Booksellers versus Bestsellers

Headquarter Nights: The Great War and the trend toward peace

2013-05-16T16:03:00.001-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

On of the great historians of all time, in my opinion, was Barbara Tuchman, and perhaps her most famous book was The Guns of August. It tackled one of the great puzzles of history, why World War I happened.

Tuchman went into great detail to make the case the war planning, especially Germany's Schlieffen Plan, which involved winning a war with France by sweeping through Belgium, thereby violating Belgium's neutrality, protected by treaty with England, was a major factor.

A.J.P. Taylor, another great historian, also made the case that mobilization plans played a major role in starting the war.

But both books raise the question, why were these plans made in a way that would inevitably lead to war?

Watching our own war fever while the Bush Administration manipulated the public into backing a war against Iraq brought this question home to me. I now think that WW I started because the participants wanted, or at least were not opposed, to what they thought would be a short and decisive dust-up.

Some confirmation for this theses comes from a little-known book written during WW I, Vernon Kellogg's Headquarters nights; a record of conversations and experiences at the headquarters of the german army in France and Belgium.

Kellogg was a pacifist who was in Belgium before America entered the war, working with Herbert Hoover on the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, and Belgium was, of course, occupied by the Germans, so he lived in a household with a German officer who often entertained members of the German High Command.

He had trained as a biologist, and was on leave from teaching that subject when he began conversing with these high-ranking Germans, one of whom was also a biology professor, in his case on leave to prosecute the war.

What shocked Kellogg and convinced him that America should do all it could to defeat Germany was the theory the top tier of German officers of the biological superiority of Germans expressed.

While in America Social Darwinism had taken an individualistic form, in Europe it was more commonly expressed in racial terms.

Race, of course, is a ticklish subject -- in World War II, a number of Jews passed as Germans to stay out of the death camps, and were able to do so because they were physically indistinguishable from other Germans, though allegedly a different "race." But the German officers Kellogg found himself talking to believed there was such a thing as the German race, as opposed to the French race, or the Dutch race, or the English race.

From Headquarter Nights, the argument Kellogg found himself subjected to:

But as with the different ant species, struggle — bitter, ruthless struggle — is the rule among the different human groups. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on. so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its desirable natural evolution. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage as regards internal organization and form of social relationship is best, and should, for the sake of the species, be preserved at the expense of the less advanced, the less effective. It should win in the struggle for existence, and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization — its Kultur — on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them.

This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters; argument logically constructed on premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter — by head work. You long for the muscles of Samson.

Few people desire to do evil in the world, but the things they justify to themselves as good can be quite astonishingly evil. The arguments Kellogg heard in Belgium while doing his relief work did not die out when the Germans lost the war -- instead, they mutated into the arguments that justified the Holocaust.

Kellogg said that these views were held by most German biologists, as well as non-biologists.

Nor should we assume that they were restricted to high-status Germans. Here's the English view, as expressed by Rudyard Kipling in 1899:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

The notion that the better "breed" could benefit people by subjugating them was current. In addition, the English had established a large and powerful empire by subjugating foreigners and foreign land. At the time, the understanding of economics was that you needed to control more territory and resources to gain greater wealth. England subjugated India, bringing to them the dubious benefits of British bureaucracy and extracting from them raw materials for England's industry.

But as a trained biologist, Kellogg was well aware of alternate theories about evolution. He did not agree that mankind was "a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable kinds, like the different ant species" or that mutual conflict was the only key to evolution -- he considered mutual aid to be at least as important.

Mutual Aid will perhaps be familiar to the reader as the title of Petr Krapotkin's book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Krapotkin argued against the Social Darwinists, pointing out that what he called mutual aid, a term that encompassed symbiosis and altruism, played an important role. In accepting Krapotkin's ideas and thinking human beings are pretty much alike, rather than being like different ant species, Kellogg was a more modern thinker than the German officers he argued with.

And perhaps the horror of the Holocaust helped eliminate that kind of thinking. Certainly, wars have been declining in number and in the deaths they cause since World War II.

Of course, in a modern industrial society, war is no longer a path to wealth -- in fact, it seems to be a dead loss. That's got to reduce the incentives for war. And empires no longer show a return on investment. Global capital is no longer willing to repatriate profits and pay taxes to the home country that finances the wars.

And of course, World War I didn't turn out the way people thought it would. Germans remembered the Franco-Prussian War, which was quick, decisive, and led to the unification of the German states. Germany had been the underdog, but had beaten the French in less than a year in a conflict fought mostly on French soil, some of which became German at the peace settlement.

It had been mostly a war of maneuver, in which the Germans mobilized more quickly, and the German General Staff showed better organization and competence than the more traditionally organized French General Staff.

So it's easy enough to see why the German war plans were organized so that they would inevitably lead to war, with no way to put on the brakes. They wanted war. And since 1870, the French had been thinking, Next Time....

The last big war the Russians had fought was against Napoleon, and they had acquitted themselves rather well. They had, however, been recently humiliated by the Japanese.

All the participants expected a glorious campaign in which losses would be tolerable and the people at the top of society would have increased status and power.

What they got instead was a war waged like pest control, even including the poison gas. Military planners seemed to have forgotten what war was for. Clausewitz said "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." Yet the military goal of WW I seemed to be to kill as many people as possible.

The pointlessness of the war was soon apparent to those delegated to kill and die in it, and to the horror of those responsible for starting it, total peace began to break out up and down the line at Christmas, 1914. The unwillingness of those on the front line on both sides to kill each other might be called a desertion in place. But the reputations of the generals depended on the enlisted men killing each other, and the generals soon had the war going again.

And again, after the failed peace that followed WW I.

