themselves, but the bulk of the scientific work was done by others, in a natural progression from medieval theology. A great deal of historical and polemical revisionism obscured this--most people have the wrong idea of what Galileo's offenses were, for instance; or buy into the polemical lie that people believed the Earth was flat before Columbus. (It seems the clerical advisers objected {correctly} that Columbus estimate for the Earth's radius was too small.)

Why witch-hunts? Wherever people believe in witches, witches are killed, but only in Europe were there hunts. Why? If the only sources of power are God or the Satan, and some people have supernatural power that isn't from God, what other choice could there be? The earlier Church was wiser, and held both witchcraft and believing in witchcraft to be offenses (making accusations a bit hard to manage). The infamous Spanish Inquisition turns out to have been far more interested in reconciling witches than burning them (very few died), and he finds most of the witch crazes happened in regions with little central political or religious control.

Some of those same supporters of witchcraft=Satanism were also devoted to the abolition of slavery. The vast majority of opponents to slavery were Christian, and opposed it on Christian theological grounds. Various popes issued bulls against it for centuries. Stark endeavors to show that slavery was less oppressive in Catholic America than Protestant America, but I'm afraid the numbers say otherwise. Only in the Protestant Southern USA did slaves actually multiply: everywhere else (including the Protestant British Caribbean) their numbers had to be maintained by continued importation. Islam did not, and could not, develop an anti-slavery theology--Muhammad owned slaves himself.

In an amusing note on a section about the effects of different religions on attitudes, he points to a study finding a positive correlation between frequency of prayer and personal ethics--except among Japanese or Chinese, who often expect tangible good luck from prayers. Some Chinese have been known to whip idols which failed to deliver on the prayed-for results.

The book was on hold for someone else, so I can't supply nice quotes. Stark shows what different philosophies can mean in terms of society and science, and documents a great deal of misinformation about the history of science. Read it.

Soul Survivor

by Phillip Yancy How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church

"I have spent most of my life in recovery from the Church" says Yancey. His home church he describes as racist, "fundamentalist," and contentious, and at the "burial" of his home church (disbanding because of falling membership in a changing neighborhood), he visualized against the crowd of alumni a "procession of those not present, people like my brother, who had turned away from God in large part because of this church."

Yet despite the failings (evils) of his home church, there was still something there. And despite the failings of the thirteen men who became his "mentors," he found evidence of God's grace in all. He eventually could forgive his church--and even himself.

If you recognize all the names in his chapters you're doing better than I, although I'd heard of the work of a few whose names I didn't know.

• Martin Luther King, Jr. A Long Night's Journey into Day
• G.K. Chesterton Relics Along the Seashore
• Dr. Paul Brand Detours to Happiness (He found effective treatments for leprosy)
• Dr. Robert Coles Tender Lives and the Assaults of the Universe (He wrote Children of Crisis documenting the life of the poor and rich in America) -
• Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky Chasing Grace
• Mahatma Gandhi Echoes in a Strange Land
• Dr. C. Everett Koop Serpents and Doves in the Public Square
• John Donne As He Lay Dying
• Annie Dillard The Splendor of the Ordinary (a writer and poet)
• Fredrick Buechner Whispers from the Wings (a preacher and writer)
• Shusaku Endo A Place for Traitors (a Japanese writer, whose novels center on the betrayals during the time the Shoguns stamped out Christianity in Japan)
• Henri Nouwen The Wounded Healer (a priest and writer who left writing to work with the handicapped)

For those who know Yancey's work, one common theme is what sense to make of pain, failure, and our own betrayals of what we ought to know and refuse to obey. Over and over again, despite the curses of oppression or poverty or disease, you can hear "Blessed are the poor." The Protestant circles I generally travel in don't talk much about the redemptive power of suffering. It seems odd that a curse we're called on to alleviate could also be a blessing: but then that's God for you--always able to outmaneuver circumstances.

Each of these "mentors" addressed something in Yancey's life. King's devotion to Christian nonviolence was eye-opening to Yancey, as he saw an "inferior" so clearly superior and prophetic. That King wasn't perfect doesn't mean he could not be a prophetic voice for our time--the Bible is full of imperfect servants of God.

From Chesterton he relearned joy.

It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I have never even seen a book on "the problem of pleasure." Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question: the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians.

(And I can't resist including this famous quote from Chesterton:)

"To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it . . . Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex: it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind."

From the chapter on Dr. Robert Coles:

What transformed a physician and social scientist into a devotee of literature? Coles answers, "A man like Tolstoy knew more psychology than the whole twentieth-century social scene will ever know. All this stuff about the stages of dying coming out now--why not just go back and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It said everything. And who has added any wisdom to the field of marital problems since Anna Karenina? And Dickens, oh my, what Dickens knew about human nature! I simply wander around from one place to the next, teaching these novels and trying to, in a way, undo the devil in the medical school, law school, and business school."

Gandhi was, of course, no Christian, but he tried to apply some of Jesus' precepts, putting his own life on the line. The world knows most of that story. And Gandhi serves as an indictment to the "name it and claim it" Christian worshipers of self-fulfillment, and a demonstration of what power there is in obeying even a little of God's commands.

With Brand, "for the first time in my life, I encountered genuine humility." A missionary surgeon; the man who discovered how leprosy really destroyed (and how to stop it); a man who dedicated years of his life to finding ways to repair damaged hands and feet; and more.

I can't do justice to this book in a few paragraphs. Since I got it for Christmas I've tried to get 4 or 5 other people to read it. You read it too. That's Soul Survivor by Yancey.

The Rise of Christianity

by Rodney Stark

How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the Western world in a few centuries.

OK, I'll confess that I never expected a sociologist to be a good literary stylist. Perhaps I'm just not well enough read in the field, but the others I've read have been mediocre at best. Rodney Stark is a sociologist turned historian who tries to use the analytical techniques of his field in history. His method is explicitly reductionist: can the rise of Christianity be understood non-miraculously?; or perhaps better ask can we understand the mechanism of the rise of Christianity?, ignoring the question of whether the mechanism was Divinely guided or not.

