Tim Nunan

Wow -- I went to a creationism conference/seminar in Pennsylvania last night as part of AMS 309 (we have to write an article based on a Christian Right event for the class) and I must say, it made quite an impression on me. I've been trying for most of today to write a draft of an article about the event (the draft must be ~1500 words), but I've continually felt a little discombobulated trying to write. In order to (hopefully) alleviate this, I've decided to write down a complete draft/journal entry of what happened at the event, and some of my main impressions. Hopefully I can return to this later and draw from it as I write my article draft.

So we left Princeton at about 5:05 PM on Friday, March 31st, headed for Souderton, PA. After a rather uneventful drive, we got to the school, which was in a rather rural part of Pennsylvania -- we missed the road the first time, and it was a small turnoff. But despite the location, the school at which the event was being staged was quite new and modern. It looked to have been built in the last five years, and I can't think of the proper adjective to describe it, but it was all quite new -- lots of, I guess nice, cinder block construction. As I recall it was just a lower school and middle school, although the event we were there to see was aimed at middle schoolers and high schoolers.

That said, the actual event was a "Youth Night" and was part of a four-night series of lectures and presentations titled "It's In the Heavens!!" which involved lectures on creationism (namely, why it was true). There had been an introductory lecture the previous night, that, we were told, touched on genetics more, but Youth Night was supposed to be more of a smattering of topics and was to address common questions that "evolutionists" might ask of creationists.

As we made our way towards the auditorium, there were some docents outside the main doors to the room handing out questionnaires. Of these volunteers, none were older than about sixteen years old, and I struck up conversation with one of them. His name was Japeth and he was a tenth grader at another religious school in the area. I didn't ask him any questions about creationism per se, but rather talked with him about who, exactly went to the school at which the event was taking place. The most relevant information I got from him was that the pastor of the local Leidy's Church (a non-denominational church that had been organizing the event) had spent a lot of time trying to get a creationist speaker from Answers in Genesis (a young-earth creationism organization) to come to the area and speak. As the event suggested, they had eventually been succesful in getting someone to come out.

Before I write about who exactly they had speaking, though, I would like to describe the auditorium. Immediately upon entering the auditorium one could see that this was a serious event. The auditorium, like the rest of the school, was clean and new, and the seats of the room (which numbered about 300 by my estimation) were divided into blocks of three and had plenty of legroom between the aisles. There were no windows in the room. We opted to sit in the third row in the left "block" of chairs, behind a group of teenagers. As we made our way to our seats, some Christian Rock was playing at moderate volume over the PA -- loud enough that you could make it out reasonably well, but not loud enough to make talking difficult. Moreover, a band was getting set up on stage: three female teenage singers, older teenager male guitar, bass, and drum players, and an older man playing the piano. There were some homeschooled kids sitting in front of us whom I talked to a little bit as I sat down, but I had only been talking to them for a few minutes when the local youth pastor came up to the lectern at the front of the auditorium and made an announcement.

The youth pastor invited all of us in the audience to stand for song, and about 60-70% of the people in the audience stood up (I stayed seated to be able to write in my notebook). After everyone stood up, he introduced the band, who then played through 3-4 light Christian Rock songs. Sam Zeitlin, who was there with my along with Liz Skeen, took some fairly detailed notes on the content of the songs, but from my perspective most of the songs had relatively generic lyrics, along the lines of praising God, about how God had created the universe (not in a mechanistic creationist way -- just, he was the origin of the universe), and so on.

Instead of paying close attention to the songs, I took a look around the auditorium to get a better glance at the audience. My first impression was that the audience was mostly children, and males at that. Many of the front rows of the auditorium were lined with young teenage children, almost always sitting together in groups, while their parents and older children tended to sit towards the back of the seat "blocks." At first glance, most of the kids looked like totally normal teenagers -- they wore lots of T-shirts, jeans, shorts, sneakers, etc -- no overly conservative dress or anything like that. At the same time, however, while the girls I saw there were not overly conservatively-dressed, neither did one see a lot of short skirts, etc. Besides the balance of gender and dress, virtually the entire audience was white. There was one black teenager there. During the song, most of the people who were standing up seemed to be having a reasonably good time. Although the lyrics to the songs were being beamed up to a large white projection board on stage, not a ton of people were singing, especially among the children. However, most people seemed to at least be at attention, although towards the end of the songs two of the kids in front of me started to goof off. The most relevant details here are that a) during one of the songs, one of the teens in front of me made a gesture that consisted of raising his right arm almost vertically-up (I don't know what this meant) and b) during another song, a person in the middle seat "block" had their eyes closed with their palms facing towards the ceiling of the room. I'm not sure of the significance of this, either, but I just want to note it.

Anyway, after the songs were done, the youth pastor came back to the lectern to lead the audience in prayer. In the prayed, he thanked God for bringing the speaker, Jason Lisle, to the event, and, in his own words, prayed that the Word would come through Mr. Lisle during his presentation. He then said amen, etc., everyone followed, and invited Mr. Lisle to the lectern.

Overall I was pretty impressed with Jason Lisle, the "creation astrophysicist" whom Answers in Genesis had sent to this event. A white man of about forty, Lisle got a legitimate PhD in astrophysics from Boulder (at which time he was still "in the closet" about being a creationist), and after he got his PhD, he apparently joined Answers in Genesis and started doing the speaking circuit. At this event, Lisle was dressed in a conservative grey-black suit with a tie, and spoke in what I would call a kind, gentle voice. At first glance, one would have no reason not to like him. He seemed like a very nice, affable, well-spoken man and was thoroughly polite when I talked to him.

