I'd never seen a bald eagle in the wild before, though you can find them in Wisconsin. But yesterday as I waited for the bus at the campus end of State street, a bald eagle soared overhead, and then circled around and around until its circle drifted east out of sight. Beautiful: it brightened the otherwise dead-snow dingy street.
The bird must have followed the Yahara up to visit us. Thanks!
We cannot persuade our committed foes, and shouldn't bother trying. We may be able reduce their recruiting rate, though.
If we take their challenges as our battlefield, and attempt to deny them directly, we're apt to lose. For example, consider Qutb's first front. Our culture very plainly has deranged aspects, and atheism has a very prominent place in it. You may try to say that every society has problems--but Johnny Abdul will be more scandalized by alien faults than familiar ones. The local problems (government corruption, etc) may hurt him more, but they don't shock him as much as the unfamiliar ones.
You may try to point out that a secular government doesn't require secularism--but that subtle point is apt to elude him: It has escaped attention here in the West as well. In short, Johnny Abdul is likely to agree with Qutb that we're a lot of deranged atheists.
Johnny Abdul is not an atheist; he despises them. He does like the goodies we offer, and for a lot of people, in peacetime, that's enough to reconcile them to us. But even in peacetime, and more certainly in war, sophisticated Muslims will warn that the goodies are a trap to snare good Muslims into materialism and vice. Which of course they certainly can be.
To make matters worse, Johnny Abdul may want the goodies, but he can't have them. He doesn't make enough money. He can't, not without fairly dramatic political and economic restructuring--which won't happen. The political poles in these societies are the entrenched interests (and factions thereof) and the revolutionaries--who have coalesced around radical Islam. Not much hope for useful change there... If it were possible to improve Johnny Abdul's economic life, he'd be more likely to go along with the great Satan in order to get medicine, etc. But he is simultaneously more likely to become more sophisticated and realize the trap of materialism.
One school of thought holds that if we can make the Muslims middle class, they'll exclude religion from their calculations--like Sunday-only Christians. But Marx was wrong, and not all motives are economic. How many of the suicide bombers are poor? How many of the 911 killers were poor?
In any event, we can't change the economic conditions of Mideast countries without taking control of them--the reforms required are too radical. They need new political systems, changed economic structures, different educational priorities, different social attitudes towards corruption and nepotism--not just better roads.
The other front--that sharia is the way of joy--is hard to counter directly, since Johnny's imam will point out that we (being infidels) have no standing to judge such things. We can publicize the horrors of the Iranian mullahs or the Saudi custodians of virtue or the Taliban soccer field mayhem. It won't get very far coming from us. I see that we've finally gotten a satellite station up, but I don't know much about it yet.
Iraq is a great place to plant radio/TV stations for the whole Middle East--and we haven't moved on that yet. Even so, we can't expect that anyone will accept our critiques of Islam.
So on what fronts can we fight Qutb et al? I've mentioned the seductions of materialism already. Materialism is a two-edged sword, and I think more likely to cause us problems. Our advertisers are too good, stirring up desires for ever-more stuff. And who gets blamed for the inevitable frustration? Not the imam...
We can try to publicize ways our society is qualitatively morally superior to any Muslim state. Don't laugh--you can almost always find a virtue in one society that is ill-developed in others. (The MidEast is famous for hospitality, for instance.) We can try to publicize our extreme care for the lives of innocents, and our generosity in Iraq, etc. Unfortunately we've already lost the first PR campaign about care for innocent lives--Al Jazeera saw to that. It is now yesterday's news, and the Arabs "know" how deadly we were. True, they also know that Al Jazeera lied, but the bloody images will stick with them.
In any event, as the war continues, I worry about the depth of our commitment to careful warfare. Most especially when (not if) we lose one of our cities, I expect our patience to run thin and more thorough warfare become standard again. In some cases that might be more effective--but I'm not expert enough to be sure. Suffice it to say I don't think we'll prove ourselves superior in motives.
Generosity is tricky. To actually win hearts and minds the largess needs to
(Correction) It was pointed out that some countries are much less corrupt than others, which is true. It is also quite true that arranging for point 1 is hard in any country (or state or county or city or school board . ..), thanks to national pride and Not Invented Here issues.
Of course standard operating procedure has been to give military funding on the assumption that inevitable military coups will bring American-trained and hopefully American-friendly officers to the top. So far this hasn't helped a lot--some, perhaps. Turkey has its own traditions going back to Ataturk. Pakistan is resolutely two-faced. Egypt? The militaries are part of the corrupt establishment too.
We need to get into the media in a big way throughout the Muslim world--not just in the Mideast. We start with broadcasting unbiased news, and include music and other attractive features. Then we have to add the extra features that bring our message across.
I see we have a brand-new station called Al Hurra. According to the NY Times article they only broadcast 14 hours a day, and some of the material doesn't seem terribly relevant--a documentary about Anthony Hopkins?
Making news unbiased is a very difficult task. Merely reporting accurately what reporters see around the world results in a horribly biased picture--because of what reporters are not allowed to see. Think of the news organs that sold their souls to be allowed to report from Hussain's Iraq, or the wild disparity in what you can report in Israel vs what the PA allows to be reported. Tyrants insist on whitewashing, and one way or another, they get it. Either you report what you are shown and nothing else, or you don't get to report anything. (And no news is good news, right?)
