tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43427184635384842472024-03-07T23:41:23.002-08:00What's The Matter? With MojoMojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-11596948484230541532011-10-20T19:09:00.000-07:002011-10-20T19:11:38.351-07:00Sickness<div align="justify">My hitherto unstated goal of posting a blog every day failed after less than a week, although I can claim an excuse which makes up in veracity what it lacks in originality: I was sick. I had not been bitten by a tick, mosquito, or even vampire; I had, in my lay opinion, simply underslept, resulting in a quite crippling migraine which made this laptop a very unwelcome companion. I am pleased to report I am all better today; I am, on another level, pleased that I have neither resorted to the artificial subterfuge of manipulating the date of this blog nor given up on the whole blogging project in the face of a single setback.
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The subject of sickness recalls a lyric:</div>
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<center><b>We all have a sickness, that cleverly attaches and multiplies/ No matter how we try</b></center>
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<div align="justify">It comes from a song which I'd like to share with you - <i>Dig</i>, by Incubus. The video was selected from a shortlist by fans of the band; the striking animation is from an artist styling himself "Kaamuz".</div>
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<center><iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HhEjFWiWmik?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
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<div align="justify">There is a particular dig I wanted to discuss, but the hour grows late and I am, after all, not completely recovered. Ask me about the Swabian Venus sometime. It's very cool.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-71304222684023922272011-10-18T16:38:00.000-07:002011-10-18T17:11:02.809-07:00Something lighter<div align="justify">After a couple of blogs dealing in a rather portentous fashion with Occupy Wall Street, I feel this is a good moment to turn to something lighter.</div>
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<center><img src="http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/8404/tubemapthumbnail.png" height="300" width="500"></center>
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<div align="justify">This iconic design - which you may or may not have recognized at once as representing the world's oldest underground railway system, in London, England - depicts, in its most modern form, some 270 different stations, arranged along eleven different lines - some merely subsurface (i.e. "cut and cover" tunnels, dug as trenches from the surface and then covered over) and others deep-bore tunnels (whose circular cross-section inspires the popular nickname "the Tube"). The intricate map was originally designed by a London Underground employee named Harry Beck. It doesn't reflect the distances, or precisely the layout, of the real Underground network; but it does give an accurate depiction of their positions relative to one another - which is of course what travelers on the Underground need to know. Beck's genius was to realize this. Prior to his 1931 prototype map, a more accurate official version existed; however, this version had to devote such attention to the very crowded central portion of the Underground under the City proper that it was unable to encompass the more distant periphery of the network. Beck's model, organized on a system of bright colors, parallel lines, and topological relationships, avoided that problem stylishly.
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Beck's version, however, was not officially sanctioned, and the stuffy bureaucrats in command positions of the London Underground were skeptical of its promise; so Beck produced it as a labor of love, shyly offering it two years later for consideration. The public loved it; and, for most of the next thirty years, Beck produced new maps to reflect the evolution of the network.
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Every good story needs a villain, of course; in the story of Beck's Underground, that villain was Harry Hutchinson (being called Harry was not a requirement of employment with the London Underground, but it helped). Hutchinson was a publicity officer with the Underground whose lack of design background did not prevent him from producing his own map when faced with the challenge of integrating the new Victoria line with the already complex existing network; Beck, who had surmounted similar challenges for three decades and faced down a rival plan submitted by Hans Scheger in the 1930s, was unimpressed and offered an alternative version. But he had reckoned without Hutchinson's politicking; the London Underground rejected Beck's version, and he never produced another Underground map.
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Although the Underground has evolved tremendously since the first Beck map in 1933, the current version still strongly recalls the original - indeed, Beck is formally credited on each new version of the Tube map as the inspiration for everyone who came after. It is impossible to put a price on immortality; the rather feeble recompense provided by the London Underground for Beck's original, unsolicitated, and instantly classic design was... ten guineas.
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<center>* * *</center>
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One of the many stations on the London Underground was originally planned as Seymour Street, in the London Borough of Camden. It opened to little fanfare in 1907 under the alternative name of Mornington Crescent, and for much of the first sixty years of its history its chief function was to momentarily break up the monotonous view confronting passengers on the non-stop Edgware train. It lies on the Northern Line, which is a dual-branch line; an oddity of this is that taking the Charing Cross branch leads one to Mornington Crescent <i>en route</i> from Camden Town to Euston, while taking the City branch will also allow one to alight at either Camden Town or Euston, and yet find no Mornington Crescent between. The station was seldom used, and indeed by the early 1990s had fallen into such disrepair that significant renovations were needed.
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Despite its humble nature - and, in fact, possibly because of its self-effacing now-you-see-it-now-you-don't existence in the mysterious subterranean waste separating Camden and Euston - Mornington Crescent station received those significant renovations, even though they took most of the decade to complete. The reason for this is that Mornington Crescent, too, achieved a form of immortality, featuring prominently on the legendary British radio quiz show <i>I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue</i> from the sixth season in 1978 onwards.
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The game of Mornington Crescent combines the pulse-pounding excitement of Cribbage with the athletic demands of Shove Ha'Penny. Its intricacies are difficult to explain to the layman, however I was fortunate enough to track down an episode in which, helpfully, experienced Crescenters Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer, and Graeme Garden were able to offer their wealth of expertise to highly-thought-of novice Ross Noble in his very first game:</div>
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<center><iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z6ZeqeFIj7g?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-43918072603567188352011-10-17T22:36:00.000-07:002011-10-17T22:45:51.808-07:00The Morality of Wealth<div align="justify">Following from my OWS musings the other day...
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It occurs to me that the simplest formulation of a message from the OWS protests is the antithesis to Gordon Gekko's mantra of "Greed is Good" - the protestors are making the case that the acquisition of wealth is a moral evil.
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To be sure, they are also advocating a certain amount of wealth as a civic right (and possibly as a human right). It is possible to construe this as indicative of a certain underlying confusion regarding either their ends, or the means by which they can be achieved. But it is also possible that their animus is not directed against wealth <i>per se</i> - rather, it is <i>too much</i> wealth that identifies the targets of their wrath.
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This raises the question of "how much wealth is too much?" Although OWS spokespersons of varying degrees of authority might venture widely different answers to that question, I'll suggest here that the broader sympathy in society for OWS' position, if not in all its details or manifestations, stems from the sense that "good" wealth is <i>earned</i>; any wealth beyond earned wealth is "bad." People tend to view Social Security as "earned" wealth, and they tend to view inherited wealth as "unearned." These are generalizations, of course; but this hypothesis explains why a person who is wealthy in absolute terms may be perceived as morally justified in their wealth, and why a person in relative poverty may still be considered unjustified even in the meager income on which they depend. People who disparage "welfare" may well feel differently about its provisions for veterans of armed conflict; there again, pacifists who view volunteer service personnel as taking pay for morally questionable purposes may consider this "unearned."
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The morality of wealth, then, has two dimensions. It is firstly measured in the raw amount of wealth one possesses; but, perhaps more importantly, it is determined by the manner in which one acquires that wealth. We can go further: we can say, fairly safely, that wealth acquired purely for its own sake will seldom be considered morally justified reward. We can also say that wealth acquired through exploitation will be deemed immoral. In the former case, we identify an aspect of "earned wealth" - that it is a means to some other end, essentially incidental to that end and earned in proportion with the justness of that end. In the latter case, we see further that the means to the end must also be just in order for wealth accrued ancillary to those means to be "earned." We can conceive of a noble end employing morally questionable means; it is unlikely that money acquired in the pursuit of such an end by such means would be considered "earned."
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This analysis of whether income is earned or not is complicated by subjectivity. For one thing, envy is a factor that can distort our notion of what is "earned." Unless we have a very clear and objective view of what opportunities we ourselves as earned, we are apt to identify those beyond our reach as "unearned." Resentment is toxic; it clouds our judgement. Neither is this resentment a one-way street - it is quite as easy to contemplate a wealthy man resenting the relative pittance drawn by an unemployed student, as to imagine the reciprocal situation.
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Another factor to consider is the human propensity to judge others by the standards and values of our own experiences. It takes an unusual character to form values that are not self-justifying; the wealthy banker who seems exploitative to the protestor who lost his job in the recession will argue that he is reaping the rewards of his own wise investments, and moreover is enabling opportunities for others to make wise investments of their own; he will argue that the failure of others to make decisions that prove as profitable as his should not be blamed on him, and he will reject the possibility that his decisions worked out because of dumb luck and accidents of circumstance, let alone the notion that his decisions enriched himself only by denying others access to their rightful share.
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We are all generally much better at recognizing <i>bad</i> luck when it strikes us, than we are at appreciating good fortune. What we call "good fortune," when we do acknowledge it at all, is actually nothing more nor less than a Bowdlerization of "unearned wealth" - by definition we do not "earn" good fortune. Chance operates irrespective of merit, and the distorting effect of human subjectivity makes us, as a rule, incompletely aware of its operation. We equate randomness with equidistribution - the 'cluster effect' illustrates this cognitive fallacy. Another manifestation of this kind of thinking crops up when we consider distribution of wealth; intuition tells us that the fairest distribution is the one dictated by chance, the one that by definition is least tainted by deliberate willed choices and therefore minimizes the likelihood of anybody having more "unearned" wealth than anybody else. Intuition here is quite false, of course; if everybody enters a lottery and buys a single ticket, they each have <i>equal chance</i> of winning, but equality of opportunity will not translate into equality of outcomes. To achieve the intuitively desirable equality of outcome requires a seriously distorted inequality of opportunity, one that exactly counterbalances the random distribution of opportunity among a population of individuals. It should be noted that the intuitively desirable outcome is therefore only achievable by maximizing the distorting effect of deliberate willed choice, and that the operation of this willed choice will necessarily take the wealth that some individuals would have by fortune (and so be strictly "unearned" but not thereby immoral since it was not acquired by choice but by circumstance alone) - this in fact is the textbook example of the noble end (equality) subverted by ignoble means (arbitrary redistribution of property).
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The central paradox here was well described by Derek Parfit in his refutation of utilitarian arguments. He was able to demonstrate that, if we consider any two populations, one of which has higher 'utility' (a measure of happiness, or wealth, or "good" by some abstract measure) than the other, and we adjust the 'utility' of the two populations, reducing the greater and increasing the lesser, so as to equate them and <i>increase</i> the total utility of the two - then repeat this process, introducing a further population whose 'utility' is lower than the newly-homogenized population and merging it into another combined population of yet greater total utility - we reach what Parfit calls "the repugnant conclusion:" a very large population whose <i>total</i> utility exceeds that of the original group but whose <i>average</i> utility is barely positive.</div>
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<center><img src="http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/2308/parfit.jpg" height="300" width="500"></center>
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<div align="justify">The, perhaps equally repugnant, conclusion we can draw from Parfit's thought experiment is that a degree of relative wealth inequality may be optimal. With a nod to John Rawl's model of social justice - in particular, its concept of the "original position" behind the "veil of ignorance" from which its minimax provisions abstract the rules that provide for minimal support standards for the poor in society - we can add that wealth inequality is optimal IFF social mobility is maximal: in other words, wealth is only <i>truly</i> immoral if it is made unattainable to any member of society. Genuine equality of opportunity is the hallmark of a just capitalism.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-35892114673428832302011-10-16T20:50:00.000-07:002011-10-18T04:16:24.436-07:00Of comments, communists, and commixture<div align="justify">For some reason, since I returned belatedly from my sojourn in ports foreign, I seem to be encountering difficulty with commenting on some blogs that I know I was able to comment on before.
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Apparently, my google account does not have permission to post comments - but only on some blogs. Is this a new security feature? Something I should know about Google? Something I can fix?
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In other news, I've been following the Occupy Wall Street protests with some interest recently. It's interesting to compare with the other significant popular political movement of recent times, both as a phenomenon in itself and as an artifact of media reportage - in the Information Age, of course, the two are inextricably intertwined.
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The T.E.A. party coalesced around a single simple (perhaps simplistic) theme - that Americans are Taxed Enough Already, and that government must be spending too much if taxes can't cover spending. Its members by and large supported Republican candidates, on the basis that the Republican party is nominally the party of low taxation. Energizing the Republican base, it claimed responsibility for the 2010 election "shellacking" of President Obama's party.
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OWS also takes a single simple (perhaps simplistic) theme - that the richest 1% are prospering in a time of economic trouble at the expense of the 99% that make up the rest of us. The difficulty for protestors here is that their message, while resonant and popular, does not clearly translate into a program of action. The organizers of the original OWS protest were keenly aware of this problem, seeking to identify a specific demand to which protestors could address themselves. Various proposals were made, by various groups, all of which can be seen represented among the crowd at what was once Liberty Plaza Park. Anarchists advocating the dismantling of government join drum circles with communists advocating its enlargement. Campaigners for racial equality share space with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Tea Partiers swap billboards with their former detractors. In one sense, there is something wonderfully democratic about the OWS protest - those who derided the T.E.A. party as an "astroturf" rather than a "grassroots" movement would struggle to level the same charge against the chaotic organism that is OWS. In another sense, the protest is dismayingly jejune - and, despite its longevity, it remains representative of a much smaller percentage of the population than it might wish. Neither has the clear rallying cry yet emerged - the general anti-globalist anti-capitalist themes persist, as they have for decades, without translating into the ballot-box power of the T.E.A. party.
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Democrats clearly hope that OWS can do for them what the Tea Party did for Republicans, but there are several reasons for believing this will not be the case - not least of which is the significant cohort of OWS protestors who consider Democrats to be part of the problem, and not part of the solution. From a sociological standpoint, the movement remains fascinating; but until a coherent political or economic message emerges, it is unlikely to advance beyond a mere curiosity.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-69600827955443743392011-10-15T16:34:00.000-07:002011-10-17T04:34:58.035-07:00Sleeper<div align="justify">
<i>There is a legend told of a certain king, who with his knights betook himself unto a cave high among the mountains; and there he gathered around him his knights, and there they fell into a long sleep, for they were weary with fighting. Yet they slept, and did not die, for they knew that the day would dawn when their country would once again have need of them. </i><br /><br />
<i>And long years passed.
And at the end of many years, came there unto the cavemouth a shepherd, seeking after a lost sheep. And he saw within the cave the king, and around him arrayed in a circle his knights; and swords were in their hands, and shields before them; and their raiment shone bright in the light of the shepherd's torch. </i>
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<i>Then saw the shepherd a gilt horn, set high upon one wall of the cave, and beneath this horn were written the words: "To Awaken The Sleepers." And the shepherd was sore afraid, yet his curiosity was as great even as his fear; and he stretched out his hand, and he took up the horn, and he blew upon it.
