Stroll Through the 'Roll on 10-9-05

It's been awhile since my last blogroll roundup and it will be awhile before I have time to try to include so many on the 'roll, so here goes. I looked for entries written during the past week that did not cover something I have already discussed here. I might try to do this in a somewhat more abbreviated form on a somewhat regular basis.

These are in the order (more or less) they appear on my blogroll.

Cox and Forkum watch the birdie -- and the Saudi.

I'm going to point out two Cox and Forkum cartoons from the past week because one is so funny and the other is so important.

First, the funny one. Maybe it's just because birds halfway crack me up anyway, but this one about the avian flu is a well-needed dose of laughter on a story that, while important, rests on a razor's edge between having enough hype to get the attention it deserves -- and enough hype to get it incorrectly dismissed as "The sky is falling!"

Preparations for the avian flu, of course, dovetail nicely with preparations for a possible bioterrorist attack. So, while we're on the subject, we might as well take note of what our Saudi "allies" have been up to.

Armchair Intellectual on societal consequences of religion

Gideon Reich reminds me of a paper I want to take a gander at when I've more time. His discussion is also a good starting point.

This study reminds me of an interesting point. Many religious types seem to focus more on what their beliefs supposedly can do to improve society at large rather than how they can help individuals live their lives. Certainly, a better society will likely improve the lot of its citizens, but this raises an interesting question: Why not attempt to promote their faith based on what it can do directly for the prospective individual convert? Is "a better society" replacing "pie in the sky" as the promise of choice?

"Brazilian" Joke at a geezer's corner

Bothenook pokes a little fun at our Commander in Chief.

Bubblehead tells A Tale of Two Razors.

At The Stupid Shall be Punished, Bubblehead considers the recent suicide bombing in Oklahoma.

Ed Morissey delivers a sartorial beach-slapping.

Captain Ed explores stupid fashion statements from two angles and concludes that: (1) Yes, it is "fair" to "judge" someone on the basis of the outlandish aspects of their chosen attire. (2) No, an airline does not have to let you fly while dressed in a manner that appals their other customers.

The second example reminds me of the time a socialist showed up at my apartment to solicit my support for his candidate in a local election. I introduced him to the concept of private property by saying: "I am not a socialist." as I slammed the door in his face.

Chapomatic discusses war journalism.

Chap offers some very interesting thoughts on mil-blogging and journalism over at Chapomatic. Sez he: "I'd like to have it pointed out where the Constitution outlines those unique responsibilities for a Fourth Estate of Government; I don't seem to remember where that article is." There's a lot more to it than the good one-liner, so take a look.

Self-Marginalizing Leftist Visits Charlotte Capitalist

Andy Clarkson has some thoughts on why the left is foundering so badly even as the Republicans hand their own heads on a platter to the Dems.

The Complimenting Complimenter (very politely of course) complains!

He has noticed a problem with Blogger's otherwise nifty method of stopping comment spam, which was becoming a serious problem here a while back.

When I encounter the problem he describes, it is usually when I am not already logged in to Blogger. Oddly, the username and password spaces are absent, while the captcha and its answer space are present. Usually, I have forgotten that I am not logged in (or assumed that I was since the login prompts were missing) and I got the same error. But once, I noticed that just as I was to fill in the answer to the captcha for the third time, the login prompts showed up. No error that time.

Now, I just wait for the login prompts to show up. But still, we shouldn't have to wait on them, should we?

The Counterterrorism Blog on Iraq

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross discusses the importance of Iraq to al Qaeda as explained in a recently-obtained letter by Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy in Iraq. "I've written before ... of al-Qaeda's increased efforts to tailor their message to appeasement-minded Westerners. Apparently, Zawahiri has also given some thought to how he can bolster al-Qaeda's image in the Muslim world."

(See also the second Daniel Pipes article below.)

It happens to the best of us.

James Lileks is so good, even a quick note of regret (or go to his front page) about a mistake makes good reading and offers a lesson besides! "I wrote a screedblog for today, but I made the mistake of doing some research afterwards, and discovered something that completely blew up my point."

I've been there before, as have countless other bloggers. But what separates the men from the boys is that Lileks did his retrospective research before rushing to post his screed.

A quick note of regret beats that post I wrote months ago that saw me get bloodied by my readers. Worse still, I hadn't even heard of Bonfire of the Vanities yet!

Daniel Pipes Raps on Stupid Terrorists

Pipes wonders whether a couple of his recent articles might have helped terrorists. He rightly concludes that his very funny article on stupid terrorists does not: "'Don't make dumb mistakes' is not operationally useful." He does have some concern about another article, though. "[T]here is indeed a danger of guiding Islamists to a more successful path. But I proceeded because I thought that danger is outweighed by the need to warn Westerners of what lies ahead."

Read both articles. I might quibble with Pipes on exactly how big a deal his "help" really is in the second case, but I am in complete agreement that we need to know about the internal debate going on within radical Islam.

Free Love already!

David Veksler reports on some good news: There is an effort underway to repeal the odious Wright Amendment, which limits air travel options in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Martin Lindeskog goes medieval entrepreneurial.

My fellow blogger and friend, Martin Lindeskog, has decided to start his own business! I wish him nothing but success and hope he does well in the Venture Cup!

The first link is an open thread post in which he seeks input on intellectual property matters, finding partners and capital for starting the business, and whether a nodisclosurere agreement might be a good idea.

I'm a scientist and so, predictably, have no useful advice for him. Perhaps one of my readers might have some useful ideas. If so, drop by and tell him I sent you.

Yaron Brook: Keep the internet free!

Over at the Egosphere (which seems to be undergoing some changes), is an ARI piece against UN control of the Internet. "The Internet was created in and by the land of the free, America. It has now become the object of an alarming power-grab by the world's dictatorships and their puppet, the UN."

The Resident Egoist on Fuel Efficiency

Over at Existence is Identity is an interesting and disturbing blog about three articles. While Detroit notes a shift in consumer preference for cars with greater fuel economy, some politicians are variously launching Carter-esque campaigns to urge "conservation" while others are attempting Hillary-esque shenanigans or worse.

Yes. High gas prices are being used as an excuse for the government to pick up GM's health benefits tab! Read it now.

Bioluminescence

Lubber's Line has a very interesting piece up about how microscopic organisms at sea can cause problems for submarines trying to hide. "[B]ioluminescence can gave away the position of a submarine operating on or near the surface by leaving a tell tail glow in the ship's wake."

Visual Abstractions

Have you ever looked at a painting and said something like, "This painting looks 'more real' than reality"? Robert Tracy at Illustrated Ideas explains what the artist had to do to achieve this effect. (Pun intended.)

MADD = "Prohibitionist Twits"

Glenn Reynolds points to an interesting read on the transmogrification of Mothers Against Drunk Driving into an anti-alcohol lobby.

Oh yeah, and your taxes are helping support them.

Ah! Now you're going to visit the link! I knew you would.

The Good and the Bad of Bush's Speech

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch points to a pretty good dissection of the good and the bad in Bush's recent GWOT speech.

360 Participants in Nuclear Arms Race

An LGF writer notes that "British intelligence has identified more than 360 organizations engaged in a clandestine nuclear arms race, to bring the bomb to Islamic countries."

Espionage in the White House

Michelle Malkin blogs on the traitorous "Marine" who has apparently been sending state secrets to the Philippines, and who was caught last week.

Clinton Library Funded by Bribery?

To ask whether the above is a rhetorical question would be, itself, a rhetorical question.

Vigilis points to a story in which former FBI Director Louis Freeh claims that, "Bill Clinton raised the subject [of getting permission to interview suspects in the Khobar Towers bombing] only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library."

Unsurprising and despicable, if true.

Global Temperature Cycles

Mover Mike points to an interesting story on global warming as part of a 1500 year long climate cycle.

Unisex Bathrooms

Diana Hsieh takes note of a trend I remembered from grad school that I had hoped had gone the way of the third person singular unisex pronoun (heeshee): unisex bathrooms. Thank God the multiculturalists are fighting the good fight!

TIA Radio

Zach Oakes catches something I somehow missed: TIA Daily will start a series of 90-minute webcasts. "I can't wait for the first one on the 13th -- Rob Tracinski will be interviewing Cox and Forkum."

Blog Search Comparison

Curtis Weeks puts some blog search engines through their paces at Phatic Communion. (I looked in several places and could not figure out how to get the permalink for this one entry. Good luck!)

Can the Democrats take the House?

Power Line takes a look at whether voter discontent with the spendthrift Republicans might cause them to lose the House. "The main cause for optimism is that Republicans get to run against Democrats."

Optimism? I disagree with the evaluation, but not the prediction. If the Democrats remain so bereft of new ideas that the voters still can't stand to vote for them, this means that the Republicans will remain free to continue emulating them! How can one be "optimistic" about getting Democrats when voting for Republicans?

And Democrats who care not a whit about "civil liberties", for lack of a better term, at that!

