On death penalty

Saddam Hussein was hanged, and the liberals (especially in Europe) howled with outrage, because "civilized societies do not condone death penalty."  (I have a strong feeling that, had it been George W. Bush who were hanged, it would have been met with silence, if not outright approval by the very same people...) Aside from the many attrocities carried out on orders from one of the most ruthless dictators in recent history, here's a list of penalties that were metered out by Saddam's "justice system":

• Cutting off ears for desertion


• Cutting off hands for theft (fingers for less valuable goods)


• Breaking the spines of liars (in a very literal sense: with a cement block dropped on people's backs)


• Pushing homosexuals off of tall buildings


• Beheading with a sword (al-Bashar) for espionage, treason, and smuggling

To the mind of a European "sophisticate" hanging this monster was an act of barbarity...  Hearing this I can't help but feel Shadenfreude at the decline of Europe - a civilization this wimpy does not deserve to survive. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended". This applies to human societies as well. I just finished reading Mark Steyn's "America Alone", a very witty and very depressing book that points out the demography-driven inevitability of the transformation of Eutopia into Eurabia within a few decades. When the islamic masters take over the liberal institutions of Western Europe - after their population will have become majorities in their European host countries - they will not display the same squeamishness about harsh punishment for offenses far more benign than those  of Saddam.

I do feel somewhat conflicted about the death penalty, but for very different reasons: the way it is administered in countries such as the US, it is far too delicate a procedure, with the opponents now arguing that even the sanitized execution by lethal injection is too "cruel", as it does not kill instantenuously, letting the condemned feel a little bit of the agony of dying. And why shouldn't they? Why should we be so timid about inflicting pain on people like Cary Steiner, who in February 1999 in a Yosemite Park lodge sodomised for hours the 15-year-old Juli Sund, after having strangled her mother and a 16-year-old Argentinian girlfriend, and then drove her (and the two bodies) to a secluded spot in the park, and slit her throat? Or the Belgian electrician Marc Dutroux, who kindapped and sexually molested several young girls, whom he kept in a concrete-lined, sound-proof dungeon in one of his houses. Two of those girls, both 8-years-old, starved to death in this dungeon between February and March 1995, when Dutroux was held in jail for car theft. These "people" deserve much worse fates than a few minutes of "agony" after a lethal injection or a quick, nearly painless death by hanging. It seems that a life imprisonment might be a tougher penalty than this. We don't allow terminally-ill patients to end their lives and suffering, and yet we're offering an easy way out to "people" whose cruelty makes your blood curl. It makes no sense at all.

Science as religion

I've been watching the recorded sessions of the conference Beyond Belief with very mixed emotions. This conference, organized by the Science Network and held November 5-7 at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, gathered together scientists and philosophers, ostensibly to try to answer questions such as, "Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?", but mostly to bash religion, Intelligent Design, and... George W. Bush.

Now, bashing religions, if done well, is music to my ears, if only because religions have enjoyed the status of holy cows in our society way too long. However, seeing this being done by arrogant assholes like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Kraus makes me cringe at calling myself an atheist (I so do not want to be like them!) I actually have more respect for the compassionate, soft-spoken Joan Roughgarden, who actually defended religion, that for the condescending, haughty atheists like Dawkins, regardless how many books the latter wrote.

As much as I despair over the resurgence of religious fanaticism in the world, currently unleashing mayhem and threatening to destroy our civilization, I do not see science offering a better alternative to religion as the ultimate guide for our actions. Anybody who believes science to be free of ideology and dogma obviously hasn't been paying attention. One only needs to recall the treatment given by fellow scientists to Bjorn Lomborg for his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" to know that the price for challenging the currently dominant and politically-correct dogma is steep indeed. While "heretics" who dare to cast doubt on the junk science presented in support of "global warming" as man-made phenomenon do not face being burned at the stake, they do it at a tremendous risk to their careers - a modern day equivalent of being driven out of a medieval village, covered in tar and feathers.

