Month: January 2011

A reader writes:

Just a thank you for posting the Mental Health Break, "Growing is Forever."  Those redwood groves are where I grew up.  I spent endless hours as a child exploring them, crawling inside the hollow trunks of fallen giants, catching salamanders and chewing the sweet stems of the sorrel that grow at the base of these trees.  (Redwood sorrel is the shamrock-y looking stuff you see at about one minute in.)  I was a boy scout in Humboldt County, where this video was shot, and we camped in those damp groves, and our fathers and older brothers went into the forests to cut them down, or to the mills to turn them into lumber or pulp.  Fortunately, some of the groves have been saved, and if you are lucky one day you will find yourself in one.  If you are really lucky, it will be a quiet, foggy day and you will be alone in the grove, and you will notice how soft is the carpet of rust red needles the trees have shed over years and years and you will lie supine and gaze up through the mist and be amazed.

Humboldt is also known for another kind of greenery. On a post-Christmas note, one of my unexpected pleasures was the new BBC/Discovery Life documentary series. Even Oprah's narration didn't irritate. The episode on plant life was mind-blowing – a near miraculous fusion of HD and stop-motion.

Jonah Lehrer revisits the "tendency of many exciting scientific results to fade over time":

One of the sad ironies of scientific denialism is that we tend to be skeptical of precisely the wrong kind of scientific claims. Natural selection and climate change have been verified in thousands of different ways by thousands of different scientists working in many different fields. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that such theories won’t change or get modified—the strength of science is that nothing is settled.) Instead of wasting public debate on solid theories, I wish we’d spend more time considering the value of second-generation antipsychotics or the verity of the latest gene-association study.

"I screwed around in New Orleans for four years, like, 'What do I want to do with the rest of my life?' Then I got online. I said, I have nothing better to do than to be online and to be here at the very beginning. Very very lucky. I've been doing this for fifteen years because I screwed up in college. So when I go to colleges to give speeches I said, 'Drink.' (laughter) And I still do believe that. That's somewhat – and I tell the parents when I talk to Lincoln clubs, I say, 'You should give your kids an extra 50 dollars a month to drink.' And it's not – well obviously there's the Internet now. But if your kid can survive the indoctrination process in college he or she will be okay. And that's obviously where the worst bias happens in the world. So anything to get you through those four to six or so years," – publisher Andrew Breitbart.

Last week Andrew Gelman labeled the above bar graph his "graph of the year" because of its ordinariness: 

Bill James (and others) have pointed out that true racial equality in baseball came, not when superstars such as Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays started joining major league rosters, but when there was room for ordinary black players to join their equally unexceptional white colleagues on the bench. Similarly, graphical methods have truly arrived when journalists use graphs to make ordinary, unexceptional points in a clearer way.

Over at National Review, Rich Lowry has written a daring column about American greatness:

When the likes of Marco Rubio, the new Republican senator from Florida, say this is the greatest country ever, sophisticated opinion-makers cluck and roll their eyes. What a noxious tea-party nostrum. How chauvinistic. What hubris.

Yet, what other countries deserve this designation?

His conclusion: "Our greatness is simply a fact."

Somehow Lowry fails to grasp why this kind of assertion is so, well, fatuous and irritating. Imagine that once a month or so, Michael Jordan called a press conference, confidently listed his achievements as a basketball player, and insisted, "My greatness is simply a fact." He'd be correct: he was a spectacular basketball player, arguably the best in history. Same with Tiger Woods. Or Stephen Hawking. On the other hand, we're put off when people announce their own greatness – experience has taught that they're usually doing so because they're a braggart, or a narcissist, or a bully. (In Rich Lowry's case, it's intellectual bullying – wielding the collective club of nationalism against genuine worries about America's fiscal bankruptcy, academic decline, and economic stagnation).

So it goes when conservatives invoke the greatness of America. The rhetoric that follows is inevitably political. When Marco Rubio lauds the USA, we roll our eyes because we have not had our skepticism of politicians sugically removed: we understand that politicians pin on flag lapels and talk about the greatness of America because they're calculating pols, not because they think more highly of the United States than the rest of us. Our eyes tend to roll when politicians kiss babies too. That isn't because we object to the notion that babies are lovable – merely because most politicians aren't. Especially when uttering fatuous platitudes.