Big Screen Genetics

Over at Riding Sun, the Gaijin Biker has a really interesting post about a potential problem in Tom Cruise's gene pool.

I'm a geek.

I never follow Hollywood celebrities.

This is really weird.

Trust me.

This is one happy Democrat.

Rob Schumacher seems confident that the Democrats could score some stunning electoral gains in the near future.

The more likely scenario, I think, is that the Democrats will fail to capitalize in the short term. (See Power Line link above.) In the long term, if the Democrats do not embrace free market economics or their old heritage of defending civil liberties or both, they will become a marginalized left-wing party and the Republicans will split into a religious party and a free market party.

Serenity Reviews

Haven't seen it yet, but I will, sooner or later. Diana Hsieh as been promoting it for quite a while at Noodle Food and liked it. Blair at Secular Foxhole liked it and gave it 4/5 stars. And that guy over at Passing Thoughts has a new favorite movie!

Good War Roundup

I mentioned this once, but only as a note in a post update, so I'll mention again that there is a good roundup on the war over at Self Uncensored.

Spitzer's Abuse of Power

It's a short post over at Thrutch, but it indicates a must-read on Elliot Spitzer. "[F]rom my perspective, Spitzer's abuse of power is even more brazen than I'd previously imagined."

Shakespeare Conspiracy Update

I found this academic's thoughts on the notions that (1) "Shakespeare wasn't really (couldn't possibly have been!) Shakespeare" and (2) whether Shakespeare might have been Catholic to be very interesting reading.

Two goodies from Ultraquiet No More

Over at the group submarine blog are a couple of interesting posts well worth a look. First, Vigilis notes the latest submarine thriller to hit the book stalls, Red Star Rogue, about the circumstances behind the loss of a Soviet submarine off Hawaii in 1968. The book posits that the boat attempted to launch a nuclear missile against the United States.

A coworker told me about the book. It sounds interesting, but I suspect that Vigilis' advice not to believe everything you read applies here.

And Bubblehead plays BS detector for one Lt. Raymond Perry, who wrote on the recent collision between the USS Philadelphia and the merchant ship Yaso Aysen. "If I had seen a statement like 'Don't have a collision' in a set of standing orders, I would have laughed my ass off...."

Chortle. That's right up there with "Don't do something stupid."

That's a rap.

Man! That stroll through the 'roll took forever! Hope you liked it.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed some wording, fixed some typos.

The Straw Man of Scientism

A Package Deal

A term I've seen bandied about quite a bit lately by social conservatives is "scientism", which, in their hands, seems often to be a package deal between the following two ideas:

1. Actual Scientism: The idea that science, here used in the common sense of "natural science", can explain anything. Clearly, natural science cannot do this as the approach used to gain scientific knowledge, known as the scientific method, is derived from a realist metaphysics and a rational epistemology. In other words, natural science follows from philosophy and ultimately depends on philosophy for validation. Science has nothing to say, for example, on whether the law of non-contradiction is valid. (It assumes that this law is true.) In this sense of the word, scientism, denotes the mistaken idea that science can questions such as "Is there a god?" Clearly, natural science cannot answer every type of question.

2. Reason in General: The notion that reason can be used to answer nonscientific questions, and by extension, any secular outlook.

Merriam-Webster gives two definitions for the term, the second of which is closest to the first, valid portion of the above package deal: "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences , and the humanities)".

Science vs. Reason

Is this use of the word scientism (the one in M-W) even a valid concept? It is, and because it is, we must briefly explore it to understand how the term is being misused by the religious right. We have already covered one example: Science, a discipline derived from the answers to certain philosophical questions is not able to address philosophical issues. But what of other branches of the humanities? History, for example, presents us with all manner of questions we simply cannot answer via the scientific method. Quick. Name me a series of experiments we can run to explain why the Roman Empire fell. Or if we consider the data set of all past fallen empires and use this data to form a hypothesis, what experiment will we run to test said hypothesis?

Having noted the unsuitability of science to answer certain kinds of questions, it is worth noting that the unsuitability of the methods of natural science to answer them does not mean that reason cannot be applied to gain an understanding of such questions. Consider a simple, everyday example this time. A boy tells his father he was jumping on the trampoline at his friend's house during the hour he was late for dinner. His father, without conducting a single scientific experiment, concludes that he is lying. It just so happens that his father helped this friend's dad disassemble the trampoline for someone who had bought it and arrived to pick it up -- just before the activity was supposed to have occurred. Since it was impossible for his son to have been jumping on the trampoline, the boy is caught in a lie. The boy's stated activity contradicted a fact of reality: the missing trampoline.

People use reason every day without employing the scientific method. This, astonishingly, appears to be what some on the religious right would like you to forget. This is partly because there are some areas -- like religion -- that will not stand up to rational inquiry and they want to make sure you don't think your mind is fit to examine them. So the religionists know they cannot argue their case. But the religionists also have an interest in your equivocating between religion and other philosophical outlooks so that you will be off guard when they attempt to inject religion into politics. They'd love you to take what they say on faith. Failing that, your indifference to a greater role of religion in government will do. The end result -- their control over your life -- will be the same anyway.

A spoonful of humor makes the arsenic go down....

What better way to do this than to mock scientism, while passing off a few philosophical errors of your own as common sense? And how much better if you can claim that "scientism" is just another religion?

This is exactly what one Jonathan David Carson does today at the ironically-named American Thinker.

First, he warms up his audience by reminding us how loony our culture has become after decades of bombardment by leftist, Chicken Little type intellectuals and the mass media that sheepishly follow them.

We're like a condemned man who worries about the preservatives in his last meal or its cholesterol content. We'll worry about anything but our real worries. If we lived in Sudan, we'd worry about cell phone radiation or the wrinkles around our eyes. The worse our problems are, the more we agonize about something else.

I exaggerate? We live in by far the richest country in the history of the world, and what do politicians talk about? Money. We have cocaine addicts who eat organic foods, animal rights activists distraught over the deaths of gorillas in Uganda, and people terrified that Bush will discover what books they are checking out of the library and put them in concentration camps. Divorced couples fight in front of their children and are horrified by accounts of child abuse. Teachers complain about the stultifying effects of rote learning as their students learn nothing. Educators worry that their charges have read too many literary classics and not enough trash.

Now that he's warmed us up, he slips in a couple of things we really do need to watch out for -- as if they're equally absurd. Here they are. (Objectivists will note that faith and force are covered. Interesting.)

Civil libertarians warn of a police state when most of us see police officers only when driving past them as they ticket speeders. We go years, decades, with no contact with the police whatsoever.

One of the favorite worries of the professional worrying class is the establishment of religion.

In the original, "Civil" follows "trash", uninterrupted by a pause or, Carson hopes, any thought. This is too bad, for one of the "worries" our "worrying class" and the founding fathers had in common is the establishment of religion. To discount this valid concern just because modern day liberals seem unable to distinguish between their own foamy-mouthed hostility to religion (which flows from their own confused disdain for America) and the dangers posed by theocrats with guns is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

One of the beauties of being able to enlist scientism to the cause of trashing the idea of keeping our government secular is that those guilty of scientism are such fat targets for ridicule. This is no trivial point. Robert Tracinski once made the following criticism of certain types of opinion writing.

[T]his approach tends to produce writing that sounds brilliant or witty on a superficial level, but which doesn't deliver a clear message. A standing example of this problem is provided by conservative college newspapers; in my experience, these papers habitually rely on ridicule of the left's gaudier absurdities (which is not difficult) in place of substantive arguments.

Carson's main point is that separation of church and state is a fiction because "scientism" and religion are both ... religions. In fact, reason and faith are opposite epistemological approaches. It is arguable that scientism -- in the correct sense of the term -- is guilty of the same fundamental epistemological sin (i.e., faith) as religion. In fact, Carson does seem to agree with this argument ("Science rejects hypotheses on the basis of evidence; scientism, for which there is not a whit of evidence, nor could there be, is the a priori rejection of contrary hypotheses. "), but this is not his larger point. Remember: He uses scientism as a package deal to attack separation of church and state, an attack for which there is no argument that will appeal to any thinking, freedom-loving American.

Enter the device of ridicule. Humor, such as the lampooning of leftist absurdities, relies on the implicit acceptance by the humorist and his audience, of certain common premises. As such, humor can be used properly or not. Properly, humor can be used to establish a rapport with your intended audience in order to make them interested in your topic and more likely to consider your argument. Once, writing against environmentalism for a college audience I knew was somewhat sympathetic to that movement, I opened with a humorous take on beer advertising. (This was also, incidentally, how I introduced the concept of "package deal", which was important to my point.) This led beautifully into my main argument. Improperly used, humor can be used to avoid making an argument altogether.

For example:

Making fun of such obvious buffoons as Hawking as God, the Skeptic, and the Orator is good sport and, what's better, easy, but their buffoonery conceals an evil stratagem. Trusting them is a lot more dangerous than trusting shamans to cure serious illnesses. The Skeptic may pretend to give a lighthearted look at the adulation accorded Hawking, but he has a serious point:

"Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not met by these ancient cultural traditions".