I think the death of what Kellogg called "neo-Darwinian" views may have had something to do with the fact that war is in decline, but the economic factors are probably more important. For the most part, war is now viewed as a deadweight loss.

We still hear echoes of the views of the Germans Kellogg debated with in the jingoistic claims for American exceptionalism. And China is beginning to awaken to new dreams of empire and irredentalist claims for lost territory -- even Okinawa, which was conquered by Japan in 1609 and became a prefecture of Japan in 1879, is on the list, with every piece of property the Chinese ever dominated

The nightmare of Headquarter Nights can happen again.

Dratted Suirrels!

2013-05-15T22:01:00.001-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

Last year I moved into a house where there are trees, bushes, flowers...and an overgrown yard that needs a lot of work.   This particular home had been neglected for many years, except that someone had put down a ton of wood-chips, with cardboard underneath to kill the weeds in some of the yard. I have not done any gardening since I was my Dad's indentured lawn servant. He used to follow me around when I mowed the yard, pointing out three or four blades of grass I missed, etc. He paid me the vast sum of $2 a week. After I took a a labor history class in high school, I asked him for a raise; he told me he would 'do the job himself'. I said 'what, are you going to be a scab, then?" I got my wages raised to $5. Dad was a left-leaning history buff, and appreciated my rejoinder.

This yard, though, was mine, and my challenge. . I took on the Sisyphean task of putting it in order, and weeding it was the first item on the agenda. After sweating for weeks, removing a million dandelions, blackberry bushes, and English Ivy, I decided I wanted a treat for myself.

I went rosebush shopping

I had along a female relative who was wildly enthusiastic about my project. She is alert for any signs of domesticity in me.    She drove me to a big, fancy gardening place out in the sticks, where there were acres of rosebushes to choose from. I bought three rosebushes, picked out for their scent, color and hardiness.   I did not want roses that were pretty, big, but had no scent.     In the end, I went for 'Julia Child' (yellow) 'Memorial Day' (pink) and 'Shakespeare'' (red).   I was suckered by the 'Shakespeare' rose. Who could resist having 'Shakespeare in the front yard?

She said David Austin roses were the best for our climate, but in the end only one of the rosebushes, the "Shakespeare" was that variety. She also said 'pay attention to the scent of each rose'', and at this place, each rose was marked by not only what the their blooms would smell like, but how strong the scent would be. It was rather like picking out wine for a wine cellar; the details were that careful, luscious and vivid; using terms like 'spice' and 'aroma'..

After I got the roses in the ground with THREE different kinds of rose food, I gave them a good watering. I discovered, then, that the short hose I have did not reach Julia Child which had been planted far from the house, so to water it, I had to spritz the water long distance, holding my arm above my head, to reach the plant.

Looking at the roses each morning, I was hoping they would grow like Bamboo and get big fast. I called my female relative, and asked how soon till they get full sized. She said 'two years'.

Oh.

The next day, at the grocery store, I saw some tiny tea-roses, already blooming with pink, white and red miniature roses. They looked like they needed a home.   I bought six of them, two of each color, and put them in another part of the yard, close but not too close to each other. These last few warm days, I am out at midnight or at 7 am, watering all these roses. I had somehow forgotten about all the upkeep involved...

I also bought some big pretty purple daisy like flowers with white centers, annuals, that I do not know the name of. In my enthusiasm to get them in the ground, I lost the little tag that says what they are. They are very hardy. I bought them two months ago, and they are still blooming, going strong. I keep waiting for them to 'die back', but it hasn't happened yet. I pick off the dead blooms, and stare at them, wishing I had the money to have bought many more pots of them. They are amazing.

All over the yard, about a six weeks ago, spindly knee to waist high plants, with long skinny leaves, 'weeds' I had not targeted, suddenly burst into gorgeous, feathery purple flowers, like the flowers on clover, but much bigger. I learned that their name was 'Bachelor Buttons'. They are the most prolific flower in the yard, even growing up through the pavement here and there. I don't have the heart to cut them back, even though they are everywhere.

A well meaning person gave me a huge bag of wild bird seed. This got me looking at bird feeders; after a few false starts I went to Wild Birds Unlimited, where a crafty saleswoman (you know the type) got me to buy four bird-feeders, two of which were supposedly 'squirrel proof'. Also, she sold me blocks of suet for birds that don't like seeds, with wire baskets to hold the suet

One feeder was OK; it had a wire basket over the feeder that kept squirrels out, but the second, which had a plastic 'dome' over the feeder, did not keep 'Houdini' out of the food for long. She lowered herself down onto the dome, riding it like an exercise ball a couple of times, till she figured out she could hang by her back legs, easing herself around the edge and jumping on the lip of the feeder. Her mate, Edmund Hilliary, was more prone to taking great leaps over a five foot gap to land on this feeder.   And the suet feeders were harvested merrily by both; they would hang by their back legs and eat upside down in seeming comfort, not going away even when I rapped on the glass. They would glance at me, snicker, and go back to chowing down on the '''bird''' food.

My cat Piglet sometimes looks out the window at the fun. She had not seen squirrels before; I think she thought they were small vegetarian cats who could climb really well.    She knew what birds were , but these squirrels were a mystery to her. Once, when she sneaked out of the house, she came across a squirrel on the ground only a few feet from her. They both froze, then both galloped in opposite directions.

I do get some birds. Chickadees, Juncos, and some other small birds I have not identified yet. They eat both the seeds and the suet. Two huge bluejays from the one yard over drop by now and then, where they have a nest, to eat the birdseed spilled on the ground. I am hoping for a lot more bird visitors in the winter, when wild food is harder to find. And by then, I hope to have figured out how to baffle the squirrels. The two I am dealing with are too smart for me, so far.   I have seen feeders put on poles at that shop, but I hate to buy $50 -$200 pole systems when I have a couple of perfectly good trees to put feeders in.