With that said, Lisle then came down to the lectern, and, after fumbling with the microphone for a few minutes began his presentation. He opened talking about how the Bible calls Christians to be meek and fearful when attempting to explain themselves, and that he hoped that the people watching the presentation tonight behaved that way when explaining their views to non-creationists. He used the example of a crowbar, which I find kind of strange: “The answers we give people to these questions are kind of like giving them a crowbar: you can use a crowbar to pry open a lid, which is what we want to do to people’s minds, or you can use that crowbar to bash the heck out of someone, which is what we don’t want to do.” He talked about how people needed to put their "Biblical Reality Glasses" on when interpreting the evidence, and emphasized that the Bible was the Word of God, was an actual history, and needed to be interpreted as such -- as a literal history and not an allegorical text. With that said, he noted how creationists are often asked tough questions by evolutionists, and that it was a shame that people often could not answer questions that had really good answers to them. He outlined the ten areas he was going to focus on in the night, and then went through them.

--- At this point in this entry, I would like to focus thematically rather than chronologically. I think there was some stuff Lisle touched on that I found bizarre, or telling, and I think the best way to get there is just moving from theme to theme.

Genetics: The most striking thing here was what I could only call a fantastic depiction of what genetics are and what it has to do with evolution. Lisle presented genetics in terms of a never-defined term, "information." He never explained what "information" was, how it had to do with base-pair relations, what it had to do with species, and so on. Also notable was Lisle's use of the term "kind," a term that was also undefined, but apparently refers to an initial class of animals that was created in the Garden of Eden (i.e. 'the dog kind') In terms of looking at the theory or the ideas behind this part of the presentation, I think the main thing is that Lisle did not even engage mainstream genetics, in terms of looking at current theories of speciation and species change; rather, he simply invented a new vocabulary that, to the untrained ear sounds scientific and well-defined -- information is a term that I'm sure most people think they know what it is -- and just runs with it. The main thing here, was that rather than misrepresenting mainstream scientific findings, or even just like lying about something, a system of thought that is called "genetics" but is actually something totally different, that speaks of "information" but never defines what it means, is simply erected. Moreover, when claims from evolutionists are entertained, they are done within the framework of the new parallel science (i.e. the new "genetics") and are dismissed based on the rules of this new system, which have been set up so as to make proposing a type of evolution impossible. Heredity is presented in such a way that genomes actually decrease in length over time (as opposed to having changes in content). There is never any clear differentiation as to what the difference between a variety, species, kind, genus, etc. is, and any thought of speciation is immediately presented in terms of binary opposites -- a bacteria turning into a man; a cat turning into a dog. Environmental pressures are always depicted in such a way that populations never get selected (i.e., you never hear about situations that would favor individuals with extreme traits, like only huge beaks or small beaks. At any rate, the main thing here is that an entirely new vocabulary has been invented; it is a vocabulary so strange that the result cannot even be called a misunderstanding of the science, since that might imply that a few details could be tweaked here to get a more accurate picture. The entire vocabulary of "information" and "kind" serves only to obfuscate.

(BTW, speaking of obfuscation, I realize this is incredibly poorly written, but I want to get my thoughts down, so :-p)

History of Science: Throughout the presentation creationism, not evolution, is presented as the proper heir to the scientific tradition. At points during his lecture where Lisle would refer to historical discoveries, like continental drift, like natural selection, they were always presented in a creationist context and were explicitly noted to have been discovered by creationists. While it is perhaps true in a sense that the men who proposed continental drift and natural selection were creationists, this comparison confuses the type of creationism seen in America today, which only really began in the 1920's, with the much less energized, often less vitriolic creationism that existed prior to Darwin. Moreover, I would argue that there is a severe difference between the man who accepts young earth creationism in the face of richer theories, and the man who accepts it as the best-existing explanation of the world at the time, prior to later discoveries. At any rate, though, by presenting seminal scientific discoveries as the work of creationists, and by claiming that natural selection actually better fits creationism than it does "evolutionism," one cannot help but get the feeling that evolution has somehow stolen creationism's rightful place in history, that evolution presents this sort of rogue outlook, not only unsupported by evidence but also out of place in historical development.

Secular Scientists: Although Lisle talked a lot about meekness, I think that parts of his presentation suggest otherwise, although in his defense he may not be personally responsible for them, since the presentation seemed to come directly from Answers in Genesis. In addition to scientists being depicted implicitly as a group who takes a theory on faith without the evidence -- in other words, they have a non-Biblical bias, and thus interpret all evidence in light of a materialistic world view -- scientists are consistently depicted as bumbling, white-haired, and arrogant, in contrast to the young, charming, Lisle. Many cartoon graphics during the presentation showed white-haired, balding scientists conniving to figure out how to hide holes in their data. In particular, one cartoon depicted a scientist going, "The earth is billions of years old! Take my word for it!" And so on. When I talked with Lisle after the presentation, although he said he did not look down on scientists who were not creationists, he called them "victims of an erroneous world view." The implication throughout all of this is that the conventional scientist, in addition to being too aloof and arrogant, is looking at the same set of evidence as creationists, but without "Biblical Reality Glasses." As a result, he looks at evidence with certain assumptions (not referred to explicitly, but probably referring to a paradigm that looks only for testable [natural] causes). Assumed, I think, but left unsaid here is that there is a large conspiracy of some 99% of the world's scientists to suppress the truth of creationism. Here, I think of a passage in Arendt: for the creationist, the consistent support for evolution, the mass agreement among scientists for it, can only be interpreted as evidence of a conspiracy, whereas the non-creationist looks at this as a sign that evolution is actually richly-supported by evidence. What the conspiracy explanation may lack in evidence or sensibility, it makes up for in consistency not only with other creationist views but also other right-wing theories about a massive left-wing conspiracy, about liberal universities, and so on. Evolution is thought of as a theory so evidentially-weak it can only be rescued by a massive conspiracy.

