An Almanack

As soon as I saw a picture of Rod Blagojevitch (back during the Dem Primaries) I knew he was up to no good. This judgement, now vindicated, did not come from deep knowledge of IL state politics. I just knew that someone with such a lush growth of hair on his head had to be a bounder. This would be true even if the hair were fake. Donald Trump. Gary Hart (in the eighties, not now). Bill Clinton. Elvis. All talented people, all got in trouble. What do they have in common? Hair where it is supposed to grow, not on their ear or back.

IL has a second chance now with Patrick Quinn. He is different from Blagojevitch in every possible way.

“He’s the anti-Blagojevich, for sure,” said State Representative Jack D. Franks

You have got to love the guy: NYTimes

Mr. Quinn, 60, can be so unassuming that he watched the inauguration of President Obama in Washington crunched down on his knees so that people behind him could get a better view. When prone to boasting, which is not very often, it can be about miserly stuff, like staying in budget hotels and eating discount meals.

More to the point I am making,

And with a hairline more John Lithgow than Elvis, he does not even look the Blagojevich part.

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I come home from a business trip to see a large envelope from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Inside is a handsome card embossed with a Golden Seal.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee requests the honor of your presence to attend and participate in the Inauguration of

My heart beats faster. Finally, all those blogs I wrote on Daily Kos are paying off. Impassioned arguments with Hillary Clinton supporters back in the Spring of 2008. Alegre, eat your heart out in your little corner. We are the ones going to the Inauguration.

Barack H. Obama as President of the United States of America

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Hoax phone calls used to be funny. As a teenager, Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple computer, figured out the Bell System technical protocols- he and Steve Jobs had found the manual at the SLAC Library. Woz used this knowledge to call the Pope, pretending to be Henry Kissinger. His fake German accent was good enough to get the Holy Father out of bed. But before he took the phone, an aide figured out that it was some California teenager pulling a prank. (more…)

Whenever a nation has done something deeply embarrassing, which shames its decent citizens, moral philosophy thrives. As though the obvious atrocity can somehow be hidden behind sophisticated reasonings about abstract thought experiments. Psychologists must have some fancy name for this phenomenon.

We live in such a time now. You cannot open the New Yorker or the New York Times Magazine without running into a conundrum designed by the best and the brightest to teach us lessons on moral values. The difference between us and the ancients is that we look to science, not religion, as the source of our values. Thus, neuro-scientists emerge as the Deep Thinkers of our time. Supposedly their knowledge of how our brain is wired allows them to deduce ab initio what is right and wrong.

One the most fundamental of these puzzles is the Trolley problem. It goes something like this.

On your morning walk, you see a trolley car carrying five passengers. It is hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. The passengers are oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five people. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

But wait a minute. Here is the twist. The single worker is Mr. Average Joe, who is working an extra shift so he can pay off his mother’s hospital bill. You just received a text message identifying the five conscious occupants of the Trolley car as Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson, Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Joshua Greene. (You are carrying an iPhone. Duh.) And you have just enough time to Google these names before making the decision.

Now, which way would you throw the switch?

Who is more valuable? Five moral philosophers or an honest working man?

Those with the correct answer will be entered into a raffle for the complete works of Ayn Rand.

I am at my daughter’s birthday party the other day, chatting with the father of one of the girls.

“So, what do you do?” (more…)

An analogy is often made between scientific research and exploration. In High Energy Physics, the accelerator physicists are the ship builders, the theoreticians the map makers, phenemenologists the navigators and the experimentalists are the sailors. The spokesman for the experimentalists is the captain of the ship, a dashing figure with power over life and death during the voyage. Ah, if only we were still in this romantic era..

Exploring in Canoes

The mega collaborations of thousands of physicists, that are being formed, are more like aircraft carriers. A good way of projecting power, but a bad instrument for exploration.

“But you can’t go exploring in a canoe”, I am told when I bring up this point.

Actually, you can. Canoes were exactly what the polynesians used to explore and settle the largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific. (more…)

Breaking News….

The crack investigation team set up by General Musharraf to investigate the death of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto has submitted its report. The conclusions might surprise some who made hasty deductions based on a grainy video.

Mrs. Bhutto died from a severe case of indigestion. Having lived abroad for so long, her stomach could no longer handle the spicy food of her homeland. A particularly spicy meal of Naan and Chicken Tikka at Army HQ in Rawalpindi did her in. Other than that, the dinner was a nice affair.

In the videos shown you can see her bending over suddenly with stomach pain. Purely by coincidence a young man in the crowd can be seen raising a revolver and aiming it at her head. The near simultaneity of these two events led most of the world to mistakenly conclude that Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated. The truth is mundane but inescapable.

Unscrupulous elements are trying to take advantage of the confusion. They will be put down mercilessly. The truth has always been on the side of the Glorious Pakistan Army.

Absurdistan Zindabad!

We return to our regularly scheduled program now.

Other Posts on Pakistan

Contrary to popular wisdom it really is the time now to assign blame. It lies squarely with the Pakistani Army and its Commander-in-Chief, Pervez Musharraf. The same army assassinated her father, Zulfikar Bhutto, after a sham trial. The same army has been plundering the country’s wealth and put its judges in jail in the name of security. (more…)

Our publisher has described the origin of his name elsewhere. Interesting names are all around us.

The Roman Catholic Church had a Cardinal named Sin. He was the Archbishop of Manila, (more…)

Other articles on Pakistan
Excerpt from an interview with President Bush by ABC News Nov 2007.

What’s his name has agreed to hold elections in January, and he’s agreed to take his uniform off. Frankly, I think he should do that in the privacy of his own home, but hey, everyone wants the man to take off his own uniform, so lets let him do it anyway he wants. Make sure you cover it live Charlie.

Do you mean Musharraf?

Yeah him. Have trouble remembering his name. General. General something. Hey, he knows how to call me, I don’t need to remember his name. (more…)