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"I also doubt they are calling themselves Sissy with any kind of ironic intent"

What is it? The bleached remains of some long-ago army column defeated by enemy forces or perhaps the forces of nature in desert warfare? Look a little closer and you'll see the remains of a family of tiny Pantry Moths — who knew that's what mealy worms turned into? — who had lived out their lives inside an old can of Ghirardelli chocolate powder in the farthest reaches of our kitchen cabinets. We tossed the chocolate powder but learned a thing or two about death by chocolate and parallel lives.

"I just looked at Sissy Willis's blog. The person (I am still not clear what sex/gender the person is) does not seem to be sane," writes commenter Matt Penfold at PZ Myers's science blog Pharyngula in response to an admittedly provocative comment we had left there ourselves this afternoon. We are intrigued with Mr. Penfold's scientifically-challenged powers of research and analysis, not to mention his tenuous grasp of the language:

I also doubt they are calling themselves Sissy with any kind of ironic intent. Which also suggests their grasp of English is as bad as their understanding of climate change, or since they seem to consider the current Pope to be some kind of hero, their grasp of morality.

They/themselves/their? Didn't you mean she or he, sir? Had Penfold delved a bit further, he might have been puzzled to learn that along with Pope Benedict XVI, Charles Darwin is one of our intellectual heroes. But then for him, the debate is over, the scientific consensus is in, and Sissy Willis is insane. Talk about parallel lives.

"From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful"

   

February 12, 1809 isn't just for fans of Abraham Lincoln. Another great man whose legacy — like Honest Abe's, larger than life — inspires and enlightens ever more with the passage of time, was born the very same day in the very same year. Darwin's Shrewsbury (graphic image from their site, above) invites fans to send birthday wishes to Shrewsbury's favorite son, British naturalist extraordinaire Charles Darwin, blogged here early and often.

While Leader of the Free World-Elect Barack Obama channels Abraham Lincoln as "the world" looks on in shock and awe, admirers of Charles Darwin are getting ready to celebrate their hero's 200th birthday, together with the 150th anniversary of publication of the great naturalist's earthshaking On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (full text available online here).

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one," we quoted from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in a caption accompanying this image taken from the deck of the schooner "Friendship" heading out of the Chelsea Creek on a sunset cruise three years back, "and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

We're delighted to note that that greatest of great men of our own day, Pope Benedict XVI, reiterating a point he has made before, has sent his own good wishes Darwin's way at a recent conference:

In agreement with his predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II, the holy father stated that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. He stated, “Belief in the creator does not exclude accepting the theory of evolution.” In fact, the pope bluntly asserted that the antithesis that some assume exists between the concept of creation and the theory of evolution is absurd, “… because there are so many scientific proofs in favor of evolution which appears to be a reality and enriches our knowledge of life and being as such.”

Which brings us to something David Brooks said in that February 2007 NYT op ed we cited in our previous post, something that's been puzzling us for years:

And here’s another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism’s deepest truths.

We suspect it has to do with our species' primal hard-wired fear of being watched and the concomitant — do you love that word as much as we do? — "natural tendency to believe." We are not at all surprised to find faith-based protestations on both sides of the aisle. Compare the Young Earth Creationists who "believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days on the right with the similarly willfully anti-scientific Al Gore-allied Anthropogenic Climate Changeists on the left whose fire-and-brimstone sermons declare that "the debate is over" and "scientific consensus" is the last word. The coldest winter in years be damned!

“'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives,' wrote Charles Darwin," we captioned this image last April, adding "Yes, you, Ben 'No Intelligence Allowed' Stein."

How sadly predictable. We had thought that Ben Stein's loony anti-Darwin movie was an aberration, just as we had thought Susan Sontag & Company's anti-American post-9/11 rantings and ravings would soon pass. But no. They're here to stay. This from Reason was enlightening:

Opponents of Darwin traditionally have been led by biblical literalists, whose "arguments" on the subject have been generated mostly by the Book of Genesis. Now their camp includes some of the most prominent thinkers in the conservative intellectual movement.

