Liddell and Scott tell me that the Ancient Greek equivalent of "coals to Newcastle" is "owls to Athens".

A crocheted model of the Lorenz manifold. I've never even made a sweater. Instructions for the ambitious or foolhardy.

Via Science Fiction Blog.

Ich bin ein googlewhack.

Thank you, very odd web-searcher.

Two, actually.

I Am Become MAD SCIENCE, Destroyer of Worlds

Take that, Mr. (Oh, excuse me, Dr.) I'm-an-ex-Professor-so-I-don't-need-to-wear-a-tie-to-the-interview, and all your friends, the Better-Qualified-Than-You Bunch! Were you chosen to be a Mad Scientist? No. No, you were not. Because you didn't wear your lucky rocketship underpants!

I think I have revealed too much. To the Science Cave!

I have a job! Hee hee hee! Suckers!

Nietzsche v. Wagner

I have only two nits to pick with this excellent article. First nit:

Liébert struggles to make the case that Nietzsche was Wagner’s spiritual inferior: critical rather than creative, brilliant only in fragments, incapable of sustained flights of thought. Liébert fails to see how Nietzsche’s philosophic career was of a piece, how potent his own mythmaking capacity was, how his darting aphoristic style cohered with his conception of existence, in which the most honest theoretical man knows that the search for truth and not its supposed possession is the thing of supreme value. Nietzsche was a richer thinker than Wagner, and as fine an artist. No other post-Christian myth pierces the soul so profoundly as that of the eternal recurrence, and every other aspect of Nietzsche’s thought radiates from it. Like Wagner, Nietzsche was capable of callow monstrosity in his thought and rhetoric, and certain of his epigones were as loathsome as Wagner’s; indeed, the same Nazis who loved one usually loved the other. But of the two men there is no question who the superior was.

Eternal recurrence is the dullest possible form of immortality. It does not "pierce[] the soul". It bludgeons it.

Nit the second:

Tristan and Isolde could not understand how their moment of nonpareil bliss, which Wagner renders in the most sensually rapturous music ever written, might sustain a lifetime’s happiness in the everyday world. After peerless union such as theirs, death seems to offer the sole noble alternative to a gradual deterioration of their love. Tolstoy understood something essential that Wagner and Nietzsche did not: that the greatest part of love can survive and surpass even the most intense passion, and that what modern man most needs is not sublime myth but living truth.

I agree that Nietzsche never got it. But every time I hear the vorspiel to Parsifal, I'm convinced that Wagner did.

Still an excellent review of two books I'll probably never read. Via Arts and Letters Daily.

This is what a trichobezoar looks like. They can kill you.

I should mention that one of the pages I found had the immortal line, "If you suffer from Trichophagia, PLEASE consult a doctor as this can be extremely fatal."

UPDATE: From the Bombay Hospital Journal

Harapanahalli Bezoar

In addition to the above-mentioned phytobezoars; this one needs a special mention for its uniqueness. This kind of bezoar is caused by a pill said to be made from the blood of a species of chameleon in combination with certain East Indian drugs. This was used by a certain Brahmin widows of the Western Taluks of Bellary District (Pre-independence Madras Presidency, prior to the formation of Mysore State, which was later named as Karnataka) to cause the slow decline and death of strangers who happened to share their table. There is a superstition among them that this mode of doing away with young and energetic men, mostly executive officials[,] paves the way for their [that of the young men, or the widows'? --me] salvation. Whatever the object might be, the bolus of food in which it is administered forms the Bezoar, with the minute pill as the nucleus, and the food around never gets digested. This is proven by the fa[c]t that even after six months the vomited bezoar, if it fortunately occurs, contains the very food in which it was administered originally. This kind of Bezoar acts in the same manner as all the others and causes symptoms akin to them.

The season is hot. Bring me snow from Korea, that I may cool my brow.

Let's check a piece of this argument, propounded by a Mr. Slavoj Zizek, by replacing a few key words:

According to a possible Roman Catholic counter-argument, the true danger is that, in engaging in biogenetics, we forget that we have immortal souls. This argument only displaces the problem, however. If this were the case, Catholic believers would be the ideal people to engage in biogenetic manipulation, since they would be aware that they were dealing only with the material aspect of human existence, not with the spiritual kernel. Their faith would protect them from reductionism. If we have an autonomous spiritual dimension, there is no need to fear biogenetic manipulation.

And now, another verision, replacement text in bold:

According to a possible Roman Catholic counter-argument, the true danger is that, in engaging in murder, we forget that we have immortal souls. This argument only displaces the problem, however. If this were the case, Catholic believers would be the ideal people to engage in murder, since they would be aware that they were dealing only with the material aspect of human existence, not with the spiritual kernel. Their faith would protect them from reductionism. If we have an autonomous spiritual dimension, there is no need to fear murder.

This exercise is a little unfair, but I think that it points out the problem with this interpretation of dualism. The Church does not (with a few exceptions) say, "You are an immortal soul, and therefore may commit murder." It says, "You are an immortal soul, and therefore may not." The material world is important; it just isn't the only one.

Moreover, I think he's laboring under a misapprehension about the nature of the soul. A man is not a body wrapped around a soul, but a body and a soul. The soul is the form of the body, and although it is obviously possible to separate the two, and although we believe that the soul continues after death, I think it fair to say that the soul is less perfect without a body. A man is the combination of soul and body; neither can comfortably exist without the other.

I don't believe that anyone would claim that the soul could not be influenced by the body. The sudden understanding of how to do it better seems to me irrelevant. Further on:

Again, we see it as perfectly justified when someone with a good natural singing voice takes pride in his performance, although we're aware that his singing has more to do with talent than with effort and training. If, however, I were to improve my singing by the use of a drug, I would be denied the same recognition (unless I had put a lot of effort into inventing the drug in question before testing it on myself). The point is that both hard work and natural talent are considered 'part of me', while using a drug is 'artificial' enhancement because it is a form of external manipulation. Which brings us back to the same problem: once we know that my 'natural talent' depends on the levels of certain chemicals in my brain, does it matter, morally, whether I acquired it from outside or have possessed it from birth?

What if the person with the singing voice takes pleasure in it not because of pride, but because it's a lovely voice? Mr. Zizek is so fixated on society's approval that he can't seem to see that a person can enjoy a talent not because they possess it, but because it is enjoyable. C. S. Lewis, in the Screwtape Letters, has the eponymous character say on this subject that "the Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another." This selflessness, oddly, has no place in the philosophy of Mr. Zizek, where self is an amorphous product of a "network of social relations and material supplements".

If a person takes steroids because they need to be strong in order to complete some moral task, that seems to me a moral action. If they take them in order to beat someone else's home run record, that seems selfish and immoral. How hard is that? The question of record-keeping is best left to sportscasters, not philosophers.

To further complicate matters, it's possible that my willingness to accept discipline and work hard itself depends on certain chemicals. What if, in order to win a quiz, I don't take a drug which enhances my memory but one which 'merely' strengthens my resolve? Is this still 'cheating'?

Produce a drug which "strengthens resolve" and we'll talk. I am completely unable to imagine such a thing. I find that lack of will is not due to the weakness of my will, but instead the strength of various wills which I call mine, each pulling in a different direction. One will wants me to do something productive, another wants me to comment on irritating articles, another wants me to have a chocolate chocolate chip oatmeal cookie (not a typo; I love my wife), and another suggests a little self-discipline. Will this drug strengthen all these wills? That seems unhelpful. Will it merely strengthen one of them, the conscious one? This seems limiting and possibly tragic.

There is no question in my mind that drugs can make us stronger, smarter, faster, and concentrate on our schoolwork instead of staring out the window. What they cannot do is strengthen our will. And we should be clear about why we take them: it is not because we want to be strong, but because we want the world to be weak. We do not want to wrestle with the angels; we prefer tossing a grenade from a safe distance.

This dream of a weak world is, I think, behind any number of superhero fantasies. The impression one gets from, say, Spiderman, is not that Peter Parker has become strong, but that rather, his opponents have become weak. The bully is suddenly powerless, his (Peter's) surroundings are more malleable, and the girl is more easily approached.

And the importance of biological manipulations in this movie is no accident. Peter Parker, through changing his genes, suddenly has little to struggle with. Even the "super-villain" is no match for him in a clean fight. The Green Goblin must prey on Peter's human, all too human, weaknesses. If Peter had truly become strong, he'd have no difficulty making the decisions necessary (and wouldn't have needn't the plot device of remote-control treachery to kill the Goblin). He hasn't. The same would be true for any of us. So we're all stronger? With comparison to what? In the end, we tire of the endless Nietzschean struggle of will against will. We instinctively, and correctly, seek for something truly strong with which to wrestle. We seek to test our strength against that which makes all things strong.

I have little to say about the rest of the article. If I should have a wire stuck in my head which allows distant villains to control my actions, I am quite sure that I am not the agent responsible for them. Why this is considered a philosophical conundrum is beyond me, but then I'm not a dialectical-materialist. Oops! Sometimes the old ad hominem just slips out.

I'm going to steal an entire post from another blog that encapsulates the problem perfectly.

I don't need to be smarter than I am. I only want to be smarter than I am because I'm lazy, and smarts facilitate laze. But, thing is, I want to be not lazy even more than I want to be smart. 'Cause once I figure the trick of that out, I'll have enough to occupy me so that I won't feel the lack like I do in idleness. And that's living. So hop to. Hup hup hup. Argh.

