Fitna

The death threats that accompanied the publication of this short movie seem to validate its premise--that Islam is intrinsically violent, and requires reform.

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.

Cone and Wright

Everybody seems to be writing about Wright. This is an interesting take on the prophetic aspects of his work.

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."

Tranquil?

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.

Spring is here!

All the signs of spring are here:

• Notes on the calendar say so
• A squib in the newspaper says so
• Somebody hit a skunk on the highway near our house
• My better half killed a fly in the living room
• The daffodils are buried in 6 inches of wet snow

Check. It's spring.

Meth followup

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.

Clarke

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?"

In the neighborhood

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?

Birth rates

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.

Aesop's Fables

translated by Laura Gibbs

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.

Piracy

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.

Good to see they weren't all eaten

The Zoological Society of London spotted Liberian pygmy hippos in the forest. It was feared they'd all been eaten during the civil war, but apparently some survived. They were already very rare, and now are very much rarer--but you can't blame the refugees. They had to eat.

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.

WCRP

Do you know what cantankerous means? Your boat is bobbing wildly in the harbor.

Across the pond

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.

Geneva again

I spent most of the trip working with a colleague to get a software project completed, or at least ready for testing. We succeeded in the latter goal, though not the former. The required remaining changes are few and fairly straightforward, though.

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.

Primary in Wisconsin

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.

OK, I guess I wouldn't

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.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Guilt

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.

Headline of the hour

Paleontologists discover new meat-eating dinosaur fossils

Pandemonium in the museum during mad race for the exit.

Shuttle

I remember the countdowns to the Mercury launches, and the excitement of hearing men actually flying into space. And I remember the Mercury model I had. And of course I remember the moon landing.

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.

Okay....

From The Star classified ads for Feb 14:

LOOKING FOR home bible study or home church and Used Treadmill

Florida

It was startling to get off the airplane in the tiny international airport of Melbourne, and find that cars had to be air-conditioned instead of scraped and heated. Lots of palm trees, 75 degree clear sky (which I don't actually get to see much of), road construction and a sign warning of alligators in the pond--that's this corner of Melbourne.

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.

Easy to see after the fact

God created the world, and also sustains it, as we are told from scripture. Creating and sustaining are two aspects of the same thing, of course, as we can easily infer from the unity of space and time, but the important thing is that both creation and sustaining are chosen. The world would not be maintained a moment if God did not act to do so.

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.

WCRP

So zoos find that birds can have arrhythmias--and the larger the bird, the worse it gets! A crow might need emergency attention once every couple of years, but the emu sees a cardiac unit every other month, an ostrich even more often; and you don't want to be between a roc and a heart place.

Vitamin D

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.

American Islam, The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion

by Paul M. Barrett

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:

• Osama Siblani, a publisher in Dearborn
• Khaled El Fadl, a scholar
• Siraj Wahhaj, an Imam
• Asra Nomani, a feminist agitator
• Abdul Kabir, a Sufi leader
• Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a webmaster
• Mustafa Saied, a radical who reformed

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.

Hypnopaedia?

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...

Bread and circuses

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.

When the weather warms. ..

Now that the temperature has climbed up from windy -12F to a relatively mild +12F, people are unwrapping their faces and on campus I see red cold-chapped noses and cheeks and even (il faut souffrir pour etre belle) cleavage.

Current usage

Modern idioms insinuate themselves everywhere. My better half had been cleaning the counters and put back the appliances when she was done. Youngest Son asked "Is the toaster online?"

Is that a T-Rex lurking behind the snowbank?

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.

Rock Art

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.

Bobby Fischer

I remember the Fischer-Spassky match well. The games were printed in the International Herald Tribune, and I'd cover the game with a card and try to figure out what each player's next move would be. Sometimes the card slipped and I missed a set of moves and wound up thoroughly confused. (Once or twice there was a misprint in the paper, too.) It was quickly pretty plain that I wasn't a grandmaster. We rooted for Bobby the underdog of course (the Russians dominated the chess field).

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

On shift again

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.

Die Große Stille

We watched Into Great Silence tonight. There was an oddity or two: the French text had “give up everything and follow me” to be a disciple, but the German and English translations left off the “follow me” part, for instance.

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.

Copyrighting Pyramids

So Egypt is planning to copyright ancient Egyptian designs, including the pyramids. This should be a great boon to Imhotep and his heirs and assigns. Where they can be identified. For the unexpired copyrights. Where Egyptian law pertains.

Transience and futility of power

This article was pointed out to me this morning: a meditation on the transience of power by Paul Johnson, about how powerful men fall, like the rest of us, to the grim reaper; and all their plans evaporate. Nicely done, but he spoils it at the end:

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!"

