Quick Roundup 103

Feed Burning

I don't anticipate this causing any problems, but some time in the next couple of days, I plan to join Feed Burner's syndication service. So if you follow this blog via RSS and your feed disappears or stops updating in the next few days, that would be why.

I plan to track the atom feed for a few days after that just to be sure. If I see a problem, I'll leave the URL for the new feed in a blog post.

But what did al-Gore smoke?

This morning's top Drudge Report headline: "Cigarette Smoking 'Significant Contributor' to Global Warming". Drudge links to one of those transient "flash" links he sometimes uses and it isn't even for the right story.

But I did find this.

Wow.

Greenland, he also says, is going to split in two.

Please, Al. Do tell us more. Make sure anyone with a grain of sense knows you're a crackpot. Maybe they'll decide to look into the "science" behind global warming a bit more deeply.

Thanks. (That was said in Bill Lumbergh's voice.)

And speaking of Inhofe...

While Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) did a great job attacking global warming (link above at "more deeply") the other day, I learned via email that he is hardly a consistent advocate of science. Consider his stands on cloning and stem cell research:

In the area of research, I support a total ban on all types of cloning. There is much that is promising in the field of biotechnology but we must be wary of getting ahead of ourselves. The question is not "can we do this," but "should we do this." In the case of cloning, that answer is NO.

Additionally, I am opposed to embryonic stem cell research. However, I do favor aggressively pursuing alternative types of stem cell research. Much of the promising research in this field has come out of adult stem cell experiments. The experiments using embryonic stem cells have been inconsistent and unreliable and it is unethical to create an embryo only to kill it simply for its parts. [bold added]

This is just about as clear a way of saying, "I favor reason, but only if it doesn't clash with my religion," one can get without saying it outright.

Inhofe may have delivered a good speech, but he is about as reliable an ally of science as Pervez Musharraf is against Islamofascism.

Faith and Force

This leads in nicely to the Vatican's recent "defense" of reason against the Mohammedan hordes. The Vatican is now decrying religious violence because it "undercuts" religion.!

The Vatican's foreign minister said Wednesday that misunderstanding between cultures is breeding a "new barbarism" and expressed hope that reason and dialogue would stop those who use their faith as a pretext for attacks.

In a speech on the closing day of the U.N. General Assembly's ministerial meeting, Giovanni Lajolo said extremists are far from devout and undermine the very religion they claim to defend.

"Violent reactions are always a falsification of true religion," [Explain how, without recourse to a claim of divine revelation. --ed] Lajolo said in a passage devoted to the pope's Sept. 12 speech at Regensburg University in Germany.

Hmmm. Like a bolt from the blue, I am reminded of the following quote from Ayn Rand, taken from her 1960 essay "Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World" (reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It):

Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when mean deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, persuasion, communication, or understanding are impossible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind--a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. [bold added]

In truth, Islam is ripping the benevolent mask off of religion and exposing it to all the world for what it is. And the jig is up unless the Musselmen can be persuaded to stop, at least as the Vatican sees it.

There is an interesting historical parallel going on here: Recall that the communists in the old Soviet Union needed a dose of freedom to keep their economy from total collapse. But they rightly feared freedom because the people would want more of it, endangering their rule. Now we see that the Vatican, leading a church in a secular civilization, needs to appear to be on the side of reason or it will lose all credibility. But since reason and faith are opposites, the Church must also contend with a "slide" of that civilization away from its moral prescriptions.

In fact, the jig is up for only one thing: pretending that faith and reason are compatible with one another.

A Cold, Hard Look at Arabic Culture

Via Issac Schrodinger, who actually emailed me about this, I learned of an astoundingly good article about Arab culture by someone who lived there for awhile, Stephen Browne.

I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I "made my year" as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of "running" from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say "he did a runner" to explain why someone isn't showing up for work anymore. And while my experience wasn't nearly as unpleasant as Jill Carroll's, I could have told her a thing or two before she went to Iraq armed with her overflowing good will.

In Eastern Europe and the South Balkans, whenever I have gone to live in a place which I had formed opinions about, the actual experience of living there has always radically changed those opinions, sometimes into a completely contradictory ones. Most often, my academic research led me to form a beautifully coherent model which experience turned into a semi-coherent collection of observations and tentative conclusions.

In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from "blowback" from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization. And by the way, among "rational, fair-minded" non-interventionist libertarians, not a damn one of them has asked me, "What in your experience caused you to change your mind?" Instead what I get are gratuitous insults followed by insufferably condescending lectures about how wrong I am. [bold added]

It is all very good. Read it ASAP.

Out of Pocket

I will be almost without Internet access from later today until some time Sunday. responses to comments and email will be slow. And my blogroll sidebar may still be goofed up in Internet Explorer.

-- CAV