The Eternal Appeal of the Apocalyptic (2)

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted earlier on the Corner:

And while we’re on the topic of doom-mongering, at least one enormously wealthy, lavishly consuming, aristocratic idler has (reports the Daily Telegraph) a few dark words for the peons. Warning that the human race itself could be in danger, Prince Charles has repeated earlier demands that (other) people should consume less. Changes need to be made to our economic system “so that Nature sits at the very heart of our thinking”. The prince also took the opportunity to remind his audience that he felt a “spiritual connection to nature”. Of course he does.

The Queen, thank heavens, is only 85. Her mother lived to be 101.

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The Eternal Appeal of the Apocalyptic

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Posted earlier on the Corner:

It helps sell religions, movies, political agendas: Is there nothing that the prospect of apocalypse cannot do?

Via AP:

Abel Ferrara made his new film “4:44 Last Day on Earth” to serve as a wake-up call to humanity over impending ecological disasters.The movie, by the director of 1992′s “Bad Lieutenant,” focuses largely on one couple — played by Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh — passing their final hours on Earth as they Skype their goodbyes to loved ones from a New York City high-rise.

“The bottom line is this film is about man’s destruction of the Earth,” Ferrara told reporters Wednesday in Venice, where the film is being shown in hopes of snaring the top Golden Lion prize later this week.

“This isn’t about a meteorite, this isn’t … some horror show. This is about humanity not coming to terms with its carbon footprint,” the director said. “It’s on us. It’s our responsibility.”

The time in the title is the exact hour before dawn when humanity ceases to exist. The exact calamity which befalls Earth’s citizens isn’t ever spelled out, although there is an “ozone-hole” theme. At one point, viewers see, as a backdrop, an image of environmental advocate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore projected on large screen TV giving an interview. “We reached out to Al, we reached out to Gore, definitely,” Ferrara said.

Of course he did.

Full disclosure: I enjoy ‘end of the world’ movies. Even 2012. I’ll be off to see this one…

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Prayer doesn’t bring rain

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

If any believers want to hazard a guess as to why God decided to ignore Texans’ official three-day prayer session for rain, it would be illuminating.  Perhaps prayers are sent without any serious expectation that they will be answered (and why is that?), so that when they are not answered, the believer feels no great disappointment and no need to explain the lack of response.  Nevertheless, we are told all the time that God does answer prayers.  Indeed, Governor Rick Perry and his followers would not have appealed to God if they weren’t confident that God, in his concern for human suffering, listens to and responds to such petitions.  So why not these?  

One would have thought that the Texans presented a worthy petition for relief, since the failure to end the drought has resulted in the loss of life and massive loss of livelihood and property.   Perhaps the number of prayers sent God’s way didn’t reach a quorum.   Or were not heartfelt enough.   Or maybe Texans don’t in fact deserve to be relieved of draught. 

Catholic theologians up to the Pope himself stress that God is Reason and compatible with reason.  Presumably, therefore, the causes and meaning of his behavior are accessible to human understanding and not shrouded in capriciousness and mystery.   Still, it’s hard to come up with a reason why he couldn’t have sent some rain in response to the Texans’ request, since he does so many good things for us everyday in response to prayer, theologians like Michael Novak assure us. 

The possible suggestion that God has in fact answered the Texans’ prayers, but we can’t hope to understand how, would be a bit hard to accept here as elsewhere. 

Governor Perry seems to have given up on the divine angle for now, however, and is asking for aid from a more reliable source: the federal government.

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Death by Commission

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Amy Zegart,  a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, warns in the Los Angeles Times today that the U.S. sure as heck better not ratchet down its massive anti-terrorism efforts and its still-lingering fear rhetoric:

The fight is nowhere close to being won, and America’s most perilous times may lie ahead.

Among her evidence for the ongoing, even escalating, nature of the threat, especially from weapons of mass destruction:

In 1995, a Japanese cult released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring thousands. It was the first WMD terrorist attack in modern history, and it sparked a wave of

Wait for it . . . “Copy cat attacks?”  “Successful efforts by anti-American terrorist groups to develop stockpiles of sarin gas?”  No: the Tokyo subway attack “sparked a wave of presidential terrorism commissions years before Bin Laden became a household name.”  

There’s more: a group of terrorism experts in 2005 mostly did not believe that “the odds of a nuclear attack on the U.S. were negligible.”   Even if “not negligible” means: requiring never-wavering massive expenditures on “homeland security” throughout the land and reactionary airport screening protocols, these are presumably some of the same experts who predicted in 2005 that there would be a biological attack on the U.S. by 2010.