Candidates

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.

Am I in a bad mood?

Courage

This judge has courage. If he believes in the gods, he knows they might show up and charge him

Zap!

While waiting for his ride this evening, Youngest Son walked across the rug to sniff the long-stemmed narcissus flowers growing in the dish. He was startled by a static shock to his nose.

Writer's strike

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.

Mines

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?

Department Meeting

The Department meeting today covered a wide range of topics--too many for the time allowed. One that caught my eye was a proposed new course Seeking Truth, Living with Doubt, to be based on the book by Marshall Onellion and Steven Fortney. Onellion had worked with a lecture series at the library on faith and reason; one of whose speakers was Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists. Red flags immediately--Hedges, to the best of my observation, lied.

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.

Translation music again

On Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin tonight he played both the French and English versions of "Les feuilles mortes" / "Autumn Leaves" by Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert (English by Johnny Mercer). I'd commented earlier that you could tell the original language, but it wasn't true this time. I think this may be because the melody is so forgiving--extra syllables slide in naturally. Both sound fine, neither seems more awkward than the other.

The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

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.

Lazy Sunday

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.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

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 not local history?

I noticed in this article from the Isthmus that Madison was Copperhead territory during the Civil War. Certainly an interesting, if not especially noble, aspect to the history of the town.

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...

Shed preconceptions about mental health maintenance

This is brilliant.

State and Family

Youngest daughter had an interesting insight last night. In China, the baleful one-child policy didn't just create "little kings." It created a society without aunts or uncles or cousins or neices or nephews. It skeletonized the family.

Funny how you can tell

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."

Did they mean that?

In Chalmonix we saw a store called Amazone Lingerie on Ravanel la Rouge. You do remember the legends of the Amazons, who cut off the right breast so it wouldn't interfere with the bowstring when shooting, right? Somebody didn't.

25% of Germans...

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.

Non-dancing men

In the US airports there's a man with two glowing pointers guiding airplanes into the gate. In Brussels, there's nobody. I wonder if this is featherbedding in the US or a real safety issue.

Dancing Men

The Ethiopian airlines logo looks like the Dancing Men from the Sherlock Holmes story.

Despair or envy?

A friend from our old church said there was to be a special church meeting last Thursday. Saturday there was a big tent up, which was odd, and on Sunday there were 4 or 5 men guiding parking in the newly renamed “Heartland” church. My wife and I talked about that briefly, and I thought there must have been a merger.

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?”

Travel reports

Middle Daughter is used to noise, but not the noise of her new host family in Dakar, Senegal. She met them last night, and knows 5 names out of the fifteen or so going in and out. She also has not figured out who is an in-law, a younger child or an older grandchild. She sounded a little dazed. We tried calling the number she gave us, but the message said it was disconnected

About Red Oak: It's in North Aurora, IL, along the east bank of the Fox River. I hear that Jim the manager is still there after 20-odd years. I used to take Eldest Son and Eldest Daughter to see the six foot bull snake and the raptors waiting for their wings to heal. The beehive's glass case is built into the wall, and Eldest Daughter always looked for the queen bee. Middle daughter wouldn't remember it, and the younger ones have never been there.

Our apartment complex was then at the edge of civilization. We took plaster casts of deer tracks and turned in some of our discoveries, such as a fox skull, to Red Oak. The lot was home to half a million caterpillars. I once had to chase a muskrat out of the hall; the door didn't close properly until after the muskrat had wandered in, and he was not happy. Right after we moved back to Wisconsin, the bulldozers came through. The Pick-your-own-raspberry farm with its petting zoo and ice cream shop, our half million caterpillars, and a lot of Illinois countryside disappeared in a hurry.

Red Oak's trails were short enough for toddlers to handle but long enough for them to find something interesting. There are now longer trails and a bike path.

Hello Crow lived in an old grain bin, just off the trail around the bend from the nature center. People had been greeting him with "hello" for years, and so he would always hop to the edge and croak, "'Ello, 'ello, 'ello." He was a very friendly bird. One day we didn't see him and I asked Vince, the assistant at the time, where Hello Crow was. Vince said blandly, "Hello Crow died the other day." Later, with the kids out of earshot, he told me that some teenagers had stabbed the bird when he came up to greet them.

The nature center now has a lobby, an auditorium, and office space. The office space Jim used to use is now serving its proper function as a storage closet. The old raptor room has reptiles and amphibians, including a delightful fat salamander and a huge Florida king snake. The bees and the play-with-it table, with deer antlers and fox skulls and snake skins, is the same as before, except for new paint. I'm glad we took the detour.

