The Cassini space probe, still rounding Saturn like an adopted satellite, has set the feats of predecessors Galileo and Voyager firmly in a history of steady and subsequent progression; its telemetry and fidelity introducing the world to pictures once unthinkable. Hardly more than a buxom asteroid, moon Hyperion fell within Cassini's camera sights and the images beamed to Earth depict something of incontestable accuracy and impenetrable, forbidding strangeness — which would rightly leave one unsettled if the mystery of Hyperion did not also mean that there is, yet, in commensurate vastness, wonder in Creation.
Today's American Minute:
He was the only US President to also serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was appointed by President McKinley as the first governor of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and by President Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of War. The largest President, weighing over 300 lbs, a bathtub was installed for him in the White House, big enough to hold four men. His name was William Howard Taft, and he was born this day September 15, 1857. President Taft stated: "A God-fearing nation, like ours, owes it to its inborn...sense of moral duty to testify...devout gratitude to the All-Giver for...countless benefits."
No man's rights to life and liberty can be held inviolable without their recognized accordance from an absolute; an absolute best understood when it is, even if in locution, personified as God.
Exploration of Mars by remote control continues as NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity defy adversity and entropy in their trolling about the oxide planet. Each rover having completed nearly two years of service — sixfold the official requirement for mission success — usage and wear has compromised the operation of neither, Opportunity's recent reboot-breather the only geriatric stumble so far. Discoveries are made, wonders are recorded. Spirit witnessed — and then digitally recounted to us — the alien sight of not one moon but two moons, Phobos and Deimos, cutting across a black night sky. Six-wheeled geologist Opportunity has set upon site after site, just now completing the survey of an extrusion nicknamed "Lemon Rind."
Attractive for workhorse, lowest-bid machines, the Martian rovers are remarkably invested with character. Spirit napped during the day to store enough energy for its midnight stargazing; Opportunity, its conscience of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory control team wary of overexertion in the red desert, will be taking its next several days of rock-hunting a little more easily. There are no men in interplanetary space today, and yet it cannot be said that man is not in space.
The national conversation over Hurricane Katrina suffers not only from faithlessness and self-interest but also malapropism, as an exasperated Jonah Goldberg protests typographically borne anti-Semitism: "Please, please stop blaming all of this on the Levys! It's not their fault they failed."
The best-laid word stocks of spell-check oft go astray. Jeans sales reportedly plummeted when some commentators held buckled Levis responsible for the disaster.
Two British-born intellectuals of the phlegmatic school, John Derbyshire and Andrew Stuttaford, have been unhappily documenting scientific illiteracy with some vigor over the past few days and weeks. Today Derbyshire cites a poll revealing Galilean apostasy; yesterday, Stuttaford reported Creationist intransigence. Is that regression? Or failure? Or a very normal division of interest and knowledge? Most of the people who understand neither astronomy nor biology are the people who understand engine blocks, underbodies, plumbing, construction, agriculture and commodities. And an evangelical's good works are hardly impeded because he believes two orders of terrible lizards appeared some two hundred million years later than, say, my acquired estimation.
Study of nature is made possible, for those who are endlessly curious, by a world kept running by those who are not.
Some National Review readers do not find the visibly shaken particularly inspiring.
Rightly so. Judgment of Governor Kathleen Blanco and Senator Mary Landrieu, the two most visible statesmen in the days following Hurricane Katrina's landfall, cannot be qualified by our innate sympathy for the unfortunate. Blanco and Landrieu's message via national media has been classically leftist-populist: disconsolate and condescending, addressing Louisianans as hapless victims and lining up sidecar entitlements and eulogies for southern residents when those two might instead have encouraged good people to meet and surmount a serious and deadly challenge. In despair there is the essence of conceit. No public officials, man or woman, should appear surprised or incomposed in crisis, let alone when a natural disaster endemic to their state or region strikes. No leader betrays doubt before his constituency. None worth following, anyway.
