waka waka waka

Here’s something curious. I have no idea if this video — allegedly taken from a camera being snaked through a sewer line in North Carolina — is real or fake, or, if real, whther it depicts something already well-known or utterly strange. What the hell are these things? They look like mighty good eatin’.

It is morning again, and I am back at my desk (technically speaking, it was also morning when I left).

Although it has been heavy slogging these past six weeks or so, with many long nights of darkness both inner and outer, today there grows within me a slender reed of hope, a delicate wisp of a thing that is nevertheless almost eschatological in its import, that by Friday there may be deliverance. Outwardly I am silent, laboring in my little cell and gazing fixedly at the screen as always, but with my inner eye I now can see the far bank of the mighty river, and my mind sways to the slow and patient rhythm of old Negro spirituals.

There is, as usual, no time for writing, but I must make note of two recent deaths. The first is the artist Pina Bausch, whose haunting and iconoclastic dance-theater extravaganzas the lovely Nina and I had attended at every opportunity in recent decades, and who died, suddenly, of cancer on Tuesday at 68. Her obituary, with links to other remembrances, is here.

At the other end of the cultural spectrum was the impressionist Fred Travalena, a genial extrovert whom those of you of “a certain age” may remember from his heyday in the 1970’s, when he was a fixture on the comedy circuit, and on the chat and variety shows. An obituary is here, and if your memory still needs a little jogging, you might have a look here.

There was of course that other fellow who died, but that would take several paragraphs, and for now I have a barge to tote, and bales to lift. Perhaps this weekend.

Once again, it is approaching midnight, and I am still at the office, lashed to the wheel. This should not last much longer, I hope — perhaps things will be back to normal next week — but for now, serious bloggery remains entirely out of the question.

Fortunately, you needn’t turn away empty handed, for just this minute my estimable colleague Yaniv Sarig has seen fit to leaven my toil by emailing me an amusing clip from YouTube. If you have ever wondered just where, exactly, lies the limiting extreme of dazzling human ingenuity in the service of utter frivolousness, I think we now have it in view. Have a look here.

Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion and science are not just, as Stephen Jay Gould famously called them, “non-overlapping magisteria” — but really do represent fundamentally incompatible ways of understanding the world.

Next, the main course: an extended e-mail exchange between the adamantly hell-bound infidel Sam Harris (a founder, most recently, of the Reason Project), and the science writer (and former editor of the journal Nature) Philip Ball. It is not brief, but it is worth your time, I think: it limns with useful clarity the range of viewpoints to be found within the growing community of unbelievers, an aspect of this debate that is often overlooked. Read it here.

Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code — and may even, before long, have the little grey cells back in sufficent working order to start scribbling tendentious poppycock at the usual rate once again.

But for tonight, just a link: an Op-Ed item from the Wall Street Journal (admittedly not a neutral voice on this topic) about the increasing number of scientists who have broken ranks to question the orthodox view of anthropogenic global warming. Here.

We have all had the harrowing suspicion, rising at times almost to a dreadful certainty, that the inanimate objects of the world are arrayed against us with bloodless and implacable malice. We pop the window open on a fine spring morning and it falls back down, shattering the glass. We grab the only pencil at hand in urgent haste to write down a number before it flies from our memory, and the point breaks off. We lift a jar of mayonnaise by its lid, which comes off in our hand; the jar smashes on the kitchen tiles. Our keys conceal themselves behind the toaster. The picture-frame leaps from the wall for no apparent reason. The doorframe interposes itself between our little toe and the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Leave it to the French, who have always understood that we are doomed, to build upon this woeful scaffolding an intellectual edifice, a school of philosophy. It is called Resistentialism, and has been described as being “largely a matter of sitting inside a wet sack and moaning.”

You may learn more here.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by some Muslim women — is “not welcome” in France, and the French National Assembly is now preparing an inquiry into whether the enshrouding of women to shield them from the view of men other than their owners is so fundamentally at odds with Western secular culture that it should be outlawed. In his words:

The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is an issue of a woman’s freedom and dignity. This is not a religious symbol. It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Sarkozy that the burqa is indeed an affront to everything that a modern secular nation should stand for. It is a public symbol of inequality and religious oppression, of a grotesque, tribalistic, culture-of-honor system of andrarchic, repressive sexuality that has no place in the modern world. It is no different than leading women about on a dog-leash.