Mrs. James

Her keys are in a box on the bookcase

We dropped her off at O'Hare, together with her friend also going to Senegal; had a hug, said a prayer, and she dragged her huge suitcases into Terminal 3 in search of Iberian Airlines. Apparently she was able to get the one problematic one on board with an overage payment; I was afraid it was going to exceed the absolute limit.

We worry, of course. The malaria suppressants didn't prevent one attack on the earlier trip. And accidents happen frequently in places where cars are ill-maintained and stars serve as street lights. And she doesn't always suffer fools gladly.

She's lived away from us for a long time now, but we'd usually see her for dinner every other week or so (me more often, since her student job was in the same building I work in). But this will be 10 months, or more if there are strikes (and there will be: teacher strikes and student strikes and random strikes).

We'll miss her, though I'm glad to see her fly.

I called it an adventure last night. Adventures are “Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner.” She's going to be 10 months late for dinner.

---

The better half and I and her older sister didn't go straight home, but went to Red Oak Nature Center, where her older sister and brother used to watch the bees and snakes and owls and walk the trail by the river. The almost tame Hello Crow was killed years ago. Some things were the same, but 18 years makes for a very different perspective—in all senses, and Oldest Daughter had to get down on her knees to see the bees the same way she used to. Just like Ricks had shrunk for me.

Party UPDATE

Apparently when I was elsewhere the fellow trying to hit on the young lady used a different line; considerably coarser. He only talked politely when I was around. And the Green Beret/Marine/Army fellow had to be persuaded at knife point to back away from blocking one man's exit from a bathroom stall. Wish somebody had mentioned little details like that to me earlier...

Boss-Man

I knew days before we went that we'd have uninvited guests, and we'd have to feed them. That was pretty obvious from the location; and the Luke 14:16-24 reading from the night before had been a pretty clear reminder.

Middle Daughter heads to Senegal next week to study for a year, and a send-off party was in order. She posted the announcement on Facebook and had 5 replies in 2 minutes. At least 37 friends from high school, from college, from work at college, from frisbee league, from church and old friends and family RSVP'd—and showed up.

On only 3 weeks' notice, and constrained to find a picnic shelter downtown, the only place available was Brittingham Park. Its a beautiful spot by Lake Monona, with spacious grounds, a nice shelter, and bike path by the lake. Why hadn't somebody else snaffled it earlier?

Because that's where the bums and the drug dealers hang out.

The better half made Jolof rice (veggie or lamb) and curry, made tomatillo dip, bought veggie trays and chips and soda and the other trimmings. (One of Middle Daughter's friends brought beer and hard lemonade later.) All was carefully packed in the van, together with brooms and cleanser and paper towels.

When we arrived there were about 20 black men hanging around the shelter, and several other men sleeping on benches. One offered to take charge of getting the place set up for us, and did. We offered him food, and he and his assistants ate and left—sort of. He came back later requiring “change,” and I was able to truthfully claim to have almost none on me. Over the course of the afternoon he became more and more bombed (not on stuff from our party, though) and a nuisance. He wound up with 3 plates of food, the last two piled up in a revolting mess. I don't think he learned that in the Marine/Army sniper group he claimed to have served in.

After about 40 minutes or so the first guests started to arrive. They weren't hungry. MD was having a good time talking with them, though. More started trickling in, and then a few more. I'd no notion who most of them were, of course—do fathers ever know them all?

Then Eldest Son brought the two youngest kids for an hour, and the food consumption started in earnest. A bleary gentleman with a bike importuned some food (though he disparaged all forms of processed sugar (at length)), and tried to chat up one young lady with the conversational line that she should hang out with boys her own age and not old guys like him. He required a substantial amount of my time. He called me Boss-Man, and explained the virtues of having a street name—because then you could honestly tell the cops you didn't know the real name. After I'd run interference a few times he asked me if I was prejudiced. Some of my wife's family were just arriving, so I told him No, I grew up in Africa, and learned a lot of things there. One of them was to take care of your family, and I was going to do that. Now. He got the message, and slowly took his fried brain elsewhere.

I wished I'd taken notes on how my father dealt with the importunate and marginally present. He was the original “Boss-Man” back in Liberia.

Several people called MD for directions. The party was in the section of the shelter facing the lake, and from the road all people could see was the drug dealers (who didn't bother us, fortunately).

My better half's father and cousins came to celebrate the adventurer, and three old friends from church. In and out went various homeless guys asking for food, which they got, together with a quick lesson on African food in America. More of MD's friends came and went, and seemed to be having a good time talking together and meeting people they'd only heard about.

A squat fellow with squint and glassy eyes tried to buttonhole guests. My wife enlisted her father's help, who proceeded to collar him and talk to him about the plan of salvation. Not quite what he expected, I suppose.

