Wild Animals in the Apocalypse

I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.

-- Revelation 6:8 (NASB)

Setting aside for a moment the fact that most of Revelation is obviously highly symbolical, the question might naturally arise whether wild beasts are really the threat.  After all, the European Cave Lion is now extinct, and we have hunted most of the big predators to the point where they are endangered species in very real risk of extinction. The idea of thousands of grizzly bears descending on New York City, or of thousands of leopards chasing people through the streets of Paris, or of thousands of crocodiles making the streets of Sidney run red sounds like a really bad movie, not a serious possibility.

But then, the text does not say bears or leopards or crocodiles, only "wild beasts".  If we back away from our preconceptions just a bit, it is easy to see that "wild beasts" can still pose a problem today.  Feral dogs have posed a problem throughout history, and coyotes are expanding in North America.  Rats have carried the fleas that brought the Black Death, bats can carry rabies, and armadillos -- also spreading in North America -- can spread leprosy to humans.

Misquoting Pascal

The heart has its own checking account, that reason still knows nothing about.

NPR to Lose One of Its Few Reasons to Exist

If tomorrow National Public Radio depended on a $10 donation from me to stay in business, I would not give it.  Too often NPR has exasperated me with their liberal bias, which is so uniform that it has presumably become unconscious.  It is extremely offensive to have tax money (or, if you prefer, public debt) used to cheerlead for evil ideas.

Yet even though I would not save NPR, I would miss some of its programming.  Maybe the program I would miss most is Car Talk, at least as much for Tom and Ray's sense of humor as for the practical advice they give.  I remember being astonished years ago when I first heard the show -- surely these were not typical mechanics!  No, they are not.  They both went to MIT, though neither is an engineer -- Tom got his bachelor's degree in Management (and later a Ph.D. in marketing from Boston University), and Ray got his bachelor's in "Humanities and Science".

Their last live program will be this September.  Sure, reruns will still be played for years to come, but it won't be the same.  

I'm going to miss them.

We Are All Positive Barbarians Now

The IEEE has a good article questioning the wisdom of the US deploying cyberweapons like the Flame virus.  The main rationalizations seem to be

• we really don't like the people against whom we use them, and 
• no one is able to stop us.

Such a position is indistinguishable from "might makes right," an idea that has appealed to nations through the ages when they believed themselves to be the mightiest.  

We can do better than that.  The concept of America has always been about more than just the narrow interests of the US citizens currently alive, or even the interests of future generations; it has also included a belief that the really important differences between people are not the country or caste into which they are born, but what they make of themselves through their choices.

In contrast with that is an attitude that Chesterton identified in The Barbarism of Berlin as that of a barbarian:

There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be forgotten; but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot, I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy; that, in the eyes of the other man, he is only the other man. And if we carry this clue through the institutions of Prussianised Germany, we shall find how curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders; but Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the Garonne--and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and true stands the watch on Rhine; and what a shame it would be if anyone took their own little river away from them. That is what I mean by not being reciprocal: and you will find it in all that they do: as in all that is done by savages.

So if we are going to engage in cyberwarfare, we cannot call it cyberterrorism if the same weapons are turned against us -- unless we are barbarians, which requires turning our backs on the founding and sustaining principles of this country.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case, and not just in a cyberwarfare context.  When the US captures and holds a foreign national without trial, we say he is "detained", as if he has been held up by traffic.  When a foreign nation does the same thing to a US national, he is said to be a "hostage".  When the US bombed bridges in Serbia, we were told that these were legitimate military targets; at the same time, we were told that a watch was being kept on certain US bridges, lest Serbians bomb them in an act of terrorism.

It would be naive to believe that refusing to engage in cyberwarfare would prevent others from using computer viruses to attack us.  It might be a little easier to get treaty cooperation discouraging such actions if we were not already engaged in them, but treaties and other social pressure might be of limited effectiveness in containing untraceable attacks.  Still, we can no longer howl about how unfair such attacks are when we are on the receiving end.

Rococo Basilicas

When I look at cumulus clouds, 

 
I like to imagine them as vast, floating, Rococo basilicas covered with ivory and gilded with gold, with thousands of niches for saints both familiar and unknown.

Which Is More Likely / Which Will Happen First?

1. Life is discovered on Mars, or definitive proof is found that Bigfoot is real?
2. SETI detects a signal unambiguously from an alien civilization, or it is definitively proved that ghosts are real?
3. A third-party candidate wins the presidential election, or the whole electoral system is cast aside by a dictator / coup / foreign invasion?

Shopping Carts

Photo by w:nl:Gebruiker:Michiel1972, Wikimedia Commons

This isn't the most profound problem, but still...

We have no hope as a nation if people are truly too lazy to push the shopping cart 30 feet to the nearest corral.