As a matter of historical curiosity, this new turning of neocon eyes toward heaven comes just as Pope John Paul II has officially recognized that "the theory of evolution is more than an hypothesis." Indeed, it comes as evolutionary thinking itself is shedding considerable light on an array of questions and problems, from brain growth to the development of immune systems, from sociobiology to economics, from ecology to software design. Such research is yielding anti-designer results. F.A. Hayek long ago recognized the phenomenon of "spontaneous order" and described how it arose in markets, families, and other social institutions. Now, ingenious computer models are confirming Hayek's insights. It is increasingly obvious that social systems, from commerce to language, evolve and adapt without the need for top-down planning and organization. Order in markets is generated through processes analogous to Darwinian natural selection in biology. In other words, we can indeed have apparent design without a designer; the world is demonstrably brimming with just such phenomena.

Forget about the impotent Ben Stein. Is Baracko Bama listening?

"Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness"

Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1510, Michelangelo. Fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.

"We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness," asserts William Staneski in an American Thinker essay that Lucianne calls "Probably the most important piece you will read this weekend." Staneski has a lot of good stuff to say about the Gramscian march through the institutions of the "post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day," but we are frankly horrified at his gratuitous dissing of both Darwin and the animals, two of our own staffs of life. First a few Staneski excerpts and then our take:

It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism …

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can't escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don't realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.

All well and good, and the fish "not aware of the water in which it swims" called to mind the liberal media's who-me? cluelessness regarding their own Pauline Kael bubble [via The Qand O Blog, via Maggie's]:

It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.

Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.

We weren't shocked, shocked at all, but only, once again, frankly horrified at one of our big-time fave moviemaker's, Woody Allen's totalitarianesque take on what we had thought was supposed to be a democratic election:

It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.

Forget about the electorate. These folks want an acclamation. Talk about "Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness." Speaking of which, the Vatican is a welcome voice in the wilderness:

From time to time, Catholicism can be seized with fits of enthusiasm and veer toward one extreme or another. Over the long run, however, its instinct is usually to seek the sane middle, driven by what Pope Benedict XVI has called the Catholic genius for seeking "both/and" solutions to seemingly "either/or" problems.

In Rome this week, a blow was struck for the sane middle on the most vexed issue in the modern relationship between faith and science: the theory of evolution …

Leclerc said of intelligent design that it "substitutes divine will for the mechanism which it is the province of science to study, even though this is obviously a matter of two distinct levels [of causation]."

Creationism need not apply.

Update: "Loved your post, and used it here," emails Fausta, who dives into William Staneski's "Drumbeat" — referenced above — and comes up with Obama's head:

Where is the substance? Where is the unmovable core? Where are the absolutes Obama stands for?

"Obama is indeed," she writes, "the perfect candidate for the post-modern sea."

“How can I be sure that you won’t take my words and twist them to suit some agenda that you already have?”

"We should be grateful to the Palin family. They are allowing us to ponder and to wonder at everything we all thought we always knew," writes the The Anchoress in a brilliant essay gently calling to task "all of you people howling at the Palins and at those of us in the same tribe, you who only know a caricature, you know a template that is extremely outdated; you cannot believe that a conservative woman can be a true feminist; a woman in full." McCain Blogette photo of the First Dude, Governor Palin and Nana McCain Thursday night during John McCain's acceptance speech. "I felt like my heart was going to explode with pride for her and for him," says McCain daughter Meghan of her father's announcement that Sarah Palin would be his running mate.

