Stromata Blog

Our Future First Couple

Barack:

Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

I begin to understand: We should have invaded Pakistan instead of Iraq!

That would certainly have been a more interesting conflict. Pakistan’s army and air force are larger, better equipped and more professional than Saddam Hussein’s ever were, and we would have to reach the country either through amphibious assault or by making a deal for bases in India. Also, war with Pakistan would have satisfied the First Liberal Principle of War-making: minimal relationship to American national interests. We’ll leave to one side the question of how easy it would be to locate Osama in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier and serve an arrest warrant.

Michelle:

When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

So the callousness of bigoted doctors in the pre-civil rights South (who in any case had no effective means of treating syphilis) is a reason to prohibit life-saving medical research today? I’d like to say something humorously dismissive, but, frankly, I’m appalled. Can we at least extract a promise from Senator Obama that, should he be elected President, this woman will be required to remain strictly silent about all matters of public policy for the next four (or eight) years?

Cleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness

Washington State, a center of Gaia worship and the Cult of the Goracle, has banned dishwashing detergents that contain more than 0.5 percent phosphorous. Rather, it has banned their use by individual households. Restaurants and other institutions can still suds up with whatever brand they like. Ordinary housewives are stuck with low phosphorous products that won’t get dishes clean without the assistance of vigorous washing by hand (and are more expensive, too).

The excuse is saving lakes from eutrophication. The reason is the enforcement of Green Shari’ah, as this excerpt makes clear:

At a June 9 Bellingham City Council meeting, council member Terry Bornemann took issue with the idea that the water output of places such as Western Washington University and St. Joseph Hospital probably equal that of the city, yet they are not affected by the ban. [Okay, the reporter should be arrested for cold, bloody murder of the English tongue, but you get the drift.]

[State Department of Ecology spokesminion Katie] Skipper said this ban is about individual responsibility, reducing phosphorus on a house-by-house level. She did not know if the ban would ever be directed toward commercial or industrial use.

The Law must be obeyed for the sake of The Law. Whether the obedience does any good is a question only the godless would ask.

For the time being, only two unlucky counties are affected. The rest of the state gets hit in two years. I imagine that smuggling rings are already laying plans to smuggle Cascade and Electrosol across the border from Idaho.

Quote of the Day

Roy Spencer, “More Carbon Dioxide, Please”:

It is quite possible that the biosphere (vegetation, sea life, etc.) has been starved for atmospheric CO2. Before humans started burning fossil fuels, vegetation and ocean plankton had been gobbling up as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as they could, but it was like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck through a stopped-up hose.

Now, no matter how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere each year, the biosphere takes out an average of 50 percent of that extra amount. Even after we triple the amount of CO2 we produce, nature still takes out 50 percent of the extra amount.

I think it is time for scientists to consider the possibility that more CO2 in the atmosphere might, on the whole, be good for life on Earth. Oh, I’m sure there will be some species which are hurt more than helped, but this is true of any change in nature. . . .

The view that nature was in some sort of preferred, yet fragile, state of balance before humans came along is arbitrary and philosophical — even religious. It is entirely possible that there are other, more preferable states of balance in nature which are more robust and less fragile than whatever the state of nature was before we came along.

You would think that science is the last place you would find such religious opinions, yet they dominate the worldview of scientists. Natural scientists tend to worship nature, and they then teach others to worship nature, too . . . all under the guise of “science.” . . .

The automatic assumption that mankind’s production of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels is bad for the environment needs to be critically examined. Unfortunately, scientists who question that point of view are immediately branded as shills for Big Oil.

DST: More Than Ever and No Better for It

This year, we get an additional month of Daylight Saving Time, so tomorrow will see a national case of jet lag, with the accompanying rise in fatal accidents. The tradeoff is supposedly a minute decrease in energy consumption. Where are the chants of “No Blood for Oil!” when we need them?

This year, inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s fine book on Liberal Fascism, I have a new thought on the evils of this semiannual resetting of the clock.