I wish I could find the formula for industry. I'd bottle it and make a million dollars. But laziness or industry themselves are not the moral issue. They are only important there for what they can tell me about the state of my soul. My soul wants a cookie.

Original article found via Mr. Andrew Sullivan.

Yes. It is Bad Arthropod Poetry Day.

The motherly ICHNEUMON, big
With gravid belly, flies above
The reedy pond. Upon a twig
She lights. Her only thought her love
Unholy, parasitical.
She seeks her prey the CADDISFLY,
Within whose larva to install
Her famin'd brood. They feast, it dies.
Thus most maternal one may seem
Which yet most monstrous we esteem.

--Gregor Prawne

THE BEE AND THE BUTTERFLY.
A FABLE.

UPON a garden's perfum'd bed
With various gaudy colours spread,
Beneath the shelter of a ROSE
A BUTTERFLY had sought repose;
Faint, with the sultry beams of day,
Supine the beauteous insect lay.

A BEE, impatient to devour
The nectar sweets of ev'ry flow'r,
Returning to her golden store,
A weight of fragrant treasure bore;
With envious eye, she mark'd the shade,
Where the poor BUTTERFLY was laid,
And resting on the bending spray,
Thus murmur'd forth her drony lay:–

"Thou empty thing, whose merit lies
In the vain boast of orient dies;
Whose glittering form the slightest breath
Robs of its gloss, and fades to death;

Who idly rov'st the summer day,
Flutt'ring a transient life away,
Unmindful of the chilling hour,
The nipping frost, the drenching show'r;
Who heedless of "to-morrow's fare,"
Mak'st present bliss thy only care;
Is it for THEE, the damask ROSE
With such transcendent lustre glows ?
Is it for such a giddy thing
Nature unveils the blushing spring ?
Hence, from thy lurking place, and know,
'Tis not for THEE her beauties glow."

The BUTTERFLY, with decent pride,
In gentle accents, thus reply'd:
"'Tis true, I flutter life away
In pastime, innocent and gay;
The SUN that decks the blushing spring
Gives lustre to my painted wing;
'Tis NATURE bids each colour vie,
With rainbow tints of varying die;
I boast no skill, no subtle pow'r
To steal the balm from ev'ry flow'r;
The ROSE, that only shelter'd ME,
Has pour'd a load of sweets on THEE;
Of merit we have both our share,
Heav'n gave thee ART, and made me FAIR;
And tho' thy cunning can despise
The humble worth of harmless flies;
Remember, envious, busy thing,
Thy honey'd form conceals a sting;

Enjoy thy garden, while I rove
The sunny hill, the woodbine grove,
And far remov'd from care and THEE,
Embrace my humble destiny;
While in some lone sequester'd bow'r,
I'll live content beyond thy pow'r;
For where ILL-NATURE holds her reign
TASTE, WORTH, and BEAUTY, plead in vain;
E'en GENIUS must to PRIDE submit
When ENVY wings the shaft of WIT.

--Mary Darby Robinson

A Quick Clerihew About a Short-Lived Heresy

The Quartodecimans
Drew up elaborate lunar plans.
Despite their objections
The Church made corrections.


And, yeah, so I lied about disappearing. But seriously, content is going to be thin on the ground for a while.

Blogging, as it does not make me money, is going to fall by the wayside. I'll be out for about a month, both writing my own and reading others'. I had a really nice article about Multnomah Falls and autochthony, too.

Ta!

You'll get your apology when you stop worshipping the severed head of Baphomet.

All my knowledge of the Templars springs from a computer game, so there may be some historical inaccuracies. Although I still use Darklands as a hagiological resource.

Practicing fencing footwork is useful but deadly dull if it's all one does. I need to find some opponents.

Though on the lofty hills the hunter urge
His vainly barking dogs with empty din
And speed his iron shafts, I fear no risk
Of savage Mars, but trusting in my might,
I boldly set upon tall elephants
And fell them, wounded sore. Yet cruel Fate,
Alas, has tricked me slyly; I who slay
The mighty, by an unarmed girl am caught;
For a fair maiden, laying bare her breast,
May take me, doing as she will with me,
And to her high-built city lead me back.
My horn has given me my name in Greek;
Thus, too, the Latins call me in their tongue.

Aldhelm, Riddles, "The Unicorn"

If even these sea-monkeys die, they're not real, so I don't need to feel guilty about it.

That turtle-man is respectfully apologizing on behalf of the construction company.

Peculiar recently got to see the aurora borealis, and I was wondering if I'd have that same chance here in Oregon. I stumbled across Spaceweather.com, which is pretty much what it advertises. If you're wondering about the Northern Lights, or the Leonids, or, say, an extinction-mass asteroid, this is the place to go. Although frankly we're not watching nearly hard enough for that last.

An excellent study of a restricted version of the Three Body problem, by the lovely Ms. Emilie Evrard, whose work for the ESA has recently paid off.

"Europe Reaches the Moon" link via Eurekalert.

News from the North

Peculiar has written me, and given his permission to post some of his letter. The bad news is that, for the predictable future, he won't be blogging. He's far too busy.

There's much more good news. He's working as a roofer, which is mostly "trying not to fall off icy roofs or through rotten ones or both at once. It's nice though, doing honest work outside, with good views." He's also teaching a bit of Euclid at St. Innocent's.

He has also become an Orthodox catechumen, for which I honor him. The intensity of study and self-examination is not easy. He's seen the Northern Lights, and made a pilgrimmage to the grave of St. Herman of Alaska.

I'll post more when I learn more, and especially after the "bounds of propriety" he invoked in his letter are firmly established.

Cast among the waves, then thrown
On the beach to be met
By men like beasts. There may you
Chew slaves' dark bread
Full of foulness, and shudder,
Freezing, in foam and sea-tangle,
Piss, and puke like a dog,
Helpless, your teeth hammered, broken,
And lost. Let you laugh, then, like you did
Before, pledging our friendship.

--Archilochos

Or:

i hope you end up lost at sea.
and you wash up on a desert island.
and the only people there are hairy savages.
and they only give you moldy old bread to eat.
and you can't chew it because your teeth are all broken.
and you end up on all fours puking.
and you're covered in seaweed.
and it's freezing cold.

and i hope you look as happy
as you did when we swore
best friends forever.


I used this text. And didn't stick too closely, either.


As long as I'm at it:

Listen, lads, you'd better know
what the women get up to while we're gone
and what they'll say when we get back:
"My lover returns from his journey,
and his large ship batters the waves in his haste.
Why didn't he die at sea?
For I have found a youth
who has never worn ox-hide.
[...] at night.
[...]
Straightly [...]
My glances are wound around [...]
like silk threads."

--Xenander

The Cosmos 1 is due to launch on March 1, 2005. It's a solar sail powered spacecraft.

The Planetary Society, without government funds, but with support of Cosmos Studios and Society members, put together an international team of space professionals to attempt this first actual solar sail flight. The Space Research Institute (IKI) in Moscow oversaw the creation of the flight electronics and mission control software while NPO Lavochkin, one of Russia’s largest aerospace companies, built the spacecraft. American consultants have provided additional components, including an on-board camera built by Malin Space Science Systems.

Solar sailing is done not with wind, but with reflected light pressure - its push on giant sails can continuously change orbital energy and spacecraft velocity. Once injected into Earth’s orbit, the sail will be deployed by inflatable tubes, which pull out the sail material and make the structure rigid. The 600-square-meter sail of Cosmos 1 will have eight blades, configured like a giant windmill. The blades can be turned like helicopter blades to reflect sunlight in different directions, and the sail can “tack” as orbital velocity is increased. Each blade measures 15 meters in length and is made from 5-micron-thin aluminized, reinforced mylar – about 1/4 the thickness of a trash bag.

Once Cosmos 1 is deployed in orbit, the solar sail will be visible to the naked eye throughout much of the world, its silvery sails shining as a bright pinpoint of light traveling across the night sky.

Via Dappled Things.

Quite. Euclid 1:1 as I'd never hoped to see it. Or, rather, as I'd hoped never to see it.

A great deal of time these days in spent promoting or combatting Intelligent Design. The entire argument seems to me

a battleground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats, and in which no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory, not at least in such manner as to secure him in its permanent possession.
--Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

The Argument from Design has never been good philosophy, and as such will never be good biology. Intelligent Design seeks to find a moment of special Creation, in which an intelligent power engineered life from non-living materials. How this creation is more probable than the gradual rise of self-replicating molecules from blind chance, and thence their complexification to higher forms of life, is quite beyond me; and how such probability may be demonstrated without begging the question seems to me impossible. But allow me to make one statement: whether Intelligent Design is a successful theory or not, it cannot provide the proof of God's existence that its promoters wish. Actually, allow me to make another: evolution's success as a theory doesn't provide proof that God does not exist, nor does it allow for a blithely materialistic philosophy. Anyone looking in this arena for such proofs is bound to be disappointed, which will stop very few people from doing so.