The book seems largely assembled from individual papers, each of which attempts to quantify growth rates and influences--and a number of his conclusions contradict the received wisdom.

The first chapter is dedicated to demonstrating that a growth rate of 40% (known to be achievable--see the Mormons) is adequate to explain the estimates of a majority of Christians in the Empire by 350 AD. Obviously the rate wouldn't be steady, and his initial estimates of the number of Christians conflicts with that in Acts. Mass conversions are not necessary to explain the growth, and known principles of networking (some of which he researched) can explain the conversion rate. His research studying Moonies and Moonies-to-be found that the group of Moonies converted friends, and not strangers; and the friends converted when their network of friends became predominantly Moonie. Converts were mainly "from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented and those affiliated with the most accommodated (worldly) religious communities." He demonstrates how these features pertain to the Roman Empire through the book.

He goes on to gleefully shred some of the sociologists who use metaphor as models ("Durkheim's 'discovery' that religion is society worshiping itself . . . How would one falsify that statement, or assertions to the effect that religion is a neurotic illusion or the poetry of the soul?")

In "The Class Basis of Early Christianity" he explains his distinction between a sect and a cult and their social differences. A sect is a schism in an existing "religious body when persons desiring a more otherworldly version of the faith break away to 'restore' the religion to a higher level of tension with its environment." A cult is a new faith (at least new in that society). Cults tend to attract better educated/upper class members dissatisfied with the existing religions. New age religions and offshoots are more common among the better educated than the less so. Sects tend to attract the less privileged. Examples: in a 1977 poll 17% of those with college experience were attracted to Zen, compared with 5% who had none; while 6% of those in college had been involved in faith healing while 11% of those with only grade school had been: cult vs sect. Early Christianity, though Roman officials at first thought it a sect of Judaism, was a cult in this sense of the word--a new religion. And lo and behold, Christianity seems to have attracted quite a number of high status converts, as he expects a cult to do.

Then he addresses "The Mission to the Jews: Why it Probably Succeeded." He compares the Hellenized Jews (the majority) and "God-Fearers" to the marginalized Jews of Europe who developed Reform Judaism. The Marcion affair indicates to him that Jewish Christianity was dominant in the middle of the second century. Marcion tried to simplify some issues with the Old and New Testaments by claiming that the Old Testament God wasn't the same as the New Testament's, so we should drop the Old and strip out OT references from the New. This is what you'd expect of a Gentile group, and the heresy was promptly stepped on; which is what you'd expect of a largely Jewish group.

I can't summarize easily his analysis of women in the church, and why it was a far more welcoming environment than the pagan world surrounding it. Suffice it to say that a baby girl in a Christian family was far more likely to survive than one born to a pagan Roman one. Some parts of this chapter need a strong stomach.

Go read the book. I have to give it back to the library, but The Rise of Christianity is now on my "Buy Myself A Copy" list.

Marching Band Effect

On a related note (:-)), you've undoubtedly noticed that bands marching in a parade invariably sound ragged, or not quite professional. Sometimes this is because they haven't practiced enough yet, but even the best ones suffer from being spread out along the street. If they all hit the beat at exactly the same time, a listener at the rear of the procession will hear the drums from the rear immediately, but those from the front a fraction of a second later. The bigger the group the worse the effect. Notice how closely packed the players in an orchestra are?

Opera and clarity

Friday's paper carried an AP story about researchers who found that opera singers, and especially sopranos, mangled the pronunciation of words in the effort to hit the notes. This comes as no surprise to most of us, and in fact you can show that there's bound to be a conflict between making the note pure and making the pronunciation clear.

Look at the Fourier transform of a vowel sound. Each has a distinctive shape; but the thing to notice is that none of them are a single frequency. A pure note is a single frequency. When a singer sings the vowel U at some note it sounds like that note because the bulk of that aforementioned shape centers around the pitch desired--but it isn't a pure note. It can't be, and still have the recognizable structure of a vowel.

Most of the time we don't care--unless the singer is at some extreme. Singing extremely high or low notes, or extremely loud ones, make it very hard to keep the vowel structure clear--by the definition of extreme. Unfortunately, opera singers have to sing loudly, and often with quite a range . . .

Schrodinger's cat

My high-school daughter learned about Schrodinger's cat and the Copenhagen interpretation this week, and was having a lot of fun arguing it with a friend at school. I hated to rain on her parade, but . . . Schrodinger's cat is an observer too.

Boondock medicine

Our friend Bekah spent the summer in a remote area of Baja California, working in a public health clinic as a summer intern. While introducing Bekah to a friend, I explained that Bekah had spent her summer in "the boondocks" in Mexico. Bekah said the area was so remote, there wasn't a boondock to be found!

By the way, "Boondocks" comes from a Tagalog word, Bundag, meaning jungle. US soldiers stationed in the Phillippines must have brought the word home.

We gave Bekah a copy of Victor Heiser's "An American Doctor's Odyssey," published in 1936. Dig this out of your library stacks and read it. Heiser, then 16, survived the Johnstown Flood of 1889 by burling on his floating barn until it came to rest near a house with 21 other people marooned in the attic. Heiser worked his way through medical school and joined the Marines Medical Corps in the mid 1890s. He became interested in preventing disease, and was one of the pioneers of Public Health in the US and world wide--including preventing cholera in the Filipino boondocks.

Notable moments: *How a Chinese national eating a durian in a railway carriage responded to Heiser and his friend's eating a ham sandwich; *The explanation of the transmission of Hookworm disease, in Pidgin English; and the Anti-hookworm campaign in the southern US; *The development of, and the reasons for, the notorious Trachoma exam at Ellis Island (Fiorello LaGuardia, while he was US Consul at Fiume, hit upon the very simple idea of having people tested for Trachoma BEFORE they left for the US).