To make matters worse, most reporters prefer a comfortable life in the US or the EU, and so we get an avalanche of stories from the US and EU, and a trickle from everywhere else. The bulk of the world doesn't much care who J.Lo. marries, nor who wins the New Hampshire primaries, nor how long the New York garbagemen have been on strike.
Since we can report more scandal from the free world than from dictatorships, if you just report the stories you have on hand it sounds like Belgium is a more corrupt place than North Korea. You're not going to get a lot of stories out of North Korea, so if you want an unbiased presentation of the situation in the world you have to select fewer of the horror stories from the free nations. One way to do this is to allot a certain amount of time to each section of the world. The BBC news web site does this.
Setting aside the often rather striking biases in reporting, the BBC model actually works pretty well. We want to report local news, regional news, and world news--pretty much in that order. Getting local news means hiring reporters for every relevant local region, and cultivating local stringers. If we just rely on official press releases we might as well not bother. Is it worth while to carefully distinguish on-air between stories from reporters and official statements? We've got to devote enough resources and talent (and translators) to keep from looking like asses. This is going to be quite expensive, and while a satellite station is a good start, we need local stations too.
We don't want to make the mistake VOA made, of quoting jihadi conspiracy theorists to "balance" against honest reporting. Granted, this is hard to do in regions like Egypt where lunatic conspiracy theories about Israel and the US are the norm. To even report rumors and official statements about "Zionist mind control rays," even to deny them, gives them more credibility than they deserve. I'm afraid I have no hard-and-fast rules to propose.
Of course, regional news comes from culled local news, and world news comes from culled regional news and the big world news feeds.
When I say that most of the world doesn't care who Jennifer Lopez marries, I don't mean to say that they don't know who she is. Entertainment is a big industry that gets a lot of attention; and we've got to make sure that the appropriate entertainment news is part of the feed. "Appropriate" is key: give Bollywood info where Indian movies are big, leave out lurid details where these are apt to give offense, and so on. Reporting on local musicians is important, but fraught with traps. Some entertainers go in for political attacks in battles we don't care to take sides in; and some (like Sha'ban Abd Al-Rahim in Egypt with his vile songs claiming that 911 was a US plot) we don't want to give air time to.
The alert reader will have noted that this requires a corps of reporters and cultural specialists in hundreds of places around the world, which we don't seem to have right now. We've got to train a pool of people to draw from, for starters. The next problem is getting them to stay in the often less-than-enticing spots. If you pay large salaries as a motivator, the cultural and economic gap between the citizens and the wealthy and insulated reporters makes the reporting much less useful. I don't see any easy ways to make a military specialist "reporter" who won't be given skewed news. Maybe we could have a "Peace Corps" analog: a "News Corps."It has been pointed out that in countries that do not tolerate a free press foreign reporters are subject to expulsion, and local reporters can be intimidated. So we don't have a clear way to get timely local news; and accurate, timely local news would be a big draw. We could rely on semi-anonymous sources, but that's no substitute for reporters able to go around and ask questions. Clearly this needs work.The astute reader will also be insisting that a propaganda network cannot be unbiased, and suspecting that I am talking through my hat.
I mean, of course, that we avoid certain existing methodological biases and try to tell the truth.
Correction: The entertainment news requires a lot of review for cultural sensitivity. I may as well call it censorship, though it has nothing to do with politics.
- "If it bleeds, it leads" automatically introduces a bias that depicts the world as more dangerous than it really is. I remember watching the local news in Chicago and in New Orleans--both big cities with similar crime rates. In Chicago the crime report was a couple of minutes, while in New Orleans the crime report was ten minutes long and dominated by dramatic murder scenes. It made New Orleans sound dreadfully dangerous. If you aren't careful, the dramatic stories drown out the rest of the news.
Sit-coms are situated in houses or apartments that are far larger than that of the average American; a single hour of a crime show can have more murders than a policeman will see in a lifetime; and Baywatch to the contrary most American women aren't inflated with silicone. Would you blame someone overseas who watched the last SuperBowl for suspecting that Americans have a tendency to rip off women's blouses?
In scientific research we have to make corrections all the time. You have to understand your "sampling bias." We oversample dramatic stories in the US/EU and undersample dramatic stories in Africa. So you either must toss most of the US/EU scandals or dig deeper for stories in Africa.
- We have a tendency to quote as serious things that are said only for effect. When a lawyer claims his client is innocent, that isn't front page news. Politicians notoriously overstate issues, and we go along with the soundbite charade. We shouldn't, especially when we're trying to give the world an unbiased look at us.
There are some tricky points, as the New York Times story on Al
Hurra mentioned:
do we call Palestinian terrorists terrorists, or martyrs, or something
bland? I'm not an expert on Arabic, but I suspect we can find some
language that gets the point across. "Martyr" is absolutely
the wrong word, but
"suicide" emphasizes the crime--that sort of thing. And, after all,
the bombers want to inspire terror--so why not
mention that and call them terrorists?
To undercut the Qutb appeal, we must try to show that we are a religion-friendly culture.
One approach is to implicitly offer an alternative: not the House of War or House of Submission, but the "House of Fruit."
