The Rivers of Babylon

Sunday was a day of mourning for traditional Jews, the Ninth of Av on the traditional (originally Babylonian) calendar. By tradition, both of the Jerusalem temples were destroyed on this day, and with them the freedom of the Jewish people, which was twice driven into exile with great violence. (See inset from the Roman Arch of Titus). Hence the 137th Psalm's “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

Traditional belief holds that some day, the Anointed One will come and miraculously restore the Temple, and convert the world to the worship of the One True God.

Now ancient ideas about religious practice are rather different from contemporary ones. The Temple was a giant abbatoir, where animals by the dozens and hundreds had their throats cut and parts of their bodies were burnt, all for the greater glory of God. Not so different from what pagans did around the world (just read Herodotus, to see the universality and normality of sacrifice).

After 70 AD, when the Romans smashed a great Jewish uprising and destroyed the Temple, both the Jews and the Christians moved away from physical sacrifice, the Jews substituting prayer and the domestic practice of ritual purity for the Temple cult, and the Christians opting for their own version of a ritual meal commemorating the sacrifice of their own Man-God, which did away with the need for animal sacrifice forever. Muslims, on the other had, still practice sacrifice in memory of Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son, in the Muslim tradition the elder Ishmael, not the younger Isaac.

The deaths of thousands, enslavement and exile, loss of freedom, are surely to be mourned. The abolition of the Temple cult, perhaps not. It would be less than edifying, it seems to me, to see restored a priest-ridden Iowa Beef plant in the center of Jerusalem.

By some irony, or by plan, the evacuation of the Israeli settlements in Gaza also is being carried out just after the Ninth of Av. Gaza, of course, was not part of ancient Judea, but the land of the Philistines, heirs of the invading Sea Peoples. It was in Gaza that eyeless Samson brought down the temple upon the mocking Philistines and himself. A suicide bomber without explosives.

This is not the place to comment on the wisdom or likely outcome of Sharon's maneuver.


The exiled Jews could not sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, and the exiled Rastafarians cannot sing King Alfa's song in exile either.

And we are all in exile from Eden, so they tell us.

Get Ready, Me Hearties

National Talk Like a Pirate Day is September 19th!

T' me,
Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho,
It's "Talk Like A Pirate" Day!
That time in September when sea dogs remember
That grown-ups still know how ta play!
When wenches are curvy and dogs are all scurvy
And a soft-wear patch covers your eye,
Ta hell with our jobs, for one day we're all swabs
And buccaneers all till we die!

So hoist up the mainsails and shut down your brain cells,
They only would get in the way,
Avast there, me hearty, we're havin' a party,
It's "Talk Like A Pirate" Day!

Yo Ho!

Christopher Walken's Hat in the Ring.

Or perhaps his entire head.

He's running for President.

Maybe we need a creepy President. "If you attack us, I will devour the souls of your children!"

Morning for Troglodytes?

The Gray Lady comes out with a long piece about a local pol named Fernando Ferrer, who's embarking on his third run for Mayor of New York.

Aside from running on his ethnicity, a hallowed New York custom, Ferrer is running on socialist atavism:

For months, Mr. Ferrer has been going around the city, reaching far beyond his Bronx roots and seeking to draw in the middle-class voters who have proven key to winning city elections. His message - given at a backyard fund-raiser in an affluent Staten Island neighborhood one swampy night, or at an African Methodist Episcopal church in southeast Queens on another - strikes traditional Democratic themes in a city that has turned its back on the party, at least in selecting its mayors: that government can solve city ills through building more subsidized housing, by hiring more employees, by taxing Wall Street to improve its schools.

At the core of his candidacy is his belief that many New Yorkers face huge challenges merely trying to get by in the city, given rising housing costs, public schools that often fail to provide an adequate education, and a lack of attractive jobs for all but the elite. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he argues, does not even recognize these concerns and panders only to business concerns and wealthier New Yorkers.

Ferrer is half right. Bloomberg wanted to use taxes for a massive subsidy for a football stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan. He certainly qualifies as an advocate of welfare for the rich.

But Ferrer? He wants to revive all the nostrums of New York municipal socialism. Subsidized housing? Try Co-op City, the jerry-built disaster in the Bronx. More city employees? Can he really be serious? Tax Wall Street more? Financial services is the one area where New York City has held its own, job-wise. If he taxes Wall Street in an internet age, the back office jobs are moving to South Dakota, Nova Scotia, or Bangalore. Maybe the Rubins and Corzines of the world will stay in New York, but jobs will start to bleed.

The best way to help the housing situation in New York City:

1. Get rid of rent control.


2. Get rid of silly restrictions on the buildig industry.


3. Get the corrupt officials, unions and gansters out of the construction business.

It ain't going to happen. And as long as New York City is dominated by liberals (read, socialists), the best its citizens can hope for is that occasionally they will get lucky, and some of their people will remain truly professional in spite of everything.

Anointing a liberal cave-dweller like Ferrer would be a disaster. Fortunately, fiscal constraints (no money) will limit the damage he can do if he wins.

A Spectatular Piece of Obsolete Technology

I watched the space shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base. There is no doubt, even many years later, that this is a spectaculr piece of engineering -- essentially a computerized projectile carrying human beings.