If you can't stomach the phrase, "White Man's Burden," this book is not for you. But it you want to read an excellent story of a man who helped make your life and millions of other people's lives safer and cleaner, check it out.--Mrs. James

Airplanes and birds

My youngest received a model airplane for Christmas: one of those you pump up and let the compressed air run a piston that drives the propeller. We took it to a nearby park and flew it (usually into the ground, but that's part of the fun) until a gentleman showed up with a remote control plane of his own and a large black dog. As we left (my youngest does not like dogs), the second flight of the remote control plane with bird-shaped wings nosed down not far from us--at which point a red-tailed hawk flew out of the nearby trees, and hovered over the downed plane for a few seconds before deciding it was inedible and flying away. Beautiful.

Christmas Dinner

And so we celebrated the birth of the most famous Jew of all time with a ham dinner. I think next year we'll try something maybe a little more fitting...

Late Neanderthals 'like us'

The BBC has a science report asserting that the later Neanderthals were more gracile and structurally like modern men. It says a great deal about how little we know about them that a single find has people jumping to dramatic new conclusions: Interbreeding with modern humans or evolving in the same direction . . . The old rule of thumb says that if two critters have fertile offspring, they're the same species--which would mean that Neander and Sapiens (semi-sapiens?) were the same species. Without salvageable DNA, there's no way to test that hypothesis, though.

Evolving/breeding in the same direction . . . does that mean that the environment was less harsh, or that technology meant that you didn't need to be The Incredible Hulk to survive, and so might actually survive to adulthood? I wonder how much of the bone size difference is due to environment... The skulls are legitimately different and the baby Neanders are alleged to also have thicker bones than Sapiens, so obviously not all the difference is response to environmental stress. Someone claimed serious iodine deficiency might be responsible for making a Sapiens look Neader, but that doesn't match what little I've seen in the pictures of various deficiencies. But iodine deficiency in a Neander might look rather dramatic--and a number of the Neander sites are in areas without a lot of fish. Maybe the gracile Neander is normal and the Hulk isn't?

Theories are a dime a dozen when you don't have much data...

Failure of nerve

The site Sci Tech pointed me to this article at the Ayn Rand Institute in which David Harriman combines a legitimate skepticism about 26-dimensional string theory with a spectacular ignorance of fairly elementary experiments in the field. Sorry, Mr. Harriman, but the sub-atomic world is rather weird, and if you assume that a photon takes only one path through the two slits you wind up with the wrong answer. I hold no brief for the multiple universe stuff, but the case for dark matter is getting quite strong--go look up what's happening with Einstein lensing of remote galaxies.

I originally followed the link without checking where it lead. Somehow it seems fitting that it turned out to be the Ayn Rand Institute. Rand seems to be popular in blogland, but I find her theories marvelously simple, untainted by reference to messy reality.

A science conference

I can tell that this fellow, quoted in Wired, has been to a few conferences...

Brian Alexander, in his recent book Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, aptly describes the ennui potentially engendered by scientific sessions:

"The talks almost always take place in the dark," he writes. "During the first 10 minutes, the scientist-presenter fumbles with a bulky laptop computer in an effort to get the PowerPoint program to work. During the next 30 minutes, the scientist, who has never been trained in the art of public speaking, explains, often through a very thick Chinese, German, French or Italian accent, why the mass of pinkish cells on the right is the surprising and highly significant result of the procedure performed on the almost identical mass of pinkish cells on the left. Line graphs are shown.

"The final five minutes is taken up by a question period. Colleagues stand at a microphone in the middle of the aisle and, using the polite code phrases of science, ask the presenter if he has considered the possibility that his head has unaccountably become entangled in his ass."

We don't look at cells in physics, but we do look at interminable plots of histograms comparing data and monte carlo--frequently not very similar . . .

Mbeki supports Mugabe

The BBC reports Mbeki as saying that 'a lack of international support for Zimbabwe made forcible land seizures "perhaps inevitable".' Since I presume Mbeki is already familiar with the history (Mugabe's cronies stole the money Britain gave to buy out the white farmers, and the biggest drop in international support has come since, not before, Mugabe started the violent seizures by fake war veterans) I have to conclude that Mbeki is a liar. And why lie? Because he gets popular support in South Africa when he makes racist claims about the villainy of white "imperialists."

I wish this sort of evil were less common, but 'the yellow peril' sells newspapers. Real enemies exist, and it is a piece of cake for politicians to fan up minor grudges into bit hatreds in the name of defense. I'm a bit more familiar with American history (waving the bloody flag, anyone?), but I see the same story everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, fantasies about peaceful pre-Columbian Indians to the contrary.

Of course around the University I find people hypersensitive to bloody-flag-waving by Americans, to the point of denying that there are real enemies; and inattentive to the same thing by foreign leaders, to the point of serious dishonesty.

Cage revisited

In an earlier post I said I hadn't heard his 4:33 piece on the radio. But, I forgot ZENPR from Alex's Restaurant. (link is gone, replaced w/ description)

Debka: oops

Debka is a well-known Israeli news site, specializing in cutting edge rumors, some of which turn out to be major scoops and some of which are sheer hot air. It isn't often that I see such a contradiction as in this one, though, in which the writer claims that Saddam was kept as a prisoner by captors looking for the reward, who kept him without means of committing suicide. Umm. He had two guns, as another part of the story mentions, and not much room for food or water. Doesn't Debka have an editor?

Saddam

So Saddam is caught. Now we find out how much of the fighting centered around him, and how much was imported. I suspect that he's been mostly a figurehead for the past few months as the net closed tighter around him--hard to be involved in day-to-day management and keep your head down at the same time.

Lord of the Rings

I've seen that some theaters are offering the trilogy all at once, which has got to be at least 10 hours long, or more if they use the extended versions. This sounds like a job for the suit Dave Barry advertised which has pockets and fittings for everything. For dedicated fans only, I guess.

I haven't seen the extended versions yet. I looked at my \$ supply and decided not to buy them, and then looked at how often I had a 4 hour block of time to watch a video, and decided not to rent them.