I must ask myself, though, whether to take such an attitude is consistent with my generally libertarian attitude regarding personal conduct. If an adult woman and man enter into an agreement whereby the man shall lead her around in public, on her hands and knees, by a leash, is it the State’s role to interfere?

In this case I am inclined to say yes, as it is clearly in the interest of European culture, for the sake of its own survival in the face of an accelerating demographic cataclysm, to make itself infertile soil for this sort of alien fundamentalism. There is no shortage of places where Muslims are not only free, but encouraged, to subjugate and abase their women in this way; there is no need for France, the very cradle of the Enlightenment, to make itself one of them.

We’re talking about opinions, of course. Here are two takes on the situation in Iran: from Fouad Ajami, and from Pat Buchanan.

And if you have a little more time, and would like to be better informed about elections in Iran generally, and about that nation’s political structure, read this.

As the situation in Iran devolves further into violence, we note that two Ph.D. candidates at Columbia have done some clever statistical work on the official election results, and have concluded that they are almost certainly fake. Story here.

We’ve been on the road for the past two days, and have just got home late on this Sunday evening. There’s been no time for keeping up with events, or for the brooding and rumination necessary for the germination of a serious post.

So here’s another pungent item plucked from the ether by our reader JK, who clearly has a knack for digging up this kind of stuff. It’s about preacher Mark Driscoll, who wants to see our better halves fully committed to doing the Lord’s work down here on earth.

The Man Upstairs, as well as a few men down below, should be gratified to see that at least some members of the target audience have already gotten the message.

I’ve been letting things go to hell around here the past few weeks — there’s been little more than the odd news item or random piece of Internet flotsam — and I do hope things will be getting back to normal soon.

Unfortunately, not being a man of independent means, I depend for my solvency upon gainful employment, which in my case (having extricated myself a few years ago from the smoking wreckage of the recording industry) involves writing and maintaining software for an international corporation of medium size. Software of the sort that I work on is generally released according to an elaborate and detailed schedule, and its release involves carefully planned cycles of development and testing. Scores of people are involved, and the whole thing is managed by the vast and cumbrous apparatus of corporate administration. If any part of this interlocking mechanism fails to perform as expected, the entire machine begins to creak and shudder — so one likes to avoid being the malfunctioning component. This means that one sometimes has to make enormous efforts to deliver one’s piece of the work on time, and that’s what has occupied me, for nearly every waking hour, over the past fortnight or so; I’ve been working each day until the wee hours, and through the weekends as well.

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I am working late once again, and have as yet been unable to return to normal operations around here. So for tonight here’s a little item about physicsists and mysticism.

In an important development that may have far-reaching consequences, recent reports appear to confirm the suspicion, long held by many, that most people are in fact massively ignorant about almost everything. See here, and here.

With a hat tip, once again, to reader JK, here’s a thoughful item by Leslie Gelb on how the situation in Iran may evolve.

Apologies to all who have commented or emailed over the past few days: I am still spending nearly every waking hour either at work or aboard one of Gotham’s luxurious subway cars, and probably will be doing so through the first half of this week at least. There are a great many important and interesting things going on around the world right now — and of course “life’s persistent questions” persist as always, and harass the restless and wondering mind in the usual way — but it will all have to wait, as I have bugs to write.

It is heartening to see the momentum changing, for the moment at least, in the Muslim world. The excesses of the Taliban have provoked a vigorous response, it seems, in northwestern Pakistan, and there are reports that an al-Qaeda exodus to Yemen and Somalia may be beginning - which may in many way be more problematic in terms of their containment, but which at least would get them farther away from Afghanistan, and from Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. In Lebanon, Hezbollah was handed a defeat in recent elections, and there has been a rising tide of democratic activism in Iran in advance of today’s elections there.

Time does not permit me to comment further just now — and of course with fundamentalism and authoritarianism exerting a constant pull in the region these trends may easily be reversed, as we have seen so often before — but for the moment at least the wind seems to have shifted a bit.

With conservatism back on its heels all over America, loyalty to tradition seems everywhere to be a waning virtue. Not so in New York State politics, where the stewards of the commonweal are every bit as venal and corrupt as they have been since before the Revolution, as we see in this heartwarming item from yesterday’s Times.

With an impending deadline to meet, I shall remain fettered to my oar till the wee hours for the rest of the week at least. While I am surely grateful, during this disruptive economic paroxysm, to have the opportunity to spend a healthful fifteen hours a day sitting in a cubicle writing code so as to earn my daily crust, this does mean that logorrheic scribblings of the usual sort are quite out of the question.