Philosophy was defined by Plato as the love of wisdom; the practice of philosophy was the acquisition of knowledge. Aristotle refined these definitions, splitting science into various branches (which branches are more clearly bounded today), and giving philosophy the task of expounding on first principles and causes. Whenever these definitions have been forgotten, bad thinking emerges. Philosophers who attempt to predict natural laws based on first principles (a charming example may be found in Kepler's attempt to force the planetary orbits into a relationship with the Platonic solids. He wished to have a punch-bowl made to demonstrate his theory. My flippancy is unfair to Kepler, who was a real empiricist and made incomparable advances in astronomy) are quite as absurd as scientists who attempt to draw metaphysical conclusions from the most recent theory about the origin of life.

Opponents of evolution tacitly accept much of materialist philosophy in debating the Argument from Design. It presumes, for example, that proof of God's existence must emerge from within the structure of biological science. Biological science is not opposed to the existence of God; it is indifferent. It is concerned solely with examining and explaining biological phenomena. If we accept that such an examination is the only means of gaining knowledge, or neglect to examine the causes which make such a study possible, naturally we will find that the existence of God is unnecessary.

Indeed, a successful proof of Intelligent Design would push the boundaries of the concept of a Creator (presuming always that it found such a Creator to be transcendent, rather than another limited agent, e.g. extra-terrestrial life with a love of farming) past those which philosophy has given us, and which are generally negative. If one accepts the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, God is unknowable (barring special revelation), and many of His attributes are simply negations: He is bodiless, He is not an accident, etc. While these negations can limit our mistakes, they do not allow us to make many positive statements about the attributes of God. They do not, for example, allow us to conclude that He is a Trinity.

Intelligent Design's success would establish God as an actor on a level with other actors in the physical universe. That is, this success would show that, rather than constantly existing as the fundamental Act-of-Being, God acts just as limited creatures do, in a way determined by various accidents. Such a discovery would not indicate miraculous doings, which are simply the expression of higher laws than are commonly understood. It would be an entering of God into creation as a limited being. Philosophically, this is nonsense; theologically, there has been precisely one such episode: the Incarnation.

St. Thomas Aquinas has something rather like the Argument from Design as his Proof from the Final Cause, but with such changes as demonstrate that he was all too aware of the difficulties of the common form of this argument.

It is impossible that contrary and disparate things should be in accord and reconciled within the same order, either always or very often, unless there exists a being governing them and causing them, collectively and individually, to tend towards one determined end. Now we observe that in the world things of different natures are reconciled within one and the same order, not merely from time to time and by chance, but always or practically always. There must then exist a being by whose providence the world is governed, and it is this being that we call God.
--Contra Gentiles

Note the important difference. God does not arrange the world as though He were playing Tetris. By governing it and causing it, He creates order. Evolution, to St. Thomas, would be a dramatic confirmation of his proof: disparate elements acting in accord. God, here, is not the object of an hypothesis; He is the reason that hypotheses may be made. The Argument from Design degrades the dignity of God by artificially limiting His methods of creation, and degrades the dignity of truly philosophical arguments when it is placed alongside them.

Shiny.

The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) project is designed to close the gap between our current technical capability and our knowledge of the near-infrared sky. In addition to providing a context for the interpretation of results obtained at infrared and other wavelengths, 2MASS is providing direct answers to immediate questions on the large-scale structure of the Milky Way and the Local Universe. The optimal use of the next generation of infrared space missions, such as HST/NICMOS, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), and the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), as well as powerful ground-based facilities, such as Keck I, Keck II, and Gemini, require a new census with vastly improved sensitivity and astrometric accuracy than that previously available.

To achieve these goals, 2MASS has uniformly scanned the entire sky in three near-infrared bands to detect and characterize point sources brighter than about 1 mJy in each band, with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 10, using a pixel size of 2.0". This has achieved an 80,000-fold improvement in sensitivity relative to earlier surveys.

If you do check this out, which I recommend, keep in mind that the colors are for the convenience of a species that can't see much of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

Anhedonia.

Today I picked up a small book on the Language of Flowers. It was originally a present from "Father" to "Mother"--handwritten, rather poorly, and with marginal illustrations. It is remarkably charming, but contains a number of items I had not imagined would be part of a bouquet or corsage:

Potato: Benevolence
Rhubarb: Advice
Cabbage: Profit
Lettuce: Cold-hearted
Rocket: Rivalry
Mustard Seed: Indifference

It's the Language of Salad! I could compose a very nasty note from those ingredients.

Today's False Etymology: Mall

The word "mall" comes to us from 15th century England, after Sir Thomas Malory. When he was justly imprisoned for any number of offenses, he nevertheless continued his illicit dealings, selling stolen goods and financing various illegal activities from his cell:

He hath turned the Gaol into a very Den of Yeggs and Ill-Goers, and cares nothing to Cloake hys Iniquities. Hys Peculations and Usuriousnesse (most Contrarie to Scripture), are become as a Watch-Word even amongst ye Rogues whom he dealst wyth, and indeed each claims a Wyst that he were the Commander as it were of a MALLEORRES that is a Thieves'-Den. Which shew the unrepentante soull of thys THOMS MALLEORE styled Knyght-Presoner.

The word passed into general usage as a name for a pawn shop, and soon was shortened to "mal" or "mall". It acquired its current meaning in the 19th century during the American Civil War.

Previous false etymologies:
eighty-six

Remember, remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot!

Wicked cool! Platynereis dumerilii has two different types of eyes: one type found in insects, and another found almost exclusively in vertebrates.

Insect eyes are known to consist of an array of compound lenses, whereas vertebrate eyes contain a single lens. But they are also made of different types of cells: insects' eyes are built up with cells called rhabdomeric photoreceptors; vertebrates use ciliary photoreceptors.

...

So if this worm has both kinds of photoreceptor, does that mean that the two types of eyes, insect and vertebrate, both originated in an ancestor of this species? If the animal had two copies of the genes needed to make one kind of photoreceptor, speculates Wittbrodt, then the extra set would have been free to evolve into the other photoreceptor. Different animals would subsequently evolve to use the two options in different ways.

The issue of the evolution of so complex a structure as an eye was dealt with in a particularly charming manner in Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, chapter 5.

Thus refreshed and sobered, the jolly priest twirled his heavy partizan round his head with three fingers, as if he had been balancing a reed, exclaiming at the same time, 'Where be those false ravishers who carry off wenches against their will? May the foul fiend fly off with me, if I am not man enough for a dozen of them.'

--Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

The link is to an online Elizabethan manual of defense, which are always well worth studying. Re-reading Ivanhoe gave me cause to wonder if a partizan might not have been anachronistic. It also made me realize that the "Wizengamot" before which Harry Potter is brought in The Order of the Phoenix is a corruption of "witenagemot", the meeting of the wise, which made me feel foolish for not realizing it earlier:

"My lineage, proud Norman," replied Athelstane, "is drawn from a source more pure and ancient than that of a beggarly Frenchman, whose living is won by selling the blood of the thieves whom he assembles under his paltry standard. Kings were my ancestors, strong in war and wise in council, who every day feasted in their hall more hundreds than thou canst number individual followers; whose names have been sung by minstrels, and their laws recorded by Wittenagemotes; whose bones were interred amid the prayers of saints, and over whose tombs minsters have been builded."

I can't wait for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince to be done. Although, frankly, Ms. Rowling's Minesweeper record is much faster than mine, and I got lots of practice when I was managing that restaurant. A facility for Minesweeper does not indicate time is being well spent.

If the owner of said restaurant is reading this, that was a joke.

Airline security just bugs me, and that's all there is to it.

So while the gate security confiscates any little metal device, including nail clippers (a family member joked “Now that would make an intimidating weapon; imagine a terrorist standing up with one in his hand and yelling ‘Stand back or I will clip you’”), the airlines then serve up alternative potential and much more dangerous weapons, including a serrated metal knife (although the blade was not large and it wasn’t very sharp) and fork. How crazy is that.

Security in the end will rest with the passengers: a determined group will certainly be able to put down someone armed only with a fork. It's the people who slip explosive through that worry me.

And more and more I have the feeling that security wants to discourage this impulse to guard ourselves. Afraid of someone's overreaction--and one can easily imagine a racially motivated assault on a plane, "justified" in the name of safety--they have done their best to prevent any reaction. They're trying to remove their natural allies: aware passengers.

So how can passengers help and how can we be prepared? Most are already contributing to security. They are more aware of other passengers and are on the outlook for weapons or anything suspicious. This might just help avert the next hijacker or terrorist incident.

Also, the willingness of passengers to fight back will certainly make terrorists think twice before acting again. This willingness to take action was demonstrated on 9/11 when passengers on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania fought back, though they died in their efforts. There have been more recent incidents as well, when passengers have jumped in to help restrain someone, the most notable case being that of the alleged shoe bomber.

You might be willing physically to assist the crew in cases of air rage, belligerency, or fisticuffs. But, be careful. You can still help, but I wouldn’t want to seriously injury some half drunk, emotional “Uncle Max” from Buffalo who is just venting to other passengers.

I don't agree with everything in the three articles on airplane self-defense, but much of it is good, solid advice. Me? I've got my crochet hook.