Opus, by Breathed The State Journal picked up the comic strip Opus last month. It gets twice the area as the next largest strip, and 4 times the area of some of the others. I don't think the Journal is getting their money's worth; it seems Breathed has forgotten his old skills. Opus isn't funny.

Paris

The State Journal put a "Who is Paris Hilton" story on the front of their Daybreak section last week, sparking a little argument around the kitchen table. My eldest daughter thought her ugly and stupid-looking, with phony style.

I think she'll be an attractive lady when she grows up. (If she grows up.)

Powerpoint Poisoning

The NYTimes quotes Edward Tufte saying that Powerpoint limits presentations to such minimal information as to distort them. You can't easily put much text on a slide, or easily show connections between points--and the bullet model isn't the most appropriate for all presentations.

Amen. It may be OK for trying to decide between "tastes great" and "less filling," but it (and OpenOffice's equivalent) is painful to use when describing an analysis.

I know that you can only put so much info on the screen and expect people to be able to read it (focus!--and don't get me started on remote video: it's like trying to read through jello). The discipline of paring down your speech to the important points is hard to acquire, and Powerpoint helps with that. But when you share details--and lots of them--with people who care about the details, Powerpoint is a mess.

FWIW, our solution is to provide all presentations on the net, so that remote sites (like mine) or laptop users can read the details in a PostScript or PDF file.

What's that again?

Headline in the classified section:

Year-end blowout on used cars!

Makes me want to take one out for a spin!

Is it music?

John Cage "wrote" a famous piece: 4:33 which was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a pianist not playing the piano (in 3 movements). But is it really music? When was the last time you heard this played on the radio? Hmmm? (Peter Sinclair's ZENPR in Alex's Restaurant doesn't count.)

The Transformation of American Religion

How We Actually Live our Faith, by Alan Wolfe

Alan Wolfe's claims that religions in America have been changed at least as much by the culture as the culture has been changed by religion. He makes a pretty good case for it, too. We talk a lot about God, but on inspection we don't actually say a great deal.

When you're too close to a mountain, you don't see it very well. It may seem a small thing to say that our culture loves novelty, but the pervasive quest for novelty has profound effects on everything from the economy to religion. Set aside brand-new do-it-yourself religions like Wicca: religions appeal to timeless tradition--perhaps newly revealed to some Smith or another, but nevertheless reflecting the ancient/eternal plans of God (or karma, or whatever). "Gimme that old time religion" is its traditional appeal--after all, ultimate reality shouldn't change.

But Americans don't respect tradition and authority. Americans enjoy/suffer the most hyper-individualistic culture I know of, with very little reference to duty or sacrifice. Churches, synagogues, and Muslim groups all make accommodations to these cultural traits; by downplaying the elements of sacrifice, focusing on "consumer-oriented" service, and very often minimizing doctrine in favor of affirming personal experience.

The result: churches which differ less and less; making fewer and fewer claims to truth; and trying to appeal to members who may have once been Catholic, Pentecostal, and Methodist--or at least members of churches with those names. Even nominal faith-based social projects tend to rely almost exclusively on the same social and economic principles as secular programs. God

"is a God of love, comfort, order, and security. Gone is the God of judgment, wrath, justice, mystery and punishment. Gone are concerns about the forces of evil." America's God has been domesticated, there to offer solace and to engage in dialog with the understanding that, except that under the most unusual circumstances, he will listen and commiserate. In a world governed by this more accessible God, sin still exists and atonement is still possible. But the sins are less numerous, less serious, and more forgivable. The wrongs that people do are the sorts of things that can be set right by pleading to God's good side, not his commanding presence.

I firmly agree that the church must constantly translate its message into the language of the then-current culture. Unfortunately there are irreducible complexities--statements about the nature of God and man that aren't part of everyday experience. We easily slide from the precise to the fuzzy to the wrong. Because guilt generally makes you feel guilty, feeling guilty is a good sign of guilt. So we talk about feeling guilty (part of everyday experience). But not all guilty feelings are important, and so we wind up talking about feelings and psychology rather than moral guilt.

Wolfe looks at the impact of culture on religion in worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, morality, sin, witness, and identity. (And he skewers The Prayer of Jabez gratifyingly.)

I find it hard to pick out a single section from his chapter on tradition, but he details the curious interplay between Jewish denominations in their reaction for or against the traditions--including a Conservative kaddish which event which has the aura of tradition while changing just about everything about it.

Sin seems to vanish into psychology and non-judgmentalism--for some reason people don't like to hear that they are sinners, and often don't come to churches that talk about sin. They want uplift (a good thing), and somehow the subject of sin doesn't come up so much.

Morality

Wolfe covers many topics here. Though fundamentalists often speak of the submission of wives to husbands, in practice this is heavily modified and indeed many women resemble what he (after Carol Gilligan) calls "difference feminists," holding that "women's morality tends to be more caring and cooperative." Mormonism "is all but creedless and stands completely without exegesis." And Islam in prisons . . .

Although Islam in many ways resists the culture of the prison, in other ways it copies it. "We have to deal with discipline in the ranks of the masjid [mosque]," as one life-term Sunni Muslim comments. To do so, Muslims, he points out, judge their own, and when mild punishment fails, "other methods can be invoked. In certain instances people have been severely beaten up or stabbed, depending on the severity of the transgression and the threat it presents to security of the Muslim community."

And he looks at the famous study in which 150 students were told that some of their exams were graded in error--some over and some under by a point. (All were a point too high.) "The teacher wanted to know whether students who were more religious would be less likely to cheat that those who were less religious. And that is exactly what he found. ... the faithful, on every single measure of religiosity, were the ones more likely to say so. ... The true importance of this little study lies in the fact that, given a chance to cheat, the overwhelming majority of students, religious or not, in fact took it."