This we can do with programs of religious good news: 5 minute TV/radio pieces on how some religious group or other group has been helping other people. Keep religious groups prominent, but throw in the Shriners or community efforts from time to time; and make sure the philanthropy is uncontroversial, and not likely to excite envy. (No stories of aid to Israel or the Palestinians, or of buying Cadillacs for the preacher) It is true that all the good actions of an infidel won't make him as good as the worst believer, but the point is to frame the debate in terms of actions and judgment of whether actions are good or not. Title it "By Their Fruits You Will Know Them."
The impression we want to leave is that just as the hearer can judge
the generous spirits of people of different faiths, so can we. The
secular society gives good people a chance to prove themselves, and bad
people a chance to be discovered. The deeds are the proof, and not the
invisible belief. As far as I can tell it is perfectly orthodox
to say that "Even in lands of ignorance
good people demonstrate their goodness, and presumably will be rewarded
by God. Likewise even in lands of submission you find evil people whose
disobedience will be punished by God."
Other broadcast squibs should acknowledge the holy days of Islam, Judaism,
Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity (both calendars), with
mentions and brief explanations through the day.
Another program would be "The Voice of the Prophets;" reading without commentary in the local vernacular from the Old Testament, New Testament, and Koran. Precede each reading with a quick who-and-where, but no more; and call the program an aid to devotions. No Hadiths, no commentaries. Cycle back to the beginning as each book ends. Offer cassettes/CDs of the mix or of each work separately. (Use Egyptian Arabic rather than classical Arabic for broadcast in Egypt, Farsi in Iran, etc.)
This will infuriate some Muslims who'll take it as an insult to the Koran to be read on the same program as the Bible, and also those for whom it is blasphemy to translate the Koran. (Of course it is translated anyway, and offered as a devotional aid but not as the Koran itself.) Insofar the Koran is studied in the local dialect instead of Arabic, to that degree the dominance of Arabia decreases. Non-Arabic Muslims are currently second-class Muslims (see Among the Believers).
Just as the "By Their Fruits" show allows Johnny Abdul to judge by deeds, this allows him to judge ideas, and see that other prophets (esteemed by Islam) praised God well too, and deserve respect for that. He can't object too strongly to such readings of the writings of honored prophets--unless the Koran suffers by comparison, as I suspect it might.
I would hardly look for conversions from Islam with such a program. (I judge that such conversions would be a good thing, but don't think this program will do it.) But you can hope that a little of the respect Muslims hold for the ancient prophets may start to be accorded to those who quote them, and try to follow them.
Most of the Muslim world seems to be convinced that the uppity Jews have seized possession of a very holy site in the heartland of ancient Islam's glory days and are persecuting and murdering innocent Palestinian Muslims in order to hold it.
The persecution does exist at some level, though it seems milder than (for instance) the standard operating procedures of the Egyptian government for dealing with Copts. Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem) describes Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian laborers that must be humiliating. Even if this changed, I doubt that non-Palestinian Muslims would care.
Officially sharia is fixed and firm, but in practice you'll find numerous variations. Can we hope for a more benign sharia?
Even if versions of sharia appear which re-interpret the precedents set by the early caliphs (and I've heard rumors of a few), we've no guarantee these will survive competition with the rest--especially when the Guardians of the Holy Cities oppose them. And spreading new versions will take time. It took decades to spread Wahhabism, and it'll take decades to undo the damage.
It seems that we don't have many ways to soothe Muslim ire over Israel
short of nuking Tel Aviv. Given the coupling between attitudes towards Jews
and attitudes towards Christians, betraying Israel would not only fail to
buy us peace, it would harden Muslim resolve and increase their
confidence in defeating the rest of
us infidels. I'm not sure we can afford that.
Suppose one could arrange for a real peace agreement between the Jews and the Arabs, and the two groups actually succeeded in getting along as well as two neighboring countries ever do. I grant that this is unlikely now and will remain unlikely until after radical and undoubtedly violent changes in Palestinian society. A substantial fraction of the Palestinians would have a vested interest in compromising on the rules about infidels. That helps build peace. You might think that "No harm, no foul" would mean that remoter Muslims might be mollified if the Palestinians weren't complaining. But I don't think so. Recall apartheid South Africa. The loudest complainers and saber-rattlers weren't the front-line (neighbor) countries, but the countries farther away who couldn't be called on to suffer for the cause.
Remote Muslim countries would still have the same motive for inciting hatred of Israel--to distract their citizens and focus their anger away from the corrupt authorities. (Just like Africa in the 60's and 70's) Not all Palestinians will go along with a peace treaty, so there'll be no shortage of handy 'martyrs,' and there'll be a money stream to fund them.
I think the best we can hope for is some decline in unrest about Israel, and a little 'looking the other way.'
This time they find that fertile women rate other women uglier than they do when not fertile. The first paragraph of the report is:
Women judge the attractiveness other women more harshly when at their most fertile, suggests a new study. The phenomenon could be a strategy to devalue potential rivals, says the psychologist behind the work - being bitchy about others could help a woman win the attention of a desirable man.Umm, speaking as a man, I'm not sure that's a good winning strategy for a woman to try.
What strikes me as more important about this study was this:
Perrett's group previously found that women preferred more feminine, caring looking men for most of the month, but preferred more rugged, dominant looking types during the most fertile phase of their cycle.In contrast, the women's attitudes towards male faces did not appear to vary with the menstrual cycle in this new study.
In other words they could not reproduce their earlier result .
I wonder if this is due to differences in the way researchers react to women in the fertile part of their cycle. Pheromones anyone?
