The sun is bright. Don’t look at the sun or you will damage your eyes. Anything that focuses the sun will only make it more dangerous. The Solar Death Ray is dangerous. Don’t build one. I’m surprised I haven’t burnt or blinded myself yet. The fumes from molten plastic can’t be good either. Don't play with fire.
HH: We're going to come back and talk about the U.S. Senate in a moment. I want to start with Benedict XVI. Rarely have I seen mainstream media turn and bare their teeth as quickly as they have towards Benedict, Mark Steyn. Why? And what does it tell us about media?
MS: Well, I think they were rooting for Ellen Degeneres or Rupert Everett. And the fact that the new Pope is, in fact, a Catholic, seems to have come as a great surprise to them. And, you know, each to their own. But if, for example, social conservatives were to complain that the new editor of the New York Times wasn't Rush Limbaugh or you or William F. Buckley, that would sound equally ridiculous. The fact is, institutions are allowed to act in what they see is their own interest. And this, in fact, is just rather childish, this reaction to the Pope. They're sort of, they seem genuinely bewildered that the Cardinals of the Catholic Church think differently on these issues, from Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times.
HH: It is remarkable. Here's a tremendous intellect. The man speaks ten languages, authored forty books, is generally regarded as a very gentle, though very serious thinker, and the world's media is aflame with discontent, probably because he's not for turning.
MS: No. And I think interestingly as well, the difference between him and most western politicians, for example, is that he has given some thought as to how he wants what he believes in to survive, in a very difficult century which we face. For example, he's concluded in Europe, there's no point listening to the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan, because secularism is weak. And that even though he is 78, you know, if he lives to 90-95, by the end of his life, it will be clear to all but the most obtuse, Belgian, Dutch, French, German and Italian politicians, that secularism as it's practiced in Europe, has been a disaster. It's left them with this birthrate that's made them almost extinct, and which will be presenting tremendous conflicts. And he thinks the real challenge is to make Christianity resonate with the people who are going to be in the majority in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world, and not to listen to this sort of pathetic, feeble, parochial minority represented in the western media.
HH: I reviewed all of the elite newspaper's editorials today, and every one of them brought up the fact that he had opposed Turkey's admission to the EU as a reason for grave concern. Is it a reason for grave concern, Mark Steyn?
MS: No, I don't think so. I think he understands, for example, that Islam is the fastest growing religion in Canada, America, Britain and Europe because it's not like the Frank Griswold Episcopal Church. It doesn't say hey, man, whatever your bag is, we're cool with that. If you want a gay church, you want a lesbian church, you want an abortionist church, we'll go along with that. It's precisely because Islam is a demanding religion that it has an appeal. And no one needs a religion that merely licenses your appetites. And this is what the guys like Frank Griswold and the Episcopal Church don't seem to realize. You know, the churches that are complaining about this fellow, are the churches that the New York Times want the Catholic Churches to be like. These are the churches in decline, and frankly, I think a lot of these critics have made themselves look actually rather ridiculous in being unable to see it like this. If you want a gay, abortionist church, found one of your own. There's nothing in Catholic theology of the last 2,000 years to suggest that they'd be cool with that.
I don't know Levitt's answer here, but one explanation (besides the obvious "they're idiots") for why people become drug dealers when the economic returns are poor is that being a drug dealer offers -- and, especially during the crack boom, offered -- nonmonetary returns, by having much more status than working minimum wage . . .
My historian-brother often says that one of the most interesting phenomena that he's observed is the cross-cultural willingness of people to trade away economic benefits for status. I suspect that this is one example of that. So, in a surprisingly similar way, is being a politician. That's an obviously poor economic move for most folks. But one of the drug dealers in Price's book talks about how he likes the way he becomes the center of attention when he enters a room full of junkies. Politicians, I think, get the same thing, especially in the bubble-environments of Washington, or state capitals. I suspect, in fact, that people are, to varying degrees, hardwired to get an endorphin rush from that sort of attention, just as they're hardwired in varying degrees to respond to drugs.
Enjoyed your "Freakonomics" review, and as someone who has a number of friends in concert production, I can assure you that a large proportion of them aren't doing it for the money. You'd be appalled, or maybe you wouldn't, at what some of the hardest-working people around settle for monetarily when they can get and give free tickets/backstage passes to concerts, and hang around with rock stars. I understand the film industry has the same weird pull. As someone who briefly dallied in concerts, the ironic part is that after a year of being required to attend all of the shows my company produced in a job setting, I had pretty much lost interest in live music altogether.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance."