Witness

It is no secret that evangelicals, despite the name, rarely evangelize. Instead of the often reviled Bible-thumping proselytizing, you find extreme sensitivity (to the point of shyness) to the feelings of others and a heavy reliance on "lifestyle evangelism," in which you try to be a good person and hope non-believers notice.

In traditional evangelism, the church, standing in for God, is the savior and the sinner is the penitent; believing themselves to be in possession of a truth that will set others free, evangelicals seek to bring the power they possess to those whose empty spiritual lives render them weak. Lacking either downtown locations that bring them in contact with strangers or public places in which they can reach out to passersby, evangelical megachurches, by contrast, have little choice but to offer incentives that will bring people to their doors. That process inevitably transforms the balance of power between institution and individual. The unchurched and the newly churched know that they have something the megachurches want--their potential or continuing membership--and they are willing to drive a hard bargain before they offer it up.

Evangelicals have tried to use contemporary music as a vehicle for evangelism. But

one has to pay careful attention before the coded religious messages of Heart in Motion can be detected. . . . There is always a price to be paid by those who cross over into the mainstream, and for evangelicals, the price is self-effacement.

Identity

For Muslims in a non-Muslim America the mosque has taken on a number of the roles that governments or community organizations performed back in their Muslim homelands--and so the mosque takes on a prominence that it lacked back home. In fact, "in the United States, mosques inevitably come to resemble churches," with well-defined congregations, with formal instruction, and with opportunities for socialization.

In East Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community in the United States, "the Sunday service--or any service, for that matter--is a time to meet with friends," writes an anthropologist who lived in and studied the community. "This is very much the case for young unmarried men, who cluster in corners of the building. Not always welcome in the homes of one another's parents because of the unmarried sisters who may be present and because they are often perceived as a general nuisance, the mosque is a safe haven for them. Unless they have pretensions to religious sophistication . . . enlightenment by the sheiks is probably not their primary concern."

(It had not occurred to me before that the sequestering of women would have the effect of creating a pool of discontented young men hanging out in a place quite likely to offer radicalizing instruction.)

My take

Go read this one for yourself. I cannot do the book justice here--he covers too many aspects of the transformations for any neat summary.

Are the transformations good? As I read my history, each era has its characteristic virtues and vices--and likewise the church in each era. If you "go with the flow"--we know where the broad road leads. I believe that only by maintaining the tension between the ideal and the available can churches stay honest. Preach uplift if you like, but don't forget about sin. The same Jesus who said "My yoke is easy" also said "count the cost."

What was that again? department

Not far from here is Temple Gardens, whose sign proclaims "Chinese Restaurant, Noodles of the East." Under that new sign you can clearly see in the unfaded blue paint where a previous sign read "Frozen Custard, Burgers, & Blues."

You are what you eat

This article from BBC about helpful parasites seems slightly horrifying. Why would hookworms be helpful? Perhaps for the same reason that leaches are still useful for draining blood from congested areas, or perhaps there's some handy chemical the hookworms use to suppress the body's reaction that we might be able to isolate. I'd prefer that, myself. After all, hookworms do cause some damage.

I'm not an expert, but what I've read seems to fit a "bored army" model for some immune disorders. The immune system is supposed to be sensitive, and if you don't give it enough to do it can become hair trigger sensitive, and start going after our "slightly odd" (but necessary) cells. Or to describe it another way--every part of our bodies needs exercise to keep from deteriorating, though not so much exercise as to destroy us. Running is good, shin splints are bad. A mild cold doesn't hurt too much, malaria is bad news.

If that model is correct, then we need a little exposure to dirt to keep us "in fighting trim," but not so much that we damage ourselves. I have no prescription for how to do that. Having kids play outside and maintaining basic waste sanitation (our own wastes are more likely to infect us than those of other creatures) seems like a nice rough and ready set of rules. (Yes, I know about river blindness, but I live in Wisconsin.)

Practical Science

I see that Leeds University is doing its best to benefit humanity. Although perhaps folks might want just a tad more butter on the toast in Milwaukee than in Yorkshire... This is in the grand tradition of discovering that cheese flavors are different with different thicknesses, or how to dunk a cookie in tea (a "biscuit" to the islanders) or how best to mop up gravy. OK, maybe we snicker a bit, but there's value in checking that the received wisdom is actually right--sometimes it isn't.

New fountains at the Capitol

The State Journal says that new fountains are planned to replace the old ones on the capitol square. It's a shame--the old ones were distinctive, and reflected Wisconsin's Dairyland fame: they looked like cow pies.

Greater Jihad

I'm told that most flavors of Islam recognize a lesser and a greater jihad, where the lesser is the physical war against infidels and the greater is the struggle for self-mastery. Does that mean the greater jihad is about inner booty?

Simile is not Causality

I found posters tacked up around the department today. "Carol Adams draws the parallels between women and animals, sexism and meat in The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow," sponsored by, among others, the Campus Women's Center and the Hindu Student's Council. The underexposed illustrations are of a cow showing the cuts of meat and a naked woman similarly outlined.

Pretending that metaphors are reality appears to be Adams' stock-in trade.

That pornography often objectifies the object of desire to be a mere body with automatic stereotypical reactions is clear, and bad; and that our arts and culture are being "pornographied" as porn becomes mainstream is also clear, and bad. But an sexually objectified body isn't meat, but skin and meat and reactions. A hamburger will just lie there; a pork chop never says "Do it again!" Even simple nude pictures have an implicit narrative of welcome.

I say nothing about comparisons with S/M and torture pornography, partly because I know little about it, but mostly because it doesn't form the majority of the market. You can't honestly take an extreme as typical.

So is her claim dishonesty or self-deception? I appeal to common experience: the constellation of feelings in erotic desire don't map into the sensations of desire for a chili-dog. To be self-deceived about something so obvious demands that she be horribly emotionally crippled. I think she's dishonest.

I think the Hindu sponsorship is telling. The claim that animals are equivalent to people is not supported by science--it is essentially a religious claim. If science could make any such statement (it can't) it would be more along the lines of "life forms are not all equivalent to each other."