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And there was a great sound throughout the cave, and then a great silence.
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<i>And in that silence came a voice, that was deep and strong and yet oddly cadenced, for it was the voice of the King, and the King's dialect was not the dialect of modern men. And the King asked: "who blows upon the horn that waketh the sleepers?" Then stood forth the shepherd, those his knees trembled, and spake, though his voice trembled likewise, saying: "It is I who blew the horn." </i><br />
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<i>And the eyes of the King opened, and there was in them a terrible lambent fire, and the shepherd fell to the ground.
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"Rise," said the King, and the shepherd did as he was bidden. "Tell me," the King continued, while around him his knights continued in their long slumber, "do the ravens yet circle over this hilltop?" And the shepherd, who knew the hills well, said that this was so. Then waxed wrothful the King, saying, "Thou fool! Thou hast wakened us before the appointed time! While yet the ravens remain above, so must we remain below. Begone, fool, and do not return!"</i>
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This legend, in its various forms, has existed since early historic times - indeed, the prototypical story concerns the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Washington Irving was later to borrow from the same theme for his tale of Rip van Winkle), whose miraculous slumber and subsequent awakening is recounted in the Qu'ran, where its telling mirrors early Christian accounts from such writers as Gregory of Tours.
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The Seven Sleepers, I should add, have no relationship to the Seven Sisters - unless, perhaps, you're a fan of Gematria.
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A more modern Sleeper emerged in the 1990s in the UK, building on a partnership begun in a philosophy lecture between Louise Wener and Jon Stewart. Although they were subsequently joined by Diid Osman and Andy Maclure, making the band a four-piece, the Britpop outfit are remembered for Wener's androgynous, breathy, and confrontational presence - to the extent that the term "Sleeperbloke" was coined as the band rose to prominence, and denotes unremarkable persons making up the numbers in an operation. The original "Sleeperblokes" took this epithet in stride, cheerfully donning interchangeable "Sleeperbloke" T-shirts for live performances, one of which your chronicler caught while the band was on their <i>It Girl</i> tour. The album of the same name, released in 1996, was a Sleeper hit but hardly a sleeper hit, eventually going platinum.
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Among the quirky tracks on offer on the 45-minute album was on entitled "Good Luck Mr. Gorsky." Here it is:</div><br /><br />
<center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W8IEWf0yPxk?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></center>
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The unusual title recalls a legend involving the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who apparently uttered the cryptic eponym when he landed on the Moon. Since I'm not R-rating this blog, I'll be somewhat delicate in recounting it; the gist has a young Neil Armstrong losing a ball over a neighbor's fence and, in going to retrieve it, overhearing that gentleman - a Mister Gorsky - in a heated argument with his wife over a certain recreational activity for which his appetite is markedly greater than hers. As the story goes, the young Armstrong arrives just in time to hear the defiant Mrs. Gorsky aver that she will perform this particular service "when that little boy next door walks on the moon."
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Although 20 July, 1969, must have been a sleepless night for Mission Control and the astronauts' families, not to mention excited viewers all over the world, Mr. Gorsky at least may be expected to have slept very well indeed...
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<center>* * *</center>
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The story is apocryphal, of course. Those killjoys at snopes.com <url="http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.asp"">confirm</url> that no such words were uttered by Armstrong - although John Grunsfeld, a repairman on a <i>Colombia</i> mission to fix the Hubble space telescope, did call out "Good luck, Mr. Hubble!" in reference to this tale.
Neil Armstrong was the first of just twelve men to have walked upon the Moon's surface - the last being Eugene Cernan in December 1972, almost forty years ago. At least, that's the <i>official</i> story...</div>
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<center><img src="http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/6374/capricornrun.jpg" /></center>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-29980319950324812442011-10-14T19:18:00.000-07:002011-10-14T20:45:21.888-07:00Drops of Jupiter<div align="justify"><i>And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?</i> <br /><br />~ Train, <i>Drops of Jupiter</i><br /><br />Yes. Yes, I did. Hello, folks. I'm not proud to admit that I hadn't taken a hiatus from writing, or even from writing online; I'd merely gravitated to writing for other audiences. However, this seems more appropriate, even if my inner <i>Diddakoi</i> chafes at the prospect of sitting in one place and putting together a solid body of back-to-back bloggage.<br /><br />I love that I remembered the word Diddakoi. It refers to a Romani of mixed blood, a gypsy even to gypsies; I encountered it, as I have so much else, through one remove - this dimly-remembered fragment of my childhood was itself a dimly-remembered fragment of my father's when he recounted it to me, himself having been friendly with a group of Diddakoi as a youth. I think my lifelong love both of words and of secrets stem from the snatches of Romany <i>patois</i> he bestowed upon me - <i>Pogadi Chib</i>, more properly, although I didn't learn about that until much later, and for example not until long after I detected the Romani influence on the Polari of <i>Round the Horne</i>'s "Julian and Sandy" - recurring characters on a legendary and groundbreaking 1960s radio show who conversed, like the gypsies, like the medieval guilds and priests and peddlars, like the modern-day moneylenders and politicians, in a secretive language, a <i>cant</i>, designed to conceal as much to inform. Julian and Sandy were hilarious; but they were also important to my education.<br /><br />I'm digressing. This is, of course, what happens when you set out to write with no set plan but a great many words pent-up within you; and I venture to hope that somewhere along the way I touch on something of interest to somebody (even if I don't, I invariably find things that are fascinating to <i>me</i>, and I have a belief that nothing is done well that is not done first and foremost for oneself). This may or may not constitute a much-belated answer to a question <a href="http://littleredhenry.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Heather</a> posed a while back, one which she must by now have given up hope of ever seeing answered...<br /><br />But getting back to Jupiter - it features tonight in one of those myriad coincidences that make astronomy such a rewarding pursuit, in this case a close pairing with our own moon and the distant star cluster known as the Pleiades - more poetically, the Seven Sisters; rather less so, Messier object 45 - that is both beautiful and a wonderful excuse to explore some mythological associations. The Pleiades, being a very highly visible star cluster, feature in the mythos of almost all cultures, although I will overlook almost all of these to mention briefly before closing what may be their most recent contribution to memetics.<br /><br />Billy Meier - his given name is Eduard, which may allow for inferences to be drawn about his choice of <i>nom de guerre</i> - was a Swiss farmer whose adventures included a spell in the French foreign legion and a marriage to a Greek woman named Kalliope (named, of course, for one of the Muses, a group of <i>nine</i> sisters in Greek legend; the muses, as you may already know, were credited with inspiring works of art and inventive fancy). His travels took him around Europe, into Turkey - where he lost an arm - and, by his own somewhat unbelievable account, to the Pleiades.</div><br /><br /><center><img src="http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/3636/iwanttobelieveya.jpg"></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">This famous image, which adorned Spooky Mulder's wall for several seasons of <i>The X-Files</i>, was originally shot by Billy Meier. It is one of many that he took showing a remarkable array of spacecraft, or as he calls them "beamships," by which Nordic aliens traveled the light years between Earth and the Seven Sisters - and by which on at least one occasion he claims to have traveled with them. Among his several Pleiadean (or <i>Plejaren</i>) contacts was a female named Semjase, after whom Meier later named a building where his non-profit ufological organization is headquartered.<br /><br />Meier is widely regarded as a fraudster. There are numerous discrepancies in his photographs, and "Semjase," like several other obliging aliens who agreed to pose for him, strongly resembles humans of his acquaintance - indeed a dancer, Michelle DellaFave, has alleged that Meier deliberately misrepresented pictures of her in support of his contactee allegations. Perhaps most damning is this image, taken from a scorched negative that Meier clearly attempted to destroy:</div><br /><br /><center><img src="http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/611/65091807.jpg"></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">This seems to show a model spacecraft on a tabletop, of the sort a hoaxer would need in order to produce lo-tech fraudulent images. Meier weakly claims that he constructed the model, and others like it, having been inspired by his own repeated sightings of UFOs.<br /><br />Despite the apparent shakiness of his evidence, Meier does have supporters in the ufological field, and the idea of human-like "Pleiadean" aliens is almost as canonical now as that of humanoid "Grays." This support helps him bear the considerable skepticism that greets his claims - beside travels with aliens, he also claims to have gone back in time to meet with "Jmmanuel," whom Meier asserts was the real Jesus Christ, and, most recently, to have foreknowledge of an impending Third World War. This, according to Meier, is expected to commence in November 2011. Before you start hoarding tinned goods and making peace with your God, I should point out that it was <i>also</i> expected to commence in November 2006, 2008, and 2010; perhaps Meier is just another voice craving an audience...</div><br /><br /><i>And sometimes you take a swim/Found your writing on my wall...</i> <br /><br />~ Tori Amos, <i>Hey Jupiter</i>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-45790729798755040082011-07-03T12:09:00.000-07:002011-07-03T17:53:26.005-07:00Project: Blue Beam<div align="justify">Having just recently launched AgencyWatch, this seems a propitious time to turn attention to one of the more preposterous conspiracy theories to have emerged during the Twentieth Century: Project Blue Beam, an alleged global (indeed, supraglobal) conspiracy by the Masonic "6.6.6" group, involving their traditional puppet organizations, NATO and the UN, and amounting to nothing more nor less than a faked Rapture to bring about a New World Order. Craziness of this sort is so far-fetched, so utterly removed from anything in reality, that it naturally takes hold and develops a following in the fertile soil of the Internet - small wonder its progenitor, the late Serge Monast, published it online in 1994.<br /><br />Loyal readers may have detected a certain willingness in this author to entertain perspectives that are... unorthodox. This goes with the territory when you set yourself up as a critical irrealist, but it's still important to draw the line somewhere. When an alleged multinational conspiracy has no shred of evidence for it, and moreover makes no sense intrinsically, it's worth taking a leaf from James Randi's approach and asking some sensible questions about it.<br /><br />To begin with, let's look at the original thesis, and its author.<br /><br />Serge Monast was a Quebecois, a journalist, a poet, and a beard-wearing loon, in no particular order. He founded the International Free Press Agency (<em>L'Agence Internationale de Presse Libre</em>, or AIPL), which proved more obliging in publishing his screeds than most mainstream outlets - these included such gems as <em>Le gouvernement mondial de l'Antéchrist</em>, <em>The United Nations concentration camps program in America</em>, <em>Le Protocole de Toronto (6.6.6.)</em>, and, of course, <em>Project Blue Beam (NASA)</em>.<br /><br />As with most conspiracy theories, the Blue Beam argument is accreted around grains of truth - transnational organizations do exist that attempt to shape the global economy and establish a global currency; that operate as international police and international military organizations with supranational authority; and that seek to establish certain moral and ethical norms worldwide. The uncontroversial existence of these organizations bespeaks a globalist trend in sociopolitics, and there are certainly legitimate concerns of all kinds that can be raised against such a post-national paradigm. But Monast eschewed these relatively mundane concerns over sovereignty, self-determination, equality, and accountability, going instead for the deep-end paranoia of ascribing a specifically anti-Christian agenda to these trends. This agenda he identified with the Masonic/Satanic 6.6.6. group, which he believed had been stealthily concentrating power for decades (if the words 'Bilderberg Group' wandered through your mind there, we'll be getting round to them in a future blog). He described in some detail how 're-education camps' would be established for those Christians who clung to their beliefs and rejected the 'Luciferian' indoctrination into the New World Order. Prisoners here would be color-coded on a rainbow scheme, according to their nature and ultimate fate. Details of this, sadly, were not available when Monast published his magnum opus - it may be noted in passing that if this were all the product of a kind of demented genius, an especial genius attaches to the careful omission of readily-conjured details such as this, thereby lending a spurious air of authenticity to the revelations.<br /><br />By contrast, the four-step plan of 6.6.6. to bring about Armageddon - to immanentize the Eschaton, to quote Robert Anton Wilson in <em>his</em> magnum opus - was very clearly elaborated by Monast. First, all archaeological evidence of existing world religions would be eradicated in a carefully-orchestrated series of earthquakes. Second, a hologrammatic 'God', mediated by satellites and black technology, would appear unto the peoples of the Earth to preach the New World Religion. In tandem with this, step three would initiate telepathic mind-control of the converted. The fourth and culminating step would be a horrorshow of "electronic and supernatural" illusions, designed to compel obedience or induce madness, or both. This "Night of the Thousand Stars" will see the Antichrist enter into his power, and fulfil sundry ancient prophecies.<br /><br />Monast mentions Star Trek, directly and obliquely, at various points in this narrative, which is quite appropriate since all the elements he describes occur in various forms throughout the work of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry - himself implicated with the shadowy cryptocultic Council of Nine. Whether Monast was freely adapting science-fiction material to clothe his paranoiac fantasies, or whether he was acting as an unwitting agent of a genuine conspiracy with motives of its own, is a question debated by today's conspiracy theorists without resolution.<br /><br />Serge Monast died in 1996 of a heart attack. He was 51 years old, and had spent the previous night in jail; he had complained increasingly of persecution by the authorities since the publication of Project Blue Beam. His followers conted he was killed by the kind of "psychotronic beam weapons" he describes in his literature; there is no more evidence for this than for anything else contained therein.<br /><br />But then, there wouldn't be, would there?</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-66765154528618185982011-06-25T22:13:00.000-07:002011-06-25T23:38:35.832-07:00Mojo's Mailbox #5<div align=justify>Events in the real world have complicated my schedule, which was already battling the headwinds of my considerable inertia and less than laserlike focus, but I do want to try to maintain something here on a fairly stable basis, so it behooves me to thank the various contributors who give me reason to. Since the last mailbox, I have been inexcusably indolent, but still several of you found reason to drop me comments and thereby earn honorable mentions here. I'm going to try to resurrect this as a weekly feature, which of course requires having something to intersperse mailboxes with. Fortunately, I left myself a laundry list of items in progress last time out, so I at least have the material - it's just a matter of spinning it out...<br /><br />I begin with the Mindbender, at which <a href="http://littleredhenry.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Heather</a> gamely attempted an answer, which I can now confirm was incorrect. A future post will discuss the correct solution and pose a new Mindbender for the cryptically inclined to cogitate upon. Heather has been an encouraging presence on this baby-stepping blog, and I'll be speaking more of her later.<br /><br /><a href="http://karenfollowingthewhispers.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Karen</a> was nice enough to thank me for my fortune-cookie-lite offering on her blog, which I find very perceptive and thought-provoking, so really if anybody should be thanking anybody it ought to be the other way around. I encourage anybody reading this to imbibe some wisdom from her if your other commitments so permit.