"When are the media elites going to read their own polls and discover the American people are antiabortion (with very few exceptions) and pro-creationism (in that they believe in a Creator)," asks Lucianne commenter DocH, responding to Times business columnist David Carr's unsourced reference in his otherwise excellent "Drawing a Bead on the Press" yesterday to Sarah Palin's "antiabortion, pro-creationism politics." Antiabortion she is, but her views regarding the teaching of creationism in schools are another question. If you define pro-creationism as DocH does as belief in a Creator, fine, but that is not what is meant by Carr or others like Charles Johnson and ourselves, who have been following the Intelligent Design movement's insidious campaign to incorporate religious teachings into public school science curricula. As Johnson explained the other day regarding disingenuous leftists' quoting out of context of Palin's statements regarding creationism:

So I was disturbed to learn of Sarah Palin’s apparent support for creationism. However, as I posted in a comment earlier, she does not appear to be the fanatical type who wants to force or sneak the teaching of creationism into public school science classrooms.

But this is going to be a point of attack for the left.

We're still waiting for a reputable journalist to delve into original sources and write a definitive piece on where Sarah Palin stands on the issue. How about it, Mr. Carr?  Enquiring minds want to know, and you're off to a flying start in your Times article, a self-acknowledged stranger in a strange land trying to understand the tribal customs of the locals:

Her cultural resonance is familiar to anyone who’s ever read a fashion makeover article or clipped “Lose the Baby Fat in a Month!” But it is fundamentally different from what we’ve come to expect from women running for higher office …

But while Ms. Palin may be unfamiliar to the hosts of Sunday morning political shows and to readers of the letters page of The Washington Post, to readers of a whole other kind of media — particularly women’s magazines — she represents the ideal blend of femininity and toughness, mother and mayor, good girl and governor. As the saying goes, “She’s just like us.” Only better …

Like a lot of delegates at the Xcel — and the woman whom they nominated as John McCain’s running mate — Ms. O’Hara was fired up by all the sudden energy, but a bit suspicious of those who were there to cover it.

“Conservatives have a bad history with The New York Times,” she said, looking at my press ID, still smiling and still very friendly. “How can I be sure that you won’t take my words and twist them to suit some agenda that you already have?”

Her friends from Montana leaned in and enjoyed the spectacle as I stammered my way through a response. I’m working on an answer because I don’t think it is the last time that question is going to come up.

Don't stop now, Mr. Carr. You're on a roll.

Update: Anchoress-lanche!

"As a grain of mustard seed"

Tiny relaxes mid morning surrounded by the English ivy that covers the neighbor's house.

"Hoo, boy - thems is some kittehs," comments ailurophile par excellence Elisson re the Chelsea Grays. Here's lookin' at you, kid.

A bristling specimen of common burdock (Arctium minus) — Old World invasive biennial forb of waste places and member of the daisy family (Compositae or Asteraceae) — has set up shop just under the forsythia by the side steps at Chelsea-by-the-Sea, a perfect place for our camera's eye to study its progress from flower to seed. The first-year rosette of basal leaves went unnoticed by us, but this year's bushy crop of stunning magenta and pink flowerheads surrounded by hooked green burrs (x 4) towering over the stairs is making quite a splash. 

You're probably aware that the "hook and loop fastener" Velcro was inspired by the structure of burdock's fruit, but did you know it all started in the Alps?

Detail of botanical illustration of Arctium minor shows cross section of flowerhead (magenta and pink) enclosed in a prickly burr or involucre, a series of bracts or phyllaries (green turning to brown when ripe) with hooks curving inward. (Flora von Deutschland Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885)

From SwissInfo.org's How a Swiss invention hooked the world:

It was in 1941 that [Velcro inventor Georges] de Mestral had his eureka moment. Walking his dog in the woods, he spotted that his woollen socks and jacket and his dog's fur were covered with burrs — small seeds or dry fruits found in many types of plant including thistles and, in this case, burdock.

Back home, de Mestral slipped a few burrs under a microscope and saw that their barbed, hook-like seeds meshed with the looped fibres in his clothes … in 1955, the hook-and-loop fastener was patented under the name Velcro, which comes from the French words "velours" (velvet) and "crochet" (hook).

