Month: March 2011

While reviewing James Gleick’s new book, The Information, Nick Carr warns that the "danger in taking a mathematical view of information, with its stress on maximizing the speed of communication, is that it encourages us to value efficiency over expressiveness, quantity over quality":

At a technology conference last year, Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt tried to put our current “information explosion” into historical perspective. Today, he said, we create as much information in 48 hours—five billion gigabytes worth—as was created “between the birth of the world and 2003.” It’s an astonishing comparison, and it seems to illuminate something important about the times we live in. But the harder you look at Schmidt’s numbers, the fuzzier they become. What does it mean to create information? When we measure information, what exactly are we measuring? What the heck is “information,” anyway?

Pakistani Christian women mourn the death of minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti in Islamabad on March 2, 2011. Gunmen shot dead the Catholic Pakistani government minister in broad daylight claiming a second high-profile victim among beleaguered opponents of an Islamic blasphemy law. By Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Images.

One country criminalizes disgusting, bigoted speech, even by someone obviously shitfaced; the other protects it, even when it is horribly insensitive and perfectly sober. I'm glad I live here.

In Ohio's legislation to curtail public sector union collective bargaining rights – just passed by the Senate – the following passage exists:

Sec. 3101.01 of S.B. 5: … A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.

So a blanket and total ban on any form of legal protections for gay couples, including any semblance of even domestic partnerships or civil unions, is, as one Republican put it, the "first big step in restoring fiscal responsibility in Ohio." And so the Tea Party slowly reveals itself.

[Update: an Ohio reader lets me know that this language merely reiterates the Ohio Revised Code since the Ohio Constitution was amended by ballot initiative in November 2004 to define marriage to be between a man and a woman. Its purpose in the bill is to strip out the benefits that would be affected by collective bargaining.)

Adrian Covert explains how a dating site helped Libya's opposition coordinate:

On a Muslim dating site called Mawada, there’s a man with a profile titled “Where Is Miriam?” He will frequently receive messages from other Muslim women which read something along the lines of “may your day be filled with Jasmine.” He’s also quite popular with the ladies, amassing over 171,000 admirers. But neither “Where Is Miriam,” nor his admirers are interested in love. They’re interested in toppling the Libyan regime led by Muammar Gaddafi.

According to ABC News, the dating site had been used over the past couple of weeks as a clandestine location to exchange information and words of encouragement regarding the citizen uprisings in Libya.

Goldblog says that Benedict XVI's eviceration of the toxic myth that the Jewish people were somehow collectively responsible for the death of Jesus is news. The scope and strength of the condemnation may be stronger than in the past (Jim Martin says it is), and if it serves as a reminder of the pathology in the era of Galliano, Qaradawi and Gibson, so much the better. But, as Jim notes, the Second Vatican Council made this clear long, long ago in Nostra Aetate, a document whose anniversary was recently commemmorated by the US Congress. The Council has more authority than the Pope – something non-Catholics also sometimes forgivably fail to understand. But this leaked quote from Benedict is admirably clear:

Now we must ask: who exactly were Jesus’ accusers?  Who insisted that he be condemned to death? According to John it was simply “the Jews.” But John’s use of this expression does not in any way indicate – as the modern reader might suppose – the people of Israel in general, even less is it “racist” in character.  After all, John himself was ethnically a Jew, as were Jesus and all his followers.  The entire early Christian community was made up of Jews.  In John’s Gospel this word has a precise and clearly defined meaning: he is referring to the Temple aristocracy.

And just to make sure people get it: the Romans executed Jesus of Nazareth. That does not mean we should regard all modern Italians as somehow suspect, for Pete's sake. But anti-Semitism is not a rational impulse. And I regard it as shameful that it took decades after the Holocaust for the Church to take this important stand, especially since anti-Semitism was all but created by Christianity. Money quote from Nostra Aetate:

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God's all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.

Dana Goldstein examines the data:

Simply put–and decades of polling on class size backs this up–Americans love the idea of their children getting more one-on-one attention from teachers. Indeed, OECD data shows the U.S. has one of the world's largest gaps between average public school class size (23.6 sstudents) and average private school class size (19.4 students), suggesting that small class size is one of the main perks affluent Americans are paying for when they pull their kids out of public schools.

All that said, it's certainly true that small class size is not clearly correlated with high achievement–and neither is large class size.

Nine Afghan boys, doing nothing but collect firewood, were mistakenly killed by US helicopter gunners in an area soon to be abandoned by NATO anyway:

“We were almost done collecting the wood when suddenly we saw the helicopters come,” said Hemad, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “There were two of them. The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting. They fired a rocket which landed on a tree. The tree branches fell over me and shrapnel hit my right hand and my side.”

The tree, Hemad said, saved his life by covering him so that he could not be seen by the helicopters, which, he said, “shot the boys one after another.”

Petraeus has offered a rare personal apology. Of course this was a mistake. But it reinforces the human toll of fighting an insurgency you often cannot see in a region you cannot fully control where insurgents and civilians are often interchangeable. At some point, the inevitability of this kind of civilian death makes one reassess the justness of this long, long war – and the chances of "success" whatever that now means.

Can you imagine how we would feel if nine American boys were slaughtered from the air by an occupying power? Does anyone think this kind of mistake – inevitable in such a war zone – can do anything but help the insurgency?

Even as gross generalizations go, this is rather harsh:

Intellectuals have a tendency to become whores. They are not especially well paid, and they resent the fact. But modest compensation is not the thing that bothers them the most. What they really crave is recognition, and in its pursuit they are apt to become slaves to fashion. But pursuing the latest intellectual fad is not the greatest of the sins that they are inclined to commit – for they are even more apt to adopt a servile and submissive posture when in the presence of political power. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all had an intellectual claque in the West. Fidel Castro still does. Even Kim Jong-il and Muamar Gaddafi have had such admirers.

Obviously, antagonism to intellectuals is nothing new. But it's strange to read that passage and juxtapose it with its author's background: 

After reading Litterae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship from 1971-1974, Paul A. Rahe completed a Ph.D. in ancient history at Yale University under the direction of Donald Kagan in 1977. In subsequent years, he taught at Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, and the University of Tulsa, where he spent twenty-four years before accepting a position at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History and Political Science and holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage…

In the course of his career, Professor Rahe has published dozens of chapters on related subjects in edited books and scholarly articles in journals such as The American Journal of Philology, Historia, The American Journal of Archaeology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, The American Journal of Business and Professional Ethics, The Journal of the Historical Society, The National Interest, The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly, and History of Political Thought. He spent two years in Istanbul, Turkey in the mid-1980s as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs; he has been awarded research fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation; and he has held research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Study, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C. , Clare College at Cambridge University, All Souls College at Oxford University, and the American Academy in Berlin.

The Onion's version of the growing divides here. Dish fave:

Nov. 19, 2010: Mississippi governor Haley Barbour takes a swing at Mitt Romney, misses, and then has to sit down for 45 minutes to catch his breath.