The latest bombing in Riyadh

I've heard claims that al Qaeda had bad intelligence, or they wouldn't have attacked the compound they did. After all, there weren't any Americans there. I wish I were confident that this was a mistake.

It's no secret that Saudi controlled Arabia has internal problems, and some analysts have gone so far as to say it is unstable. We know that 'al Qaeda' is very popular in some parts of Arabia, and a crackdown by the royals might spark a civil war.

How does radical Wahhabi/al Qaeda benefit from a civil war in Arabia?

• They might win, of course, though that may be a long shot.
• They hurt the evil royals, who are on their enemies list. The price might seem a bit high for the rank-and-file, but the bigshots care more about their money pipelines--which I'd think would get pinched.
• A civil war anywhere in Arabia would have to impact the price, and probably supply, of oil from there. Saudi controlled Arabia being pivotal in oil price stability, we'd have to see prices shoot up around the world. And if there are significant interruptions, Western (read "Crusader") economies get hurt badly.

  And if Western powers bring armies in to Arabia to help protect the supplies, it ticks off hundreds of millions more Muslims. Up goes recruitment and influence for 'al Qaeda.'

Is it worth to 'al Qaeda' to lose some supporters in Arabia to hurt the evil Crusaders so badly? Probably. They don't get the satisfaction of killing the infidels themselves, but they do get to watch Europe's economy and influence tank, and maybe replace their Saudi support with even more popular support from around the world. Donald Sensing disagrees in this piece from 2 months ago, but his analysis is predicated on Osama's stated policies. I don't think Osama is still alive.

By the way, I write 'al Qaeda' in quotes to include affiliated groups, splinters, and name changes.

Did I read that right?

On a hill near Reiner road is a pile of rubble--concrete, sheets of grimy metal and a nest of rebar. Beside it stands a sign declaring in huge letters BOMKAMP, and the site certainly looks like somebody planted a bomb there. The first thought through my mind was "I knew Madison was ultra-leftist, but I didn't know they were hosting Palestinian training camps.." Of course, the fine print on the sign says "Excavating" . . .

A walk around the main ring

I've been working at Fermilab off and on for 25 years, and I've never taken the popular walk around the main ring. Last Thursday afternoon was warm and breezy, so after shift I decided to finally try it, and started out on the bike path. The clouds thickened, and the wind shook the praire grass, and it seemed a pleasant enough walk--until I noticed that the path seemed to quit at the D0 site, and the only path out of there went to the power transmission towers (which crackled nicely in the moist air).

Ah--light dawns--the path is on the inside of the ring! And so it proved: take the access road over the berm and there is main ring road, running around just inside the berm. It was getting pretty dim by this time, and flock after flock of geese came honking overhead to bed down on the cooling ponds.

It seemed a kind of anti-Mordor. On one side of the road are gravel parking lots next to blue or red buildings full of alien hummings, high tech gadgets and huge cabinets seen in the garish fluorescent light. On the other side--4 foot high prairie grass, with geese swimming in the cooling channel beyond; and beyond that more grass hissing in the wind with more waterfowl gently honking on further hidden ponds.

Why I am not a Muslim

by Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq is furious. Why is the West so blind, refusing to see Islam as it really is? Why is the Moslem world unwilling to look at the fraud perpetrated on them?

And so he wrote this book to summarize as much of the scholarship about and against Islam as he could. Some is quite valuable, and some much less so. He quotes Smirnov summarizing Morozov's assertion that Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) did not exist--not noticing that a Soviet religious scholar in 1930 was not free to say anything else--his job was to denigrate all religions, by any means.

I wish I were more confident of Warraq's sources. The claim that Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) borrowed (and corrupted) a great deal from the Jewish Midrash stories is quite interesting. Clumsy transitions in the Koran's story of Cain and Abel or of Joseph compare unfavorably with the clearer (exactly parallel) stories in the older Midrash--pretty clear evidence of borrowing.

Warraq seems to have shoveled all the sources he could find together without sorting through them carefully. He quotes Crone approvingly in a claim that the Koran was written late (2 centuries late), not noticing that the Shi'ite split was early, and would inevitably have meant different scriptures if the canon were not already firm.

To make matters worse, Warraq is an atheist (he calls himself a humanist), and he proceeds to trot out all the tired old chestnuts to prove that there is no God and therefore Islam is false. He seems to have no idea how badly this weakens his attack.

The Koran claims that the Christian trinity includes Mary--which was never true; and implies that the mother of Jesus was the sister of Moses, and similar nonsense. It is taken to repudiate itself internally as later pronouncements supercede the earlier eternal pronouncements. There are even the "Satanic verses." The Hadiths can stand even less scrutiny--they are known to be largely bogus, and Warraq claims that Hadith-writing industries appeared during the Umayyads and lasted through the Abhasids, fueled largely by political disputes.

After shredding the Koran, Warraq addresses himself to the character of Muhammad (MTLHMOHS), who doesn't shine with a very holy glow. Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) seems to have become more skillful at discovering convenient revelations to suit his interest as time went on, as shown by the stories of the early Moslem hagiographers themselves. His cruelty was perhaps in keeping with his culture, but then how is he a model for the ages?

He goes on to document how "tolerant" Islam has had heretic hunts. Everybody knows of the Shi'ites; but the Mu'tazilites led one such heretic-hunt, only to be hunted away in their turn. You can hear very bitter quarrels to this day, with various schools anathamizing each other, in places like Pakistan.

Islam's vaunted tolerance for others (about which see Bat Ye'or) developed its rules in an era when Moslems were both conquerors and a minority. (My observation, not his.) Life wasn't pleasant for the conquered, and as Moslems became the majority, the need for tolerance evaporated, leaving behind only fitfully applied rules.

Moslems apologists love to boast of the glorious flowering of arts and sciences in the Persia, but Warraq and others note that the arts were inherited from Zoroastrian Persia, and the whole business dried up about the time that the gates of ijtihad were closed and sharia was fixed. (Maybe a coincidence--I seem to recall a political/military decline; but my references are 150 miles away.)