Most "flower flies have "yellow-and-black stripes and are excellent mimics of wasps or bees," according to the US Forest Service site. "Flies are considered 'incidental' pollinators," adds the USDA Agricultural Research Service, "moving pollen on their body hairs from one flower to another as they search for nectar." This striking specimen was busy incidentally pollinating flowers of gold of pleasure, AKA false flax (Camelina sativa), another weedy plant of waste places that caught our camera's eye this morning along a seedy stretch of sidewalk during walkies. Camelina has "long been grown in Europe, its oil used as a lamp oil until the 18th century.

Gold of pleasure (Camelina sativa), a weedy member of the  Brassicaceae or Cruciferae (AKA the crucifers, mustard family or cabbage family) of economic plants is another one of those "volunteers" in our own backyard that promises to be a boon to mankind. According to a Journal of Applied Poultry Research study, it is "one of various oilseed crops being studied for its potential value in biofuel production. The resultant by-product of oil extraction, camelina meal (CM), could be marketable as a livestock feed.

Update: Compare profile of burdock blossom, far right, with cross-section of flowerhead in botanical illustration above.

We stumbled onto camelina's virtues the other day when the Professor commented "I certainly agree that non-food-based biofuels are the future. Corn-based ethanol is justifiable, if at all, only as a bootstrapping measure," linking to an AgWeb article by Dr. Don Panter, President of Sustainable Oils, LLC:

Most important to the debate of fuel vs. food is the fact that biodiesel can be produced from non-food crops. Camelina, for example, is a non-invasive, oilseed crop of the mustard family. It can be grown in arid conditions or rotated with cereal crops and requires low amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. Aptly nicknamed “gold of pleasure,” the high-yielding energy-crop boosts farm revenues by creating a food-plus-fuel scenario. The meal produced from crushed camelina can be used to create omega-3 enriched feed for livestock, a significant benefit that has gotten swept away in the controversy. The beauty of non-food crops like camelina is that they are here today and don’t require new technology breakthroughs, just a commitment to see them succeed.

Update II: Burdock receives a gentleman caller, one of those fuzzy flower flies that looks like a bee to the untrained eye, "but there are several features that make it easy to separate [Syrphus sp.] from a bee: the eyes are huge, the antennae are short and stubby with a bristle half-way along, there’s nowhere to carry pollen and there is only one pair of wings." 

And camelina's bounty isn't just for diesel-powered vehicles, livestock and flower flies:

Camelina's other attraction is its possible application in human nutrition. It has a unique fatty acid profile that could make it a good source of omega three and omega six fatty acids. McVicar suggests that the health food industry is currently seeking products that have improved health attributes, which might present new opportunities for camelina.

The biblical parable of the mustard seed comes to mind:

And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

                — Matthew 17:20 (King James Version)

Back to biodiesel, Rudolph Diesel himself planted the seed — a peanut seed — over a hundred years ago, as BioShuttles explains:

Biodiesel has been around for over a century. Dr. Rudolf Diesel actually invented the diesel engine to run on vegetable oil and in fact when he presented his engine at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, his engine was running on a fuel derived from peanut oil. Prior to his death in 1913 he stated that; "The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it."

"The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time." However due to the low cost of mineral oils at the time his engine was modified to run such oils. However, in European countries since the mid 1990's and in UK since 2002 reductions in biofuels duty has made the use of biodiesel economically viable as is now seen to be the "sustainable fuel of the future".

The Lord and the Invisible Hand move in mysterious ways.

Update: Maggie's links, commenting on the old saying that "The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but mosquitoes come close":

'Toon from Theo. It's wrong, though. Without mosquitoes, we would have no Gin and Tonics.

Be sure to check out all the links. It's a treasure trove, as usual.

Update II:  A treasure trove of links to all things bright and beautiful at Modulator's Friday Ark #201

Update III: Lots more things bright and beautiful at Carnival of the Cats #228, now playing at Cat.Synth.com.

"At the consideration of our comparative insignificance"

Mt. Erebus, discovered by Captain James Ross in 1841 and named after one of Her Majesty's Antarctic discovery ships under his command, was first climbed on March 10, 1908, by a party of geologists and scientists from Ernest Shackleton's 1907-09 British Antarctica Expedition. The volcano is part of Ross Island off the coast of Victoria Land in McMurdo Sound. Mt. Erebus was the only known active volcano in Anarctica at the time, but "Scientists have just now discovered an active volcano under the Antarctic ice that 'creates melt-water that lubricates the base of the ice sheet and increases the flow towards the sea,'" according to Science Daily [via Watts Up With That].