<br /><br />The "Project" Project - which, like many a Project to be discussed therein, is on official hiatus right now, although persistent rumors suggest it may yet emerge like a B-movie serial killer in the last reel - kicked off with a review of one of James Randi's sting operations, and brought a truly wonderful aphoristic response from <a href="http://earthdragonhealing.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Laurie</a> about the scope of "the natural" - Laurie's blog deals with holistic themes that blur the boundary between the scientific and the mystical, and is another I'd highly recommend. Heather, for whose comments I can't express sufficient gratitude - Pirandello wrote about characters in search of an author, and I think many bloggers are characters in search of an audience - spoke eloquently to another aspect of magic: the wonder of it. I agree with her that we can get preoccupied looking for the man behind the curtain, and take the fun out of having our senses beguiled and deceived for a time. I have a few ideas for future blogs that arise out of this comment, and I appreciate the stimulus.<br /><br />Although I don't get out and about around the blogosphere nearly enough, and I'm going to have to figure out a way to discipline myself into doing that because there are so many talented and interesting writers out there, I still doubt I'll find a title that delights me more than <a href="http://fabulositynouveau.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Fabulosity Nouveau</a>. Wendy's blog weaves personal and global narratives and always has something, well, fabulous and nouveau to peruse. We are now clearly engaged in a war of compliments, since she said very nice things about my blog back when I was still writing it - although actually the nicest for me was that she intended to go look something up because I'd mentioned it. The idea that I can serve as a doorway onto something new for a reader is very satisfying for me, and it's certainly true that everybody who's commented on these pages has done as much for me in turn.<br /><br /><a href="http://tossingitout.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Lee</a>, whose multifaceted creativity is partly responsible for what you see here, anticipated one of my blogs-in-progress in referencing <em>1984</em>; Orwell's examination of the relationship between thought, language, and political action is very pertinent in today's media-saturated environment. I've got a couple more Agencywatch pieces lined up for days when I'm feeling political, and hopefully I'll be able to address the point Lee made in his comment without getting fitted for a tinfoil hat.<br /><br />And so to the Round-up, which, I was pleased to observe, earned itself a thumbs up from <a href="http://brycedaniels.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Bryce</a> that I'm happy to return: as a fellow alter-ego, I'm always gratified to see a creative talent married to a personable voice, just like what I'd like to be when I'm growed up. Bryce is the latest in an already uncountably vast sea of gifts from the generous and artistic Heather, with whom this mailbox fittingly ends as it started. She tagged me with questions, which I shall herewith attempt to answer.<br /><br /><strong>1. What's the first thing you do in the morning?</strong> This is appallingly soppy, but the first thing I do in the morning, which is also the last thing I do at night, is tell my wife I love her. Sometimes I use those words, sometimes I use others, but that's always what I'm saying (and what she says back, unaccountably). A Cambridge professor found - for such men are always finding such things, presumably in lieu of such other things as fashionable haircuts or matching socks - that we can read words, even if the letters are scrambled, as long as the beginnings and endings are where they should be. I find I can live through days on the same basis.<br /><br /><strong>2. How old do you feel?</strong> Ageless, I guess. One of the factoids I like to drop in the path of conversations - much as vandals drop breezeblocks in the path of oncoming trains - is that I was born a blue baby; strangulated by the umbilical cord, and revived only after some time in the infamous blue light by a dedicated team of doctors to whom I am on most days profoundly grateful. This is too convenient a scapegoat to pin all of my oddities on, but prolonged reflection upon the circumstance has left me with an outlook that has elements of the fatalistic acceptance of the very old and the perennial wonderment of the very young. I am remarkably blessed by this, and one of the several side-effects of it as a condition, if it's reasonable to refer to it as such, is that I generally feel myself to be the approximate age of whoever I'm dealing with, although they invariably feel I'm either younger or older than is actually the case. Very occasionally, I'll meet someone who doesn't know Germany was once divided, or that the Challenger was a shuttle that exploded in the sky over Florida, or that music was once recorded on cassettes (I no longer even expect anybody to remember vinyl), and be reminded of my provenance in the linear-time stream; but for the most part I live either in the moment or outside it, and in neither wise am I much troubled by concerns over my age, or lack of it.<br /><br /><strong>3. What's your sign and does the description match your personality?</strong> I'm a great believer in the parasimplicity principle - not least for the egotistical reason that I formulated it myself. The parasimplicity principle is itself parasimplistic, by which I mean that it can be expressed in myriad ways all of which mean the same thing in different paradigms: one of the simplest is one adopted, long before my strangulation and subsequent birth, by Oscar Wilde - "nothing is itself alone." There is a neat symmetry in the fact that one of the more difficult expressions of parasimplicity is the reciprocal of Wilde's dictum: that "everything is other than itself." This seemingly irrelevant prolegomena leads to an observation about the descriptions appended to the various zodiacal signs, which are in my experience sufficiently lengthy and wide-ranging that it would be remarkable if I <em>didn't</em> identify with them. That said, I am both a textbook Pisces and a textbook Dragon, to a remarkable degree in both cases. Whether this is an application of the parasimplicity principle, or merely another example of it, I'm not sure; and, happily, neither frame alters the convenience of fit.<br /><br /><strong>4) How do you like your caffeine?</strong> I very rarely drink coffee - by 'very rarely,' to qualify, I've drunk perhaps half a dozen cups this millennium - although I drink tea, both in the quaint English hot-with-milk-and-two-sugars and the adopted Southern iced-and-sweet varieties, much more frequently. Almost all of my caffeine, however, comes from Pepsi products. I drink far too many soft drinks, but everybody has to have a vice.<br /><br /><strong>5) Favorite cartoon character?</strong> This question made me laugh, because another of those train-wreck factoids of mine concerns my youthful fondness for certain anthropomorphic female cartoon characters (Jessica Rabbit wasn't my style; oddly, Brittany Chipmunk was). But, in a more - shall we say - <em>cerebral</em> sense, my favorite is probably the Pink Panther.<br /><br />I now need to find some victims to tag in turn with these same questions... and that concludes today's mailbox. Please don't attempt to unbuckle your seats until the ride comes to a complete halt. Thank you.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-31314292678562185932011-06-19T09:35:00.000-07:002011-06-19T10:08:02.913-07:00Mojo's Round-Up #1<div align=justify>Herewith a brief culling from recent news items ...<br /><br /><strong>Sports</strong> ~ Wimbledon seed Bethanie Mattek-Sands has something of a reputation as an avant-garde fashionista and, despite Wimbledon's famously restrictive on-court dress code, she turned heads at the Wimbledon player's pre-party in this little number:<br /><br /><a href="http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/8656/bethaniematteksandstenn.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 230px;" src="http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/8656/bethaniematteksandstenn.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The dress, designed by Alex Noble - famous for his associations with Lady Gaga and her, shall we say, eclectic wardrobe - certainly got attention. Whether her play on the courts - Bethanie is seeded 30th for the All-England Championships scheduled to start Monday, rain permitting - proves equally eyecatching remains to be seen.<br /><br /><strong>Politics</strong> ~ Sticking with a sporting flavor, two heavyweights of the American political scene met this weekend for a long-awaited summit - on the golf course. President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner teamed up on the links against Vice-President Joe Biden and Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich. In an outcome that seems increasingly unlikely to be played out in Congress, Obama and Boehner both won - although victory wasn't assured for either until the eighteenth hole, which may well mirror the protracted contests in the corridors of power over the deficit, engagement in Libya, the lawsuit against Boeing, and a host of other issues great and small. Still, at least the Speaker and the President pocketed $2 each from their five-hour golfathon.<br /><br /><strong>Animal Planet</strong> ~ To Montana now, and a macabre task for Northwestern Energy in East Missoula, where a power outage was traced to the unwelcome influence of a deer fawn... resting on a high-voltage power cable thirty feet in the air.<br /><br />Tasteless college prank? Dry run by Santa Claus?<br /><br />Apparently not, according to East Missoula resident Lee Bridges, who claimed a bald eagle she had seen around the same time the outage was reported was responsible.<br /><br /><a href="http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1715/deerinpowerline.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 262px;" src="http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1715/deerinpowerline.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Entertainment</strong> ~ They tried to make her go to rehab ... but for Amy Winehouse, whose career held so much promise when she stormed the Grammies in 2008, her very public travails with drink and drugs continued last night in Belgrade, where a shambolic and incoherent performance saw her booed off stage after what the Blic daily newspaper slammed as "the worst [concert] in the history of Belgrade." At this rate, the talented singer seems doomed to become another rock 'n' roll "What Might Have Been" - while successor artists like Adele go from strength to strength in her wake. Winehouse is the subject of an infamous New York sculpture entitled "The Only Good Rock Star Is A Dead Rock Star;" let us hope this doesn't prove prophetic.<br /><br /><strong>Hero of the Day</strong> ~ David Lundberg plies his trade in a profession often associated with fairly unsavory activities and pursuits. But even a private eye can rise above the tawdry fare of photographing illicit trysts, and so it was when Lundberg successfully completed a two-month quest to track down a homeless man in Salt Lake City. Max Melitzer had been living rough for years and had drifted out of contact with his family - so, when his brother died of cancer, leaving Max a significant sum in his will, the family hired Lundberg to locate him and give him the news. Although Lundberg has respected the family's wishes for privacy and has not disclosed the amount of Melitzer's inheritance, he did tell the AP: "He'll be able to have a normal life, and be able to have a home, provide for himself, and purchase clothing, food and health care."<br /><br /><strong>Officialdom of the Day</strong> ~ Meanwhile, in Montgomery County, Maryland, hosting this year's US Open Tournament, Jennifer Hughes of the county's Department of Permitting Services was acting to restore the karmic balance. Mindful of her duty - "protecting communities and protecting the safety of people" in her own words - she acted swiftly when she saw a threat outside the Congressional Country Club where the world's best golfers are gathered, and issued a $500 ticket to... a lemonade stand.<br /><br />The six children running the lemonade stand - the oldest was 13 - were dismayed and confused. After a local cameraman spotted the confrontation, the county wisely elected to rescind the ticket. And what will the kids be doing with their ill-gotten gains?<br /><br />Donating them to charity.<br /><br /><strong>Today is ...</strong> ~ Father's Day, of course! The celebrations aren't confined to the United States; Pakistan is one of several countries that dedicates this day to fathers, although apparently the honors don't extend to fathers-in-law. In Chowkazam, Pakistan, an ugly scandal brewed as a cleric accused his son-in-law of tying him up and shaving his beard, a mortal offense in his religion. The son-in-law, Muhammad Imran, had borrowed a fridge from Maulvi Muhammad Hanif; when Hanif asked for it back on Friday, Imran flew into a rage. He said he would get the fridge - it later transpired he had already sold it - and then assaulted his father-in-law, tying him up and shaving off his beard. Hanif was treated for his injuries at a local hospital, but was more concerned about his beardless condition: "I am a cleric, how am I supposed to show my face in society any more?"<br /><br />Imran is being sought by authorities; he should probably hope they catch up with him before Maulvi Hanif's fellow clerics, who are up in arms over the incident.<br /><br /><strong>And Finally</strong> ~ The emergence of swarms of 13-year cicadas inspired Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream in Columbia, MO, to produce an innovative recipe that has attracted the attention of the health department: they boiled the bugs, coated them in chocolate and served them up to customers - apparently, they taste like nuts, which is quite appropriate since you'd have to be nuts to want to eat that stuff.<br /><br />Whatever next? <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110618/sc_livescience/steakmadefromhumanexcrementisitsafe">Steak made from poop?</a><br /><br /></div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-57582193794185031882011-06-19T09:25:00.000-07:002011-06-19T09:34:35.138-07:00Is this thing on ...?<div align=justify> Oops. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing... I hadn't realized just how useful the A to Z Challenge was for keeping my nose to the grindstone, so to speak. There are actually a few bits and pieces I've been working on during my long hiatus away from this blog: if I were sensible, I'd parcel them out over the next couple of weeks to give myself opportunity to get back into the swing of things.<br /><br />I am not sensible.<br /><br />Accordingly, I'll be posting up in relatively short order a prototype for a new "Round Up"-format blog; an observation on Weinergate, which came and went while I was away but deserves comment; a second "Project" blog; and a lengthy counterblast against a <em>Time</em> article allegedly identifying five myths about our economic recovery. Plus, we're long overdue a Mojo Monthly Mindbender, and indeed the solution to the one posed previously; and there's a Mailbox to craft.<br /><br />Hopefully, you'll still be around to read this; even more hopefully, you'll gain something from the experience.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-92065905638095003802011-05-08T11:03:00.000-07:002011-05-08T12:01:08.020-07:00AgencyWatch #1<div align="justify"><em>Being the first in an occasional series investigating the doings of one of our approximately 666 federal agencies here in the United States. Yes, that's right, 666. If you suspect I engaged in some judicious counting there... you're right.</em><br /><br /><strong>Today's Agency: HSARPA</strong><br /><br />The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, created as part of the Department of Homeland Security Act in 2002, is the Science and Technology (S&T)) arm of the sprawling Homeland Security apparatus created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It manages the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, whose focus is more on Research & Development (R&D) as opposed to the S&T brief of HSARPA.<br /><br />Ever notice how acronyms start piling up when you look at government? Almost like they're trying to hide something, isn't it?</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/96/50515322859916550264978.jpg/"><img src="http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/9168/50515322859916550264978.jpg" border="0"/></a></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Similar to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), HSARPA differentiates itself by focusing on projects with a realistic chance of producing workable technologies within two years of commission. Their focus is on counterterrorism, cybersecurity, border control, and disaster response; in many ways, HSARPA resembles the 'Q division' of James Bond fame.<br /><br />They don't express their mission in such gee-whizz terms, of course. According to the HSARPA website, its approximately $1 billion budget is allocated to "push scientific limits to address customer-identified gaps in areas where current technologies and research and development are limited." The agency's Director, Roger D. McGinnis (sounds a bit like "MacGyver" if you say it fast), oversees diverse projects ranging from the extremely popular new screening technologies employed by the TSA, to new cabling technologies that avoid rolling blackouts like those experienced in the early 90s, to cellphone-sized detectors of chemical agents, to inflatable blast plugs that seal off tunnels in emergencies. And these are just the projects Dr. McGinnis feels comfortable talking about in public.