| Thursday, October
18, 2007
Insomnia, but I better get to bed. The
response to our Hell contest is remarkable. I'm keeping
up with the flood, but I am glad I made it clear I am not going to
acknowledge entries. I do thank all those who responded.
James Watson has committed PC suicide by saying that
evolution not only doesn't guarantee that isolated groups will evolve equal
intelligence, but predicts they probably will be different. Intelligence is
inherited, and the races of mankind evolved in isolation, and QED. This has
triggered a positive flood of condemnations for Watson, and we expect a
public lynching at any moment. (I was present when the Stanford genetics
department students disrupted a AAAS meeting in San Francisco, chanting
"Herrnstein, Hook, and Page! Let's put them in a cage!" and thus prevented
any rational scientific discussion on intelligence and inheritance.
Watson, a good political liberal and Nobel prize winner,
must have known what would follow his pronouncements. I'll have considerably
more on this, but it's not an issue that invites rational discussion. But
then there's precious little rational debate in these United States. That's
the nature of democracy as a form of government. Equality soon trumps
liberty and everything else.
And see below
========
Niven and I had a good walk today, and now it's time to
spend a lot of time in Hell.
I'll be on TWIT this week, recorded next Sunday afternoon.
==========
It's Noon and I have to get upstairs and Go to Hell.
Meanwhile the world goes on with its usual silliness.
I see that a number of Democrats have withdrawn as
co-sponsors of the Armenian Genocide Bill, but Pelosi is still committed to
bring the bill to the floor of the House for a vote. It's not going to pass:
even if it gets through the House, it will die in the Senate. The result is
that two passionate groups, Armenians and Turks, will both be unhappy over
the United States with regard to a matter that happened so long ago that
almost no one living was alive at the time, and not one single person responsible
for whatever happened lives to tell the tale.
My understanding is that there were a number of horrors at
the time, largely because large numbers of people were displaced without
preparation. Certainly there were people who wished every Armenian dead.
There were others, particularly in the villages, faced with allocation of
resources in a time of near famine. There were Muslim fundamentalists who
detested the mostly Christian Armenians. There was an Armenian revolt
against the Ottoman Empire. There were Armenian soldiers in both the Turkish
and Russian armies, but the Russians with Armenian units conquered portions
of eastern Turkey. There was something like a civil war in much of Anatolia.
Turks accuse both Armenian Regulars and Armenian guerrillas of atrocities.
The Turks claim that Armenians had been valued citizens of
the Empire until the revolt (although the previous Sultan, deposed by the
Young Turks and the III Army Corps of the Turkish Army, had been known as
Abdul Hamid the Damned largely because of his slaughter of Armenians in the
1890's). The Armenian Knights of Vartan consider the Young Turks as the
instigators of the events of 1915. The Young Turks included Mustapha Kemal,
but later fragmented into factions.
The point being that there are thousands of stories, and
everyone with any authority at the time is long dead. It happened in an
Empire long ago in a country far away, and the notion that the United States
Congress can sort out just who did what to whom, and what the motives were,
is absurd. The Brits tried over 100 Turkish officials for what amounted to
crimes against humanity in an early version of the Nuremberg trials (these
took place in Malta, then a British dependency taken from the Knights of
Malta who had defended Malta against the Turks and held Malta in Sovereignty
from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, who --- but you get the idea). The
British trials resulted in nothing; the officials, who had been held for
about five years in lockups in Malta, were released. Meanwhile, a British
battleship took the last Sultan to Malta after he had been deposed by
Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk, the Turkish hero of Gallipoli (his forces
stopped the ANZAC invasion), argued that the Sultanate ceased to exist when
the Sultan had been unable to prevent the occupation of Constantinople by
French and British forces after World War I (the occupation lasted from 1918
to 1923). Kemal later ended the Caliphate as well.
If all this is giving you a headache, understand that it's
a very quick gloss over a very complicated matter, and I doubt that one
Congresscritter in fifty knows even this much about Turkish history from
1890 to 1925, or anything at all about the conditions in Turkey in 1915.
Incidentally, the Armenian community used to consider the Kurds as at least
equally guilty with the Turks, although that seems to be changing now under
the "enemy of my enemy" theory.
The Armenian community, particularly those in America,
believe that some good will come from formally labeling this genocide. The
Turkish government, which considers Kurdish Iraq as a base for Kurdish
rebels operating against the Turkish border, hates the idea. The US, which
protects the independence of Kurdish Iraq and rejoices that at least this
portion of Iraq is not subject to insurgency is in the middle of all this.