Houdini and Edmund Hillary don't look like they have missed any meals; I will report back if I get any more high-tech (expensive) bird feeding equipment that can finally baffle them. Right now, I am laid up with an twisted knee inside, and in in no shape to chase squirrels.

Hiroshima, a book that helped prevent nuclear war

2013-05-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

As I was thinking about which nonfiction books that I have read to review for this column, I keep coming back to the book Hiroshima, by John Hersey. This book   was first published complete in the July 15, 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, then expanded a few years later. It is a collection of six interviews of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

The interviews cover their recollections of the day of the bombing, the immediate aftermath, and the weeks that followed.

John Hersey was an American, he had been an Allied war correspondent for several years in both Europe and in the Pacific. He had access and could interview the Japanese survivors of this bomb right after the American occupation of Japan. When he was commissioned by the editor of the New Yorker to do a series of pieces interviewing survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, he was the first journalist from America to do so.

He interviewed many Japanese who had been in the city who had witnessed and survived the bombing. The group of six people he chose was heterogeneous, one   of which were 'foreign national' living in this city; a German priest, and one a Christian, a Methodist. who had been educated in the United States who spoke 'excellent English'..

Two doctors, a tailor's widow who was a mother with two kids, and a young female clerk were the others.. No soldiers, sailors or government officials; the survivors in this book were harmless, ordinary people, four of them in the 'helping' professions. by choosing to include two doctors, Hershey gives the reader the immediacy of seeing through these doctor's eyes those wounded, maimed and dying from the bomb..

These six residents of Hiroshima were very lucky. It is estimated that 135,000 people died in the atomic explosion that day. Some instantly, some from hideous third-degree burns from the blast, or radiation sickness in the days that followed, which caused repeated vomiting, hair loss and eventual death. Four square miles in the center of the city was completely destroyed, while many, many others who survived the initial blast were sick for years later, with hibakusha, or 'bomb sickness' - weakness, dizziness, and digestive issues, as well as leukemia and other cancers killing many, years later.   Five of the six survivors in this book had some bad injuries from the blast; the clerk had one leg nearly crushed and nearly destroyed.

Most of the survivors were viewed with suspicion by other Japanese, endured prejudice in hiring and marrying, and were seen as 'undesirable' people; even their children were treated like 'undesirable people'. Many survivors would hide the fact that they had been in Hiroshima, and lived through the blast. Only after several decades, when most survivors have died, did the survivors get better treatment from the Japanese government, and given stipends to live on.

I grew up in the other shadow of the bombing of Japan. Most of my childhood was spent in Richland, Washington. The Hanford Nuclear facility, or 'area' as it was called, was close by. My Dad worked as an inorganic chemist there, specializing in running a sodium cooled plutonium reactor, the Fast Flux Treatment Facility.. The local industry in Richland had been making plutonium based atomic bombs for the American military through the mid 1940's and the 1950's (then gradually switching to domestic nuclear power plants).

Hanford had made the Nagasaki bomb that was dropped on Japan, a plutonium bomb dropped four days after the Hiroshima bomb.

The local high school I went to, Columbia (now Richland) High's sports teams, their football and basketball teams are called 'The Bombers' (still are,to this day); and the insignia on the sport gear, the t-shirts and sweatshirts show a mushroom cloud on them.

So as I grew up in Richland, it was a matter of bragging and pride in my hometown that we had built one of the bombs that was dropped on Japan. And the stories I head from my dad about the war in the Pacific are part of my perception this action. Dad told me that he had been in the Marines in 1945, a young man of 19, drafted, and was going to be to be in the invasion of Japan.. From previous battles with the Japanese, it was known they would fight fiercely, street by street, to the bitter end. My Dad told me several times that he was dreading the invasion of Japan, and knew he would possibly, even probably die.

He always figured that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan saved his life.

Some WW II veterans who are historians like Paul Fussell also praised the bombing of Japan, He pointed out in his essay Thank God for the Atomic Bomb that the use of atomic bombs shortened the war by weeks or months, and saved lives on both sides. According to Fussell,10,000 people, civilians and solders, were dying every day in mainland China alone in that summer. So I have been exposed to many points of view, both negative and positive, on the use of the bomb on Japan.

The lessons that I take from Hiroshima, from living in Richland, from my Dad's stories, and even from Fussell is that ordinary people, like these six people and people like my Dad, are in grave peril when war breaks out.

But, it has come full circle with the atomic bomb.

It has been centuries in the Westsince we lived in a world where our leaders were at the same risk in wars as the man in the street. This era ended in the 1480's in England,when the last king, Richard the Third, died leading an army in the field defending his crown. For centuries now ordinary men and women who fight in armies or as hapless civilians behind 'enemy lines', while the men who start vicious wars are safe at home, directing the fighting.
But the atomic age changed this.

I have a gut feeling that this book was read in the Kremlin by Stalin's advisers in the early 1950's, and by Mao's advisers in China, and by other world leaders who acquired their own atomic bombs.

When General MacArthur wanted to drop the bomb on North Korea,President Truman, who had authorized the first use of atomic bombs, forbade it. Truman had gotten reports from Japan,and did not want to use such a horrible weapon again.. I do think that despite the bellicose Cold War that lasted from 1946 to 1989 (and some thereafter) this little book may have delayed the a nuclear World War lll. These leaders and others must have drawn the rational conclusion that not only would nuclear war be horrific, that also there was nowhere to hide from atomic bombs. Any and every leader now could be wiped a atomic bomb from the sky, or smuggled into their country.