<br /><br />One of the most interesting public facets of HSARPA's work is the Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI - yet another acronym), which aims to secure the nation's online activities from attack. Of course, we'd never use the fruits of this research offensively against other nations... that's why we call it the Department of <em>Defense</em> these days, and not the Department of <em>War</em>. Wikileaks has made the vital importance of cybersecurity crystal clear to this administration, as if it weren't already aware. Although work on the CNCI covers many traditional areas such as data provenance and hardware-enabled trust (respectively, tracing where data comes from and building security into the computers used to access that data), HSARPA has a brief to pursue more 'blue-sky' ideas, like: <em>"What if we could design a network that adapted itself to defend against attacks?"</em><br /><br />I'm sure <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcisPdJVNl8">John Connor</a> has an idea about <em>that.</em><br /><br />HSARPA, of course, fits within President Obama's "Winning the Future" strategy, with its unfortunate <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QS0q3mGPGg">Charlie Sheen</a> resonance. Quite why the future should constitute a zero-sum game, when it's clear our foreign policy assumes geopolitics in the present is anything but, is an open question. In any case, Homeland Security makes up a very small part of this "victory", if Federal budget allocations are any measure. The lion's share of research will be conducted - as always - by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); I guess to win the future, you have to be <em>in</em> the future.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-39920350202726802732011-05-06T15:12:00.000-07:002011-05-06T16:03:22.713-07:00Project: Alpha<div align="justify">With the passing of April, and hence the setting aside of the A-Z challenge - I'll be keenly following <a href="http://tossingitout.blogspot.com">Lee</a>'s review of what went well, and not so well, with that - it's time for me to find some other structural hook to hang my ramblings upon.<br /><br />In need of a new Project, it occured to me that I could do a Project on Projects - it may or may not be another alphabetical set, but it gives me the kind of theme I can work with.<br /><br />Today's subject is, fittingly for a first choice, Project Alpha. This was the brainchild of magician James Randi, a man who freely admits that the various illusions and feats of prestidigitation he performed were the result of sustained and practiced cheating: misdirection, fraud, chicanery, and deception. He offers no apology for it - the essence of Magic, after all, is knowing something the audience does not, and most people who attend a magic show understand that the performer is hoodwinking them somehow. The allure is in trying to work out just how he does it.<br /><br />As his career progressed through the Twentieth Century, Randi increasingly found himself competing for airtime with supposedly authentic paranormal talents like that of Uri Geller. Not perturbed by the competition, Randi was affronted that people - even apparently intelligent scientists in supposedly rigorous experimental laboratories - took Geller and his ilk at their word and believed they produced their effects through "psychic energy." As an experienced stage magician, Randi was by nature and training much more inclined to believe that Geller and Co. were simply tricking people: they were, he felt, no more paranormal than he was, and he took offence at the superstitious and mystical interpretation of acts like Geller's spoon-bending trick. The following video demonstrates some of the evidence for a more prosaic interpretation: Geller is simply a skilled flim-flam artist with a penchant for cutlery.</div><br /><br /><center><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DinkCry5KlM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br /><div align="justify">Randi set out in the 1970s to investigate and challenge Geller and other purported psychic talents, a stance adopted by other self-confessed tricksters and illusionists like England's Derren Brown and the venerable Harry Houdini. He encountered serious difficulties - not because he was unable to replicate Geller's effects; he was, quite easily - but because people <em>wanted</em> to believe in psi. At one demonstration, Randi was angrily accused of being a fraud. He smilingly admitted this was so - everything he had accomplished had been done by sleight of hand, trickery, and misdirection. No, no, his interlocuter angrily replied: he was a fraud because <em>he actually was using psychic powers</em>, and only <em>claiming</em> to be a charlatan!<br /><br />(Houdini got the same treatment from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of whose propensity towards belief in such matters we shall speak another time.)<br /><br />Randi might have expected this sort of thing from the rubes who pay to be entertained by magic shows, but he was deeply dismayed to find similar levels of credulity - and dismal levels of scientific rigor - among those parapsychologists who attempted to 'test' the abilities of psychics like Geller. It was this dismay that led Randi to set up Project Alpha, which, in 1979, infiltrated two Randi stooges into a research project, conducted at Washington University and handsomely funded by the board chairman of McDonnell Douglas - himself a believer in the paranormal. Randi also wrote to the researchers warning them to be on the lookout for fakes, and suggesting methodological refinements that might catch such tricksters in the act. He even volunteered his services as an observer; these were declined. The researchers were employing a two-stage approach: in the informal stage, they wanted everything to be as cosy as possible for the putative psychics.<br /><br />Randi's stooges, Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, sailed through the first stage despite resorting to grossly obvious manipulations of the tests - for example, they 'read' messages in sealed envelopes by simply unsealing and resealing them, and moved objects in 'sealed' containers by blowing through holes in the containers. In one test, they altered the dimensions of spoons by the simple method of swapping the labels attached to spoons of different sizes. Incredibly, these clumsy frauds went unnoticed by the researchers, who proved so obliging in their efforts to facilitate trickery that even Shaw and Edwards were surprised. Although Randi had instructed them to confess their deception if they were ever asked about it directly, they never were during a period of almost 2 years. During the second stage of the process, under more rigorous laboratory conditions, their psi abilities faded dramatically; still, the researchers were unwilling to conclude that they were deliberate frauds, speculating instead that such conditions might inhibit psychic abilities.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Shaw and Edwards had become minor celebrities in their own right, dazzling other paranormal researchers with their abilities even as the Washington University team cooled on them. Eventually, after two years, Randi pulled the plug, revealing the whole deception in an article in <em>Discover</em> magazine. Many parapsychologists were outraged, much as the fawning courtiers of the Emperor with No Clothes were furious at the little boy who remarked upon the Imperial nakedness; some, however, thanked Randi for his service to their cause.<br /><br />Does the success of charlatans like Randi, and the suspicions over successful entertainers like Geller, mean there are no genuine paranormal talents out there? The James Randi Educational Foundation promoted a One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anybody who enjoys a measure of celebrity and the support of a reputable academic for their claimed paranormal abilities; to date, nobody has won the prize.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-38604465316175466162011-05-04T17:57:00.000-07:002011-05-04T18:28:53.553-07:00Mojo's Monthly Mindbender: May 2011<div align="justify">I had intended to introduce the Mindbender with a musical/mathematical quiz thing, but it still requires finishing touches, and besides, May is already four - count them - days old. So, instead, and inspired by the cinematic flavor of some of my new blogreads, I volunteer something a little easier. Maybe.<br /><br />This quiz is just a single question, and it's one of the oldest in the book. Who's the odd one out? For full credit, I'll require an explanation to back up your answer. I have an answer in mind, but any offering that makes sense will earn an as-yet-to-be-determined Mojo Prize.</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img94.imageshack.us/i/anthony20edwards6.jpg/"><img src="http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/2089/anthony20edwards6.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img709.imageshack.us/i/kristenstewart1q.jpg/"><img src="http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/865/kristenstewart1q.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img706.imageshack.us/i/waynejohn.jpg/"><img src="http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/6420/waynejohn.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img196.imageshack.us/i/tippihedren3x5.jpg/"><img src="http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/4582/tippihedren3x5.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img23.imageshack.us/i/johnnydepppicture3.jpg/"><img src="http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/5526/johnnydepppicture3.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img196.imageshack.us/i/47151jodiefoster.jpg/"><img src="http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/8240/47151jodiefoster.jpg" border="0"/></a><br /><br /></center><br /><div align="justify">I'll happily give feedback on any guesses, conjectures, comments, and criticisms in the comments to this blog. The answer will be revealed almost a month hence, on June 1st 2011, at the unveiling of the next Mindbender - unless, of course, one of you clever folks uncovers it before then...</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-88136442134402046572011-05-04T16:35:00.001-07:002011-05-04T17:57:39.142-07:00Mojo's Mailbox #4<div align="justify">Completing a thirty-day A-to-Z blogging challenge, after long blogless years, is the internet equivalent of following a four-year stay in a monastery with an all-expenses-paid no-questions-asked weekend at the Playboy mansion: satisfying and exhausting in equal measure.<br /><br />This explains, without excusing, the hiatus between my last post and this one - a necessary pause for your chronicler, and perhaps a welcome one for his readers, but one that concludes here with a roundup of comments before I embark on the next chapter. I may retain the A-to-Z format, at least for a while (the structure appeals to me) but I'd like to leaven my written contributions with rather more in the way of reading. The little I managed to do during the past month whetted my appetite, and there are at least 15 people to whom I owe it simply as a courtesy. This, plus the surprising difficulty of obtaining dilithium crystals at Walmart and the concomitant unavailability of my time machine, should see a reduction in the number of blogs I produce monthly, but hopefully a compensating increase in the number of comments I bestow on yours. I earnestly hope this proves to be a good thing...<br /><br />So: to the mailbox.<br /><br /><a href="http://littleredhenry.blogspot.com/">Heather</a> has been a selfless commenter on my doggerel, with far too little by way of grateful recognition. Consider this a partial recompense for your kind and encouraging words! The flip side is that they have kindly encouraged me to inflict a trivia quiz in the next post that ushers in the Monthly Mindbender series of Mojonalia, for which you may yet have cause to curse my name. Either way, your blog's delightful, and I intend to go back and comment on the posts I missed. Your visuals appeal to my sense of the eclectic, and you quoted one of my favorite songs of all time in your Z post, so it will be a profound pleasure to shower belated praise on your efforts over the last month. I look forward to reading more of you in future!<br /><br />P.S. Thanks ever so much for my award!!! We never tire of flattery, here at Mojo, Inc. ...<br /><br />I was pleased that <a href="http://earthdragonhealing.blogspot.com/">Laurie</a>, whose blog I found full of wisdom and wonderfully open to alternative ideas, enjoys a good Rickroll as much as I do. <a href="http://wistfulgirl.blogspot.com/">Mrs. Mojo</a> and I were surfing Youtube the other evening and encountered a Rickroll while perusing the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtN1YnoL46Q">"Duck Song"</a> series - highly recommended by me, which might mark mine as a peculiar sense of humor - which was among the highlights of the day. In my defense, it was a Monday, and those are seldom awesome.<br /><br />I was also delighted to see comments from new readers - a very satisfying feeling for a n00b blogger like myself, that! <br /><br /><a href="http://emeraldcity48.blogspot.com/">Luana</a>, whose blurb reveals herself to be a high-caliber polymath, earns even more of my admiration by having produced an A-Z of movies. This idea is sufficiently brilliant that I will shamelessly steal it - I haven't decided whether to do so this month or allow a little time to elapse so I can deceive future followers into believing it was all my own creation. The blog of her alter ego <a href="http://fixingmadison.blogspot.com/">Madison</a> is also extremely interesting and entertaining, although I'm not sure what to make of people who create online <em>alter egos</em> ... </div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img821.imageshack.us/i/50515322859916550264978.jpg/"><img src="http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/9168/50515322859916550264978.jpg" border="0"/></a></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Moving on... <a href="http://madlabonline.blogspot.com/">Nicole</a> was very complimentary about my posts, and I'm delighted to reciprocate about hers. Another cineaste, and an eloquent and entertaining one, I'm happy to add her to my list of followed blogs as well.<br /><br /><a href="http://writinginwonderland.blogspot.com/">Sylvia</a> hosts an entertaining blog that is both informative and demonstrates terrific taste in blog templates.</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img821.imageshack.us/i/50515322859916550264978.jpg/"><img src="http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/9168/50515322859916550264978.jpg" border="0"/></a></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Well, <em>I</em> liked it... In all seriousness, Sylvia's one of several people I've encountered through the A-Z blogroll who is just a very positive presence - her blog's another that's full of useful and encouraging tidbits of information, and I thank her for doing an exemplary job with it.<br /><br />Last, but not least, <a href="http://elizabethmueller.blogspot.com/">Elizabeth</a> bestowed yet another award for my already-groaning shelf - part of an extraordinarily ambitious and generous journey through the 1000+ blogs on the A-Z blogroll that I cannot sufficiently admire. As soon as I can devise an appropriate award of my own, I shall be sending it your way. You inspire me.<br /><br />Thanks to everybody who I've met through the A to Z challenge; for those I missed, and for those I didn't follow as closely as I would have liked, I look forward to seeing more in future.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-43592455926840239872011-04-30T21:11:00.000-07:002011-05-02T04:17:29.075-07:00Z is for ... Zeno of Elea<div align="justify">Herewith a culling from my personal archive - an illustrative fable, borrowing heavily but unwittingly from Lewis Carroll's <em>What the Tortoise Said to Achilles</em>, which I didn't actually encounter until later in a linear-time paradigm. The tortoise in my story advances three of the "immeasurably subtle and profound" (thank you, Bertrand Russell) paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher hailed by Aristotle as the inventor of the dialectic. It is perhaps appropriate that this fable takes a dialectical form.</div><br /><br /><center>* * *</center><br /><div align="justify">"Let us race," declaimed the tortoise with a loftiness belying his low center of gravity.<br /><br />The hare left off appreciating the feel of the wind cool against his long ears and regarded the tortoise with leporine indulgence.<br /><br />"You want... us... to race?" clarified the hare, not unkindly he thought.<br /><br />The tortoise nodded, an exercise that took long enough that the hare had time to watch a small cloud scud across the sky overhead. It looked like a nice head of lettuce, he thought. His stomach rumbled: his was an active metabolism.<br /><br />"Each other?" The hare was a thorough if not a very bright animal.<br /><br />Again the tortoise nodded, and the hare occupied himself scratching at his flank.<br /><br />"But I'm much faster than you," explained the hare as sensitively as he could. "You racing me would be just pointless."<br /><br />"Oh, it doesn't matter how fast we go, you know," remarked the tortoise pleasantly. "It's a question of how far."<br /><br />This seemed a rather odd view of racing to the hare, who felt that he knew a thing or two about racing after his serial adventures with the farmer's hounds; but he kept his counsel, because he felt rather sorry for the tortoise.<br /><br />"However," the latter was now saying, "you do make a good point. Would you agree to give me a head start?"<br /><br />"Hang on," said the hare. "A head start to where? A race has to have a start and a finish."<br /><br />"It does, does it?" The tortoise seemed amused. "Let's suppose a race goes from some place to some other place that's different. Then to move between those places, we can surely agree that at any moment one would have to be moving either from a spot or to a spot between them. Correct?"<br /><br />The hare thought about this. His nose twitched as he worked it out, and this time the tortoise had the luxury of observing a cloud scud by overhead.<br /><br />"I think so," said the hare at length.<br /><br />"And," continued the tortoise carelessly, "at any moment one would have to be in a spot between the start and finish of the race, yes?"<br /><br />The hare chewed pensively. His feet were much happier with racing than his brain.<br /><br />"That seems right," he ventured.