tsujigiri

The editorial comments of Chris and James, covering the news, science, religion, politics and culture.

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." -Douglas Adams

Saturday, May 17, 2003

Bill Miller on God and George W. Bush. Miller thinks that the real story is not that Bush is a puppet of crafty Christian groups bent on installing a Christian theocracy, but that Bush and the Republican Party are bent on making the pious in America an integral part of the Republican Party base.
However labeled, Mr. Bush's faith entails a direct relationship between the believer and God. It does not provide a pope, or any other intermediate authority figure. Nor does Mr. Bush's religion provide a very specific playbook, except the Bible, and among born-again Christians that book can be regarded as anything from a collection of inspirational poetry to a literal recipe for life. (Mr. Bush gives no sign of being among the literalists.)
Is that supposed to be a comfort? Should I be soothed by the notion that the POTUS doesn't necessarily think that the story of Elisha and the She-Bears is literally true? But, being a Bible-believing Christian, Bush must agree that the message should be taken seriously: if children tease bald men, the Lord will kill them in a ghastly manner. This part was relevant, too:
Mr. Bush startled Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the devout Muslim who now leads Turkey, by declaring: "You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in the Almighty. That's why we'll be great partners." It is probably not entirely irrelevant to our international relations that Tony Blair is, as one British columnist put it, "the most overtly pious leader since Gladstone," while Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder of Germany are adamantly secular. Mr. Schröder was the first German chancellor to refuse to end his oath of office with the customary "so help me God."
Good for Schroder. Some people get separationism and some don't. And those who do are often at a political disadvantage: Jimmy Carter, while personally a very devoutly religious man, understood separationism and ended his speeches with "Thank you and good night," rather than, "And God Bless America," like everyone else. And he was a one-termer. Ronald Reagan smiled while he raped the country, and so shamelessly pandered to his hard-core religious political base that he has become a Republican deity and his actions are a blueprint for political success. The most impressive thing about George W. Bush is that he actually seems to be a worse president than Reagan. If you had suggested, in 1988, that someone could damage the US more than Reagan... And this is interesting:
As for the enduring notion that Mr. Bush takes his instructions from the organized Christian right, it misses a much more interesting story: as an independent political structure, the Christian right is dying. For one thing, the organizations that hit their stride in the 1980's have waned. The Moral Majority is long gone. The Christian Coalition is withering. Bombastic evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have aged into irrelevance, and now exist mainly as ludicrous foils. Their attempt to turn the war on terror into a religious war — Mr. Robertson called the prophet Muhammad "a wild-eyed fanatic," and Franklin Graham, the preacher son of Billy Graham and a friend of Mr. Bush's, described Islam as "evil" — afforded Mr. Bush a chance to play ecumenical healer by rebuking them.
I'm not sure the rebuke wasn't more obligatory and half-hearted than an example of Bush's steadfast inclusionism. The Christian right dying seems like a good thing, but as the article notes
...many local activists have gravitated into the Republican Party as county chairmen and campaign consultants. Once an independent force hammering at the president and Congress, they are now an institutional part of the party base.
Great. Now they're going to be operating at the grass roots level, where I can't see them as well. Fabulous.