Translated into English, this means that scientismists are fanatically ("courageously") striving to crush ("supplant") Christianity and Judaism ("these ancient cultural traditions") and replace them with a state religion, the state funding it under the guise of science and repressing its rivals on the pretext that the Constitution prohibits an establishment of religion.

We're not even done laughing at Hawking yet when Carson slips in the idea that these loons have established themselves as the state religion and want to wipe out Christianity. (This implication is made more explicit later. e.g.,
"Scientism is not the whole of the established religion of the United States, which is called 'secularism'....")

Carson is correct to be alarmed at the prospect of a religion having control of the apparatus of the state, though he curiously fails to consider how disentangling the state from most scientific research and from the education system might lessen the danger. This is curious -- unless Carson would turn a blind eye to the apparatus of the state serving another religion: his own.

State Religion: A Question of Whether, Not Which

Would he do this? The title of his article and one of its main arguments are that "scientism" is already the established religion of the United States. And he is right in the sense that the educational and scientific establishments are pretty much owned by the left. But is that his only point, or does he slip something else in? Is Carson merely unhappy about the fact that America has a de facto state religion or is he merely unhappy about which religion that is?

Consider the following. And consider that the remainder of the essay is devoted to more favorite idiots from the left, like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, rather than an examination of ways to, say, get the state out of the business of promoting ideas. Also consider that his essay ends with the following: "Al Gore, a few chads short of a presidency; the United States, a few hanging chads short of a religious tyranny."

Current events, including the debate over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, make a lot more sense if we stop taking at face value claims of the Court majority that it is preventing an establishment of religion and recognize that it is instead defending an establishment that has already taken place. How else can we explain what otherwise appears to be a paranoid fear of an establishment of Christianity despite the near total lack of advocates of a state church? The Court is not afraid of an establishment of Christianity; it is merely doing what established religions do, which is to wipe out the opposition.

Really?

Recall the Terri Schiavo case. Suppose you wanted to "have the tube pulled" under similar circumstances, but with the addition of several conservative Christians to the Supreme Court (a distinct possiblility given that the ages of four of the justices, excluding O'Connor, are at least 69), a majority of conservative Christians sat on the court. In the unlikely event someone disagreed with your decision strongly enough to try to take it to the Supreme Court, might the court act the same way again? Might such a majority make the filing of such cases more likely? Would you end up in a state of living death? Christians are already free to choose this for themselves if they wish.

And what of stem cell research? Even its critics admit that it has tremendous potential for saving lives. Someone whose life could be affected (saved or prematurely ended) down the road by how the court rules on a stem cell case might have a reason to be "paranoid" about someone who thinks stem cell research is "playing God" and would -- to borrow a conservative phrase -- legislate from the bench to ban it altogether. Christians are already free to forgo treatments based on stem cell research for themselves if they wish.

And let's get to the holy grail (or one of them, anyway) of the religious conservatives: abortion. A unmarried woman who wants the option of terminating an early pregnancy might also get a little "paranoid" about the fact that Bush has nominated someone who, not content to let God send her to Hell Himself for having an abortion, would ban this practice? Christians are already free to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term if they wish.

The ideas that animate a judicial nominee will affect her rulings, and these rulings will affect lives. The ideas of a judicial nominee have consequences. In each of the three types cases I have mentioned above, the likely rulings of devout Christians would be enough to make anyone affected by them "paranoid" enough, and the question of the establishment of a state religion hasn't even been reached!

But according to Carson, "[There is no other way to] explain what otherwise appears to be a paranoid fear of an establishment of Christianity despite the near total lack of advocates of a state church?" Paranoia about conservative Christians, yes. But what of the establishment of religion?

There are court cases in the pipeline about whether Creationism has to be taught alongside evolution in science classes. If Carson wants to credibly claim that science can't answer all questions, he must concede that it can answer some questions. If the state is to pay for the teaching of science rather than mythology, is it not of some valid concern how a future Supreme Court Justice might rule in such a case? (As a mental exercise, replace the Judaeo-Christian creation myth with that from some other religion and ask whether that should be taught as well.) Christians are already free to read the Bible to their own children or even home-school them altogether if they wish.

The Creationists want to have the Biblical story of creation taught, or at least mentioned as an equally valid alternative to evolution) at government expense in our public schools. While this would not alone constitute the full establishment of Christianity as a state religion, it would be a law respecting the establishment of same and it does two other undesirable things. (1) Like the promotion of any other ideology by the government, it is something the government has no business doing. (2) It is a "foot in the door", a precedent for future encroachements of Christianity into public life.

School prayer is another goal of the religious right. It would likely be less upsetting to many in the public to attempt to reinstate school prayer if they were already used to having Genesis read to their children as "scientific" theory in science class already. And a court that would permit the one would be much more likely to permit the other. Note that Christians are free to encourage their children to pray quietly at free moments while they are at school, send them to religious schools, or home school them altogether. They are not "free", however, to make the children of others pray, nor should they be.

So far, in just thinking through this out loud here, have come up with numerous public policy positions which would likely be affected if the right lawsuits were filed and a majority of conservative Christians were on the Supreme Court to -- ahem -- legislate from the bench: living wills concerning the removal for life support measures from the terminally ill, stem cell research, abortion, the teaching of science in public schools, and forced prayer in public schools.

Look at how much your life could change if Christianity even got on the road to becoming the de facto state religion -- as Carson claims "Scientism" is now -- of the United States! Who even needs to call this "establishment", Dr. Carson? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. The subordination of our secular republic to Christian dicta is the establishment of a state religion. You fault the "scientismists" for not calling their religion a religion and damn them for establishing it, but you fail to call what the religious right is doing "establishing" their religion and imply that I am mental for being apprehensive about it!

I am not an adherent of scientism. I am also not a Christian. I frankly could do without the babblings of new-agers or the "concern" for my soul of the Christians. I leave you alone, Dr. Carson. Please leave me alone. That includes the following: Quit trying to make the government able to force me to live according to your beliefs. You are already free to live by your own lights.

One Legitimate Point

Having said this, I would add that Jonathan Carson does halfway make a valid point. It is the point that was made far better by one of our founding fathers when he told someone what form of government his new nation was going to have: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Our government does not exist in a philosophical vacuum. Its laws do reflect the philosophical consensus, more or less, of its people. While ideally, the government would never be in the business of actively promoting a given religion or philosophy, its officeholders act upon their personal beliefs and the people will hold to some general consensus in these spheres. Our form of government exists to protect the rights of the people, rights which are derived from the need of each individual to think in order to live. In a republic, then, each man has, through his vote, the ability to weigh in on the public debate.

Our founding fathers knew that the risk of freedom is that of making the wrong decision, but that is the risk inherent in one's very nature as a rational being. The founding fathers also knew that a refusal to take that risk meant certain tyranny or death, hence their willingness to risk death for freedom. To lessen the inherent risk of freedom for their young nation, they made our government very difficult to change quickly. Through its system of checks and balances, the founding fathers also made our government into something particularly ill-suited for establishing tyranny: it was made specifically to get in its own way, keeping ambitious individuals in check.

But at least one of the founding fathers still issued the warning I cited above. Enough bad decisions over a long-enough period of time will destroy our form of government and in doing so, endanger the freedom it was built to protect. If there is a legitimate context for speaking of a "state religion", it is not in the sense of a belief system forced upon the citizens by tyranny, but in the sense of this general consensus. If this "state religion", this general consensus of the people, favors, say, the enforcement of unproveable dogmas more than the protection of individual rights, that is what the people will eventually get, and they will deserve it. Our founding fathers knew that they could not save us from ourselves, but they did the next best thing: They made radical political change into a long, drawn-out process. One is much less likely to make a bad decision if one thinks about it for a long time, than if one makes it in an instant.

So yes, I am paranoid about the establishment -- in word or in deed -- of Christianity (or any other religion) as the state religion. The only way to accomplish this is to have people like Jonathan Carson laugh at people like me as paranoids while they pretend that they are being persecuted because the "state religion" isn't their own. Over a long enough period of time, while they keep laughing and everyone slowly gets used to less freedom and more bullying around, they will get what they want -- if they can keep it up long enough, and if the people stay asleep long enough.

The bad news for Jonathan Carson is that we have our minds and the founding fathers have given us time to use them.

-- CAV

Updates

3-29-06: Added hypertext anchors to section titles.

How NOT to Confront Islamism

This is unbelievably disappointing. [Update: See Note at end.]

Via Matt Drudge is an interesting story about goings-on behind the scenes among the leadership of the Arab refugees near Israel. (By the way, "Hudna" is Arabic for "armistice".) As with many news stories, one of the most interesting parts occurs near the end. In this case, it is at the very end of the article.