Carnivores and Animals: For me the most memorable part of the lecture was Lisle's discussion of life in the Garden and Eden and dinosaurs. At first glance, dinosaurs seem to present a huge problem to the creationist: how did humans co-exist with huge land-dwelling creatures, many of which were carnivores and might have hunted humans? How did they exist in the Garden of Eden? Why don't we see any stories of man dwelling with dinosaur? And so on. But no objection presents too big a hurdle to the creationist, and so the explanation is that dinosaurs did indeed exist in the Garden, but that prior to the Fall they did not eat meat and enjoyed a peaceful existence with other animals (who also were herbivores). Only after the Fall did they become predators. And when asked why we don't have very many records of dinosaurs, the response is that we do: creatures like Behemoth, and cave drawings depict dinosaurs, they say.

I can only say, looking back on this part of the lecture, that there was something so fantastic, so unreal about the material presented that it didn't seem as unbelievable as it now sounds. When you get up and talk to a man with a PhD after this lecture, and he tells you with a straight face that he thinks creatures like velociraptor, tyranosaurus rex, pterodons, triceratops walked the Earth thousands of years ago, and, in spite of their tremendous teeth and claws, ate watermelons, were ridden by man, were domesticated by man . . . what you are actually talking about is so unbelievable, so surreal, so fantastic, that you almost forget the magnitude of the fantasy you are being walked through. These claims, because of their extraordinary nature, the way they demand you to comprehensively re-think the world around you in a way so removed from reality, help remove the ability to be critical the way one might be of a more most Intelligent Design, of a less fantastic claim on its own

Phew! At last, fall semester comes to a close. When this semester began, I knew it could get kind of rough towards the end -- I didn't have many breaks, as I was in Yellowstone over fall break and in Dublin during winter break, then back to Princeton for exams & fun, and now, at last, I'm done. I managed to space things apart and get essays done ahead of time, so it was pretty painless, but I'm just glad that I now have a week where I'll be able to spend some time chilling and hanging out without having to worry about *the next essay* I ought to be preparing over break . . .

Anyway, I write now because I had my history of science final -- my final final -- today. All in all, it went very well. I knew all of the term identifications, although some of them were, I felt, a little too specific to spend my time writing on (Sadi Carnot was one of them). I ended up writing on deplhogisticated air, Joe-1 (a Soviet atomic bomb), the Copenhagen Interpretation (has to do with quantum mechanics), "soft heredity," and something else, I can't remember. I spent a little too long on some of these, but the upside is that I should almost definitely get full credit on all of them. The next section was a quotation identification section, and here, too, things went well. One of the quotations was from like the one reading I didn't do, then originally looked over (a physicist writing about the aether), but everything went well on that section, too. We then had two essays, one more content-based, the other more thematic. In the first essay, I wrote about how "Big Science" was, in fact, a large break from tradition. I wrote about how Big Science generally reduced the freedom of research that university professors used to have and how it permanently divorced epistemology from physics, etc -- it was a pretty solid essay. The next essay was about whether individuals have an impact on scientific change, or whether change is more contigent on the circumstances being right. I opted to say that individuals, in particular ballsy ones, do in fact have a large effect on scientific change. I was a little strapped for time (I finished with three minutes left), but on the whole I'm very happy with how the exam went and think I should get an A-, maybe an A on it.

That brings me to the academic report for this semester, where things have gone great. I found out today, via SCORE, that I got an A in Borges, I know I got an A in German, and barring a disaster on the final paper (which would just be bizarre), I should get an A in Astrobiology. This certainly wasn't what I was expecting when I began the semester, but I'll certainly take it. Next semester, I'll be doing more distribution requirement stuff, but I want, for the sake of my departmental GPA, to be getting high grades in the history & science classes I take in the future. This semester has been a good start towards that.

All in all, I feel very relaxed right now. I shaved off my entire beard last night, which was a relaxing experience in itself, and everything is going fine. Tomorrow, I'll just get up fairly earlier, do some packing, spend some time with Nicole, and be home in the evening.

Well, I'm just hanging around in my skivvies on a Saturday morning as I write this, with approximately a week to go in Fall Semester. Everything is going great + I've basically settled on course choices for next year (and, to some degree, in the future); all that's left is to keep chugging on my two final papers and do my last Astrobio Problem Set -- which is pretty damn annoying; they gave us two extra problem sets in the course.

Anyway, besides the obnoxious final problem set, things are going very well all-around. Nicole's stuff is going good -- though I think she should go to Japanese more -- and we'll probably get something to eat today in exchange for a favor I did for her the other day. The debate tournament last week was Hell, but we'll go out to dinner at Winberie's tomorrow night in exchange for it, after doing some Worlds Prep with debaters from Swarthmore and perhaps W&M. I know basically nothing about the format, and I'm not very ambitious about this trip. i just hope to enjoy spending some time in Dublin, to which I may never go again, and having a good time debating people from around the world. Dublin isn't the sexiest location in the world (then again, neither is Vancouver next year), but it should be pretty cool.

