A modern Great Game

Grim has a nice summary of who and what in Syria right now. Will Assad stay in Moscow? Will it matter?

I have no idea how many observers we can rely on there, but Trent Telenko says he's heard that the Turkish backed forces have been using drones heavily, presumably inspired by Ukrainian tactics. It would be interesting to know how that's working -- and maybe learn a few lessons ourselves.

Assuming Erdogen's proxies win, I wonder if he will turn his sights on "Greater Syria" (aka Lebanon) or the Kurds first. If Lebanon, he might find it convenient to try to wrest Hezbollah out of the Iranian orbit -- it would give him tremendous leverage in Lebanon, and street cred with his Islamist allies, given Hezbollah's fight against the "Little Satan."

The enemy of my enemy is my Best Friend for a Few turns.

If you tarry 'til you're better

You will never come at all.

An Episcopal priest has decided that Jesus' demand that you be reconciled to your brother before coming to the altar means he mustn't celebrate the Eucharist, or take it, until the church has dealt with its history of "white supremacy." Not surprisingly, he'll probably be defrocked.

He seems to be either objecting to God's denial of inherited punishment or claiming that we can make ourselves pure enough on our own. He'd do better, I think, to claim that inequalities of income or status represent current sins -- there's a little more of a tradition of that sort of claim.

Protests such as Ramey’s have been key to forcing change in the Episcopal Church, said the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, former dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School in New York City. Bishops ordained 11 women to the priesthood in 1974, in defiance of church policy. In 2007, five priests in Massachusetts refused to officiate weddings until the church allowed them to perform same-sex marriages.

FWIW, This Douglas the story cites is called "an expert on racial reconcilliation." She's written a book, but permit me to wonder who exactly she has managed to reconcile. I’ve said it before and will continue to say: you can’t be white and Christian. I don’t mean that in terms of looking like a white American, but instead, the construct of “white.” With allies like that...

It looks like he decided that his parish (he resigned, btw) was obstinately sinful because of the inaction of the greater church, and that he should declare his own interdict.

Prince Johnson

is dead. He apparently collapsed and died in his shower early today (other sources say died in bed) (Thursday starts earlier in Liberia). During the Liberian civil war he became one of the warlords, and famously captured, tortured, and killed Doe -- and had it filmed.

Following continued clashes with Taylor and the pro-Doe ULIMO group, the INPFL was disbanded and Johnson was forced into exile in Nigeria in 1992, where he converted to Christianity and reconciled with the Doe family.

The "reconciled with the Doe family" is interesting. You always wonder if a famous conversion like this is real or political, but if he managed that, I'm guessing real. He became a pastor, and a senator--apparently not always a straight-up one, but that's not surprising in a senator. I never met the man and have no personal impressions.

Do I need to say that the tribes he represented remember him fondly, and the tribes he fought against are angry he never stood trial? His troops did a lot of ugly things during the war.

I've already opined about Truth and Reconciliation in Liberia, and I don't know of any new evidence to change my conclusion (it's probably a bad idea). I think the only political way forward is for the warlords to die off. There's another way, a supernatural way, and it sounds like Rev. Johnson found it.

Christmas in Singapore

From Plough

Rising and descending between Venice and The Shoppes amid the rootless evergreens, I realized that I was witnessing a colonization of sorts – but it was not the imposition of Western or Christian values on the world. The West itself had been the first to fall to this new empire without realizing what had happened, leaving behind caricatures of itself and expensive retail chains. Political philosopher Patrick Deneen coined the term “anticulture” to describe this colonizing force – not a nation-state but the unspoken ideology of those currently running our nation-states – that drives global commerce and government, uprooting local traditions in order to sell us newer models of ourselves. Weaken the ties of family, faith, community, and culture, of the particularity that roots us in time and place, and nothing remains but homo economicus, whose only fixed identity is to consume.

Left of Bang

by Patrick van Horne and Jason A Riley

How can you predict dangerous situations before they go bang? This book was highly recommended by several folks. The first chapter annoyed me--you don't have to give a sales pitch when you've already sold the book.

Bottom line: They provide some categories and things to watch for, but the only way to apply them is to spend time watching the people around you in order to get a baseline to work from. My neighborhood isn't yours--there are about 5 languages within half a suburban block. It would be quite different just across the highway in the apartment complex, and neither resembles Afghanistan.

Once you have trained yourself to see things, and know what to expect, you can spot the anomalies.

I had our kids read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. I don't know if it helped.

Update: I forgot to mention--the authors say 10 years to become expert, based on Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. I assume that means a) less than ten years and b) native talent can make it even faster.

An Autistic Guy's Guide to Security

by TL CR The author is British, and the book badly needed proofreading, but on the whole the advice is sensible, and explains why some things are important. I think it would be better paired with the book in the next post.

China Marine

by E.B. Sledge.

Some of you know his With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa: an enlisted man's tale of some of the worst fighting in the Pacific. What happened when the war ended and it was time to come home?

As the book's title hints, he didn't come straight home. His unit was sent to China to help demobilize the huge Japanese armies there, and try to help the Chinese Nationalists get control of the country back from the Japanese, and try to stay out of the way of the growing civil war.

