As I left the cafeteria at about 20:00 yesterday, there were mists streaming over the Juras, and the sun was just behind them. The mists around the sun flared white and brightness sifted down the slopes--brightness tinted with a little green and brown.
The sun went behind the ridge and clouds spilled over, but to the north it shone through a pass and the rays were pearly across the farther ridge: dark green below and bright green behind the rays where the sun still lit the side of the mountain.
Most people seem to think you can generate a “cafeteria culture” picking the best of this and that just as easily as you can select the dishes most to your taste from a palate of ethnic restaurants. I gather the notion is accepted unexamined.
If you think about it a little, it seems less obvious. A culture is an expression of the values and beliefs of a people, together with things that have hung on for tradition's sake. An outsider who does not share the traditions or the values misses the connections that give a custom meaning and the balancing that helps keep it from becoming a problem.
Recently I spent a few days in Senegal. That's hardly enough to have made definitive observations, but I did notice a few things. One was notable by its rarity. Senegal is famous for men holding hands as they walk down the street. It is an immemorial expression of friendship there. I saw just one such couple.
Maybe I was watching at the wrong time of day, but given the debates I've been reading about on the news web site I think the change is real. And I think I know why.
Their culture is no longer simply local, made up of the customs and values of their tribes, their neighbor's tribes, and their religions. It is also inevitably influenced by the Western entertainments and news that not just the rich but the middle class imbibe. One of the features of our hypersexualized amusements is the convention that adults don't kiss or hold hands unless they are in a romantic/sexual relationship.
So in the cities now (and perhaps the countryside) a couple is aware that what had always before been simply a signal of friendship might be interpreted as being effeminate or homosexual. That used to be unthinkable, and because it was unthinkable men were free to be expressive about their friendship. But now the bright line is gone, and so is the freedom.
There's a lot of public debate about homosexuality there now, with some people claiming that it doesn't exist in Senegal. I think part of what they're trying to do is oppose the (very recent) notion that homosexuality is a nature and not a distortion of nature. They're also trying to retrieve the social landscape that allowed men to express friendship freely. (And there's the religious prohibitions, and what I described as a sense of betrayal)
The mere fact that they're having the debate says there's been considerable Western influence in this area.
Beggary is another issue. In the tribal culture you are entitled to rely on family and clan. There's theoretical reciprocity—they can rely on you when you've something they need. That sets some limits on beggary with expectations that you will do your share if the time comes. But if you are in trouble you can even hand your children over to other family or even neighbors to be raised for you.
The emphasis Islam places on alms makes it easier to be a beggar, but also requires that even the beggar think about alms.
Now bring that into prolonged contact with Westerners, who are from much wealthier societies with a much different approach to alms. Alms are individual to individual, based on perceived need. The Westerner is the obvious person to get money from—he has relatively a huge amount. If he recognizes the need and gives, that establishes a relationship between them.
From the tribal point of view the Westerner has now implicitly admitted that he is willing to be “of the clan” with the beggar. But since the ability to do favors is so heavily weighted to the rich Westerner, there is very little possible reciprocity. There's not that much the tribal man can do for the Westerner. The beggar may take the money once and leave, but the chances are very good that with such a “rich relation” and what the tribal man sees as an obligation on the part of the “rich relation” that he will not just hang around, but escalate the requests.
Of course if he picks up on the Westerner's expectation of need, he'll amplify his needs.
Result: The Westerner sees the beggar becoming a wretched and ungrateful parasite. The tribal man sees the Westerner as greedy and anti-social.
In a polygamous society women are supposed to be submissive and obedient—make waves and hubby might go looking for a newer edition. Mix that attitude toward women with expectations from Western promiscuity and you get a very unpleasant environment for women, who may very well not buy into either the promiscuity or the submissiveness but who get hassled none the less.
Sometimes the results can be better, though I'm having trouble coming up with examples off the top of my head. Shared technology isn't what I'm talking about, but about what happens when different beliefs and expectations meet to form either a nice hybrid culture or a bastard culture.
Susan Greenfield says modern technology is changing the way our brains work. The article runs off into science fiction about half of the way through--be polite and ignore that part. But the issue she worries about is significant--the technologies we use (and the entertainments we fill our minds with) must have effects on the way our brains wire themselves. For the brain does rewire itself. The brain of a piano player will be different from that of a taxi driver who doesn't play piano--not because of innate gifts (though they may be there) but because of the years of training: of the fingers and ears for the one and of directions and mapping for the other.
Will training ourselves to respond to computer screens and stylized information effect our ability to respond in person? Will it change the repertoire of responses?
He said it well. Pray for the people of Burma.
And the situation may be worse than it appears. If the rice crop was lost--that's a lot of rice to buy on an already tight market.
I'd never heard of Amanda Marcotte before, but I caught the sound of general hilarity, schadenfreude, and innocent delight in poetic justice.
I gather that said Marcotte wrote a feminist tract designed to "empower" women titled It's a Jungle Out There. Turns out that the illustrations she picked involve a busty female Tarzan demolishing attacking African tribesmen. You can guess what happened next. Her apologies don't seem to be good enough to calm the storm.
The blogger linked to above has some of the offending pictures and an extended quotation from one "Twisty Faster," another "feminist" writer. The illustrations do suggest that Marcotte is a little slow on the draw. The explanation from Twisty turned a little light on for me, though.
That's right! White privilege! It's just like male privilege, except in this context it's just for white chicks. Where dude bloggers may exercise control over women according to their status, white feminist bloggers may exercise control over women of color according to their status....
In the example cited above, the one where I allude to having posted a pro-Marcotte book dealio, the "control" aspect was expressed in my failure to address the current controversy. In so failing, I effectively endorsed white privilege in feminist bloggery, and closed down a potential avenue of discussion. That this was unintentional is of no consequence; it was perceived by many, and rightly so, as an example of what has been popularly referred to as "circling the wagons."
...
The sad irony is that I never cut dudes the tiniest bit of slack in the male privilege department. They write in and say, "But Twisty, I never rape my girlfriend, aren't you being just a little shrill?" And I always reply, "You might," I used to tell them, "be the nicest male dude on 9 planets, but the fact remains that you're a dude, so you automatically benefit from male privilege whether you actively choose to or not, and unfortunately this privilege, though it may be invisible to you, is experienced by women as misogyny, again, whether you like it or not."
It's the same exact thing with white privilege. So, if you're a white feminist blogger: you may not choose it, you may hate it, you may ignore it, or you may not even see it, but you do exercise your white privilege daily, and it is absurd to expect that this exercise would be perceived by women of color as anything but racism. Because it is racism, dum-dum.
Got it. A's "privilege" is "experienced by" B as "misogny." Or "racism."
And if I, with two (so far) working legs climb on my roof to fix a shingle that is "experienced by" my neighbor in a wheelchair as "ableism."
There's another word for the experience of unhappiness with someone else's privilege. Envy. Used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but these days I guess you get to blame the other person for it.
The African Studies weekly memo contains this. I added the emphasis.
CFP: Journal of Women's History - Reproduction, Sex, and Power. Reproduction, sexuality, and bodies have been key sites for state and religious intervention and control, for defining gender, class, race, and sexual identity and for establishing hierarchies and inequalities. They have also been of central significance to individuals and to organized feminist movements. Although today some may think of "sex" and "reproduction" as unrelated topics and fields of research, historically they have been closely intertwined. This issue seeks to spotlight the centrality of reproduction, sex, and power to women's history and to demonstrate the ways in which power has been made, played, and fought over and through reproduction and sex. Indeed, histories of nations and empire, foreign policy and law, religion and popular culture are not free of these seemingly private experiences. Precisely how power has worked through reproduction and sex varies in time and place; this special issue will illuminate the points of similarity, divergence, and convergence, the moments when these areas of personal experience become politically powerful and sites of collective action. The range of possible topics is broadly defined, including, for instance, obstetrics and gynecology, midwifery, technologies, practitioners, birth control, adoption, sexual practices, sexual identity and parenting, health and sex education. Research essays from all time periods, geographical regions, and methodological and theoretical stances on the themes of this issue are welcomed. Submission deadline is September 1, 2008. Manuscripts should be no more than 10,000 words with notes. Please consult the JWH website for submission guidelines: http://www.press.jhu/journals/journal_of_women's_history/guidelines.html .