On the work front, all is going well. Besides the forementioned problem set, my work basically consists of two final papers, neither of which should be terribly problematic. The first is for Astrobiology, and I'm writing mine on what I've dubbed "tidal stars" -- small stars that are normally too small/cool to be considered as home stars for life-bearing planets, but whose tidal pull (and energy produced by that pull) could extend (or perhaps contract) the range of space surrounding the star suitable for life. That's a mouthful, but I feel that the paper is going really well. I'll need to talk to Tullis on Monday or Tuesday about this monstrous equation I need to use to calculate tidal energy, but it's going very well and I feel I should do well on the paper, given that I'll have ample time to correct and edit it. I'm unsure what the grading distribution is like for Astrobiology, but with a good paper, I should end up with an A or A-.

I also have a paper for Borges. I know what I'm writing about -- what does it mean to be a villain in Borges? -- but haven't started yet. This isn't really a case of procrastination (I'm sure people are vomiting as I consider not writing a paper a month in advance 'procrastination'), but I've just been focusing more on the Astrobiology paper. Today, in the time that I work, I think I'll look at the GEO 255 problem set, then think about writing an introduction for the Spanish paper. I've thought of invoking the movie Face/off, or the scene in the Iliad where Achilles jumps the shark + drags Hector through the streets of Troy -- invoking this idea that to beat your nemesis, you become him, a theme that I feel is prevalent in Borges.

In terms of courses, I'm currently starting the semester off with EEB 222, GER 102-5, SPA 307, AMS 309, and HIS 362. I'll almost certainly drop HIS 362, because although it's supposed to be a great course, it's supposed to be ridiculously hard, and my other courses are a fair amount of work. I should get news of whether I was admitted to LAS 402 in a few days, however, and if I get into that, I'll take it -- SA + interesting topic + trip to Mexico = bingo.

In terms of the future, I met with Angela Creager of History of Science the other day, and now I'm pretty positive that I'll concentrate in that. In terms of what that means for the future, I'll probably take a junior seminar with Michael Gordin in the Fall of next year; Creager was uncertain whether D. Graham Burnett was teaching any courses in the fall, besides a freshman seminar on whales, but in the spring, he'll teach 293, which I'll take, along with a graduate seminar, which I would also, probably like to take. That would make junior fall something like:

HIS 400 (Gordin)
GER 207 (?)
SPA 3XX (?)
A science course, or an EM

Something along those lines. Anyway, everything's going well + I look forward to returning home next week. Tschüss.

To stick to my trend of extremely infrequent but long Livejournal entries, here goes.

Today was Thanksgiving. For the meal, I went to Prof. Howarth's house with Nicole, where we had a nice Thanksgiving meal (turkey, squash, stuffing, etc.) and great desserts (some pretty fresh strawberries and blueberries, great pumpkin pie, etc). Some of the other students who were there were pretty interesting, and I had some good conversation with Howarth's daughter, who works for an international bank and writes and lives in Brookyln. We talked a little bit about Latin-American literature (she did an AFS program in Brazil in high school and studied Portuguese in college; she now knows Portuguese and Spanish). Other than a kind of confusing taxi ride to Howarth's house, it was a good Thanksgiving Day and all went well. When I got back, I hung out with Nicole for a little while, went to Wilcox where I watched the end of the Dallas-Denver NFL game, and read some more of "The Double Helix." Currently I'm watching "American History X" in the suite, which has been great so far, and tomorrow I hope to go see the Rent movie at the Garden Theater.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I'm writing is to review the perennial object of Tim's fretting and obsession -- course selection for the next semester. Let's begin.

First on the slate, and the only definite slot, is German 102-5. I applied to the course, and given that I have an A in the class, am in Rankin's section, and generally am doing pretty well in the class, I'm confident that I'll get into 102-5. 102-5, says Rankin + Michael Jennings, is a double-credit, more intensive course, and most people take it with three other courses (i.e. five credits). Some of the variables for the class include whether a) an earlier section of the class will be offered from 8:30-9:50 with Rankin and b) whether it's prudent to take four courses with 102-5. I believe Rebien is the other professor teaching 102-5, but I'd prefer to stay with a proven commodity with Rankin. I'd be fine with the 8:30 course, too. Anyway, that's the first slot.

Second is a Spanish class of some sort. I really want to not let my Spanish slide, and I'm also interested in pursuing a certificate in Spanish. Now, there are probably two options here. The first, and probably easier option that I'm leaning towards would be taking Spanish 307; I could take this whether or not 102-5 was early or not, and since it meets three times a week, I feel I could get more proficient at Spanish while getting 2/3 of the way towards a certificate. I'm wary of taking courses "that I should" after my experience in Spanish 207, but in some sense, taking 207 wasn't as terrible as I crack it up to be -- while the course wasn't that amazing, it's a pre-req for a lot of upper-level Spanish classes. Another option here would be Spanish 306 (Cervantes and his Age), but this course would probably be a little bit harder than 307 and almost definitely involve more reading. That's probably not a reason *not* to take it, especially since reading Don Quixote should be amazing, but it's something to consdier, I think, if I take five classes.