<br /><br />"Well then," said the tortoise, "in that case, no matter where the start and finish are, or when we consider one's position, one has to either be in the place where one is and the place one just came from, or the place where one is and the place one is headed."<br /><br />The hare's ears drooped.<br /><br />"That can't be right," he said miserably.<br /><br />"Oh it can," said the tortoise with placid contentment. "Unless of course movement is continuous and it's the instant that's an illusion. But then there's no reason to suppose that it means anything to say that at any moment anything's in any particular place. One might as well say one starts the race at the finish, since no moment's any more real than any other."<br /><br />The hare hopped about unhappily in a circle. "You're confusing me," he said.<br /><br />"Don't worry about it," enjoined the tortoise earnestly. "Let's pretend that it does matter and we actually do occupy some coordinate in spacetime."<br /><br />The hare's eyes were glazing.<br /><br />"I'm going to walk over here," said the tortoise, starting out on that journey, "and you can wait there."<br /><br />He sauntered off, while the hare tried to work out if he had time for a snack and whether he might actually already be having one. The tortoise had upset his delicate sensibilities, and he was sorely in need of a radish.<br /><br />Some minutes later, the tortoise hailed him, from a distance of some ten feet away.<br /><br />"That should be enough of a headstart, don't you think?"<br /><br />The hare looked doubtfully at the space between them.<br /><br />"It doesn't seem very far," he suggested timidly.<br /><br />"Oh but quite far enough," returned the tortoise. "Because now to win the race, you'll have to pass me. And to pass me you'll have to reach me."<br /><br />"Yes..." said the hare, with the uneasy feeling that he was about to get a migraine.<br /><br />"Of course, to reach me, you'll first have to get halfway here."<br /><br />The hare thought about this. "Of course," he said, but he didn't sound certain.<br /><br />"And naturally, to get there you'll have to go halfway first."<br /><br />"... Naturally ..."<br /><br />"And to get there you'll have to go halfway as well."<br /><br />"I suppose so..."<br /><br />"And in fact no matter how many times we divide that distance up, you'll always be able to divide it up one more time. For you to reach me, you'll have to first travel an infinitely short distance."<br /><br />The hare extended a paw towards the tortoise, and hesitated, and withdrew it.<br /><br />"Can't I just -?"<br /><br />"Not logically," said the tortoise firmly. "In any case, even if you could start out, and even if having started out you could move from place to place... there's still the problem that you'll never catch up with me, let alone get past me."<br /><br />The hare felt sure there was something badly wrong with this, but he couldn't put his paw on it.<br /><br />"Because," explained the tortoise patiently, "even though I travel much slower than you, I am travelling at the same time as you are and on the same journey, albeit from a different start point. We're going in the same direction, is what I mean to say."<br /><br />"But," blurted out the hare, "you're only ten feet away! I can cover that distance in no time!"<br /><br />"On the contrary," sniffed the tortoise. "You can only cover that distance - or any distance - in some time. And in that time, I can cover some distance too. Oh, not nearly as much of course... but enough."<br /><br />"You'd only go..." the hare struggled with mental arithmetic, "one foot."<br /><br />"Correct!" said the tortoise delightedly. "And of course you'd cover that distance easily as well... but I'd have moved on..."<br /><br />"... a tenth of a foot..." whispered the hare miserably.<br /><br />"Quite so!" went on the tortoise. "And I know you'd cover that distance even quicker... but I'd have moved on another hundredth of a foot. Oh, you'd get very close," he smiled, "but you'd never catch me."<br /><br />The hare scratched his other side. The smell of radishes was overwhelming.<br /><br />"You win," he sighed, and hopped past the tortoise to get some food.</div><br /><br /><center>* * *</center><br /><br /><div align="justify">This concludes, only slightly late depending on how one measures these things, my personal A to Z challenge. I want to reiterate thanks to everyone who helped me along the way, and apologies to all of them, and more besides, for not getting out there and commenting more in return. It is my earnest hope that I'll be redressing that balance in coming days.<br /><br />I also have a mailbox to compile, which I'll be getting around to hopefully tomorrow. I've been honored with an award, from a blogger I appreciate greatly but haven't done much to show that lately, so that needs to go up as well. Busy, busy, busy! PLUS the inaugural Mojo's Monthly Mindbender (which for May will have a musical and mathematical bent, since I might as well milk the alliteration for all it's worth) and perhaps the first tentative steps towards the Mojofesto, in preparation for November 2012. I eagerly await the inspirations and communications the blogosphere has in store for me over the coming thirty days - thanks for the ride so far, guys and gals!</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-33264354684385781452011-04-29T07:36:00.000-07:002011-05-01T07:55:10.838-07:00Y is for ... Yak<center><em>As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.<br />You will find it exactly the thing:<br />It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,<br />Or lead it about with a string.<br /><br />The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet<br />(A desolate region of snow)<br />Has for centuries made it a nursery pet.<br />And surely the Tartar should know!<br /><br />Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,<br />And if he is awfully rich<br />He will buy you the creature - or else he will not.<br />(I cannot be positive which.)</em></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Hilaire Belloc's 1896 poem ascribes to the yak considerable virtues, without troubling to mention the Himalayan bovine is among the largest species in the family - a wild yak can stand 7 feet tall at the shoulder and weigh over a metric ton - or that they are so well-adapted for the harsh high-altitude environment they call home that they struggle in more human-friendly habitats. In Tibet, domesticated yaks - which are smaller than the wild yak - are used as hardy beasts of burden, and for their milk, their meat, their hides ... even their dung makes valuable fuel, for there is little vegetation in the high Himalayas that can serve this purpose. Yaks even provide a tourist attraction, and are employed in bizarre sports like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkOe5ZWo1vU" target="_blank">yak polo</a>.<br /><br />Another use to which the yak has been put is in substituting for another infamous Himalaya native, also known by a name beginning with Y. Hide from yaks has been claimed in the past, wittingly or otherwise, to be residual evidence of the legendary yeti, the cryptid apeman of the Himalayas. Other specimens have been reliably identified as belonging to Tibetan blue bears, or the serow, a species of mountain goat. Cryptozoologists continue to return, however, drawn by a long history of mysterious footprints in the high snowfields, periodic intriguing finds of partial remains - the Panboche hand, a relic that had Neanderthal features but that was stolen before it could be fully tested, is a classic example - and a wealth of eyewitness reports stretching back into history and persisting to the present day. We shall speak more of the Yeti another time.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-24851820022022515752011-04-28T07:06:00.000-07:002011-05-01T07:26:17.665-07:00X is for ... Xanth<div align="justify">The <em>Xanth</em> novels of Piers Anthony - he claims the partial eponym is coincidental - are a series of works of comic fantasy, originally conceived as a trilogy, that now spans enough books to qualify as a cubic trilogy with some to spare (the 27th <em>Xanth</em> novel was entitled <em>Cube Route</em>, a punning reference to the fact that 27 is 3 cubed).<br /><br />Anthony has found a gold mine with his <em>Xanth</em> universe - its magical Talents, its population of centaurs and gargoyles and goblins, its tongue-in-cheek Adult Conspiracy to protect children from knowledge that might scar their youthful minds, and, above all, its pervasive puns have made it hugely popular with a devoted following. The author himself has remarked that <em>Xanth</em> novels are all his publisher wants him to produce these days, and if he sounds a little bitter there it's because even the most successful milieu can become an albatross round an author's neck if he's unable to write about anything else.<br /><br />Particularly in the fields of humor and fantasy, imaginative creativity is the author's mainstay. When that author has spent around three decades churning out sequels set in the same world, there is a tendency for his well of inspiration to run dry. Indeed, for neutrals at least, <em>Xanth</em> novels, taken as a whole, constitute an uneven set; some are sublime, others simply seem to be extended Feghoots whose sole purpose is to fulfil Anthony's contractual obligations and shoehorn puns, almost at random, into a derivative plot.<br /><br />That being said, even the worst <em>Xanth</em> novel is entertaining - Anthony is a fine writer, and he's been canny enough to supplement his own inspiration with that of his legion of fans. He receives huge amounts of fan mail incorporating suggestions for plot devices, character twists, new Talents - and puns, of course. I myself have sent him almost a dozen puns in the hope that one would show up in a future <em>Xanth</em> novel.<br /><br />No pun in ten did.<br /><br />You may groan now.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-58076014555992920212011-04-27T06:43:00.000-07:002011-04-30T09:38:27.827-07:00W is for ... Wendigo<div align="justify">The story of the Donner Party contributes an altogether distressing footnote to the history of Western migration in the United States. Great numbers of pioneers set out in the 1800s to colonize the West; many of these subscribed to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, believing that God had ordained this land for them much as the Bible tells He had ordained Israel for the Jewish people. Of course, these pioneers found that God had already populated the area with humans, just as the first settlers discovered the Algonquian natives already living blameless lives on land they foolishly believed to be as much theirs as anybody else's.<br /><br />Most of the wagon trains that forged westward from Independence, Missouri, followed the Oregon Trail for a period of several months before reaching safe haven in California, in the vicinity of Sutter's Fort - founded as New Helvetia in 1839. The Donner Party deviated from this trail to take a 'shortcut' through Fort Bridger that took them the long way around the Great Salt Lake and through the Great Salt Lake Desert, an inhospitable and dangerous trek that added a month to their travel time and was to have horrific consequences. This 'shortcut' was proposed to them by an adventurer named Lansford Hastings. The Hastings Cutoff seemed on paper to make good sense as a straighter alternative route to the Oregon Trail; but Hastings advanced it as such without having traveled it, and so the perils of the desert, and of the Wasatch Mountains, were not taken into account. <br /><br />When the Donner Party, including several other families as well as George Donner, his wife Tamsen, and their five children, arrived at Fort Bridger following after a wagon train led by Hastings, they were assured by Jim Bridger that the route was easy and would cut 350 miles from their journey. This was blatantly untrue, although it encouraged the party to stay at Fort Bridger and enrich its proprietor. One might charitably assume Bridger, not having followed Hastings Cutoff himself, was unaware of how misleading his information was - except that Bridger had been left in possession of letters written by one Edwin Bryant, who had traveled ahead far enough to ascertain that the journey was anything but easy. Bridger never gave these letters to the Donner party, who were hardly survivalists - they were used to comfortable living in Missouri, and included few men with the skills necessary to succeed at an arduous journey through barren terrain. Of the 87 members of the Donner party, only 27 were adult males, and several of these were advanced in years: George Donner himself was 62 years old when the party set out.<br /><br />The sufferings endured by the Donner Party defy description. They had already lost several members to disease, trauma, and at least one instance of alleged murder when two wagons became entangled and James Reed stabbed a man to death, by the time they came to the Sierra Nevada. The month's delay occasioned by Hastings Cutoff meant the snows arrived at the same time. Riven by dissent, riddled with disease, starving, inexperienced, with the last of their cattle and horses already perished, and trapped by snowdrifts on all sides in bleak mountain country, the Donner Party confronted the horror of their circumstances with a solution no less horrific: they resorted to cannibalism. Efforts were made to keep family members from eating their own relatives, a macabre courtesy to the dead; and there is no unequivocal evidence that anybody was deliberately killed for meat. Certainly, there was no need: the elements did a brutal job of supplying dead bodies to sustain the survivors. Originally trapped on October 20, 1846, the last survivor of the party - Lewis Keseberg, over whom a cloud of suspicion hung for the rest of his life since he admitted sharing a cabin with Tamsen Donner but could not adequately account for her whereabouts - was rescued almost six months later, on April 10, 1847.<br /><br />Although the desperate plight of the Donner Party renders the desperate measures they resorted to for survival understandable - if still morally murky - to Western minds, the Algonquian people could account for it another way. Hearing how party member Patrick Dolan urged his companions to sacrifice someone so that the others might feed - before this became the inescapable necessity it evidently did become for others - and that when his notion was rejected he tore off his clothes and fled into the wilderness, the Ojibwe Indians would recognize the malign influence of one of the more powerful <em>manitous</em> of their folklore - the ravenous and deceptive Wendigo, a spirit capable of possessing men that hungers constantly for human flesh. According to Algonquian legend, the Wendigo is perpetually emaciated, even when feeding on human meat; some tribes believe that as it feeds, it grows larger, so that it is never sated. Cases of so-called <em>wendigo psychosis</em> - when people become convinced they are possessed by a Wendigo and become ravenous for human flesh - are documented in anthropological research; during times of famine, Algonquian tribes perform Wendigo dances to ward off the spirt. The Oji-Cree shaman Jack Fiddler was imprisoned by Canadian authorities in 1907 as a murderer; he maintained that he was releasing people from the terrible Wendigos that had enslaved them.<br /><br />It is tempting to bask in our cultural imperialism and deride tales of the Wendigo as superstitious; we can rationalize them as enforcing taboos against cannibalism, and encouraging cooperation during times of hardship and strife. And certainly, the Donner Party were in the direst straits imaginable when they broke that ultimate taboo. But still, the ghoulish fascination with Donner Pass lingers...</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-53608385791210146312011-04-26T14:00:00.000-07:002011-05-03T18:44:37.250-07:00V is for ... Velikovsky<div align="justify">With the end of the A to Z challenge hoving into view - hoving, moreover, at rather alarming speed, given my somewhat scattershot approach to daily updates in a linear-time paradigm - this seems as good a moment as any to write a blog about an obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian.<br /><br />The obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian in question is one Immanuel Velikovsky, a medical man who published in the 1930s the first article advocating the use of encephalography as a diagnostic tool in cases of epilepsy. A disciple of Freud who also authored several papers on psychoanalytic subjects, Velikovsky was a well-traveled man, fluent in several languages and educated in Montpellier, Edinburgh, and Moscow. He obtained his medical degree in 1921, and for much of the next two decades lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where he worked with other notable Jewish intellectuals - including one Albert Einstein, later to refuse the Presidency of Israel - on the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, Velikovsky was naturally interested in Freud's own output; as future events were to prove, he shared his mentor's somewhat monomaniac habit of shoehorning all manner of data into a pet theory, and, with war looming, Velikovsky decamped with his wife - the violinist Elisheva Kramer - to New York, there to research material for a book about Oedipus.<br /><br />The 'Oedipus complex' is one of the better-known offshoots of Freud's comprehensive psychosexual theories of human development - it describes a syndrome in which the son's unconscious sexual attraction to his own mother creates a tension eventually resolved by self-identification with his father, and is named for the mythical king of Thebes immortalized by Sophocles in <em>Oedipus Rex</em>. Freud considered this a universal stage in the development of all males - females passed through a similar 'Electra Complex' in which they fixated on the father - which earned him a devoted following at the time as psychoanalysis flourished, but has since equally drawn criticism from more cautious and more pluralist researchers. Part of Freud's basis for universalizing his theories was the support he sought and found in historical contexts. An example of this was his <em>Moses and Monotheism</em>, which rewrote the Bible and argued that Moses and the Pharaoh - identified as Akhnaton, the first Pharaoh to promote monotheistic worship of the Aten - were one and the same. From this revisionist leap, it was a short journey for Freud to postulate the murder of Moses/Akhnaton as the motivation for the Jewish belief in a Messiah, and thence to characterize the importance of religion in the Jewish identity as a shared guilt complex arising out of the Oedipal murder of the father-figure.