The guiding philosophy seems to be that you must abstract your study further and further until it is completely abstracted from reality.
The 90% statistic is very bad news--I wasn't aware that the situation was that dire.
The pasta is also not great news--that has to be imported also (and will also be rising in price). There's not much encouragement for Liberian rice farmers if people shift from one import to another.
It would be useful to understand why domestic rice is so unobtainable. Is the country rice still of lousy quality (with the occasional stones in it), or is it too expensive to get it to town, or are there not enough farmers left? Some of those problems are solvable--"not enough farmers" is a tough one, though. Has any country successfully sent people from the city back to the farms? (No, I don't consider the vile Khmer Rouge to have been successful.)
Some of the Psalms stir memories.
One of the leaders in our previous church was also a "worship team" leader, and had a liking for songs based on the Psalms. At least every other week when he led we'd be singing from the Bible instead of the Newsboys.
He was also one of the elders. Over several years the church slid farther and farther into unaccountable "seeker-oriented" directions, thrashing plans about as though the elder board had ADD, dropping almost all education and trivializing the worship. The elder board roster rotated, but one constant through it all was this man; and I have to conclude that much of the blame for the church's disintegration was due to his policies and attitudes. I don't know what board meetings were like, but with the rest of us--he is a teacher, and I guess he tries to treat everybody like middle school students.
Of course I'd like to not think about the old problems anymore.
But when I read those Psalms, the music comes back to me, and the memories of worshiping God together. And the less happy memories too.
I'm not angry with him. I don't want to be, and since the first things I remember are times of worship together, it helps me to remember who comes first.
I guess I'm fortunate: some former members are still furious.
The headline said that better nutrition meant a greater likelihood of having boys. The first paragraph mentioned a nutritious breakfast. I didn't try to track down the original paper, or even finish the story.
But I predict that the effect is small. Why? Because the natural sex ratio (without abortion for sex selection) is only from 1.03 to 1.06 boys to girls. If a nutritious breakfast meant (for instance) 50% more boys, I'd expect the ratio in developed countries to be more like 1.2-1.3 (not everybody chooses to eat wisely).
So, let's unseal the box and read the story: From the BBC:
The study focused on 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK, who were asked to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy.The researchers found 56% of women with the highest energy intake around the time of conception had boys, compared to just 45% among women with the lowest energy intake.
That's more like a 20% effect, but look at the statistics. If they broke the group into thirds (more probably 5ths, but never mind that) then the highest group has 230 members, with an excess of 14 in the top group and deficit of 12 in the bottom group. This isn't a 3-sigma effect. I don't believe 20%. 10% maybe, though I'd want to see corroboration.
The article says there's been a decrease in breakfast caloric intake in the developed world. Hmm. Not what I'd have expected.
At any rate, the effect is still small enough to disappoint women trying influence the sex of their babies.
When their first report came out a few years ago, I thought their fit to an orbital cycle looked like wishful thinking. I gather from the Kipling quote on their web site that a number of other people thought so too, and they have some hard feelings about it.
Well, I'm sorry about that. They got the money to expand the experiment's size (sodium iodide crystals under the Gran Sasso mountain), and this time their signal modulation looks much more believable. The preprint is here at Arxiv. It looks like they understand the backgrounds pretty well, and the statistics are now much better. Single interaction (single flash) events which dump 2-6 KeV of energy into the detector happen more often the more the Earth's motion around the Sun matches up with the direction of the Sun's movement through the galaxy. More energetic events don't show this modulation with time of year.
They've dealt with a lot of the common background possibilities (even with seasonal changes in water in the rock changing the amount of neutron moderation in the granite). Their results seem to be consistent with a "gas" of weakly interacting massive particles ("WIMP"s) that is more or less at rest and which the Sun/Earth system is speeding through. Every now and then a WIMP scatters off a nucleus, whose recoil energy shows up as a flash of light in the NAI scintillator. The WIMPs must be slow enough that the difference in the Earth's orbit with and against the Sun's speed (± 3 E4 m/sec) makes a noticeable difference in the interaction rate at this scattering energy.
Interesting. A cloud no bigger than a man's hand?
Update: Apparently I wasn't the only one. We weren't taking data (no beam), and the control room is very noisy, but there's no mention of a tremor in the CDF shift log. They're a lot closer to the epicenter than I am.
I keep hearing that men are commitment-phobic. Better writers than I have pointed out that given the social expectation that a woman will have sex with a man she is friendly with, there’s not much incentive for a short-sighted man to commit himself to her.(*) If he’s only interested in a sexual relationship for right now, and not in kids or sex when he’s middle-aged—he already has what he wants.
But I think there’s more. When I hear people talking about their lives, and the lives of those they admire, I find that they often seem to fear losing their freedom as though this were the be-all and end-all of their identity. They admire the footloose, who pull up stakes to live in India for a year, always ready for a fling. “Free as the breeze.”
It is hard to communicate with people who have such radical misconceptions, and harder still when they’ve imbibed them unthinkingly from the zeitgeist.
They’ve confused two different things. There is an intrinsic freedom in our natures that makes us agents. But what we usually think of as “freedom” is more of a property of time than of us—it is the possibility of action. (I’ll ignore political freedom for now. That’s yet another use of the word.)
And just as we use time, we use our freedom, even if only to waste our time and waste our possibilities. This kind of freedom is like a consumable, to be used in creating something: play time, fixing the neighbor’s car, teaching the kids—which in turn produce other things—a happy neighbor or more mature kids.
Once I’ve spent the time and freedom, it doesn’t come back; so of course I need to be wise. But if I’m afraid to choose, I lose the opportunities anyway. The so-much-admired footloose wanderer never actually creates a serious relationship, much less a marriage, because he (or she) is afraid to use his life; afraid to make anything but superficial choices.
I’m married. I traded some freedom and possible choices for a marriage; for children; for lives molded together; for someone to rely on and someone who can trust me.
I’ve a profession and a job. I gave up other possibilities for this one, and subject to the contingencies of work life (will money for salaries be there?), I can learn and help and be trusted. It’s a little too late for me to become a doctor now, and astronaut is completely out of the question. I spent my freedom.
Of course we can spend our freedom making stupid choices that we pay for for the rest of our lives. Some even damage our nature as free agents: addictions, for instance. Life is risky.
What will you buy with your time and your choices?
You must admire the creativity that goes into making every square foot of space in a place into a revenue generator. Vending machines sit in every corner, ads wrap around bus windows, ads flash around the border in the ball park, and blue-screen effects put ads behind the batter. Even urinals have ads perched at eye level, and probably one day (on the principal that all publicity is good publicity) they'll be placed in the target zone as well. Salesmen at Best Buy can be fired for failing to offer to sell useless warranty plans, and it seems everybody has a plan to help you buy right now.
The ingenuity involved is truly amazing: "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light."
And the result is a horror. The whole is far worse than the sum of the parts. Almost all the things to be sold are harmless or good (excepting things like those warranty plans and divorce attorneys trying to drum up business). But saturate the air with them and we can't breathe.
Leviticus isn't a popular book of the Bible: repetitious descriptions of sacrifices aren't particularly interesting or edifying. But Leviticus 19:9-10 seem apropos:
"When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not be so thorough that you reap the field to its very edge, nor shall you glean the stray ears of grain. Likewise, you shall not pick your vineyard bare, nor gather up the grapes that have fallen. These things you shall leave for the poor and the alien. I, the LORD, am your God.