Obviously the spheres are fallen shotgun pellets. "There's another probe, RYllx! Get it!"
OK, seriously, these things do look rather odd. Of the 23 spheres (not counting one partly out of the picture), 11 have pretty clear boundaries between hemispheres--and several of the irregular ones may also, but I can't tell without turning them over to see. That sounds a lot like droplets hardening as they fly. 5 of them have divots--maybe expanding gas explosions?
I'd expect droplets to be squashed more by air pressure, but then the Martian atmosphere is thinner, so maybe this is OK. But in that case do the drops cool fast enough?
And what would be the ratio of melted to blasted material? If this was from a volcanic eruption, I'd expect the rubble of the old hardened cap to be blasted away as well. But I remember pictures of Pompeii showing 10 meter layers of volcanic ash, so maybe we can neglect the old crud. But a lot of that was hot ash, which I was given to understand forms when dissolved gases in the magma expand as the pressure is released. The difference in pressure between subterranean magma and earth's air vs vacuum seems pretty trivial (200-300 MPa or so). So maybe the Martian magma has less dissolved gas? That could be because the pressure is lower (75-120 MPa) or because the chemistry is different. On Earth dissolved gases include SO2, H2O, and CO2 (SO2 is easier to measure than the others, natch). The rovers are seeing rocks with sulfer...
Suppose the beads are from a meteor impact. Then I expect most of the material to be shattered but unmelted rock: if you have enough energy to melt rock, nearby you have enough energy to shatter it, and there's more matter around the melted zone than in it. So unless the melted rock beads travel farther than ordinary gravel, there should be more gravel than beads lying around. I don't see that. So I'd guess this isn't from meteor impacts. Unless . . .
Correction Oops. I forgot that the hotter central stuff will also have more KE, and has a better chance of travelling a long distance.
Is there a systematic bias due to the blowing soil? Will irregular gravel tend to be buried and smoother stuff remain uncovered? It does appear that the more irregular stuff is both smaller and more buried, but I'd want to look at a few more samples, and try a wind tunnel test or two.
I'm rather surprised nobody has studied fingernail structure before. Dr. Ennos calls it "ingenious," as the layers of keratin (parallel to the "moon") in the middle layer mean that it has substantial ("almost at tough as horses' hooves") strength along the axis of the finger, but can be easily torn off in strips for reliable trimming.
My own experience in tear-trimming nails is that most of the time (8 times out of 10 or so) the nail tears off more or less cleanly, but the rest of the time the strip widens as it tears, sometimes reaching the nail bed. Not 100% reliable . . .
Nigeria quashes air crash rumour
The Nigerian authorities have called off the search for a plane alleged to have crashed near the commercial capital, Lagos, last week.Do you believe the eyewitnesses didn't actually see the plane crash? Me either. I wonder who's covering up what. Smuggling, probably.Aviation minister Malam Isa Yuguda said no evidence of a crash had been found.
Mr Yuguda said investigations showed that neither Nigeria nor any other country had declared a plane missing.
So we'll be shipping back to Cuba the folks who rebuilt a 1959 V8 Buick into a boat. Unless they were on some terrorist/criminal watch list, why? We can always use people like this. Don't we have a special category for immigrants with special skills/training? (I know, I know--we don't want to encourage more people to drown themselves trying to imitate him. Still. . . )
When I went to the library to find Land of the Magic Soldiers another title jumped out at me from a frail volume: Through Liberia by Lady Dorothy Mills. From its publication date of 1926 you can guess how patronizing Lady Mills could be. Her trip (Monrovia to Saniquelle to Sinoe) was at the time when the government was starting to coordinate a crackdown on Leopard Societies, and cannibalism wound up as a major theme of the book; with the Mano and Gio tribes indicted. (I remember Harley writing that each tribe accused its neighbors of it, but said their tribe never indulged--or at least not since very long ago.)
Her journey was without roads and without much in the way of maps, and her relations with the ever-changing roster of bearers ranged from the amusing to the vexed. Because the government would requisition unpaid labor for various projects, villagers tended to take to the bush when word came of somebody needing bearers--unless they had solid assurance of getting paid.
If you can get past some of the cringe-making generalizations (about coarseness or musical talent) it is an interesting snapshot of an era. It looks like the claim that Masonic and Poro mysteries are similar must come from before 1926. I remember that the Masons were big in Liberia, and The Mask of Anarchy claimed that many AmericoLiberian bigwigs also ranked high in the Poro. I wonder if they really are similar, and if that made it easier for the "civilized" bigwigs to join the Poro.
I'd not heard before of the old Departmental Regulations that allowed pawning relatives but not selling them as slaves. The distinction revolved around the presence or absence of a special token of jewelry or some such item of domestic value.
A pity her camera didn't work on closeups--or perhaps she always wanted to put her subjects within a setting. I'd have liked to see the people a little closer.
You probably won't be able to find this book, but it is interesting.
All true. But he forgets four big problems.
At some point the ever-smaller size of transistor gates starts to make them very sensitive to transitions or damage due to cosmic rays. (Our atmosphere blocks a lot of that.) If you want to use them in space you have to design for redundancy or for error checking to a degree not required for earthbound consumer electronics.
Sure, I'd like to go to the moon. But I think Dennis is overoptimistic about the cost.