A duck that must have been a cross between three different strains of wild and domestic wandered about, and a couple of immature ones waddled through and between looking for spilt bread and chips: a very helpful and amusing cleanup crew. One of MD's highschool friends is afraid of ducks, unfortunately.

A classmate of Middle Daughter's from Yoruba came by just as we were about to end the festivities. He'd been an economic consultant. One day he asked himself why he was doing this dull job when he had no family to support, and joined the Peace Corps, then went back to school. He's older than I, and hoping for a PhD.

One of our old friends walked around the shelter, to be met with the greeting “Hello officer.” Which rather surprised her, since she hasn't worked as a police officer for many years, and she's not very tall. Must be something about her bearing, since the dealers agreed they'd not seen her before nor she them.

We rolled up the sidewalk at 6, but weren't able to clean up properly because a Korean student group (not scheduled) showed up and started putting their stuff all over the benches. The remaining veggies and pop my wife arranged that the homeless men take. We weren't quite out of food, but almost. We'd have had to take home a lot more, and much would have gone to waste, if not for the homeless men hanging around the place.

We left. MD hung around talking with friends until the mosquitoes came out.

The party seemed successful, on the whole.

Overheard conversations 2

The seats in airports are close together, and when there's a lull in the announcements you can sometimes hear other people. One lady, I guess in her early to mid thirties, was complaining that all the interesting men with either “gay or taken.”

Whee! What a can of worms. I assume that when she said “interesting men” she meant husband material, since one can usually discuss art or philosophy with someone else's spouse. So she's wondering why she can't find potential husbands.

The two classes of men she mentioned are easily understood; though there's a third class she didn't mention and an underlying question she didn't think of. Homosexuality is currently popular, and appears to be more popular among the higher income and education levels—which are groups more sensitive to fashions. And eligible men who are willing to marry aren't likely to wait around a few years to find a better Miss Right: if they find one they'll probably marry her. (I don't believe the notion that there's a one-and-only somewhere in the world; I think there's a pool to pick the one-and-only from.)

She didn't mention a third class of men sometimes called “Peter Pans” who don't want to grow up and are afraid to choose. I hope this was because she didn't find them interesting. I gather they are fairly common, though I know very few. I guess not many are willing to make the commitment of years of study either.

There's an underlying issue as well. It seems to be true that a wife needs to be able to look up to her husband, to understand that some quality about him is exceptional, admirable, superior. (That's a dangerous word—but understand that we have many qualities, and superiority in one doesn't mean one is a superior being. If you don't understand that point, don't bother complaining about this essay.) Common traditional qualities are that the man is strong and a good provider. Others qualities (sometimes to the dismay of parents) are that the man is a creative artist, or adventurous, and so on. Whatever it may be, she apparently needs to feel that there is something valuable in him that she lacks enough of. The husband presumably notices that there are qualities in his wife that he admires, but the subject here is the woman's complaint.

OK, here's the catch. The traditional “good provider” quality generally translates into “good income” these days. If she is well educated and has a good career, the pool of men with a better income than hers, or a better education than hers, is substantially smaller. Not only is the pool smaller, but the rate of homosexuality is higher (fashion sensitive), and the competition for the attention of men is higher and so the chances that an eligible man will already be taken is higher. This isn't a new observation, by the way, but it does seem to rouse vicious antagonism. Of course there are divorced men, but they are obviously poor risks.

You can chalk up the smaller pool of men as an unintended side effect of the woman's career, or you can ask what it is that the woman values. Is it possible that she might value and take comfort in a man's superiority in something other than money-making? It is obviously easier to be comforted by the sense that the man can take care of you, but we've always had a minority view that some other qualities are also important.

If that's the answer for her, it isn't a comfortable one.

Overheard conversations

I was near enough to hear, but not to become a part of, a conversation involving some people I knew and a number of graduate students I didn't. The conversation turned to marriage, and the grad students started batting around statistics, including those that said that men lived longer and women shorter lives when married. So why, a couple of them asked, would a woman want to get married? The answer seemed clear enough: Achilles' choice (a short life with glory or a long life and be forgotten); but there was no way for an outsider to jump in.

WCRP

The US hasn't switched to metric yet: from lack of litership?

Geneva and CERN

The Meyrin site feels a lot like old town Geneva. The streets are narrow, curved, and short, the buildings seem randomly aligned, and entrances surprise you. When you feel you can't get there from here, know that somewhere is a hidden alley or doorway that the natives understand. In both the land runs up hill and down dale, the cobblestones of the city reappear in the edging of the walkways, and much seems old.

But it is much more like what old town Geneva must have been: not aswamp with tourists but with workers and carts going to and fro. A few places are for refreshment, but most is for work; and the farms are very close.