Human beings experience it in many forms; the shameful and surreptitious attraction to pornography, drink, cruelty or plain laziness: the subconscious knowledge that you are going to do something bad; and though you try to deceive yourself into imagining you will not succumb just yet, you let yourself approach the edge just near enough so that in a moment of weakness you will fall over as planned. Except, as Dalrymple argues in the City Journal, the human recognition of evil normally allows us to resist so it never has us wholly in its grasp. Looking back on 14 years of service in hospitals and prisons, Dalrymple realized he was witnessing the inexorable incapacitation of human discernment; the deadening of the ability to distinguish between good and evil which is so essential to survival.
In nearly every case the one thing the perpetrators and victims of evil were never allowed to do was to judge their own acts. That was absolutely forbidden. The universal course of treatment prescribed by all the organs of the Welfare State was to find ways to make them 'feel better about it'.
Dalrymple makes a strong case for the utility of morality as a survival skill. It is a craft, which like hunting and gathering, was once passed on to keep people from perishing in the wilderness. Now it is disparaged; the modern welfare state has no need of it.
By a strange process of summation the politicians of the welfare state become afflicted with the same blindness they wrongly believed confined to low-income housing estates. Suicidal public policies are pursued -- even when everyone knows they are suicidal -- because no one can remember how to behave differently.
"A military strike against the Taliban is full of perils that are far greater than the dangers we already face. Escalation is unthinkable. It must be avoided at all costs." Jonathan Schell, September 2001
"I don't think you have to love Saddam Hussein to be skeptical about the rosy scenarios being put forward on behalf of 'regime change'. Even Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident who strongly favors invasion, admitted that there is only a 5% chance that the aftermath will be a democratic, peaceful Iraq that respects human rights." Katha Pollitt, Nov 2002
"Blue-collar [Dennis] Kucinich is the only one who can win back the blue-collar Reagan Democrats. Imagine him in a debate with Dubya. It would be a knockout in the first round, & we'd have an honest-to-God working-class President. Kucinich is the man to light the fire." Studs Turkel April 2002
85 year-old Mae Magouirk of LaGrange, Georgia, is currently being deprived of nutrition and hydration at the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy. Mrs. Magouirk suffered an aortic dissection 2 weeks ago and was hospitalized. Though her doctors have said that she is not terminally ill, Ms. Gaddy declared that she held medical power of attorney for Mae, and had her transferred to the LaGrange Hospice. Later investigation revealed that Ms. Gaddy did not in fact have such power of attorney. Furthermore, Mae's Living Will provides that nutrition and hydration are to be withheld only if she is comatose or vegetative. Mae is in neither condition. Neither is her condition terminal.
Furthermore, under Georgia law, if there is no power of attorney specifying a health care decisionmaker, such authority is given to the closest living relatives. Mae's brother, A. B. McLeod, and sister, Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, are both still alive and capable of making such decisions. They opposed Mae's transfer to hospice, and are fighting to save her life. But in spite of the lack of a power of attorney, and the fact that there are closer living relatives who should be given precedence by Georgia law, Ms. Gaddy sought an emergency appointment as guardian from the local probate court. The probate judge, Donald Boyd (who, I am told, is not an attorney and does not have a law degree), granted Gaddy's request, thereby giving her the power to starve and dehydrate Magouirk to death, though such an action is contrary to the provisions of the living will.
I have spoken to Kenneth Mullinax, Mae's nephew, and he has confirmed all the above. He also tells me that he believes that Ms. Gaddy has no bad motives, but is simply misguided and mistaken. Mullinax said that Ms. Gaddy has testified in court that she has "prayed over" Mae, and is convinced that it is "time for her to go". Whether the fact is relevant or not remains to be seen, but apparently Ms. Gaddy is also the sole beneficiary of Mae's will.
As a professional writer I am of two minds about the galloping ignorance of young people today. On the one hand, it may mean more work for me, as a growing number of Americans, including even corporate executives, struggle to compose simple sentences. On the other hand, it may hasten our national descent into a pre-verbal state, whereby all communication is achieved by grunts, clicks, quotations from The Simpsons and Seinfeld, and blasts of machine-gun fire; in such a society I am unlikely to thrive.