Our ownership is conditional, and so are our rights to our own property. Not contingent on the whims of the state--that way lies tyranny. God says don't be too greedy even with your own things. I'm seeing wisdom in that I hadn't thought about before.
Over at the “MereComments” site (adjunct to Touchstone) Christopher Hutchens wrote of his dissatisfaction with what he saw as a side-effect of the doctrine of “security:” mediocrity. "any religion which encouraged mediocrity--which did not help us to discover the gifts God had placed within and then drive us past our natural sloth to develop them--could not be of God or lead back to him. "
”Believers who live in the fear of God, and who, according to his command, strive to make their vocations and election sure, will be people of accomplishment--the lack whereof I now regard as presumptive evidence of unbelief. I am not silly enough to think this must mean accomplishment in things for which the world has respect--although frequently enough it will--but it does mean real labor, real striving to confirm and perfect what God has placed in us “so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”I don't think that mediocrity would be my first worry, but I hear little enough of "work out your own salvation" and Matthew 25 and indeed any hint from pulpit or teacher that a certain amount of self-discipline is required. Paul wrote of trying to whip himself into shape like an athlete would, but the only serious endeavor suggested for most of us is evangelism. And quite a few of us are not very gifted evangelists.
He also wrote about the other side of faith and works: what faith looks like without any support from works or thought, when faced with a little temptation. It withers and dies.
Experienced pastors, when faced with students who “lose their faith” at college, do not begin to argue back with them on matters philosophical or theological. They inquire into “lifestyle” issues in the attempt to ascertain whether there is a release to be gained from overthrowing the faith in which they were raised. There usually is. Real intellectual difficulties can normally be neutralized in favor of further study through reasoned discourse with educated believers who have entertained the same doubts--but only in the presence of a conscience that gains nothing from discovery that orthodox Christianity is wrong.Immerse yourself in the "fun" parts of youth group, and in amusements and diversions, and where is the growth in faith? Let God have only a couple of hours on Sunday and "coast on the culture" the rest of the week; and then look back at your life to see little but dust. The rains come and the floods rise and the winds blow. And then what?
You dress up and put on your best behavior for the date. Avoid controversial subjects at dinner and make appropriate noises at the right time during the movie. Cheer for the home team at the game, even though the outcome won't matter to either of you tomorrow morning.
How on earth do you get to know anybody during a date? First impressions are all very well, and after that you may learn a little about how they want to appear, and how they act when all goes well. But masks are easily arranged, and it turns out most of life isn't a dress-up affair.
What you really want to do find out is what a person is like at the core, and that's not easy to discover. What will this woman do when something important is at stake, and she's frustrated? What will this man do when there's not quite enough to go around?
We can try to test somebody's character with games, but that's a poor substitute. The whole point of a game is that it is a contest that doesn't matter. A poor sport in a game isn't likely to be a good sport in a marriage, so you learn something about the person, but not as much as you ought.
You can try to watch them at work. Good luck. For high schoolers that's not so possible, and even for older people unless you happen to work at the same place you're not likely to be welcome as an observer. And even if you are, for many jobs the work isn't physically tiring, and I suspect that fatigue is a valuable stressor.
If you could see how a person behaves then they are weary and still trying to do something important, you would learn a lot about what kind of person they are at the core. Are they trying to beg off? Are they snappish, but still devoted to the task? Do they fade? Who are they, at the core?
Symmetry demands that they observe you too. Both you and the people you want to know need to be involved.
But in what? Games? Games don't matter. Amusements? They tell something about tastes, and sometimes morals, but not much else.
We're a rich country, and work that is both important and physically demanding isn't as common as it used to be, and communal work is even harder to find. No corn husking bees for suburbia!
This reads as though I am suggesting that an ideal second date would be a weekend working with Habitat for Humanity, building a house.
Well....
Yes.
Provided you both think that's important. Mowing lawns for the elderly, or helping somebody move, or something.
It isn't all about character study, either. There's often a camaraderie among those who work hard side by side (or bickering, but it is nice to find that out early on!), and something that links you together. Whether you will be mates or not, you can be friends sharing something important.
I've been grousing a bit about this. The sub-prime mortgage loans were obviously risky, and while I understand the problems of companies being too big to let fail, it didn't sit well with me to cough up money to pull them out of trouble.
But maybe it turns out we have a moral obligation to bail out the companies who were only doing what they were told to do.
"The judge thought his message would make a greater impact if he delivered it to a black-only audience, he said." Later, when the sheriff said that everybody needed to hear the message, he said "In retrospect, it was a mistake."
I suspect he was right the first time. The defendants needed to hear the message ('What in the world are you doing with your lives?'), and I suspect it made more of an impact when the judge explicitly divorced it from "whiteness."
Of course it doesn't make a good precedent, but the much of the power of the action lies in the fact that is isn't going to be a precedent, that it was exceptional.
And he is probably also right to apologize, since a judge should set a good example.
In 2006 an Austrian animal rights organization submitted an application to a district court in Modling to appoint a legal guardian for a chimp named Hiasl. The strategy was to establish "legal person" status for the hairy defendant. (The judge was sympathetic but refused.) It is perhaps less problematic to view the situation as does The Third Chimpanzee author Jared Diamond: not that chimps are a kind of human, but that humans are a kind of chimp
(My emphasis)
"Less problematic?" Currently (and properly) the law values humans and considers chimps negligible in comparison. Do Diamond and Roach really think that lowering human value to that of a chimp causes fewer problems than giving human honor to chimps? We can abide the occasional Incitatus. It disrupts things, but doesn't generally do any lasting damage. But redefining humanity to be no better than property doesn't help the chimps and it is hell for the luckless or weak.
Sorry, I got very tired of Cone and decided to finish reading this instead
This is subtitled Nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality, and that's pretty much what it is. It rambles back and forth through his life, telling what he found or was shown, and he's willing to explain his imperfections. Sometimes it is poignant, and sometimes ...
I've been to a play. It was Romeo and Juliet, and I took a date. It was my first date ever. Even though I never wanted to act myself, taking a girl to a play was a good move.
...
Even though it is good move to take a girl to a play, I screwed it up.
...
Later in the play they accidentally kill themselves. It is not very believable, but that is what happened.
...
When we were walking out my date clasped my hand, and even though I wasn't feeling very mushy I smiled at her. We ascended the aisle and made our way through the crowded lobby onto the steps of the playhouse. There were girls everywhere, all of the misty-eyed. Two girls in front of us were talking to each other. One of them threw her arms in the air and cried out, "I wish I could know love like Romeo and Juliet!"
I couldn't take it anymore. I whispered under my breath "They're dead."
I didn't think anybody heard me, but my date did.
Read it.
Since anybody can sue anybody for anything (even if the court has no jurisdiction in Switzerland), the mere fact of the suit means very little--perhaps the gentlemen want a little publicity.
Some of the comments make me a little sad, though. Some people are afflicted with a blanket distrust of "authority figures." But the CERN experiments aren't like trying to use nukes to loosen up the San Andreas fault and make lots of small earthquakes instead of one big one. (You could write volumes about the unknowns and risks there.) This is more like claiming that dredge fishing will annoy giant squids which will rise up and eat you. It is actually possible to say "not bloody likely" in a case like this.
I'm no economist.
I like listening to the radio in the car, and prefer classical or songs where the human voice is heard clearly past the music. The stations specializing in the latter tend to be "oldies" and the ads have been for cosmetic surgery, medical treatments, nursing care for parents, and other such middle-aged attractions.
I've never heard so many ads for debt reduction ("We helped XYZ reduce their tax debt to 28 cents on the dollar!") in my life. Maybe it is a couple of firms getting really aggressive, or maybe demand is way up. With home equity loans getting harder to find...