 

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Magical Thinking Watch: Whiteboards in every classroom, a literate student in every home

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Education technology does not seem to be solving our education woes.  So concludes this impressively-reported New York Times story on an Arizona school district that has spent $33 million since 2006 on the ed. establishment’s usual panaceas of “whiteboards,” laptops, and interactive computer programs.  Despite this outpouring from the taxpayer cornucopia, test scores have remained flat.  

Big surprise.  Educational technology would be the solution to mediocre academic performance only if the lack of educational technology were the cause.  Somehow, however, John Milton managed to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew without an Ipad, as did thousands of other children far less gifted than he; generations upon generations have mastered algebra, geometry, and the rudiments of historical knowledge just reading from—gasp!—books! 

The most important tools in the classroom are self-discipline, perseverance, and a desire to learn (or, failing that, fear of the consequences for not doing so).  Don’t expect the ed. establishment and its by now massive orbiting planetary system of consultants, foundations, and contractors to acknowledge that fact, however, since it would entail getting back to basics, restoring order, intellectual authority, and discipline in the classroom, and demanding hard work from children and commitment from parents.  All that is far too judgmental and socially divisive.  Not to mention that it would defund the highly-profitable ed. industry

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No roads for me but a new hospital for thee?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s on-again, off-again suggestion that federal disaster relief for Hurrican Irene victims be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget is a courageous precedent to set against further deficit spending.   And yet I wonder how many of the Republicans who have backed that idea, including Cantor himself, require similar offsets for “counterinsurgency” infrastructure projects abroad–which David Petraeus, undoubtedly to great huzzahs in the Republican establishment, recently warned against cutting.    The belief that by building roads and hospitals in Afghanistan, America has the power to change that society in significant and positive ways, and to foster long-term good will towards the U.S., strikes me as no less fanciful than any Great Society faith in the ability of government social service programs to eradicate dysfunctional underclass behavior.   Restoring electricity and rebuilding bridges in New Jersey and Vermont, by contrast, is eminently doable and a service that American citizens can legitimately expect their government to provide–even if the costs of doing so should be offset during this time of spiralling deficits.

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Diversity at the NIH

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Bradlaugh

Heather:

Good post on the Columbia "diversity" rackets.

On the general issue of racially-proportionate representation in this and that, I’ve done a couple of rounds with the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research at their website.

The topic is the recent NIH study on the lack of diversity in grant awards.

If you look at the Office of Extramural Research website you’ll see my comment at 11:09 am on September 1.

This raised outrage from "Saddened by Blatant Racism in Science" at 9:43 pm (oh, cheer up, there!) and an incomprehensible, and statistically illiterate, critique from "DrugMonkey" at 7:34 am on September 2.

My responses are "awaiting moderation." In case they don’t make it, they are:

•  To "Saddened by Blatant Racism in Science":

Alas, in science data is countered by data, not by disgust or offense.

To "DrugMonkey":

I cannot see what range restriction has to do with it.

Let us suppose, as a fair approximation, that the U.S. population contains 40m blacks, 40m Hispanics, and 220m non-Hispanic whites. Let us further suppose that the IQ distributions have means 85, 89, and 100, with standard deviations 15 in each case. Then the numbers of Americans out beyond 130 IQ are, b-H-w, in thousands: 54, 125, 5000. The numbers out beyond 3SD are, also in thousands: 1.3, 4, 297. This is the most elementary statistics (I used Microsoft Excel). These numbers offer a perfectly sufficient explanation for the observed disparities at the grant-awarding level. If they do not, tell me why they do not.

You say that success in science is not correlated with "mental horsepower" (which I suppose means IQ). Two sentences later you say that: "You don’t get very far in these careers with a population mean IQ." These statements seem to me to be contradictory.

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Columbia Prez. Lee Bollinger is accused of not valuing “diversity”

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Occasionally, the racial victimology and extortion complex provides some entertaining and pleasant justice.  The accusation that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is insufficiently committed to diversity, and, by implication, is racist, is one of those moments. 

The departure of two black administrators from Columbia has provoked the racism insinuations from two black Columbia professors.  Delightfully, the New York Times saw fit to amplify their charges in a long, vacuous story on the front page of its New York section.   Frederick Harris, the director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, opined:

the departures “have shaken my confidence — as well as the confidence of many others at Columbia — in the ability of Columbia to maintain diverse leadership at the top.”

