Is Sarah Palin “a ferocious wolf”?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since she is an avowed Evangelical Christian, touts the cause of teaching Creationism, and has a licence to hunt wolves in Alaska, is it possible that Sarah Palin VP candidate on the John McBush ticket fits this quote from the Gospel according to Matthew:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are like ferocious wolves.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• McCain Taps Lady [Breaking]
• Palin’s Homes
• Meet Sarah Palin ‘the Barracuda’: anti-abortion, pro-death penalty and gun-lover

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and Georgia et al get the big headlines

so now that Beijing’s Olympics are fading away, even in China, we are reminded by NY Times that conflict is really everywhere:

Wow, how about a long dispute between South Korea and Japan, about 46 acres of islets and specks of land hours away from South Korea by ferry.

More multiple deaths in Sichuan’s earthquake zone

Image via Wikipedia

From www.chinaview.cn:

22 dead after magnitude-6.1 quake jolts Sichuan Province
www.chinaview.cn 2008-08-30 23:24:32 Print

PANZHIHUA, Sichuan, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) — Twenty-two people were dead after an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale hit Panzhihua City in southwest China on Saturday.

As of 9 p.m., 17 people were reported dead and about 100 others injured in Sichuan, and five others dead and 26 other injured in neighboring Yunnan Province.

The quake struck the juncture of Renhe District of Panzhihua and Huili County of Liangshan Prefecture at 4:30 p.m. (Beijing time). The epicenter was about 50 km southeast of downtown Panzhihua, at 26.2 degrees north and 101.9 degrees east and at a depth of 10 km, the National Seismograph Network Center said.

In Panzhihua, a 54-year-old man was killed in debris in Miyi County and another person was killed Yanbian County. Nearly 1,000 houses were destroyed and cracks appeared in walls of more than 400 houses.

In the affected counties of Liangshan Prefecture, 86 people were injured, and many houses were destroyed or in dangerous conditions. The number of people buried in the ruins were not immediately available.

The quake also affected Chuxiong Prefecture in Yunnan Province, leaving five people dead and 26 others were injured, 11 severely, as of 8:30 p.m., said Mengfu, a prefecture government official.

The casualties in Yunnan were reported in Yongren, Yuanmou, Wuding and Dayao counties, in which four deaths were in Yuanmou, about 55 km from the epicenter, and another in Yongren, about 30 km from the epicenter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tremor Rocks South West China
• Quake rattles southwestern China

It sure was a whopper of a meeting!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I guess the most important thing that doesn’t get mentioned often enough about the Democratic Convention in Denver is how well organized it was. And they were lucky to be there a week ahead of Hurricane Gustav’s landfall in Louisiana.

The Acceptance Speech event was especially amazing falling on the anniversary of MLK’s event at the Lincoln Memorial 40some years ago and drawing a great crowd of 80,000+ to Invesco Field and however many thousands across the country to all sizes of TV sets in all kinds of ordinary locations.

I’m a grizzled cynic and a 72 year old Canadian citizen and my eyes were brimming with tears for much of the night. This kind of political drama sure makes Harper & Co look like small beer!

Related articles by Zemanta

• From King’s ‘Dream’ to Obama’s Reality
• Outside the Stadium, Giddy Chaos
• John Lewis DNC Speech: Text

Dream on South Ossetians!

Image by precariopoli via Flickr

In a world that is said to be globalized, the South Ossetians look forward to a form of small country independence as neighbors of the Russian Bear.

Optimism or delusion?

They’ve got mountains that look a bit like Andorra’s, but then there are those Russian tanks and planes that are still in South Ossetia as “peace keepers”. And while Russia declares their independence, the rest of the Western world seems to think that they are a fractious part of Georgia.

Dream on South Ossetians!

Related articles by Zemanta

• War of words over South Ossetia future
• Russia ‘to Absorb’ South Ossetia
• An Embattled Enclave Yearns to Be Free (and Liechtenstein)

I posted this image the other day and didn’t know much about its provenance

Image via Wikipedia

so its fitting that I found a collection, in the latest web version of New Yorker, of building projects architected by the Calatrava, who is described thus:

“In this issue of the magazine, Rebecca Mead writes about the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. “Calatrava has been trained both in architecture and in engineering, but he thinks of himself as an artist, and it is as such that he has been embraced by his most enthusiastic champions,” Mead writes. “His completed structures are instantly recognizable for their use of sculptural forms that draw upon motifs found in the natural world.””