Third in the slot is EEB 222. This seems like a cool course for a couple of reasons. First, it fufills the ST requirement, which is good. But moreover, it also doesn't have a lot of the harms associated with most science classes. It meets two times a week for three-hour meetings, with a maximum of 20 people in the meeting, making for a somewhat-more seminar like atmosphere. It has papers and problem sets instead of exams, which is a plus, and the topics covered in the course -- serious topics in evolution and ecology, with us doing actual experiments, etc. -- all appeal to me. Moreover, if I want to major in History of Science, I need four science courses total, and given that I want to take some upper-level EEB courses in the future, and do well in them, and this seems like a good introduction to some of the more advanced topics.

Now, a question here is whether or not I want to take four or five courses. Right now, if I get into them, the ideal schedule would involve me taking two application courses I'm applying to -- "The Christian Right and the Open Society" and "Pre-Columbian Art of Southern Mexico." Both of these seem like pretty cool classes, and both are SA's, which would basically liberate me after this semester from distribution requirements (save for 1 EM, not a big deal) all the while I take interesting classes. I need to develop some contingency plans for what to do when/if I don't get into the application courses, but hopefully by spending some time over the next couple of days doing so, I can figure things out. I don't meet with my academic advisor until Tuesday, so hopefully by then I can get my act together.

Partly to appease the cherub and partly out of guilt, I've decided to update my Livejournal. Right now, I'm lying in bed on Sunday morning, just having written the beginnings to an essay for the Elmer Adler contest, an essay contest going on at Princeton right now. I won't reveal the topic, but I feel that I have an interesting idea, and that, given enough time to edit (which I should have -- the essay is due Dec. 1st), it should be interesting.

Right now midterms are bearing down on us, but I frankly don't have that much work to do. While a lot of my friends have several midterms all one after the other next week, all I have is a Borges essay due Wednesday, which I've already written and revised, and will talk about with the professor tomorrow, and an Astrobio problem set, due Tuesday, that I've also finished. I'll also have a German midterm interview at some point with Rankin (hopefully Thurs. morning, after I've talked with him again at the German Table Wednesday night), and that's about it. The only piece of work which I need to begin on is my presentation for Astrobio, which has to do with comparing ancient lake shorelines on Earth to those on Mars. The paper I'm summarizing is only two pages long and seems pretty straightforward, so I don't think that will be too terrible; I may meet with Prof. Onstott from Astrobio at some point during the week to discuss the presentation and let him catch me if I'm doing something dumb.

Next weekend should be interesting, too. Friday and Saturday, Sheltzer and I plan on going to the Brown tournament. While there should be a lot of good teams there, they'll be breaking to octo-finals, so we have a great shot at breaking. This would be a good chance to win our first break round -- in the past, we've lost all of our break rounds on unanimous decisions, partly because of our occassional incompetence, partly because of lame cases run by the government teams -- but I'm sure we'll break the curse sometime this year. Sunday morning, I get on a bus at 5:00 AM taking me, along with the other Astrobiolings, to Philadelphia, where we'll take a flight to Salt Lake City. From there, we'll continue by van up to Yellowstone, in what should be quite a long trip when all's said and done. I'm a little apprehensive about the weather in Yellowstone, but it sounds like it should be a pretty cool experience. I'll have to pay for food, but that's not a big problem.

Lsatly, I'm still unsure about being an RCA. It would effectively save my parents about $10,000 or so, because of the way taxes bite off income, and I would love to have a double-sized room, but I'm a little bit apprehensive about the responsibilities, especially if I get some lame freshmen in my group. I think I probably will apply, although I need to think some about who to ask for recommendations (and to write the application essays) before doing it. I still have some time, and will definitely go to the info sessions, but I'm not fully convinced yet. Anyway . . .

Well, as I haven't updated in a while, I've decided to jot down what's been going on recently.

I only have three days until I leave for Princeton, yet it seems like a lot longer than that, partly because I have a pretty epic day of college counseling appointments: today (Sunday) I have three hours total, which is all right, but on Monday, I have a whopping *seven hours* of appointments. Fortunately, three of them are two-hour appointments, so I won't be running around all day, but still, that should be an interesting day. Tuesday, I'll just be looking over what I've packed, arranging my CD's at the bank, taking out some money, and so on. I'm really looking forward to getting back -- this summer has gone well in that I made a ton of money, but I'm anxious to get back to school, see the cherub, and come back to classes and debate.

As far as classes go, I think I've settled on a good course schedule. Right now, I'm thinking about dropping Normative Ethics for SPA 222, which I think would be a good class for me to improve my Spanish and also a good introduction to the department. I talked with Greco a bit last night about courses in the Philosophy department, and he suggested some good courses to me for Spring -- there are a ton of great PHI courses in the Spring -- and he just generally gave me the down low on the department. Thinking about Spring courses some, I think I'd like to take GER 102-5, Civ Lib (or English Constitutional History -- it might be excessive to take both), a Spanish course (300-level, probably), and, maybe History of Biology with Angela Creager. I'll be interested to see how the History of Science course goes this Fall.

