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SAY
IT AIN’T SO
The great American public is not, of course, as incorrigibly "racist" as our elites think. Nor are they as stupid. Do the media lefties really think people don't see through their games? I was working in Manhattan back in December of 1993, when Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad killer, did his work. My homebound commuter train was the one behind his. Of course, we were stuck between stations for nearly two hours. This was pre-cell phone, and I had no way to contact my wife, who was watching the coverage of the story on TV, and was, naturally, worried sick. Neighbors came in to rally round and watch the TV coverage with her. Telling me about it afterwards, she remarked: "Everyone kept saying: 'Oh, it must be a black guy. If it was a white guy, they would have told us.'" CRIMINALIZING
AN ACTIVITY WITHOUT DEFINING IT But aren't there laws against "insider trading"? Oh, yes, whole rafts of them, ITSAs and ITSFEAs, laws that not only provide criminal penalties for the offense, but that in addition authorize the SEC to recover civil penalties from offenders. Well, if Congress has passed laws against it, then Congress must have defined the offense, mustn't it? Otherwise the laws would be unconstitutional, wouldn't they? No, Congress has never defined "insider trading," and yes, the laws against it are thereby, in all probability, unconstitutional. As Daniel Fischel observed in his 1995 book Payback, which is about the Michael Milken scandals: Criminalizing an activity without defining it runs counter to powerful traditions in American law. Defendants have a constitutional right to fair notice that behavior is criminal. .... America has no tradition of common-law crimes, where courts can declare conduct criminal on a case-by-case basis. The Supreme Court declared such common-law crimes unconstitutional more than 150 years ago. The fundamental problem is that on a broad interpretation, practically all trading is "insider trading," while on a narrow interpretation, only a tiny portion is, all of it covered by existing, much clearer, statutes. This is one of those areas where, as Fischel relentlessly documents, every attempt by government to solve the problem ends by making it worse, while further curtailing individual liberties and doing violent harm to our Constitution. It follows, of course, that we can confidently expect to see more, and ever more, legislation against "insider trading." LIKE
AN OWL EXPLODING Even nonsense has sources and transmission routes, though. Where did the number "4,000" come from? A reader in Israel has suggested it was taken from the number of Israelis who called the Israeli consulate in New York to ask for information about friends and loved ones. For that, 4,000 sounds about right. Even the Derb household, which has no connection to the World Trade Center, took in half a dozen calls that day from family and friends in England and China, asking if we were all right. Here is a website discussing the origin of that "4,000," and here's another. If my reader is correct, we have a modest insight here into the narrow, dark mentality of subliterate spreaders of anti-Semitic poison — people like Baraka. Scanning news items on 9/11, he sees one with the words "4,000 Israelis ... World Trade Center ..." Not bothering to read the whole thing, or reading it but being too stupid to understand it, or possibly just in a spirit of malicious invention, Baraka cooks up: "Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers...?" The dismal, depressing, but undoubtedly true thing, is that this nasty little piece of gibberish will now become an article of faith to millions of anti-Semites in the U.S. and abroad. To fly a plane into an office building is one kind of evil; to sow seeds of madness like this — to pour gasoline on the smoldering fires of unreason — is another, hardly lesser, kind. WHAT
IS MIND? NO MATTER? WHAT IS MATTER? NEVER MIND I've been reading Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, in which he offers his views on human nature, centering those views on the refutation of three myths (as he calls them): "the blank slate," "the noble savage," and "the ghost in the machine." "The blank slate" is the notion that human beings come into this world with no mental attributes at all, and that the whole of a human personality is formed by interactions with the environment. I find it hard to believe that anyone has ever held this view — surely not anyone that has raised children! — but Pinker turns up a couple of specimens.