According to [Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud] Abbas, ... [President] Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

So the leader of the United States of America -- a secular republic -- is stooping to the level of the Islamists?

If this is true, and I can think of no good reason to doubt it, Bush called the "War on Terror" a religious war in the above quote. While this is true for the Islamists, it is definitely not true for the West. George Bush, as the leader of the United States, should have simply told Abbas (if he were to speak to him at all) that any acts of aggression against American interests (including Israeli sovereignty) would be met with an overwhelming military response. If asked why, Bush should have said that it is his job to protect the inalienable rights of his citizens. Period.

Man's rights to think, speak, and act freely, and to profit from his actions are necessary for his survival. It is the President's job to make sure that we Americans can survive by protecting those freedoms. It is this very truth that requires a secular state -- so that those who would abridge our freedoms on "God's orders" will be rendered unable to act. It is also precisely this point that must be impressed on the mostly theocratic Islamic world, and especially on the Palestinian Arabs.

"God told me to do it." This is not a positive reason to wage a war. It is an excuse. In fact, it's Osama bin Laden's excuse.

Someone please tell me this report is wrong.

-- CAV

PS. Here's another such report.

[PA Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Note: Via LGF and Thrutch, it appears that the White House is denying these assertions. I must say that I'm relieved to hear this!

The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series that President Bush claimed God told him to invade Iraq.

"He's never made such comments," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The comments were attributed to Mr Bush by the Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath in the upcoming TV series Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs.

Also, there is a very good roundup on the war over at Self Uncensored.

Updates

Today: Added reference to second report and quote.
10-7-05: Added update notices and Note to end.

Eat a Ham Sandwich for al Qaeda Day

I'd like to thank Meryl Yourish for sending her readers my way, and her readers for stopping by!

They've banned Piglet in England?!?!? To avoid offending the sensibilities of whom? The Moslems who don't care what's on a coworker's calendar or mug -- or the ones who want to blow us up regardless of what we do? I think that's one of those questions that sort of answers itself.

With apologies to Meryl Yourish, but none to any Moslem who cannot tolerate the notion that I might dare fail to act in accordance to their religious strictures, I hereby propose that the first annual "Eat a Ham Sandwich for al Qaeda Day" take place on Monday, October 10, 2005.

Have a delicious ham sandwich, or a couple or three (to cover for anyone left out of the fun, of course) for lunch at work, at the park, or in a restaurant. Those who wish to celebrate the glory of Western civilization for more than a single day are encouraged to do so, and should consider a three day festival to culminate with a ham sandwich on that holiest of days, Columbus Day. In fact, I urge you to do so, whether or not you live in the New World, and particularly if you reside in England, which appears to be committing cultural suicide.

Spread the word. And the mustard. And the mayo.

And if they don't like where I'm going to put my ham sandwich, I have another place I can think of to put it.

-- CAV

PS Be sure to read the comments.

Updates

10-6-05: Added PS.
10-9-05: Thanked Meryl Yourish for the link.

Idiot Bumper Stickers, Part 2

Or: Ideas Matter

In this, the second installment of an occasional feature of my blog, I'll let others do most of the talking for me.

Mark Steyn will do the honor of kicking off since he decimates, perfectly, a bumper sticker I see from time to time in the loonier parts of town. Here's a version even nuttier than what he describes or that I have seen to date.


I would add that, to a vendor with a name like "StampAndShout.com", I guess all intellectual traditions, including the rational -- symbolized by Einstein's famous equation -- would "look the same" since they would each involve an attempt to reach some coherent understanding of the world. (And since leftists equate reason with socialism anyway, they have a point, by accident, in that very delimited sense.) But that is neither here nor there. Steyn comes up with this jewel!

I found myself behind a car in Vermont, in the US, the other day; it had a one-word bumper sticker with the injunction "COEXIST". It's one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority. The C was the Islamic crescent, the O was the hippie peace sign, the X was the Star of David and the T was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is, it's the first of those symbols that has a problem with coexistence. Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn't need a bumper sticker at all. [bold added] Indeed, coexistence is what the Islamists are at war with; or, if you prefer, pluralism, the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighbourhood. There are many trouble spots across the world but, as a general rule, even if one gives no more than a cursory glance at the foreign pages, it's easy to guess at least one of the sides: Muslims v Jews in Palestine, Muslims v Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims v Christians in Nigeria, Muslims v Buddhists in southern Thailand, Muslims v (your team here). Whatever one's views of the merits on a case by case basis, the ubiquitousness of one team is a fact.

Brilliant, quote there in the boldface. The whole essay is good, of course, and his larger point is right on target: "That's why they blew up Bali in 2002, and last weekend, and why they'll keep blowing it up. It's not about Bush or Blair or Iraq or Palestine. It's about a world where everything other than Islamism lies in ruins."

In other words, ideas matter.

This theme crops up in two other excellent pieces today, as well. In one of these, Christopher Hitchens echoes Steyn's point that it is the motivating ideology of the enemy that animates it and not -- as moral relativists or blame-the-West-firsters would have it -- anything the West (or any other group of kaffirs) has actually done.

Taken together with Steyn's observation that it's frequently the Moslems fighting some other group around the world, Hitchens's observation that what the Indonesian terrorists are doing in Bali hurts Indonesians -- and aids no other supposed terrorist cause hypothesized by the left -- is especially devastating.

Consider this, look again at the awful carnage in Bali, and shudder if you ever said, or thought, that the bombs in London in July, or the bombs in Baghdad every day, or the bombs in Bali last Friday, are caused by any "policy" but that of the bombers themselves. Note the following:

1) East Timor was for many years, and quite rightly, a signature cause of the Noam Chomsky "left." The near-genocide of its people is an eternal stain on Indonesia and on the Western states that were complicit or silent. Yet Bin Ladenism wants not less of this killing and repression but more. Its demand to re-establish the caliphate is a pro-imperialist demand, not an anti-imperialist one.

2) Random bombings are not a protest against poverty and unemployment. They are a cause of poverty and unemployment and of wider economic dislocation.

3) Hinduism is considered by Bin Ladenists to be a worse heresy even than Christianity or Judaism or Shiism, and its adherents, whether in Bali or Kashmir, are fit only for the edge of the sword. So, it is absurd to think of jihadism -- which murders the poor and the brown without compunction -- as a movement against the rich and the "white."

So, what did Indonesia do to deserve this, or bring it on itself? How will the slaughter in Bali improve the lot of the Palestinians? Those who look for the connection will be doomed to ask increasingly stupid questions and to be content with increasingly wicked answers.

Once again, the left's excuses for terrorism are shown to be wrong and again, we have not merely the induction that radical Islamists are motivated by their beliefs, but further evidence.

For the last article, we depart from Islamists and look in our own back yard, which Bush is allowing to become trashy and weed-choked: Venezuela.

The raid on private property in Venezuela has begun.

The excuse is the elimination of factories and large land tracts that are supposedly unproductive. Because these enterprises do not generate wealth or jobs with the zeal that President Hugo Chavez might desire, the government will expropriate them.

Once they are held by the state, Chavez, always generous with the income derived from oil or the taxes paid by Venezuelans, will inject the properties with capital and with thousands of workers who will earn lavish salaries.

Those enterprises will lose huge amounts of money, naturally, but to the revolutionary mind this is an insignificant fact. The losses will be washed down with abundant swigs of public money, creating a multitude of grateful stomachs that presumably will join the revolutionary bandwagon. That is precisely the essence of populism.

The economic consequence of such stupidity is the collective impoverishment of society. The more public enterprises lose money, the poorer becomes the society that needs to sustain them.

How does Chavez explain the fact that the communist countries were abysmally poor? Their thousands of enterprises -- crammed with unnecessary workers, directed by apathetic bureaucrats who parroted political slogans and inflexibly ruled by controlled prices -- inevitably slid into generalized disaster.

That was explained to Lenin -- patiently and futilely -- by Ludwig von Mises in a book titled Socialism, published in 1922, when the Bolshevik revolution had just begun.

The communists paid him no heed. Not because they didn't understand the impeccable reasoning of the Austrian economist, but because the decision to seize property was ideological, not economic [bold added].

And so we have the left presenting Westerners with the injunction: "Coexist!" They tell us to do so with the wolves who would devour us, and whose very actions hurt even their coreligionists to boot. They sympathize with someone who is meddling with Latin America and ruining the economy of his own nation in the name of helping "the poor", despite ample theoretical arguments and historical evidence that his policies will lead to ruin.

In short, the leftists urge us to ignore the fact that Islamists act on their beliefs to kill us and other Moslems. They admire a man who is demonstrably ruining his country, and does so by acting on his beliefs. Might they, acting on their beliefs, be giving us bad advice, and attempting to shame us into following it?

I know the answer to that question, but knowing this answer is not necessary. One needs only follow the advice of Ayn Rand when encountering such drivel. She advises us, through the mouth of Ellsworth Toohey, the villain of The Fountainhead: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes."