Fortunately, reader JK has sent a nourishing morsel our way. Apparently some mischievous demigod — Loki, perhaps, or Puck, or the impish Coyote of the American Indians — saw fit, the other day, to amuse himself in human form. Have a look here.

I’m working very late tonight (and for the rest of the week), and have no time for brooding and scribbling — so for this evening, I’m afraid all I have to offer is froth and diversion. Here, then, are the great Harpo Marx, and his namesake, collaborating on a familiar theme.

Here’s an odd little video clip, showing something or other having a swim in Lake Champlain.

North Korea, which is by some accounts facing catastrophic internal crises as Kim Jong-Il attempts to engineer the transfer of absolute power to his youngest son, has pressed its policy of brinkmanship even further by sentencing two US reporters to 12 years in a labor camp for an alleged border violation.

Everyone is, as might be expected, “deeply concerned”. It is hard to imagine that the Obama administration will be content to let matters stand, but hard also to see a clear way forward. North Korea is forcing itself into a very tight corner here, and given how precarious things appear to be within its borders, anything is possible.

The Islamic mystic al-Kharraz tells us: “Only God has the right to say ‘I’.”

This necessary insight has nothing to do with Islam, or even God.

In grappling with persistent questions regarding key aspects of human existence and the natural world — intentionality, free will, morality, and so on — it is very easy to become entangled in terminological difficulties. Here’s a particularly contentious example.

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From E.A. Robinson, 1931:

“If a man is a materialist, or a mechanist, or whatever he likes to call himself, I can see for him no escape from belief in a futilty so prolonged and complicated and diabolical and preposterous as to be worse than absurd: and, as I do not know that such a tragic absurdity is not a fact, I can only know my native inability to believe that it is one.”

There you are, then. Take your pick.

Many years ago, the historian, philosopher, and author Will Durant asked an assortment of his eminent contemporaries for their opinon of the meaning of life, and gathered the responses into a book, now rather obscure. It happens that I own a first-edition copy, and the other day I took it down from the shelf.

The first reply, which I have transcribed here in its entirety, is from the great H.L. Mencken. If this were the only entry, the book would still be worth its cover price several times over. I hope you enjoy it: you are not likely to run across it anywhere else.

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I’ve finally had a chance to read President Obama’s speech to the Ummah. Mr. Obama is a remarkable orator, who knows very well that these early days of his presidency are a historically unique opportunity — and although there was much that I might quibble about, I will say that he rose to the occasion admirably. There are many awkward realities that may, despite his optimistic tone, prove to be insurmountable obstacles on the road to Utopia — even, perhaps, Munich-style pitfalls — but, as a man who is himself something of a melting pot, he sees, rightly, that the world is now far too small a place to house both Islam and the West if we can’t get along somehow, and clearly believes that he is the right man, at the right moment in history, to lead these ancient foes out of fourteen centuries of continuous and sanguinary conflict.

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Mulla Nasrudin once undertook to take nine donkeys for delivery to a local farmer.

The man who entrusted them to him counted them, one by one, so that Nasrudin could be sure that there really were nine.

On the road his attention was distracted by something by the wayside.

Nasrudin, sitting astride one of the animals, counted them, again and again. He could make it only eight.

Panic-stricken, he jumped off, looked all over the place, and then counted them again. There were nine.

Then he noticed a remarkable thing. When he was sitting on donkey-back, he could see only eight donkeys. When, however, he dismounted, there were nine in full view.

“This is the penalty,” reflected the Mulla, “for riding, when I should, no doubt, be walking behind the donkeys.”

“Did you have any difficulty getting them here?” asked the farmer when Mulla Nasrudin arrived, dusty and disheveled.

“Not after I learned the trick of donkey-drivers — walk behind,” said Nasrudin. “Before that, they were full of tricks.”

From “The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah

Religious fanatics have been spreading the love again. First we had Sunday’s murder of Dr. George Tiller by a paranoid Christian extremist — in the sanctuary of a Christian church, no less — and then, Monday morning, a lethal assault on an Army recruiting station by a Muslim zealot.

The latter item, in particular, bears watching, I think; I have a feeling there may be quite a bit more to the story of Mr. Abdulhakim Margahid Muhammad than we have heard so far. It is interesting also that the case seems to be getting far less coverage than I would have expected: I wonder if the timing is significant.