This book was, in those years after the war a huge best seller.. Banned for years in Japan, while it was occupied by the United States it was printed as a book only two months after it was published in the New Yorker, and revised as John Hersey went back and interviewed these six survivors again.

It has never been out of print.

Just as the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is credited with helping start the American Civil War, I do think the six survivors testimony in Hiroshima prevented a nuclear World War III.

The world has not yet found its way to world peace. There is still dreadful threats on all sides from religious strife to economic and political upheavals. But I do recommend that everyone read Hiroshima. This gripping testimony of six eyewitnesses to nuclear warfare, and the pitiful, horrifying aftermath should not be missed. Those 135,000 civilians should not be forgotten, or died in vain.

I love this bookstore!

2013-05-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This bookstore is a former opera hall.

More on it here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/04/24/el_ateneo_grand_splendid_this_historic_palatial_theater_is_now_one_of_the.html

Meerkat's crabclaw rig goes sailing!

2013-05-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

I went sailing for a couple hours with the new Meerkat crabclaw rig today. I count it a success

It took some fiddling to get the sail to set right, and I've got a lot to learn, but she performed well on all points of sail. Reaching with the sail on the lee side of the mast and the downhaul eased was a treat, almost like sailing with a spinnaker. The big surprise to me was how the curved spars kept the sail flat.

I think I had the outhaul too tight the whole time, and I didn't make it easy to adjust while sailing, but one of the most interesting things is that it matters a great deal where you put the attachment points for the sheet on that curved boom. I had one part of the lead in the right place, one too far back. As a result, the boom was twisting so that the sail twisted tighter at the top. I moved the lead inboard, and that seemed to cure it.

Reaching with it on the lee side of the mast was so different from reaching with it on the weather side, I'm going to try to find a way to move it from side to side on the mast, like a dipping lug. The boom moves away from the mast, and the pull is up and forward instead of down and forward.

Humans need Mars!

2013-05-04T13:27:00.004-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

I was reading another Seattle paper a few days ago, and saw an article about cannibalism being proved among the colonists at Jamestown colony in the winter of 1609-1610. It seems 80% of the colonists died from starvation that winter. There were written accounts from the time that mentioned this, and newly found archeological evidence from a 14 year old's skull found that had been hacked open to eat. A very grisly story, but the darkly amusing part was this article was placed just below an article about the recent enthusiasm for colonizing Mars.

This was funny, but I think misleading. I think the readers were being asked to put these two stories together in their minds, and think about the likely mortality rate in a Mars Colony. This sort of negative thinking has pushed the work on a humans to Mars expedition back, decade by decade. In 1968, when we had just circled the Moon, and were planning to land on it the next year, the expectation at NASA was that we would send a human expedition to Mars by 1990.

People need to face that we going to have a high death rate in a Mars colony. Human error, accidents, even catastrophes will happen, even if starvation does not plague the first settlers.

We may have failures, even with everyone dying off and vanishing, like the Roanoke colony in Virgina. We even have to worry about comet impacts; there is a 'close call' predicted for 2014 for Mars, the type that killed the dinosaurs off 64 million years ago (though if a comet did hit, it would add a lot of water to the surface of the planet - you might Google the articles about this - Mars-Comet-2014)

But that does not mean we should not go into space, not colonize other planets. Look at the history of this country. Fortune favors the bold..

Just in passing, I would like to note that another famous early English colony, the Plymouth colony, experienced a 50% die-off the first year. The survivors married each other (and other newcomers) and some 5% of the population of the USA is descended from these colonists, including my business partner, John Watkins. The name of the Plymouth colony member that was his great many-times- grandfather was John Howland, an indentured servant. John Howland now has hundreds of thousands of descendents alive in the united states today.

As Mars appears to be barren and generally void of life. we will not be displacing or wiping out any native peoples a' la Avatar or even in our own history through disease or deliberate policies. There is no good reason not to go; even for the reason Everest was climbed in the 1930's for the first time; 'because it is there'.

I want, then, to recommend the book The Case For Mars, first written back in 1995 and recently revised. This book is a good introduction to the problems of humans colonizing Mars. and some clever shortcuts that could be made. The author's thesis is that we should plan right from the start to go 'one way', and leave astronauts there to start up a permanent colony.

This is an upbeat book, written by a notorious Mars booster Dr. Robert Zubrin. It has a lot of useful information, and good hard science in it, with a lot of the technical answers with original thinking covered on the problems that would be faced. A ''sequel'' to this book, How to live on Mars, a comic SF fictional immigration 'handbook', set in 2095, is filled with practical information.

It is a funny book, a good book, that is a commentary on life as we know it now, as well ..... but I am biased. I did some editing on this book. It got a review in the Wall Street Journal that was favorable and a 1/4 of a page long, so it can't just be me.

What with the risk of a meteor collision like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, as well as the comet near-miss that is approaching Mars next year, it would be good for the survival of the human race to live on more than one planet in this solar system. Even with all the problems the human race faces now, it took economic progress in the West to turn humans into environmentalists, and we are better stewards of the Earth than we might be otherwise. We do a better job rescuing and reclaiming streams, cleaning the air, sewage,using cleaner technologies, and saving endangered animals, by using advanced technology applied to the problem. Humans are far from perfect at this, but the general trend is good,. in my opinion.

On a darker note, I want to recommend two books by Richard Preston, The Hot Zone, and The Demon in the Freezer. I read the Demon in the Freezer first, and could not put it down, then searched for other books by this author, and found The Hot Zone.

I was brought to the realization that the human race may be hit by (another) disease outbreak originating in Africa. Our government chose to ignore the last big epidemic from Africa, until it was too late to contain it; the AIDS epidemic (see the book The Band Played on by Randy Stilts).

