Quick Roundup 1

Posted in advance.

Ack! I know it's regarded as a good idea to take a break from blogging now and again, but I was in a rhythm before I took my break and now I'm not. Ugh! Writer's block and a general feeling of being out of touch are the flip side to taking a hiatus!

An Admin Note on Roundup Posts

It's a new year, and it's time for a new feature: the Quick Roundup.

And what, exactly, is a "Quick Roundup" anyway? This is yet another attempt on my part to solve the dilemma posed by my frequent desire to post about several unrelated news items that strike my fancy without necessarily going through the trouble of posting separately for each one. The previous attempts were my recurring "News and Notes" and "Around the Web" features, but during my recent blogging hiatus, I realized that these "solutions" were actually beginning to cause me more problems than they solved.

For one thing, I was beginning to miss the spontaneity of blogging about good stuff when I learned about it. For another, I realized that I run the risk of getting "scooped" by other bloggers by sitting on the good stuff for too long. And then the amount of material I was saving up was causing it to begin taking way too long to compose some of those posts, especially when I had not composed short blurbs in advance.

Even worse, I am heading into a likely scheduling crunch at a time when I'd like to post at least twice a day on most days. It seems like I can kill several birds with one stone by doing smaller catch-all posts on most days, so that's what I'll do.

I'll probably get rid of the old "News and Notes" feature altogether and keep (and possibly rename or shorten) the midweek roundups I'd been posting under the "Around the Web" title here and at Ego.

By the way, to link to any one section of one of my roundup posts, simply add "#xyz" to the permalink name, where "xyz" is the first three letters of the subsection title, excluding prepositions and articles (e.g., "...1.html#adm").

Hmmm. On the name.... Looking back at this one, I see that there's nothing "quick" about it! Oh well!

Two More Post-Katrina Murders

In a followup to this post on the recent 70% increase in Houston's murder rate (over the same time last year), I found the following story.

Two Hurricane Katrina evacuees from Louisiana were shot dead in southwest Houston early Saturday morning. Keith Hayes, 19, of New Orleans, and Calvin Clay, 23, from an unidentified city in Louisiana, were at an apartment complex in the 8900 block of Bissonnet around 1:30 a.m. when they became involved in an altercation with an acquaintance who is also from Louisiana. The acquaintance shot the victims several times, jumped from a second-floor balcony and fled the scene on foot. Both victims were taken to Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital, where Hayes was pronounced dead upon arrival. Clay died several hours later. [bold added]

No word on whether the murderer is himself a Katrina refugee, but the odds sound pretty good. In the meantime, the Democrat mayor is speaking out of both sides of his mouth when begging for alms from FEMA.

The killing of the two men [same two as above --ed] brought to 10 the number of Houston homicides this year involving Katrina evacuees. Hurtt and other city officials, however, have cautioned that the evacuees' role should not be overemphasized.

"I don't think that would be fair for us to do," Garcia said. "That would be assuming that Houston was crime-free before Katrina occurred."

Other officials say it's reasonable to expect a spike in crime when an urban area experiences a sudden increase in population -- more than 100,000 Katrina evacuees have been housed in Houston-area apartments -- without a corresponding increase in resources.

This is the reasoning behind Mayor Bill White's request that the Federal Emergency Management Agency provide $6.5 million to pay overtime to officers in targeted areas. The agency said it is considering the request. [bold added]

The locals don't buy it. One Cynthia Albright said, "This stuff was not going on over here until they got here. It's their mentality. It's totally different,"

Either way, it's lame.

Via RealClear Politics, I learned of this column whose author, one Jeff Smith, says that the common belief in God is a sign of evolution at work. The column is, I think a not-so-good-natured jab at Creationists, but it fails as humor -- or passes as a meanspirited attempt at humor -- precisely because of its author's poor grasp of epistemology.

Smith seems to think that knowledge is not objective, but consists mainly of things learned from others: "In fact, we learn that there is always an answer. All we have to do is to find out who knows it." He then goes on:

Difficult questions need not be idle questions; they may be matters of life and death. Or so they can seem. Our desire for certainty, even for absolute knowledge, is built into us just as surely as our brains are. And the anxiety of not knowing -- about what's around the corner, about imminent danger, about the threats of the weather -- has led us to fashion answers and a source of those answers.

That source can be speculation and guessing, it can be divining by looking at chicken entrails, questing like a pilgrim monk or creating a being that knows everything. Yes, a god.

And all of this happens because it's the way we have learned to survive. If we didn't do it, we wouldn't survive as a species. It's the essence of natural selection. Yes, God is a product of evolution.

His punch line is: "We can make our gods any thing and any way we like. And that's exactly what we do. I call that intelligent design."

At first, I found the column perplexing. What is Smith trying to say here? Is he serious or joking? Both, and neither, I concluded. And either way, the column is lame.

"Oh!" I thought at one point after I read the piece. "Yes. We can imagine a God with our highly-evolved imaginations. Hah, hah!" But if so, then the punch line makes little sense. How is making stuff up out of whole cloth going to confer an evolutionary advantage on any creature? Eyes didn't evolve to cast kalaidoscopic hallucinations: They evolved to see what there is out there that could affect the ability of an animal to survive.

Likewise, a mind would evolve, not to spin pointless yarns, but to grasp relationships among things out there in the environment in relation to how those relationships might affect its possessor. The punchline can make sense (and so be humorous) only to a typical modern subjectivist who does not think the mind actually grasps reality (or to someone else for whom omniscience is the standard for claiming any knowledge at all). Note that nowhere does Smith even casually note that men have successfully invented and discovered things by virtue of their minds grasping reality independent of others.

And ultimately, someone like Smith does not really care that his joke insults the intelligence of anyone who reads it. He thinks that the mind is impotent anyway. That's why it has to invent comfortable illusions like God to avoid the torment of admitting that it isn't omniscient. And somehow, this is the key to our "survival", not in the the real sense of being alive, but in the sense that some petulant child "needs" a new pair of $200 sneakers to "survive".

I am no Creationist, but even Creationists have a monumental respect for reason compared to this guy.

No wonder they've a chance at winning this intellectual battle.

-- CAV