Juan Williams was on the Bob Edwards show yesterday promoting his new book. He stated again that people in Muslim garb in airports do frighten him (without any caveat this time) and that his saying this is part of Honest Debate.

If you’re truly interested in such debate, the first rule is to question the validity of your premise beforehand.

The Muslims who conducted the 9/11/2001 attacks were wearing button-downs and khakis, while the people who held Mumbai hostage in November of 2008 wore jeans and tshirts. Unless you’re actually in, say, Basra or the Swat valley, your chances of being attacked by a person in a dishdash or chador are slim to none. Not only is this a horribly inefficient method of profiling, the attitude is also extremely silly. My aunt had “dothead” yelled at her in New Jersey by a man tattooed with a German Iron Cross, while a fellow geophysicist of Indian origin was recently beaten up in London by a bunch of punk thugs wearing Union Jack tshirts and bandanas as they referred to him as a “Paki.” These are attacks that occur almost everyday in the western world. At the gym the other day, I saw a guy with a giant iron cross tattooed on his right leg. A colleague put up the British flag in his office. By all rights, I should be frightened by these outward symbols of identity, correct? If I had then gone on the Rachel Maddow show and freaked out about it, I would have been laughed off the set.

The best way to fight fundamentalism is to get rid of it in yourself first. Each time I hear paranoid squawks about the growing Islamization of the West, I don’t fear Muslims. All I think is, “Hey, these guys sound exactly like those old mullahs in Kuwait who fumed and incited their young over the growing Westernization of the East.” Don’t sound like a fanatical mullah, for starters.

Next time: “Collective guilt” for you, but not for me.

Players vote unanimously to approve deal with owners to end NFL lockout.

Let the unrestricted free agency rodeo begin!

I’m currently reading two books. (I probably do this in keeping with my Vatul nature; consider it an offering to my ancestors, if you will.) They are Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

The books have nothing to do with one another and I picked each up for completely different reasons, but there are a couple of questions that both books bring up.

1) Is addiction a personality trait? I understand addiction as various things –  habit gone bad, a genetic predisposition and certainly as a disease – but is addiction / can addiction become a part of you such that it is something to describe you? Think about that question for a second. See, I view John Belushi as a great actor and an addict, neither which are necessarily part of his personality. I am trying to get at the distinction (or lack thereof) between what you are and what you do. If you think I am going about this the wrong way, read Question 2.

2) In his foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie remarks, “I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament.” Easy for him to say when he is a great writer who came gifted with the tools. Just like it’s easy for me to treat exploration geophysics as a job when I come with the necessary geological knowledge and technical abilities. But, how can Rushdie treat something as a job to be done that is such a part of him? Again, how do you plot that line between what you are and what you do?

I’m reminded of some of Mark Folse’s odd words, “Passion and discipline are two names for the same thing, aspects of the same cruel and delightful god that drove men to go to extraordinary lengths to plant a flag on the moon and to write Moby Dick.”

And Frank Sinatra, “Do Be Do Be Do.”

Update: Scientific American asks and answers similar questions this week. “… the link is not between creativity and addiction per se. There is a link between addiction and things which are a prerequisite for creativity … You don’t become addicted because you feel pleasure strongly. On the contrary, addicts seem to want it more but like it less.”

Stumbled upon a street called Ruelle des Ursulines and you know I had to check it out. I ended up walking through the grounds of the School of the Ursulines, one of the oldest schools in North America and a UNESCO world heritage site.

More pictures from the Quebec trip in this slideshow.