Brian Clegg has posted a review of Martin Bojowald’s new book about loop quantum gravity at the Wall Street Journal, but Mr. Clegg might have just as well spared himself the trouble of writing an intelligent summary of a very difficult book for Rupert Murdoch’s ultra-right-wing rag, because almost all the readers’ comments came from dim-witted creationists whose only interest in anything about science is denouncing Charles Darwin.

You cannot prove by any means that the central concept of one living God is untrue. Stop trying.

But why did reader Charles Sullins post this touching declaration on a thread about loop quantum gravity? God only knows, and it quickly got worse, as the pseudo-Christian spokesperson Keith Beveridge initiated a general attack on “secular Darwinism.”

By definition a world view should be balanced, practical, not too simple, not too complex, and match up fairly well with the world at large. Secular Darwinism fails on many of these accounts, most notably in my opinion in its self referential claim to truth in the face of its fundamental claim that there really is no truth, just molecules in motion.

And then it was God this and God that, for more than 100 comments on an article about loop quantum gravity!

But since you can read any number of articles and comments on those articles about almost any other subject except science in the WSJ without ever encountering the word “God” in any of them, I decided to ask Rupert Murdoch’s pseudo-Christian readership a couple of salient questions.

Isn’t it bizarre that SCIENCE is the ONLY SUBJECT about which so many readers of the Wall Street Journal constantly invoke their (very selective) CHRISTIAN faith?

But when it comes down to anything that might cost them a penny, like extending UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS for their desperate neighbors, then all that ANTI-DARWIN PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY flies out the window, and their new song is…

LET ‘EM STARVE!

Every word of the Bible is LITERALLY TRUE, they claim, when it’s “God created the Earth in seven days.”

But when it’s “LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF!” then that’s probably just a METAPHOR, and anybody who wants to apply that principle letter by letter is nothing but a STINKING COMMIE!

So if you think Christianity is all about CREATIONISM, there are very good Christians all over the Republican Party and the Wall Street Journal.

But if you happen to believe (as I do) that Christianity is all about PEACE AND CHARITY, then all you can find IN EITHER MAJOR PARTY is ridiculously blatant HYPOCRISY.

“We murder Afghan civilians and destroy whole villages every day, WE GOOD CHRISTIANS, and for every murder we have a very good excuse that excuses everything!”

“They hit us first!”

Do they really believe that Jesus preached the morals of some snot-nosed playground bully?

“O GENERATION OF VIPERS, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.”

And pseudo-Christian spokesperson Kevin Beveridge replied…

What do you base all this on? Do you know any Christians? The behavior you describe doesn’t hold true for ANY Christian I have ever met in my life, and I know hundreds. The evangelical Christian doctrine is as far from your post as it can be. Read Grudem’s Systematic Theology to learn what most American Christians believe and how they try to live.

But I couldn’t care less what these phony Christians claim to believe, while they cheer for greed and violence every day.

So I rephrased my original questions for Mr. Beveridge.

Did I miss your sustained criticism of George W. Bush’s WAR OF CHOICE in Iraq?

Did I miss all your denunciations of GREED in these pages?

Maybe you could supply a few links, and prove you’re not just another PHONY CHRISTIAN who cares more about creationism than peace and charity.

Or did you think the Sermon on the Mount was all about THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES?

“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS, for they will be called children of God.”

Did you ever cite that text to condemn the CHICKEN-HAWK George W. Bush?

Show me your comments in these pages urging peace and charity with the same vehemence that you support creationism!

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, LOVE YOUR ENEMIES AND PRAY FOR THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

“LOVE YOUR ENEMIES!”

But that’s just a metaphor, I suppose, and the LITERAL TRUTH only appears in the Book of Genesis, instead of the New Testament.

“He that is greatest among you shall be your servant, And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, HYPOCRITES! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”

And so far neither Mr. Beveridge or any of the other dim-witted fanatics on that thread have provided an iota of evidence that their bogus “Christianity” applies to anything except Charles Darwin, and I’m beginning to lose my childlike faith that they ever will.

Baluchi “Tree of Life” carpet from Mazar-i Sharif

We were born on the ladder of bone
in the tenth generation of sorrow

Peace was promised again and again
until even grief was broken
on the wheel of the sun

-Ghodi (trans. Jacob Freeze)

Kabul, 2005

Modernization Theory was invented by an ambitious academic at Harvard called Walt Whitman Rostow. He said that if you put the right technologies in place and educated key elites then the countries would inevitably develop into advanced capitalist societies. They would go through a series of logical stages (there were five) until you got what he modestly called “Rostovian Lift-off”.