There's a medium-long interview with James Cone available. I listened to it (don't try to watch--the sound is out of synch). It sounds very much like the Bibliotheca Sacra analysis on House's site (offline now) was correct in stating that BLT makes "black" experience the touchstone for revelation, deprecates Bible, and interprets all human relationships in terms of power. Cone is not consistent in his analysis, of course. He claims that all religion is violent when associated with the powerful, even if there isn't any overt violence; but then goes on to say that the powerful always use religion. Therefore the only true religion is that of the oppressed. If they become powerful--then what? Their religion in turn becomes "violent." Unless this time it magically happens to bring on the Kingdom of God.
The sanctity of the oppressed is such a fundamental part of this system that I think I can finally understand why conspiracy theories like "AIDS was created to destroy black people" or "the government spread cocaine among black people" are so popular. Aside from the usual gnostic attraction of such theories, they provide this generation with their own oppression to make them holy. This generation has no separate water fountains or Jim Crow laws, and much less overt racism to face (yes, I hear things, and things have changed), and in fact can see programs like affirmative action intended to help them. They have to have something that makes them oppressed, and therefore morally better than the rest.
So it is good to have a list of grievances, the more dramatic the better--never mind their accuracy or relevancy. It isn't just a matter of being able to blame your situation on somebody else--it makes you better than them because you are thereby identified with Jesus.
If you have the stomach for it, watch the video.
Is Cone a worse heretic than Osteen (for example)? They both turn the Kingdom of God into money and power here and now. Cone is certainly more hateful, but frustrate somebody who thinks they're entitled to prosperity and see what bubbles up.
Is the movie fair to the millions of Muslims that don't go in for cutting off heads? Not really. There are plenty of Muslims who don't care for trouble and aren't that interested in imperialism. They are rumored to constitute a majority.
Is it unfair? Not really. Too huge a fraction of Muslims support this rhetoric and violence, even if they'd not actually do anything themselves. Egypt comes to mind
Is it hate speech? No, but it quotes a lot of hate speech.
I'd provide a link, but the sites keep getting shut down, so a static link is no use.
Watch it. Even though it doesn't describe all Muslims, it describes a subset with whom we have been at war for decades, and probably will continue to have to fight for many more. And we need a few reminders. The powers that be in the media seem to have an overwhelming fear of being offensive or making Americans angry(*). 9/11 memorial shows without footage of the carnage? Maybe that is related to the death threats mentioned above?
I'm told the movie pops up (and gets deleted) on Youtube--search for it.
(*)Except angry at a short list of domestic targets.
I picked up a book by Cone from the library, and am trying to get through it.
It isn't easy.
I am a physicist in academia, and get some of the letters that any scientist with visibility gets. I actually try to read them. It isn't easy--the writers generally use words like "energy" in novel and incomprehensible ways, hide assumptions, move conclusions valid in one setting to completely different ones, complain of conspiracies by mysterious elites, and only rarely say anything of worth.
The first chapter of Cone's book is like that--but dripping with hatred as well. Perhaps the hatred is understandable--it was written right after King's assassination--but it doesn't bode well for the theology part, which I haven't gotten to yet. And "understandable" anger does not mean the work is going to be valuable or accurate or even "authentic."
On the side of a office building on 1st street is a large mural of a prone woman with a phantasmagoric array of images on her back. It took months to create. No, it isn't vulgar. It wordlessly advertises one of the businesses inside: "Tranquil Tattoo" When I think of people shoving needles into each other, "tranquil" is not the first word that comes to mind. Perhaps the clients are soothed with soft music, or maybe they are schnockered, or perhaps the tattoists slather them with lidocain first. Laughing gas?
Has anyone tried to correlate tattoo positions with acupuncture sites, and done follow up on client health? You got an "M" on a positive energy site for your pancreas, but the "O" landed on a negative site for your spleen, so they should cancel out, except for the occasional internal electrical discharges.
Check. It's spring.
The pictures finally appeared in the paper. I've met the woman (Holly King) briefly, but never seen Underwood before. She looks gaunt. I don't remember that.
The reports suggest that this was a small-scale operation, so cleanup shouldn't be as huge a worry to the neighborhood. Nothing new on the kids, though--"with relatives" I knew already.
I've ignored Spitzer(1), I've ignored Wright the Cone-head(2), I've ignored the brokerage firm fire sale on Wall Street(3)--but I can't ignore this one.
When I first started reading science fiction more grown-up than Tom Swift, Clarke was there. And he was thoughtful and inventive. Sometimes he was prophetic: geosynchronous orbits and "I remember Babylon" (the latter more fulfilled by the internet than satellite broadcasts, but it was the social aspects that worried him). Sometimes he wasn't--he seemed to suffer from the popular SF delusions about the role of human sexuality in society.
His prose could be deadenly didactic when he went into a long riff away from his story. And his ideas about God were pitiably simpleminded.
But he was a creative genius. And we'll miss him.
(1) I have some taste. And I didn't know who Spitzer was before, and didn't feel competent to analyze his downfall.
(2) I'll bone up a little more before I say anything.
(3) I have nothing interesting to say. "Yikes?" "Hope this does the job?"
About 150 yards from me a special team from Chicago is dismantling a methamphetamine lab. Two were arrested. The two kids will probably stay with grandparents. I had to come through a police checkpoint to get home, and about 8 homes are in the cordoned-off area where nobody is allowed. This is the first bust in this county.
In between us is a home where the wife does in-home daycare. The neighborhood is duplexes, tightly bunched together. A fire or spill and a lot of people could have been hurt.
I've been by the place many times—even tried to drop off info when I was a board member. Never met anybody. That's not the only place where people rarely appear, of course—that seems to be the norm in most neighborhoods. Still, that place seemed unfriendlier than usual. But I'd have never suspected a meth lab.
They can be anywhere, though.
I hope our neighbor's daycare doesn't suffer. It is ironic that the neighborhood will appear less safe now that is objectively more safe.
Maybe they will be done by morning. The police chief said it might take 20 hours.
I've heard that contamination usually means the building housing the lab has to be torn down. I wonder what this has done to the kids?
The theme of low birth rates is back again; from warnings by Steyn to snide derision in The Nation.
Why should there be so few children, though?
Let me count the ways...
Country music sometimes celebrates family and children, but the pop music I hear almost never does. I don't know enough about European pop to reliably compare it with American music, but what I've heard/understood has been more like American pop and rap. Music affects you; and favorite genres that the past few generations have immersed themselves in have little room for family.
C.S. Lewis spent one section of The Four Loves on affection: love for those nearby. It seems unlikely that a person would come to have affection for children if there weren't any around.
Our society is strongly segregated by age and function. If it weren't for church services I'd meet almost no children except my own in an average week—and even in church the small children aren't part of the service. Children and youth spent years in school (and I'm deeply suspicious of the learning efficiency there), and not integrating in any serious way into adult and civil life. There is no legal room for children at work, nor, thanks to intense specialization, is there much practical room for them.
The segregation extends to social gatherings and amusements as well, with the prominent exception of sports. I'm not a big sports fan, but finding all ages gathered around the basketball game on TV or out at the baseball park is good to see. Aside from that: we have children's amusements and adult amusement, and infinite subdivisions of each, with a substantial number of people isolated not just from other ages but from other people as well, while they sit in front of a screen. Just as I am doing right now.... Hmm No meeting means no affection.
With children not part of the daily picture, they tend to become abstract. Abstract children are an expense and interfere with amusements. Real children (yours or the neighbor's) you can think of affectionately, but abstract kids are alien.
And who wants to be bothered with aliens? So, fewer kids.
I read a book of these of the fables when I was little, and liked the stories of cats and foxes and wolves and frogs, though I didn't think much of the morals attached. The stories were far stronger than the didactic morals. This is a much more complete set of fables, with a better translation.
The Greeks used weasels to catch mice instead of cats, so some old familiar stories sound rather different.
Not all the fables are Aesop's. Some were written as much as 500 years later. Some are Greek and some Roman and some seem to have been retold even later.