My mother recommended this to me. Bergner tells the stories of several people, white and black, who love Sierra Leone and stayed with it through the horrors of the civil war. The Kortenhovens came to Foria from Grand Rapids as missionaries of the Christian Reformed Church. Neall came as a mercenary from South Africa ("He's a bit of a nutter," Captain Smith, the British spokesman said, . . . "But he single-handedly saved Freetown.") Lamin Jusu Jarka saw friends burned alive by RUF fighters, and C.O. Cut Hands chopped off Lamin's hands. Michael Josiah studied medicine at what was left of the national university, learned microbiology and physiology and wears a magic bullet-repelling belt from a Kamajor priest: his goal is to unite modern medicine with traditional magic and make Sierra Leone a center of healing for the world.
Race matters here. Many Sierra Leoneans wanted the British to recolonize them. But even the proud Lamin, eager to see the British gone and natives ruling themselves again answered "what made you fall in love with your wife?" with
"Well," he said, sounding almost surprised that I should need to ask, "you can see her color. She resembles as if she is a white woman. So I love her for that."
And yet race isn't really the issue. Bergner gets all the pieces together, but doesn't make the connection. On the one hand you have the discouraged British officers, whose initial enthusiasm eroded to almost racist defeatism ("They have the attention span of goldfish." "I'm not saying they're subhuman, but . . . "). On the other you have devotion to family, and the amazing way Joseph was able to rebuild a wreck into a school in three months.
The difference isn't racial, but cultural. To make Western machinery work you need a hierarchy of obedience. (To put down a prison uprising, the commander calls on a local officer to go get gas masks and other gear from storage. He goes off, finds a project more important to him, and never comes back.) You need a kind of abstract group-think, in which principles are more important than comfort.
The tribal attitudes are different, and in some ways more individualistic. The net of group obligations is different, more "personal." Magic and the spirits of things play a very large role as well. I am not expert enough to give a complete explanation, or to tell an accurate enough story; but if your life centers around placation of unknowable powers you won't ask a lot of questions or even assume you'll completely understand when faced with apparently unknowable powers centered in human beings: white men.
He spotted the 14.5 and 12.7 machine guns on trucks along the road. "Target visual," he told his crew. He rolled tight, banked hard, dived down, dozens of rebel soldiers running, scattering, looking from the air like "long swastikas," he thought, one arm and one leg bent and raised. He touched the black button. The gunship trembled, volcanic. Shrapnel dropped bodies without drama; the soldiers appeared simply to fall, as if tripped. "It's actually a bit of an anti-climax," Neall explained. He destroyed the trucks with their mounted guns. "It's not like the movies. When the rocket hits the vehicle there's no flash or cloud of smoke. Nothing shoots hundreds of feet into the air. I suppose if you hit the petrol tank it would be quite nice, but I've never had that privilege. You get a slight fire because there is some fuel around. And pieces start falling off the vehicle."
"If you can't take a joke," Neall muttered triumphantly in the cockpit, veering away from the rebel maimed, the rebel dead, "don't join the army."
And there's Komba:
Komba didn't show a great deal of remorse with me. He told me of a raid he and his boys had carried out for food-finding. There had been a man caring for a small child, and Komba had spared him, setting him free from the line of villagers who would be marched away at gunpoint, bearing looted goods to the West Side Boys' encampment. Later Komba and his crew had raided the same village. The man had launched himself at Komba, trying to wrestle away his gun. This Komba felt as a betrayal. When his boys finally pinned the man down, Komba told them not to shoot. "I operate on him with me ax," recalled the opening, the eating, as vindication.
. . . . (half the book later)
But now, if you needed your car fixed in the King Tom area of Freetown, you might easily have turned into a particular garage, and seen Komba leaning under a hood.You couldn't have seen anything of his past. You wouldn't have seen anything out of the ordinary, only a young man, perhaps nineteen, among six or seven other apprentices, without tools, gazing longingly at engine parts, wishing they had the equipment and knowledge to fix them. The garage boss had little incentive to train them. . . . But the boss offered his teaching, and the chance to practice with his wrenches, at rare intervals. The education had the pace of a spiritual journey, led by a charlatan. Once each month, maybe, he imparted the workings of a single component. At this rate, Komba could declare himself a mechanic in about a decade. So far, he was sticking with it. More than a year had passed, and most days I went to look for him, he was there, waiting to learn.
Frustration, determination, and horror. This isn't a book for everybody.
Claim: The act asserts that every child will be reading at grade level by 2014, regardless of recent immigration status or handicap. Ummm. Not a good way to start an argument.
Claim: The act requires the use of a Reading First curriculum, which scripts what a teacher is required to say. Umm. This sounds like overstatement, but isn't beyond the realm of possibility. One size fits all is bad. Very bad.
Claim: The act is a one-size fits all. I can believe bureaucrats can be that dumb. Not individually (usually), but certainly collectively.
Claim: The act "cannot be blamed on Texas and the Republicans," because it was created by a corporate/political committee in 1989 by Bush 1 and Arkansas governor Clinton. And everyone knows that Republicans are demons and Texas is hell :-)
Claim: One bad thing about the act is that Corporations (TM) supported it to make schools look bad so they could use vouchers and private schools and tutoring services to make lots of money. Even worse, by making people feel bad about themselves and their education, they won't complain as much when you ship their jobs overseas.
