Archive for June, 2012

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Fabio Paolo Barbieri on the Contempt of the American Command for the Enlisted Man

Posted June 21, 2012 By John C Wright

A powerful and brief statement by the wise albeit irascible Mr Barbieri about the sad state of the US military:

http://fpb.livejournal.com/632086.html

He quotes an article from LifeSiteNews.com:

Col. Crews recounted an interchange in 2010 between Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a military chaplain. While Adm. Mullen was briefing the troops on what the repeal might look like, the chaplain asked if those with “biblical views that homosexuality is a sin [would] still be protected to express those views?”

Adm. Mullen reportedly responded, “Chaplain, if you can’t get in line with this policy, resign your commission.”

Another chaplain’s promotion was unexpectedly rescinded, said the colonel. The reason: forwarding an email sent by a fellow chaplain that was critical of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. Due to this action he was told he would need to be “more closely supervised.”

Yet another chaplain wished for his chapel to be considered “sacred space” and not used to officiate same-sex marriages. He was told that despite his wishes, his chapel would be “sexual neutral territory.”

After Chaplain (Major General) Douglas Carver, the U.S. Army’s Chief Chaplain, called for a day of prayer and fasting “in keeping with your religious traditions,” the Military Religious Foundation (MRF) “wanted him fired,” said Col. Jacob Goldstein, a panelist and senior U.S. Army Jewish chaplain. He added that despite the MRF’s claims that this was offensive to Jewish people, “this fasting follows in our tradition.”

Chaplains are not the only ones feeling pressure. Veteran’s Affairs officials told veteran honor guards that mentioning God in prayer was not acceptable. It took a Temporary Restraining Order from U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes and four months of litigation for the name of God to again be permissible.

Four months was not soon enough to prevent heartbreak to the widows of the fallen. Lisa Ward, the widow of a war veteran, made a promise to her husband – in the event of his death, he would receive the full burial ritual. But arriving to bury her husband and fulfill her promise, she was told the full burial ritual was against federal government regulations. The ritual mentioned God.

“I can’t redo my husband’s funeral,” she said with tears in her eyes.

My comment: This is the result obtained when you have your military institutions being used as a sandbox for social experimentation rather than as a cadre for the defense of democracy around the world.

 

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And now for some real news, fans of science!

Posted June 20, 2012 By John C Wright

This is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but a once-in-history thing. I am only sorry there will not be a firm date which defines a clear boundary line, but at some point soon, Voyager One becomes the first manmade object ever to depart from the solar system.

The cameras were shut off long ago, but the instruments record an uptick in the particle count which indicates the spaceship has departed from, or nearly so, the relatively empty space that a sun sweeps clear of interstellar particles via solar light pressure. This envelope is called the heliosphere. The interstellar medium, if I can use the word without smiling, is thicker, by which I mean the vacuum is marginally less perfectly empty.

The signal takes sixteen hours at lightspeed to reach from the ship to receivers here on Earth or about about 121 astronomical units away.

Here is an article with some details

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/get-ready-because-voyager-i-is-this-close-to-leaving-our-solar-system/258456/

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The Penguin Equation

Posted June 20, 2012 By John C Wright

I should tell my loyal readers that obviously I intend to spend the rest of my adult life kvetching about the Drake Equation. Sad, but manic obsession can strike anywhere, and at any time. I blame Carl Sagan.

Doc Rampage writes:

““Haste makes waste” is not an equation for the trivial reason that it does not express an equivalence but rather a causal relationship. “

Thank you. I think we can agree on this point, as well as on the point that “Slithy were the borogroves” is not really a sentence despite having the appearance of the subject-verb-object form of a declarative sentence. I also agree that God=Love is not an equation for the reasons you give, that the nouns in the sentence are not mathematical operands.

I will make the further statement that in order to be a “scientific equation”, the operands must refer to something science can define or measure, such as the number of stars which produce planets. When you get to concepts that involve a judgment call of something which cannot be reduced to a measurement, such as the definition of life or the definition of civilization or the lifespan of a civilization, we are no longer talking about something in the realm of physics.

