I have rejoined SNN and my first podcast back with them is about—Sarah Palin, of course. (That’s the general link. Here’s the individual one.)

If you listen very carefully, you will hear Tig on it.

He and Gracie decided that the best time to play kitty tag was while I was (sigh) recording the podcast.

Click here.

Laugh.

Don’t be drinking or eating.

Jon, I want that on a t-shirt.

In his Memo from Cairo today, the NYT’s Michael Slackman writes about Egyptian attitudes towards 9/11.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

The premise of the article is that the United States hasn’t done a sufficient job of making its case to the Muslim world. But that ignores that the United States isn’t alone in this battle for hearts and minds.

Slackman then lectures:

Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.

Slackman is doing the talking here. “Experts” provide him with suitable cover to claim that this isn’t his own opinion. But this is a common device in “journalism.” If you want to say something, there’s always an “expert” who’ll say the same thing and “confirm” that you’re correct.

Perhaps, though, there are other forces. From a State Department blog:

Conspiracy thinking has grown, especially since the September 11 attacks, says Mohamed Abdel Salam, Head of the Regional Security and Arms Control Program at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt. His article, “The Modes of Arab Conspiracy Theories,” says “markedly non-scientific modes of thought prevail throughout the Arab world,” one form being conspiracy theories.

My Right Word makes a similar observation (the one quoted above comes from an Arab source):

But that’s what I and many others have been sounding out for years (okay, in my case, decades). There is something called a mindset. There is nothing racist in this. It is a fact. And the MiddleEast/Arab mindset is such that logic and rationality play much less a role in political education and wisdom than in other regions.

he also refers to Bernard Lewis:

Well, I can’t subscribe to it since the terrorists themselves claim to be acting in the name of Islam. There was one Muslim leader who said, not long ago, that it is wrong to speak about Muslim terrorism, because if a man commits an act of terrorism, he’s not a Muslim. That’s very nice, but that could also be interpreted as meaning that if a Muslim commits it, it doesn’t count as terrorism.

When a large part of the Muslim world was under foreign rule, then you might say that terrorism was a result of imperialism, of imperial rule and occupation. But at the present time, almost the whole of the Muslim world has achieved its independence. They can no longer blame others for what goes wrong. They have to confront the realities of their own lives at home. A few places remain disputed, like Chechnya and Israel and some others, but these are relatively minor if you’re talking about the Islamic world as a whole.

Lewis also points out that the entrenched tyrants of the Muslim world have a reason to resent the invasion of Iraq: the current Iraqi government is an imperfectly functioning democracy. If the government in Iraq is successful, it will signal to the rest of the Arab/Muslim world that change is possible. Not that Lewis expects quick political change, but he believes it possible over the long term.

Slackman also doesn’t acknowledge the role the official (and unofficial) media in the Arab world plays in perpetuating these myths.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories that are so prevalent in the Arab world result not from a rational assessment of the situation. (Amazingly Slackman’s article never mentions that Egypt is the second largest recipient of American aid; that the United States and the West, continually provide the Palestinians with much more money than the Arab/Muslim world does.)

The Arab world thinks its grievances are real. But instead of shining a light on reality and asking why these grievances persist in resistance to fact and reason, Slackman lectures the West that we ought to understand and accommodate the mindset.

Opinion Dominion writes about the 9/11 “truthers”:

In short, they encourage conspiracy belief in the Middle East, and that cannot possibly help achieve peace there.

Unfortunately articles like Slackman’s effectively legitimize and entrench these beliefs, making them even harder to dispel. So that’s how the New York Times celebrates the 7th anniversary of 9/11, by making the ideology that led to the terror more sympathetic to its Western audience.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

You might remember, a few weeks ago there was news about the “Real Genius” weapon. Well now different scientific news recalls another movie.

CERN - the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire – the same organization where the World Wide Web was born, is about to start testing the Large Hadron Collider in an effort to recreate conditions after the Big Bang.

However there are those who fear that the experiment could destroy the world and have filed lawsuits to prevent the activation of the device.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Does this remind anyone of this dialogue from Ghostbusters?