As has been the case for over thirteen centuries, East and West are still glowering darkly at one another across a deep cultural divide. One hopes always for harmony and rapprochement — themes that Mr. Obama will, I am sure, focus on in his upcoming speech from Cairo — and perhaps, in this small and brave new world, with the stakes so very high, the goal is not entirely out of reach, though it is hard to feel much optimism.

As the blind man said, “we shall see.”

So distracted am I, and so out of touch with the world of music just at the moment, that I didn’t know it until I read it in today’s Times: the incomparable Manny’s, midtown Manhattan’s Mecca of musical merchandise, has closed its doors.

This lavish emporium, set in “Music Row” on West 48th Street amongst the theaters and recording studios, was where everyone who was anyone went to buy everything. You never knew who you would see in there, but you were bound to see someone, and on the walls were thousands of signed photographs of the pantheon of music-biz luminaries who had passed through to shop and shmooze over the decades.

I know all things must pass (which, by the way, reminds me of the time I saw George Harrison in the shop, sometime back in the early Eighties), but this is awfully sad news.

You can read the Times article here, and take a little tour here.

In a brief item posted today, Bill Vallicella wonders:

Does it matter whether life has an ultimate meaning or not? Someone might be satisfied if he has a good chance of attaining middle-sized happiness: peaceful days, restful nights, an adequate supply of health and wealth, satisfying employment, a loving spouse, friends, progeny, long life, and the like. Why not rest our hopes in what is known to be possible rather than in what is not known to be possible, such as immortality, the resurrection of the body, the visio beata, entry into Nirvana? Why hanker for what is beyond our mortal scale? Why not accept the finite? Are we not just a particularly clever species of land mammal?

Indeed, we are finite, and we are mortal, as are all living creatures. The problem is that we, and we alone, are in the poignantly unfortunate position of knowing it. The unique gift that evolution has bestowed upon us allows us — nay, forces us — always to imagine the future, and we do it very well: so well, in fact, that we see very clearly that soon we will not be a part of it. Is it any wonder that, clever mammals that we are, we have found so many imaginative ways to make that gift shut the hell up, and will pay dearly for them?

Bill continues:

Death, as signalling radical and irreversible change, is the muse of philosophy. What Jack London in John Barleycorn called “The Noseless One” refutes myopic worldliness.

To one on his deathbed, this fleeting life, about to vanish, must appear empty and worthless, much ado about nothing, a vain struggling and jockeying for position in a parade going nowhere. But the possiblity of death is here right now for all of us, and this metaphysical insecurity demonstrates the impossibility of myopic world-immersion for one who sees clearly. One cannot be satisfied by a merely mundane meaning. Whether or not life has an ultimate meaning, one cannot live meaningfully except in quest of it.

Indeed, once the message becomes clear, it is difficult to sit comfortably, even if it appears we may fidget in vain. As the late John Updike’s Henry Bech reminds us: man is “a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust.”

The link in the previous post was taken from a comment thread in a blog-post called to our attention by reader JK. The post, from the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog, is an attempt to assess the import of North Korea’s recent nuclear test (if that is indeed what it was).

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a handy item for you hobbyists out there: courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists, it’s the Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator. Enjoy!

I’ve just got back from class, it’s almost eleven, and I haven’t the time or energy tonight to write the longish post I really want to be working on. So for this evening I’ll just leave you with a bit of froth from our friend and commenter “the one eyed man”: Old Jews Telling Jokes.

P.S. On a personal note: proud and heartfelt congratulations to my brilliant and beautiful daughter Chloë, who was awarded her Master’s degree today. I’m kvelling.

The latest phase in the persecution of the brave Burmese dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi by Burma’s odious and repressive ruling junta is underway, and today testimony was given in this bizarre case by the American John Yettaw, who swam across a lake to reach Ms. Suu Kyi’s house on May 3rd, and spent the better part of a day there before swimming away. Ms. Suu Kyi is charged with violating the terms of her imprisonment by entertaining this uninvited guest.

Mr. Yettaw, a Mormon from Missouri, apparently claims that God sent him to protect Ms. Suu Kyi from an assassination plot that was revealed to him in a dream. It is hard to imagine that there isn’t a great deal more to this story than meets the eye, even beyond the obvious assumption that the brutes running the country set the whole thing up (in one of many odd details, apparently when the police spotted Mr. Yettaw in the lake, they didn’t shoot at him, but “threw stones”).