Paging Maggie Thatcher. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher?
The first of two revisions for expansion of the Gross Domestic Product in Second Quarter 2005, initially reported to be 3.4 percent, is neither astounding nor worrying:
The economy grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, slightly less than initially estimated but still a solid performance, especially given galloping energy prices.
And an economy strong enough to continue producing through both long-term challenges and short-term crises is strong enough to boom when those rare months of economic quiet arrive.
At Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez presents, through narrative, the same question asked by many a self-proclaimed leftist who supports at least in concept the assertive democratization known now as the war on terror.
I have noticed an increasing frequency with which academics puzzle over the diminishing accuracy of traditional epistemology, specifically when applied to the responses of certain groups on the "left" and "right" to the rise and aggrandizement of tyranny.
If I may, an idea: figure ideology as a circle with eight marks, forty-five degrees apart each, beginning at zero degrees so that the circle may be bisected vertically and horizontally. Clockwise from zero, respectively notate pragmatism, objectivism, moralism (ninety), traditionalism, parochialism (one hundred eighty), collectivism, nihilism (two hundred seventy), and solipsism. Notate the left semicircle as relativism, the right semicircle as absolutism; and (optionally) the upper half of the circle as coherentism and the lower half foundationalism. Assign the following people respectively to the foregoing eight ideologies, give or take: Mickey Kaus, Christopher Hitchens, Natan Sharansky, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Michael Moore, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Woody Allen.
The reason why the "anti-war Socialists" in France in the Belmont Club brief sided with the Nazis is because they were as elementally morally relativistic as the leaders of the Third Reich. Analogously, the reason why a man like Hitchens works for the right is because he is at root a moral absolutist — only he (for better or worse) believes reason, not God, is steward of truth. Like all moral challenges, this war divides men into two broad groups; those who believe in truth, and those who either claim to and don't or those who believe truth is theirs alone to control. That would be the operative "right" and "left."
My formal education in this is nil, and I realize that this may very well be, to paraphrase Bill Buckley, "a kind of epistemology, as written by the sorcerer's apprentice." But to hear and read the confusion among the learned and know that I — if through a glass darkly — understand as consistent what has appeared to others as a tectonic shift, begged this little assertion.
When the morning began, New Orleans was slated for demolition by God's own low-pressure, cyclonic wrecking ball. When Hurricane Katrina weakened and tacked east, oil was selling at a record price and Wall Street was to hold its nose and dive. Oil fell and stocks rose. One more year, presumably, of Cajun cooking and sub-sea level revelry. Fate failed to deliver what headlines had grimly promised — but then a bad day for news is a good day for the rest of us.
Last week I characterized the legislative ambition of the United Iraqi Alliance as unrepresentative of its base, especially the Shiite religious community that rejects theocratic doctrines of Wilayat al-Faqih. One clergyman is particularly disappointed — none other than Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who, while unduly critical of federalism, has no patience for the sectarianism of which Iraqis are regularly (and unfairly) accused:
The Sunnis are your family. Stay by their side this time so that they stay by your side in the coming times. Consider them as your brothers and sons and do not bear any grudges within you because of the injustice of the past, as both of you were victims.
Three brothers, three victims; three pioneers. Where Sunnis are politically recalcitrant, Shiites and Kurds are eagerly modernist. While Shiites work to rid themselves of Iranian-backed, Islamist street gangs, Sunnis and Kurds have impressed secularism into the constitution. Kurds and Sunnis differ on a patriot's colors — the north's gilt sun on red, white and green to the midland's red, white and black — but Sunnis and Shiites are one, responsible for making mercifully brief the old Governing Council's promotion of an Iraqi flag bearing the Islamic crescent. If Iraqi culture is cantilevered, as derogators and sympathists alike suggest, we should keep some faith in the strength of the single vertical support that has kept Iraqis aloft this long, for we share it as all men: a desire to be free and at peace.