<br /><br />Velikovsky took a different but no less bizarre tack - his psychohistoric theory identified the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton with the Thebean king Oedipus directly. He was seeking confirmation of his theories in contemporary Egyptian accounts of the Exodus, a task made possible by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 but still fraught with difficulty. He found in the Ipuwer Papyrus evidence that seemed to correspond with the Biblical plagues of Egypt; there was a trifling chronological problem with the centuries these events were believed to have happened, but Velikovsky was equal to that and embarked upon a feat of revisionism that left Freud in his shadow: nothing more nor less than a hybridization of Biblical scholarship with Egyptology into a new Velikovskian history of the ancient world, one in which psychoanalytic theories were consistently demonstrated in the events and personages recorded in the resultant mishmash.<br /><br />The story takes a turn for the even wierder when, in 1950, we catch up with a Velikovsky now deeply embedded in catastrophic cosmology and hawking his <em>Worlds in Collision</em> around various publishing houses. Despite his track record as a published scientist, and despite the erudition and scholarship of his work, he is turned down by eight publishing houses because what he is writing is deemed to be simply too controversial - too "out there" - for the highly conventional world of academic publishing. Part of their reluctance stems from the unifying thesis of Velikovsky's reimagining of the Bible: he ascribes many of the events of Biblical history to an extraordinary astronomical event, the eruption of the planet Venus from the planet Jupiter, and the subsequent near misses as both Venus and Mars swooped past Earth <em>en route</em> to their current celestial positions. The complete lack of any precedent - indeed, any conventional astronomical evidence - for this remarkable cosmic occurence dissuaded Velikovsky not at all, because he was able to compile all the evidence he needed by selectively culling from widely-disparate sources and, where necessary, guessing.<br /><br />Eventually, Velikovsky's perseverance was rewarded: the textbook division of prestigious publishing house Macmillan agreed to publish <em>Worlds in Collision</em>. It seemed as though Velikovsky's ideas were going to be aired before the public - but there was a problem. During his research for <em>Worlds in Collision</em>, Velikovsky had corresponded with, among others, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley - a potential stablemate at Macmillan's scientific division. The problem was that Shapley considered Velikovsky's theory of planetary billards patently absurd, and mounted a vehement, and successful, campaign with the assistance of other scientists contracted to Macmillan to have Velikovsky's book shelved. The success of that campaign demonstrated that Velikovsky's own world was in collision with the monolith of orthodox Science.<br /><br />Doubleday, a publisher without a textbook division, picked up the book; and the assaults of the scientific community upon it continued. No less a luminary than Carl Sagan used his various bully pulpits, including his PBS show <em>Cosmos</em>, to inveigh against Velikovsky's maverick ideas. He cited the atmospheric composition of Venus, the radioemissions of Jupiter, the physics of celestial orbits, and other established scientific facts to assert that Velikovsky's proposed causal mechanism was junk science - it simply couldn't have happened as Velikovsky asserted it had. Sagan did have the grace to consider Velikovsky's thesis, and reject it on the basis of scientific observations that contradicted it; he criticized others in the scientific community who had simply tried to silence Velikovsky because his proposals were so far outside the mainstream.<br /><br />This firestorm of criticism came as a surprise to Velikovsky himself, for whom ten years of his life had been devoted to systematically laying out the evidence for something that, to him, had become obvious. In vain, he tried to defend his own claims, pointing out that the vast majority of his evidence was concerned with archaeological and historical matters: what had convinced him of the truth of his assertions was the remarkable concordance between mythologies in places as far-flung as China and Egypt. And he gained a following among the lay public, who were sympathetic to him because of the harshness of the treatment meted out by his fellow scientists. Velikovsky was neither the first nor the last man to have his work ridiculed because its results lay outside the mainstream - Robert Goddard, for example, had been mocked in the <em>New York Times</em> for lacking the knowledge "ladled out daily in high schools" when he proposed the use of rockets in the vacuum of space; a groveling apology was printed when, years later, his theories were employed to put men on the moon.<br /><br />Science has since moved on from attacking Velikovsky's causal mechanism to attacking the substance of his thesis: the assertion that the miraculous events described in the Holy Bible were actual historical occurences. This transition perhaps illustrates why the reception to his controversial book was so hostile: Science and Religion have always been "worlds in collision." Ironically, the evidence used to undermine the catastrophic theories of Velikovsky was partly compiled to support the catastrophic theories of global warming. Al Gore, a man with no significant scientific background - unless you count his claim to have invented the Internet - earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize, an Emmy, an Oscar, and a Grammy for <em>his</em> advancement of a catastrophic thesis. It's all about <em>who</em> you know, rather than <em>what</em> you know...<br /><br />Although history will remember Velikovsky as a brilliant but flawed thinker, his years of scholarship did raise questions that remain valid despite his rigorous pummelling at the hands of the scientific community. For example: if there was no Great Flood, as documented in the Book of Genesis... why do the mythologies of Australia, China, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Zimbabwe, and the Americas - cultures that had no contact with one another until well into the period of historic time - agree that there was?</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-52788821711001312782011-04-25T19:51:00.000-07:002011-04-28T22:15:05.475-07:00U is for ... Ultima Thule<div align="justify"><em>U is also for Untimely; V, W, X, and Y posts are all due by Friday of this week. Perhaps the stars will align helpfully...</em><br /><br />Thule (rhymes with Julie) was, from antiquity and well into medieval times, the name for a geographical region in the far north of Europe. Believed originally to be an island - the Gaelic name for Iceland is <em>Innis Tile</em>, which literally means "Island of Thule" - it is nowadays commonly accepted that the region referred to by ancient texts as Thule was probably Norway.<br /><br />Thule was first described by the explorer Pytheas, although even ancient historians such as Strabo and Polybius considered his to be an unreliable account. In fact, information on the historical Thule is remarkably vague; one of the few matters on which all sources agree is its location in the distant North. The Latin expression <em>ultima Thule</em> means - more or less - "beyond the known world", or "off the map." In the context that identifies Thule with Iceland specifically, Ultima Thule is identified with Greenland; but the expression is more poetic than literal. Virgil employs "Ultima Thule" as a symbol for an unattainable goal; Poe cites it as a "Dream-land" in his 1844 poem of that name.<br /><br />One relatively modern mention of Ultima Thule was in the Dutch manuscript known as the <em>Oera Linda</em>, a collection of mythic, historic, and religious writings purported to date back as far as 2000 BC. Almost certainly, its provenance was much more recent, although as with many esoteric texts the intent of its author or authors is as mysterious as his, her, or their identity; whether it represents an earnest attempt at scholarship, an elaborate hoax, a parody, or a work of imaginative fiction comparable with Borges' fictitious history in <em>Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius</em>, is an open question to this day. It was presented to a librarian in Friesland, Holland, in 1867 by one Cornelius Over de Linden, suspected by many of being the book's originator - he claimed to have inherited it from his grandfather, although various evidences support the contention that it was actually a product of the 1850s.<br /><br />The substance of the <em>Oera Linda</em> manuscript is a remarkable if rather unorthodox revisionist history of the world, in which all the modern races of the world are traced back to an Aryan master race whose Frisian culture, a matriarchal society centered on the worship of the Norse goddess Freya, originated in Northern Europe. It mentions, not only Thule, but also Atlantis as centers of this ancient civilization, which is claimed to have fostered both the Greek and Phoenician alphabets. An inspiration for the Theosophists, and thence Crowley's Thelema - although Crowley was more a crypto-Egyptian than a crypto-Nordic occultist - and the modern revival of neo-pagan Wicca, the <em>Oera Linda</em> was also a favorite among the high command of Nazi Germany: indeed, it was referred to as "Himmler's Bible," and was a focus of study at the <em>Ahnenerbe</em>, a Nazi think tank attempting to vindicate the vile Nazi belief that Aryan peoples were naturally superior to all others. <br /><br />The consensus that the <em>Oera Linda</em> documents - made available in 1933 in a German translation by Herman Wirth - were forgeries, should have prompted a rethink: instead, it was the prelude to a wide-ranging exercise in self-delusion that took Nazi Nordicists to the Arctic, Tibet, and the Ukraine, among other far-flung destinations. Sketchy reports from early visitors to the Canary Islands of blond-haired and blue-eyed Guanche natives were sufficient to spark talk of an investigative trip there, but Generalissimo Franco's uncooperative attitude towards Nazi Germany dissuaded the eager seekers after truth from following up on this lead.<br /><br />As with so many manifestations of the Nazi regime, the <em>Ahnenerbe</em> combined the ridiculous with the sublimely evil; among its many projects as the war progressed, it absorbed the <em>Institut fur Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung</em> - the macabre "Institute for Military Scientific Research" that performed unthinkably depraved experiments on human subjects. Of the many horrifying reflections inspired by any sustained investigation into the deeds of Nazi Germany, perhaps the most chilling is the banal ludicrousness of the hoaxes that provided a threadbare rationale for their monstrous activities. Nazism was a particularly gruesome iteration of the endeavor Virgil characterized in his <em>Georgics</em>: a quest for an unattainable goal. Seekers after truth must learn that it comes to them in a form and at a time of its own choosing; we can no more state a truth we have not found than we can describe a country we have not seen.<br /><br />Sadly, Nazi Germany was not the last nation state to do great harm in the name of a Big Lie...</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-53572114256767178512011-04-23T06:37:00.000-07:002011-04-28T22:20:02.208-07:00T is for ... Tiananmen<div align="justify"><em>T also stands for Tardiness, and Time Machine - eagle-eyed readers may detect the implementation of the latter in redress of the former here and in the next couple of blogs.</em><br /><br />Tiananmen is the Chinese name, roughly translated as "Gate of Heavenly Peace," for a famous monument in the Chinese capital, Beijing.</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="The Gate of Heavenly Peace" href="http://img198.imageshack.us/i/3155939tiananmengatefor.jpg/"><img src="http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/6135/3155939tiananmengatefor.jpg" border="0"/></a></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Often considered the main entrance to the Forbidden City, the Tiananmen is in fact the southern entrance to the Imperial City, within which the Forbidden City is located. The entrance to the Forbidden City is in fact the Meridian Gate, which, like the Tiananmen, is not so much a gate as a fortress.<br /><br />Although the name Tiananmen is well-known in the West, few here would associate it with the building depicted above. Chances are, when you read the word "Tiananmen" you remembered this image:</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="Tiananmen Square, 1989" href="http://img268.imageshack.us/i/1989tiananmen.jpg/"><img src="http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3606/1989tiananmen.jpg" border="0"/></a></center><br /><br /><div align="justify">Ironically, this iconic still image, taken June 5, 1989, does not depict Tiananmen at all - the full image shows a line of tanks rolling down Changan Avenue in the direction of Tiananmen square, where they were expected to rendezvous with a large gathering of peaceful protestors. As you can see, in this picture they are being held up by a single Chinese citizen. It's not terribly clear, but he's holding two shopping bags. In <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8zFLIftGk" target="_blank">the video</a> that was taken contemporaneously, the lead tank can be seen attempting clumsily to maneuver round the man, who gesticulates at it with his weapons of mass commercialism and moves to stand in its way each time. There is a pause during which it becomes obvious that the tank commander will have to either kill this civilian or halt his advance.<br /><br />And then the tank stops its engines, and the ones behind it follow suit. The might of the Chinese army is momentarily stilled by the courageous self-determination of a single individual. The video then shows the young man climb onto the lead tank, and appear to conduct a conversation with its occupants. As he climbs off, the tank attempts to start up again - and once more he resumes his post blocking its path.<br /><br />If you do remember these events when they happened, you may be surprised to see that, at the end of the video clip above, the protestor is apparently carried off by a small group of fellow citizens - he is not killed, and apparently not arrested. The Chinese government officially claims not to know who he was, or what happened to him. The British <em>Sunday Express</em> identified him as Wang Weilin, but this has never been confirmed. He is commonly known as "Tank Man", or "The Unknown Rebel": <em>Time</em> listed him in 1998 among the 100 Most Important People of the Century, and his act of defiance was broadcast around the world. As I said, I believe he is probably the first thing you think of when you see the word "Tiananmen" - at least, he is unless you are somehow accessing this blog from China.<br /><br />Within China, the protests of 1989 are veiled from the public by the state-controlled media. Even online reports of the events are kept behind the "Great Firewall of China." Modern Chinese citizens have no idea of the scale of the 1989 protests, their international reception, or even their true character, because the official Communist Party of China (CPC) line is all they've been told. According to this line, the CPC acted to quell a political disturbance in the interests of stabilizing the economy - and of course the Chinese economy has grown like gangbusters since 1989, so clearly whatever they did worked...<br /><br />The history of the "June Fourth Incident," as it is somewhat euphemistically termed in China, is fascinating. Although this was the first time Western eyes got to witness a large-scale popular protest at Tiananmen Square - the world's media had been invited into Beijing to cover a Sino-Soviet summit meeting in May - it was not the first such protest. The triggering event for the "June Fourth Incident" was the death of former CPC Secretary-General Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign his post two years earlier after sympathizing with an earlier wave of protests. The unrest among China's intellectual classes developed from a failure of reform under Deng Xiaoping. Deng's position as Paramount Leader from 1978 to 1992 is interesting politically, since he wielded executive power without holding any of the three offices - President, Premier, Secretary-General - in which such power was theoretically vested. His tenure coincided with an uneasy transition to state capitalism, in a time period when Communism globally was under assault. Particularly towards the latter part of his administration, Deng had to contend with a succession of anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union under the weight of Mikael Gorbachev's <em>Perestroika</em> reforms. <br /><br />Secretary-General Hu made a useful scapegoat for the failure of China's early economic reforms to provide opportunities for its burgeoning population of college-educated citizens. This failure actually resulted from the refusal of the CPC to embrace the political reforms upon which free markets thrive - decentralization, liberalization, freedoms of speech and association, and other quintessentially Western notions. Speaking after the "June Fourth Incident," Deng criticized protestors for their attempts to create a "Western-dependent bourgeois republic." This paranoid hostility towards free markets sat incongruously with <em>chiangjuageguan</em>, the policy of implementing market mechanisms for price-setting that Deng himself had championed, and that produced inflation nearing 20% by 1988 because the system was riddled with corruption, hamstrung by centralized government control, and directed by people who viewed market forces as supernatural and alien.