What would happen if we took their advice? This is a question more people should be in the habit of asking everyone else all the time. Might it be foolhardy for us to act on the professed belief of the "Coexist" crowd that we should ignore the actions and repeated admissions of the likes of bin Laden and Chavez? Do you think? That's what the peaceniks stopped doing long ago and wish you'd stop doing, too.

To coexist, one must exist in the first place, and to do that, one must think, at least if one is to do so for very long. Hmmm. What is that bumper sticker really saying, again?

-- CAV

Google: A Sign of the Times

An interesting pair of news stories concerning Google Maps reminds me of something Leonard Peikoff recently said of his preference for the civilization of ancient Greece to that of modern-day America.

I'm not putting down technology.  But I'm saying that if I had a choice of living in a culture that is utterly barren and void but technologically still the way it is today, or [having it reversed, as in a] non-technological culture such as Ancient Greece -- I would, without hesitation, go back to Ancient Greece. Now I'm sure I would miss the plumbing there, ... but that still does not mean that my choice of life would be made on that grounds.  

I would much rather the intellectual life of that kind of society and the potentialities of the future, rather than live in a society which... Remember, you're free to take a different opinion; this is, in my opinion, an optional issue. I'm not here trying to prove that anybody who is happy in the world today has something wrong with them. [laughter from the audience] It's an optional issue.  

Look, I've been fighting the trend in the world for 45 years, and it's gotten worse for 45 years. I've become very bitter in my old age, and I've found a lot of solace in the fact that people used to be a lot better than they were, in reading literature from the past and considering past civilizations.  That's one of the things that keeps me... sane." [quoted by Jason Roberts]

Google, the computer company I'd love to love, demonstrates our age eloquently and on a near-daily basis. Their internet search engine is the best, bar none. Unless you live in China. I keep hearing them being called "the new Microsoft", as they roll out new products on a continual basis. Matt Drudge reports today, for example, that Google and Sun plan to offer a web application to compete with Microsoft Office. (See more on web apps here. I use Linux and hate vendor lock-in anyway, so I say, "It's about time!")

This company bedazzles the world with new technology daily -- while helping the autocrats of China keep her people in medieval serfdom. And so we have Exhibit A: this story about how a layman was able to use Google Maps to locate Roman ruins.

Italian computer programmer Luca Mori made a surprising discovery recently when he used the Google Earth geographic imaging program to examine satellite photos of his home town of Sorbolo: signs of an ancient Roman villa beneath a nearby river bed.

"At first I thought it was a stain on the photograph, but when I zoomed in, I saw that there was something buried under the earth," he told the Daily Telegraph in London.

...
 
When he examined the Google Earth image closely, Mr. Mori noticed an oval-shaded form more than 457 meters long (or about 1,500 feet), along with some strange-looking rectangular shadows.  

He contacted some archeologists via the Internet who theorized that the shape might correspond to an ancient river and the rectangular shape could be a buried manmade structure.

Mr. Mori next tried the National Archeological Museum of Parma. They dispatched archeologists to the area, which was occupied by a corn farm, and they checked out the discovery.

"At first they thought the site might be Bronze Age, but a closer inspection turned up ceramic and stone pieces that showed it was a Roman villa built some time just before the birth of Christ," he said, as quoted on the web site China View [link added].

It is supremely ironic that  a  Chinese web site reports this. For  while  Google demonstrates the miracles of capitalism in one instance, it aids its destroyers in another. To wit, Exhibit B:

The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislative caucus yesterday called on the public to write to Google to protest its listing of Taiwan as a "province of China" on its Google Maps service.

In addition to sending its own letter of protest to the US search-engine giant, the caucus asked the government to lodge a formal protest and request Google to clearly define Taiwan as "an independent state."

In the spirit of our age, it might be more accurate to note that Google's actions are somewhat sensible on a brutish, short-range level, but foolish in the long-term. Perhaps because Google has been so pliant, it is receiving good publicity on the above Chinese web site. That may be a big "perhaps", but a smaller one is that its submissiveness lets it in the Chinese market (though not all the way) to begin with.

Note that this infusion into China of technology -- and therefore of efficiency -- is aiding a nation that is building up its military and is poised to threaten its neighbors in Asia, not to mention the United States, where Google is headquartered. Even if we ignore this, though, the above example shows us that, far from simply "doing in Rome what the Romans are doing", Google is making concessions to China on a worldwide basis. On even this level, at what point will Google's compliance end? And on the more fundamental level, does Google even realize it's hacking at the roots of the tree that bears its golden fruit? Or: Does Google want to run Google or even be able to exist freely as Google?
 
As I ponder these questions, I am composing this post in Gmail, which is owned by Google, to be posted on my blog, which is hosted by Google -- but blocked in China!

What a convoluted world we live in today! How will it all turn out?

I often side with Dr. Peikoff on which "world" I'd prefer, but when I'm in the mood for suspense, I pick this one hands down.

-- CAV

Mbeki See, Mbeki Do?

The president of South Africa may be getting ready to monkey around with property rights in the same economy-wrecking fashion his neighbor to the north, Robert Mugabe, did in Zimbabwe.

As of this week, when South Africa proposed for the first time the uncompensated expropriation of land held by white farmers for black resettlement [emphasis added], Mbeki looks set to sail the same course as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe (also a fine orator but a lousy leader) in handling the probably impossible task of compensating his people for his country's cruel history. But he should be careful: Complete economic and social chaos precipitated by fast-track land reforms could be the result.

The author of this article, unfortunately, agrees with the basic premise that farm land owned by whites should be redistributed to blacks -- but only slower. Nevertheless, she points out the economic disaster that will likely visit South Africa if this scheme is attempted, particularly if the land is simply handed over to blacks who do not know how to farm it!

I am the daughter of a central African farmer. I know how quickly the land and sun can swallow you out there. Of about 4,500 confiscated farms in Zimbabwe, only a couple hundred are now fully functioning. And the harvest of food staples has dropped about 90% since 2000. An estimated 2.9 million Zimbabweans need food assistance.

Alexandra Fuller also wonders aloud (I imagine for Mbeki's benefit since the recap of the Zimbabwe disaster would make this idea stillborn to all but the most obtuse.) whether the huge number of Zimbaweans now in South Africa because they fled famine might cause Mbeki's move to be unpopular. I would add that Mbeki's proposed move may not merely backfire in the short term with the majority of his voters: It risks permanently alienating a very important minority.

-- CAV

Overview of Chinese Internet Censorship

There's an article in Time today that provides a good refresher course on Chinese web censorship.

Much of this effort relies on modern technology.

Employing much of the same information-screening and filtering technology used worldwide to combat pornography and spammers, Beijing has built a Great Firewall of China that restricts viewing of scores of foreign websites (such as those for Amnesty International and numerous news sites); the government has also deployed tens of thousands of Internet police to investigate online crimes, including political offenses. While some tech-savvy surfers can find ways through the firewall and past Web police monitors, the vast majority of China's 100-million online population will search in vain for Mandarin equivalents of the Drudge Report, blog screeds and independent journalism that define free online speech in most of the world. A recent study by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society concluded that "China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world."

Hmmm. Amnesty International? What? The Chinese government doesn't want its proles to know how badly America treats its prisoners (and worse still, their free Korans) in Gitmo?

Of course, good-old fashioned government force and the fear it induces are what really keep the lid clamped down.

... Beijing maintains control by instilling the fear in Web scribes and online businesses that they are being watched -- and that, if they cross the line, they are risking their investment, their business, even their freedom. The threat is real: Human Rights Watch estimates that 60 Chinese are serving prison sentences for Internet-based political crimes, and Beijing frequently closes down websites operating on Chinese soil whose owners allow controversial postings.

Indeed, far from loosening up, Beijing is intensifying its scrutiny of the Web. Last week, the State Council released even more stringent regulations—aimed at online forums, blogs and wireless SMS messaging—that bar postings of news that goes against "national security and the public interest."

Sadly, the Chi-Comms are being aided and abetted by a today's version of Armand Hammer: The unholy corporate trinity of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google.

Yahoo!'s China operation was widely criticized last month for turning over information to the police that helped send journalist Shi Tao to prison for 10 years (Shi had posted a list of topics that Chinese newspapers were forbidden to cover, including the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre). Yahoo! officials said they had no choice but to abide by the "laws, regulations and customs" of countries where it does business. It isn't alone in its sensitivity to local customs: Microsoft's MSN portal blocks the Chinese words for "democracy" and "freedom" from the blogs it hosts, while Google omits banned websites from its search results.

And yet, there are a couple of rays of hope. One of them is the sheer size of China and her economy, as reported recently by George Reisman (HT: The General).

More important was what I saw from the ship as we left Shanghai: mile after mile of factories, power plants, wharves, an incredible number of cargo cranes and containers. (About once a year, I get a view of the cranes and containers in San Pedro, which is the port for Los Angeles and by some accounts the busiest in the US. I'm sorry to say that I think it's dwarfed by what I saw in Shanghai.)