No, this wasn't Scrapleface; she meant it. Corporations to her are a magic monolith, all run from the same boardroom. That all the corporations I've heard of are desperate for well-educated workers means nothing to her; "Corporations" have a wicked agenda by definition, and what any good particular instance of a corporation may do doesn't matter--it must be a coverup.
Well, this is Madison.
India is sponsoring a foundation for innovations--the "small" inventions that don't get a lot of press but often get a lot of use. Hurray for the hackers!
NASA claims that safety concerns mean no new Hubble missions. It sounds more like budget hardball: If you cut our shuttle funds, we'll kill the Hubble.
Has anybody not heard of the Gospel of Thomas? Or Q?
Q is for Quelle, the hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus from which Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew much of their common material. Maybe it was a document or set of documents, maybe a set of oral traditions, or maybe Q is one of the existing gospels (just my wild idea).
A warning first: I found Jenkins' writing style a bit heavy. The way he organizes material doesn't always make it clear who the speaker is: whether it is him or one of the various groups of scholars he references.
That said, this book is badly needed. Reporters and publishers are more interested in novelty and shock and the resulting sales than they are in boring old accuracy. The Jesus Seminar is quite good at getting press coverage, despite their tiny numbers and extreme positions. This book helps show up the lies.
An example of how the Jesus Seminar works: to find out which sayings of Jesus are authentic, first they chucked anything supernatural. Then they chucked anything Jewish, on the grounds that these were background material, and not new--and Jesus would only be saying new things. Never mind that Jesus was a Jew, and almost every one of his listeners were Jews, so you'd expect Jewish ideas and idioms. As a result, they deprecated everything Jesus said in the Gospel of John, and almost everything in the other gospels as well. But they love Thomas . . .
Early church writers commented at length on various heresies they disputed with, so scholars have known all along that there were numerous documents which purported to be alternative gospels, and even had quotations from some of them. Most of these were written by one faction or another of the Gnostic movements.
Gnosticism apparently derived from mystical traditions of the Greeks and Egyptians, which were blended with Christian ideas to form Christian Gnosticisms. Their common central notion is that the world is evil, the soul is at least potentially pure, and can be liberated from bondage to the evil world and illusion by secret and sacred knowledge (gnosis, hence the name). They concocted chains of created creators to explain how an evil world could be created, and corresponding realms of existence and secret passwords to enter them. Because the world is evil, sex and childbearing were deprecated. They insisted on mystical interpretations of Jesus' life and sayings, rejecting a real crucifixion. They appeared rather late, with Gnostic schools flourishing from about 135 AD and later. Some sects were more successful than others--Valentinus' followers were still around at about 300 AD. Because they insisted on mystical interpretations, they had no compunctions about writing their own gospels--which they meant to be mystically true, albeit not literally true.
Discoveries over the past 150 years have recovered many of these documents. The largest of these seems to be that at Nag Hammadi. Not all of the documents are necessarily from Christian Gnosticism--"some have no words or names even loosely associated with Christianity," and there's part of Plato's Republic as well. Other texts include a Gospel of Mary, Thunder Perfect Mind, a Gospel of Philip, Pista Sophia [found and published a hundred years ago], and so on. Twenty of these are collected in The Complete Gospels.
The most famous of these 'gospels' is the Gospel of Thomas, known by fragments until its discovery sixty years ago. The Gospel of Thomas opens with the words "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." The obvious implication of the very first sentence is that the reader already knows of public sayings and stories of Jesus. Hence Thomas cannot be earlier than Q (in whatever form Q may have been). Thomas is a "sayings" book, and contains no history. It combines versions of known statements by Jesus (presumed to be from Q), statements that Jesus could have made consistently with orthodoxy, and gnostic parables and philosophy that are not only distinctly non-orthodox, but are plainly quite late--dating from at least AD 135 and probably much later. It has dialogs including Mary Magdalen or Salome, characteristic of "Gnostic texts of the late second and third centuries."
Yet the Jesus Seminar folks want it dated 50-70 AD and treated as an independent source, equal to Q (which nobody has seen, by the way) and superior to the canonical gospels. Somebody has an agenda here. They profess to discern "levels" in Q, some earlier or perhaps due to different witnesses.
I'd like to see their methods for unraveling the contributions to a text made by different writers at different dates tested in a double blind experiment. The fact that they often disagree with each other is strong evidence that textual criticism at that level is better classified as amusement than either art or science, but I'm willing to give them another chance. I can well believe that Thomas had several writers tinker with it, but that's a pretty dramatic case.
The Jesus Seminar group try to shoehorn various hypothetical gospels (Gospel of Signs) and fictional gospels (Gospel of Peter) and Gnostic gospels (Gospel of Thomas) into the first century, and push back the canonical ones as far (and farther) than they can--to give their pet theories about Christianity priority. And the theories they like say that early Christianity was non-doctrinal, non-liturgical, non-hierarchical, and woman-affirming. All but the last are known to be quite false.
The Nag Hammadi texts that caused such a great stir turn out, as Jenkins points out, to convey nothing revolutionary at all--merely more documents of types and nature already known. The speculative claims dressed up as scholarship about "many Christianities" and "egalitarian Christianities" are the same ones trotted out at the beginning of the last century. The newspapers and magazines cheerfully publicize noisy claims, but have no skill (or apparent interest) in putting them into scholarly context, or reporting when the claims are refuted. Old knowledge isn't news--fresh lies are. And so we have popularizations (From Jesus to Christ, The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Search for Jesus), all professing to be the voice of scholarship discovering a woman-centered Christianity with no hierarchy and no difficult doctrines or rules; but these popularizations actually represent the far fringes.