There are several other epidemic diseases that could break into pandemics, lurking to break out in a big way; a good example is the five varieties of Ebola. The worst of these being Ebola Zaire, which has a 90% fatality rate, and no known cure - only palliative measures. The author says the evidence points to both diseases started out as diseases from monkeys and apes in Africa, that spread into the human population from eating or handling sick monkeys, and the destruction of their habitat...

We nearly had an outbreak into the general human population of Ebola Zaire near one large American city, from a population of monkeys kept in a military facility. Carelessness, and the insane pursuit of making money by quickly selling groups of imported monkeys to American labs without adequate precautions. This nearly caused an outbreak like those seen in Africa, when whole villages were wiped out by Ebola. Though this book is 20 years old, the risk is nearly as high it was then. Plus, with warfare and economic conditions being far worse than it was 20 years ago, in Africa, the chance of a big outbreak is high. There have been several small outbreaks in the last 20 years. The author notes that the West did not contain AIDS when it could...so our track record of spending enough money to 'notice' and stop fatal disease outbreaks is abysmal.

The Demon in the Freezer, which I read first. covers first the heroic struggle to destroy smallpox in the world, by dedicated health workers, doctors and scientists chasing the smallpox outbreaks around the world and 'encircling' them, vaccinating everyone around an epidemic, to 'contain' it and snuff it out. in the early 1970's, smallpox was finally eradicated in the entire world. The difficulties in doing this, the resistance of the local governments, is well told. These men and women are heroes, and this story should be better known.

The second half of the book is the history of some of these scientists then turning to fiddling with smallpox in labs, to 'weaponize' it, i.e. making it stronger, and in some cases 100% fatal. The author interviewed Soviet scientists who had defected years earlier, who reported that the Soviets had done this kind of research...and after the fall of of the Soviet government, these scientists had scattered and gotten jobs in many other nations. Right now, up to this date, there has been no success in destroying all the smallpox kept frozen in labs, as all sides want some 'just in case'. So,the chance of an 'accident' or a deliberate release of this disease is still very high.

For those who want to read a fictional account of how bad this could get, should read the thriller Andromeda Strain or watch the early 1970's film adapted from the book - it is excellent. Or the more recent film, Contagion. This last film was carefully made, a realistic account of a natural pandemic flu outbreak killing millions who catch it, with only a 20% fatality rate.

Having a version of smallpox available that has been tweaked to be 100% fatal could be disastrous for the human race. As this author points out, we live in the age of air travel. One sick person could be 1,000 miles away in a few hours, spreading an air-born illness to everyone she touches. Unlike the days of, say, the Black Death, which spread only a few miles a week. any contagious illness spread by touch or breath, that is highly fatal, could be around the world in a day or so.

When I read The Band Played On 20 years ago, I went around for six months trying to get my friends and family to read the book. I was shook to the core by the author's proofs that this fatal illness was ignored by our government, as they did not care much about the population it first appeared in - the gay population. Now, even though we are on the verge of a cure, this illness has killed millions, and had decimated some African countries. It is now epidemic among straight youth, esp. minorities, and seniors in this country. Our abandonment of good public health worldwide, because of ''the cost'', means a pandemic could happen anywhere, anytime.

We are fairly aware of the bird flu outbreaks that occur in the Third World and then spread around the world, but most people don't think about what else is out there.

I have to put these two books on my list of great non-fiction of the late 20th and early 21st century, and a must read for everyone. As we as a human race makes plans to colonize Mars, ,these diseases still snap at at our heels and endanger us all.

Jamie Lutton owns Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill, and her blog with her business partner is Booksellersvsbestsellers.

Capitalism:So much more than markets (Rethinking Liberalism)

2013-05-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, with the goal of making a profit.

-- Wikipedia

by John MacBeath Watkins

Several political movements have been named by their opponents. "Liberal" used to be a term of disapproval before it became a term worn with pride, and then became a term of disapproval again. "Fascist" was a term invented by its liberal opponents, and enthusiastically adopted by its followers.

Capitalism is a term invented by Karl Marx in about 1850 to describe something new in the world, something he thought evil. As the Wikipedia definition demonstrates, the term is now retrospectively applied to all systems in which there is private ownership of the means of production, a situation that has probably existed as long as the institution of property has existed.

But Marx was not describing prehistoric societies where flint knappers owned their tools and hunters owned their spears. Through most of history, there had been peasants who owned their land, their draft animals, and their plows, and artisans who owned the tools of their trade. The situation Marx invented a new term to describe was one in which no longer did each weaver own his loom; ownership of the textile mill belonged to the capitalist, a person who did not weave or spin, but whose profession was to own, and to manage or hire managers.

The capitalist was the creator and the creation of the industrial revolution. Prior to this, there had been a number of theories of how economics worked.

Thomas Hobbes believed that government made it possible for labor to create value. The war of each against all, much like the 30-years war, made it impossible for agriculture, navigation, or commerce to take place, which is why we should form a social contract and value the sovereign who keeps us from violent death and ensures that those who plant can reap.

The Physiocrats thought that all value came from the soil, and government should interfere as little as possible. This appealed to planters whose wealth depended on crops such as cotton and sugar, and who wanted to be left alone to keep slaves doing the work.

The mercantilists thought the goal should be to bring as much wealth to their country as possible, which meant getting control of resources, providing the means to exploit those resources, such as roads and bridges for commerce, and steer the most profitable operations of business to their own country. They were natural empire builders, the sort who would conquer India and prohibit the Indians from building textile mills because it was better for England that industry should be in England.