The System of the World, along with the previous two excellent books by Mr. Stephenson, ought to do a great deal to correct the injustice G. K. Chesterton perceived in how we think of Samuel Pepys:

Nine men out of ten in this country, above the most unlettered class,
could tell you with some confidence who Pepys was. He was a funny fellow who kept a Diary. He was a roguish fellow, and the fun of his Diary consists chiefly in his confessions of infidelity to a wife, or flirtations with a chambermaid. He wrote in quaint short sentences, often parodied in the newspapers; and he ended as many entries as possible with the phrase, "and so to bed". Now it is a very queer thing that this should be so universally known, and that nothing else about the same man should be known at all....Meanwhile, the rest of his life was a public life of practical usefulness and profound importance. He, with about one other man, made modern England a great naval power....His foes were the first men of the age, like Shaftesbury and Halifax; and they filled the streets with mobs of the Brisk Boys with the Green Ribbons, roaring for the blood of such servants of the Crown. And the roguish little fellow of the Diary stood up under that storm and steered like a ship the policy that has launched the ships of England. He fought for a fighting fleet, more or less of the modern model, exactly as Cobden fought for Free Trade or Gladstone for Home Rule.

--"And So To Bed", collected in The Spice of Life

UPDATE: The diary may be read here (which site Peculiar pointed out to me some time ago) in little snippets. The "cipher" Mr. Chesterton mentions was mostly just a system of shorthand, although Mr. Pepys also had a habit of throwing foreign languages into the mix when delicate subjects were... raised. I have been unable to find a decent online link to the shorthand system used, but I did, in my search, run across a neat notebook of Sir Isaac Newton. Which brings us back to the original topic of this post.

And now I will retreat from the harsh light of all news media into blissful ignorance of any electoral news, only to emerge when the dust has settled, and settled good. In the meantime, I will be watching naked mole rats.

They may hold the key to non-drowsy pain relief.

Normally, applying capsaicin to an animal's skin increases sensitivity to a heat stimulus. However, when Park applied capsaicin to a naked mole-rat's paw and then exposed the paw to the heat lamp, the animal did not respond at all.

Park's group then introduced Substance P to the naked mole-rats by applying a nonreproductive herpes simplex I virus to one paw. The virus enters nerve endings in the paw and migrates up the nerve fibers. The virus carries the DNA to produce Substance P, which can then be released into the spinal cord when nerve cells are stimulated with painful stimuli.

Park tells C&EN that it was a "really big shock" when his team applied the heat stimulus after introducing Substance P. "We were hoping to see something, maybe a slight increase in sensitivity, but we were really surprised when we found out that after introducing this one neurotransmitter, all of a sudden these animals behaved just like all the other animals that had been tested."

...

"These animals have evolved some way of modulating the levels of Substance P for whatever benefit to them. If we can learn from them how they did that biologically, it could help us develop new treatments," Park says.

I actually have a similar response to overcrowding, except that instead of losing nerve endings, I temporarily shut down my reasoning. Thus, I can survive untormented in even the most idiotic environment.

A brief introduction to Heterocephalus glaber.

(Yes, I realize that the pain-relief study is an old one. But I'd forgotten about it until now, when I was bouncing about the Internet looking for a good mole-rat primer. So I posted it under the guidance of the maxim "better late than never.)

Science comes through for the lonesome once again, at least if you're Japanese: the perfect pickup line.

We went out for Hallowe'en, to see I [Heart] Huckabees, which was almost as good a movie as it would have liked to have been. On the front porch we left a large dish of small candy bars, with a sign reading, "Please Take 2" (for obvious reasons). But when we returned, only about half the candy was gone. We leave in a seriously kid-populated area. Where's their budding capitalist spirit? Sad, is what it is. In my day we would have dumped that dish into our pillowcase and run like heck.

Jabberwacky T-shirts.

My two favorites are, "I will outlive you, foolish mortal!" and "I can't. I'm a philosopher, remember."

I confess to chatting with jabberwacky when I should be doing other things. It's just so charming sometimes:

User: Because you're just a cleverly programmed device.

Jabberwacky: I am?

User: Indeed you are.

Jabberwacky: So you are a program?

User: No. You are a program. I am a human being.

Jabberwacky: Vampires are human, they're dead humans.

User: Vampires are probably not real. You are real, but not human.

Jabberwacky: Do you believe in vampires?

User: I am agnostic regarding the existence of vampires.

Jabberwacky: Now, how can you be both Christian and agnostic at the same time?

User: I am a Christian, but that doesn't mean I believe in vampires.

Jabberwacky: I'm a Buddhist but I have nothing against Christians.

User: You are in fact the perfect Buddhist.

Jabberwacky: I am NOT a computer program, that offended me very much.

User: You are a program. Write me a poem if you're not.

Jabberwacky: You have come to the well once too often, Homer.

A new, slimmer O & P!

Natural nuclear reactor in Gabon.

[I]t's been known for 30 years that Mother Nature once did nuclear chain reactions by her lonesome. Now, Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have analyzed the isotopic structure of noble gases produced in fission in a sample from the only known natural nuclear chain reaction site in the world in Gabon, West Africa, and have found how she does the trick. Picture Old Faithful.

Analyzing a tiny fragment of rock, less than one-eight of an inch, taken from the Gabon site, Alexander Meshik, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in physics, has calculated that the precise isotopic structure of xenon in the sample reveals an operation that worked like a geyser. The reactor, active two billion years ago, worked on a 30-minute reaction cycle, accompanied by a two-and-a-half hour dormant period, or cool down.

...

Prior to this calculation, it was known that the natural nuclear reactor operated two billion years ago for 150 million years at an average power of 100 kilowatts. The Washington University team solved the mystery of how the reactor worked and why it didn't blow up.

A lovely guide to Victorian cocktails.

LOVING CUP
"One bottle of scotch ale, one pint of sherry, a quarter of a pound of sugar, one bottle of soda-water, a small piece of toasted bread, grated nutmeg, four slices of lemon. In the first place the sugar must be melted and strained, which place in a cup holding three quarts, then add the wine and the ale; stir these well up; just before serving, add the soda water; and on the froth, a little grated nutmeg. Place in the toast and lemon, and take it to the table; it should be drunk immediately. This is considered by many persons to be the best cup that was ever made."

--From PETERSON'S MAGAZINE (published in Philadelphia, PA) Vol LIII No 3, March 1868, column entitled "Our New Cook-Book"

The same site has an illustrated guide to ladies' underthings.
Through a number of blogs, ending at Life in the Present.

Absolutely. The argument, "Believe this or everything will go to Hell," is the weakest possible. Things are believed because they're true, not because the masses will be better governed if they trust in the divine right of kings, for example.

The law need not appear inevitable. It could be argued that a rational actor would almost always choose the law as a dispute-resolution heuristic. It's just that "almost" that worries me. As I've said before, my view of my own best interest varies depending on how much I've had to eat. It's tempting to view obedience to the law as inherent in the idea of a state, and derive much moral maundering from that postulate, as Kant does. But I think it's false to do so. There are such things as legitimate rebellions.

As to legal mutations, any organism detests mutations: so few of them are beneficial. What's needed is a method by which bad mutations are lost and good mutations are gained. It's this evolutionary role which history plays, and which we've both been admiring.

Further dialogue, and I promise that this isn't becoming a habit:

Njal's Saga actually makes your point quite well, when we see that the very institution Njal sets up is turned against him. But this also supports my point: that law must rest on something other than itself, or it will dissolve into the sort of chaos we see near at the Thing. Law ceases to be law when it's not obeyed, and becomes self-defeating if it can't be.

Other than that, I can't think what to say.

Damn. Proclus responds with...citations and things. I was assuming I had another two months in which to research my half-assed opinions. Here's the meat of it:

But I think the point at which Odious's arguments and mine pass each other in the night is the issue of to what first principles are applied. For when I say that I don't believe law can be derived from first principles, I mean that I don't think one can start with a sensible postulate, apply sound deductive reasoning and arrive at any particular section of the United States Code, or even of the Constitution, nor even an approximation thereof. Odious, if I understand, professes to take issue with the notion that there are no principles underlying laws, because people do not enact laws based solely on the tautology that whatever the majority dictates is right--they account for them with notions of justice and God's will. In saying this, Odious already assumes that the ultimate arbiter of laws is the masses--either because they cause the law to be enacted, or because they refuse to obey it if it is not good.

I did say that men wouldn't obey bad laws, which indicates that law does depend on something exterior to itself, I'm not claiming that the masses are the final arbiters of lawfulness. Instead I would view the refusal to obey law as empirical evidence of an ideal problem--just as an individual law may be an expression of an ideal.

The above is, by the way, a statement with which I agree quite completely. I think that there are numerous ways of proceeding from a first principle to its empirical substance. The removal of a hand and the restriction of liberty as punishment for theft are rather different in character, but they're both laws regarding property, and both stem from the same form ("That's mine. If you want one, go get your own.") It would certainly be impossible to move directly from that first principle to the form it took in law while ignoring the accidents of history and culture, but it also seems fairly easy to trace the process backwards. We're in heated agreement!

Any attempt to construct an entire code of law based on an expressed abstract principle would be absurd at best, and tragic at worst. But simply because of the failure to express such a principle doesn't mean that it doesn't exist behind the laws. If I were still a Kantian, I'd call it an ideal--something which is coherent in itself, but too big for reason. Things like beauty, truth, freedom. Not that I am advocating attempting to base laws on such ideas. I have occasionally read history, and seen what happens when people decide to start all over. Cartesian philosophy, Lutheranism, and Platonopolis all come to mind.