A sample: It is difficult to convey just how arcane the Gnostic scriptures
are without quoting documents in full, particularly since they require knowledge of
a whole mythological vocabulary, but here is a typical example from one of the Nag
Hammadi texts, the Letter of Peter to Philip. The dialog begins when "the
apostles answered and said, 'Lord, we would like to know the deficiency of the aeons
and their pleroma.'" And: "How are we detained in this dwelling place?" Jesus
replies,
First of all concerning the deficiency of the aeons, this is the deficiency, when the disobedience and the foolishness of the mother appeared without the commandment of the majesty of the Father. She wanted to raise up aeons. And when she spoke, the Arrogant One followed. And when she left behind a part, the Arrogant One laid hold of it, and it became a deficiency. This is the deficiency of the aeons. Now when the Arrogant One had taken a part, he sowed it. And he placed powers over it and authorities. And he enclosed it in the aeons which are dead. And all the powers of the world rejoiced that they had been begotten.
Yes, I've read the Gospel of Thomas. I've read the canonical four. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are tied to places and times. Thomas sails off into fantasy land. It doesn't take a genius to tell which is more reliable.
If you've been looking at some of these "alternative" gospels, or have friends who have, then get ahold of Hidden Gospels and find out some of the facts around the hype. If not: the executive summary is that the latest finds tell us a little more about second and third century Gnosticism, but nothing about first century Christianity--claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
To clarify: When I refer to the War On Terror I mean the war against the AlQaida and allied groups with Salafi/Wahhabi goals. There are other terrorist groups and ideologies; and there are groups which could join forces with the Salafis against us, notably the Shiites. Recall that the current suicide bomber cult had its origins in Khomeini's Shiite theology. While it is true that the Wahhabis hate the Shiites, they both agree that we're infidels.
So, indicators that things are going well could include:
I could go on, but life is short.
In this (second volume of a set) book Stark (who also wrote The Rise of Christianity) sets forth the claim that it was largely impetus from devout Christians trying to do God's work that caused the rise of science in the West, witch burning, and the abolition of slavery.
The skeptical Encylopediasts of the Enlightenment thought quite highly of themselves, but the bulk of the scientific work was done by others, in a natural progression from medieval theology. A great deal of historical and polemical revisionism obscured this--most people have the wrong idea of what Galileo's offenses were, for instance; or buy into the polemical lie that people believed the Earth was flat before Columbus. (It seems the clerical advisers objected {correctly} that Columbus estimate for the Earth's radius was too small.)
Why witch-hunts? Wherever people believe in witches, witches are killed, but only in Europe were there hunts. Why? If the only sources of power are God or the Satan, and some people have supernatural power that isn't from God, what other choice could there be? The earlier Church was wiser, and held both witchcraft and believing in witchcraft to be offenses (making accusations a bit hard to manage). The infamous Spanish Inquisition turns out to have been far more interested in reconciling witches than burning them (very few died), and he finds most of the witch crazes happened in regions with little central political or religious control.
Some of those same supporters of witchcraft=Satanism were also devoted to the abolition of slavery. The vast majority of opponents to slavery were Christian, and opposed it on Christian theological grounds. Various popes issued bulls against it for centuries. Stark endeavors to show that slavery was less oppressive in Catholic America than Protestant America, but I'm afraid the numbers say otherwise. Only in the Protestant Southern USA did slaves actually multiply: everywhere else (including the Protestant British Caribbean) their numbers had to be maintained by continued importation. Islam did not, and could not, develop an anti-slavery theology--Muhammad owned slaves himself.
In an amusing note on a section about the effects of different religions on attitudes, he points to a study finding a positive correlation between frequency of prayer and personal ethics--except among Japanese or Chinese, who often expect tangible good luck from prayers. Some Chinese have been known to whip idols which failed to deliver on the prayed-for results.
The book was on hold for someone else, so I can't supply nice quotes. Stark shows what different philosophies can mean in terms of society and science, and documents a great deal of misinformation about the history of science. Read it.
"I have spent most of my life in recovery from the Church" says Yancey. His home church he describes as racist, "fundamentalist," and contentious, and at the "burial" of his home church (disbanding because of falling membership in a changing neighborhood), he visualized against the crowd of alumni a "procession of those not present, people like my brother, who had turned away from God in large part because of this church."
Yet despite the failings (evils) of his home church, there was still something there. And despite the failings of the thirteen men who became his "mentors," he found evidence of God's grace in all. He eventually could forgive his church--and even himself.
If you recognize all the names in his chapters you're doing better than I, although I'd heard of the work of a few whose names I didn't know.
For those who know Yancey's work, one common theme is what sense to make of pain, failure, and our own betrayals of what we ought to know and refuse to obey. Over and over again, despite the curses of oppression or poverty or disease, you can hear "Blessed are the poor." The Protestant circles I generally travel in don't talk much about the redemptive power of suffering. It seems odd that a curse we're called on to alleviate could also be a blessing: but then that's God for you--always able to outmaneuver circumstances.