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

So if you’re reading this next week, the experiment has been so far successful. But if not, apparently the black holes were a bigger problem than the researchers anticipated, but at least we were first with the news.

h/t Secular Blasphemy, who lives in Norway, which is a lot closer to the collider, so if there are any problems maybe he could send out a warning e-mail.

UPDATE via Instapundit: An item about debunking the doomsday scenarios.

Several rounds of scientific studies, considering increasingly outlandish scenarios, have ruled out the black-hole threat. The evidence shows that the collider is absolutely safe, and poses no chance of cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the hysteria continues: Part of the reason for that is that scientists say it’s conceivable that a less threatening breed of subatomic black holes could be created. But another factor is that there’s so much science-fiction appeal to the tale of the black hole that ate the earth.

But this is also fascinating:

Speaking of time travel, Cramer has been in the midst of a real-life experiment in retrocausality - a kind of backward flow of information from the future to the past. I first wrote about this experiment almost two years ago, and Cramer recently told me that he’s still trying to get the apparatus to work. Perhaps what Stephen Hawking said is true: Nature abhors a time machine.

And if Cramer’s successful he’ll write an article about it last week!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Let me try once again to explain to the doubters out there why I don’t care that Palin’s views on abortion are different than mine. Or that she’s a “Christianist,” as Asshole Andrew Sullivan keeps calling her. Or that she and I may not see eye to eye on many issues. The fact is, it’s 2008, and it’s about damned time a woman was a member of at least one of the two national presidential tickets.

The pundits are telling us that angry would-be Hillary voters won’t vote for Palin. The pundits are wrong. They will vote for Palin, and they are moving to the right for this election—the polls keep coming up McCain, after having been Obama, Obama, Obama. It’s not just a post-convention bounce. It is the excitement that having a female candidate is engendering (pardon the pun).

Those of you who don’t get it simply aren’t going to get it. It’s the same reaction I get when I try to explain the difference between Judaism the religion, and Judaism the culture. If you don’t get it, I am wasting my time trying to explain the differences. But let me try once more.

Year after year after year, women watch as the leaders of this nation, the leaders of corporations, and the leaders of the world all look pretty much the same: They’re men. There are precious few women in world leadership positions. And it’s not because we haven’t been out there for the past forty years. The feminist revolution has been around for long enough for women to be in leadership positions. And yet—we are not. And part of that reason is that the old boys’ network does exist. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. Name the last powerful woman in the Senate or House of Representatives whose name isn’t Clinton. Tell me what happened to Geraldine Ferraro after her run for VP. Tell me how many women are serving in the Senate now.

Sixteen.

How many women Senators have there been?

Thirty-five.

How many women Presidential candidates? Vice-Presidential candidates?

Governors?

Twenty-nine.

How many women have been the heads of the DNC or RNC? Secretaries of State? Ambassadors to important countries? Chiefs of Staff?

There has been a dearth of female leadership in this nation, but there has not been a dearth of women on leadership tracks to choose from—in spite of the constant refrain that is so. It’s almost like the same old stupid “Gee, where are all the women political bloggers?” discussion that gets rolled out every time some idiot wants to troll for links. We’re here. But that glass ceiling exists. It’s not our imagination. I work for a company that only has a female executive because they bought a company with a woman president. In 2008, I work for a company that had no women executives at all. Not. One. So do not tell me that women are simply imagining the barriers that still exist for women in the corporate and government structures. It’s pretty easily proven by the numbers.

Sixteen women senators. Women make up half the population of the United States, but only sixteen percent of the Senate. Granted, representation isn’t a one-for-one deal, but it’s effing 2008, not 1978. We’ve been in politics for long enough to have better representation than that.

So now perhaps you begin to see why Sarah Palin is so exciting to ALL women, not just women whose politics already agree with her. Even the women who hate her are secretly glad to see a woman on the ticket for the highest office in the land.

Women are going to vote for McCain for various reasons. But a fair amount of women are going to vote for him because he put a woman on the ticket. If you think that’s tokenism, if you think that’s patronizing, if you think it’s hollow symbolism, you haven’t been paying much attention to what most women feel.

We want to see Sarah Palin succeed, because it will move us forward in ways equally as important as Barck Obama’s candidacy has moved African Americans forward.

It ain’t tokenism. It’s about effing time.