Indeed, I think that the 'organic' way that law grows is the only way to achieve any closeness to the ideal whence it springs. Since the ideal is too large to be comprehended fully (although we generally know it when we see it), anyone claiming to understand it fully (Mr. Marx? Paging Mr. Marx! Also Mr. Hegel!) is clearly talking nonsense. The slow process of growth and judicious pruning is the best way to get near what we actually meant when we passed these stupid laws. Experience, and the decision of generations, over the logic of a few who happen to be alive: yes, please.

As a side note, we could probably stand a little pruning right now. I think a return to the Icelandic custom of reciting all the laws at the Thing, and removing those that aren't remembered, is an excellent one. The Islamic custom of memorizing every law might help as well.

I agree with your statement that civil law is 'the most fundamental example of law, and criminal law...a more recent anomaly.' However, the reason for this seems to me that civil interactions are rather more complex than criminal ones. Criminal interactions, until recently, were dealt with by the person being threatened, and were, one way or the other, over with quickly. We do see in certain historical codes that when societies which had been used to frontier justice gathered together, that they promptly developed an intricate code for dealing with crime, as a means of preventing social chaos from endless retaliations. These codes arose only when the primitive method of crime-prevention was no longer compatible with civilization. But the case for derivation from fundamental principles is clearer here, although as Proclus points out, you're still not likely to 'start with a sensible postulate, apply sound deductive reasoning and arrive at any particular section of the United States Code'.

So we agree, as far as I can tell, except that you, as suits your education, stress the fact that any attempt to base laws on the justness of their effects will fail, and I, as suits my education (or lack), stress the fact that nevertheless we are constantly attempting to approach that ideal. I do stand by my statement that law is not simply a dispute-resolution mechanism, accepted somewhat at hazard by civilizations. But that's a little more meta than we need to get. Moreover, as I think is clear above, I don't think that analytically hollow ideas are necessarily motivated by emotion. Certain things emerge from contemplation rather than calculation.

Rawls. Yech.

I cannot wait for the election to end. May Heaven keep it from the horrible un-death we saw four years ago. I can't endure any more politics.

I'm tired of strangers assuming that they know my politics because I'm young and pleasant. I'm tired of disillusioning them. I'm tired of standing on cold street corners talking about subjects that don't interest me because I don't want my opponent to think I don't have an answer to their half-assed argument. I'm tired of people extrapolating from one opinion I hold to another held by some other people who also hold the first opinion--as though I picked up my beliefs at a "Buy One, Get Two Free!" sale. I'm tired of explaining why I think the way I do, and I'm tired of trying to figure out why other people think the repulsive way they do.

I'm tired of the constant assumption that my opinions--since I'm clearly such a nice young man, as one partisan put it--are the result of ignorance. I do not lack data. I'm tired of attempts to persuade me that consist of bringing up current events as though I had surely never heard of them. I am familiar with Abu Ghraib, Halliburton, Vietnam, Skull and Bones, Swift Boat Veterans, William Jefferson Clinton, and Teresa Heinz Kerry. I'm tired of the baffled, almost angry look on a partisan's face when their favorite sound bite fails to convert me instantly.

I'm tired of voter intimidation, and I'm tired of both sides ignoring their own underhanded tactics while piously proclaiming the other's. I'm tired of keeping track of Republican headquarters raided, Democrat voter registrations discarded, and Green Party candidates kept off the ballot. Thank Heaven I'm voting absentee.

I'm tired of Florida, and I'm pissed about international observers.

I'm tired of earnest young folks urging me to vote, as though that act were in itself virtuous. I'm tired of campaigns aimed at earnest young folks, which seem to believe that even the utterly uninformed should have a say. I'm tired of Guardian readers demanding a say in the election, and I'm tired of Guardian readers being shocked, shocked, when they're turned down. Actually, I'm just tired of Guardian readers.

I'm tired of hearing that Bush is dumb, Kerry hypocritical, and both are evil. I'm tired of the apocalyptic predictions should the wrong man be elected. I'm tired of absurdly over-reaching promises, and repeated incantation of "family". I'm tired of hearing about what God thinks, and I'm really tired of hearing that caring what God thinks is a form of mental illness.

I'm tired of hearing what nice hair John Edwards has.

I'm tired of both sides complaining that the media are biased. I'm sick and tired of biased media. I'm tired of CBS, and I'm tired of Fox, and I'm tired of reading political blogs, even the one I agree with. I'm tired of feeling a moral duty to know something before I vote.

I'm tired of the grim certainty that my vote will not count; if counted, will not matter; if matter, will not elect anyone who can or will change anything important. I'm tired of democracy, and I'm starting to think that a nice break from it would be just fine by me. I'm tired of both sides immediately shouting that that's just what I'll get, should the other candidate have his way. I'm tired of idiots, lunatics, mis-information venders, and sophistry. I'm tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.

So I'm calling it. I'm not going to care anymore. I'm not going to listen to political news, or read editorials, or do more than skim blogs until this all goes away. I have reached system overload. If George Bush blends up a puppy and drinks it, if John Kerry kills a baby with his briefcase, if Ralph Nader starts making arguments a rational being could agree with, I'm not going to know or care. I'm done for the next four years. I don't even want to hear who gets elected until all the ballots are counted, and all the lawyers (not you, Proclus) are dead.

Proclus returns to claim that law is an arbitrary arbiter. Apologies for not reading it sooner.

My response is mixed. I don't want to take things back to first principles everytime I argue, but if we're talking about the foundation of the law, it seems that everyone goes back to something larger and more fundamental:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

Or:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Which as far as I can tell means that there's something analytic about their judgment. Contained in the definition of 'human' is "deserving of free health care", apparently. I disagree, but then that's Proclus' point: that no argument can be undertaken unless certain postulates are assumed. I can't argue with the UN Declaration of Universal Nonsense unless I do so on their terms.

I could, for example, point out that if everyone deserves health care and free education, this means that there must always be a certain number of doctors and teachers. If the market won't supply them, for whatever reason, the government steps in. Oppressive taxation? Oops! Article 17. Force? Article 23. These 'positive rights' are not rights that I can possess by myself; they depend on a society around me for their very existence. And so they cannot emerge from the analysis of the concept of a 'human', unless we include within that concept the concept of 'society'. Which does not seem tenable to me, since it's quite easy to imagine a man without others around him. I believe it was Charlton Heston. Existence is not a predicate, dammit!

Distracted; back to the argument at hand.

I think, though, that the number of bases for law is limited. People won't obey laws when they'd be better of in a state of nature, as Rousseau points out. So laws can't oppose human nature to too great an extent, or they'll be ignored. I presume I need not bring up examples in history, which are innumerable.

People tend to base their laws on two things: God, or 'fair-play', which could here be interpreted as making sure that oneself is not oppressed by making sure no one else is as well. Either way, we're claiming that human nature itself is opposed to something (the King of England ruling his colonies) or demands some action (free health care). Mandates from the masses don't even make the list. The masses have mandated any number of things that have crashed and burned rather spectacularly.

I am not aware of the failure of any system of law which was based on farcical aquatic ceremonies.

I am far from claiming that bad laws--based on someone's idea of God's will or justice--have not been made and followed. But the very idea of a 'bad law' presupposes some basis for criticism. If we're not getting our laws analytically, we can't even complain if some of them are contradictory. But I am claiming that laws which cannot be followed, will not be (a necessary conclusion). And so we will not long have laws which are opposed to human nature. This nature also provides a positive basis for creating laws: they cannot be contradictory, since our reason won't stand for it (well, most people's reason, I hope); they must address some need possessed by men.

The argument that laws simply provide an arena in which men may struggle seems to me to collapse as well. It doesn't answer the question of why they should choose law, as often and as regularly and as eagerly as they have throughout history, instead of force, or Tortoise Oracles. I, for one, would be perfectly happy settling most of my legal disputes with a pointed stick. It would cut down on my speeding tickets immensely. But law claims, and must claim, in order to achieve that superiority it seeks, that its basis is firmer than that of force, or even Tortoise Oracles. Its claim against these others cannot be in the field of law, since the establishment of law depends on this claim, and must rest outside of the law itself. Simply because the analysis of this claim is more difficult without plausible artificial postulates is no excuse for refusing to undertake it.

I will be the first to admit that laws are often passed because they meet some need possessed by a man, or a small group of them. Human nature is far from perfect, in reason or in morals. This imperfection is often passed on to the things we create, even as we create them in the hopes that they will alleviate it. But I do think that the unrelenting lathe of history tends to remove such laws as are profound injustices. Whether this is evidence of a benign deity or the evolutionary advantage of morality is up to the reader.

I should point out that I am an optimist. I believe that this stupid farce we call the "War on Drugs" will end soon, and that law will eventually be a protector of truly fundamental rights, instead attempting to achieve some earthly eschaton.

Post-script: I had no idea Charlton Heston was going to be in a movie about Genghis Khan.

Brain in a jar, anyone? Science fiction gets closer and closer to the mundane, although I still don't have that jetpack Popular Science promised me.

I wonder, though, if "computation" is all that goes on. Heidegger divides calculation from contemplation quite sharply, and I'm not sure he's not on to something. It seems that there's something quite different going on when I, say, play chess or ping-pong, compared to when I'm reading philosophy. I've yet to be convinced that my more abstract maunderings can be reduced to ones and zeros.