When we awoke this morning to local and national newscasters' reflexive hysteria over the latest shocking, shocking revelation of the imminence of the end of the world, precipitated by greedy, all-powerful Western man's usurpation of the forces of nature, we knew they had it all wrong and rolled over for a few more minutes of shuteye. Upon arising, we headed for the blogosphere and soon got up to speed via Maggie's Farm, where The News Junkie sent us over to An Englishman's Castle, who in turn directed us to the wondrous website of ICECAP, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, "portal to all things climate for elected officials and staffers, journalists, scientists, educators and the public."

"Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole," according to NASAs scrumptious Earth Observatory website. "The area of strongest cooling [blue] appears at the South Pole, and the region of strongest warming [red] lies along the Antarctic Peninsula. [NASA map of Antarctic Temperature Trend 1982-2004].

ICECAP in its own words:

It provides access to a new and growing global society of respected scientists and journalists that are not deniers that our climate is dynamic (the only constant in nature is change) and that man plays a role in climate change through urbanization, land use changes and the introduction of greenhouse gases and aerosols, but who also believe that natural cycles such as those in the sun and oceans are also important contributors to the global changes in our climate and weather. We worry the sole focus on greenhouse gases and the unwise reliance on imperfect climate models while ignoring real data may leave civilization unprepared for a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon.

"Last year when Antarctica set a new record for ice extent, it got no media attention," explains ICECAP Executive Director Joseph D'Aleo:

They focused on the north polar regions where the ice set record low levels. This summer when unprecedented anomalous cover continued in the Southern Hemisphere again no coverage. Then this report [the Chicken-Little one we so rudely awoke to this morning] in the news today. You probably saw it on your favorite network or internet news site (pick one, any one):

Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse - Latest Sign of Global Warming’s Impact Shocks Scientists . . .

Let’s put this in perspective. The account may be misinterpreted by some as the ice cap or a significant (vast) portion is collapsing. In reality it and all the former shelves that collapsed are small and most near the Antarctic peninsula which sticks well out from Antarctica into the currents and winds of the South Atlantic and lies in a tectonically active region with surface and subsurface active volcanic activity. The vast continent has actually cooled since 1979.

"After we left the Ross Ice Shelf yesterday, we relocated to McMurdo Sound [where] we saw Mt. Terror and for the first time Mt. Erebus," writes contemporary Antarctic traveler Stefan Töpfer at World Signia. "The sound today serves as a re-supply route for cargo vessels and for aircraft that land upon floating ice airstrips near McMurdo Station. However, continuous occupation by scientists and support staff since 1957-58 has turned Winter’s Quarter’s Bay into a markedly polluted harbour."

"This was a sight so surpassing every thing that can be imagined, and so heightened by the consciousness that we have penetrated under the guidance of our Commander, into regions far beyond what was ever deemed practicable, that it really caused a feeling of awe to steal over us at the consideration of our comparative insignificance and helplessness, and at the same time an indescribable feeling of the greatness of the Creator in the works of his hand," wrote plant explorer Joseph Hooker, describing the reaction of captain and crew upon humankind's first sighting of Mount Erebus -- the world's southernmost active volcano -- in the austral summer [that would be winter in our neck of the woods, north of the Equator] of 1841 during the first of two excursions to the Antarctic Circle by Her Majesty's discovery ships Erebus and Terror. During that trip Hooker is said to have slept with a copy of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle account of his 1831-36 South American expedition. Plant Explorers.com explains the connection:

[The Erebus and Terror, during their second expedition begun in 1842] made it safely to the Falkland Islands by April the 6th, then on to Hermite Island where Joseph was eager to botanize ever since reading of Darwin's visit only a few years before. He found that the island's cool humid climate was the perfect environment for mosses and he collected over 100 species during his stay. His other discoveries on the island were perhaps more surprising to him than any of the strange and exotic flora he had seen so far -- a number of the most common plant species closely resembled, or even appeared to be identical to, plants from England. Thus began his lifelong studies of the distribution of species.