All the old famous ones are here—sometimes with noticeable differences. Many of the tellers couldn't resist the urge to have one of the characters explain the situation. “Realizing his mistake after the fact, the wolf exclaimed 'My self-conceit has been my undoing!'” The ancient epimythium doesn't always seem to harmonize well with the message of the fable, but most of the time it illuminates the attitudes.
The tales are a treasury of wisdom, of course, dealing with the various aspects of life in their often contradictory ways. They admonish a man to deal generously with strangers and to take care of his own first and avoid evildoers. (Sometimes minor variations on the same story are used to illustrate completely opposite points!) One theme I don't find much of is forgiveness, but endurance and accepting your lot in life turn up a lot.
I can see why some fables were omitted from the children's collection. The one about the Emperor Tiberias (593) and the silly attendant requires explanation (“slap that makes you a freeman”). There's a tale (521) that shows that the Anatolian antipathy to Arabs is of long standing (Hermes fills a cart with dishonesty and wicked tricks for distribution among mankind, but it breaks down among the Arabs who appropriate the contents). Another (574) suggests a menage a trois as a solution to infidelity.
If you haven't read Aesop's fables, you must. Find a copy of some collection and read it. This one is good.
The BBC has a teaser report for their broadcast on piracy, and they bring up an interesting point I hadn't realized.
A piracy attack is an attack against a vessel that happens in international waters.However, attacks that happen inside territorial waters, which are normally 12 nautical miles from the coast, are deemed as acts of robbery.
The laws that govern this distinction also determine the type of response that can be initiated.
For example, if a naval or coastguard vessel is a witness to an attack by pirates who manage to get into territorial waters, they are often forced to break off the right of "hot pursuit", as they do not have the permission of the relevant sovereign government to be in those waters.
As Mr Herbert-Burns of Lloyd's Intelligence Unit recalls, that is exactly what happened in the case of the Danica White.
"Two days after the attack, a United States naval vessel tried to intercede and fired shots across her bow," he says.
"The Danica White then managed to get inside Somali territorial waters and the United States naval ship had to break off pursuit for that reason.
In the special case of Somalia, this rule ought to be waived, since there is no sovereign government there.
I remember Suzy at the zoo. We all chanted "Suzy open your mouth," which is what the feeder did come feeding time, but I guess she was smart enough to know we were fakes. She mostly didn't bother, and even when she did she didn't open wide.
Just before the Texas et al primaries, NPR aired a couple of stories about which American candidates were preferred by the “man-on-the-street” in Iraq and Britain. No prizes for guessing who was preferred.
This seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for stories. It is not exactly a secret that Western European politics tends to run much more along statist and socialist lines than American, and so they quite naturally find more in common with left wing Democrats. (And I gather that Americans who don’t think “nationalism” is a dirty word scare the bejabbers out of them.) And given that most of the news is about the hotly contested race, that reporting tends to be biased in favor of Democrats, and that Iraqis have few other useful sources of information about the candidates besides the current US reporting, they’ll tend to favor the candidates they hear about.
In US Olympic reporting, reporters will interview the gymnast’s trainer’s wife to try to fill the time (ignoring non-US contestants, as a rule). This is equally silly. In any event, British opinions about our candidates matter about as much as my opinions on the best Mayor for Lyons.
I took off most of Sunday, and took the bus/tram/feet to the English-speaking evangelical church in the old city. The number 9 bus doesn't go all the way anymore: you have to change to an electric tram to get from CERN to the railroad station. The tram has automatic ledges that extend from under the doors when they open, so there's less of a tripping hazard getting from the platform to the train.
The service was good. Afterwards I must have looked quite a sight as I tried to pull on my bright red Wyalusing State Park hoodie, trying to stick my head through a sleeve.
The sun made a rainbow arc through the fountain.
I wandered through a different part of the city this time, and found the natural history museum. I was curious about what the glaciers had looked like, and went in. I gather they sort of gathered in the mountains and pushed outward. I started to feel strangely weary and lightheaded--found out later that week that the med I'm taking can mess up the potassium balance: and has.
The place has a huge bird display, and I found that the black and white crow that hangs around CERN is a "pie bavard" aka magpie. That seems appropriate, somehow. Eldest son would have loved the place.
It must have been the first sunny day this year--everybody was out; lovers everywhere by the river and lake.
I ran across a Russian Orthodox church. The gate was open and the doors and there was a woman with her child playing in the yard, and I wondered if they had tours. But then a woman backed out of the church, crossed herself, backed out further and crossed herself, and then did the same a third time. I felt a little delicacy about the idea of sightseeing there.
I was in the middle era between lunch and dinner, and on Sunday only the expensive tourist places seem to be open, so I passed up the opportunity to drop mucho francs on a meal. Not much fun to eat alone anyway.
The fountain spray was blowing onto the pier, and a large crowd was standing there getting rained on. And at 1600, it turned off.
I have to improve my French if I'm going to keep doing this. I feel like six kinds of idiot spending so much time around a town and not knowing anybody besides other physicists.
Wisconsin has an open primary system. This seems somewhat crazed to me: why should non-party members be allowed to specify who the party is going to nominate? I’m neither Republican nor Democrat, but I can walk in and fill out a ballot to say who I think they should nominate. (“Vote for only one”)
Still, they both agreed on these rules, so I suppose they think the potential biasing of results is compensated for by the possible additional votes in the main election.
I doubt that anybody except New Hampshire and Iowa hotel owners and TV station owners are really happy with the primary season this year. Most of the candidates have already dropped out by the time Wisconsin rolls around, too. There’s not a lot of choice left by now. The Hillary/Obama contest is still fairly tight, and I’ve no good sense of which way people are going to vote. Madison seems to have Obama-mania, but that’s only a small and not very representative part of the whole state.
I have about 6 choices left, I think.
Vote for one of the dropouts. Quixotic, but it does send a little signal. Tiny signal. Lost in the noise.
Ron Paul. Hardly. I’m not Libertarian and he has some unfortunate connections with wackos.
Hillary Clinton. Is this going to be another package deal with Bill? Anybody seriously think he won’t be hanging out in the Oval Office? She comes with other baggage too: corruption, for instance. And she seems to carry the usual “leftist” attitudes about social policy, from abortion to that damned interfering village of the bogus proverb. She’s a quite skillful liar, though not quite in Bill’s league—and that is sometimes a useful trait in a wartime president.
Mike Huckabee Doesn’t seem to understand much about economics, and his analysis of Middle Eastern affairs seems naïve. Trying to get clear reporting about how his religious views inform his politics is a hopeless exercise: reporters are hopelessly superficial. He actually has administrative experience.
John McCain I’m seriously annoyed with his “Incumbent Protection Act,” but to be fair the majority of the House and Senate voted for it, so the blame has to be shared. He’s the only candidate left with the vaguest idea of what the war is about. He has a deep love for being a maverick, which is going to be tough to satisfy if he winds up the leader. And he seems to have succeeded in cheesing off quite a number of the leaders of economic and social conservative groups, which complicates politics after the election if he wins.
Barack Obama He’s solidly in deep left field on cultural and economic issues, culpably ignorant about war, and has virtually no experience. Not a chance. I haven’t forgotten about his Pakistan remarks, and neither have they. Of all the stupid things to say… And his “Patriot Company” proposal is a frighteningly open-ended bid for control of the economy. I’ll not say he’d use it badly, but this puts the tools in place for anybody to mishandle.
Important issues: the war (rules out Paul, Obama, and probably { I-can’t-tell-if-she’s-lying } Clinton right off the bat), the economy (rules out Paul, Obama, Huckabee, and probably Clinton), immigration, abortion, energy policy… Nobody fits all the criteria, unfortunately. Which is usually the case.
Probably McCain.
I've a bad habit of puzzling over things just to see what they're made of, and I thought about taking a ride on the Shuttle.