Here is the image:

Related articles by Zemanta

• More Surgery for Calatrava’s Bird: Columns for Everyone!

Beijing can have clear days!

James Fallows, who writes for Atlantic and lives and runs in Beijing posts this picture from his apartment.

Here’s the link to his post!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Beijing air on July 2, 2008 or 37 days till Olympics 2008
• Can Beijing win the battle against its smog?

A unique view of Shanghai copied from Danwei

View Larger Map
Today’s Shanghai Morning Post printed a photo showing a view of the Bund from a floor near the top of the 492.3 meter skyscraper. The World Financial Center’s outdoor observation deck is said to be the highest in the world.

Gawd, look how small those “skyscrapers”, in the lower left image field, look!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Checking Out The Pudong New Area (johnchow.com)
• Shanghai: China’s City of Glitz And Glamour (abcnews.go.com)

A new riff on Religion, God and Science

Image via Wikipedia

According to Owen Gingerich is emeritus professor of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard University. Link to his piece

In delineating the history of the concept, Oxford’s Peter Harrison has concluded that today, science, insofar as it assumes the reality of mathematical laws, operates with a tacitly theistic assumption about the nature of the universe. The mere existence of this underlying rationality of the universe, its deep ontology, points toward a divine creative reality that we can label as God’s agenda.

The physicist John Polkinghorne reasons along the same lines when he writes that we must “face the fact that science is privileged to explore a universe that is both rationally transparent and rationally beautiful in its deep and accessible order. … Something profound is going on in science’s exploration of our deeply intelligible universe that calls for metascientific illumination.”

What does this view purchase for the religious understanding of the world in which we find ourselves? Some events that seem totally incredulous to those of us who take seriously the world’s stability and dependability, such as the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion and entombment, can be seen not as rare suspensions of the laws of nature, but as the intersection of a more fundamental spiritual universe with the physical universe embedded in it, a physical universe in which the ontological laws of nature always hold, but which is only a subset of the total reality. It is a matter of faith that such a spiritual universe exists, and by the same token, also a matter of faith to deny its existence.

I find it interesting to refer back to Einstein’s views about his own faith, for example:

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man/woman, and in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.

But he did draw a line concerning the limits of “a spirit vastly superior to that of man/woman”:

I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind (either the individual or collectivity).

I can’t imagine that Einstein would accept that the physical universe is embedded within a spiritual universe, whose Highest Power could interrupt the lawful unfolding of the physical universe in any way. But I can imagine that Polkinghorne et al can suggest that the physical must be embedded in a God run spiritual universe. The Highest Power can undo the Laws of Nature at will. Surely that would have upset Einstein as much as Quantum Physics did or “God can’t play dice with the Universe”.

Now that I have listened to Robert Anton Wilson’s views on the philosophical implications of our human sense of “reality” (see the link below) once we have accepted the “reality” within the microscopic quantum universe, I can begin the understand how Polkinghorne et al need their own perception of their higher spiritual reality to reconcile their acceptance of science while subscribing to belief in God’s power over the physical universe.

Wilson’s explanation simply points out that human beings are subject to the limitations of the tools used to perceive and measure the “reality” they exist in. We see “our reality” depending on our perspective of what we can perceive and observe with the tools we choose to use or invent.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mark Vernon: Why can’t scientists and bishops agree with each other?

And then there is this view of the natural limits on the grasp that human beings can have of “realities”!

• Robert Anton Wilson Explains Quantum Physics

Einstein’s thoughts about religion and God

Book cover via Amazon

I have just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography “Einstein, His life and Universe”. The book told me the story of a man who left an indelible imprint on theoretical physics and our meager understanding of the Universe. He also had a sense of being a part of something much greater than himself.

He said more than once that he wasn’t an atheist, but that he did not believe that there was a God who interceded in human affairs and the unfolding of the Universe.

Here are some of his thoughts on this subject:

I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the Universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly unterstand these laws.

What separates me from most atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos. The fanatical atheists are like the slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who-in their grudge against traditional religion as the “opium of the masses”-cannot hear the music of the spheres. I prefer the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and our own being. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

According to Walter Issacson, “A tenet of Einstein’s faith was that nature was not cluttered with extraneous attributes. Thus, there must be a purpose to curiosity. For Einstein, it existed because it created minds that question, which produced an appreciation for the universe that he equated with religious feelings. “Curiosity has its own reasons for existing,” he once explained. “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”