"What! He's building a university that will let women drive?"
Yeah, dude. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is investing $10 billion and two years into a revolutionary, coeducational graduate school built under the massive oil conglomerate Saudi Aramco. He feels that the Arab world is slipping behind the West in terms of intellectual achievements and indirectly attributes the slacking to the fervent religiosity of the region, which tends to prevent collaboration and research into controversial sciences, such as evolution and genetics.
The university is planned to be sectioned off from the nation's police, who enforce Muslim mandates, and it's the only place in the country that will allow women to drive and openly socialize with males. (Israelis, however, are barred entry into Saudi Arabia as a whole and cannot enroll in the school regardless of their sex.)
If the political turmoil that King Abdullah predicts unfolds and threatens the university, I think America should get involved. If our goal for the millenium's early years is to democratize and liberate, this is a prime opportunity. The "king has conceived of the new university as a liberalizing counterweight" to the medieval social mores of the region, and its success may determine the immediate success of Arab women's gradual advancements.
I'm gonna summarize my article with a poem.
Oh King Abdullah, King Abdullah,
Build your school upon the sand
You've invested so much moolah
To construct intelligence within your land
So wall it off, wall it off,
Barricade it from vehement cops
Who look at evolution and Muslimly scoff
Because we're wrong, and Allah's tops
Let women drive, women drive,
And maybe the rest of Arabia will follow suit
Sink or support, the King made the dive
And we don't want reversion to roots
Help them move on, them move on,
Maybe democracy's going strong
So send in the aid with a marching band
To assist the school upon the sand!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/middleeast/26saudi.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Abolition of Man
We're the most powerful species. We're the catalyst for thousands of extinctions, the wanton indulgence of self-interest at the expense of insignificant insects and rodents. Our ancestors climb trees, but we saw them down with our beacons of intellect and replace the natural world with our perceived paradise, a conglomeration of skyscrapers, complex social contracts and cubicles for the human geniuses who drive it all. Evolution has granted us the greatest wonders yet bestowed upon an organism (how many species can pick up a pen? how many species have the capacity for self-reflection?), but evolution has similarly granted man's microscopic foes the insidious weapon of drug-resistance. "MRSA is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to penicillin or related antibiotics" and has consequently become "responsible for more deaths in the United States each year than AIDS."
In football locker rooms, the hidden shelters behind the cultural achievement of centuries of games and spectacles, players battle against the lining of their jerseys, the sweat in their helmets and the microbes that teem in the humid mire. The bacteria is most easily transmitted by contact, either direct (person to person) or indirect (two people sharing something, like a towel, without ensuring hygienic quality).
We created the disease. For all of the benefits of medicine and imposed antibiotics, all advances have an undeniable and monolithic setback, which is that bacteria are natural organisms, too, and can undergo mutations that make them impervious to our genius manifest. As we come to rely upon vaccinations and pills to ward off death, the emergence of bacteria that surmount our defense becomes potent a fortiori.
We're not any better than bacteria. We function in accordance with the same laws that they do. As we transcend the limits of our capacities by inventing inorganic means by which to do so (such as manufacturing medicine to unnaturally empower our immunological response to malignant organisms) we are supplying those very organisms with the means by which to assault us more effectively. Perhaps as we progress in technological feats we are actually not progressing, but on the contrary inviting disaster and the shipwreck of our monuments by voicelessly taunting bacteria and viruses to try to hurt us now.
One of my favorite songs is entitled "The Abolition of Man," and the final couplet goes like this:
The abolition of man is within the reach of science,
But are we so far gone that we'll try it?
Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
In football locker rooms, the hidden shelters behind the cultural achievement of centuries of games and spectacles, players battle against the lining of their jerseys, the sweat in their helmets and the microbes that teem in the humid mire. The bacteria is most easily transmitted by contact, either direct (person to person) or indirect (two people sharing something, like a towel, without ensuring hygienic quality).
We created the disease. For all of the benefits of medicine and imposed antibiotics, all advances have an undeniable and monolithic setback, which is that bacteria are natural organisms, too, and can undergo mutations that make them impervious to our genius manifest. As we come to rely upon vaccinations and pills to ward off death, the emergence of bacteria that surmount our defense becomes potent a fortiori.
We're not any better than bacteria. We function in accordance with the same laws that they do. As we transcend the limits of our capacities by inventing inorganic means by which to do so (such as manufacturing medicine to unnaturally empower our immunological response to malignant organisms) we are supplying those very organisms with the means by which to assault us more effectively. Perhaps as we progress in technological feats we are actually not progressing, but on the contrary inviting disaster and the shipwreck of our monuments by voicelessly taunting bacteria and viruses to try to hurt us now.
One of my favorite songs is entitled "The Abolition of Man," and the final couplet goes like this:
The abolition of man is within the reach of science,
But are we so far gone that we'll try it?
Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Dismantling Walls That They Devise
A 17 year-old wanted to honor his grandfather's death by flying a flag over the Ohio Capitol building for his "love of God, country and family," which anyone can do by purchasing a flag and going through some simple process. The lead architect cited his office's rule for ordering flags: "Personalized dedications are permitted, but . . . political and/or religious expressions are not" and the boy was declined, but he was also persistent. He wrote a letter to his congressman, and now the rule reads: "Personalized dedications are permitted, but limited to three hundred (300) characters."