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

An unsettling theme of the past year has been the string of high-visibility, dramatic, career-destroying moves by professionals who in some way hold the public's trust. I suppose these include all the high-profile accounting scandals, insider trading scandals, and bogus stock research fiascos. But what I find more unsettling than financial scandals (which are not really that suprising) are young professionals, pursuing somewhat idealized fields, who have torpedoed their careers at the outset in quite heinous ways. The first of these that I noticed was Thad Roberts, who was a friend of mine for several years before he became a NASA intern. While in Houston, he involved himself in a half-cocked scheme to steal a safe full of moon rocks from the Apollo missions. Here was a guy who I really respected. He was bright, energetic, charismatic, and motivated, with the dream of becoming an astronaut. He is one of the few fellow students in my experience who could actually help me understand something in class (usually if I don't get, no one else does either). He had a good life, and he had clear dreams and goals, and I admired him. Some of my own choices have been partly motivated by a desire to emulate him. And then he does that... I've spent a lot of time churning over this. Meanwhile, Hendrik Schon was busy falsifying experimental data for his PhD thesis at Delf University. He then went on to falsify experiments at Bell Labs. In September, an investigative committee found him guilty of scientific misconduct. Schon had published a rediculous number of papers, many of them in the journals Science and Nature. Once his fraud was discovered, it resulted in the largest block retraction in the history of Science [link]. Eight papers were retracted by Schon's various co-authors. Papers in Nature also were retracted. Not that anyone reads these minor journals... Schon's actions disturb me because he is professionally not too distant from me. I understand the drive to make things work. I've often sat watching a statistical measurement and thought that perhaps I would get a better result if I threw out the current measurement and started it over. That isn't fraudulent, but it is not good science. I understand the desire to see something work, and the pressure of deadlings and the need for publications. It would be very easy to rationalize one or two small overstatements, or a massaging of the results for aesthetic appeal. But how long is it before you've stolen your moon samples, sold them on the black market, replaced them in the lab with chunks of asphalt, and then written scores of widely read papers about how the moon is covered in asphalt? Once you've fabricated all that impressive research, maybe Jayson Blair can help you get famous with a favorably embellished article in the New York Times. Of course it is unsettling when someone is caught repeatedly falsifying events in the New York Times. I'm not too worried about Blair, though, because the stuff he falsified was evidently nothing that I ever read or would care about very much. The most disconcerting thing to me about the Times' long article is its occassional references to Blair's grooming and dietary habits: "Jerry Gray, one of several Times editors to become mentors to Mr. Blair, repeatedly warned him that he was too sloppy — in his reporting and in his appearance." I wish I knew what they meant by that. Was he not abiding by the dress code? Failing to shave regularly? Another statement in the article uses the term "eccentricity" in reference to Blair's appearance. Another quote from the article: Blair's editor said, "I told him that he needed to find a different way to nourish himself than drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machines." Another editor later said of Blair, "He works the way he lives — sloppily." Some of these comments are just a bit too cryptic. I suppose what really impacts me in all of these stories is the realization that I can still screw up very dramatically. After so many years of work it seems impossible to think that I might discard my career before I really even get started. But these guys managed to do it. I always wonder what happens to these people next. Where will they be in ten years? Can Thad or Hendrik ever go back to science? Can they recover from such high crimes, like Iran-Contra conspirators? Or will they suffer a fate of oblivion, like the DC mayoral aide who said "niggardly?" I asked some physics professors at Utah what they thought about this. They suggested Thad might change his name and start over as a student, but no one would work with him if they knew who he was or what he'd done. There but for the grace of Chance go I.

Sunday, May 11, 2003

Spirits Get the Blame in Cambodian Illness: The people of a couple of tiny villages in Cambodia, Ping and Bornhok, have been afflicted by a disease that resembles SARS, but, unlike SARS, responds to antibiotics. The villagers blame the spirits. The NYTimes article is here. The great thing about the article is that it covers, at length, the different spirits and what they're responsible for.
Arak Chantoo, the mountain spirit, is the Zeus of the pantheon, and when it is angry it is believed to bring chest pains, headache, dizziness, high fever, hydrophobia and sometimes death, anthropologists say.
Hydrophobia? This is nice, as well:
One shaman told the people of Ping that they were being punished for felling sacred trees. Another told the family of a 16-year-old girl named Mel — one of the first to die — that she was being punished for having a sexual affair.
And if you like your proof to be of the incontrovertible sort:
"I know the disease was caused by spirits because after we held a big ceremony with all the villagers, people stopped dying and didn't get sick any more," the village chief said.
Those ridiculous savages. Meanwhile, back in civilization -- namely, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England -- prayers are being said for a missing boy.
Police fear Daniel fell into the river while playing and was drowned - although they have not ruled out the possibility that he was abducted. Daniel's step-grandfather, Keith Dutton, said as he attended a church service near the family home on Sunday: "We are prepared for the worst although we must not lose hope. "The family are grabbing on to that iron bar of hope."
The iron bar of hope? Don't they mean "the wet toilet paper square of hope"?