And what's with this visceral hatred of George W. Bush? The cheap, gratuitous jokes would have been embarassing at a divorce lawyers convention, let alone a gathering of people who undoubtedly think of themselves as "luminaries of science". ("Our current president's support of Intelligent Design is surprising, considering that his very existence disproves it." - is just one example. One has to give a bit of credit to the audience, which, although almost certainly not sympathetic to GWB, responded with few laughs.) These people are supposed o be role models??

Quote of the day

"There's something pathological about the liberal need to belittle and demean everything about a person they disagree with in any regard." - Simon, a commenter on Ann Athouse's blog. You nailed it, brother!

A cure worse than the disease

Why is it that whenever the government bureaucrats try to "fix"something, their solution is often clumsy, burdensome, and illogical? Take the airport security, for example: after the Lockerbie bombing the airline personnel receiving luggage from passengers was required to ask every passenger 3 inane questions: "Did anyone unknown to you give you any items to carry on board this aircraft? Did you pack these bags yourselves? Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?" This went on for years and I haven't heard of any bombing or hijacking attempts that had been thwarted by that dumb procedure. Luckily for the government and the airlines, the passengers played along and did not bother to answer these questions truthfully, as this would have wrecked havoc. ("To be honest, since I packed these bags yesterday I left them unattended several times to go to the bathroom and to run errands." "Full check, please!")

Immediately after 9/11 security screeners confiscated, among other things, nail clippers, although it must have been self-evident to anybody with half a brain that after the events of that day no hijackers would be able to take over an airplane, even with box cutters, let alone nail clippers! The formerly operative advice, "Stay calm and do what the hijackers tell you to do" has gone out the window, even before any government official declared it invalid. After the most recent bombing plot discovered in the UK, people not only had their shampoo and toothpaste confiscated (this was, at least, somewhat reasonable given the nature of the threat, apparently involving liquid chemicals smuggled on board and then combined to make explosives), but laptops were also banned from carry-on luggage for no discernible reason whatsoever. This latter directive was recently rescinded, but it is still bewildering why it was issued in the first place. It is still somewhat of a miracle that the government did not make us fly barefoot, given the scare with the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.

Of course, this could be dismissed as a mere nuisance that makes otherwise comfortable lives a little bit less comfortable, but with minimal societal costs. It's a very different story with legislations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which, in reaction to the Enron debacle, imposed a lot of onerous requirements on businesses, stiffling American competitiveness and hobbling the stock market. As the Opinion Journal's John Fund writes: "Increasingly, Hong Kong and London are the places where companies are finding it easier and cheaper to list their shares and raise capital. Last year, of the 25 largest initial public offerings in the world, only one took place in America. This year, Hong Kong is likely to end up as the No. 1 market for stock offerings world-wide." This sort of governmental overreaction can have consequences far more costly and damaging than a silly ban on nail clippers.

Bush is Hitler and you're not dead yet?

If George W. Bush is Hitler, and the United States is a fascist regime, as so many from the Angry Left assert, how come his enemies are not dropping dead like flies, the way the enemies of Russia's Vladimir Putin have been recently? If Noam Fucking Chomsky - to name just one example - had been directing his venom toward Russia and not the United States, he would have been dead by now. It's funny how these assertions about the evil nature of this country are proven wrong by the very fact that they are uttered openly and with complete impunity: in most countries they would not be tolerated. And that's exactly why the Angry Left says those things - because it feels perfectly safe. It is so cowardly that it will retreat and impose censorship at a mere hint of violence from the Perpetually Offended (i.e. muslims) - under the cover of "sensitivity", of course - but it will beat its chest and spray spittle yelling about its inalienable right to say any vile nonsense about the only country that will go to great lengths to protect that right. Few things are more pathetic.

The Futurist

Almost every article in the excellent blog The Futurist is a tasty morsel of good news in the poisonous soup of negativity we are force-fed day after day by the mainstream media. (Unlike in the MSM, these articles started appearing well before the electoral victory of the Democrats. Were it not for this victory, we would never have learned from the likes of the New York Times that the American economy is doing quite well, actually.)