The LA Times calls this a "touchstone case in the church-state culture wars" and seems convinced that the people behind the wall trying to support it suffered a heavy defeat. But I fail to see how trying to honor one's deceased grandparent by flying a flag that mentions God over the Capitol building is in any related to a church-state debate. It's more like a jackass-state debate. In flying the flag, that state is by no means endorsing a religion or imposing upon passersby. The media and foolish adherents of injurious convictions are thrusting false meaning into a controversy that doesn't need to exist. They're trying to tear down walls that they create just for the spectacle of the rubble and subsiding ash when it all comes down. The remonstrations are mere squabble over letting a citizen elate in the success of a relative with whom he can no longer interact, and in that sense the issue is closer to freedom of speech rather than the separation of church and state. It's really not that big of a deal. It's really not that big of a blow against Separation.
The LA Times calls this a "touchstone case in the church-state culture wars" and seems convinced that the people behind the wall trying to support it suffered a heavy defeat. But I fail to see how trying to honor one's deceased grandparent by flying a flag that mentions God over the Capitol building is in any related to a church-state debate. It's more like a jackass-state debate. In flying the flag, that state is by no means endorsing a religion or imposing upon passersby. The media and foolish adherents of injurious convictions are thrusting false meaning into a controversy that doesn't need to exist. They're trying to tear down walls that they create just for the spectacle of the rubble and subsiding ash when it all comes down. The remonstrations are mere squabble over letting a citizen elate in the success of a relative with whom he can no longer interact, and in that sense the issue is closer to freedom of speech rather than the separation of church and state. It's really not that big of a deal. It's really not that big of a blow against Separation.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
You're Freaking Killing Me
The American public is opposed to torture. But it's also opposed, and more strongly so, to war and bombs and the death of its citizens. So perhaps that's the reason that the C.I.A. has not disclosed its interrogation methods to Congress, and certainly not to us. Guantanamo Bay was a pretty rough incident for the interrogators, showing the public the army's inhumane and systematic degradation of prisoners' morale and willpower by stripping them of clothes and adorning them with black bags over their heads and all that.
But that was a while ago. People forget things.
In what appears to be a step toward ethical treatment, Congress passed on ban in 2005 on C.I.A. torture methods that constitute "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of prisoners, but many of the members of Congress who voted weren't aware that the Justice Department had already decided that the methods didn't violate that standard.
Hollow steps.
Intelligence officials even claimed the most unbearable tactics were no longer in effect, such as "waterboarding," a simulated drowning of victims, but memorandums disclosed in 2005 reveal that such practices have continued in secrecy.
“I find it unfathomable that the committee tasked with oversight of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program would be provided more information by The New York Times than by the Department of Justice,” Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said to the acting Attorney General.
You're killing me. The greatest power in the world can't keep track of the agencies that contribute to its power? Come on, America. It's like you're not even trying.
Can you imagine drowning?
Can you imagine being drowned?
I have a secret fear of Saran Wrap. When I was younger, I saw a movie in which someone was asphyxiated with a plastic bag tied around their neck until they had nothing left to breathe but their own toxic carbon dioxide. That recognition of impending death as your lips turn blue and you feel your head throb as blood pumps faster and faster, trying to circulate the oxygen that isn't there--what absolute terror.
To impose that terror upon another is worse than death, because it makes them acknowledge with excruciating certainty that death is near, but not immediate.
Whatever information a subject may withhold fails to warrant such grievous procedures.
Come on, America. Find a better way.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/washington/05interrogate.html?hp
But that was a while ago. People forget things.
In what appears to be a step toward ethical treatment, Congress passed on ban in 2005 on C.I.A. torture methods that constitute "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of prisoners, but many of the members of Congress who voted weren't aware that the Justice Department had already decided that the methods didn't violate that standard.
Hollow steps.
Intelligence officials even claimed the most unbearable tactics were no longer in effect, such as "waterboarding," a simulated drowning of victims, but memorandums disclosed in 2005 reveal that such practices have continued in secrecy.
“I find it unfathomable that the committee tasked with oversight of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program would be provided more information by The New York Times than by the Department of Justice,” Senator John Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said to the acting Attorney General.
You're killing me. The greatest power in the world can't keep track of the agencies that contribute to its power? Come on, America. It's like you're not even trying.
Can you imagine drowning?
Can you imagine being drowned?
I have a secret fear of Saran Wrap. When I was younger, I saw a movie in which someone was asphyxiated with a plastic bag tied around their neck until they had nothing left to breathe but their own toxic carbon dioxide. That recognition of impending death as your lips turn blue and you feel your head throb as blood pumps faster and faster, trying to circulate the oxygen that isn't there--what absolute terror.
To impose that terror upon another is worse than death, because it makes them acknowledge with excruciating certainty that death is near, but not immediate.
Whatever information a subject may withhold fails to warrant such grievous procedures.
Come on, America. Find a better way.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/washington/05interrogate.html?hp
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