Thursday link roundup

• Church Sign Wars - very good
• What Russia Wants - written by my old Boss at Cato
  
• The path to citizenship - it makes illegal immigration much more understandable
• Making money twice - a very good read
• Julian Sanchez put it very well with

  we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of course. Pretty much whatever they did, they’d be doing because they expected it to maximize their profit; the issue is their judgement, not their motives. Or put another way: The problem isn’t that people were greedy, it’s that they weren’t very good at being greedy.

• Ron Paul fades into further irrelevance
• More Bailout - Yglesias posits what is hopefully a liberal dilemma

  Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone’s going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.

• A nice article on Obama's community organizing days - notices the lack of anything measurable.
  

Fifth Generation Warfare sighted in the wild!

Check out this interview on bloggingheads with the author of The Family, which is a book about a loose network of self dealing Christians in high placed.

From the interview (I haven't read the book yet) it seems to match all of the definitions of 5GW (loose as they may be), and it's been around since the 30s as well.

Thoughts from my fellow war nerds, which is to say Soob and Slog?

Monday night rapid fire

• A photographer in Seattle wins a lawsuit against police for eighty thousand. His offense? Taking pictures of police doing public work in a public place. I think law enforcement is heading for a meltdown that will leave everyone worse off, which will be the topic of a much longer post as soon as I get time.
• David Friedman with more on the Ron Paul affair, it's a good examination of self selection and rhetoric.
• David Friedman again with one of the best blog posts I've seen on religion in quite a while.
  

Nuking Mecca would be counterproductive and silly

I listened to the Republican Debate from Sunday and heard Tom Tancredo repeat his strategy of nuking Mecca if terrorists launch another attack on the United States. It's just silly. Everyone is sold on the notion that religions are "of" something, like peace or justice.

Nuking Mecca is a way of fighting on technicalities and hoping that the other side believes in them as much as we would like them to. It's like trying to fight LSD use by threatening to build a Starbucks on Jim Morrison's gravesite.

Quick links while uploading

An assortment of things I've read while I've been uploading things today

• The golden age of Chicago prostitution - The Everleigh sisters are respoinsible for the term "get laid". An interesting read - the more things change...
• Rifle Robots!
• John Allen Paulos has a new book out soon, I think it's going to a more civil (and knowing Paulos well written and interesting) version of the recent Richard Dawkins screed. My favorite blurb from the Amazon page "A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind"
• How to build your business without quitting your day job
• Firefox tune-ups
• Conan O'Brian hates my homeland - favorites

  Brazil
  Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.
  
  Burkina Faso
  In the traditional tribal language, that's Burkina for "land of" and Faso for "people who want to get the hell out of Burkina Faso."
  
  Colombia
  You'll come for the enticing beauty of the Caribbean Sea. You'll stay because you've been kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a Dodge Dart.
  
  East Timor
  It takes a lot to admit you live on the bad side of Timor.

The start of the Friday In Appreciation Series

I've decided to start a more or less weekly series about the people and forces of that don't get enough credit in our society. I call it the Friday In Appreciation Series.

We live in age when sanctimonious piety rivals hydrogen as the most common thing in the universe. Be it suburbanites railing against city-dwellers not having children, Ultra-Calvinist urbanites railing against Bushies standing in the way of progress, or Muslims from loser countries blaming Danish cartoons for their crappy lives, it's hard to walk five feet without getting smacked in the face by righteous outrage, backed up by the usual litany of reasons people have for telling other people to run their lives.

But there's one group that not only walks the walk and talks the talk; they also handle the snakes. Yep, I'm talking about Snake Handlers. It's refreshing to see someone use the fine print and not bother other people. They actually follow the fine print just because it's there. They even keep going when their leaders die of snake-bite. Now that's faith!

Thus I begin the series.

Quote of the moment

From this page,

"That's the problem with religion: you beat your way past the clerics, fight your way through the demons, stand before the holy of holies, and when you rip away the veil, there's nothing there but a mirror."

-- Owen Rowley

Two from Slate

• Hitchens on Falwell - a nice vicious hit job, closing with

  It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."

• On Generals - An interesting piece on the lack of turnover at the Pentagon due to the Iraq war. Unmentioned is the lack of turnover as a result of 9-11, which should be the larger clue.
  

Tab clearing roundup

• Michael Totten goes to Kurdistan - phenomenal reporting.
• The Yazidi religion of the the Middle East, very strange and interesting.
  

Sunday round up

• A good read on economics and statistics
• Islam and Christianity - IBM and Microsoft - Embrace and Extend
• Resiliancy, and how to measure it
  

Quck roundup

• An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
• Underwater windmills
• How we would fight China
• The metaweb/FreeBase
• Evidently February was cold
  
• Blurb has dropped their prices.
• Strangest suicide attempt, ever

  Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta's Journal Constitution.
  
  The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.

• Baby steps to a better editorial, it's easier to see why this one is so wrong.
• The 20 best comic book weapons.
• It's odd seeing this already existing - I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.
  

Annoyances in the media

It's atheism this time, Sam Harris in particular. He rapes the mirror in 10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism. It's a smarmy read, in particular

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history. People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok.

How remarkably pointless. Everything good is on his side, and everything bad, even though explicitly and actively atheist, is on the side of religion.

What does it say of people who can't admit that their position on an has an unpleasant side? Libertarianism is unclear on Foreign Policy and weak on the mentally ill. Liberalism is weak on education, conservatism is weak on immigration (pretty much every blend of conservatism). Why not admit these things? Any internally consistent ideology or religious theory will have strong points and weak points by any objective measure,

It's been a little while

Sorry for the light blogging.