Warraq illustrates that Islam is inherently totalitarian and deeply oppressive of women. The quotes are fairly damning.

For the honor of truth, I should point out that the theory and practice can differ amazingly. It is, or was until the Saudis starting throwing Wahabism around the world, quite possible to find Africans who called themselves Muslim whose practice was much more like their animist neighbors than anything in Arabia.

His answer to me would undoubtedly be that the seeds of the "pure form" are there, and can easily be brought to fruition by purist reformers. And he would be correct. Islam has always had a violent tendancy--unavoidably, given the way it started.

In sum, you'll find a lot of useful references in here, but there's a lot of less reliable material. Use salt.

Global warming

I've heard conflicting explanations of the causes, but I also keep hearing news reports about melting ice in important areas.

For the moment, never mind the causes. Short term there's not much to be done anyway--if ice packs are warming just stopping CO2 emissions won't do much beyond changing the slope of the warming curve. If this is a warming trend, we're stuck with it for at least a decade or so.

Given that, what is at risk in the short term?

I see three general types of risk:

• Rising sea levels due to melting Antarctic ice. (Arctic ice is already floating, and won't change sea levels if/when it melts.)
• Melting Arctic ice change the ocean currents in the north, and the nutrient flows, with possible damage to fishing.
• Changing ocean currents change the air weather patterns in unpredictable ways. Some regions might get better growing weather, but even if agriculture is easier in some regions we have to deliberately adapt to it. If the wheat belt gets too dry we could have a new dust-bowl/desert if we keep on trying to grow wheat there.

What regions are susceptible to rising sea levels?

I think we ought to write off New Orleans, global warming or no--we're fighting a losing battle there. Plan a 20-year evacuation, with a new Mississippi course (and watch the notoriously corrupt Louisiana politicos swoop on this trough) as a test case. It is the biggest single city-drowning problem I know of in this country: Venice on the Gulf.

There'll be lots of problems, and things that don't work; but

• It just gets harder the longer we wait
• The political and legal and engineering lessons we'll learn apply to the partial city drownings elsewhere (and flood plain cities, too; and cities next to active volcanoes)

Moving a city takes bucks, and a lot of political will. There's a lot of voters in N.O. who don't want to move unless somebody can guarantee they'll be better off afterwards. The only really big club the Feds and state have is the Army Corps of Engineers and a new route for the Mississippi. Given that the Mississippi is going to pick a new route on its own in a few decades and kill a lot of people when it does, it makes good public policy sense to try to point it into a convenient channel. And that dries up New Orleans trade.

There'll still be a rump city hanging out to the bitter end, trying to run the pumps and repair the levees on its own, but if we make it clear that insurance companies don't have to insure property in the flood area after 2030 I think most people will get the message.

I wonder if something like the Abu Simbel project might get the ball rolling: condemn the whole French Quarter and move it to 'Newest Orleans.' I'd predict lots of storm and fury, lawsuits, sabotage, and very powerful people making sure they wind up with lots of bucks. And at the end, if it moved successfully, the tourist promoters would make a virtue of necessity and offer combination packages. We might have to move the cemetary too...

Now that I think about it, the collapse in the fishing industry is starting already. A sudden change in ocean currents might be a good thing if it started up a new rich region we didn't find out about for a few years.

The changes in local climate we can prepare for, if we've a mind to. What we need are variants of old crops and new crops with farming procedures to get them growing efficiently in new places.

That's nice and vague. For example, suppose that the Great Plains become substantially drier. We then can't tap the aquafer enough to sustain wheat. (Not that we can do that sustainably now anyway...) So, we give up on wheat there. What instead? (For the sake of argument, we'll assume we can still grow crops of some kind, and don't have to plant grass and pray for rain.) Amaranth? I've never tried it myself, but I understand it is a nice dry weather crop, though not a lot of yield. OK, three problems: nobody knows how to eat it (and people can be very stupid about unfamiliar foods), the yield isn't great, and we don't have any procedures for growing it or tools for harvesting it on a large scale.

Trying to get people to eat new foods isn't something the government is very good at, unless its World War II and everything is in short supply. Waiting for private enterprises to see a need, develop means, and advertise the heck out of the product sounds like a nice, adaptable approach. Unfortunately, the time scale for developing new crops and tools is more like decades than quarters; and very few businesses I know of think that far ahead. So we need federal research funding for new crops--crops for a dry Midwest, for a wet Midwest; for a cooler South, for a hotter South; and so on.

And we try to increase yields slightly. We could breed for greater yields if we could assume a particular climate. I think a shotgun approach works better, though--try a little of everything and hope something works.

No matter what the causes of the ice melting are, these are things that need addressing.

Unread books

OK, I have to admit it. I have plowed through some pretty formidable tomes over the years; tombstone-heavy books that mated dull material with clumsy style. But I haven't been able to finish the incomparable Koran. Maybe the small print and Sale's older English make it worse.

I started at the back, with the short suras, and tried to work my way forward. The earlier suras are supposed to be shorter, more lyrical, and more benign; the compilers were the ones who decided to include them in order of descending length.

It doesn't help. I read a little while, wonder what in blazes he means with some particular turn of phrase; stop to look up what some obscure item refers to--and then I hit some jarring thing like "I swear by the declining day." Ummm--God is supposed to be saying that? And what's this about blowing on knots?

I'll try again--I want to deal with original sources as often as I can--but . . .

Yes, I'm still trying to learn Arabic, and no, I haven't made much progress.

On a related note, I never finished the Book of Mormon either. I gratefully gave up on that ghastly forgery when I heard that it wasn't relevant to Mormon doctrines, (which apparently derive more from a different book and a collection of nominal revelations.) For those unfamiliar with the book, Joseph Smith claimed an angel gave him some gold sheets and the magical ability to translate them into what turned out to be a book in form quite parallel to the Bible, but shorter and written in ungrammatical King James-style English. It purports to be a history of various tribes of Israel which emigrated to North America and proceeded to undergo a series of wars and disregarded prophets; their only legacy being a lot of mounds.