Capitalism adopted parts of all these philosophies, but grew from the changes in technology. Frederick Law Olmstead, who traveled in the South from 1852 through 1857 writing for the New York Daily Times, considered that slavery and the inefficiency it enabled had impoverished the South, its wealth restricted to the few owners of large plantations. From Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom, an 1861 abridgement of that work:

'The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little – very little – of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral... They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.'

In short, he viewed them as insufficiently capitalist. The slaves of the South were at that time worth more than all the factories and railroads in the entire nation, but even so, they were not efficiently employed, because their cost was less than the cost of hiring free men. Not that the cost was low; about half the wealth of the South was in the ownership of slaves.

Capitalism did well enough out of slavery, with 80% of the South's cotton going to British textile mills and coming back as fabric. But the semi-feudal society of the South did not reward labor well, so did not have sufficient demand to support its own industry.

As for the mercantilists, they saw conquest and the domination of other peoples as the key to gaining wealth. The West was won by people following those imperatives, using the nation's troops to conquer land for private ownership. The conquest of Indian land was not an enterprise for libertarians, it was a nation dominating by force people who commanded less force.

Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed in 1890. Perhaps it is no accident that in 1898, America tried to expand into a true empire by seizing most of the remaining colonies of Spain in the Spanish-American War.

The failure of America to become the sort of empire the proponents of the Spanish-American War had envisioned was really the end of the mercantilist dream. And the intellectual basis for an economic theory replacing mercantilism had been laid long before.

The theory of comparative advantage -- that is, the theory that if each nation produces what it makes best, and trades it to other countries -- was first examined in detail in David Ricardo's 1817 book, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

Ricardo suggested that such trade left both countries better off, in contrast to the mercantilists who advocated high tariffs to encourage domestic production of as many goods as possible. This was a very different view of how value is produced, and because it suggested that the production of value is not a zero-sum game, it was a major break from previous notions of how the world works.

The theory of comparative advantage has always been a hard sell, especially in hard times. But another intellectual revolution was to make capitalism work much better than the alternatives, and it grew out of the work Ricardo and a moral philosopher interested in the nature of value, Adam Smith, had done on the way markets work.

I'm talking, of course, about the marginal revolution, one of the least-known and most important revolutions in history. Economists in Austria, England, and America participated in perfecting the theory that the marginal utility of goods is key to understanding their value.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo had not understood value well enough to explain why diamonds are worth more than water. The one was a shiny stone, they other essential to life, yet the stone was worth more, which Smith regarded as the paradox of diamonds and water.

Marginalists could explain this. Many people had no diamonds, but all had sufficient water to maintain life, or they were dead. Since the dead demand no material object, the remainder of the population, who usually have more water than they need, do not hold additional water to be of high value. Most people the world over own no diamonds. When you have no diamonds, wanting to own one has some value. The notion of marginal utility could explain and quantify the effect of scarcity on prices.

Marx, remember, invented the word "capitalism," but he did not invent a really workable theory of value. About the time he would have read of the theory of marginal utility, he stopped writing. Personally, I think he realized that his theory of value, based on that of John Locke (Locke said labor creates property, Marx said labor creates value,) was crap compared to the theory of marginal utility, which left his theory with no place to go.

The marginal revolution gave liberal economists a powerful tool that allowed them to run an economy more successfully than those who did not adopt this notion. It laid the basis for the economic consensus that gave us steady growth with only modest downturns from the late 1930s until 2008. In the early 1930s, there was a sizable leftist movement, reflecting that many people didn't buy into capitalism as the best way of life. The steady success of a kind of capitalism where government moderated the excesses of the markets and made it possible for them to thrive undermined the socialist alternative, as did the less than brilliant performance of Fabian socialism and the wretched failure of the Communist economies.

The economic philosophies that asked government to moderate the effects of capitalism were first Keynesian economics, then monetarism. Keynes claimed that when the economy got into a liquidity trap -- that is, when the natural rate of interest is below zero -- fiscal stimulus is needed to get the economy running again. Moneterists claimed that monetary policy could do the job, making central banks the essential institution of capitalism.

But what has happened is that with the collapse of the socialist alternative, the left is defined by Keynesian and even monetarist ideas, while the right is defined by what amounts to pre-Depression economics. Although those on the right wish to portray this as an argument between socialists and capitalists, it is really an argument between different brands of capitalists.

When the only real alternative to capitalism is another brand of capitalism, you can say with some certainty that capitalism has won. Rhetorical efforts to label Keynesians as socialists remind me of the efforts of the Catholic Church to label the Goliard poets as "Bohemians."

The Goliard poets were rebelious clerics who wrote scandalous songs and poems often featuring "Father Golias," a figure who possessed all the flaws of the rulers of the Catholic Church. At the time they were suppressed (in 1289, the Church decreed that "no clerks shall be jongleurs, goliards or buffons"), the Gypsies, so called because of the untrue claim that they were from Egypt, were moving into France, where they were called Bohemians, because of the untrue claim that they were from the kingdom of Bohemia. They were foreign, poor, transient, and often stole things.

The Church began to refer to the Goliards as "Bohemians," in an effort to make them seem less socially acceptable. But the term bohemian has come to mean a rebel poet, which is pretty much what Goliard meant. The Church had managed to change the sign, but not the signified.

So those who now wish to associate a rather successful branch of capitalism with the term "socialism" should be wary that they may revive the legitimacy of the term "socialist."

The paleoeconomic right wants to "end the fed." It's my belief that in so doing, they would be well on their way to ending modern capitalism, which since 1913 has relied on the central bank to moderate the excesses of the market and guarantee some stability in the economy. The problem is that a system that relies on large accumulations of capital needs a market in debt that can be relied upon. Alexander Hamilton understood this, which is why the Funding Act of 1790 funded the debt rather than paying it off -- he wanted to create a market for securities that could finance commerce. He proposed a Bank of the United States, which would accept deposits and make commercial loans. It was to take on the functions of the Bank of England, which had rescued the pound by acting as a lender of last resort in 1763.