The most curious aspect of the whole thing, perhaps, is the very unusual name ‘Yettaw’, which, had you just shown it to me and asked me to guess its origin, I would have said was… Burmese.

You can read the news at CNN here, or take in an informative Wikipedia article here.

The Pakistani army’s new offensive against the Taliban has been underway for several weeks now, and it does appear that they have applied considerable heat. In today’s Wall Street Journal we find an article by Fouad Ajami in which the noted Mideast scholar weighs in on the struggle for the survival of the secular Pakistani state, and on America’s disconcertingly vague and diffident Pakistan policy. Here.

It appears that the California Supreme Court has decided to uphold the ban on same-sex marriages that the state’s voters passed in November. There would have been vociferous manifestations of outrage no matter how the decision might have gone — either from those who felt that an activist Court had overridden the expressed will of the people, or from those who feel that it isn’t the State’s business who marries whom, and that the ban violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am sure the latter group is sorely vexed by this ruling.

I certainly don’t mind if gay couples want to marry — it doesn’t gore any of my oxen, as far as I can make out, and I think it is rather mean-spirited to deny them participation in the custom — and I think it’s a pity that they couldn’t muster enough support amongst the voters to block the ban. But I don’t think an argument based on the Equal Protection Clause is compelling, as it is not the application of marriage laws equally to all married couples that is at issue, but the very definition of what a “married couple” is in the first place. This is, I think, the sort of thing that is better left to the voters than the courts.

Some years ago, anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of “Human Universals”: cultural traits that seem to be instantiated by all human societies. The list is broad, and contains almost all the things you’d expect to see: the collection includes belief in supernatural/religion, for example, as well as sucking wounds and language employed to misinform or mislead. Conspicuously absent, however, is one that I have long thought should be included in a truly comprehensive roster: the urge to make “Top Ten” lists.

Over at CNN we see that even zoological taxonomists are not immune to the pull of this this ubiquitous primordial drive: scratching the list-making itch, they have compiled for us their choice for “Top Ten New Species of 2009″. Have a look here.

We are still on vacation, but I did find some time for the blogosphere this evening. I spent it, though, reading and commenting on a fascinating thread about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s place.

Here.

From our friend Sarah Zimmerman comes a link to an article by Steven Van Zandt about just what it is that ails the music business.

Readers will know Steve as Bruce Springsteen’s long-time associate in the E Street Band, and as consigliere Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. I got to know Steven myself during the making of the Springsteen album The River at Power Station Studios, where I was a member of the engineering staff, and I later worked on some of his solo projects. He is an enormously thoughtful, passionate and articulate man, and in this essay he examines the etiolating effect on the music of the way records are, by and large, made these days: by solitary individuals working in little private rooms, without any of the social interaction and specialization of responibilities that were, he argues, essential to the process during the golden age of record-making. As much as appreciate the value of the tools that the digital revolution has given us, I think he’s right on target.

Read the article here.

We’re on vacation through Monday, and will likely not be writing much (though you never know). Please feel free to browse our extensive archives, or try the “View a Random Post” link at right.

From number 720, in the Krailsheimer edition:

Ethics and language are particular, but also universal, branches of knowledge.

In this illuminating insight the great Pascal anticipates moral philosophers and evolutionary biologists such as John Rawls and Marc Hauser by over 300 years. As homo sapiens we all share an innate moral faculty and finite ethical grammar, just as we do for language — but also like language, the particulars of its instantiation varies, within elastic limits, from culture to culture.

By way of Dennis Mangan, here is a review of the new hybrid car from Honda. It is less than favorable.

The government of Sri Lanka has announced that the leader of the “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam”, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in the sanguinary denouement of that nation’s long civil war.

This news will certainly come as a great relief to a great many people in that tormented island. Mr. Prabhakaran was a ruthless terrorist who gave the world such blessings as the explosive vest and female suicide bombers, and who also masterminded the assassinations of Indian prime minister Rajiv Ghandi (who was killed by a young woman who detonated herself as she greeted Mr. Gandhi with flowers) and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa.

It is said that when Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, defeated the Persian king Cyrus in 529 B.C., she had him decapitated, and threw his head into a vessel full of his own blood. “You who have lived so long on the blood of others,” she said, “now you may drink your fill.”

It’s been a busy weekend — it often seems there is less free time on the weekends than during the week — so there has been little opportunity for brooding and writing.