Instead saying “The Drake Equation is not an equation” I will now, armed with the distinction you have given me, rephrase my bitter complaint:

I myself take it to be true that the more stars there are, the harder it is to believe that life, if it arises naturally and automatically, will not arise among the stars in their countless myriads. If there were fewer stars, it would be easier to believe we are alone. But the so called Drake Equation does not express an equivalence but rather a causal relationship.

The equation offends me, because it looks like science, it looks like an statistical expression of something like Mendeleevian genetics.

The Drake so-called Equation is actually more like taking a birdwatcher to a marsh, and saying, “The more birds that there are in the marsh, the greater your chances of seeing an ostrich or a penguin” without knowing whether or not those who species, or any species, inhabit that particular marsh.

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Drake = Not an Equation

Posted June 19, 2012 By John C Wright

Revisiting this dead horse to whip it a few more time might clarify a question of terminology. I apologize for imposing on the patience of my readers.

Doc Rampage asks:

“When you say that the Drake equation is not really an equation I presume you mean to say something similar to “it is nonsense and it does not express a proposition”.”

I am saying something very specific, not merely ‘it is nonsense’. I am not concerned with whether it expresses a proposition, I am concerned with whether it expresses an equation.

Let me try again: in physics, we observe that certain proportions exist between things we call constants. For example, when observing the flight of a musket ball, we note that it forms a parabola, that is, the forward motion is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the powder charge and the drop is PROPORTIONAL IN THE SQUARE to the distance thrown. This can be expressed by the same equation used to graph a parabola. The color of the musket ball does not change the equation. It is an irrelevant factor. Again, the angle of the shot defines the distance to the spot where the ball falls, such that a 45 degree angle casts the ball the farthest length for a given charge of powder and mass of shot. This also I can express as a proportion or an equation relating the angle to the point at which the parabola cross the origin.

When the proportion is expressed in terms of a unity, that is, all the terms are defined in relation to one term, this is called an equation. By definition, where there is no proportion, there is no way to express all the terms in relation to one term. When that happens, we do not have a poorly formulated equation, we have something that is no equation at all.

It is in no wise a matter of formal syntax, for, if it were,  “too many cooks spoil the broth” would become an equation if expressed in the science-y looking terms “x = nb where x is the number of cooks, n the chance of spoiling and b is the spoilage ickyness factor of the broth” whereas the inverse square ratio is not an equation if written in text not using an equals sign “a cube of twice the height fills eight times the volume.”

What the Drake Equation does is list things that are not defined (how do we measure how alive a thing is, or how civilized?) and which at our present state of knowledge is an unknown and invents a term which has no meaning other than the sum of all the undefined unknowns. While it is written in the form of an equation, is not an equation, because it does not express a proportion between the factors given.

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Interview with InfoCatólica

Posted June 15, 2012 By John C Wright

Bruno Moreno Ramos asked to interview me for his Spanish speaking audience at www.infocatolica.com at http://infocatolica.com/?t=noticia&cod=12118

Here is the English version of my answers:

Interview John C. Wright

 

Q: You were raised as a Protestant, you grew into an atheist, you married a Christian Scientist and then you went and became a Catholic. It’s hard not to think of a miracle. How were you led into the fold?

A: Odd as this will sound to Christian readers, my reason for being an atheist was because of a deeply rooted love of truth.

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Preventing Caesar-Worship and the Madnesses of Crowds

Posted June 15, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader with the iatric yet tumultuous name of Doc Rampage asks:

It is an old observation that when people are deprived of true religion, they will construct a false one, but why would the false religion be one that is so obviously and blatantly false? Why worship a mere man? I am starting to see how emperors and pharaohs were able to take on the mantle of godhood a phenomenon that always struck me as bizarre. Surely anyone could see that the rulers were just men, and surely the private mockery of such pretensions would quickly render the pretensions impossible to maintain. But after witnessing the Obama mania, I begin to see how strongly and irrationally people do want to make gods of men. It may not be at all appealing to me, but it is clearly appealing to many, many other people. It is rather a frightening revelation.