Fermilab spreads itself. It seems more like a collection of small villages than a city, with acres to roam in. Even the center, with its high-rise and a ring of accelerator buildings, feels rural, with woods and lakes.

Today

I haven't forgotten.

I wonder at how eager men are to believe lies. Old and thoroughly discredited, or new and absurd; anything at all will do.

I wonder about how porous our security really is. We keep getting probing attacks, and bland assertions that the incident was benign, with apologies to the offended probers. Not a trivial concern for me, since I fly from time to time (Saturday).

I wonder how the history books a hundred years from now will describe us. They may not describe us at all: after all, important history only starts with the "end of the age of ignorance."

Firewater

AP reports that "an Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water," "using a radio frequency generator he developed to treat cancer". "The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel."

I suppose they couldn't resist a story like this: free energy and a cancer cure in the same article. No doubt it clears up acne and grows new hair too.

On Killing

The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col Dave Grossman

The subtitle tells the point of the book. Why do so few soldiers kill, and what happens to them when they do?

The first clause may seem counterintuitive: quite a few soldiers were killed during the Civil War, WWI and WWII, what is the author referring to?

He brings up the Napoleonic wars as evidence as well, and tries to reference the wars among the Greek cities (though he's on very shaky ground there). If you use the accuracy of the Prussian soldiers (measured at firing ranges), count the number of men in a square who can fire at any one time, and see how close the enemy soldiers were standing; you estimate a casualty rate several orders of magnitude higher than what actually appears to have been the case. From this he concludes that most of the soldiers were “posturing” (firing in the air to frighten) because they couldn't bring themselves to kill. In this case there's another explanation: the smoke helped conceal, and, as Devil Anse Hatfield pointed out, it isn't all that easy to hit somebody who doesn't stand still.

His Civil War inferences are more solid: the same problem of far more shots than casualties; but in addition there's the tidbit that when scavenging the battlefield afterwards for discarded muskets, almost half were not just loaded but double-loaded. Your buddies beside you can't quite tell if you shoot, but loading was done standing up, and everybody could see if you were reloading your weapon. A few muskets had been reloaded almost to the muzzle! Misfires could not have been that common—it wasn't raining.

World Wars I and II were conducted with a lot more attention to effectiveness, and after-the-war interviews disclosed that in WW II only 15-20 percent of men in combat fired their weapons.

So how come so many died? Napoleon thought the answer was artillery, and it was certainly lethal during the Civil War as well. In WW I the answer was the machine gun—which is a remote weapon manned by a crew. It would be useful to cross-check this with casualty reports from army hospitals, but this the author does not do. Were most injuries/deaths from infantry rifle bullets or machine gun bullets or artillery damage? The data is probably available somewhere.

Aha. Found something. An essay on medical care in WW I. “In the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), 20,420 men were treated for wounds inflicted by rifle balls, a combined 51,226 were treated for wounds by either shrapnel or shell and an additional 74,883 were treated for wounds by an unspecified gunshot missile.[14] The Surgeon General's post-war report concluded that, "Taken as a whole, the percentage of wounds from exploding missiles probably varied, from 50 to 80 percent being the highest when battle conditions were most stabilized, as in trench warfare."[15] This differs significantly from previous wars, such as the American Civil War, in which the Minie ball caused 94 percent of all battle wounds and artillery shell and canister approximately six percent. “

”The most prevalent battle injuries admitted into Medical Corps hospitals involved the lower extremities; 78,032 men were admitted with these injuries, with 5,722 (7.33 percent) eventually succumbing to their wounds. A list of the causes of these injuries, with the concurrent fatality rates listed in parenthesis, shows the emergence of artillery: rifle ball, 10,582 (3.69%), shell, 9,371 (9.10%), shrapnel, 18,182 (5.64%), and not specified, 39,897 (8.65%).[34] “

This does not deal with fatalities, which of course could result in a major bias in the data, unless rifle shots are relatively randomly aimed. (Gas killed about 3%, and can be ignored here.)

The Army took this to heart, and in Korea the rate was 75%, and in Vietnam 90%. Now whether this meant actually shooting at the enemy is an open question, as the author emphasizes. Current training is far more realistic, and American soldiers are significantly more effective than before.

Which, of course, means that they are more effective and accurate at killing. (And not killing when the they're not supposed to. I've used that shoot/no-shoot police training system—you have a fraction of a second to tell danger from innocence. They get good at it. Our group wasn't.)

At a distance, where there's no personal interaction, it is quite easy to kill. When surrounded by comrades running a war engine (as in artillery or machine guns) the social pressure is high and the guilt is divided (and the distance is usually large as well). Closer up, it is more traumatic for most men, and a common feature of the stories he quotes are of soldiers going off somewhere to throw up for a while.