It is easy to fantasize about what you'd do with a million dollars. So long as it is "found money" with no obligations, dreaming goes wild. But in real life money always comes with obligations, whether you care to recognize them or not. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I chose to drop a couple million bucks on a fling, even as exciting a one as a space flight. Small luxuries sometimes, but something of that magnitude is over the top.
Maybe I'm a little hypocritical: why would an occasional dinner out be OK and not a flamboyant trip? Or maybe scale really matters, and proportionality is the key.
And the notion of displacing real science on the ship makes me a little itchy. As a scientist myself, I get a little annoyed when PR interferes with work or learning or teaching.
When I think about it carefully, what I really want is not just a ride on the Shuttle, but a good reason for being there as well: to be trusted with some task important enough to launch me. That's even more far-fetched, I guess.
The legend of the "Stolen Generation" of Aborigines always seemed a little over the top. It looks like it was actually a lie. Not an accidental "I don't have all the facts" error, but a misrepresentation of the contents of the files in Read's possession.
This sort of thing seems to turn up on a regular basis (Bellesiles was in the news recently, but he's hardly alone). Why would Read lie? Fame? He got fame. His claim was one people were afraid to challenge for fear of being deemed racist, so his reputation wasn't as insecure as it might have seemed. Hatred? He succeeded in "sticking it to the man." Fell in love with a thesis and twisted the evidence to support it? Maybe.
Unfortunately the taxpayer doesn't pay me to take vacations in Florida. I was working in Melbourne, with a heavy schedule. So I didn't get to the Kennedy Space Center. But we all went up on the roof to watch the shuttle launch. From all those miles away you couldn't hear a thing, of course, and the shuttle itself was tiny, but the match-flare light of the boosters was clear--much more orange than I expected, but the main engines' light is blue and hard to see. It went in and out of the clouds, and then was gone from view; but with a huge curly cloud trail behind it.
I'd love to take a ride on it. Still.
And now I know what Dave Barry means by "a Florida driver's license." A noticeable fraction of the cars are piloted by drivers with an insouciant disregard for traffic laws reminiscent of West Africa. Left turns from the right lane against the light are just one of the creative maneuvers employed here.
I tried a Bob Evans restaurant, and I think I'll pass in the future--too much salt for my poor diet.
But I did get to see the Atlantic from this side, albeit in the dark.
A mother is nursing her baby. God is sustaining the strength of her arm, the stiffness of the chair, the production of milk, and the baby's swallowing.
A man, kneeling on another's back, is cutting his throat. God is sustaining the force of gravity that keeps him pinned, the sharpness of the knife, and the pressure that forces the blood from his veins to drain uselessly into the dirt.
The creative/sustaining act of God supplies and upholds our acts of love and hate.
We are told that God cares about good and evil, and I've been instructed that sin is “missing the mark;” offending against God's laws. That hardly seems adequate to express what is going on here. Sin tries to make God an accomplice to evil.
An inadequate analogy would be if your father was a policeman and took you for a drive in the squad card so you could learn about crime prevention. Instead of watching and learning and maybe helping, you snatch the wheel to run over a child. You've tried to involve your father in your crime.
From another angle: God is upholding our choices instead of His—which means He is serving us in some way. And yet our choices are so far against His nature that the only human word to describe the situation is suffering. In maintaining our sinful world God is taking the role of a suffering servant. We could not have understood this before Jesus showed us, and yet in retrospect it is clear—unimaginable, but clear.
And from yet another angle: God covers all the bases; there is no loophole or argument undealt-with. If a man dared accuse God, saying “You supported this too, so you must pay”--Jesus shows what He paid freely.
This report in Science Daily is interesting. I'd want to see verification before I took any action though. And I'd want to look at the paper.
Marshall's research has demonstrated how ingested vitamin D can actually block VDR activation, the opposite effect to that of Sunshine. Instead of a positive effect on gene expression, Marshall reported that his own work, as well as the work of others, shows that quite nominal doses of ingested vitamin D can suppress the proper operation of the immune system.
Since the body generates its own vitamin D, there really isn't any need for supplemental D anyway. If this pans out (a really big IF), then vitamin D milk is a bad idea.
I hesitate to use the phrase, since the word bias has such nefarious connotations these days, but I suspect a sampling bias in the selection of people Barrett decided to illustrate his book with. I do not mean that he deliberately selected people who would look bad, but that he selected people who were mostly famous for one reason or another, and thus wound up with an unrepresentative sample.
I certainly hope so.
Barrett studies 7 people:
One theme common to almost all of them is the view of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the Ur-conflict, symbolic of all and subsuming all other conflicts into itself. Siblani's principal loyalty is not to the United States, despite his protestations. It is to his religion, and the political interests that his religion currently claims. He and several others say as much—their religious view of Israel and US interests in the Middle East is such that they would rather we suffered defeat than have the religious and political interests of their original homelands suffer. This is perhaps understandable in first generation immigrants, but it does not constitute loyalty to their new country.
I know we have a history of this kind of problem. One obvious example is immigrant Irish bringing their old feuds with them and nurturing them for generations; going so far as to raise support for terrorist organizations here to this day. They also failed in showing loyalty to their new country. The interests of Ireland are not the same as the interests of the United States.
Another common theme is the radicalization of American Islam thanks to new Arab and Pakistani immigrants. This dismays most of those Barrett talked to. It is a serious error to imagine that Islam is a simple faith with a single variety: some flavors are hideously intolerant and violent. Those varieties are on the increase in this country—and pretty much everywhere else too thanks to Saudi money and Egyptian Brotherhood organization.
Wahhaj worked to reduce crime in his neighborhood, and had quite a bit of success and fame from it, but his rhetoric pre-911 was not temperate and he celebrated terrorist supporters. Since then he has moderated his language a bit, but if his opinions have not changed he is not a friendly force.
Asra has worked for years trying to get women allowed to worship in the same place as men; to enter by the same door; to get equal treatment. She has partly succeeded, in one mosque.
Sami was accused of giving technical support to terrorist websites and promoting terrorist ideals on his own. The case was not proved and he was found innocent and made a cause celebre, and for some reason Barrett seems to think he actually was innocent. Perhaps so, but I don't find many people shipping me hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Something smells here.
Mustafa's story is chilling. Using nothing more than standard issue religious knowledge and the Muslim Zeitgeist, he found that the way to get respect was to be “holier than thou” by being “more militantly anti-Jewish than thou.” In effect, he spontaneously radicalized. He says he turned down an invitation from some Muslim Brotherhood leaders for cadre training, and some time later began to realize what an idiot he had been in mistaking infidel-hatred for piety.
Are these people representative? Apparently Asra isn't, or she'd have not had so much trouble trying to get the mosque to do something as simple as let women walk in the same door as men. Mustafa may well be representative of many youth—the story he told is very credible. I've seen Christian youth stand up and declaim positions of piety and assurance that I know they had no training or experience to understand, to the applause of the others. Fortunately the Christian Zeitgeist is far more benign than the Muslim one, and none of the kids dallied with terrorist groups.
Islam in America is multifaceted, as Barrett describes, and the problems are also complicated. Many of the new immigrants have no interest whatever in assimilation, and little pressure to do so from either fellow Muslims or the rest of the country. (“Multiculturalism” has never been seriously analyzed or debated publicly—it has been sold as if it meant nothing more than having lots of different ethnic restaurants in town.) Many forms of Islam are incompatible with liberal democracy, many are incompatible with personal freedom, and most Muslims pay lip service at least to the doctrine that they owe allegiance to a caliphate—a foreign government (recently abolished, but there's plenty of agitation for reinstatement). This isn't the same as Catholic allegiance to the Pope—he lost all governorship years ago and his authority for secular rule was never unchallenged. The Caliph is both Pope and King.
About thirty years ago my father told me that America was going to have to face up to the problem of Islam and democracy. I didn't know what he was talking about then. I know now.
Read the book. I don't take his recommendations at the end very seriously.
