South, though: Jonathan Hall's post is quite extensive, and if he's correct it looks like Peru had an impressive metallurgical culture, which spread north into Mesoamerica; but apparently the trade didn't go further north into the modern USA. The absence of tin would explain why nobody bothered to try to smelt bronze, and the easy availability of native copper removes the need to smelt copper, but why wouldn't there be some trade? Did the North have nothing the Mesoamericans wanted, or were the desert stretches that great a trade barrier? There's always the coastlines and raft-boats -- unless there really was nothing they wanted.
''I do not know everything; still many things I understand.'' Goethe
Observations by me and others of our tribe ... mostly me and my better half--youngsters have their own blogs
Thursday, October 31, 2024
New World metallurgy
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Banality
I wonder if she read The Screwtape Letters' 1961 preface, "I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."
Those quiet men sometimes harbor the wildest evils in their hearts and in their minutes.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Time
The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.
You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.
At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.
Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.
Internment
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Incitatus
BBC's famous "Yes Minister" comedy assumed that the existing bureaucracy defines most of policy (and tries to perpetuate and enlarge itself). I haven't seen much evidence that this is wrong.
There's no way any human being can know all the people in a single government agency, much less the whole government. To pick people to direct an agency you have to trust someone else's vetting of them – and trust the standards by which they were measured. The reports that cross your desk are distillations of distillations: how do you know if there was a pattern to what was omitted?
We hope that the president we vote for will pick a trustworthy team to farm out the other personnel selections to and give them the general policy directions for their various underlings to implement, and then listen to what we hope is their good advice. We hope we can trust the policy statements and party brand. We hope we're not buying a pig in a poke. That's a lot of hope.
Trump seemed to have some sensible advisors, but so many of his team rotated in and out that I figure continuity had to have suffered – and then bureaucratic momentum wins. "Personnel is policy:" and the bureaucracy has most of the personnel already – and offers a pool from which one may select directors.
Perhaps instead we vote for Incitatus, with religious faith in the party brand and trusting that the team that selected Incitatus is benign. That team, invisible to any ballot, will pick the cabinet, set the policies, and try to decide on the proper reactions to the crises that will arise. The president will sign bills like a living autopen, read from teleprompters, and smile or glower on cue.
It might seem as though either way the bureaucracy dominates, but it isn't entirely just a difference in degree. In the case of a compos mentis president, decisions in the various crises would be made by the same person; there's no guarantee that the same person each time would give Incitatus the lines to say. And a forceful president might have some impact in despite of the bureaucracy.
Post-liberalism
In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states.
This, after Pinkoski's description of the subsuming of private enterprises under government control in a way that is fascist in all but name, is telling.
Leaves
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Mushroom song
(The third seems slightly corrupted, but maybe the music was different.) archive.org is back.
The mushroom is a vegetable To select it few are able You won't know them when you meet them You won't know them 'til you eat them If in heaven you awaken You will know you were mistaken And the ones that you have eaten Weren't the ones you should have et. Mushrooms are a vegetable which you eat when you are able you will know one when you see one you will know one when you eat one if in Heaven you awaken then you’ll know you were mistaken Must have been a toadstool, tough luck!!! Mushrooms are a veg-e-table That you eat when you are able, You will know when you eat them, You will know them when you eat them. If in heaven you awaken And you find you were mistaken, That the mushrooms you had eaten Weren’t the ones you should have et. Must have been toadstools -- tough luck! “Mushrooms is a veg-e-table; to detect them few are able. If in Heaven you awaken then you’ll know you were mistaken, And the ones that you have eaten weren’t the ones you should have eat!”
Friday, October 18, 2024
Gleam again
The only downsides were my forgetting a cap, and the mandatory word salad on the signage explaining why looking at this exhibit will make you a better person. Why can't an artist just say "I thought this would look pretty"?
There were interactive exhibits too, and foxglove blossoms 14" high, and they made sure the interactive things were kid accessible.
Simple cell-phone cameras do not do it justice--they haven't the dynamic range of the human eye. And anyway, it seems better to just stand and take it in.
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Tired of only seeing some relatives at funerals,
Gas mileage through West Virginia wasn't quite nice. Minivans... As we ate our snacks at a rest stop there, a young lady drove up in a car leaking some kind of fluid from the front, who promptly got on the phone. I asked if she was OK--she'd hit a deer, and apparently it went under her car. I'd not thought of that damage vector before. (We didn't see any deer.)
I listened a lot, and learned some things about building airports and dog training for deer hunting and building garden hardware, and about family I'd not been in close contact with for a while--some things joyful and some sad.
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Allegheny cemetery
Many of the older stones were eroded by acid rain, and are difficult to make out, but there's a great deal of what is essentially public artwork honoring the memory of people you've never heard of (and some you have). I gather that the Winter mausoleum is the most famous. Winter copied the design of the Woolworth mausoleum: a pseudo-Egyptian temple with busty Greek-style sphynxes and heiroglyphs that mixed real phrases and gibberish, and doors showing the proprietor being aided by de-animal-headed Egyptian gods.
Many of the mausoleums have stained glass within, which you can view through the front door's grating--Winter's has 3 panels. Oddly, even the good Father Pitt/Dr Boli only mentioned one of them--which shows Winter as Pharoah enthroned. Modesty seems not to have been Emil Winter's most prominent virtue.
Yes, the noses of the bronze figures on the door show signs that visitors have been rubbing them, and the snooty sphynxes show similar signs, though not on the nose.
It isn't just rich businessmen who are buried in the cemetery, of course, a friend and confidant "of the illustrious Washington" is also buried there. Daniel O'Niell's statue shows him still at his editor's desk, and the (presumably recopied) stones for Ebenezer Denny and his wife Nany Denny ("Stop, Passenger! and here view whatever is admirable summed up in the character of Mrs. Nancy Denny...") tell of older ways of memorializing.
Many plots had a little walled flower garden above the grave--sometimes a painfully small grave with small numbers on the stone. Once there was a fashion for headstones shaped like scrolls, which, combined with the flower-garden cavity gives the impression of a giant sardine can being opened with a rolling key.
Karl Lennart Gronros from Finland had a stone paid for by his friends so that all would know that the 24-year-old was a mechanical engineer.
It is a bit disconcerting to see so many headstones for people younger than me.
Monday, October 07, 2024
Risks
We need to balance risks. Predators flock to the scene--they already have. But the risks from them seem, so far, relatively low compared to the risks of locals running out of clean water and medicine. It isn't a nice way to think about things, but in an emergency you have to triage and spend your energies efficiently, and some people are going to get murdered who wouldn't have been if you spent the time to vet everybody every time, but more will live because they got uncontaminated water to drink in time, or got shelter when their home and roads washed away.
We're not always good at evaluating risks.
Grim says the Feds haven't shown up yet in his area, but local and private assistance are helping a lot.
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Reminder
I'm fairly bald, and couldn't tear out much hair--his background was amazingly confused. He mixed decades and centuries, put Nero in the 300's, explained that Catholic meant imperial (didn't seem to know about the Orthodox at all), explained to the assembled that Baptists maintained a parallel unbroken tradition back to the apostles and didn't break away from the Catholics, and when one woman asked him afterwards why he didn't end with prayer, asked that she show him in scripture where this was illustrated or commanded. (Acts 20:36)
I prayed I could find some way of contributing positively, and was granted such an opportunity. But the situation was also a good reminder--I know a fair bit about the Church's history, and the background for the faith, but the important parts lie elsewhere. His history was a garbled mess, but his talk about Jesus' message to the church was fine.
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
So far
Even as far away as Louisville and Cincinnati we saw trees and branches down.