My comment:

I should urge my atheist friends that it is prudent for the commonwealth for men to worship a jealous God, because even if god is a fiction, it will draw away the natural human tendency to worship Pharaohs and Caesars and Fuhrers into a fictional being, one capable of doing no harm.
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The Catwoman Equation!

Posted June 14, 2012 By John C Wright

For those of you paying attention to the discussion in recent days in this space, all I can ask is, why are you doing something more useful?

Meanwhile, we are discussing SCIENCE! Yes, that triumphant march of knowledge based on observation and experimentation, making only repeatable and testable theories about the physical properties of physical matter, without allowing absurd flights of fancy or mere guesswork based on wishful thinking to intrude.

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Mark Shea ask the Musical Question: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Posted June 14, 2012 By John C Wright

Allow me to post a link to Catholic and Enjoying It, where we can stroll down memory lane together.

Mr. Shea writes:

Remember? Just a few short years ago when actual adults (lots of them, not just a few, and famous and powerful ones, not fringe, kook, and unimportant ones) were–publicly–saying this kind of stuff, not just with a straight face, but with an earnest, impassioned face and eyes glistening with tears of urgent messianic fervor?:

“We have an amazing story to tell,” she said. “This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.”

– Michelle Obama

“Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus.”

– Politiken (Danish newspaper)

“No one saw him coming, and Christians believe God comes at us from strange angles and places we don’t expect, like Jesus being born in a manger.”

–Lawrence Carter

“Many even see in Obama a messiah-like figure, a great soul, and some affectionately call him Mahatma Obama.”

– Dinesh Sharma

“We just like to say his name. We are considering taking it as a mantra.”

– Chicago Sun-Times

“A Lightworker — An Attuned Being with Powerful Luminosity and High-Vibration Integrity who will actually help usher in a New Way of Being”

– Mark Morford

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The Space Princess Equation!

Posted June 14, 2012 By John C Wright

Related to our previous post, and to clear up certain technical matters, here is  a re-reprint of a post from 2011 and from earlier this year, explaining the now-famous Space Princess equation.

—————————————————-

A reader whom I will, for the sake of anonymity, refer to merely as ‘Curmudgeon’ (albeit his real name is Homer Snodgrass of 12 Manitowish Avenue, Mammoth Falls, Wisconsin, 54545, and his social security number is 1205-119-8577, and the PIN number of his bank card is 4560) holds the opinion that too many modern persons of the youthful persuasion (he refers to them as “kids!” or “punks!”) are devoted to science fictional ideas as a thinly disguised substitute for spiritual longings.

‘Curmudgeon’ reads and promotes what he calls the ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ School of science fiction. This school is remarkably similar to the Mundane Movement of Really Boring Self-Righteous Left-Leaning Science Fiction, being mostly a list of things that ain’t gunna happen.

Here is a summary of his manifesto:

(1) There will be no colonization of space, either O’Neil or otherwise, for the same reason no one lives in a submarine at the bottom of a trench in the Arctic sea;
(2) we are never meeting any intelligent extraterrestrial life;
(3) or if we do, they will be incomprehensible, so much so that even the question of whether they are truly ‘intelligent’ or not will be debatable;
(4) there will be no faster than light travel – It is not just a good idea, it’s the Law;
(5) medicine may shift where the top of the bell curve falls, but human beings are not going to live much past 80 or 90;
(6) psionics is just magic wearing a lab coat;
(7) time travel is less possible and less realistic than fairy unicorn sparkly magic;
(8) The Soviets and the Red Chinese and Cubans all promised and vowed to bring about modern, scientifically-run secular humanist utopias very much along the lines of Gene Roddenberry’s ideas. (So… how is that workin’ out for ya’? What is the murder count now for the Utopians? Upwards of 110,000,000? Let’s give the idea one more try!)

Now, for some reason, my friend Curmudgeon thinks I am of his school of science fiction. I am not.