George Washington warned us not to become involved in the
territorial disputes of Europe. Now we are involved in the ideological
disputes of the Middle East. Will it ever end?
============
A definitive
Paper.
Art Robinson on Global Warming
Jerry
Check out
http://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/robinson600.pdf
Robinson inherited Access to Energy from Petr
Beckmann. He was formerly associated with Linus Pauling. The article
presents a great deal of data, with many charts. It will tell you more than
you thought you needed to know about the subject. I recommend that everyone,
whatever your position on the subject, read this carefully.
==============
La Affaire DeGeneres
This goes under the heading of "Whatever were
they thinking?"
Over the years, Ellen DeGeneres -- a good Norman
name, by the way -- has made both enemies and friends, but far more of the
latter than the former. She gives the impression of being basically decent
and mannerly, able to take criticism without exploding, and even those who
don't watch her show -- I never have -- got a favorable impression from the
series of TV advertisements starring a number of animals working in her
office. I forget what she was advertising, but I remember both her and the
ads.
Ellen, or her domestic partner, or both, wanted a
dog, but they have cats. They adopted one dog from a private agency, but it
didn't get along with the cats, and before they got too attached to it they
returned it to the agency, exchanging it for another. That dog didn't get
along with the cats either, but Ellen's hairdresser liked the dog a lot, and
when Ellen sent it to her hairdresser's home the entire family including
both teen aged children fell in love with it. Now so far we have a typical
story with a happy ending, and we'd have expected to see it some time as a
promotion of Ellen, or the private dog adoption agency, or the hairdresser,
or all of the above. We'd have all smiled a bit, even as we suspected it of
being a quite enjoyable and forgivable Hollywood publicity stunt.
Then it all changed. The pet adoption agency, a non
profit whose purpose in theory at least is to get as many pets as possible out of the
hands of the dog pound and out to loving families, has a contract stating
that those who adopt dogs can't give them away without permission of the
agency, which wants to check out the suitability of the new home. This makes
sense. You certainly don't want a Yorkie given to the manager of a Pit Bull
training facility to be sacrificed as part of a ferocity training exercise
(and yes, such things do happen). You don't want a dog going into the home
of three toddlers supervised by a drunken aunt while everyone in the house
either works or pursues nefarious activities. And so forth. As a means of
preventing incipient tragedy the contract makes sense.
The adoption agency, discovering -- somehow, and one
wonders just how -- that Ellen had given Iggy to her hairdresser went out to
the hairdresser's house and in front of two crying children took possession
of the dog; whereupon a tearful Ellen went on national television to regret
the incident with tears, and to denounce the pet adoption agency, Mutts and
Moms, by name. Whereupon the pet adoption agency lost many of its donors,
received a flood of denunciations, and, it is claimed, received many death
threats as well.
None of which should have been astonishing, leaving
one to wonder, whatever were they thinking? The obvious thing for them to
have done would be to take a quick look at the hairdresser's family -- they
did have an agent out there to claim the dog -- see that this is a neat
middle class home with kids who like the dog, and confer their blessing
while asking the new owners to sign the non-transfer contract just in case.
I mean, if your goal is successful placement of a puppy, you would not
instantly assume that a well publicized transfer to the hairdresser of a
well known and popular entertainer was a Bad Thing. Indeed, one might see
some positive publicity possibilities here. How is it rational to rip a
puppy from the arms of children in a household employed by Ellen DeGeneres?
They must have expected something to happen.
All of which makes me wonder if this isn't some kind
of Hollywood stunt gone bad. I have lived in this town for forty years, and
this wouldn't be the first time someone conceived of a PR stunt that
exploded. On the other hand, I have trouble believing that DeGeneres would
subject her hairdresser's teen aged kids to this kind of emotional stress.
She just doesn't seem to me to be that kind of person.
Which leaves one wondering whether the owners of
Mutts and Moms, the pet adoption agency, have enough sense to conduct any
business requiring contact with the general public. If DeGeneres's
hairdresser isn't suitable to adopt one of their pets, just who is likely to
be good enough?
The guy I really wouldn't have wanted to be was the
Pasadena cop who went with the Mutts and Moms people to go rip the dog away
from a pair of teen aged girls.
Never a dull moment when you live in LA LA land.
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