Periodically my mind wonders back to the Mathew Paris essay "Nature Does Not Exist", where he states that there are few meaningful differences in application or effect between religion and science. Then my thoughts turned to Alan Paulk's line "Religion is first century technology" and how that tracks with Robert Kaplan's assertion that Islam is an excellent religion for hard times (paraphrase).

Then I think the original (to me) thought that technology does not replace spirituality, or compete with it either, but merely pushes it back to another level of abstraction. This leads me to think that the modern conception of a distinction between the religious and the secular is probably new and not meaningful.

And that's what has been in the back of my head for the past few days.

Nietzsche at the end of a long, poorly focused day

Today's quote is

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche

via the Nietzsche Family Circus
Just have to love the Germans.

Somehow I've let all of the tedious work that has to be done during the month have to happen today. Diagramming, estimating, writing, organizing. Humbug. Everything has taken forever today.

On another note, the photos I took on Saturday turned out well, and surprisingly Gothic and noirish. All of my more recent shots have gone in a Sin City direction. I'll post them soon.

Classic movies everyone should see

• Ivan the Terrible Part II - Quite good, interesting insight into the Russian character and the central role autocracy has always played in Russian history. Visually it's quite stunning too.
• The Seventh Seal - Man's struggle with God and Death come across much more believably in subtitles.
• I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang - Life on the chain gang comes across as more believable than realistic, an excellent piece. The final few minutes are particularly jarring.
  

Well put description of our times

From Josh Trevino

In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question.

On a more practical level these days we treat one's religion as their race (which is to say involuntary and not subject to questioning or criticism), and we're already far too touchy about race these days.

This might be worth a road trip sometime

Certainly for a photo essay.

The Stone Circle of Elberton

Driving on rural Ga. 77 in northeast Georgia, you seem to time-travel across the sea to ancient Britain. What appears to be a scaled-down clone of Stonehenge rises above a hilltop.

Elbert County stonemasons, not druidic priests, fashioned this circular array of six granite slabs, but its origins are almost as intriguing.

In 1979, a mysterious stranger calling himself "Mr. Christian" commissioned the curiosity on the edge of a cow pasture 7.2 miles north of Elberton.

He reportedly told the president of an Elberton granite finishing plant that what he called the Georgia Guidestones would be "for the conservation of the world and to herald a new age of reason."

As they talked, he admitted his name really wasn't Christian, but he was a Christian and a patriot, who represented a group outside of Georgia with similar beliefs. Only the Elberton banker who handled Mr. Christian's substantial deposit ever knew his true identity. He took the secret to his grave, and no one has ever identified Christian or his associates.

Things that annoy me about our modern world

At the moment, it's the politically correct West, and their treatment of Islam. I recently came across an ad for the movie Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

I read the site and found it irritating. The phrase "religion of peace" has been repeated often enough to be ridiculous, and it is a patently ludicrous assumption. But the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily the truth, it's usually another falsehood, as it is in this case.

Plainly put, saying a religion is a religion of peace is about as meaningful as saying the Norelco Bodygroom is an electric shaver of peace; it's a term that doesn't apply. Religions aren't inherently anything, it's all in the practice, and that varies with people location and time. If the practice at a given point in time and place is warlike or placid, then so be it. It's a meaningless statement. It's like imputing anti-semitism to vegetarians due to Hitler's aversion to meat.

Religion and super heroes

Here is an interesting list of Super Heroes by religious affiliation.

Least surprising: Captain America - a Protestant, no shocker there.
Most surprising: The Thing - Jewish!

They classify the favorite of my later teen years, the Question, as Objectivist, which is close enough to a religion I suppose.

Random thoughts

• Castro might have Parkinsons
• Dennis Prager actually has something interesting to say. Personally I think there's much to Eric Hoffer's notion that a well-written and internally coherent religious text holds back civilization.
  

Public piety

I have long believed that people are hard wired to practice religion in some form, and this current article on Cnn.com "So Long to Gas Guzzler Guilt". The article is about a company called "Terrapass" that trades in pollution credits to make up for the auto emissions of environmentalists

The company is a for-profit enterprise, but caps its profits at a maximum of 10 percent of revenues.

Those revenues so far, Arnold says, are "itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny." The company started selling TerraPasses in November and had sold about 620 as of last week.

If you buy a TerraPass, the money will be used to purchase smog allowances on the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Climate Exchange allows polluting companies that produce less than a certain amount of airborne pollutants to sell credits to other companies that then allow them to go over the limit.

The overall limits are reduced over time making it more costly to exceed them. Organizations and companies that buy pollution credits reduce the overall supply of credits and also make it more costly for companies to exceed the limits.

and

Since car drivers are under no legal compulsion to try to compensate for their tailpipe emissions, the TerraPass will only appeal to those who feel some guilt about their driving, and want to do something about it.

Not surprisingly, few SUV drivers have been buying them. Most have gone to owners of fuel-efficient cars that produce relatively few pollutants.

That initially surprised Arnold.

"We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," he said. "It just doesn't exist"

Instead, he's been traveling to environmental fairs pitching the idea to those who, for the most part, drive fuel efficient small cars and gas/electric hybrid vehicles.

"Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars," said Arnold.

As for himself, Arnold doesn't own a car. He commutes to work by bicycle.

The need to show piety is deeply ingrained in us.

Thinking about Culture

First I come across this interview with the Aspen institute with some serious thinkers (Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson and Gilles Kepel), about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the immigrants, then 5 minutes later I come across this Rumble In Europe post (speculation about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the Europeans. Then that night, I see an interview with Irshad Manji on Tucker Carlson's program (synopsis, Islam is infected with Arabian culture).

All quite interesting to read and watch, I suppose the most interesting part is that I came across all of the independently, all within 2 hours of each other, and they all had the same general topic.