In fact, I am a founding member of the Space Princess school of science fiction writing, which, to date, includes me and a writer named Edward Willet: Albeit we two have retroactively included every big name Willet and I can think of into our movement against their will and over their strong objections, if they ever had any female royalty from outerspace in any story.

Inductees include Edgar Rice Burroughs, who invented Dejah Thoris, and Robert Heinlein, who invented Her Wisdom CCIV aka Star the Sexy-Space Empress, and Michael Moorcock, whose hero, Kane of Old Mars, traveled back into a previous eon of Martian existence to meet his space princess Shizala. In other media, STAR WARS and BUCK ROGERS and FLASH GORDON and TEEN TITANS all include space princesses of one sort or another, including Princess Leia, Princess Ardala, Princess Aura, and Koriand’r of Vega (Starfire to you non-T-heads).

My school of writing contradicts Curmudgeon’s ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ school at nearly every point.

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Sagan — a Demon in a Candle Lit World

Posted June 13, 2012 By John C Wright

Please read My Sagan Obsession over at Yard Sale of the Mind by one of my fellow alumni from St John College in Annapolis. I like the purple prose, and, better yet, I agree with him. Here is a snippet from the middle:

I believe that, far from belittling science, knowing the gory details helps one appreciate just how wonderful science is. When what seems like a crazy theory – plate tectonics, say, or relativity, or the revolution of the earth on its axis – a theory that defies what seems to be obviously true – turns out to be demonstrated as true based on a growing mountain of observation, experiment and argument, and over the egos and back-stabbing and pettiness of the people involved – well, THAT’s a triumph to celebrate. But science as presented by Sagan – we enlightened few, harmoniously united by our pure love of the Truth, who for completely selfless reasons, and armed with nothing but argument and integrity, battle the execrable ignorance of the unwashed, superstitious Many, eventually leading them, however dull and imperfectly, to accept the Brave New World we scientists have, despite their opposition, created for them – gag me.

It gets worse. I’ve read more than once someone call Sagan a ‘great scientist’. You mean, like Einstein, Faraday, and Newton? Guys whose contributions to science reverberate to this day and are incorporated into technologies used daily around the world?  THAT kind of ‘great scientist’?  The dude was a college professor and tireless self promoter who, even according to his fans, made only trivial, work-a-day contributions to his field such as any competent college professor of astronomy might make. What’s more, and more telling, his name is attached to at least two very dubious bits of pseudoscience – SETI and Nuclear Winter. In the first case, he championed the Drake Equation – a hopeless bit of fantasy masquerading as science, and in the second, he championed conclusions which the science itself hardly supported. At best, Nuclear Winter is an alarming theory that *might* happen IF a huge number of unknowns were determined to simultaneously fall toward the worse-case end of the spectrum. In both cases, Carl championed causes that not only did not improve our scientific understanding but concretely set the standard for using smoke and mirrors to promote political agendas.

But these projects sure did raise Sagan’s public profile.

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Size Does Matter

Posted June 13, 2012 By John C Wright

This is a follow up comment to my post about Scipio’s Dream and Carl Sagan’s “How Tiny is the Earth” speech.

What I do not understand is the purpose of the size-is-impressive argument in the mouths of agnostics and atheists.

I am, and all human beings should be who have the minimal scintilla of poetry in their souls, impressed by roaring oceans whose dim and far horizon forms the margin of the world, or appalled at the emptiness of sandy deserts, the majesty of mountains, or, for that matter, the size of elephant’s noses and the necks of giraffes. I would insert a joke about the mammary glands of Dolly Parton, but this would both betray my age and my lack of good taste, so I will not. But I do think the Grand Canyon is grand, and the view of Mount Rushmore. Like any small boy, I am properly impressed with a tall tree.

Unlike non-science fiction fans and non-astronomers, I am also impressed and even appalled at the size of the universe.