For tonight, then, here’s a cheery little item about Google and you.

From commenter JK comes a link to a story about a young girl with juvenile diabetes who died because her parents, besotted by delusional religious fantasies, saw fit only to pray for her, rather than seek simple and effective medical treatment. We read:

Last Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her bed, too weak to walk or speak. If her parents had called the hospital that day, Kara might have lived. Instead, Dale and Leilani—followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention—knelt in prayer beside her. Kara died a few hours later of diabetic ketoacidosis, a result of undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes.

Her parents are now facing criminal charges, as they should. But according to this article, it seems the law is on their side:

“We are not commanded in scripture to send people to the doctor,” Unleavened Bread Ministries preacher David Eells said in a statement to his followers, “but to meet their needs through prayer and faith.” Under current Wisconsin law, his followers aren’t commanded by the state, either. Part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes, is that parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available.

This is not only insane, it is patently unfair. Why should this exemption — to be allowed to watch your innocent and helpless child die before your eyes of an easily curable disease as a direct result of your demented worldview — be granted only to the religious? What about crackpot inventors or dietary quacks, for example? If I’m allowed to withhold medical treatment in favor of prayers to Jesus, why not magnetic waves or plankton smoothies?

The larger question, of course, is what role the State should play in protecting children. Are our offspring are simply chattel until majority, for parents to deal with as they like? In what practical way is refusing medical treatment to gravely ill children any different from starving them to death? The result is the same.

Obviously the State does take an interest in defending children from abusive parents; indeed, if it gets around that you’ve been spanking them when they misbehave, you might soon find yourself in very hot water. But so convinced are we in this country of the overriding value and importance of religious belief — no matter how idiotic or destructive — that to condemn our children to death in the name of the Lord is simply our God-given right. This is America, after all.

You can read this unspeakably depressing story here.

In what may be an enormously important piece of scientific work, chemist John D. Sutherland of the University of Manchester has discovered a reaction path by which RNA nucleotides can have been assembled from molecules likely to have been present in the Earth’s early environment.

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The Taliban, responding to Pakistan’s latest attempt to flush them out of Swat, has demanded that all government officials in the area must leave at once, or their families will be “arrested”. In today’s news we read that:

On Wednesday, [Taliban spokesman Muslim] Khan denied reports from many refugees emerging from the Swat Valley that Taliban militants had carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation in the region for the past two years.

Several terrified Swat residents, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Taliban, described how insurgents kidnapped and killed their critics, beheaded government informers and blew up girls’ schools.

Not at all, said Mr. Khan; they are only providing a benevolent public service:

“We are killing the people which are only no good for society, like thieves and people who are making problem for the poor people, like people who are working for army,” he said. “We are only killing these people.”

…and women who won’t wear the hijab, and people who listen to music, and girls who want to go to school, etc.

Read the latest here.

My old friend Dave Pauley, whose inbox is apparently as clogged as my own, has transmuted base metal into gold. Here is the result:

Spam Sonnet

Ascent your darling couch experience;
Go for the strong virility you need.
An MBA award to you convinced
Of greater power deep inside your seed.
Your stick will be harmonic with her hole,
Make sharp your arms in holy war above.
Your golden watch, it thinks you are too old,
So teach your organ ways to create love.
The money that it takes to live the dream
Will teach her what your epilepsy is:
More energetic feeling when you cream,
A longer distance shooting of your jiz.
With mortgage that is written out of jail,
More gorgeous women your thing will impale.

New words appear in our language almost every day. Sometimes, like a lovely wildflower or sturdy oak, they are welcome additions to the lexical landscape, delighting the rambler who encounters them for the first time. Some of these neologisms, however, produce an effect more like rounding a bend in the trail only to find a ruptured bag of garbage, or severed human foot. In a depressing item in today’s news, I have encountered just such a word: “weisure”.

This ghastly coinage describes a grim reality of modern life: the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure. The article’s author seems to see this as a sign of progress; I certainly do not. We read:

What happened? Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there’s more work and less play, according to Conley’s book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”

“For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you’re going to have an extremely long workweek,” he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.

Ah, business and pleasure, simultaneously. What a blessing!

Indeed, why stop there? Readers are advised to be on the lookout for “wex”, “wefecation”, “wisease”, “wemotherapy”, and, if the wemotherapy doesn’t work out, perhaps even a stay in a “wospice”.