* "The noble savage" is the idea that the more troublesome aspects of human nature — greed, acquisitiveness, envy, sexual jealousy, cruelty, warfare, etc. — are unknown in primitive societies, and only came in with civilization. (Or the closely related idea that they are unknown among children, and are only acquired via misguided forms of socialization.) Again, it seems incredible that anyone should ever have thought this, but apparently some people did, and have had great influence. "The ghost in the machine" is, roughly speaking, the idea of the soul — the idea that there is some part of a human personality independent of physical body tissue. This one — I mean, Pinker's attempted refutation of it — gives me more trouble. Even the way the topic is phrased is unsatisfactory, like one of those loaded poll questions carefully crafted to give a biased result. "Is there a ghost in the machine?" Why not the converse question: "Does the spirit possess a heart, a liver, and a brain?" I myself would answer an emphatic "Yes" to both questions. Of course there is an outer world, and of course there is an inner one, at least as real. And of course they impinge on each other constantly, sometimes in dramatic ways. Smack me on the skull with some large piece of matter like a 14-lb hammer, and my inner life will be abruptly and radically transformed. ("Will cease to exist," says the materialist... but of course this cannot be proved. A. E. Housman wrote a poem suggesting the exact converse.) Contrariwise, a really strong idea — an idea, a mental object — like, say, "E = mc 2," can have drastic effects on the material world. I suppose that the outer world, the world of material objects, seems more real to most people in our age than the inner world of mental and spiritual experiences, because of the wonderful efficacy of modern technology. In other times and places, though, people have felt differently. Are human beings just tangles of matter, organized in such a way as to generate mental events as a kind of byproduct of chemical and electrical flows, those events themselves then generating the illusion of self-hood, of individual autonomy? ("The brain secretes consciousness as the liver secretes bile," said a materialist philosopher.) Or are we fundamentally spiritual beings, who have the misfortune to be temporarily trapped in an illusory shadow-world of material vessels? Even in this age, millions of people would tick the second box as being closer to, or at least as close to, the truth. Neither point of view can be refuted by logic or evidence in any case, and science has nothing to say one way or the other. It is absurd to claim, as Pinker does by implication, that the topic is pretty much closed. Not the least of the problems with naive materialism is that we have no clue as to what matter actually is. I can say this with fair confidence, having recently spent several weeks with my head buried in books on quantum mechanics, field theory, string theory, and cosmology. An electron has been defined as "a negative twist of nothingness." Got that? Fill you with confidence in the sufficiency of materialist explanations, does it? And an electron is one of the tamer, more familiar inmates of the subatomic zoo. Check out string theory — oh my God. Even basic quantum mechanics can only be made to work by postulating an "observer," concerning whose actual nature, the theory has nothing to say. The fundamental building blocks of the universe seem to be mathematical theorems — which are, of course, mental constructs. This is not to trash Pinker's book, which is full of interesting facts and thought-provoking arguments, and well worth reading. I do get a little weary, though, of the lazy, slightly mocking way that cognitive-elite types come on with their naive-materialist metaphysics and utilitarian ethics. Isn't it obvious? they seem to be asking, with a barely suppressed sneer. No, not to me, it isn't. ON
THE INTERNET, NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM OK, let's see how far afield my column really travels. The following is an actual sentence in an actual human language, a language spoken by millions, and possessing a rich literature going back around 15 centuries. Any native speakers, in the language's native country, care to give a translation? Here goes: Baq'aq'i mq'aq'e c'q'alši q'iq'inebs. NONE
DARE CALL IT TREASON Her book makes it perfectly plain, for anyone to whom it was not plain already, that there is a vast and deadly conspiracy of vote-hungry politicians, butt-covering bureaucrats, business and higher-education lobbies, bleeding-heart churchmen, and lefty agitators, with the aim of establishing de facto open borders for this country. Many of us nursed the hope that this conspiracy was an artifact of the Clinton administration, and would be swiftly dismantled when Janet Reno, Bill Lann Lee, and the rest of that sorry crowd departed from the scene. Not so: the line-jumpers, lawbreakers, and terrorists have never had a better friend than current Attorney General John Ashcroft, who shows not the slightest inclination to do what needs to be done in the agencies under his control. "Treason doth never prosper: what is the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason." Treason is prospering mightily in America today, and here is one small, frail woman shouting into the wind, shouting: "For shame! For shame!" Buy her book. THE