I may even be more impressed than the average sciffy fan, because I tend to set my space operas in non-warpdrive universes, so that it actually takes my heroine, for example, 33900 years earth-relative time to sail to the globular cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici at 99.99 percent of lightspeed. And that is not even Andromeda, the galaxy nearest to us, which is more on the order of two and half million years at the same speed, or as far in the future as the earliest Paleolithic is from our past. That says nothing about the distance to the Great Attractor in Virgo, the Void of Bootes, or other large scale phenomena which, in my latest book, I have decided are either weapons or war damage of various superhuman civilizations. — my point here is that I try to emphasize the unimaginable magnitude of what are ironically called “local” locations in space, both interstellar and intergalactic.

But, as a Christian, I believe God to be infinite. Infinite means infinite, not fifteen billion years old or fifteen billion lightyears in diameter. The universe in my imagination is never going to seem large enough to make the claims of any truly universal religion seems small.

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Earth Looked so Small as to Make me Ashamed of Our Empire

Posted June 13, 2012 By John C Wright

This is more like a guest commentary than a question, so you, dear reader, will experience two opinions for the price of one. Let us hear first from Carl Sagan, then from the reader, then I will offer my own comment, and then, finally, the comment from an Roman ghost seen in a dream.

Unfortunately this is print, so I cannot wow you with my powers of voice impersonation. I do a pretty mean Carl Sagan, as well as an excellent Phil Silvers or Hans Conried. Therefore, readers,  I ask you to use your powers of auditory imagination, and to hear in your mind’s ear Mr Sagan pronouncing the following words with his signature explosive b’s and sibilant s’s, and the slight pauses before each adjective, as if Mr Sagan savors the taste on his tongue of the precision of his words.  Imagine a voice vibrant with good humor, almost joy, and the ever so slight musical pomposity of tone:
Carl Sagan:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

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Cover Art for THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA and Excerpt

Posted June 12, 2012 By John C Wright

Thanks to the miracle of the Information Age (thanks, Al Gore!) I have discovered the cover art for my latest book. This is THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA, second volume of the ‘Count to the Eschaton Sequence’ which began with COUNT TO A TRILLION.

The bad news is that the publication date is December 24, 2012.

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Things that Make You Go Hmm…

Posted June 11, 2012 By John C Wright

All my recent posts of late have been links, for which I apologize to those who want to read ruminations about Sci-Fi, listen to an endless argument about materialism, or see pictures of Catwoman. Nonetheless, one more item of interest caught my eye. File this under ‘What is Wrong with the World’:

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.

The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports…

Read the rest here. Hat tip to Mark Shea.

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Recanting Vice

Posted June 11, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader sent me this link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156593/The-lads-mag-I-edited-turned-generation-porn–Im-father-I-bitterly-regret-A-remarkable-confession-longest-serving-editor-Loaded.html

One of the men who helped the current generation turn into pornography addicts, now that he has a child, remembers his sense of decency and is properly ashamed.

I have two comments:

Such shame is insupportable in the pre-Christian and post-Christian world. Pre-Christians (pagans) would commit suicide after the Roman or Japanese fashion when they discovered that there was no confession, no atonement, and no cure for sin, no way to undo the harm done, no way to clean the stain. Post-Christians (sub-pagans) attempt to medicate or self-medicate the shallow outward manifestation of shame, depression, and sometimes self-medicate themselves to death with bottle or needle. This is the slow suicide of postchristians more craven than noble pagans.

This man’s wakening of his conscience was through the grace of family life. As father he sobered up enormously, and came to this senses. You see, a self centered life is no life at all. Caring for the helpless life of son or daughter, becoming their leader and lawgiver and teacher makes one suddenly and shockingly aware that the laws of one’s life must be just and good and decent.

The obliterating hatred of family life expressed by nearly every antichristian political policy from bribing women to remain unwed via welfare to abolishing the institution of marriage as a legally recognized sacrament via no-fault divorce, to the coarsening loss of respect for women, demoting women in the name of equality and liberty from helpmeets desirable for marriage to silicon sexbots desirable for nothing.

Hell wants to destroy the family because the family often enough matures selfish bachelors to settled and decent men, men who begin to think in the long term and in the wider scope.

 

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