As the 2008 Olympics approaches, which is to be held in Beijing, I think there'll be a major discovery process with respect to China. The television cameras will be working overtime to show the sights in the city and probably elsewhere in the country.

How long can any government keep such a huge, dynamic society under its boot? And furthermore, this begs the intriguing question of whether these images will be transmitted to the poverty-stricken countryside. If even a decent portion of that populace, which the Chi-Comms are already having to work hard to control, has access to such images, might there be rebellion in the countryside?

Another ray of hope is that there are ways around the "Great Fire Wall of China", and people are using them.

[D]etermined Chinese web surfers manage to tunnel through today's firewall with the help of software that guides them to overseas "proxy servers," computers that enable them to fetch and view banned content. Activists smuggle proxy software into China and pass it hand-to-hand on flash memory devices. "It's really cat and mouse," says Bill Xia, president of U.S.-based Dynamic Internet Technology, whose product bounces users among many proxy servers, making it hard to track the surfer's identity.

On a recent afternoon, a Chinese reporter in Beijing used one of these programs to watch a video of the Tiananmen massacre on his IBM ThinkPad. "See that boy facing down a line of tanks?" he says. "I'd heard about that." In most countries, this ability to track down elusive information is now little more than a mundane miracle of modern technology. In China, this unconstrained curiosity remains a perilous threat -- to both the browser and Beijing.

Not clear, however, is whether such software can be used at all by most Chinese internet users, who use cybercafes where they must sign in with their national ID number to use the web. I'm doubtful.

-- CAV

News and Notes: 10-2-05

Not One, but Two New Objectivist Publications!

As most of my readers probably know already, Don Watkins of Anger Management fame has officially launched Axiomatic. I plan to subscribe as soon as I set up a PayPal account. From the editor:

[S]ince the closing of Harry Binswanger's The Objectivist Forum, there hasn't been a forum for Objectivists who want to write about Objectivism for other Objectivists. That is the purpose of Axiomatic -– to provide a platform for committed Objectivists to analyze Objectivism, apply Objectivist principles to other fields of study, and help readers integrate Objectivism into their daily lives.

The first issue looks really interesting! My hat's off to Don!

Also, be on the lookout for the launch of a new Objectivist Quarterly this spring, The Objective Standard: A Journal of Culture and Politics. (HT: Gideon Reich)

The Objective Standard is a quarterly journal of culture and politics written from the perspective that man's life on earth is the proper standard of morality. According to this principle, that which supports or promotes an individual's life is good, that which retards or destroys it is evil. The purpose of the journal is to analyze and evaluate ideas, trends, events, and policies with respect to this standard.

For further updates, sign up at the link above.

Some time in the near future, I plan to permalink both of these under News and Opinion.

To Fellow Fans of the Space Elevator

Ariel Boekweg of LiftPort Group, the company that recently conducted a successful robot climber experiment in its ongoing efforts to make the concept of the space elevator a reality, informs me that you can sign up for updates on their progress here.

Blog Roundups

Martin Lindeskog posted the Midweek 39 Sampler this Wednesday at Ego.

Vigilis posted Stories You May Have Missed this Friday at Molten Eagle.

Worth Noting Again

Andy Clarkson has a timely post out on the recent blogospheric efforts to cut budgetary fat that includes a better idea and how to contact your representative and senators.

Come to think of it, a subscription to HBL would be worthwhile, too. Thanks for the tip, Andy!

Note to Self

Remember what Philip B. Pape has been able to do with his Blogger blog with the help of Bravenet!

On a Personal Note

In what is both good news and bad news for me: I unexpectedly have stumbled upon an opportunity to earn thousands of dollars a week working at home!

Hah! Just kidding. But I may have a chance to make my situation at work far more tolerable. This cannot help but be good careerwise and sanity-wise, but blogwise and opinion-column-wise, it may not be so good, at least in the short term. (i.e., I won't be quite so free to blog at work.) I'll know more in the next couple of weeks. This isn't exactly the opportunity I was hoping for, but I might take it, given my peculiar personal circumstances.

Wish me luck!

-- CAV

Updates
May 1, 2006: Added hypertext anchors.

The Great Evacuation of '05 -- Part II

Continued from Part I.

Night 1

Never having evacuated my home before, I failed to realize how long it would take to prepare to leave. The trip to and from the airport was somewhat illuminating insofar as it caused me to realize that anything involving travel would be slowed down, but I must confess that I was still not quite out of the dark on the scope of what we still had to do to evacuate.

Reducing the task at hand to its essentials (pack what's important, secure the house, and leave), I would have to say that I started the night out in "vacation mode". I figured we'd pack for a few hours, get some sleep, and leave in the morning. I was dismayed at our late return from the airport and told the wife that we'd probably be up until about 3:00 preparing to leave. I turned out to be a little off in that estimate.

Part of the problem involved plywood. As I mentioned earlier, we do not own this house, but rent it. Being busy earlier in the week and thinking that our landlord would probably come by to board up the place anyway, I simply hadn't given a lot of thought to picking up plywood. On the day I decided to evacuate, still three days before landfall, I called him when my pre-storm tasks at work were winding down. I figured I could offer my help putting up the plywood, assuming I would be still be there when he planned to do it. No dice. He had no plans to do this. So I got his permission to do this on my own, if I had the chance to get plywood.

On the way home, I learned that plywood was already in short supply and that there were huge lines at the home improvement centers for whatever plywood was due to arrive. Time was not on my side as it was. I would go to a Lowe's or a Home Depot after we picked up the rental car and I'd get boards then, if they were available. As you know from my first installment, this never happened. Lesson Learned #1: Have plywood for windows on hand in your garage if you live in a hurricane-prone area.

The Strange Calculus of an Evacuation

By now, it should already be clear that we were preparing for the worst by evacuating, but hoping for the best, which is what we luckily got in the end. But what of intermediate cases? Suppose the house were subjected to Category 1 or 2 winds, such that it took some damage, but was not essentially destroyed? That's what that plywood would have been really good for. If the house took any damage, I figured that broken windows would be its most likely form.

We and the cats would be gone, so the main consideration for us was our property. The cars were safely stored already, so they weren't a problem. All that was left was stuff. What goes with us? What stays? And how could we protect the best stuff that we decided to leave behind?

I call this section "The Strange Calculus of an Evacuation" because it was strange emotionally, and not because it was strange on any other level. The essence of the process was, of course, deciding what was most important to us and taking it with us. The strangeness came from knowing that whatever we left behind could be gone forever. Except for whatever was already in a garbage can, everything we would decide to leave had some value to us. We had expended effort to obtain it and decided to keep it for one reason or another. While we could certainly live without any of these things (or even the things we did take with us) our lives would be made harder without any of them.

Interestingly, there seemed to be two broad (but not mutually exclusive) categories of objects: those with practical value and those with sentimental value. In the former category were things like legal documents, insurance policies, tools, and supplies. These were all things that would save us time (or money -- really the same thing in that money represents stored effort) in recovering from whatever disaster awaited us. In the latter category were things like photographs, mementos, and pets. These were all things that reminded us of and reinforced our highest values, namely ourselves, each other, and our loved ones. If one thinks for a moment about this latter category of objects, one will realize that they, too save time and would have the practical value of helping us return as quickly as possible to a normal life later on -- by reminding us of our past lives during the process of rebuilding our lives. One could think of these objects as all having high practical value, spiritual (for lack of a better term) value, or both (although I do not accept the commonplace idea that practical and the spiritual conflict with one another).

In a similar sense that one's life is endangered by injury or illness, one's life is also endangered (but usually to a lesser degree) by the loss of property, which is an accumulation of time and effort on one's part to further one's own life. So the process of deciding what to take and what to leave -- and how best to protect what was left -- was really somewhat the same as lessening an injury from an anticipated mishap, or mitigating an illness so as to speed recovery afterwards. And with the distinct possibility that our lives would be radically altered for some time upon our return, one could, in that sense, say that the preparations for the evacuation were very much like preparations for some sort of an afterlife.

If this sounds strange (and it was), recall the full context: We were preparing ourselves to lose much of what we owned, and much of what we regarded as familiar and comfortable about our lives. But we were also taking steps towards making our lives after the storm start off as well as possible. The situation reminded me of nothing so much as the pharoahs of ancient Egypt, who were buried with what they were supposed to need for life after death. Except we were doing the packing ourselves, and we would really be alive later on! This has been the only time in my life that I can recall having found the notion of an "afterlife" valid or useful.

Of course, the packing was much more frenetic than this reflection might make it sound, because it had an especially urgent and practical end, but that did not remove its strange emotional undertone for me, its strange mixture of loss and hope. It is an experience I have learned from, though I can't say I especially recommend it. In fact, the preparations started out in a rather straightforward manner and we both gradually became aware of how much really needed to be done. The process gradually became semiautomatic, rapid, and somewhat efficient. There was no time to indulge in emotion or sentimentality.