Each of these "mentors" addressed something in Yancey's life. King's devotion to Christian nonviolence was eye-opening to Yancey, as he saw an "inferior" so clearly superior and prophetic. That King wasn't perfect doesn't mean he could not be a prophetic voice for our time--the Bible is full of imperfect servants of God.
From Chesterton he relearned joy.
It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I have never even seen a book on "the problem of pleasure." Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question: the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians.(And I can't resist including this famous quote from Chesterton:)
"To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it . . . Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex: it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind."
From the chapter on Dr. Robert Coles:
What transformed a physician and social scientist into a devotee of literature? Coles answers, "A man like Tolstoy knew more psychology than the whole twentieth-century social scene will ever know. All this stuff about the stages of dying coming out now--why not just go back and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It said everything. And who has added any wisdom to the field of marital problems since Anna Karenina? And Dickens, oh my, what Dickens knew about human nature! I simply wander around from one place to the next, teaching these novels and trying to, in a way, undo the devil in the medical school, law school, and business school."
Gandhi was, of course, no Christian, but he tried to apply some of Jesus' precepts, putting his own life on the line. The world knows most of that story. And Gandhi serves as an indictment to the "name it and claim it" Christian worshipers of self-fulfillment, and a demonstration of what power there is in obeying even a little of God's commands.
With Brand, "for the first time in my life, I encountered genuine
humility." A missionary surgeon; the man who discovered how leprosy
really destroyed (and how to stop it); a man who dedicated years of his
life to finding ways to repair damaged hands and feet; and more.
I can't do justice to this book in a few paragraphs. Since I got it for Christmas I've tried to get 4 or 5 other people to read it. You read it too. That's Soul Survivor by Yancey.
How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the Western world in a few centuries.
OK, I'll confess that I never expected a sociologist to be a good literary stylist. Perhaps I'm just not well enough read in the field, but the others I've read have been mediocre at best. Rodney Stark is a sociologist turned historian who tries to use the analytical techniques of his field in history. His method is explicitly reductionist: can the rise of Christianity be understood non-miraculously?; or perhaps better ask can we understand the mechanism of the rise of Christianity?, ignoring the question of whether the mechanism was Divinely guided or not.
The book seems largely assembled from individual papers, each of which attempts to quantify growth rates and influences--and a number of his conclusions contradict the received wisdom.
The first chapter is dedicated to demonstrating that a growth rate of 40% (known to be achievable--see the Mormons) is adequate to explain the estimates of a majority of Christians in the Empire by 350 AD. Obviously the rate wouldn't be steady, and his initial estimates of the number of Christians conflicts with that in Acts. Mass conversions are not necessary to explain the growth, and known principles of networking (some of which he researched) can explain the conversion rate. His research studying Moonies and Moonies-to-be found that the group of Moonies converted friends, and not strangers; and the friends converted when their network of friends became predominantly Moonie. Converts were mainly "from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented and those affiliated with the most accommodated (worldly) religious communities." He demonstrates how these features pertain to the Roman Empire through the book.
He goes on to gleefully shred some of the sociologists who use metaphor as models ("Durkheim's 'discovery' that religion is society worshiping itself . . . How would one falsify that statement, or assertions to the effect that religion is a neurotic illusion or the poetry of the soul?")
In "The Class Basis of Early Christianity" he explains his distinction between a sect and a cult and their social differences. A sect is a schism in an existing "religious body when persons desiring a more otherworldly version of the faith break away to 'restore' the religion to a higher level of tension with its environment." A cult is a new faith (at least new in that society). Cults tend to attract better educated/upper class members dissatisfied with the existing religions. New age religions and offshoots are more common among the better educated than the less so. Sects tend to attract the less privileged. Examples: in a 1977 poll 17% of those with college experience were attracted to Zen, compared with 5% who had none; while 6% of those in college had been involved in faith healing while 11% of those with only grade school had been: cult vs sect. Early Christianity, though Roman officials at first thought it a sect of Judaism, was a cult in this sense of the word--a new religion. And lo and behold, Christianity seems to have attracted quite a number of high status converts, as he expects a cult to do.
Then he addresses "The Mission to the Jews: Why it Probably Succeeded." He compares the Hellenized Jews (the majority) and "God-Fearers" to the marginalized Jews of Europe who developed Reform Judaism. The Marcion affair indicates to him that Jewish Christianity was dominant in the middle of the second century. Marcion tried to simplify some issues with the Old and New Testaments by claiming that the Old Testament God wasn't the same as the New Testament's, so we should drop the Old and strip out OT references from the New. This is what you'd expect of a Gentile group, and the heresy was promptly stepped on; which is what you'd expect of a largely Jewish group.
I can't summarize easily his analysis of women in the church, and why it was a far more welcoming environment than the pagan world surrounding it. Suffice it to say that a baby girl in a Christian family was far more likely to survive than one born to a pagan Roman one. Some parts of this chapter need a strong stomach.
Go read the book. I have to give it back to the library, but The Rise of Christianity is now on my "Buy Myself A Copy" list.
On a related note (:-)), you've undoubtedly noticed that bands marching in a parade invariably sound ragged, or not quite professional. Sometimes this is because they haven't practiced enough yet, but even the best ones suffer from being spread out along the street. If they all hit the beat at exactly the same time, a listener at the rear of the procession will hear the drums from the rear immediately, but those from the front a fraction of a second later. The bigger the group the worse the effect. Notice how closely packed the players in an orchestra are?