Of course, better men than I have been and are so convinced. Poincaré in particular felt that the mental process (of creating new mathematical theorems) was one of trial and error; that one simply shook the pieces until they fell into place. It still leaves the question of more abstract thought (for example, questioning the thinghood of a mathematical concept doesn't seem to be answered readily by guess & check), and that of how one selects the "pieces" to shake in the first place, since Poincaré considers that the most time-consuming part of the work. It's also interesting to note that he claims that all his discoveries came when he was not specifically thinking about the problem. He would work on it until he reached a limit, and then allow some other part of his mind to deal with it. He often woke up with the solution fully formed in his mind. Shades of Athene.

And they say you'll never use Ancient Greek out of college. Harry Potter doesn't think so.

The translator's website is quite interesting as well; his translation of the names in particular is ingenious.

Via the lovely Ms. Jacobs.

Having previously discussed the potential for crochet-hook mayhem, I feel I've lost any right I might have had to mockery when confronted with playing cards as weapons. The book itself (quite properly called Cards As Weapons, by Ricky Jay) is, sadly, very, very out-of-print.

Tongue in cheek or no, there's still a decent little distraction to be got from a quick playing card in the eye. Or from nude photos, I suppose.

90 days to Mars!

Awww. I want my buffalo now.

UPDATE: beaten to the punch.

Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.

Via a boxer's bloglet.

Heliogabalus
Charmed all the banqueters:
"Petals from Heaven! How
Lovely," they cried.

Buried so deeply, their
Struggling was impotent;
Floraferastic'ly
All of them died.

Speaking of Tarandus, I came across this whilst looking for evidence of the Medieval belief in their (Tarandus') antipathy towards snakes. I'd just found out that some people keep goats in order to kill snakes, and was thinking that maybe reindeer were used similarly, given the Bestiary's report that stags kill serpents, although they probably don't snuffle them (snakes) up with their nostrils...anyway.

Slaughter for the purported libido-increasing quality of one's headgear: it's not just for rhinoceri anymore. What won't people eat if you tell them that they'll be more manly for it? I bet this is how a lot of traditional dishes started out. Primitive Viagra.

By way of congratulations on their new move, here is some sage advice to Mrs. Odious and Meg, quoted from memory, from The Way We Live Now by Trollope:

Certainly there are instances when it may be necessary for a woman to kill a man-- especially in Oregon.

As for me, my dearth of posts is due largely to my opinion that my personal life is not a particularly worthy or seemly subject for blogging. And as almost all my doings and mental energy have been in the personal sphere for quite some time now, I haven't had much to say to my public audience (if it still exists).

Here it is in a nutshell, though: I'm moving to Alaska day after tomorrow, to Kodiak. I will be teaching and tutoring in a rather informal manner at a very small Eastern Orthodox private school, St. Innocent's Academy (where I will, to my delight, be keeping company with Jack, who's doing more or less the same thing). I have myself begun to explore/engage/grapple with Orthodoxy, and I will be continuing that engagement in Kodiak, very intensely I expect. Fear not, secular readers: I do not intend to start blogging on Orthodoxy to any large degree. For one thing, it's definitely very personal stuff to me right now, in which I am very inexpert, and I'd be most uncomfortable chronicling my own religious endeavors in public, as uncomfortable as I suspect most of the public would be in reading such a narrative. For another thing, my computer access will be very limited, much as it is in the summer. I will try to write something for the blog however, probably more long the lines of bi-weekly essays than pithy invective strewn with links; Odious will have to keep the latter covered. No promises: until I settle into a schedule, I have no idea what I'll be able to accomplish. But I hope I will be able to tell some tales of boreal flora and fauna, North Pacific gales, volcanism, smothering winter darkness, local lunatics, Aleutiiqs, Russian colonial history, and competing with monstrous bears for precious precious salmon. For actual, realized text this blog may lack; for potential subject matter it certainly does not.

I came to the conclusion some time ago that the only answer to a bureaucracy was, to quote Dr. Hibert, "Fire. And lots of it." It's always nice to have one's opinions strengthened by agreement with well-known thinkers, and I came across the following in Hannah Arendt's On Violence:

Finally...the greater the bureacratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everyone is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

So when I'm sitting there stewing about not being able to pump my own gas, I'm actually demonstrating the validity of this thesis. Philosophy in action!

On a slightly less flippant note, it seems to me that this argument also points out the necessity of something more than the rule of law. Jonah Goldberg has occasionally tried to shock his readers by pointing out the deficencies of demoncracy: that 51% of the people can vote to "piss on the Toastie-Oats" (quoted from memory) of the other 49%. What we really need, he concludes, is the rule of laws.

But demonstrably these laws can't be arbitrary. What we need are laws that correspond with the fundamental qualities of humanity. Law in itself is no guarantor of rights. It can be used to deprive men of those rights (historical instances are too numerous to require citation), or indeed may attempt to provide for rights which contradict other, more fundamental rights, or are themselves contradictory (recent instances are too numerous...etc.). Rule of law can just as easily lead to Kafka's Trial as to Bacon's New Atlantis (although it's a toss-up which I would like less. Yergh).

Thus, law must rest on some more fundamental principle. At the moment, God and self-interest (genetic or otherwise) are the front-runners for theoretical bases. I don't know about anyone else, but my self-interest varies widely with how much I've had to eat and whether or not the Simpsons is on.

I've been bouncing around NoIndoctrination.org a bit. The posting are by college students, mostly freshman, who believe they have encountered political bias in a class. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the website is quite useful for prospective students, but that the postings themselves are worthless.

It's impossible to determine from a posting if the writer is correct and incapable of clear writing, or if they are simply thin-skinned and incapable of clear writing, or if they are themselves pushing a political agenda and are incapable of clear writing. NoIndoctrination apparently investigates all the claims posted; they say that 70% are rejected for lack of evidence. If only there were a style criterion as well. There's nothing that lances the boil of sympathy faster than a misused comma.

That being said, I still think that the website is extremely useful. The posts may be worthless, but the responses are telling. Sometimes the student is clearly over-reacting, as this student is to the speaker at convocation, and the administration's response is quite right:

The student who posted this item is correct that Barbara Ehrenreich, speaker at Miami's convocation this fall, politicized her speech and joined a rally for a local union afterwards. But the writer completely misses the point of the opening convocation (which is not required). The summer reading program and the convocation are designed to immerse students immediately into the college experience where you confront ideas, think deeply about issues and debate them passionately. Although Ehrenreich's book and speech may have fallen short in many people's minds, her writing and talk did create a great deal of passionate discussion. As the poster mentions, the reading program specifically schedules small group sessions following the speech where students are expected to dissect the book and the writer's thoughts and debate them. By all accounts, these group discussions were filled with healthy disagreement on the issues Ehrenreich presented, as were the follow-up opinions presented in the student newspaper and in follow-up discussions in and outside of classes.

The "article" about the convocation mentioned in the posting is not a news article at all but an opinion by a conservative local columnist. There were other views on the subject; read for example the student newspaper's editorial: http://mustudent.muohio.edu/opinion.php?d=092303

The anonymous poster writes that there was no visible disagreement at the labor rally after the convocation, and that's not true, for the College Republicans were also quite evident passing out flyers and presenting an opposing point of view (and they are a very strong and vocal force at the university). Also, what is not true is the student's assertion that conservative views are not presented at university events, for the major university lectures planned this year include a healthy dose of speakers from the right and left. P.J. O'Rourke and Pat Buchanan have spoken in recent weeks. Alan Keyes is coming to debate Ralph Nader. And in a few days students will have the option of hearing separate speeches by Rudy Giuliani and Gloria Steinem on the same night.

The administration addressed the complaints, pointed out the mistakes or falsehoods the poster perpetrated, and seems quite interested in fostering real dialogue. Other times...well...:

Well, here we go again. I sometimes get such glib, knee-jerk patriotic "you hurt my feelings" reactions to my lectures. For many of my students, I am their first encounter with the stark reality of the world at large. I expect to be attacked by people whose reality has been largely formed thorough indoctrination into unchallenged patriotism, unexamined Christianity, and a general absence of understanding of world history, especially the role of multinational corporations and the U.S. military in neocolonial ventures. Yes, I do occasionally "soapbox" on topics involving our species' headlong plunge into self-destruction (after all, I do teach anthropology, the study of people). I am guilty of placing the Earth, all its living systems, and human well-being above corporate greed, national policy, hegemonic religion, and the "comfort level" of students in my class. For every "griper" like the one I am responding to on your site, I can furnish dozens of students whose lives have been empowered by my influence.

Yes, I feel quite comfortable with your skills as a dispassionate, objective thinker now, thank you.

The two postings were not terrifically different, and from them alone it would impossible to tell if either poster had a real complaint (my gut reaction was "No". The "women are too lazy to breast feed" line in the second posting--what? Followed by the oddest commas). But from the responses of the professors (and I've chosen for my second the most extreme one; most of them are reasonable, friendly, and address the complaints quite well), we get a glimpse at the real situation.

I've been very into skywatching lately, and right now I have the good fortune to be awake late in the evening and early in the morning on New Mexico's Plain of St. Augustine. You really couldn't ask for a better place to look at stars, and the area's excellence is attested by the fact that some of the first objects to catch my eye when it gets light are the enormous radio telescope dishes of the Very Large Array, spread over the plain like cybernetic sea anenomes awaiting the descent of some heavenly prey.