Rostow laid out his theory in a book he called “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto”.

Rostow’s theories obsessed the American development agencies and they came up with all sorts of ideas about how to turn countries like Afghanistan into modern democracies.

One of the oddest was the belief that it was possible to scientifically discover who the crucial “transitional personalities” were in the society. These were people who had underlying “capitalist personalities” that they were unaware of. A psychologist called David McClelland invented a way of discovering who had these traits – and techniques to then develop what he called “the need to achieve”. He was convinced you could use behavioural psychology to turn people throughout the world into model Americans.

McClelland worked tirelessly to prove his case. Here is one of his diagrams that shows that the frequency of achievement imagery in children’s books in the late 19th century leads inevitably to a rise in inventions in America as they grow up – as shown by the number of patented inventions.

From THE LOST HISTORY OF HELMAND, by Adam Curtis

A girl from Tora Bora

Who is this green-eyed child from Nangarhar Province? Why is she wearing so much make-up? Why are her face and hands so dirty?

In December 2001 American invaders almost captured Usama bin Laden in Tora Bora, a system of caves in the Pachir Wa Agam District of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, and all sorts of silly explanations supposedly explain how bin Laden got away, but after nine long years of total failure in every district of every province from Nimruz to Nuristan, the real explanation is obvious enough.

We Americans don’t understand fuck-all about Afghanistan, or any of the people in it.

Badakhshan, Afghanistan

One of the problems with American plans for “reconstruction” in Badakhshan, Afghanistan is that most of the construction workers who show up for jobs don’t know how to hammer a nail, and this problem isn’t really so much a problem (which American know-how could supposedly solve) as it is a reminder that Afghanistan isn’t just another under-developed country. It isn’t even a medieval country.

It’s a pre-historic wasteland.

Here technology hasn’t significantly progressed since the foundation of Jericho, except in the lucrative but dangerous sub-field of refining raw opium into heroin, and junkies in the South Bronx probably understand more about existence in Badakhshan than all the experts in all the embassies in Kabul.

Tajik opium-addicts in Badakhshan, Afghanistan

(Photocredits: A.K. Kimoto)

Idiots at the Pentagon who constantly claim to recognize “suspected insurgents” through the tiny cameras in Predator drones as they destroy whole villages in Afghanistan…

Idiots at the Pentagon who hire Blackwater assassins to murder “suspected insurgents” all over Pakistan and Afghanistan …

Those same idiots can’t even recognize the second-ranking commander of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour!

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

The headline from the New York Times shifts the blame to NATO and makes it all sound sort of reasonable.

NATO Is Razing Booby-Trapped Afghan Homes

House got a bomb in it? Knock it down!

But…

Abdul Rahim Khan, 50, a tribal elder from Spirwan in Panjwai District, claimed that in many cases the American troops had been destroying empty homes, even when there were not any explosives inside. However, military officers pointed out, searching empty homes was often too dangerous.

House maybe got a bomb in it? Knock it down!

Village maybe got a bomb in it?

Destroy the whole village!

In Arghandab District, for instance, every one of the 40 homes in the village of Khosrow was flattened by a salvo of 25 missiles, according to the district governor, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, who estimated that 120 to 130 houses had been demolished in his district.

“And not just Khosrow, but many villages,” says the governor of Arghandab District.

“We had to destroy them to make them safe.”

There were about 6,115 state legislative elections in the United States in 2010, and…

In those 6,115 state legislative elections, Republicans picked a net gain of 998 seats from Democrats.

Republicans now hold 3,735 state legislative seats to 3,119 state legislative seats held by Democrats, a stunning reversal of power from 2006 and 2008.

Republicans have more seats in state legislatures than at any time since Reconstruction.

So the last time Republicans exercised so much control over state legislatures, the leader of their party was Abraham Lincoln.

And of course Republicans also picked up 5 governorships and 6 Senate seats and 64 seats in the House of Representatives, and meanwhile there’s really nothing worth reporting about our absurd President and the rest of the Democratic “leadership.”

From the Assciated Press…

Before last month, there had never been a confirmed case of cholera in Haiti.

In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said cholera was “extremely unlikely to occur” in Haiti. There were no cholera bacteria there.

Then it did. Even more surprisingly, it did not first appear in a major port, an earthquake tent camp or an area where foreigners are concentrated, but instead along the rural Artibonite River.

Speculation keeps returning to that river and a base home to 454 U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. They are perched on a babbling waterway called the Boukan Kanni, part of the Meille River that feeds into the Artibonite.