Mashups were made for this:

(Hat tip: Amanda Dobbins)

Arnold Kling muses:

I just cannot buy into pacifism as some libertarians express it. It seems to me that some libertarians link arms with the far left as blame-America-firsters, with scathing attacks on America’s military and its foreign policy. I am not sure what constructive solutions come from this stance. Sure, it would be great if nationalism and tribalism would wither away, we could have open borders, and no wars. But that is not the world we live in. I think that one of my favorite Presidents for foreign policy was Eisenhower, who kept us out of Vietnam and spoke out against the military-industrial complex. But he believed in national defense, and in an imperfect world, so do I.

There's not much in his post I'd disagree with in principle. I am no pacifist, believe in the prudent use of military force as a last resort and as leverage for diplomacy, have no illusions about nationalism or fundamentalism disappearing any time ever, and believe in policing national borders. But in practice, right now, after the last ten years … well, as Will Wilkinson puts it:

To my mind, the first question is whether America’s military and foreign policy deserve withering criticism, and the answer is, Yes, it does. This isn’t a matter of “blaming America first”. It’s a matter of honestly evaluating American policy and laying the blame where the blame is due.

What does this kind criticism accomplish? What does telling the truth about anything accomplish? Ideally, when we square ourselves to uncomfortable truths about policy, we change our minds. Obviously, nationalism and other forms of tribalism are not on the cusp of extinction, but it’s a major matter of life and death to keep them in check. It is not all or nothing. Simply acquiescing to the inevitable influence of humanity’s most toxic impulses is dangerously fatalistic. A better world is by definition not the world we live in. But we can bring a better world about. We’ve done it before. A world with more porous borders and fewer wars would be a great achievement, and it’s not an impossible dream as long as people don’t reckon it’s impossible.

He concludes by insisting that sharp criticism of American foreign policy isn't at odds with support for national defense. That's exactly right. In fact, one cogent line of criticism is that the United States makes itself more vulnerable to attack by terrorists when our military campaigns in far flung countries involve dead innocents, contentious patrols of foreign populations, and meddling in various governments.

Yes, the Santa outfit is still up there in the cartoon. Because it's still Christmas. The liturgical season ends January 6, the Feast of The Epiphany. And the Epiphany is the moment we Christians say we truly understand what just happened – it isn't the final, fizzled squib of Christmas, it's the moment of retrospective insight that lights everything up at last:

The epiphany that unfolds from this freaky incarnation works both ways. If the person and the life of Jesus Christ taught us humans everything we need to know about God, that life also taught God what it is like to be one of us.

Some Christians balk at this notion of God learning. An almighty and omniscient being, they say, doesn't need to learn. But this is part of the story. The story tells us this happened too.

"Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house," the messenger tells Job. "And suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead; I alone have escaped to tell you."

When Job learned that his children had died, he wept. But God did not weep.

Jesus wept.

The Incarnation remains the corner-stone of my own faith – because it is literally the only way I see myself coming anywhere close to the divine. It is the identification of the Godhead with the human that is the true surprise of Christianity. Not just the inhabiting of our souls but the sharing of our bodies and feelings and, yes, even absence from God. Why else do we weep?

(Photo: An Orthodox Belarussian believer plunges himself into icy waters as part of Epiphany holiday celebrations in Minsk early on January 19, 2010. Scantily clad Orthodox Christians braved freezing temperatures to immerse themselves in ice holes in rivers and lakes to celebrate the Epiphany religious holiday. By Maxim Malinovsky/AFP/Getty Images.)

As Egypt's Copts reel from murderous violence, Marty's knee jerks:

Alright, I'll note the most important caveat: it is not Islam but Islamists and Islamism that are at fault in this ongoing outrage. But still! Wouldn't you think there'd be a protest or two somewhere in the arc of Muslim faith that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco and southwards to the deepest reaches of Africa? OK, maybe it takes courage in those lands to stand up and say, "No, this is not the Islam I was taught and in which I believe."

Really? Claire Berlinski cites multiple examples of protests by Muslims:

…it is just factually wrong to say there is no evidence of revulsion in the Islamic world. Why does it matter? Because it's too easy to adhere to this narrative--all of Islam's the problem, somehow–in place of asking the serious questions that need to be asked about this bombing.

…some group clearly is trying to start a sectarian war, and may well succeed–an unimaginable catastrophe for Egypt and for the region. It's pretty damned important to know which group. It matters a lot whether this was the work of al Qaeda or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The implications would be very different. The answer "Don't get bogged down in the details, all Muslims are the problem–they're either doing this or they support it somehow" is not remotely useful to formulating any kind of policy response (and also not true).