Today was recital day. Youngest Son sang "Wisconsin State of Mind" by Billy Joel and himself, Youngest Daughter sang a German song about Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, and Oldest Son sang "I've Got a Little List." All sang well, though Youngest Daughter adamantly refused to let me "film" her. What do you call it when you use a digital camera?
Today's opera is The Barber of Seville. Youngest Daughter likes opera, and came in to hear it when I turned it on, and was last seen fast asleep on the sofa. I wonder how much she can absorb that way...
I've been slowly reading a history of Rome, and just read a section on how the plebes were kept placid with food subsidies and entertainments (which grew more and more expensive), and the occasional banning of unofficial organizations. I looked up a blogger I read from time to time, and found him with his underwear in a knot about the offensive way a commentator I'd not heard of on a network I never watch described the death of an actor I'd never heard of. No doubt Mark's description was accurate and the degradation of discourse he complained of is perfectly real, but the blog post illustrated 4 levels of entertainments.
There's the movies, of course, and the reporting about actors, and the commentariat, and the blogging about it all. Luckily the blogging circus is cheap.
The Smithsonian has a story on polar dinosaurs. Back in the day, when Australia hooked up with Antarctica and had a climate like Chicago's but with a 4-month long night each year, it had dinosaurs. It had the same kinds of dinosaurs as elsewhere. What did they eat during the long dark night of the pole? Did they migrate or hibernate or eat slim, or all of the above? Stay tuned.
OK, this is great! Sheep selected for breeding purposes in Wyoming were marked with paint, and they wandered around with wet paint on their rumps. Result? "Abstract rock art." No doubt some semiotics student is deleting chapter 5 of his thesis right now.
I didn't know then that chess masters were even more likely than mathematicians to snap, and Bobby certainly went weird on us. I don't know whether his famous diva-like behavior was calculated. Maybe it was at first, and grew on him, or maybe he found it a useful quirk until it went out of hand. But his alternate reclusion and ranting told us the poor man was in trouble away from the 64-square madhouse, and his embrace of new rules suggests that maybe he knew he wasn't as good as in his youth and couldn't stand it. Or maybe he was just tired of chess.
RIP
One of the big topics of conversation around here is the budget cuts for Fermilab. These were magnified because Congress, in its infinite wisdom, didn't generate a budget until well into the fiscal year, so some previously promised money (that will now never arrive) has already been spent. Everybody knows people who are getting laid off. The ILC is gone, and a lot of people thought it was the only serious way to go forward. And the B factories are gone early. Not too much left.
Odd sight: yesterday morning I arrived at 6:45 at B0. In front of trailer 170 (the first of two lines of trailers in the trailer complex) was a white stretch limo with the driver waiting. It was a bit brisk to try to go see if he'd open his window and explain, so I didn't find out who was hiring it. None of the scientists I know would go in for that sort of silliness. Fermilab isn't exactly the kind of place you go for a wild party--and you have to go through some rigmarole to get in. At a wild guess: the limo was part of some party that started the night before, and somebody thought it would be amusing to visit daddy at work.
And it is counterintuitive, but when we're actually running the shift crew can be much less busy than when we're not--and having to deal with umpteen folks trying to tinker.
Update: I talked with Ben, who had a curious explanation: There exists a limo service which takes people to/from the airport sometimes. They have a fleet of cars, and sometimes the only one available is a stretch limo.
Set that aside. It was nearly three hours, and was the kind of thing you should be able to watch quietly. Laundry and monitoring children interfered somewhat. And I must confess that from time to time I checked the clock.
My first reaction to the opening shots was that this kind of focus on background was pretentious. But I got over that quickly enough: the images reflect what life is like there. Our crowded lives need loud commercials to get our attention, but when your world is stripped down and you're trying to pray, an apple on the table can be distracting. Actually, when you're trying to pray pretty near anything can be distracting. At least that's my experience.
It helps to know a bit about what's going on, because there's no commentary. If you're patient, sometimes the meaning or use of something becomes clear; like the loop of cloth hanging in the hall. Sometimes you have to puzzle it out yourself: the monk with the keyboard was practicing hitting the notes right because he was leading the singing for the group later.
Of course you can't see the major activity: prayer. You see people sitting quietly, but since you are a watcher and not a participant there's a certain distance. But Philip Gröning is respectful, and neither approves nor disapproves. The blind monk, and the dying monk are not shunted aside, but are still part of the group. Gröning doesn't celebrate that, just notices it. The outside world can be seen—in fact the monks have regular walks through the countryside and towns—but they're disconnected from it. Except for the abbot who is shown dealing with bills on a desk piled high with paperwork.
The movie covers a year, starting with new postulants in winter, and showing snippets of life: kneeling in cells, singing in chapel, digging out the garden, feeding the cats—and ends after an explanation of life by the blind monk.
My better half said “Half the time I thought what they were doing was wonderful, and the other half I was saying The world is full of people who need love and attention and you're shutting yourselves away in a mountain.
I'm too talkative for such a regimen not to have some attractiveness, but I have no calling to spend the rest of my life doing nothing but praying and chopping wood. Even if I were Catholic. I do think that the occasional fast from news and talk and everything else but prayer and physical work is a good thing for most of us, but not for more than a few days.
I wonder if the reverse is true (probably is): would Trappists benefit from spending a week or two every year making kids clean up their rooms and do their homework? They'd probably do OK at waking up at 4, and at changing diapers; but those are the easy jobs.
Watch it if you can. Read up on the Trappists first, so you can catch on quicker; and try and see it with the kids in bed and the phone turned off.
Fortunately, I am a writer rather than a moralist. I write essays, not sermons. And I am now nearing the end of this one, which I planned last night in bed, awake in the small hours and reflecting on the hollowness of all power, wealth, success and fame. We writers, impotent as we often seem, always have the last word.
Not quite. Fashions in literature come and go furiously fast. The hot topic books for last season's election are so much worthless paper this year. You know the pattern: everybody was talking about some timely book, and the author was no doubt gratified to appear on so many night shows; but this year nobody cares, and no one will ever care again unless some historian a hundred years hence wants to do some background research for a more important topic.
And when empires go, so do their libraries; and the barbarians always need something to start fires with or wrap peanuts in.
Most authors see their demise at the remainder table, but for all but a tiny few that demise will come. Was Aristophanes the finest of the ancient Greek comic playwrights? How could you possibly know?
All power and fame here on Earth will fade--the political and the cultural giants both--as God calls "Time's up. Next!"
I suppose it is coming on for time to examine the presidential candidates.
I am angry that they started the process so early--I see no good reason for 24/7 x 365 x 4 coverage. I detest the solemn punditry studying every random fluctuation in the polls. I hate the canned talking points. I despise the focus on electability rather than competence and accuracy.
Of course I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, so I can in good conscience skip the fooforaw. Still, I suppose I should at least familiarize myself with what the candidates claim and do, rather than rely on the "common knowledge" shaped by news outlets more interested in novelty than accuracy.
This judge has courage. If he believes in the gods, he knows they might show up and charge him
I gather that the Hollywood writer's strike is still going on. From what I hear (without detailed knowledge of how royalties generally work in that shell-game industry) it sounds like they have some legitimate beefs and a rational request.
I'm tempted to speculate that a strike improves the caliber of TV shows. Those I've seen in the past few years haven't seemed paragons of quality entertainment. But I'd be wrong--I understand that the producers are planning to fall back on "reality" shows, which apparently are even worse.
Still, it'd be a few years before the strike noticeably impacted my life directly. I just don't watch that much TV, and I've a backlog of movies I meant to see sometime or another, so no new movies wouldn't bother me that much either.
Indirect effects are another matter. With more "reality" stuff and more "Jackass" stuff about, I'd start feeling even sicker about the culture.