The result, except for the 2-3% who are not empathetic, is a strong sense of guilt for those who had to kill an enemy close up, especially if they watched him die or found some humanizing details (family photo, etc) about him. Sometimes they could suppress this feeling of guilt, and sometimes not. The stress of guilt, lack of sleep/food/shelter, constant danger, and sense of hatred by enemies generally makes psychological casualties of soldiers after a few months in constant combat, which is why we do lots of rotations.

So what do you do with them when it is time to come home? He says many cultures demanded a purification ceremony first, but does not pursue this very interesting possibility. Instead he mentions the salutary effects of: spending a few weeks coming home with the buddies you had spent your time with, so that you could talk through things with people who understood; and being celebrated (parades, etc) by the population at home. Vietnam had neither. Soldiers were moved around quickly, did not apparently spend substantial time together in the field, much less on the way home; and the welcome they received is notorious (and apparently every bit as bad as was claimed).

OK, let's think about that “purification” angle again. The idea seems promising: a soldier feels guilty and needs a transition from “killing-ok” to civilian life. The first problem is that we as a nation do not have a single culture anymore, and any given religious ceremony of requesting/granting forgiveness, while it might be very beneficial, won't be understood/accepted by most of the troops. You would need many such types of ceremony, and the large chunk of effective atheists would be left out.

It is possible to train your population and soldiers to regard their opponents as subhuman, and this makes it much easier for them to kill, and to kill without guilt. Of course it means they're more apt to commit atrocities as well, which often work against you in the long run. In the short run, terrorism works quite well—much better than bombing from a distance.

It is also possible to desensitize your soldiers, so that they are not bothered so much by shattered bodies. We do this to some degree in training; other armies have been much more deliberate about it. The child soldiers in Africa are required to kill someone (preferably a family member) as part of their initiation. The SS were required to kill the pet dog they had trained.

And, as the author points out, our movies and video games are admirably designed to desensitize us (and especially impressionable youth) to violence and gore. This is intuitively obvious to any observer, but is also backed up with considerable research, but apparently we just do not care as a society that we immerse ourselves in extremely brutal violence. What you are immersed in affects you; advertisers know this quite well.

One major difference between the Friday the 13th desensitization program and that used by the army is that the latter includes discipline: when not to shoot. It will not surprise you to know that violent crime rates keep rising even though overall crime rates have fallen recently.

I suppose I should get back to that 2-3% of non-empathetic folks who kind of like killing. It turns out that they can come in several flavors. Some are the psychopaths who make ordinary life hell for everybody else: wolves. Others are disciplined sorts--“lawful good” for the gaming crowd--who like downing baddies: like sheepdogs. They're useful and good to have around.

Since various subsections of the book are meant to stand alone, there is a lot of repetition in the book. His anecdotes are compelling. (He describes himself sitting in a swamp eating live frogs as though this were the most natural thing in the world.) The book is not for the squeamish. If you can't read it, at least think over some of the problems he mentions.

UPDATE: See a later post about some problems with the numbers Grossman relied on. I don't think it invalidates his work.

In the Image and Likeness of God

by Vladimir Lossky

Lossky was called “one of the best Orthodox theologians of our time.” I'm trying to learn a little about Orthodoxy, and figured this might include some helpful explanations.

Well, sort of. It wasn't quite what I expected. It is a collection of related articles on aspects of Orthodox theology; some of them grimly punctuated with Greek and some (such as the one on Mary: Panagia) more devotional than didactic.

He attempts to explain the use of Tradition, which in Orthodoxy includes even the icons. One theme is the distinction between the public preaching and the secret (unspoken) teachings. He constantly references the Trinity as a way of understanding aspects of the Church and of persons, and puts a heavy emphasis on the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The importance of paradox receives attention also.

To put it briefly, let us say that a person can be fully personal only in so far as he has nothing that he seeks to possess for himself, to the exclusion of others; i.e., when he has a common nature with others. It is then alone that the distinction between persons and nature exists in all its purity; otherwise we are in the presence of individuals, dividing nature among themselves. There is no partition or division of nature among the three persons of the Holy Trinity. The Hypostases are not three parts of a whole, of the one nature, but each includes in Himself the whole divine nature.

He has a noble goal, but I think it is pretty plain that trying to use qualities of the Trinity to define lesser natures has some pitfalls. For instance, he says that it is impossible for a union of persons to also be a person, by the very nature of personhood. A moment's thought should dispel that argument: the union may be of a different nature, acting in a different, non-overlapping framework.

I wish some of the results of higher math were better known. It might keep people from making false dilemmas.

No, he didn't make a Russian Orthodox out of me.