He had met Charles Darwin briefly before the expedition, but it was after his return that their true friendship grew when the two got together to compare notes. They would remain the closest of friends for the rest of their lives, often consulting one another while working on their theories -- Hooker on his theory on the distribution of species, and Darwin on the evolution of species.

"Lenticular clouds hover over Mount Erebus volcano in McMurdo Sound where massive icebergs from the Ross Ice Shelf are clogging the sea in Antarctica," says the caption of this US Coast Guard photo. "Technically known as altocumulus standing lenticulars [they] are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, normally aligned at right-angles to the wind direction," according to Crystalinks.com, which notes that lenticular clouds have been mistaken for UFOs [because of their] characteristic lens appearance and smooth saucer-like shape."

We were struck with the contrast between Joseph Hooker's "feeling of awe . . . at the consideration of our comparative insignificance and helplessness" before nature -- or Darwin's equally awestruck "There is grandeur in this view of life" -- and the narcissistic arrogance and silliness of the Reverend Al Gore and his flock of anthropogenic-climate-change flat-earthers. ['Reminds us of the contrast between Abigail Adams's stalwartness and Michelle Obama's whining.] As we wrote in our post "There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion":

Those "few who are capable of forming a judgment" but "hold their peace" are the doublethinkers of Natan Sharansky's "fear societies," whose failure to speak up facilitates the politically correct true believers' groupthink. Those who do speak up --  Sharansky's dissidents -- are dissed and ridiculed as the messengers of bad news.  Informational and reputational cascades emanating from elite institutions drown out or shut out the voices of seekers of wisdom and truth.

How refreshing that knowledgeable dissidents like the experts of ICECAP -- we notice among them one of our personal faves, astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, as well as John Coleman, disillusioned founder of The Weather Channel -- are stepping out of the shadows. The media is a lagging indicator, but like Bugs Bunny running across the empty space, eventually they will look down and fall to earth. Science of Meaning's answer to the question "What Holds Bugs Bunny Up When He Runs Off The Cliff?" applies:

It is the human imagination which is now supporting and propelling the figure across the void. It is the creative force of the humorous imagination that has run the figure off the edge of physical space, and continued its progress in a line with human, rather than natural, logic. For, in objective terms, this scene constitutes a radical denial of the physical laws of the universe.

A radical denial of the physical laws of the universe. That explains a lot.

Update: Maggie's Farm links.

Speaking sense to nonsense

 
It might have been brunch at the Ritz in our salad days, but nowadays the perfect New Year's Day breakfast for us is homemade Eggs Bennie -- in the kitchen for Tuck, above, with the latest issue of Road & Track -- or computerside in the studio for ourselves. There are a zillion secret recipes out there for Hollandaise, but we like our own Heavenly Hollandaise best: Bring the water in a double boiler to the boil and turn off the heat. Whip up two yolks with a coupla squeezes of lemon in the top of the boiler and add 3/4 cup butter at room temperature by the tablespoonsful, whisking to blend. 'Makes enough for Eggs Benedict for two. It doesn't get any better.

"But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah," writes John Tierney in his latest NYT Science Times shout into the wind of "popular wisdom" regarding man-made global warming [AKA anthropogenic climate change]:

When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

"I didn't realize the sailors threw Jonah overboard as the cause of their troubles," we imailed our sis this afternoon [our Unitarian upbringing was strong on the wonders of nature but weak on scripture]:

We: Bush's Fault™ comes to mind.
She: A story as old as time. Look how they treated Moses.
We: Can you say JESUS!? He was despised . . . rejected. It's wonderful to have someone like Tierney at the Times speaking sense to nonsense.

More words of wisdom from Tierney:

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels . . .

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

Woohoo. We've been saying as much from our snail blogging days in the 90's on down. Nice to have John Tierney on our side.

"Just blame it on the Americans"

Don't shoot the messenger. "Now there's an alternative on the horizon that promises to be safer and cheaper by zapping [malaria, dengue feaver and West Nile] germs while sparing the mosquitoes," reports Scientific American. "The technology is hidden in an artificial flower designed to attract mosquitoes and treat them with pathogen-killing drugs that allow the insects to live and continue to perform important functions such as pollinating flowers and serving as food for animals and other insects." (Adult western malaria mosquito, Anopheles freeborni, Jack Kelly Clark photo)

"All you have to do is not screw up, and, even if you do, you just blame it on the Americans," Sgt. First Class Jacob Stockdill tells students at the Army's new Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy, reports the Wall Street Journal (subscription only). What works for the Democrats -- Bush's Fault™ -- works for other enemies of victory in the war on terror:

Six years into the Afghan war, the Army has decided its troops on the ground still don't understand well enough how to battle the Taliban insurgency. So since the spring, groups of 60 people have been attending intensive, five-day sessions in plywood classrooms in the corner of a U.S. base here, where they learn to think like a Taliban and counterpunch like a politician.

The academy's principal message: The war that began to oust a regime has evolved into a popularity contest where insurgents and counterinsurgents vie for public support and the right to rule. The implicit critique: Many U.S. and allied soldiers still arrive in the country well-trained to kill, but not to persuade.

All politics is local, and spin wins. The counterinsurgency school was set up at the recommendation of Lt. Col. John Nagl, co-author with General Petraeus of the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Dan Helmer's the point man:

In April, the Army gave a 26-year-old Rhodes scholar, Capt. Dan Helmer, six weeks to get the school up and running. Capt. Helmer tells his students, who rank as high as colonel, that the important battles here are 80% political and just 20% military. He exhorts them to go to great lengths to understand local politics, culture and history, to make sure actions they take on the battlefield help convince Afghans that the Kabul government will serve and protect them . . .

Capt. Helmer, a West Point graduate from Mantua, N.J., originally deployed to Afghanistan as a mentor for the Afghan National Police. At Oxford, he was author of a study on Israel's fight against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, where an army with overwhelming conventional superiority found itself mired against insurgents who had the vital support of the locals. Fast-talking, with deep-set eyes, a sunburned neck and a moustache that he grew out of respect for Afghanistan's hairiness-is-next-to-manliness culture, he says he thought from the start that Army training didn't prepare troops well for the intricacies of fighting the Afghan insurgency.

Hearts and minds are where it's at.

In Iraq, the U.S. has set up separate counterinsurgency academies for Iraqi and coalition students. In Afghanistan, Capt. Helmer insisted on putting troops from the 37-nation coalition into the classroom with their counterparts from the Afghan army, police and spy service. One of the school's central tenets is that foreign forces cannot win the war. Afghan security forces and government officials must take the lead in any activity, whether it's an attack on Taliban redoubts or reconstruction of a mosque, in order to increase popular support for President Hamid Karzai's government.

But nobody said it was going to be easy:

Academy instructors teach that counterinsurgents must "clear, hold and build" to insulate the public from insurgent tactics while demonstrating that the government has something better to offer . . . But as the academy students discovered, putting the theory into practice can feel like building a sand castle as the tide is coming in . . . Smaller missteps can undo months of counterinsurgency efforts . . .

As a goodwill gesture in September, coalition soldiers in Khost Province handed out soccer balls decorated with the flags of the world. One of them, the Saudi flag, bears a verse from the Koran. Rumors spread widely that the coalition was, in essence, encouraging Afghan children to put their holy book on the ground and kick it.

Goodwill and good intentions are no excuse. Teddy bears named Mohammed come to mind. Technology almost lost the war. Maybe it's time to call in the marines.

Update: Time to call in the crazies for Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities.