Wildly more expensive (and completing many fewer voyages) than contemplated, and like the B-52, flying well beyond its planned life, the shuttle is also a contemporary version of a yacht, "a hole in the water into which one pours money."

The robotic space probes and Hubble telescope have produced far more science, and if the shuttle was planned to be the first step in a human space exploration program, that effort has been stalled.

I'm all for space exporation. The new private efforts are one promising approach. If we continue the public effort, we need to rethink the goals and the timetable, and to design a different vehicle.

But kudos to the crew and to NASA anyway -- it's still an amazing sight!

Idiotarianism Redux

This story describes crackpot religiouz zealotry at its worst.

Apparently not only does "God Hate Fags," according to the whacked-out Fred Phelps, he hates American soldiers, who must also be "fags."

Disgusting.

Good News on Avian Flu

It appears from this story that a vaccine that's effective may have been developed, although for ethical reasons indirect evidence -- an increased immune response with increased dosage -- is used to measure effectiveness.

One problem, as the article says, is inadequate production facilities. This problem, it would seem, is one that money could help with. Given the general nature of the threat, this is something government should spend money on.

Even if, provided vaccination works, we'll never know the magnitude of the threat we averted.

More Food for Pessimism

Fred Iklé is a thinker about strategy, including the "unthinkable."

In this piece, he argues that the absence of a nuclear attack for the last 60 years, anywhere in the world, is partly a matter of luck.

If our luck is running out, the danger is abetted by incompetence. We aren't doing enough, again with known or achievable technologies, to do such things as detect smuggled nuclear devices in ship containers.

Although the anti-nuclear movement was largely part of the kooky left, it was right about one thing -- a nuclear attack or conflict would be incredibly horrible, and greater efforts to prevent one are urgently needed.

OK. Enough dark stuff. How's Britney's pregnancy going? Are Brad and Angelina an item or not?

If You Want Something to Worry About

I recently finished reading The Great Influenza, an account of the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Aside from considerable dirt on my favorite bête noire, Woodrow Wilson, the book describes the horrors of a world disease event that killed millions.

The Great Influenza is on point today because every sign is that we are very likely to be hit with another influenza epidemic, of one or more variants of the Avian or Bird Flu that is now spreading in domestic and wild populations of birds in Asia. Here's recent roundup on possible preventive measures.

Here is a legitimate rôle for government, and of course, not nearly enough is being done. We should be stockpiling Tamiflu, and increasing budgets for research on vaccines and antiviral agents, and epidemiology. The flu virus is a rapidly mutating and recombining virus. Given a sufficient number of trials the emergence of a virulent strain highly contagious in humans is likely. With globlization, the spread of such a virus before measures such as quarantine and mass Tamiflu treatment in the vicinity of an outbreak becomes more and more of a threat.

People who worry about leakage of nuclear radiation from Yucca Mountain 5,000 years from now, increases in emphysema cases from automobile emissions, or marginal increases in cancer rates from pesticide residues ought to refocus their priorities. Here is a massive threat of millions of deaths, not enough is being done, and our environmentalists and self-proclaimed public health watchdogs are silent.

This really is a big deal.

An Honorable Endorsement

Ken Karst was one of my favorite law professors.

A constitutional scholar, who also taught the much-feared "Federal Jurisdiction," known at Harvard as "Darkness at Noon," Karst is a liberal, but thoughtful and professional. Here's his take on Justice Roberts, in a letter to the American Bar Association:

Dear Mr. Marshall,

Thanks for your letter asking for my views on the nomination of Judge Roberts to the Supreme Court. Alas, I have nothing useful to say about his history. I don't know Judge Roberts, nor have I seen him in action as an attorney or a judge. All I know about him, I have read in the press.

However, ignorance rarely prevents one from having a view, and I do have one. I am one of those liberal law academics whom Justice Scalia sometimes blames for the Supreme Court's straying from the True Path. Even so, I believe the Senate should confirm Judge Roberts's nomination. By all accounts, he is a first-rate lawyer, who listens carefully to arguments, even when they go against his initial inclinations. He seems to me to be a true conservative, who sees the judicial role as one in which courts conserve. I don't expect to agree with all his decisions, even on matters of intense controversy. I should compare him to the second Justice Harlan--with whom I often disagreed, but whom I still consider an excellent Justice.

Even though I have nothing to offer except opinion, I am grateful that you had me on your list, and I wish you and your ABA colleagues well in your deliberations.

Sincerely,

Ken Karst

When's the last time we've seen a thoughtful, civil comment like that from either side? (I hope he's right.)

Instead, we have the Gray Lady nosing about the adoption of Justice Roberts's children.

Civility is not dead, just moribund.

HT: Volokh.

Colo(u)r Illusions

These colo(u)r illusions are astounding, amazing, etc.

HT: The inimitable Eugene Volokh.

Light Blogging -- But No Valerie Plame!

My precious laptop croaked, and I'm fighting with Apple about it. And business is heating up.

Hence, light blogging, soon to be remedied, I hope.

At least you won't hear about the non-story of the century, the Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson-Bob Novak-Judith Miller foofaraw. The misguided notion of a Journalist's privilege might be worth a mention, but otherwise, my friends, it's a Yawn.