Yesterday, I also went to Chadwick to watch a Varsity football game. The guys ultimately lost, 21-30, I believe, in what was, IMO, a pretty bad loss. The team they were playing, Horizon, had maybe one legit player; Chadwick just had an absolute ton of penalties and allowed maybe eight sacks. In general, they must made a lot of terrible mistakes: fumbling the ball on their one-yard line, which lead to a score, throwing a pick in the end zone on first down, throwing a pick right after a fumble recovery, and so on. In terms of talent, they could have beaten this team by twenty points or so, and should have given up maybe ten points. On the other hand, several players had cramps, while Daniel Kohl looked pretty good, besides the aforementioned mistakes. Sam Greenspan, their new running back, also looked pretty good -- he looks like a good downhill runner -- but I don't think he gained that many yards. Kohl was probably the team's leading rusher. In all, though, I was very disappointed with the new offensive line -- they had told me yesterday how baller + good they were going to be, but they allowed like ten sacks of Kohl. A lot of the guys there got bigger, but I don't know if they know how to use their hands, or if they have quick enough feet. *Sigh.*

At any rate . . . I also checked out the new amphitheater and "Alumni Walk" that Chadwick had installed, and was much-impressed by both. The amphitheater is nice and big, yet it doesn't look so junky as the old one, while Alumni Walk is neat -- it's a built in sidewinder form up a small hill, with the names of people in each graduating class inscribed into the Walk. Next for Chadwick, I imagine, is renovating Brogan-Christensen (the cafeteria), or Roessler (an academic building). Renovating the latter would be a big project, but those are basically the only two remaining crappy buildings on campus.

Yesterday, I also took Patrick to his gymnastics class thing; on the way back, I stopped at Borders and got "Cien Años de Soledad" by García Marquez, which I hope to read a bit in the next couple of days to get a taste of; it's the last thing we read in SPA 222 and is supposed to be amazing. I've loved all the other García Marquez stuff I've read in the past, so it should be good.

Well, I'm still working on the article on babies and stem-cell research, but I've taken it in a different direction. Here's my first draft, which I'm very pleased with as a first version. After doing a couple drafts of it, I hope to submit it to the Soapbox or Princeton Progressive Review, or perhaps Green Light. If anyone who reads this has any ideas for titles, let me know.

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It was a spring day in Washington and the air was pregnant with promise. President Bush walked towards the podium in the Rose Garden to deliver a speech, flanked by twenty-one families, and with them, more importantly, twenty-one babies. As Bush soon explained in his speech, however, these were no normal families.

“The families here today have either adopted or given up for adoption frozen embryos that remained after fertility treatments,” said Bush. “Rather than discard these embryos created during in vitro fertilization, or turn them over for research that destroys them, these families have chosen a life-affirming alternative.” As the President later explained, the twenty-one families were all clients of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, a California-based adoption agency that offers not only traditional adoption services but also their unique “Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program,” which, in the words of Nightlight, “is helping some of the more than 400,000 frozen embryos realize their ultimate purpose – life – while sharing the hope of a child with an infertile couple.” At the ceremony, the twenty-one “snowflake babies” – or former embryos, if you went by what was printed on their T-shirts – basked in the graces of the President, while two of the children, a Tanner and a Noelle, even enjoyed a birthday party with the President afterwards.

All of this sounds perfectly wonderful, until you find out what the conference was about. Rather than urging more families to adopt, Bush’s speech centered on stem-cell research, discouraging research on the thousands of excess frozen embryos throughout the country that often remain after fertility treatments. So why the babies? Because the Bush administration, along with other conservative pro-life advocates, have discovered that when you need to really push a cause through, that when you want to convince people on beginning-of-life issues, nothing gets the job done like a baby.


Why babies? Because tots are the ultimate appeal to emotion: almost everyone finds them cute, so they slice through party lines; everyone alive today was a baby at some point, so they’re easy to identify with; many identify them with innocence, so they can’t be tarred as promoting an agenda. Because they can’t talk and, at least in the political world, carry with them a doting mother, they always tow the party line and come with other cute, emotionally appealing accessories. But most importantly, and the reason I suspect White House political strategists most covet: by identifying yourself with the baby, you shackle your opponent with the implicit burden of being anti-baby. It’s one thing to claim that an embryo has equal moral standing with a baby or an adult human, but it’s another thing entirely to conflate an embryo – a term that describes the first eight weeks of human development – with a baby, to say an embryo is a living, breathing baby. It’s another thing entirely for pro-life advocates, like Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, to say, “I myself am a 992-month-old embryo.”

Blurs and conflations like Hyde’s don’t hurt only because they’re factually incorrect – by definition, an embryo can’t be more than eight weeks old. They do the most damage in the realm of debate, turning what could otherwise make for a powerful exchange over dualism, medical ethics, and utilitarianism into a carnivalesque baby show. Now, all this isn’t to say that the left doesn’t invoke emotionalism when it can: witness John Edwards’ comments last fall, saying that a Kerry victory could mean that “people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Yet despite Democrats’ willingness to roll out the disabled as their champion, what chance would they have against the Republicans’ standard-bearer? Sticking with the Republican status quo would only mean that the disabled remain in the current state, while, if you believe the baby, going ahead with the Democrats’ proposals would mean the death of hundreds of thousands of “snowflakes” – a massive loss. Besides, what strategist doesn’t love a spokesman who minces words to the point of not talking at all?

While we’re on the topic of losses, let’s examine the numbers of the “snowflake babies.” Even if their invocation makes for embarrassing politics, perhaps the sheer number of babies born who would not else have lived makes up for it. Nightlight’s website clearly outlines the process and gives some numbers regarding it. After both the adopting and biological parents agree to everything, technicians thaw at least six frozen embryos (if one pair of biological parents has fewer than six frozen embryos, the other embryos come from another biological pair whom the adopting parents consult). According to Nightlight, however, the thawing process has a success rate of only fifty percent, meaning that for most couples, only three viable embryos remain. Now the eggs are thawed, but must be transferred to the adopting mother’s womb. This process, notes Nightlight, renders an additional two-thirds of the embryos unviable, leaving most adoptive mothers with one implanted embryo (and, in a way, justifies the original embryo count of six).