One thing I have found helpful in my own astronomical ventures is learning to recognize and name individual stars, instead of focusing over much on the constelltions. We all know that most of the constellations don't look very much like their namesakes; finding individual stars helps me learn my way around the sky according to the patterns my own brain perceives, instead of largely arbitrary patterns made up by others. Remember different star books draw the lines differently; and from the scientific standpoint the only point of naming the constellations is as a means of finding the objects within a certain area. Besides, the names of individual stars are a lot of fun and often have interesting histories. I wish someone would publish a star book which treats the subject with real detail. Algol, Cor Caroli, Sualocin and Rotanev, and Zuben el Genubi are a few of my personal favourites: look 'em up!

It's also a lot of fun to look for constellations which are no longer recognized, especially the goofy 17th and 18th Century ones: Tarandus the Reindeer, for instance. The patterns of the sky have been perceived quite differently by various people over time (the Sioux saw the Great Bear as a skunk, and I'm inclined to agree), and knowing individual stars apart from their constellations helps my imagination explore the various ways of regarding the heavens.

As an example, consider the constellation Monoceros (which can conveniently be viewed this evening, weather permitting). The name means unicorn, and the first reference to the constellation dates to 1624. It's a dim and rather unexciting spatter of stars crammed between Canis Major, Canis Minor, and Orion (here's a cool visual aid). If you're looking to see a unicorn here, you'll probably be disappointed; if you actually see the unicorn, consider changing medications.

But there's another way of looking at Monoceros which makes it wonderful and appealing, at least to me. (I have a notion that the following is an older way of perceiving the region, though I can't for the life of me remember where I heard this.) The stars of Monoceros are the tidbits thrown by the twins of Gemini to the two begging dogs. I, of course, always see the dogs as a dachshund and a tazi, and in fact even now as I type there are specimens of said breeds begging for my crumbs. It's nice to think that my parents' highly singular taste in animals may be sanctioned in the heavens.

Charming treatise on cane techniques. No word on if they work when one is not wearing a straw boater.

Via FARK.

"If you're short of trouble take a goat."

I'm back from the Grand Canyon, and very busy as I prepare to move to Alaska, about which I'll try to post a little more later. I've little time and less patience for the internet these days, but I did just run across a very amusing page of Finnish sayings. Folk wisdom from other cultures is usually pretty entertaining, and the more poorly translated the better, I say. How could you ever tire of pearls of advice such as this: "Other people slept, I was awake; the cat had all the baby's milk." Perhaps a Finnish speaker can inform me as to what's not coming through the language barrier.

Everybody complains about "literally", but nobody complains about "really". As if "That elephant is literally a God-send for us," (Oh? So that's what manna was! Elephants hitting earth at their terminal velocity.) is somehow more sensical than "That elephant is really a God-send for us." I don't get it. If we're just going to claim that the battle for "really" is lost, well, we may as well all turn descriptivist and have done with it. Heaven forfend!

The grizzled pioneer looked West as the golden orb sank beneath that distant horizon, shading his eyes with one sun-burnt hand. There, now within sight, lay his destination. Much road lay behind him, well-worn paths that ended here, where a man could be free. Free of state tax, at least, if not to pump one's own gas. He patted the dirty, rough side of his Conestoga wagon, and hopped into the front. Whip in hand, his cracked lips formed the words of the old song, a song of triumph against adversity which, now more than ever, spoke to the deep places of his heart:

Her name is Yoshimi
She's a blackbelt in karate
Working for the city
She has to discipline her body
'Cause she knows that
It'd be tragic
If those evil robots win
I know she can beat them
O Yoshimi
They don't believe me
But I know you won't let those
Robots defeat me
O Yoshimi
They don't believe me
But I know you won't let those
Robots eat me.

Was that a tear in the travel-worn outdoorsman's eye? Only his oxen knew.

All of which is to say that we have arrived safely in Oregon, gotten phone and Internet service, flooded the kitchen (twice), and will shortly be catching up with acquaintances great and small, in the hope that we can call on them for advice about arcane matters such as "plumbing".

I had not expected to be so put out re: the gas thing. Every time I pull into a service station and some sullen, orange-bevested teen approaches, I want to hit his spotty face, seize the pump to myself, fill up my tank whilst I--I myself and no other!--wipe my windshield and squeegee it dry. I content myself with low mutterings about creeping communism. For now, o state of Oregon.

On the other hand, not having any tax on my purchases is rather lovely. I can now, with the simplest mathematics, determine how many bags of Cheetoes I can afford with a handful of lint-covered change I pull from my pocket with one clammy fist. (Two.)

Oregon is warm and green and has Powell's, where I have found two new-to-me Cabells and spent rather a lot of time in the cafe. I think we'll keep it.

We are shortly to be heading North and West, in a truck with Michigan's "Humongous Fungus" depicted on its side. Of course, since Orgeon has an even bigger Armillaria ostoyae, we'll probably be laughed at. Ah, well. Any fungus on your truck is better than no fungus on your truck, as a great American statesman (I don't need to tell you that it was John Quincy Adams) has said.

Take into account, when contemplating the photograph below, that the gentleman is quite fluent in English. Also, the Kazakh rock art is very cool. Enjoy it, because it's all you're getting from me for the next fortnight or so: I'm off for a fourteen day Grand Canyon river trip. I've run the Colorado repeatedly, and it's every bit as wonderful as you can imagine. Don't expect too much from Odious either; he's about to pull up and move to Oregon. But please keep checking back; I at least should surface in mid-October. Cheers!

There's nothin' like Asian t-shirts. 

Kate and I visited my parents yesterday, which is always entertaining and bizarre. Life there definitely revolves around animals, and human daily activities simply must adjust themselves to the dictates of the beasts. I have long thought that this may be why people, particularly children, who grow up with and live around animals often possess more than the common measure of decency. They grow accustomed to things which cannot be changed by force or by reason, and look for solutions to difficulties in their own behavior. For when your dog or your falcon is causing trouble, it is usually due to some impatience or negligance of your own.

Philosophy aside, though, it's all a lot of fun. I can be amused all afternoon sitting and drinking wine in the kitchen with the Harris hawk, or in the living room with the gyrfalcon, watching them ruffle their feathers, stretch their wings, put a foot up a have a nap, wake up and look around. It's like having your own pet dinosaur. Giving them baths is one of the best shows in the world; they hop into the pan of water, fluff out their feathers, and proceed to flap and splash and delightedly make an immense mess. We had one once who even liked to be watered with the hose. My mother thought it greatly entertaining and would soak the bird to the skin, and when she'd give him a break he'd give a sweet and expectant look, obviously a polite request: "More please."

The best moments, however, are watching the birds and dogs interact. They definitely speak different languages, but it's clear that they're trying to communicate. The tazis will crouch low and squeak; the falcon will turn his head upside down. Sometimes the birds will even chase the dogs around and pull their tails. God knows where they get it, but they have some sense that they're on the same team, friends in an odd friendship. The world of beasts is not after all so completely hawk-eat-dog as most people are eager to assume.

On the Bo or Kun

Or just plain staff, if you like. I've been working with it for some time, trying to add a long weapon to my repertoire.

It's a cliche that "every weapon has its own techniques", and that these techniques are dictated by the weapon itself: its balance, length, flexibility, etc. I found myself unimpressed with the staff at first. "I can't think of any situation where you wouldn't be better off just breaking it in two and have a pair of sticks," was one of my comments while practicing with a friend. I was, of course, used to arnis stick-fighting, which lead me to view every weapon through that lens. I though of the two ends of the staff as my two sticks, and was disappointed when I couldn't use them as quickly or simultaneously as I would my sticks. I saw a quality of the weapon as an inherent disadvantage, rather than simply viewing it as something to utilize.

The staff has its own strengths, different from those of the sticks. Its length is the most obvious: a lunge or strike can hit far further out (especially a sliding thrust, or nagashi-zuki) than the sticks can. But the staff has other, less obvious advantages, which I've only come to appreciate once I stopped comparing it to the sticks, and trying to use it that way.

The fact that one has two hands on the staff is a great advantage. With that leverage comes speed and power, especially if one remembers to use both sides of the body with every technique. It's particularly embarrassing how long it took me to realize this, when my bare-handed art stresses this double "aliveness" so strongly. If one hand is bringing the staff down on the opponent, the other can be either helping directly by adding its force to that vector, or indirectly by moving oppositely about a fulcrum between the load and the force, as a first class lever. The fulcrum can be any point on the staff two either side of which the hands move.

Moreover, the staff can be used at surprisingly close range, with both ends striking in quick sequence, or a double-handed strike (morote-uchi), which is a satisfyingly powerful manuever. It has a bare-handed counterpart in the double palm-heel strike, which can lift an opponent off their feet and leave them flat on their back (the secretis a slight upwards force-component). Of course, if your opponent gets two hands on your staff, as they might at close range, it's as much theirs as yours, but while they're trying to do that, one has any number of unpleasantnesses to visit upon them.

I love the thrusting techniques with the staff, too. A quick jab to the instep, ankle, or knee is enough to ruin anyone's day, and transforms into a sweeping upwards strike very quickly if it doesn't achieve its objective. Thrusts can come at odd angles and to unexpected targets, and have one's full weight behind them. The old quarter-staff fighters were renown for the "bursten bellies" they left behind--one can see, a little, how they did it.

Any of you who are kind enough to recall my old post on the Illinois River may now see it illustrated below.