He met wonderful people there, and found himself in strange situations--cultures clashed quite a bit sometimes. And then he finally came home, where people were busily trying to forget the horrors that few of them had actually seen. A veteran was a veteran--but some had been on the bleeding edge and some hadn't heard a shot. (My father spent his Navy time typing paperwork on Manus Island so other guys could come home.) (Bill Mauldin drew about coming home too.)

He found his personal peace becoming a biologist.

Read it

Maybe I shouldn't go by the extremes

Transhumanism seems to borrow a bit from ancient philosophies that held that the human spirit was trapped in a physical body, and needed liberation. Except that this time liberation from the world comes through being reincarnated in a different body: one made of electronics instead of self-repairing flesh.

"Effective altruism" claims nice things on their websites, but the things I've heard of a few of its devotees bring Linus to mind.

Little people

In the mostly English and Irish legends I knew of, the Little People were not generally friendly. I read a suggestion about 40+ years ago that these were displaced indigenous peoples still hiding in the woods and wastelands. Insofar as such displacement happens pretty much everywhere, and the folks hiding will probably not be as well nourished and certainly not dressed in the usual fashions, it wouldn't be crazy to find smaller folk who look different, hiding in the woods. The tale would then "shrink" in the telling. Nice theory.

However, these tales show up in Alaska, where one expects the displace-ee's to live, and Hawaii, and Flores Island, and the rest of North America, and places in Africa. OK, Africa is different--they actually _have_ little people, but Hawaii had no indigenous people before the Polynesians showed up.

So from whence the stories?

Maybe the stories are retellings of retellings of truly ancient stories of the humans who met Neanderthals et al before they spread around the world. That would be interesting, but wouldn't tell us much about the encounters.

Maybe they are a kind of hard-wired reaction to tell a story that explains uncanny things that happen in the woods; attributing them to humanoids since we understand humans, and the humanoids have to be small because there's no sign of them afterward.

Or maybe they're real, and just have gotten good at hiding. Really good at it, because lots of former residences of the little people are now suburbia and farms. Maybe that explains why I can't find the garage door opener...

Folk music

We went to the international folk fair in Milwaukee this afternoon.

Most costumes were a snapshot of what was popular at some time in the past (the Malian men wore current styles, though) The art displayed, ditto. The dances were usually done to more modern fusions, using old-style costumes.

I wanted to ask "What is modern Lithuanian culture? How does it differ from generic 'European'?" I didn't want to embarass anybody, though. And the answer might be hard to put into words. They undoubtedly have songs and books in their own language, and some of the things they write would inherit somewhat from the old culture, but I'd bet that most of it would be written within the context of the broader generic culture, with its values and assumptions.

Backing up, what goes into culture? Religion, collective history, local fashions, local traditions. Besides the language, one obvious distinctive of (e.g. I'm not really trying to pick on them; plug in whoever you like. That was just the booth I was in front of when the thought came to mind.) Lithuania is their politics, which sometimes partakes rather strongly of religion--but isn't something other people can appreciate.

Just for laughs, I looked up vibee.tv for the top 10 pop stars in Europe today. One "star" was a duo (UK and Nigeria). 3 were US, 3 1/2 were UK, 1 Korea, 1 Canada, 1/2 Africa. 1 was EU. I get the impression of some blenderizing of culture.

How does "Lithuanian" music get to compete in that environment?

It manages. I wonder why they didn't put some of it in at the fair

Education in Liberia

"Dr. Benjamin Wehye, President of LICOSESS College of Education recently returned home from Zambia with his PhD earned in Education after five years of what he termed as “intensive online research based and solution development study,” accompanied by in-person seminars." What does he say about Liberia's well-known problems with education?

raised concerns about Liberia’s seriousness to break away from the 1860s educational philosophy which he said was centered around exclusively educating children of freed and repatriated slaves and neglecting back then, the native residents who laid the foundation for the country that is today known as Liberia. ...

Once a slave, the mindset becomes narrow and restricted to thinking that freedom is yet too far away. This is why they train their children in the same fashion, making them believe that a certain class of people does not deserve the opportunity to rise to certain levels.

Exactly what from the 1860's educational philosophy remains in the Liberian system today isn't specified. Nor is it clear what the limited educational opportunities a century ago (native tribes didn't get a lot of schools) has to do with all 25,000 applicants failing the entrance exam a few years ago: that's the descendants of the native tribes, of the "Congo" people, and of the Americos -- none passed.

If things are still pretty much as they were when I was there, problems include low salaries, unreliable payment of same, poor oversight, and low prestige for teachers--if you have an education, you want a better government job than mere teacher. There was also the problem of school fees that not all families could afford, though I gather there's been some effort to find the money in the budget to deal with that. (No doubt much will go astray.)

Rhetoric about historical offences seems unlikely to address those issues. For that matter, if this report about the LICOSESS Gbarnga school closing is a guide, the good Dr. Wehye has some housekeeping at home to take care of: "allegedly using course guides instead of a complete curriculum for its B-certificate program in Gbarnga".