I don't recommend the book unless you've a burning interest in Orthodoxy, and even then I suspect there might be better ones out there. Some parts had hair-splitting so detailed and (frankly) presumptuous that I found his criticism of dry and barren scholasticism ironic.

Old Habits

My father taught me to part my hair about a half inch above the corner of the side of the head, and I've been doing that ever since. However, I've acquired the secular tonsure, which runs into hair again about an inch from the corner, so when I part I'm combing about a half inch of nothing much across a bald spot. It looks silly, but since I rarely comb in front of a mirror I keep forgetting. 40 years worth of automatic motion seems to find its way into the muscles...

He also bought me a Norelco electric razor about 30 years ago. It's been in for new bushings and heads a couple of times, but parts are no longer available, and so when the switch went bad I shorted it out. It starts the moment I plug it in. But for thirty years, twice a day, I've been raising the instrument and thumbing the switch simultaneously, and I still try to turn on a running razor.

If my mind starts slipping when I get old, I suspect old habits of body will still be working; with gestures that used to be useful, but which then will only perplex.

Belated answer

I forgot to include the answer to the question I posed earlier this year. The answer is: England in the 1800's, as described by a Muslim writer.

Crickets

Eldest daughter called last night to remind us of the eclipse, and we went out to see. When we came back in, we were loudly reminded that a cricket had somehow migrated to our bedroom. It must have entered when flood-damaged rugs were being dragged out of the basement. We'd spotted the critter earlier, but the wiley beast got away. This time, though, there was a stack of unused homeschool materials handy (they were too workbook-y for our kids). There was no escape from the flying LifePAC of death!

Covenant Marriage

Sunday School was a little unusual at the church we visited. The teacher is a very talented raconteur, telling the old stories in new ways, heavily relying on The Message. But the talent in the class itself is even greater, with retired pastors and missionaries and seminary professors; so it seemed a little odd to have no to-and-fro.

The lesson was from Malachi; first addressing the priests who didn't take their job seriously (and then where does that leave the people who relied on them?--but we didn't get into that question), and moving on to divorce.

At which point the talk went straight into fog. Was she referring to the command to put away foreign wives in Ezra? To the injunction not to divorce unbelieving spouses if they were willing to stay married? She didn't say, though perhaps these things had come up before and the class knew what she meant. And then came a reference to “the one God meant for you,” which only seems relevant in Genesis (“Madam, I'm Adam”). And then a reference to “covenant marriage.”

The phrase was new to me, and set off the old alarm bells. Marriage is a covenant, and except for common-law marriage is an explicit one; so what's with the coinage? I get nervous when people start qualifying words like that; the result often stands on its head: like “People's Democracy.”

Wikipedia is your—well, not “friend,” exactly. Acquaintance? Covenant marriage is a marriage that requires premarital counseling and limits the grounds for divorce (abuse, adultery, felony with jail time). In other words, something rather like what we thought marriage was in the first place. Although in practice all you have to do to evade the provisions is go to a state that doesn't recognize it (47 don't) and dump your spouse there.

”No-fault” divorce was advertised as a way to keep lawyers out of a painful process that few would want to try. Both clauses seem to have been lies: lawyers are still involved and the divorce rate is now staggeringly high. The word marriage stayed the same, but the legal definition changed under it to make marriage the most easily abrogated contract we have, so long as you don't argue about property or custody. (Although it is sometimes easy to cancel a magazine subscription.)

For someone who wants a binding contract, there aren't many options.

I think the name “Covenant Marriage” is less than ideal. The “covenant” part certainly got some people's underwear in knots (they seem terrified of any hint of religion). Perhaps the coinage “Real Marriage” would be more accurate. Or maybe “Marriage Classic,” along the lines of a famous soft drink.

”Hard cases make bad law.” No doubt some people's lives were better thanks to no fault divorce, but it seems to have been an overwhelming disaster nonetheless. I'm not sure that enacting the possibility of “covenant marriage” is going to help the national divorce rate much, and if it does it will take decades. On the other hand, repealing no-fault is by now politically impossible. Even logical mild modifications, such as a probationary period (longer if there are children), may be out of reach. The culture has ratcheted its understanding of marriage into a paradigm of “rights” rather than one of union, and people hate to give up anything they conceive of as a right.

I started puzzling this out deeply suspicious of “covenant marriage,” and I still think the name is misleading, but perhaps this is a good idea. Perhaps it can grow a grassroots alternative to the semi-marriage the laws have left us.

I know there are objections that this reflects a Western, and thus Christian, and thus “unacceptably parochial” view of marriage. But even in the land of triple talaq marriages are not so unstable as here; even in France there's a probationary period. Our current situation is a mess. We have to choose some standards for family law; why shouldn't we permit one with extensive precedent and cultural roots, that was the standard within living memory?