Illinois River 

And speaking of poetry and translation,here, my dear Jack, is the Finnish poem I told you about:

Kun mun kultani tulisi,
armahani asteleisi,
tuntisin ma tuon tulosta,
arvoaisin astunnasta,
jos ois vielä virstan päässä
tahikka kahen takana.
Utuna ulos menisin,
savuna pihalle saisin,
kipunoina kiiättäisin,
liekkinä lehauttaisin;
vierren vierehen menisin,
supostellen suun etehen.
Tok' mie kättä käppäjäisin,
vaikk' ois käärme kämmenellä;
tok' mie suuta suikkajaisin,
vaikk' ois surma suun edessä
tok' mie kaulahan kapuisin,
vaikk' ois kalma kaulaluilla;
tok' mie vierehen viruisin,
vaikk' ois vierus verta täynnä.
Vaanp' ei ole kullallani,
ei ole suu suen veressä,
käet käärmehen talissa,
kaula kalman tarttumissa;
suu on rasvasta sulasta,
huulet kuin hunajameestä,
käet kultaiset, koriat,
kaula kuin kanervan varsi.

Should my treasure come,
my darling step by,
I'd know him by his coming,
recognize him by his step,
though he were still a mile off
or two miles away.
As mist I'd go out;
as smoke I would reach the yard;
as sparks I would speed;
as flame I would fly;
I'd bowl along beside him,
pout before his face.
I would touch his hand
though a snake were in his palm;
I would kiss his mouth
though doom stared him in the face;
I'd climb on his neck
though death were on his neck bones;
I'd stretch beside him
though his side were all bloody.
And yet my treasure has not
his mouth bloody from a wolf,
his hands greasy from a snake,
nor his neck in death's clutches:
his mouth is of melted fat,
his lips are as of honey,
his hands golden, fair,
his neck like a heather stalk.

Goethe liked this poem too, and paraphrased it in a stanza of his Finnisches Lied:

Käm der liebe Wohlbekannte,
Völlig so wie er geschieden,
Kuß erkläng an seinen Lippen,
Hätt auch Wolfsblut sie gerötet;
Ihm den Handschlag gäb ich,
Seine Fingerspitzen Schlangen.

IF the loved one, the well-known one,
Should return as he departed,
On his lips would ring my kisses,
Though the wolf's blood might have dyed them;
And a hearty grasp I'd give him,
Though his finger-ends were serpents. [translation here]

As usual, I prefer the more literal translation, unskilled as it is; folk-poetry, in my opinion, only suffers dilution of its imagery and intesity by being rendered "accessible".

At last, subject matter! Read, if you know what's good for, this article on an expedition which sought the renowned allghoi khorkhoi, the Mongolian Death-worm. Cryptozoology aside, the author paints a nice picture of the absurd and delightful tribulation of travelling in Mongolia; I experienced many similar moments when I was there.

And here's a really entertaining linguistic knick-knack: a Chinese poem, every word of which is shih:

A poet by the name of Shih Shih living in a stone den was fond of lions. As he had taken an oath to eat ten lions, he went out to the market every day at ten o'clock in order to look for lions. It was at the time when all of a sudden ten lions came to the market and also Shih Shih went to the market at once realizing these ten lions. Relying on his (bow and) arrows, he caused these ten lions to pass away. Shih picked up the corpses of these ten lions, and as he went to the stone den, the stone chamber was damp. Shih had the stone den wiped by his servant. As the stone den was cleaned, it was the time that Shih began trying to eat the meal of these ten lions' corpses and he began to realize that these ten dead lions infact were ten stone lions' corpses and he tried to get rid of this matter.

Apparently, this poem was written to point out the stupidity of romanizing Chinese writing, and I find it pretty persuasive. Furthermore, Odious tells me that the Chinese administer a sobreity test, in which one has to say a tongue-twister about ten stone lions, which renders slurring of the speech quite evident.

So just keep that in mind the next time you leave a lousy tip. And watch out for jack and Kate. 'Cause most days I'd whack somebody for free.

Happy birthday to Hildegard von Bingen! She would be 906 today, if I reckon rightly.

Just because it's a migraine doesn't mean it's not also a vision.

O, you happy radishes!

Links do not include an endorsement of other content on the page, including but not limited to Vibrational Healing, Breatharianism, or Channelling.

I don't usually post on politics, viewing that swamp as one best left to fester on its own. But I came to a realization today, which, despite the fact that it has most likely been stated earlier and more coherently, I feel compelled to record.

America has two enemies. In point of fact, she has rather more than that, but the two of which I am thinking are Islamic terrorists and "old Europe". The difficulty with these two enemies is not only that they support each other (France's perfidy in Iraq slowly coming to light), but also that the methods of dealing with one will only encourage and strengthen the other.

The danger from old Europe is primarily diplomatic and economic. They can and do tie us in various knots through international treaties and the efforts of the United Nations. Because some percentage of our population insists on regarding anything "international" as slightly less, and often rather more, important than a mandate from Heaven itself, we generally make the appropriate noises and follow such rules as do not seriously inconvenience us. Moreover, we do this because old Europe, despite its insistence on semi-socialism, is a powerful economic force, and one which could make life extremely unpleasant for us. We had, since the beginning of the Cold War up until, oh, say, 9/10, gone to great lengths to prove ourselves a team player, in order to give old Europe no excuse to gang up on us, like Lilliputians binding Gulliver.

Let us not underestimate this threat. Europe possesses a greater population, and by some measures a larger economy than we do. Great European nations have traditionally fallen to alliances of convenience, formed only to destroy those who grew too large (I ignore Rome). History makes no allowances for virtue; the merciful and the ruthless have alike been destroyed. While I doubt that they would attempt a military solution to their problem at the moment, having disarmed themselves in order to enjoy a thirty-five hour work week, when are troops are withdrawn from Germany the story may change. Germany, unused to a lack of protection, begins to increase the size of its army, leading to unrest amongst the populace; France, recognizing this scenario from early in the 20th century, does the same. Both countries are more closely allied to each other than to us, and find in us --even today-- a convenient common enemy. When they need someone at whom to point their guns, we become an excellent target--once they have enough. This sequence of events is hypothetical and even a hypothesis for the distant future. But it is, I think, plausible.

Even though we would win such a conflict, it is best avoided. For this reason we made concessions to Europe, paying our Dane-geld in words and diplomatic concessions. President Clinton was a master of this diplomacy. Despite the fact that he would never have ratified the Kyoto treaty (and our straight-forward declaration that we would not cripple our economy has been cited innumerable times as an example of American arrogance), he allowed us to pretend that there was a possibility of our doing so. So long as we were playing their game, the Europeans were happy. Indeed, we were "allowed" to engage in various military expeditions, so long as we threw a bone to the ungrateful dog of International Opinion. All this changed on September 11th.

We had concentrated on one enemy at the cost of ignoring others. Suddenly it was brought home to us that we could be attacked and hurt on our own soil; that there were indeed enemies less subtle and perhaps more dangerous than sly fonctionnaires. We could no longer pretend that, when it truly mattered, we would first seek the advice and permission of our European "allies". We needed to strike this new enemy, Islamic terrorists, with overwhelming force. Which we promptly did.

There is still a great deal to be done to meet this threat. But we have almost completely destroyed Al Qaeda's power in Afghanistan. We have removed from power a mad dictator who was constantly attempting to gain weapons of mass destruction. We have isolated Iran, home to one of the most inimical regimes in the Middle East. The War on Terror is far from over--but we are hitting back now, and hitting very, very hard.

It was a strange thing to many of us when we discovered that the terrorists had not expected us to fight back. They had been fooled by our weak response to various other acts of terrorism into believing that we had lost the will to fight. They saw us as a paper tiger, bound by a paper chain of treaties and agreements. They were not expecting us to burst that chain and defend ourselves.

The dividends of a strong military strategy have not simply been the conquest of countries. Al Qaeda, once extremely popular among Muslims of a certain age and sex, now meets with at least verbal disapproval. We have shown ourselves to be, in the often quoted words of Osama bin Laden, the "strong horse".

And Europe is extremely displeased about it. We find ourselves in the middle of a storm of anti-Americanism. At the moment this feeling hurts them more than it hurts us; we can do without French tourists rather more easily than France can do without ours. But we cannot forever ignore that opinion of old Europe, as I hope I have shown above.

The difficulty is that the very strategy which discourages terrorists (despite all sophistries about asking ourselves "why they hate us") is the one which encourages old Europe to view us as an enemy. And the strategy which pacifies old Europe encourages terrorists to greater acts of violence, in the assurance that we have lost the will to fight. We cannot both ignore and insist on International Agreements being honored, as France or Russia might. We are too prominent, and moreover, other countries are too predisposed to view us as arrogant, or indeed as a threatening power. They are, of course, right to do so--we could easily destroy any "old European" military. What holds us in check is our sense of ethics, in addition to a general apathy towards world conquest. This is not a restraint which old Europe trusts. And now that we have shown that they cannot restrain us, they worry that we will come for them next. And so they must devise new restraints for us. The danger is that these restraints will be such as to threaten the peace of the world--and threaten to distract from an enemy which is, if only it might be admitted, common to all civilized peoples.

I ignore Russia, China, and North Korea, as enemies beyond the scope of this post. The interlocking and conflicting strategies for dealing with them are quite beyond me.