Convoy Bombing

The NYTimes says that "Palestinian police arrested three members of a small militant group Thursday in connection with a deadly attach on a U.S. diplomatic convoy". (The link may be temporary.) I'm actually a little surprised.

Given the huge strategic importance to Arafat of US pressure on Israel, it doesn't make good sense to start openly attacking us. The key word there is openly. I have no doubt that little is done without Arafat's knowledge or direction, and the attack was meant as a warning.

The surprise lies in that the captured suspects are still alive. Live people sometimes talk. Talking it over with my eldest last night, I predicted that the PA would provide several corpses to the FBI.

Universe a Dodecahedron?

Everybody has seen the story by now that the universe may be finite and wrap around itself, with the dodecahedron shape suggested as a model (though I'm still not sure why).

OK, look at the story, and in particular look at the critical plot of data vs theory. The data fits the theory well except at a single point--the left-most point. The plot doesn't give the error estimates, which is deeply unfortunate, but from the way nearby points deviate from the curve I have to guess that the systematic error is substantial. Without that point the data is quite in line with the "infinite universe" theory, and even with it we aren't given an adequate estimate for how much the data differs from theory.

The soccer-ball universe hoopla is a bit overinflated, given the data I've been shown.

Rush

I suspect Rush would rather die than try cocaine, but Oxycontin doesn't seem so horrible. And it's probably true that fewer people die per dollar supporting the Oxycontin trade than the cocaine trade, so maybe in that sense its a more benign addiction.

I don't think I'll bother starting to listen to him, though.

I only saw his show once, and that perhaps demands a little explanation. At work I cannot concentrate properly with people chattering on the radio, so I either tune in the classical music station or leave the radio off altogether. (I can't stand pledge drives.) He had a TV show, but we watch virtually no TV (we can't even pick up the Cubs games very well!).

So my first introduction to him came when I was on shift at Fermilab, staying in one of the dorms. His show opened with a rather tasteless shot of him standing on a rotating pedestal, and then he started lighting into the New York Superintendant of Schools. Rush blasted him, then played a tiny snippet of the Superintendant's speech, then blasted him again. Next on the list was some Western militant semi-military lesbian shock group, and then something I don't recall.

On the basis of other sources I already considered the NY School Super to be intellectually and morally unfit for his job, and I hold no brief for lesbian shock theater. But to my horror, I found that after listening to Limbaugh for 10 minutes I was starting to be defensive on their behalf! Although Limbaugh's ultimate conclusions were correct, the way he defended his conclusions (and arrived at them?) was so wrong that I was becoming sympathetic to the NY School Super.

I left the common room and have never bothered with anything of Rush's since.

ET and God

"Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?", an article in the Atlantic, has to be one of the most idiotic collections of unexamined assumptions I've ever seen. C.S. Lewis addressed the bulk of these issues years ago (The World's Last Night and Other Essays).

If alien life exists, this neither confirms nor denies that God created it. (My personal take on this is that God has been so creative with life on Earth that He is probably equally creative elsewhere.) There's no fear that finding alien bacteria on Mars will somehow disprove Christianity. (Davis found a proof-text from the Koran to suggest that Islam wouldn't have a problem with extraterrestrial life, though it pretty clearly refers to angels.)

Nowhere is it cast in stone that we will be even able to communicate with aliens, supposing we ever found any. Star Trek and Dr. Who may have dressed up humans in rubber masks and had them use sound to communicate (mostly), but how would you communicate with someone who lived in a pool of liquid methane and thought at a speed of 2 words a month?

In particular, we can't say a priori if an alien species needs salvation or not. If it doesn't, then the history of God's actions on our planet will not doubt be of joyful interest to them, but not essential to their wellbeing. If they do need salvation, then the questions start. But until we find that out, we're just asking "What if God weren't good?" questions, and spinning our wheels in the same old way: How many angels can dance on a pin head? Is it as many as God wants or as many as the world God created allows?

This isn't to say that Christianity isn't falsifiable. It is. If Jesus didn't return to life, ashcan the whole thing and look elsewhere for the truth. If you can demonstrate that God created a people only to damn them without help or hope, then we have some serious issues with Christianity. But that's a very long way from worrying about bacteria on Mars.

FWIW, Davis mentions the possibility of seeding Mars with Earthly bacteria thanks to meteor impacts. It is possible, but quite hard. Since the trip is uphill all the way through the Sun's gravitational field, the effective escape velocity is very high. To get a kick like that you need to be close to the impact point, and the closer you are to the impact the more likely you are to be damaged by the heat and shock of impact.

California Governor

So Arnold won, and by quite a large margin. What difference does it make?

The ugly mess California is in can't be blamed wholly on the old governor--the suck-up bills Davis was merrily signing in his last days didn't appear there by magic: the Legislature passed them. It won't change.

The whole recall business struck me as a feel-good exercise designed to vent steam without making any significant changes. If the Californians were serious about a recall they'd have recalled the whole barge-load: not just the governor but the legislators, and anybody else they could lay a vote on. Call it a popular vote of no confidence. Of course it wouldn't touch the bureaucrats, but you can't have everything.

I predict that next year will find no significant changes in California's budget crisis and rate of loss of businesses. Neither will the year after. I'm not sure Mr. S. will do worse than Davis, but I don't see how he can do better.

Street Sweeper's Blues

This morning southbound on Wright street I noticed the characteristic marks left by the streetsweeper--which at one point carefully swerved around a dead skunk. You'd think that collecting such debris was part of the sweeper's job, but think of driving around all day with a dead skunk in the rubbish bin right behing you; never driving fast enough for the breeze to keep the smell away...

NASA? Or AnyLab after enough time?

If you haven't seen the comments of NASA folk on the Columbia accident report, have a look. Quite a few comments are anonymous and frank; and some situations sound vaguely familiar.