Check out, for example, The US Economy Today - Amazing Resilience, in which the Futurist looks at the numerous negative forces that could be expected to put a damper on our economy: terrorism, corporate scandals, Hurricane Katrina, high oil prices, and points out that only a few decades ago a subset of those would have thrown the US economy (and most other economies) into a deep recession, while today all of them combined manage, at most, to knock off a couple of percentage points from our rate of growth.

Yet the Futurist is not a Polyanna, nor a Buddhist monk reaching for a strawberry while being chased by tigers. He (I'm guessing the writer is a man) is not an incurable optimist, but someone who is very capable of backing his positive outlook with strong, rational arguments. Of course, some of this is merely predicting, which can always prove to be off the mark in a big way, but given the equally (im)plausible predictions that in the next few decades the polar ice caps will melt, or that advancements in biotechnology will increase our expected lifespans to 130 (or more) years, I'm inclined to give more weight to the latter, if only because it is something to hope for, instead of fear.Â

The End of Faith

I have just finished reading Sam Harris' phenomenal book, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason". Without hesitation, I would call it the most important book of the decade. Reading it was both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting, because it is a wonderful feeling to have someone much smarter than I express with such clarity and force ideas that I could very well call my own. The only thing better than that would be if I were able to write so well myself, and be read by so many (this book was a bestseller in the US). Depressing, because there seems to be no viable alternative to the path of apocalyptic destruction we appear to be on. That is, Sam Harris does offer such an alternative - abandoning irrational beliefs in exchange for spirituality and ethics anchored in reason and honest inquiry - but I just can't imagine enough people taking up his challenge for it to make any difference. At least not during my lifetime, which, incidentally, may be cut short by maniacs smart enough to make and use nuclear weapons, but dumb enough to believe that for mass murder they will be rewarded in the afterlife with their own personalized bordellos, each with 72 horny virgins.

Part of the problem, paradoxically, are the very people whom one would naturally expect to provide a counterbalance to religious lunatics, namely the secular liberals. As Sam Harris points out in his book, and in the excellent essay in The Los Angeles Times, "The End of Liberalism", Western liberals have been so blindsided by self-hatred and its monstrous children: moral relativism and dogmatic multiculturalism, that they actually play into the hands of those, who want to destroy Western civilization. To know that this is true one needs only to look at the treatment the erstwhile icon of the European Left, Oriana Fallaci, received from liberals for daring to criticize... islam, and for speaking about the cultural values of the West as if they were (oh, what blasphemy!) superior to the cult of death and destruction emanating from the "islamic world". Sadly, it appears that only the religious lunatics of the West are willing to take a stand against the lunatics of the Middle East - if that's the case, I'm with the former. I can coexist with Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush, but not with Bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. There are people far scarrier than Dick Cheney. The Left, in the grips of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), disagrees. To hell with them.

Here are the major points from Sam Harris' book (as I recall them):

• The human species is on the brink of annihilation because of a clash between worldviews that spring from irrational beliefs


• We live in the Age of Unreason


• This really is a war with islam, and not with terrorism


• Islam is not, and never was, a "religion of peace"


• The role that religion plays in the current conflict has been taken out of discourse


• Islam as a religion is not unique in its aggresive stance against non-believers; the Old and New Testament also contain unambiguous calls to exterminate the non-believers. The only difference is that the adherents of Judaism and Christianity either don't read their holy texts, or don't take them seriously any more.


• Religions have been a tremendous burden on human societies, causing untold suffering and destruction, and hampering progress throughout centuries


• The current predicament of humanity is different from past ones in that now people who disdain life and crave death can get their hands on weapons with the ability to annihilate the human race


• There must be a way to have ethics and spirituality without religion. In fact, we better find it fast, otherwise we may not survive next 50 years


• Happiness and suffering could well form the basis on which to build a rational, non-religious system of ethics