Andrew Jackson, the Ron Paul of his day, denounced the Bank of the United States in 1828 and refused to renew its charter in 1836.

As Wikipedia notes, "The end of the bank saw a period of runaway inflation, until Jackson's executive order requiring all federal land payments be made in gold or silver, driving all banks to require payments in gold and silver, producing the depression of 1837, which lasted for four years."

This is the paradise to which Ron Paul wants us to return.

State banks took up the slack until 1863, when the Union, freed of Jacksonian southerners, chartered national banks. The panic of 1907 revealed that capital had become so important, and markets so unstable, that the Federal Reserve system was needed.

Jackson demonstrated that capitalism without capital fails, and the Panic of 1907 revealed that to have stable capital markets, we need a lender of last resort. So let's add that to the components of capitalism.

When Marx coined the term "capitalism," it was a flawed and sometimes brutal system. He correctly forecast that it would have to change. What he missed was that the beast could be tamed, with the advancing arts of economics and central banking, and policies of social insurance making it not only tolerable, but preferable to other systems. The danger now is that we will forget the lessons we learned in an earlier and more brutal time, and eliminate those elements of capitalism that make it function well enough not to call for its replacement.

When you take the tools from the weaver and concentrate them in the hands of the textile mill owner, you take control of working conditions away from those who make the fabric. Democracy has a pretty good history of fixing that problem, with the actions of capitalists restrained to a level that keeps revolutionary urges in check. It is inherent in the nature of capitalism that the ownership of the means of production is concentrated in few hands, often in the hands of a person who is a legal fiction, the corporation. This is at the core of capitalism, and it is the need for such large investments that makes the management of capital so important.

In 1811, William Blake published the following words:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Yet somehow, among paleoeconomic conservatives, those dark Satanic Mills have become a vision of paradise. I would say they were not even capitalism, only the precursor to our capitalist system.

Links for this series:

Rethinking liberal theory 1: Thomas Hobbes, blasphemer and patriot
Rethinking liberal theory 2: The outlaw John Locke, terrorist, liberal, and advocate of freedom
Rethinking liberal theory 3: A compact to protect property, or a conspiracy to create meaning?
Rethinking Liberal Theory 4: John Milton and the many shapes of truth
Rethinking Liberal Theory 5: Adam Smith, moral philosopher of the marketplace
Rethinking liberal theory 6: Hegel, the end of history, and the triumph of the liberal idea
Rethinking liberal theory 7: Liberalism and individualism: The invention of the Util and the way west
Rethinking liberal theory 8 Property and freedom: Why language is the basis for the social contract
Rethinking Liberal theory 9: Physiocrats & mercantilists: The economic philosophies of the founding fathers

An easy-to-build alternative to the Blanchard Junior Knockabout

2013-05-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

As some of you know, the backbone of the fleet at the Center for Wooden Boats is the Blanchard Junior Knockabout. The Woodenboat Forum even had a thread from a man whose wife learned to sail in the program I helped start, Sail Now, asking where he could find one.

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthre...-Jr-Knockabout

The boats are sufficiently well known that a fellow from Portugal has made a model of one:

http://forum.woodenboat.com/showthre...ior-Knockabout

A thread that I unfortunately missed at the time.

They were designed by Norm Blanchard, and built at his yard from 1938 through 1952. They were designed for livery service, and are just about ideal for that and for sailing instruction. They have a simple rig, with the boom high enough not to hit the passengers, a low-aspect keel that doesn't stall easily, enough ballast to be stable and forgiving, a big rudder that is effective for sculling out of irons, and a comfortable cockpit.

No attempt was made to make them particularly fast, though they seem to sail about the same Portsmouth Yardstick rating as a Rhodes 19. They don't carry a spinnaker or genoa, they aren't set up for hiking or trapezing, they just do the job of a livery and instruction boat really well, because they are such good daysailers. They also have the spoon bow that was standard on fast yachts from the 1890s through the 1960s, which gives them a classic look.

Since none have been built since 1952, they aren't widely available. So, because I mess about with Delftship for fun instead of playing Angry Birds, I've been working on a stitch-and-glue version that could be built quickly and with minimal skills and which I hope captures the look, the feel, and the virtues of the Blanchard Jr. Knockabout.

Here's a cartoon of the boat with the rig:

For comparison, the Blanchard Junior rig:

Lines of the Blanchard Junior Knockabout:

Lines of my proposed stitch & glue variant:

Too bad I don't have the money to build it.

Building Meerkat's crabclaw rig

2013-04-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Well, I've built the spars for Meerkat's crabclaw rig, and today I made the sail. The rig will look something like this:

Today I made the sail. It's blue polytarp put together with double-sided carpet tape. To make sure it had some belly to it, I put some extra bow in the luff spar by, well, making a sort of bow out of it, stringing a line from one end to the other. The spars are laminated from 1 1/2 inch by 3/8 inch western red cedar, so it's going to be fairly flexible.

The conspiracy of god, the well-intentioned lie, and the strangeness of being uman

2013-04-25T00:08:00.002-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

On a forum I sometimes frequent, a person I had thought fairly normal recently stated as incontrovertible fact that "the federal government operatives did the Oklahoma City bombing to protect their seized power."

Which left me wondering, why do we have some sort of conspiracy theory for every tragedy?

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Western Australia, thinks he has some answers.

In an interview with Slate, he recently said:

"There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness."

Which immediately started me thinking about religion, in which the randomness of life is blamed on god or the gods.