The case for DST has always rested on more than its alleged economic benefits. I remember when, in my childhood, Washington State voted on adopting the gimmick. The “yes” campaign ads didn’t say a word about energy; their slogan was, “Enjoy an extra hour of daylight”. As a preteen, I could see that the “extra” hour was merely shifted from another part of the day. Older citizens were evidently more gullible, as the measure passed handily.

At what hour people wake up and go to bed ought to be outside the scope of the government’s interest, if anything is. Yet DST proponents presume to decide the preferred shape of everybody’s day and pass laws to promote that preference. This is nannyism on stilts. The health nazis at least have the excuse that most of what they wish to ban really is bad for your health. Trying to force people to change their sleep schedules twice a year lacks that justification (in fact, is unhealthy) and, once the diaphanous economic arguments are taken off the table, serves only a gauzy aesthetic purpose. The images of kids playing in the park and couples strolling in the sunset as twilight gently falls are poetic but ridiculously far outside the legitimate concerns of government. Here is another instance, to add to the many that Jonah cites, of petty fascism creeping in.

Random Reading: Saxons, Vikings, Celts – And Ice Cream Parlors

[First of an occasional series]

The wanderings of primitive peoples are one of the great romances of history, made more romantic and mysterious by the shortage of direct evidence. Somehow, somewhen the Indo-European languages reached points as far separated as the Ganges River valley and the British Isles, and the cultivation of plants spread from a handful of locations to the entire world. Other languages and technologies, too, wandered far from their birth places. No one recorded the ways and means. We do not know what to attribute to mass migrations, what to the travels of a few artisans, what to the adoption of techniques from neighbors, what to independent invention. Did agriculturalists and metal workers colonize new territories, driving out or exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants, or did such advances spread through peaceable interchange? Can we trace mass migrations in the prehistory of language, or only the success of an elite dialect or commercial lingua franca? Parallels in recorded history show that many causes can produce identical effects. English prevailed in North America and Australia, because the indigenes were overwhelmed by migrants, Latin in Western Europe because it was the language of the Roman conquerors, Swahili in sub-Saharan Africa because it was useful for trade.

Lately the ambiguous evidence of archeology and linguistics has been supplemented by DNA analysis, which offers insights into the direct ancestry of living humans. Geneticists can establish, for instance, that everyone alive today is descended from a woman who probably lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. (Those facts don’t, incidentally, prove that the human race originated at that time and place. Logically, we all must have a common ancestress. She might lived before homo sapiens existed as a distinguishable species or long after. There are, however, other reasons, notably the lack of diversity in the human genome when compared to other species, that lead to the conclusion that we are a very recent arrival in the biosphere.) Similarly, seven maternal and five paternal ancestors have been identified for the vast majority of Europeans. They are dated and placed variously, from 45,000 years ago in Greece to 8,000 B.C. in Syria, using methods that rely on an heroic assumptions, e. g., that the rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA was constant over the pertinent time periods. Still, despite all uncertainties, it is suggestive that one ancestress apparently dwelled in an early center of agriculture and that her descendants seem to have arrived in the various regions of Europe pari passu with neolithic farming.

Bryan Sykes, an Oxford professor and the founder of Oxford Ancestors, which ingeniously combines fund raising and research by selling individuals the results obtained by examining samples of their DNA, is one of the pioneers in this field. He has also written three books to explain it to the layman, the most recent of which is titled Saxons, Vikings, and Celts in America or, much more colorfully, Blood of the Isles in Britain.

Unhappily for such a promising topic, either Professor Sykes or his publisher has evidently decided that people who buy books about the scientific exploration of human ancestry know no history and want to know no science. Or it could be that the author has taken the human genome as a model: Most of the material in our chromosomes is “junk DNA”, serving no purpose but padding. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is padded like an insecure debutante: sales pitches for Oxford Ancestors, descriptions of the scenery of the Scottish isles, praise for the fine organization of British blood drives, reminiscences of professional colleagues, accounts of local folklore, even a recommendation for a particularly fine ice cream parlor in Lampeter, Wales.

The on-topic padding consists of potted history, mostly very elemen