People living nearby have long complained about the stink in the back of the base and sewage in the river. Before the outbreak began they had stopped drinking from that section of the river, depending instead on a source farther up the mountain.

The CDC has said the strain of cholera in Haiti matches one found most prevalently in South Asia.

“It very much likely did come either with peacekeepers or other relief personnel,” said John Mekalanos, Harvard University microbiology chair. “I don’t see there is any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably accidental introduction of the organism occurred.”

So how did cholera get into the Artibonite River?

Sanitation at the (Nepalese) base is handled by a private company, Sanco Enterprises SA, which won the contract over the summer by underbidding a rival. The U.N. said the septic tanks were to be emptied once a week.

But when the AP visited on Oct. 27, a tank was clearly overflowing. The back of the base smelled like a toilet had exploded. Reeking, dark liquid flowed out of a broken pipe, toward the river, from next to what the soldiers said were latrines. U.N. military police were taking samples in clear jars with sky-blue U.N. lids, clearly horrified.

The U.N. said it is up to the private contractor and local mayor to ensure its dump sites are safe. Sanco Vice President Marguerite Jean-Louis said it is up to the mayor and the U.N.

Let’s add up the evidence.

A strain of cholera native to Nepal appears for the first time ever in Haiti on the Artibonite River, near a Nepalese encampment which “smelled like a toilet had exploded” and where “reeking, dark liquid flowed out of a broken pipe, toward the river.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect those dots.

And it only gets worse.

Cholera has already killed at least 1100 people in Haiti, and “a U.S. government health expert said Thursday it may take years to completely eliminate cholera from Haiti,” because “the strain of the disease observed there is especially virulent.”

The UN will probably trade blame back and forth forever with their local sewage contractor, but I blame the UN on the basis of a principle whose universal validity I proclaim for all times and in all places.

You are responsible for your own shit.

From Computer World…

A report submitted to Congress on Wednesday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission expressed concerns over what the commission claims is China’s growing ability to control and manipulate Internet traffic.

The report points to two specific incidents earlier this year where actions taken inside China had a direct impact on Internet traffic in the U.S. and other regions of the world.

The traffic hijacking affected U.S. government and military networks, including those belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Commerce, NASA and the U.S. Senate.

Commercial sites including those belonging to Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo were also affected.

It’s unclear if Chinese telecommunications firms did anything with the hijacked data, the commission said in its report. But the kind of access that Chinese authorities had to the data could enable surveillance of specific users or sites, disrupt transactions, prevent a user from establishing connections to specific sites or divert them to other spoofed sites, the report noted.

“Incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications,” the report said.

“Incidents of this nature could have a number of serious implications.”

That’s sort of an understatement, isn’t it?

TechNewsWorld provided some additional background.

The apparent hijacking was the result of tainted networking routing tables.

A routing table is a table of routes to particular network destinations, such as servers. Routing tables are created by routing protocols. They are used to generate the information for forwarding tables, which contain only the routes chosen by routing algorithms as preferred routes for forwarding packets of information over a network. A tainted table misdirects traffic to a destination the originator of the information packets or messages being transmitted over the network did not select.

The problem apparently lies with the Border Gateway (NYSE: GTW) Protocol (BGP), which is, essentially, a routing table for the Internet. Most Internet service providers must use BGP to establish routing among one another, making this one of the most important protocols on the Internet.

However, BGP is flawed — hijacking traffic by posting false tables is easy. Researchers at the 2008 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas demonstrated this by putting up false tables that routed all conference traffic to a computer they controlled before sending that traffic to its destination.

Internet engineers have apparently not yet addressed this flaw.”

“Internet engineers have apparently not yet addressed this flaw.

Apparently not! And are there any plans to address the flaw of flawed addresses?

Nobody seems to know.

And meanwhile the Washington Post downplayed the whole kerfuffle, under very low-key headlines.

Chinese Internet diversion was worrisome, report says

The incident is “cause for concern, not alarm,” said Dale W. Meyerrose, who was chief information officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the Bush administration and is now a vice president for information assurance at Harris Corp.

But in spite of the Post’s reassuring blather, a few alarming details emerged, and according to Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for the computer security firm McAfee Inc, who briefed U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this episode, “the Chinese could have snooped on or even modified the traffic as it flowed through their pipes.”

So the Chinese can “modify” internet traffic from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines!

And that’s “cause for concern, not alarm.”

Okay! I’m calm! I love China, and IMHO the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest force for good in the world today!

(Did you hear that, Comrades?)

And so what if all those stories about China’s ongoing genocidal occupation of Tibet disappear from the internet?

It isn’t like there’s a shortage of horribly depressing news!