This should sound like a reasonable policy to even the most hardened pro-choicer. While the loss of five embryos may be regrettable, even to one who sees them as nothing more than potential life, the gain of a healthy baby who otherwise would not exist would seem to outweigh the loss. But one cannot consistently support the “snowflake” procedure – as President Bush does – at the same time that one talks of the embryo as a living human being and conflates it with both babies and U.S. Congressman. If embryos can, as Bush and Hyde seem to think, be meaningfully compared to a born human being, a single snowflake procedure kills five people in order to bring one into the world, hardly a pro-life procedure.

So much for snowflakes. Republicans’ exploitation of babies to justify their political stance on embryonic research shouldn’t change anyone’s feelings towards abortion, or even towards stem-cell research. But it should make people question the politician who, Republican or Democrat, stands up on the podium and declares herself pro-baby. It should make voters realize that innocence by association is no less fallacious and bankrupt than the same type of guilt. And it should make people think twice before making quick decisions based on emotion. It made me realize all these things and write about it, because I those I saw in the Rose Garden that May afternoon could neither speak nor protest, and I could, and things could have gone the other way around with none left to do the accounting.

I haven't updated in a while, but I'd like to submit the first page or so of an article I'm working on, entitled "Tim's Law."

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Senator Dick Durbin’s flummoxes this summer over comparing U.S. interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay with those of the Nazis proved, if anything, the continuing relevance of Godwin’s Law. The law, coined by attorney Michael Godwin in the early 1990’s, states the following:

As a debate grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Some interpretations of Godwin’s Law continue, noting that whichever side of an argument first makes such comparisons automatically loses the argument at hand, since the nature of such events is so serious that comparing them to any event short of genocide would eviscerate anyone’s credibility.
Inspired by Godwin and frustrated by political events this summer, I’d like to submit my own law – if that’s too immodest, consider it an amendment to Godwin’s – for consideration. I call it, surprisingly, Tim’s Law, and it states the following:

As a debate involving beginning-of-life issues grows longer, the probability of one side invoking babies as their standard-bearer approaches 1.

How did I come up with this? After paying close attention to both the Bush administration on stem-cell research and Catholic pro-life groups on abortion, it became clear to me that both groups have hoisted up the baby as their champion. But Tim’s Law doesn’t end here. Again seeking Godwin’s guidance, I also submit that a side has lost its respective argument once it starts wielding babies.
I know you may find this extreme. What can babies, you say, have to do with the Fuhrer? But let’s compare the two. Just as most associate anything Nazi or Hitler with evil – witness the demise of the Rotzbremse mustache – and move swiftly to condemn any Nazi comparison as hyperbolic, do not most do the opposite with babies? Babies are as innocent as Nazis were guilty; babies represent a clean slate. Every person alive today was, at one point, a baby, and so an affront to babies can be, in some respect, an affront on them. That babies are defenseless makes them more appealing: innocent and alone, babies need help. They practically demand to be loved.
Given all this, babies make excellent political weapons. Conflate your side with a baby, and your opponent hates babies. Arguments against become arguments against babies, and who would ever support that? This defense becomes all the more effective if your cause involves embryos or fetuses, for then, not only does your opponent attack babies in the debate sphere; he also wants them dead in real life. What baby arguments may lack in logical coherence, they make up for in emotional tug: witness Peter Singer’s public reputation if you doubt how most Americans feel about infanticide. But enough about Tim’s Law. What made me realize that so many had embraced babies as political devices?

"Things always happen for the other one, to Borges. I walk through Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps already mechanically, to watch the arch of a hallway and its wrought-iron gate; I hear news of Borges through the mail and see his name in a list of professors' names, or read his biography. I like hourglasses, maps, fonts from the 17th century, words, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson's prose; the other shares these tastes, but in a vane way that makes him an actor. It would be exaggerating to call our relation hostile; I live, I let myself life so that Borges may plot his literature, so that that literature justifies me. It costs me nothing to confess that I myself have written certain pages, but those pages cannot save me, maybe because quality no longer belongs to one or another, but to language and tradition. At the worst, I am destined to lose myself, definitively, and only one instant of me will survive in the other. Little by little I go ceding all to him, even though I am deeply familiar with his perverse ways of hyperbole and lies. Spinoza understood that everything wishes to preserve itself in its being; the rock eternally wishes to be rock, the tiger, a tiger. But I -- I must stay not in myself, but in Borges (if I even am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in the works of others or even in the flat twang of a guitar. Years ago I tried to wrest myself of him an pass from the myths of the slums to games of time and inifinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I must conceive other things now. Thus my life is an escape; I lose all and all is forgotton, or belonging to him.

I do not know which of us two writes this page."

There's a little quickie translation of "Borges y yo," a short little tract written by Borges about being an author and public intellectual. I read two stories from "El libro de arena" today, one of them bearing the same title as the book, and the other titled "El soborno" ('The Bribe, Bribery). With all that read, I only have one more short story to go before I've read all of the four Borges books I purchased last spring. I'm pretty pleased with myself that I stuck with all this reading over the summer, and while our reading may not directly overlap with what I read, SPA 331 should be notably easier -- at the least, I'll have a great backknowledge of Borges' stories and themes -- after all of this reading. For now, I've decided to make a few tallies:

Ficciones: 216 pages
El aleph: 200 pages
El informe de Brodie: 121 pages
El libro de arena: 141 pages

-- Total Pages --: 678 pages

That's a lot of reading! I began the first story of Ficciones, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," when I left Princeton back around the 20th of May, and tomorrow or the day after I should finish "Avelino Arredondo," a story from El libro (by the way, "Libro de arena" means "Book of sand"). All in all, my three or four favorite stories were:

- El Aleph: imagine finding a point on Earth that was every point -- in other words, a form that you can look into and witness every possible event, ever. Is omniscience a joy or a burden, and what might life be like if we had a crystal-clear memory of everything we'd ever done?