If LICOSESS does what it's advertised to, that will help. They've graduated quite a few teachers already from several campuses--the important things are simple. Train teachers, and remember to pay them.

Throwing Away and Wasting

Jesus warned that we might have to throw some things away, in fact, give up everything. True, this can translate to treasure in heaven, but in the meantime things seem to be lost.

Though one hopes that gifts to the poor aren't lost, not infrequently they're squandered, and any value will have to be supernatural. Ordinary wealth can and does vanish and benefit nobody--and may be wasted.

But in a few passages something else seems to show up. After feeding the multitudes, Jesus says to gather up the leftovers so nothing will be lost. After the Resurrection, He asks seven of the disciples to haul in a load of fish, even though he already has fish and bread waiting for them.

He seems not to want things He provides wasted. Which is encouraging.

The internet

I wonder what Dr Boli has been reading lately. FWIW, some of my scratch paper notes have become blog posts. And other things.

Special Days

The city calendar hanging beside me has almost every day flagged as some "Day": Bison Day, World Freedom Day, Fast Food Day, Craft Jerky Day, Cake Day, and World Hello Day. "Cookie Cutter Day" has another, unmentioned, name this year: the start of Advent.

At least they got Christmas Eve et al on there.

Subverting the Patriarchy

The Catholics and Southern Baptists (I'm a bit more familiar with the latter) are held as exemplars of patriarchy, which is understood to be a bad thing™(*).

Catholic devotions are famously Mary-centric, even more so than the Orthodox. (Rosary, anyone?) The Southern Baptist liturgical year celebrates the lives of Annie Armstrong (Easter) and Lottie Moon (Christmas) and their determination to serve God no matter what ossified patriarchs got in their way. I see an interesting contrast between alleged "know your place" teaching, and teaching "be like these women who overcame the people who wanted them to stay in their place."

---

Any form of organization is subject to corruption and misuse, but why patriarchy should be uniquely bad isn't clear. If Darwin's rule is any guide, approximately patriarchal societies seem to be very successful. (Is it still a patriarchy if men run some aspects of society and women rule others?)

---

Dan McBride wrote

But when the church needs workers, they do not wrack their brains.
They go enlist a lady that the WMU has trained.
It surely is a good thing that the women enter in,
'Cause we'd all be in trouble if we left it to the men!

After 55 years, a different view

Early in high school I read the collection of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). All at once, of course. He had wit and excellent twists in many of his short stories, some of which turn up in school readers. He was known for it.

I acquired a volume for our own kids later, and it gathered a bit of dust until recently. I found it on the coffee table, read here and there in it again, and concluded that one should limit his reading to one or two stories, and not try too many at once. In bulk (more than four or five), they depress. I got the impression that the author, or at least his favorite characters, didn't like women or children very much.

But in small doses:

A Poet praised the Evening Star,
Another praised the Parrot’s hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
And he, at least, praised what he knew.

Conspiracy theories

They're all the rage, and I suppose they always have been. I run into claims about drug company this, or Monsanto that, or "October surprise" scheming -- and some of the old "Jews run the world" themes seem to be getting new life, and an ugly amount of influence.

I don't hear much chatter about QAnon anymore. The only place I heard much about it was media reports; outside of those I only know of one person who is/was into it, and I never met him. It never seemed to have any institutional support, unlike Kendi's conspiracy theory, which has a great deal. and is unusual, in that he posits an unconscious conspiracy

What gives a conspiracy theory cachet? Some critical mass of celebrities endorsing it? Tribal endorsement? Popularity great enough that nobody wants to say anything against it?

Unknown story of forgiveness

Judas wasn't going to explain his doings to anybody before the betrayal, and wasn't in a mood to afterwards, so from whence did the synoptic gospels get the information about the "chief priests and officers" and the silver?

Acts 6:7 says that "a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith." If one of those chief priests was among the converted, what a story he must have had! Just like Paul, he was certain he was on the side of the angels, though using rather disreputable means, and then -- oh oh.

Maybe it was one of the officers. There probably weren't a lot of people in on the secret, though.

A reflection on the rhetoric before and after

"a curious disease which they have all caught--an inability to disbelieve advertisements"

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

Garden fork

I learned about this item rather late in life: shovels and spades and snow shovels I learned about quickly, but this one escaped my notice. It turns out to be very useful when you need to break up the soil, especially when your better half plants bulbs--a shovel's wide slice dissects more of them than the few spikes of the garden fork.

A shovel also tends to bring dirt up more as clods, and so requires a little more work to break it up so you can stir in the fertilizer or whatever. A fork is also handy when you're trying to trace grass/mint/bindweed roots traveling sideways--you can figure out which way they're going and pull more of the root out.

However

A word to the wise: the garden forks we have (garage sale specials) don't have tops as flat as a shovel's (or even the example above) for planting your foot on to ram it into hard or rooty soil. Look for flat tops when you get one.

If you try to push the more rounded models with your foot, you'll force your muscles and tendons to work harder to try to hold your foot straight and not turn sideways. You may not notice your mistake until the next day, but you'll notice. It's been a week, and whatever the tendon is attached to the tibia medial malleolus is still sore to the touch.