B-WORD I have recently heard in conversation — I have not been able to find any printed or pixilated confirmation — that there is a move afoot among homosexual activists to bring down the word "buggery" the way civil-rights activists brought down the n-word. It is, these people are claiming, offensive. I am baffled to know why it should be any more offensive than any other term for the same thing, and doubly baffled to know why this should be the case in the U.S.A. where, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the b-word is hardly used and little understood. (A lady living about 100 yards from me owns a blue Volkswagen beetle with the vanity license plate BUGGER.) The real problem with this ban-the-b-word movement, though, lies in the palm-fringed islands of Papua New Guinea, in the western Pacific. The geography of PNG has led to numerous tribes developing in isolation from each other, and so there are scores of different languages spoken in a very small area. To get any modern social organization going, the PNG-ers needed a lingua franca. Well, they got one. It is called "Tok Pisin," and is a pidgin language with a vocabulary drawn from mangled Australian English. Now, rather a common term among Australians is the verb phrase "to bugger up," meaning "to make a mess of." This has been taken into Tok Pisin as a normal verb with that meaning. A PNG handbook on road safety, for example, contains the instruction: "If you have an accident, get the other driver's number." This is printed up in Tok Pisin as: "Sapos you kisim bagarup kisim namba bilong narapela draiva." The folks at organizations like GLAAD may be able to drive the b-word out of respectable society in England and America, but down there in Port Moresby they'll have a fight on their hands. Incidentally, here's a b-word story from my newspaper days back in England. I did a piece about Tibet, in which I remarked that Chinese policies had reduced the poor Tibetans to beggary. I got a call from the sub-editor, an old Fleet Street hand. Chuckling, he told me that "beggary" is a word to be avoided in newspaper copy. Sub-editors and compositors are only human, he pointed out, and the temptation to introduce a deliberate "literal" (that is, a typo) can sometimes be irresistible. THOUGHTS
AT HOLY COMMUNION I'm sorry, but this makes me squirm. If I want to interact socially with my fellow congregants (and I confess that I mostly don't), my church offers numerous ways for me to do so. In a Communion service, though, I prefer to concentrate on the observances. I am glad to be in a crowd of a couple of hundred other people at this time — people who have taken time out from busy lives to perform an activity that has nothing whatever to do with the acquisition of money, sex ,or power** — but I don't particularly want to exchange pleasantries with them in mid-service, and can't see why I should be obliged to do so. My minister's a sensible man, not a Kumbaya type, and I can't understand why he tolerates this embarrassing and unnecessary excrescence on the solemnity of the Communion service. Does anybody else feel the same way? TELEPHONE
SOLICITORS I have a similarly unfair advantage in dealing with telephone solicitors. Phone rings — generally in the middle of dinner, of course. I pick it up and say: "Hello?" The voice on the other end says: "Is this Mr. Dreebu... Darriby... Dribushee...?" By which point I have hung up. A person who needs three shots at pronouncing my name, is a person I have no need to speak with. WRITING
AND TALKING
MATH
NOTES Reader Ben Ibach took revenge on behalf of the national economy by sending me this one, which wasted most of my morning. Three teams compete in a hockey tournament. Team A beats team B, team B beats team C, and team C beats team A. Fewer than 40 goals were scored in the tournament. Team A says they should win the tournament because they scored the most goals. Team B says they should win the tournament because they had the best goal differential (goals-for minus goals-against). Team C says they should win because they had the best goal ratio (goals-for divided by goals-against). While the judges are deciding who to give the trophy to, determine the score of each game. There is only one possible solution. (Note for nit-pickers: The score of a hockey game, as usually played, may not include any negative, fractional, or complex numbers. Nor, for that matter, may it include any quaternions, octonions, hyper-real or p-adic numbers.) I had better confess I have absolutely no idea how to do this. I got the solution, but only by writing a Visual Basic program to run through all umpteen thousand possibilities, testing to see which possibilities matched the conditions. This, of course, does not really count as a solution. Half the 11-year-olds in America can write a VB program. What we need is a good logical solution. If anybody has one, please share it with me. One more math note. In my September diary I had a note on the Chebyshev bias. I closed by saying: "Michael Rubinstein and Peter Sarnak proved in 1994 that the violations have nonzero density, a fascinating and counter-intuitive result..." Several readers felt this was a cliff-hanger. What does "nonzero density" mean? they wanted to know. So I've written up an explanation, also on my own website. — Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor. |
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