June Cross, an associate professor at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism, told the Times:

 “I’m not saying race is the issue, but it is the subtext.”

Ungrounded innuendo doesn’t get any more devious than that.  What does it mean for race to be a “subtext” but not an “issue”?  This gem of obscurantism comes from a journalism professor, someone supposedly able to teach students how to write clearly. 

Neither of the two departed administrators, Michele Moody-Adams and Claude Steele,  are themselves charging racism—at least yet.   Of course, Steele is exquisitely careful to preserve the legitimacy of all such racial accusations as a general matter:

the questions about racial implications, he said, were a “rational reaction.”

Really?  “Rational” to cry racism without the slightest evidence of racial animus?  And yet even Steele denies that in this case, his “identity” had anything to do with his departure. Continue reading →

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There’s liberal, and liberal….

Posted on September 5, 2011 by David Hume

Most of the time I think that American liberal shift from that term to “progressive” is kind of strange, since everyone knows that progressive means liberal. But sometimes I wonder if one of its positive benefits is to dampen the confusion which always occurs when one conflates the American (and somewhat Anglo) usage of the term liberal with the international usage. I thought of this when seeing this article in The New York Times, State Election Adds to Gains by Liberals in Germany:

Parties on the German left prevailed in a regional election in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday, with the center-left Social Democrats swept back to power and the Greens elected to the regional parliament for the first time, according to preliminary results.

…

The biggest losers in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were the Free Democrats, a pro-business party that is a coalition partner with Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the federal government. The party won only 3 percent of the state vote, after winning more than 9 percent in 2006. The Free Democrats will be excluded from the regional parliament because they failed to win at least 5 percent of the votes, the minimum required.

First, observe that the term “liberal” is not used once in the article itself. The term “left” is used. But the headline uses liberal. Why? I assume that the headline writer is not familiar with the German political scene, and naturally translated “center-left” as “liberal” because that is what would come to mind in the United States. But the reality is that in Germany the pro-business Free Democrats are the liberals! Liberal in the classical and European sense. This isn’t some reading-between-the-lines understanding, the Free Democrats are explicitly a liberal party. From Wikipedia:

The FDP, which strongly supports human rights, civil liberties, and internationalism, has shifted from the centre to the centre-right over time. Since the 1980s, the party has firmly pushed economic liberalism, and has aligned itself closely to the promotion of free markets and privatisation. It is a member of the Liberal International and European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party, and is the joint-largest member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group in the European Parliament.

To make it more clear, its youth wing is called the “Young Liberals”, Junge Liberale in German. So naturally when I read the title I was shocked, as I knew that the FDP was going through some hard times.

This is all rather amusing and without much substance. But, it does show that The New York Times is not quite so cosmopolitan as to deftly negotiate different terminologies in a way which doesn’t manage to garble.

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Bachmann interprets Hurricane Irene and Perry prays for rain

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Michelle Bachman recently suggested that the summer’s catastrophic weather reflects God’s displeasure with the course of American politics:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians . . . We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said: ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”

Predictably, she has now retracted her theological claims and says she was just joking. 

If the earthquake and hurricane did not represent God’s will, what did they represent in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient God?  Screw-ups?  Things that just slipped by his attention?  Any believer who dares articulate the unavoidable implications of religious practice these days, however,  will be forced into just such a recantation as Bachmann’s, for religious faith conflicts with what, for contemporary society, is the far more important secular ethic of tolerance and inclusion. 

This spring, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a proclamation declaring April 22 to April 24 as “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”   Now what is logically entailed by such a proclamation?  The same implications regarding divine will as were behind Bachmann’s unacceptable gloss:

1.  That God has omnipotent power over earthly events.
2.  That such power exists whether the power-holder decides to change or to maintain a status quo: both action and inaction represent deliberate Godly intentions towards reality. 
3.  That if God wants to end the Texan drought, he can.
4.  That God is aware of our prayers. 
5.  That God has the capacity to act upon our prayers.
Specifically to Perry’s proclamation (and to every other such “group day of prayer”):
6.  That God employs democratic pollsters who tabulate public opinion: the more people praying to him to take a particular course of action, the more likely it is he will rouse himself to that action (this corollary of all such calls to collective prayer conflicts of course with the equally prevalent meme that all it takes is one voice crying out for help to move God to action). Continue reading →

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