When scientists "join in the political fray, where they really don't belong"

"If you weren’t bright enough to do science, you could go into politics," Michael Crichton quipped in an "AEI-Brooks Institution speech awhile back. "I also come from an older and tougher tradition that regards science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else." The left's oxymoronic scientific "consensus" on anthropogenic global warming comes to mind. When people who ARE bright enough to do science -- like Dr. Frank J. Sulloway (posing above with Galápagos Giant Tortoise), who has "published extensively on the life and theories of Charles Darwin," including "Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design" -- "join in the political fray, where they really don't belong" and "where they do it really badly," observes Crichton, "they are damaging science as an enterprise."

"The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation," an LA Times reporter paraphrases David Amodio, lead author of an electroencephalograph-based study that purports to demonstrate that "liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work":

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments.

Well, yes. They stick to their principles. 

. . . whereas liberals are more open to new experiences . . . "There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said [Frank J.] Sulloway [a researcher not connected to the study], who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Yah, like liberals' support of voice-in-the-wilderness challenges by global-warming "deniers" in the human-induced-climate-change "debate." Or their openness to giving General Petraeus a chance to speak at his hearing this afternoon before "running a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the headline: 'General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House,'" as The Weekly Standard reports:

MoveOn.org has been working closely with the Democratic congressional leadership -- as an article in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine makes clear. And consider this comment by a Democratic senator from Friday's Politico: "'No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV,' noted one Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition on anonymity. 'The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.'"

More extrapolations from that brain study:

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

You're projecting again, Dr. Sulloway. Since you and your fellow liberals are so "open to new experiences," how about this one: Maybe the President's "single-minded commitment to the Iraq war" is a sign of character, while John Waffles Kerry's "perceived" flip-flopping betrays a complementary lack of character. As John McCain and Joe Lieberman ask rhetorically in today's Opinion Journal, "The president had the courage to change course on Iraq. Does Congress?"

Update: Dr. Helen links (click on "number" in the first sentence), commenting wryly,

In yet another of their "objective" studies, New York University professors draw conclusions that make liberals look good and conservatives look bad.

The good Doctor is celebrating her second blogiversary this week:

Two years ago in September of 2005, I decided to start blogging so that I would quit yelling at the television, newspaper and anyone else who would listen.

The television's and newspaper's loss is our gain.

The uses of "a well modulated meow"

Looking us right in the eye early morning, the Babe presents -- in Rich Moran's words -- "a face that defines animal beauty and comeliness."

"At what point did they realize that the simple act of looking us right in the eye, showing a face that defines animal beauty and comeliness, would make us fall in love with them?," asks Rick Moran [via Maggie's Farm], commenting on research that shows all domestic cats are descended from the East African wild cat:

I wonder when they developed the ability to tug at our heartstrings with a well modulated “meow?”. . .

Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out when cats discovered they could get more by giving less; that the ability to manipulate us, wrap us around their paw meant that they could dole out their affections by the teaspoon rather than the bushelful as lesser creatures like dogs do?

Like the great gamesmen they are, our feline betters play their cards close to the chest, "using tactical maneuvers to further [their] aims." A word to the wise, well known to all who worship at their paws, from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats:

With Cats, some say, one rule is true:
Don't speak till you are spoken to.
Myself, I do not hold with that -
I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.
But always keep in mind that he
Resents familiarity . . .

Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream;
And you might now and then supply
Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie,
Some potted grouse, or salmon paste -
He's sure to have his personal taste.

When Baby and Tiny say "meow," it's shrimp. As we wrote awhile back, "When it comes to shrimp, Tiny and Baby know how to game the system. For our part, we're willing to give them what they want in exchange for exquisite photo ops."

Update: For more exquisite photo ops of "animal beauty and comeliness," with and without backbones, check out Modulator's Friday Ark #145, Circus of the Spineless #22 -- featuring "some of the best nature blogs around" -- at Bev Wigney's Burning Silo and Carnival of the Cats #171 hosted by Frisky and Nardo, feline allies of the Father of All Cat Bloggers, Laurence Simon of TBIFOC.