- El otro: what would having a conversation with yourself as an old man or woman be like? If your self knew everything about you, would you believe it, or would you think that you were dreaming?

- El milagro secreto: A poet, wishing to complete his magnum opus -- if only in his head -- is in front of the firing squad. As the soldiers fire on him, God makes one normal second take a year to elapse from the poet's perspective, giving him time to almost-complete his poem before life resumes.

- Los teologos: two thelogians fight for their doctrines while on Earth. After one has the other crucified for professing a doctrine saying that people on Earth were but halves of one real person, things seem fine, until the victorious theologian dies and meets God, who tells him the other theologian was right -- and that his crucified enemy was his other half.

I'm looking forward to SPA 331 a lot! I need to sort out my schedule some, but things are going good. I've been playing a lot of N64 the last day or so, and I'm feeling pretty relaxed.

After lounging about in the morning, and tutoring Biology in the afternoon, this evening I sat down and read through the Opinion page of the LA Times, which I normally do in the morning at breakfast. Something caught my attention, but it wasn't even in the Opinion section -- rather, it was one of the cover stories for the 'California' section of the paper, which houses the Opinion section.

The story detailed a program that finished up today at USC, wherein kids who will matriculate at colleges in the Fall are taught basic college skills -- namely, essay writing. From what I recall, USC grad students in their CAS do the tutoring, and it seemed like a nice little program for kids who are coming from ESL or weaker backgrounds.

What I want to talk about, though, is one detail that was just so insane that I cannot take any justification for affirmative action seriously. The article detailed one Latina girl who had graduated as salutatorian from her high school this last Spring and will be attending Harvard this coming Fall. Sounds relatively normal, right? Except for the part where the girl had an 1150 on the SAT (out of 1600). Now before I go any further, let's talk for a moment about what implications this has. First off, by almost any standard, a 1150 is an embarassing score. Because this girl is at this writing workshop, I find it hard to believe that she got anymore than, say, a 500 on the verbal section. But when you have a composite score that low, you're then talking about like a 500-600 on the math section. I realize that it's difficult to do well on the verbal section when you haven't read a lot, and especially when English isn't your first language, but I feel that anyone can get at least a 650 on the math section with some preparation. It's a shame that kids don't read as much as they could, but "I didn't read when I was younger" isn't an excuse; it's a problem. I realize that it's gotta be difficult to take an English verbal test when you're speaking Spanish at home, but given that college is in English, and that any serious academic work in this country will be done in English, that's hardly an undue burden. Lastly, let's compare this score to this girl's standing at high school. If you go to a high school where your salutatorian gets an 1150, well, then, the grades at your school have no legtimacy whatsoever.

OK. That's my little rant on the 'what is' of this case: what her test scores *probably* imply given her academic standing. Now I'd like to comment on what I see as the greatest and most unjust failing of affirmative action.

Affirmative action fails most miserably when it mistakes "a hand up" with "the best education money can buy." My problem with this case, and one problem that I see in many affirmative action cases, is that you'll see a kid like this, who, although they come from a bad situation, are just without a doubt unqualified for admission to elite institutions. If a white girl from Connecticut applies to Yale with an 1150, she'll be rejected upon the first reading unless she is truly exceptional in other areas. If a guy from Jersey applies to Princeton with a 1200, unless he's walking on water otherwise, he's a goner. Now, I don't have so much of a problem with schools like, say, UC Santa Cruz, or the University of Washington, looking at a girl with these stats, and saying, "OK, normally someone from a good situation with these stats would be in bad shape, but not just completely out of the ballpark . . . let's give her a chance." In a case like this, I think that AA works better because there's less of a discrepancy between the underqualified minority, and the average white admittee, than there is at a place like Harvard. It's when you start thinking that "We should give poor minorities a hand up" (a decent goal) with "We should admit poor minorities to our best colleges" that you run into problems. As documented at Berkeley in 2003, cases like this girl tend to flunk out of higher-end schools at alarmingly high rates, putting them in a situation where they've flunked out of a school, so that transfer admissions or admissions of any kind for said person become much more difficult. If they had gone to the less selective school, they probably would have done better, thus staying in school, graduating with a degree, and, hopefully, going on to have kids + inculcating good educational values in them. Affirmative actions fails when it tries to compress a multi-generation project -- one in which education becomes a positive value in cultures -- into a single leap. All of this goes without mentioning, of course, the kids who were smart enough to not get an 1150 on the SAT who get bumped out in admissions because of 'special cases' like this one.

Lastly, questions about AA:

Does it promote a sort of paternalistic racism, especially given that it applies to *all* of a race, rather than just the poor?

If so, how paternalistic racism ("Because you're black, we'll lower our standards . . . trust us, we know . . .") qualitatively different from direct racism (insults, etc.)

The link to said story can be found here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-leap29jul29,1,5815387.story?coll=la-headlines-california