<br /><br />Hu's death of a heart attack on April 15, 1989, was the catalyst for widespread peaceful protests. The CPC's authoritarian response to these, symbolized eloquently by the mismatch between one man and a line of tanks, resulted in as many as 10,000 deaths, although estimates vary widely and, for example, the Tiananmen Mothers - an organization dedicated to promoting the reforms for which protestors died at Tiananmen - names "only" 186 citizens who were killed by their government for daring to suggest they had rights.<br /><br />This was neither the first nor the last time Tiananmen would host a mismatched conflict between the Chinese government and its people. We'll get around to the others in due course.</div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-61575392546133579582011-04-22T12:17:00.000-07:002011-04-23T17:31:46.935-07:00S is for ... Shapiro Effect<div align="justify">Before I start in on the Shapiro effect, I want to talk about the origin of the Universe.<br /><br />This could take a while. I hope you packed a thermos.<br /><br />Actually, the concept of the thermos flask relates to current theories on the origin of the universe, in this way: both are the result of research into thermodynamics, the branch of physics that deals with energy and work. You may recall that the laws of thermodynamics were invoked, <em>post facto</em>, to discredit Orffyreus' perpetual-motion machine. They state, pretty clearly, that that sort of steady state is impossible in nature. The energy in a <strong>closed system</strong> is constant; but no machine can possibly be a <strong>closed system</strong>. Its energy comes from outside itself - even if only in the sense that it is manufactured, and so its component materials pre-exist its functioning self (<em>existence precedes essence</em>, in this case at least; the philosophical implications of that assertion, and its contrapositive, are beyond the scope of this blog, however). In general, any two systems in proximity to one another will undergo a heat exchange, until they reach a thermal equilibrium: an example of this can be seen if you leave a cup of hot coffee and a glass of iced tea out in the environment. After a sufficient period of time, the coffee and the tea will be the same temperature as one another: approximately the temperature of the ambient air around them.<br /><br />Heat exchange occurs via three spontaneous processes: <em>conduction</em>, which is the transfer of heat down a heat gradient through matter, as when putting one end of a metal bar in a fire causes the whole bar to become hotter; <em>convection</em>, which is the transfer of heat within fluids along so-called convection currents, as evidenced by oceanic currents of warm water circulating from the Equator to the Poles; and <em>radiation</em>, which is the transfer of heat energy in the form of electromagnetic waves, as when the heat from the Sun warms the Earth. The Second Law of Thermodynamics reflects, without particularly explaining, an important aspect of this spontaneous heat exchange: it always travels down a heat gradient, so that hotter things spontaneously become cooler over time - in thermodynamic terms, the <strong>entropy</strong> of the system increases. Viewing the Universe as a vast closed system, within which the Earth is a smaller system, and a single human being a still smaller system within that, the implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that all things eventually fail and die; their energies are lost to the vastness of empty space, and ultimately the Universe succumbs to "heat death." Draw comfort from the fact that we are likely to be struck by devastating asteroids long before that dreadful moment arrives.<br /><br />Thermodynamics, therefore, has important consequences for our understanding of Time, and in particular its monodirectional linearity from Past, to Present, to Future. Thermodynamics frames this subjective appreciation of the passing of time as a function of increasing entropy in the systems we observe. Of course, if Orffyreus <em>was</em> able to produce his perpetual motion machine for real - he smashed it when Willem 's-Gravesande, a supporter as it happened, tried to examine it to determine if this were so, so we'll never know now (at least not within a monodirectional linear time paradigm) - that has even more important consequences for thermodynamics, but I'm getting ahead of myself.<br /><br />A thermos flask maintains the temperature of its contents much longer than usual by interposing a vacuum between them and the system containing the flask. Invented by James Dewar - the original patent was for a "Dewar bottle" - it thereby reduces heat loss via conduction or convection, since the fluid in the flask is insulated from the atmosphere around the flask by a vacuum that contains no matter and so has nothing to flow. Radiation can cross a vacuum, but a thermos flask has a highly reflective interior surface that reduces this. In practice, only the inconvenient fact that you have to be able to open the flask to introduce something into it, or indeed to drink something out of it, allows for any heat loss. Perhaps if the Dewar bottle were a Klein bottle, things might be different...<br /><br />How does any of this relate to the origin of the Universe? Well, since the Universe hasn't already succumbed to heat death, and since we observe Time passing in accordance with thermodynamic predictions, we can conclude that the Universe isn't infinitely old; it exists within a finite Time (although there's a hidden <em>petitio principii</em> there). It had a Beginning; it will have an End. The prevailing cosmological view is that, something like thirteen billion years ago or so, all the matter and energy in the Universe today was condensed into a singularity, a dimensionless point that was tremendously potent and that exploded - the so-called Big Bang - in order to bring the Universe into being. Scientists are very sketchy about what prompted this Big Bang, and about what preceded it (not least because our notions of causality and linear time really hinge on the acceptance of the Big Bang theory and aren't applicable to anything that pre-existed it), but they do agree that it happened and that its force was sufficient to cause the rapid expansion of the Universe and power the formation of atoms, molecules, and eventually whole galaxies of matter. They even posit that most of the matter in the Universe is so-called "dark matter," invisible to electromagnetic radiation: a thermos flask made out of "dark matter" really would be a steady-state system, as long as nobody went and opened the thing. All of this provides a comforting bedrock underneath the scientific laws we build from everyday observations, and so has validity as a worldview on purely pragmatic grounds; but, science being what it is, harder evidence was required to support the theory when it was first proposed.<br /><br />That evidence was first produced by Edwin Hubble, after whom the most powerful man-made telescope is named. Hubble's observations of massive and very distant galaxies demonstrated a phenomenon called 'redshift' - light perceived from those galaxies far, far away is redder than it ought to be, because the wavelengths of the light are increased. This corresponds to a decreased frequency of the light, or a reduced photon energy, depending on whether one views light as a wave or a particle (of course, like de Broglie, one can reject the excluded middle there and argue that it's both); Hubble reasoned that this redshift could be accounted for by the Doppler effect, which arises whenever there is relative movement between the source of a wave and some observer - you hear it with sirens from moving emergency vehicles, for example. Hubble's explanation for redshift allowed for calculations both of how far away these galaxies were and how fast they were moving, relatively, away from us; and <em>that</em> allowed an indirect estimate of the age of the universe. Also, theoretically, with enough data, the ability to pinpoint the location of the original Big Bang, although that hasn't been the subject of much scientific curiosity.<br /><br />You'll have noticed this blog wasn't set up to be about the Doppler effect; and, indeed, there's another explanation for redshift that was proposed by Albert Einstein (who was not a fan of the expanding-universe paradigm). In linking classical Newtonian physics to his own theory of special relativity, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity argued that the velocity of light, commonly accepted as a 'speed limit' for the universe and a scientific constant, was in fact only constant absent gravitational effects: gravity bends light, according to Einstein, which is why the massive gravity of black holes make them invisible. Scientists accept the existence of all this massive invisible gravity in the universe - black holes and dark matter and so on - because otherwise the calculations extrapolated from their scientific laws don't tally with the observed amount of matter there is around. Given the choice between invalidating the assumptions of conventional science, and invalidating the universe it supposedly measures, scientists historically and routinely choose the latter, so it's not surprising that they're far happier with dark matter they can't see than a perpetual-motion machine they <em>can</em> see. Happily for conventional science, there is also other evidence out there that supports the assumptions Einstein made.<br /><br />One of the more important items of evidence on that list was identified by Irwin R. Shapiro (yes, finally, we're about to discuss the Shapiro Effect). He it was who experimentally confirmed the predictions of Einstein's theory in 1964 by measuring a delay of 200 microseconds in radar signals bounced off the planets Venus and Mercury. This demonstration of the delay in electromagnetic radiation due to gravity provides an alternative explanation for redshift - not that the galaxies viewed are moving away from us, but that the light reaching us from them is being slowed by the gravitational pull of the intervening matter. Shapiro's result has been replicated many times since, for example with the transponders on the Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 space probes. The Viking Mars lander left transponders on the surface of that planet, which have also confirmed the Shapiro effect in operation.<br /><br />There are, of course, a host of scientists in the mainstream who will explain at even greater length than I took here why the redshift phenomenon is still confirmation of the Big Bang hypothesis, and why the Shapiro effect doesn't discredit this evidence. I don't oppose them; I just find it interesting how the edifice of Science selectively disregards valid interpretations of the evidence its methods uncovers. <br /></div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-67593938589383297652011-04-21T18:04:00.001-07:002011-04-21T18:29:15.170-07:00R is for ... Rolling in the Deep<div align="justify">An unusual circumstance attends today's blog; time is short enough that I can't indulge my general tendency to ramble around the perimeter of the subject, admiring the topiary and getting sidetracked by the resemblence of passing clouds to former heads of state, and yet sufficient that I can't in good conscience pretend it were impossible to get my head down and write <em>something</em>. As a compromise, herewith a musical <strong>recommendation</strong> and <strong>review</strong>.<br /><br />Adele Adkins burst onto the British music scene back in 2008, at the tender age of 19. Her debut album, entitled '19' for reasons that astute followers of this blog can probably deduce for themselves, earned her nominations for the 2008 Mercury Prize (previously bestowed upon such luminaries of the Brit music scene as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF-GvT8Clnk" target="_blank">Portishead</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqgXzPfAxjo" target="_blank">Pulp</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98XcLqaaBK4" target="_blank">Gomez</a>) and a remarkable four Grammys - album track 'Hometown Glory', written by Adele when she was just 16, won her a nomination at the following year's Grammy Awards also. <br /><br />She describes her genre as "heartbroken soul," and she's not exaggerating. She has a quite simply extraordinary voice - rich, powerful, swooningly expressive. Hailed as the New Amy Whitehouse when she first emerged on the airwaves, Adele has repeatedly demonstrated that she is, in fact, the First Adele Adkins. Here for your listening pleasure is the first US release from her sophomore album '21'; you probably don't need me to tell you how it got its name: <a href="http://www.dafk.net/what/" title="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYEDA3JcQqw" target="_blank">click here</a>, and prepare to be amazed.<br /><br />...In my defense, that does begin with R as well. Here's the <strong>real</strong> Adele, doing what she does best:</div><br /><br /><center><iframe width="480" height="295" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/rYEDA3JcQqw?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen=""></iframe></center>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-55256287765479678072011-04-20T21:09:00.000-07:002011-04-20T21:49:43.698-07:00Q is for ... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?<div align="justify">The phrase, literally translating as "who will watch the watchmen themselves," first found expression in the <em>Satires</em> of the Roman poet Juvenal. The inference is that setting up one group to have authority over another does not make them intrinsically worthy of that power: specifically, the creation of a police state does not, in and of itself, guarantee that the police will not abuse their authority and flout the law.<br /><br />Societies throughout history have recognized that law must be enforced if it is to be respected, which is the rationale for having police in the first place. This philosophy found its clearest expression under the Greek lawmaker Draco, who produced the first written constitution of the city-state of Athens and whose name is preserved in the eponym "draconian." Even minor infractions against the laws set down by Draco earned the death penalty; Draco himself is said to have remarked that he considered these so-called lesser crimes deserving of such a harsh punishment, and had no greater to offer for crimes of greater severity. In the draconian perspective, the fundamental crime is <em>to break the law</em> - the specifics of <em>which</em> law is broken, how and why, are unimportant. The rule of law itself is paramount, and sufficient justification for even the strictest interpretation of its codes.<br /><br />Neither is this "zero tolerance" approach an historical aberration. The application of Shar’ia law in modern states such as Saudi Arabia frequently appears in Western eyes to be harsh and barbaric; Singapore treats littering as a major crime; in Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio charges persons unable to verify their American citizenship with the crime of human trafficking - the 'traffic' being themselves, on the assumption they're in his jurisdiction illegally. All of these examples illustrate a philosophy of law in which justice consists of a strict implementation of the fullest penalties possible to all criminal acts; if, in the Platonic sense, law is seen as an instrument of the Platonic Good, then this conception of justice is essentially applying the standards of the Platonic ideal to the imperfect real world. The problem with this approach is that it assumes laws which are finite in scope and fallible in application - because they are created and maintained by imperfect human beings, and not manifestations of some Platonic higher realm - to be infinite and infallible.<br /><br />What most of us would think of as "justice" applies a more casuistic perspective. Fairness dictates that we consider all factors that contributed to a criminal act, including factors that might mitigate the responsibility of the criminal or the severity of his punishment; further, fairness dictates that we consider the possibility that the law itself, either in its conception or its application, may be at fault. The essential components of a system of <em>justice</em>, as opposed to one of <em>law</em>, are doubt and development. A just system is one that is never certain of its pronouncements, and always willing to revise them.<br /><br />It is also marked by accountability. There are, broadly speaking, four aspects to a legal system: the legislature that drafts laws, the executive that authorizes them, the judiciary that rules on cases before the law, and the police that enforce the laws. After Montesquieu, we are accustomed to see these as separate - indeed, as citizens of a police state we are accustomed to see the fourth as something separate from the first three - but in fact all four can coexist within one body and still constitute the essence of government. In fact, no government can exist that does not embody these four functions. Governments may exist to provide services under the social contract, but they can only do so if they first serve some corpus of law, even if that law is as primitive as the arbitrary pronouncements of a capricious dictator. It is not too far a stretch to suggest that the fairness of a social contract is predicted by the fairness with which the government conducts its fundamental functions in regard to the law.<br /><br />This brings us, by a circuitous route, back to Juvenal's question. Plato's resolution, incidentally, was to have the watchmen watch themselves - tell themselves the "noble lie" that they were not as other men, that their duty made them greater, stronger, impervious to temptation and duty-bound to demonstrate their superiority with exhibitions of selfless and even-handed process of law. If one accepts Plato's reasoning here, it seems not unreasonable to ask why only policemen should tell themselves this "noble lie" - can not a whole society lie to themselves in this fashion, and do away with both police and criminals in the process? Further: if everybody is capable of deceiving themselves into accepting a weight of moral duty that does not actually burden them in practice, there seems no more need for any of the other three functions of prosecuting law than there is that of policing it. Then there is no need for government of any kind, and a state of anarchy exists. This chronicler encounters serious difficulty when attempting to reconcile such a state of affairs with a general acceptance of any coherent moral code; it seems, rather, that all we would have accomplished would be to rename what we now call "crimes" as mere "actions," no more reprehensible than kissing a baby or eating an ice-cream.