The wife and I seemed to split our chores naturally along the "spiritual" and "practical" lines I have already described. We profited greatly from having organized our things when we moved into the house. So we already had memento trunks. She filled these the rest of the way with our wedding pictures and prized knicknacks (like the rooster-shaped alarm clock that inspired my first pet name for her). She made sure we took our photo albums. There were a few mementos of mine that I hadn't thought of that she reminded me to pack (like my first teddy bear). I went through our financial records and legal documents. I moved things from the porch that might blown away or be turned into missiles by the wind.

The process of organizing everything occupied us for most of the night, and we finished the bulk of it only around five in the morning. Aside from occasionally speaking with my wife about one choice or another, I recall doing the whole thing almost as if I were an automaton. Aside from the constant sorting and packing, my mind was mainly occupied with what I could do to save as much of what we weren't going to take as possible.

I solved that problem by the time we were done packing. In our house, the hallway in the center is the only room that has no windows. After we finished our packing, minus putting the pets and some irreplaceable artwork into the car, it was about 6:00 a.m. I took a quick shower and moved several chests of drawers into this hallway and facing the walls. I bagged and set things that could be ruined if they got wet -- like televisions and office equipment -- on top of the drawers. Just before we left, I closed all the doors to the hall.

Our SUV was packed like the Clampetts' truck on The Beverly Hillbillies by sunrise. My wife's family has some Swedish Ivy that they have passed down for generations. I'd been propagating that, so after Katrina hit New Orleans, my wife thought we needed to take a pot of that along with us. That was going to start out on the dashboard, but luckily, she found out on the phone that such a measure was unnecessary, so that plant stayed behind with all the rest. I had also considered taking my didgeridoo -- a present from my wife during our honeymoon -- but decided its awkward shape would cause us no end of inconvenience and drive us batty. I told the wife that she was I all I needed from my trip to Australia and that I was happy with her, thank you very much.

The didge stayed in the tomb-like hallway. I turned off the gas to the water heater (but our water main was inaccessible). Per radio ads, our gas stayed on. I shut off our power at the main breakers. Since the trip back from the airport had consumed a noticeable amount of gasoline, I decided to top off the tank with the two gallon can I normally use for my lawnmower. I wanted to skip stopping at the gas station and hit the road. We then realized that it might be useful to have that can with us, so we took it along.

Which way to go?

We were headed to my mother's home in rural Mississippi near Jackson that weekend anyway for my high school class reunion, so this became our intended evacuation destination. There is no direct interstate route between Houston and there, but there are two routes that take about the same amount of time, normally about 9 hours. When I was single and in grad school, also in Houston, I took what I will call the "northern route": basically up U.S. 59 and across to Jackson on Interstate 20. When I began dating my wife, whose family lived in New Orleans at the time, I began using a "southern route": across to New Orleans on Interstate 10 and northward to Jackson on Interstate 59 and U.S. 49. I personally favored the northern route for our evacuation, reasoning that U.S. 59 is almost as good as an interstate the whole way up, but would be little-used because that would not be common knowledge to Houstonians. In case the trip out of town took longer than expected, we had a motel room in Texarkana reserved for that night and, in case the storm cut off the route to Mississippi, the next.

Just as we were about to leave, my in-laws called my wife. They thought we should use the southern route based on their familiarity with it (or even go to San Antonio). On the southern route, Katrina-ravaged New Orleans could be bypassed via Interstate 12. But on top of my hunch that the in-laws did not realize Highway 59 was a good road all the way up, I'd heard that there was no gas along the southern route. And San Antonio offered the further complication that we had no idea where we'd stay once there or whether any rooms would be left so late in the game.

I held my ground. This was particularly fortunate with respect to the southern route: I heard news reports later that day of progress being so slow along that route that people were giving up and going back home. I later learned that someone I knew personally did the same thing, turning back at Beaumont. Worse still, Beaumont and Lake Charles, cities along that route, were badly hit by the storm. Based on travel times that day, we could have easily driven right into where the storm eventually landed and then had the misfortune of getting stuck there or having to abandon many of our most important possessions there. Lesson Learned #2: Drive inland first, then veer off in a direction parallel to the coast.

We were on our way at 8:00 a.m. In a sign of things to come, the McDonald's we were going to drive through for breakfast was closed. Good thing my wife had made some PB&J sandwiches just in case: They were now breakfast!

Day 2

We hopped onto the Interstate 610 Loop near the enclave suburb of Bellaire and headed north on U.S. 59, a recently-improved 10-12 lane freeway through most of the "inner loop" portion of Houston. There was little traffic. Had everyone gone already? We turned the radio to an AM news and traffic channel, where we heard of massive traffic jams and gas shortages on the very road we were taking.

I figured that by "traffic jams", they meant the slow traffic we encountered the night before on the way to the airport. It would be annoying, but at least it would be moving. BUZZ! Wrong answer! Somewhere north of Tidwell Road, we hit the wall. The tail end of the mass exodus. We went from 70 miles per hour to a dead stop. Fine. Traffic jams come to a stop all the time in Houston, and then things get rolling again. BUZZ! Wrong answer! We were stopped most of the time for the next ten minutes or so, occasionally moving forward by a car length or so. Must be an accident somewhere ahead. BUZZ! Wrong answer! Some guy got out of his car to retrieve a drink from a cooler in his trunk. The guy behind him honked like he was blocking traffic. BUZZ! Wrong answer! The guy got back into his car and we were all in the exact same location several minutes later.

I'm a road geek. I love maps and I think huge freeways like 59 are the bee's knees. But if 59 was a life-giving artery, it was clogged like I'd never seen in my life. As far as I could see, it was not the usual wide, grey expanse being navigated by vehicles of all descriptions. Instead, it was a carpet of gleaming glass and chrome as far as the eye could see on a sweltering day. The radio brought us news of drivers turning off their AC -- on this carpet and others like it all over town -- to save gas. Some drivers were simply pushing their cars ever so often. Getting a little worried, we killed the AC even though it was a humid, nearly 100 degree day. I wanted to think the breathless reports were sensationalism, but I was running from a storm. I decided to check on something.

My gas gauge was exactly on "F". It was 8:23 in the morning. The odometer read something easy to remember, like 11,200. (It was digital, but did not register tenths of a mile. WTF?) Thirty minutes later, we had covered from one half to one and a half miles (Remember: no tenths on the odometer. Boos and hisses to Chevy!). This was worrisome enough, but we had also used one eighth of a tank of gas. At this rate, we were on the fast track to joining the small legion of unfortunates out of gas and going nowhere on the roadside.

This was not acceptable. I decided at that moment to make use of two items I brought "just in case" -- and simply because I like maps. We were still inside Houston, so my Rand/McNally Streetfinder, a book whose well-indexed pages show every single street in Houston, was quite handy for getting us out of our immediate predicament. An old AAA atlas of the United States would take us to Texarkana.

Side Streets and Country Roads

When we got off the glass-and-steel carpet about another 10 minutes later at the Mount Houston exit, I still didn't realize the full extent of the traffic problem. This may seem absurd in retrospect, but how many times, exactly, have you and a couple other million people hit the road at once?A million is a huge number not really graspable on a gut, "perceptual" level. The radio reports were all local to Houston, too, and reports on where gas was were confined to where it was in town. So I had this hope -- to be proven wrong within a couple of hours -- that the problem gradually cleared up away from town. Ordinarily, maybe I would have figured that out, too, but I'd had no sleep and was dealing with situation that I hope remains a unique one in my life.

In any case, I'm glad to be able to say that we made it to Texarkana in "only" fourteen hours. (This would be something like a six-hour drive normally.) Those who stayed on 59 all the way to the official evacuation point, the town of Lufkin, took 17 hours to get there. I'm proud we did this and glad we did, but I will not claim I hatched my plan of escape all at once. I flew by the seat of my pants the whole time.

The Street Finder got us up to the suburb of Humble on a few back streets. The going was very, very slow, but unlike on 59, we knew we were getting somewhere. Indeed, at one point, we really felt like we were moving, so I checked the speedometer: "Never has fifteen miles per hour felt so liberating!" I exclaimed. My wife and I laughed. By this time, we'd heard enough gas reports to realize that we should, as a precaution, begin looking for gas any time the fuel gauge was at or below 3/4. This meant we were already looking for gas even though we were still in metro Houston. In Humble, we got close enough to 59 to see that it was hopeless as an evacuation route, and that we should at least avoid it for a little longer.

We found a gas station along our route and got a pump without having to wait in line like we thought we would based on all the radio reports. But the parking lot was packed nevertheless. I topped off the tank and refilled the lawnmower can as a precaution. And yes, this was dangerous, but until I thought of a better place to put it, I drove with the can on the floor between my legs. (Do not try this at home, or anywhere else for that matter! According to my perhaps somnolent logic, I was "running" from a storm at speeds often slower than the storm! What kind of accident could I get into?) My wife went in to get some bottled water since we hadn't had time to buy this earlier. The store was packed and it took her something on the order of 20 minutes for her to get through. We did have a few large Tupperware containers filled with tap water and had water purification tablets on the off chance we broke down in the middle of nowhere, but these were a cumbersome, last-resort measure.