The BBC special report on land mines is interesting. The US comes off rather well, curiously enough, as a non-signatory that has been doing more to remove them than just about anybody else, whilst certain signatories and non-state actors have been planting them anyhow. The last word was given to Tamar Gabelnick, Treaty Implementation Director for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
"One can argue the military value of any weapon - even a nuclear bomb - but does that make it moral? No."In a democratic society it is not OK to use any weapon to get the job done."
Shall I assume that English is not her first language, and she misspoke? Or shall I conclude that she has no idea what she is talking about?
The proposal met a fairly cool reception--lots of worries about hassles from upset students, is this the department for this kind of thing, etc.
Afterwards I looked up the book. Onellion and Fortney take the position, if references can be trusted to describe it accurately, that any dogmatic position whatsoever is evil. The only useful religions are those that have no "dogma," which curiously enough included Buddhism. Any sort of Christianity or Islam or Judaism that makes propositional statements, as opposed to filtering everything through mysticism, they hate.
A course on science and religion might be useful, but this one isn't going to help any.
I saw that Pressfield had written another book, so of course I read it. This one is about Alexander the Great.
As usual, he has the protaganist tell the story to someone else at the end of events. Of course nobody knows exactly what Alexander thought, but Pressfield's imagining of it is probably not too far off base (though once again I think he fails to grasp the religious dimensions of the ancient world).
Alexander tells the story of his life (skipping the conquests of the Levant and Egypt) and why he loves war and feels himself impelled by his daimon; and how bitter it can be. The battles are well told, and you get some understanding of how such a small army could have managed such amazing feats.
Go read it.
We went to church last night instead of this morning, so that we could take some neighbors whose car doesn't work (and whose Sunday is fraught). So this morning was a sleep-in down-time day. I finished Pratchett's Making Money and rested.
I made some beignets from the French Market recipe. They're good, but the kind my mother used to make puffed up hollow, which made them ideal for scooping up loose powdered sugar. (Just don't inhale when eating!) Middle Daughter is alergic to the oil vapors from frying, so we've not had these in years. The double batch didn't last long. I held off on one tray until Oldest Daughter had lunch break. Apparently butter isn't a good substitute for margarine--it browns too quickly. This recipe results in risen dough that floats from the get-go. I'll try this one next time. BTW, a wok is really nice for this sort of thing: you can set the dough on the side and slide it in rather than dropping it into hot oil and splashing yourself.
I finished pulling out the contents and shelving from the storage corner in the garage, and stuffed the last of the fiberglass batting in between the studs. Cutting up the plywood to cover this new section will have to wait a few days more, but then that wall will be finished. The garage door seems to work just fine with styrofoam in the sections. (That construction adhesive doesn't want to come off your fingers!) Of course the roof is completely uninsulated, but with some cleverness in the rafters I think we can keep the garage a little warmer this year, and presumably that side of the house as well. And in the process, quite a bit of stuff is moving out to the curb.
As I type this, Youngest Son is downstairs watching Star Trek videos. The heating ducts carry sound all over the house, so there's really no such thing as solitary video watching. TV reception in the basement is abysmal, and we don't get cable; so videos are about all we see.
This is the latest Diskworld novel. Moist has a new assignment: the Post Office is going well enough that he's not really needed there anymore. The title should tell you where.
Type of Diskworld novel: Moist and Vetinari (maybe too much Vetinari; best not to show too much of your hand) and old Ankh Morpork families; wizards play a role and the Watch has cameos. It is better structured than Thud, and full of the wonderful sly descriptions he's famous for. What happens when a golem has a crush on her employer?
Is it easier to list the complaints: The character Cosmo is a bit too crazy, and Bent's revelation almost works, and Vetinari appears too much. And I hope Pratchett isn't planning to write the book Vetinari gives a teaser for at the end.
Aside from those minor points, the book is quite enjoyable. I suggest the reader be already familiar with the Diskworld series, but aside from that I recommend it.
Why shouldn't the history of the town you are living in be part of the curriculum in school? It wouldn't have to be a very long course: a couple of days would probably suffice for Sun Prairie; a few more for Madison. This would have to come after American history, of course, so that things could be put in context. A history of the state should also be taught. I wonder how hard that would be to put together? Some contentious details might derail the course, especially if powerful figures clash. Still, it seems reasonable.
And, FWIW, I think a parallel American Indian history would be good to learn also--provided it isn't whitewashed into "Red Man good, White Man bad" propaganda. Where else on earth will anyone learn about the Crow? They won't teach about them in Burma...
I was pretty sick of the rap that came on every time I started the rental car, and couldn't figure out which button turned it off permanently, so I punched a couple of other channel buttons. They were preset to digital radio stations, and one was "Nostalgie 2" or something like that: devoted to "oldies" or at least to the novel notion that the lyrics should be clearly heard above the guitar. Oddly enough the first couple of songs were American, and then I heard some familiar chords and new words: "Et maintenant, que vais-je faire?"
Funny how you can tell--I could hear immediately that this was the original, and "What now, my love?" was a translation. Same dramatic orchestration, same meaning--but the English version's lyrics always felt slightly clunky. The musical phrasing was meant to fit the French, and the English that fit the musical phrasing was a little forced.
"Seasons in the Sun" was another such: the English phrasing was a little jerky, and even nonsensical ("the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach"), but Brel's French version fit the music much better.
I wonder how often a translation comes out better. Probably has to be "unfaithful."
Drudge Report linked to a hysterical poll report saying that 25% of Germans found some good in the Nazi government. For a change, you can actually see how the question is worded (albeit in translation).
Pollsters for the Forsa agency, commissioned by the weekly magazine Stern, asked whether National Socialism also had some "good sides (such as) the construction of the highway system, the elimination of unemployment, the low criminality rate (and) the encouragement of the family."
A more interesting question is not why 25% of Germans thought that roads were a good thing, but why 70% couldn't think so. Either the Green infection is horrifyingly widespread, or some people don't realize that you can hate and work to destroy something that actually does some good now and then. Must be nice: no hard choices to make, just demons to oppose.
Yes, I know Adolph and his supporters came pretty close to filling that bill, but this attitude carries over into less clear-cut quarrels as well.
I was sort of right.
September 28, 2007 (Rockford, Il) — Mark Bankord, Directional Leader of Heartland Community Church, announced today that the elders, Board of Directors, and Leadership Team of Heartland, after prayerful consideration, have agreed to accept the gift of the assets of the non-denominational, evangelical Pathway Community Church in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Effective Monday, September 24, 2007, Pathway has changed its name to Heartland Community Church and offer Heartland’s “different way to do church” to their community. “Based on counsel from True North 128, Inc., a Christian Church Consulting firm, the elders of Pathway approached us with the idea,” said Mark Bankord. “They are gifting the assets of their church to Heartland and adopting the Heartland name and model. They will rely on the leadership of Heartland here in Rockford to help them positively impact their community.” Pathway, a 29 year-old church that owns 40 prime acres near Madison, has been without a senior pastor/leader for the past five months. The desire of the Pathway elders and the members has been to determine the best method available to grow their congregation and to reach out to their community. Heartland’s Leadership Team in Rockford will duplicate the methodology that has been in place since the church was founded in 1998.
Apparently the Heartland methodology is to rely heavily on video lessons.
The Thursday meeting was an announcement, not a discussion: typical of the elder board, I fear. Their ambition has been to grow the church into a “megachurch” using the currently fashionable worship and ministry models. Along the way the elders alienated over half the congregation, including most of the mature and experienced members.
I'm startled to find them choosing this option, though. Perhaps they were overwhelmed with the quality of the Heartland model and materials, and figured that piggy-backing was the only way to get started fast. Or perhaps they looked around at the number of workers left, and decided they needed help from outside.
Years ago the elders decided they weren't very interested in adult education, and canned everything in the hopes that small groups would do the job instead. It looks like the Heartland model will let them just pop in a video tape and sit back.
Better than nothing, I suppose. But the plan has that attenuated “tele-church” feel. Does a video-taped speaker count as one of the “two or three gathered in my name?”