Hot hiking

We reserved time at Turkey Run months ago. Since we're unlikely to be going back anytime in the near future, we had to take advantage of it while we could. No way will I sit in the cabin and watch TV (??), even if it is air-conditioned (ahhhh!). Sleep, yes :-) So we went hiking in the cool of the morning (85) and the evening (95), and just after we got there the first day (98). True, we were under tree cover, so the sun didn't bake us, but those temperatures are “in the shade” values. I wore a cloth hat to keep the ticks and sun off, and squeegeed a half teaspoon of water from the chin-strap. Was it the haze or delirium that made distant objects fuzzy?

The place is beautiful, the trails well-laid-out, and when they say Very Rugged they don't mean wheel-chair accessible: they mean you have to climb on a ledge or wade in a V-shaped rock stream-bed. No machetes required, and kids can handle it; but I took it easy and only got a few twinges from the knee. The runs are microclimates unlike the surrounding countryside, with trees you only find farther north.

We saw caves and a coal mine and fossils and walked a stream bed underneath a rock ceiling. The bird feeder at the nature center gathered about 20 hummingbirds, goldfinches, a squirrel and chipmunk and a couple of groundhogs, a tufted titmouse and juvenile cardinal, pigeon and lizard and some other things I didn't recognize. A microphone picked up their sounds so we could hear them indoors. I got a shot of 4 hummingbirds all sitting still at once on a feeder.

Rain soaked the place the day before, but left only a little mud in strategic ledge locations and a small trickle in the streams to remind us. The ladders were a little muddy too. In high water trail 3 would be a very tricky walk—demanding some kind of walking stick to keep you from slipping.

Much of the work was done by the CCC, just like Lincoln's New Salem. In fact, Lincoln's New Salem only lasted a few decades, and was reconstructed a hundred years later. Which means the CCC reconstruction has lasted almost 3 times as long as the original, and in a few more decades will date from longer ago from us than New Salem was from the CCC. If the Republic lasts, we'll probably see chunks of the walls they built sitting in museums.

A covered bridge (go through “at a walk”!), ravines and ledges, a suspension bridge, a sign saying “70 steps” down to the river (actually only 67), a young fox trying to catch a squirrel (must have been desperate), and dozens and dozens of “unofficial” trails. It is close to Indianapolis—must be swamped on weekends. (The outdoor pool is only open on weekends this late in the season.)

Delirium daydreams: what would people wear for hats in Eden? Birds, of course! Trained to spread their wings to shade you, or fan you when needed, bred with smoother claws for a gentle scalp massage, and ready to eat any ticks that landed on you...

Nice breakfast, even if some finicky people wouldn't touch sausage that had been on the same plate as eggs....

*

Barry Bonds breaks Aaron's record

making him the home run king. At least in America. He has a long way to go to reach the Japanese record.

No, I'm not a big baseball fan, but we hear enough of it in the house that it seems appropriate to take notice of events from time to time.

From the family Cubs fan, who is 90% scar tissue (to borrow a line from George F. Will), and who was born during Hank Aaron's 1957 World Series:

Barry Bonds was the best all-around ballplayer in the game when he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He could hit, field, steal, make tough plays look elegant and easy. He very likely would have been ticketed for Cooperstown before he decided to turn into a slugger, and he would have been a shoo-in. With no asterisk in sight.

Now he's a surly s.o.b. with a permanently sullied record. If he didn't cheat, he's gone way out of his way to look like he has.

Meanwhile, Sammy Sosa has cleaned up his act. In 2004, Sosa managed to squander years of goodwill in Chicago: the corked bat, the steroid rumors, the boombox driving his teammates crazy, the entourage, the ego as big as Lake Michigan. In Spring 2005, the Cubs unloaded Sosa on the Orioles. He endeared himself to Orioles fans, all right: his first public performance in Baltimore was a snit because the team didn't send a limo for him at his hotel. It went downhill from there, and the Orioles dumped him. Nobody touched Sosa for the 2006 season. Nobody.

He stayed in shape, he kept knocking on doors, and finally the Texan Rangers let him come to 2007 spring training with the following stipulations: no steroids, no corked bats, no boom box, no entourage, and leave his ego at home. He is earning somewhat more than a journeyman infielder would. In Texas, Sosa has been respectable on the field, if not spectacular. He hit his 600th career home run (against the Cubs) in July. He may yet get to Cooperstown.

Mrs James

Do they speak English?

Fliers stapled to phone poles sport a cross with HOPE emblazoned. Across the top it reads "Homelessness Outreach Prevention Effort." A clever acronym, but it doesn't quite mean what they think it does...