<br /><br />Moreover, there seems a flaw in Plato's premise that anybody can succeed at telling themselves this "noble lie" indefinitely - especially when they occupy a position of power over others, the temptation must arise to define, rather than simply accept, the rights and wrongs of human conduct. This tendency in the powerful towards overreach and corruption of the highest ideals is thoroughly explored in Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel, <em>Watchmen</em> - the title is, of course, a nod to the ancient Juvenalia, <em>inter alia</em>. The arrogance of Ozymandias; the intolerance of Rorschach; the cynicism of the Comedian; the despair of Nite Owl; the cosmic indifference of Dr. Manhattan; all of these illustrate the perils of power.<br /><br />And then, of course, there's Silk Spectre, and perils of an entirely different dimension.</div><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" title="ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting" href="http://img688.imageshack.us/i/watchmencharacters.jpg/"><img src="http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/702/watchmencharacters.jpg" border="0"/></a></center>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4342718463538484247.post-42375826949213396052011-04-19T16:03:00.000-07:002011-04-19T16:12:25.017-07:00P is for ... Panama<div align="justify">The country of Panama lies on the isthmus connecting the Americas. It is one of several countries that arose from the ruins of the <em>Virreinato de la Nueva Granada</em>, the Spanish colonial jurisdiction established in 1717 and centered at Bogota (in what is now Colombia). Spanish rule in the New World was always problematic: the terrain, the natives, the poverty of the infrastructure and the vast leagues separating the colonists from their Spanish roots all played a role in the turbulence of the period. The Viceroyalty of New Granada was set up in an attempt to bolster the authority of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and in turn was obliged to delegate its own authority to a Captaincy General in Caracas and the <em>Audiencia</em> of Quito - these were to become the centers of Venezuela and Ecuador, respectively. The autonomy of these regions grew over time, not only outliving the <em>conquistadores</em> but also resisting the unifying efforts of Simon Bolivar and others: the internecine politics of Latin America remains a complex and delicate discipline to this day.<br /><br />Bolivar it was, of course, who led the successful efforts of New Granada against Spain; he was born in Caracas in 1783, four years after it was designated a Captaincy General and three years before it acquired an Audiencia of its own. The Bolivar family were originally Basques: La Puebla de Bolivar, from which the familial name is derived, is a village in the Biscay province, and <em>Bolibar</em> in the Basque tongue Euskera means "valley of the windmill". Bolivar, now known throughout Latin America as <em>El Libertador</em> ( "The Liberator"), was a distant descendant of King Fernando III of Castile, canonized as <em>Saint </em>Ferdinand in 1671. Ferdinand is claimed by the Catholic Church as a holy incorruptible, and was himself regarded as a "liberator", defeating the Moors notably at Cordoba and Seville. It is, perhaps, one of history's ironies that St. Ferdinand's successes during the <em>Reconquista</em> should have laid the ground for the conquest of the New World and the triumphant rebellion of his descendant, Simon Bolivar.<br /><br />Bolivar was theoretically in line for a position among Spanish nobility: his grandfather had purchased the titles of Marques de San Luis and Vizconde de Cocorote, and although the Spanish Crown had not issued the patent of nobility by the time of New Granada's independence, Bolivar's elder brother would have held those titles if the issue had been resolved. The family's legal dispute with the Spanish authorities, however, was to be dwarfed by <em>El Libertador</em>'s crusade against their rule in the Americas. Bolivar himself had completed his education in Spain, and indeed married a Spaniard in 1802. After her untimely death in Gran Colombia of yellow fever, he lived for a few years in Napoleonic France. It is arguable that he would have been content to remain under Spanish rule, had Emperor Napoleon not unwisely attempted to seat his brother Joseph as Spain's Head of State.<br /><br /><em>Pepe Botella </em>("Joe Bottle", a soubriquet alluding to Joseph's drunkenness), as King Joseph was derisively known by the Spaniards, was not a popular monarch; his brief reign coincided with the Peninsular War and the expulsion of Napoleonic forces from the Iberian Peninsula. It also coincided with <em>juntas</em> in Latin America, of which Simon Bolivar was an influential leader. The First Republic of Venezuela declared independence from Spain in 1811; Francisco de Miranda (known as <em>El Precursor</em> and arguably a role model for Bolivar) was to become <em>generalissimo</em> of the nascent republic in its fight for self-expression. This fight was, sadly, doomed: an ominous earthquake destroyed the capital of Caracas on the second anniversary of the Caracas <em>junta</em>, a coincidence that badly shook confidence among the Venezuelan people and contributed to Miranda's ignominious surrender in 1812.<br /><br />Bolivar, more fortunate than Miranda, was able to escape to Cartagena, where he wrote his first public document: the Cartagena Manifesto. This detailed Bolivar's understanding of the fall of the First Republic and its several causes; and he was to demonstrate that he had heeded the lessons of Miranda's failures during the conduct of the so-called "Admirable Campaign" to liberate New Granada. It was during this, ultimately successful, campaign that Bolivar issued another famous decree: the <em>Decreto de Guerra a Muerte</em>, or Decree of War to the Death. This was an explicit exoneration of any crime committed against a Spaniard in the cause of Neogranadian independence, and it led to some truly horrific excesses that were by modern standards anything but "admirable". Less than two months after the <em>Decreto</em>, Bolivar retook Caracas and established the Second Republic. This fared little better than its predecessor: the Royalist sympathies of the rural<em> llaneros</em> (who made up a formidable army in their own right, loosely under the command of Jose Tomas Boves) and the necessity of military rule in the prevailing circumstances of ongoing war against the Spanish peninsulares left Bolivar with a dwindling base of support. Bolivar, along with Santiago Marino, a fellow revolutionary with his own armed forces in the east, was exiled to Cartagena as the Second Republic collapsed.<br /><br />In March of 1814, Ferdinand VII returned to the Spanish throne; he took a hardline stance, perhaps understandably, abolishing the 1812 <em>Constitucion</em> and sending an expeditionary force captained by Pablo Morillo to settle unrest in the Americas once and for all. In the face of this formidable strengthening of Spain's resolve, Bolivar fought valiantly in the service of the United Provinces but was obliged to retreat to Jamaica in 1815. Here he wrote the "Letter from Jamaica", an appeal to Britain and the English-speaking world to side with the "American" people (Bolivar used the term "American" in its strictly correct sense of "native of the Americas"). It met with an unsatisfying response, but Bolivar did find an ally in the President of newly-liberated Haiti, Alexandre Petion. Despite growing tensions within the ranks of revolutionary leaders (Marino, for example, only accepted Bolivar as head of the new Republic after Bolivar made a brutal example of another disloyal revolutionary, Manuel Piar), Bolivar was able to consolidate his authority and, importantly, secure the services of the<em> llaneros</em> under Jose Antonio Paez (later to become President of Venezuela); Morillo, unwisely as it turned out, had disbanded the army of Boves and the <em>llaneros</em> were now more favorable to Republican persuasion. <br /><br />In 1819, Bolivar led a brilliant surprise assault on the Spanish stronghold of New Granada, securing famous victories at Boyaca and Bogota and altering the course of South American history. Bolivar returned to the Venezuelan Congress in triumph, and in December 1819 was declared president of Gran Colombia, the new state merging New Granada with the Third Venezuelan Republic. 1820 was a high point for Bolivar: Spain negotiated a peace and he was the head of a liberated nation. Unfortunately, this nation proved too vast and too diverse to remain united under his rule. By 1828, the situation had deteriorated to the point where he was obliged to name himself a dictator; and on September 25 of that year he survived an assassination attempt. Two years later, Gran Colombia dissolved and Bolivar died at the age of 47 - he may well have considered his own death something of a liberation after the privations of war and government. Bolivar's dream of a unified America failed, but he remains a national hero in the several countries that emerged out of Gran Colombia's death throes.<br /><br />Panama came late to the independence party. It remained a province of Colombia until 1903, and might have remained longer than that, but for a quirk of geographical good fortune. At that time, a vessel traveling from New York to San Francisco faced a 22,500 mile journey around Cape Horn - a treacherous and time-consuming passage. However, with the east and west coasts of Panama separated by a distance of less than 50 miles, the potential existed to create a shipping canal that would cut this journey by more than half. The advantages of such a canal to the United States were obvious; and, indeed, they weren't the first to think of it. Way back in 1529, the Spanish had planned such a venture, although it was beyond their scope at that time; and in 1698 the Scotsman Mark Buke embarked upon the disastrous Darien scheme, which was to have far-reaching consequences for his homeland but very little impact on Panamanian shipping. <br /><br />The U.S. had the combination of financial and political clout, and technological know-how, to make a practical possibility of the Panama Canal: but it was a formidable enterprise, and they were obliged to buy local cooperation. Panama had unsuccessfully attempted to declare itself a sovereign state repeatedly since Bolivar freed the region from the Spanish yoke; after the failure of the Hay-Herran treaty between the U.S. and Colombia, which would have granted the U.S. a perpetual lease on the land that would become the canal, the government of Theodore Roosevelt lent its support, both financial and political, to Panamanian independence. The Panamanians were in turn very supportive of the proposed canal; they saw it as bringing prestige and prosperity to their country, and the explicit support of the United States gave their claims of sovereignty international legitimacy.<br /><br />Five days after the U.S. formally recognized Panama, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was signed. Interestingly, no Panamanian was a signatory to this treaty. In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, modern readers may be somewhat alarmed to note that Jean-Phillipe Bunau-Varilla was a French lobbyist and employee - and prominent shareholder - of Ferdinand de Lesseps' Panama Canal Company, who signed the treaty on behalf of Panama (he was serving as its ambassador, although hardly in a selfless spirit) but without the formal consent of its government. The Treaty granted the U.S. control in perpetuity of a Zone - the <strong>Panama Canal Zone</strong> - extending six miles from each bank of the proposed canal. In return, the government of Panama received a lump sum payment of $10 million, and an annual stipend of $250,000. De Lessep's Panama Canal Company, which had prior concession to build the canal, was also purchased under the terms of the treaty by the U.S. Government: the price negotiated for that by Panama's ambassador was a rather more substantial $40 million.<br /><br />Not surprisingly, the terms of the Treaty sparked resentment in Panama that never really subsided. Bunau-Varilla's proposed design for the Panamanian flag, which bore a more than passing resemblence to the Stars and Stripes, was rejected in favor of the current design: a divided rectangle in red, white, and blue with two stars displayed in opposite quarters. With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, tensions grew higher: Panamanians were obliged to identify themselves to U.S. authorities upon entering the Zone, and U.S. employees within it enjoyed wages more than double those of Panamanians. By 1918, the U.S. was actively interfering in Panamanian affairs of state, revoking a decree of the Panamanian president and occupying Panama City and Colon. With the advent of World War Two, the U.S. was obliged to offer concessions to the Panamanians in return for locating further U.S. military bases outside the Zone; in 1947, the controversial Filos-Hines Treaty, which would have extended the presence of 140 such sites, was defeated in the Panamanian National Assembly after public protests which included a march by students of the <em>Instituto Nacional</em> bearing the Panamanian flag. The <em>Instituto</em> was Panama's premier public high school, and it was to play a prominent role nearly twenty years later in the history of the Canal Zone.<br /><br />During the 1950s, Panamanians were influenced by numerous events: the CIA-orchestrated ouster of Guatemala's president Jacobo Arbenz; the successes of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement; Castro's revolution in Cuba. As a result of these developments, the U.S. made further concessions to Panama. Eisenhower's administration agreed in principle that the Panamanian flag could fly within the territory of the Zone, which had been de facto American soil since 1903; shortly before his assassination, John F Kennedy agreed that both Panamanian and American flags should fly at non-military sites within the Zone. These orders were overturned by decree of the Canal Zone's Governor, Robert Fleming, a month after Kennedy died: perhaps attempting to appease all parties, he succeeded in inflaming them instead by ordering that no flags should be flown within the Zone at civilian locations. Students at Balboa High School, within the Zone and strongly sympathetic to the U.S., erected a U.S. flag in direct contravention of the decree; when school officials took it down, the students walked out and erected another, this time posting a guard around it. Popular opinion within the Zone supported their stand.<br /><br />Popular opinion outside it was very different. Incensed by this assertion of American imperialism, the students of the <em>Instituto Nacional</em> once again took up their flag - the same one they had carried in 1947 - and marched it into the Zone to stand proudly alongside its fellow at Balboa High School. Led by one Guillermo Guevara Paz, the delegation had informed Zonian authorities of their intent in advance. They were met on January 9, 1964, by a crowd of Zonian citizens and a nervous phalanx of police, who agreed to allow a half-dozen students to advance to the Balboa High School flagpole. Incensed Zonians surrounded it, singing the <em>Star-Spangled Banner</em> and preventing the Panamanian students from reaching their goal. In the ensuing violence, the flag of Panama was torn - accidentally, according to the Zonians; deliberately, according to the Panamanians.<br /><br />The Governor, <em>en route</em> to a summit in Washington to address the situation, discovered upon landing that the situation had escalated far beyond his control. Word of the flag-tearing had spread, and Panamanian demonstrators invaded the Zone at several points, bearing their national flag; they were repelled by armed police. Panama's armed forces, the <em>Guardia</em>, rejected Zonian calls to restore the peace, and demonstrators attacked the so-called "Fence of Shame" that separated Zonian from Panamanian soil. By 8:35, the U.S. Army's 193rd Infantry Brigade had deployed in the face of thousands of outraged protestors. Although accounts differ, it is generally accepted that 21 Panamanians lost their lives during the riots: January 9 became known as "Martyr's Day" and remains a national holiday in Panama. Among the "martyrs" were six-year-old Maritza Avila Alabarca, who died of respiratory problems after U.S. troops bombarded her neighborhood with CS tear gas, and 20-year-old Ascanio Arosemena, shot from behind allegedly while helping wounded protestors flee the scene of violence. Six of the dead were burned to death by rioters who destroyed the Pan American Airlines building in the Zone. Four U.S. soldiers were also killed.<br /><br />The violence of Martyr's Day set the stage for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces. President Carter signed the 1977 Treaty that relinquished U.S. control of the Zone, which formally passed to Panama in 1999. The former Balboa High School, now named for the fallen "martyr" Ascanio Arosemena and used as a training center for the Panama Canal Authority, is the site of a memorial upon which the names of the 21 fallen Panamanians are listed. Sadly, this wasn't the last violent episode in Panama's history, and it wasn't the last time U.S. troops would be involved, although the circumstances of Operation "Just Cause" were markedly different, and represent another iteration of that historic irony that linked the destinies of St. Ferdinand and Simon Bolivar.<br /><br />"A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!" Leigh Mercer's 1948 publication of this famous palindrome brought it to prominence; but although the canal is indisputably identified, inquiring readers may occupy themselves with disquieting consideration of these linked questions: <em>Who is the Man? What is the Plan?</em></div>Mojohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03282589125180652625noreply@blogger.com0