While my wife was in the store, I perused the Street Finder, and found a series of Texas Farm-to-Market (FM) Roads (This is one of several idiosyncratic types of roads in the Texas state highway system.) that would get us from Humble to the next major town on 59, Cleveland. This route involved a big jog east along FM 1960 and across Lake Houston before we'd turn north on FM 2100. FM 1960, a major route, was over 30 miles per hour in some places, but traffic was often stop-and-go, mainly due to ill-timed traffic lights.

Before we get to Cleveland, we must pause for a moment for my favorite "road story" of the day. Along FM 2100 just north of FM 1960 is a town called Huffman, where we found, once again and to our great delight, a gas station with gas and without lines! We were not quite "down" to 3/4 of a tank yet, but by now, we saw and heard about enough dried-out stations that we weren't going to pass this up! I pulled in, slid my card , and started pumping. The pump pulsed about three times and stopped. At this point, a bearded guy popped up out of nowhere with the obvious news: "We're out of gas!" At the price of $3.00 per gallon, we made off with 0.057 gallons of gas, enough to fill about half a beer bottle, for which we paid the hefty sum of 0.17 American Dollars. The receipt is pictured here.

Remember when I said I removed the gas can from that dangerous place I was storing it when I found a better place for it? That gas went straight into the tank. We hit the road for Cleveland safer, but wondering where we might find our next gas. The north-south FM roads going up to Cleveland were slower, but still always moving. Ever since we hit the wall on 59, I kept track of our average speed. It was somewhere along this stretch that we finally surpassed 5 miles per hour as our average speed. This crept up all the way to 8 by the time we made it to Cleveland.

The Final Strategy

My wife was pleased at our progress, but bothered somewhat by the notion that there might not be much gas very far from 59, the "official" evacuation route. My main worry was that 59 would be horrible all the way up to I-20. I also thought that maybe -- with relatively little traffic -- small towns away from 59 might stand a better chance of having gas. She wanted to try 59 again at Cleveland and I was beginning to think that country roads were the way to go. So we devised a plan based on what we were doing anyway: We'd zig-zag around 59, taking country roads and checking on 59 from time to time. This way, if 59 ever improved, we could use it instead.

At Cleveland, it became apparent that all the traffic from the FM roads was local traffic heading to 59 to join the mass exodus. This had two potential implications: (1) 59 would probably still be a mess, which we confirmed, and (2) The country roads northward might have lighter traffic. Our next step would be to take more FM roads through the towns of Rayburn, Romayer, and Ace; and TX 146 to Livingston, a town along US 190, a road that connects 59 to Houston's other major northbound evacuation route, Interstate 45.

The traffic along this leg was faster, usually something like 30-45 mph, but there was plenty of traffic. A distressing number of gas stations were devoid of fuel. FM 787 was bumpy enough to cause one of the cats to get carsick, but Jerome, who has traveled cross-country with me, was fine. We made great time -- for that day -- to Livingston, a town of less than 10,000. This was also our next chance to check on traffic flow on 59.

Decision Time

We were just at 3/4 a tank again. We saw a gas station with gas in Livingston, but its line wrapped all the way around the block. I found the end of the line and waited there for a bit until an angry honk -- the only one I got that whole day despite arguably deserving a couple -- told me I was blocking the entrance to a car wash. "Who the hell washes a car on a day like this?" I thought. I pulled up next to the penultimate car , rolled down the windows, and turned off the engine. We sweltered for 15 minutes, cats panting and line completely stationary. "This is as close to The Grapes of Wrath as I ever want to get." I said. And then I thought: "And what if this outfit runs out of gas before we get to the head of the line?" Seeing that this line was nothing but a time sink, I decided to leave. We'd check 59 from our vantage point on U.S. 190 and, if necessary, follow 190 to Onalaska, where we could take FM 356 northward to Sebastapol and then head northeast to Lufkin.

My wife can be very fickle about my various schemes, and taking country roads was no exception. Until all the empty stations, she seemed happy with the time we were making, but we were now at the 3/4 point, so she was getting paranoid about them. We passed a few other stations in Livingston with gas and huge lines. She wanted to try one of these, but I asked her to calculate the distance it would take us to get to Lufkin first, and to get the populations of Livingston and Lufkin from the map. (The figures were out of date, but it was their relative numbers I thought would be convincing.) Distance on planned route: about 100 miles, population of Livingston: about 5000, population of Lufkin: about 30,000.

We were on U.S. 190 in heavy, slow-moving (about 15 mph) traffic after we'd gotten used to decent speeds. As I said before, this road led to the I-45, the other major northbound evacuation route. On the radio, there had been reports all day that the southbound lanes of 45 were to be opened to northbound evacuation traffic, so I figured that most of this traffic consisted of motorists frustrated with 59 who wanted to try their luck with 45. We'd turn north at Onalaska and lose these birds.

But the wife -- my navigatrix -- needed convincing. I told her what I thought was going on with 190. The other side of the road was clear, so I offered this pitch. We had plenty of gas to get to Lufkin, a town six times the size of Livingston, which itself had gas. The problem seemed to be that all these small towns were just not used to all this traffic and were getting sucked dry. If Livingston, a "big small town", had gas, the Lufkin would certainly have it, and would perhaps be large enough that we might be able to find a place with shorter lines. At worst, everyone would be turning north like us. If we saw that, I told her I'd return to Livingston for the gas, an easy trip since eastbound 190 was basically devoid of traffic.

She agreed to this. I knew we'd be heading to Lufkin in short order.

Bun Rationing

But before we were to turn north, we saw a welcome sight: A restaurant was actually open. This Sonic drive-in restaurant was the first such establishment we saw open all day. As soon as my wife pointed it out, I said we were stopping there. My last decent meal had been a lunch of sushi the day before. And while the PB&J was nice to have, this carnivore never passes up meat. So we both ordered hamburger meals. We were told that the restaurant was running low on some supplies and asked whether a hamburger with one bun would be OK. Of course it was.

At the time, I joked about whether a burger with one bun was an "open-face" or a "half-assed" sandwich, but as Miguel Cervantes would put it, I "had hunger for sauce". That was the best damned hamburger. Ever.

We left the Sonic feeling much better. Our waitress mentioned that there might be gas at the station near FM 356, but they were out. Fortunately, my prediction about the traffic was right on the money. At least 2/3 of the westbound traffic was continuing on 190, while the rest went north on FM 356.

Our average speed all the way to Lufkin was somewhere around 60 mph.

The Best Little Pit Stop in Texas

Our approach to Lufkin was on TX 94. Shortly before getting there -- I think in New Hope -- my wife spotted a short gas line. I pulled over into it. Some guy was talking to the drivers ahead of me. "I guess that's a caravan." I remembered how my original plan had entailed the use of our two beaters. This kind of improvisation would have been nearly impossible in that situation. This made me especially glad we rented one large vehicle for our escape. As I was thinking about this, the guy approached me and told me to pull ahead into a different line. This was weird. Was this a trick to cause me to give up my space? But if one thing impressed me all day at every stop, it was how remarkably civilized everyone was acting. "Are you the owner? I asked. "Yes."

I pulled up and got gas, topping off my tank and refilling the two-gallon can, which I placed in the very back of the truck this time. I pulled over to park while the wife took a pit stop and bought snacks at the store. I observed the man making sure everything was running smoothly. His station was clean. I saw him change the garbage bag himself, a pleasant contrast to the (understandably) overflowing bins every other place seemed to have. This place was an island of normalcy in an otherwise chaotic, hot, and frustrating day.

My wife got back to the SUV and we were about to go when I realized I had some unfinished business to do. I got out of the truck and went over to thank the owner. I told him he had the best-run place I'd seen all day and that I hoped he made money hand over fist for the rest of his life.

With that, we took off, making our final approach to Lufkin with a full tank of gas. All we had to do was check on US 59, which had a decent chance of being clear, what with Lufkin being "the" evacuation point.

And it was. Our trip to Lufkin from Houston on often-crowded country roads had taken us 10 hours compared to the 17 hours it took those who stayed on 59 the whole way that day. This trip normally takes only 2 1/2 hours. But at Lufkin, the road was moving at normal speeds. We rejoined 59, which goes all the way to Texarkana, and made that leg of the trip in only 4 hours.

To be continued....

Note: I think I can finish this ... saga (as it has turned out to be) in one or two more posts. In the next, I'll cover the return trip and then (either in the same post or one more) discuss some thoughts I had on the evacuation and "price gouging", which might have spared some uncertainty at the pump and/or caused more motorists to have greater foresight.

-- CAV

Updates

9-24-06: Yes. 2006. Added link to conclusion. Added strikethrough.