He elaborated:

"Basically what’s happening in any conspiracy theory is that people have a need or a motivation to believe in this theory, and it’s psychologically different from evidence-based thinking. A conspiracy theory is immune to evidence, and that can pretty well serve as the definition of one. If you reject evidence, or reinterpret the evidence to be confirmation of your theory, or you ignore mountains of evidence to focus on just one thing, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist. We call that a self-sealing nature of reasoning."

My heavens, that sounds like religion through and through. Was religion the original conspiracy theory, a way to gain control of an irrational world by assigning blame?

But of course, there is the theory demonstrated in The Invention of Lying, a Ricky Gervais movie in which he plays the only man in the world who can lie, or even conceive of there being such a thing as a lie.

He uses this super power to become wealthy and powerful, but the biggest lie he tells is to his dying mother. She's afraid of the nothingness of death, so he tells her the comforting lie -- that instead of nothingness, what awaits her is the best place ever, where she will live in a mansion and everyone she loves will be with her and she will be young and healthy and beautiful.

The doctors and nurses overhear, and religion is born out of lies and good intentions. It is a vision of a good, kind, but imperfect man whose words send his world spinning out of control.

This is certainly a more benign version of the origin of religion, and at least as credible. And I suppose the assemblage we call religion could have many origins for its many parts.

As we've discussed in the series of posts on the strangeness of being human, we are not entirely logical creatures, and the dominance of logic as a motivator of human action may, in fact, be fairly recent. In the post on the bicameral mind hypothesis, we talked of Julian Jaynes and his theory that for most of the time between the invention of language and the Greek golden age, we were not "conscious" in the sense of possessing a metaphorical space in our heads that narrates our lives -- we were not self-conscious.

He portrays a society in which the gods speak to us through that part of our brains that only the insane listen to now, a society in which the patterns of civilization were written in our myths, which programmed our minds. His theory is that as society began changing too rapidly for this to continue working, we had to learn to think for ourselves.

But are these mythic patterns left behind so easily? There is a deep yearning in mankind for the mythic past, even for the voice of god to tell us what to do, to free us from the terrible burden of freedom. A friend told me last Saturday about how his devout father had yearned all his life for something like the voice of god, and seemed at last to reconciled himself to never hearing it.

I would not begrudge him that dreaming world of mystic voices and certain belief. I do fear he would find what our ancestors found, that the world is changing too fast for the pattern of life to be set by mythic figures that tell us how to live. We must adapt to survive.

But there is a reason we want the dream back. We've seen the nightmare of reason, the Terror and the killing fields.

In the first post in this series, I quoted Yeats:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

And still we yearn for that faery world, in fantasy literature, in new age books, in religious practice. We can look back, and wonder at the poetry of it, and find the wisdom in it.

But we must not expect the bush to burn for us, or the voice of god to give us eternal truths. William Manchester's book about leaving the middle ages behind had an almost perfect title: A World Lit Only by Fire. We have left that world behind us, and the burning bushes with it. In the clean, efficient, industrial light of our disenchanted nights, we remember the dreaming world, and we need to feel the pull back to it to keep our logic from becoming too cold and cruel, but it was logic that gave us facts at our fingertips and the power to shape our world.

Who knows, maybe there is a god, and he's responsible for everything, for the gunman on the grassy knoll, the painfully bland music in the elevators, the martyrdom of random strangers at the Boston Marathon and the Oklahoma federal building bombing. Or maybe there's just a need, and when we don't have gods to fill them, we have conspiracy theories and well-intentioned lies.

That other explosion: The preventable deaths in Texas

2013-04-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

A factory just blew up, in West, Texas.

This was a totally preventable accident, and it was exacerbated by extraordinarily poor and reckless city design in this small town.

We have known how to prevent accidents like this since at least 1947.. This disaster should never have happened, and if it did happen, the loss of life was absolutely preventable. Those who died, those who lost their homes in the blast, those hundreds who were injured, this was absolutely unnecessary.

This factory had ammonium nitrate stored on the premises The city fathers, as the town grew, either allowed homes, schools, nursing homes and apartments to be built around this factory, or allowed the factory to be located very, very close to these homes. .... I don't know which

This was all a recipe for disaster. And it is on record that this factory failed some safety inspections, and had bargained down the fines they had received for those violations. They had forgotten the adage 'penny wise; pound foolish.' All the facts are not in yet, but it appears to save a few bucks, they cut corners.

And even if their safety record turns out to be squeaky clean, who in their right mind puts a middle school, a high school, apartment buildings and a nursing home within the blast radius of a factory that handles dangerous chemicals like ammonium nitrate? All these buildings were located mere yards from the factory.

The city developers in West should be held responsible for allowing homes and schools to be built so close to this factory. There was no excuse for this.

I blame the zoning committee at this city for this madness; if the widows of the firefighters have any sense, they will sue the pants off not only the factory owners, but the city itself for allowing this. Does the almighty dollar rule over common sense?

Eleven first responders, including fire fighters, and three others died in the blast...and these were volunteer fire fighters, local men who put their lives on the line; evacuated the homes, apartments, and nursing homes, and who tried to fight the fire, are responsible for their not being a much greater loss of life.

They are amazing heroes.

But - have they died in vain?

When are we going to enforce safer practices in American factories? Over and over, we have accidents like this, and nothing changes.

Perhaps insurance they carry will allow the factory owners to rebuild, but what about the loss of life? All those brave firefighters died saving lives in that town, lives that were put at risk because several entities had not practiced any common sense.

We all know better than this.

In 1947, an accident in Texas City, Texas killed 600 people and injured thousands when a French ship carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded. The explosion could be heard over a 100 miles away..That horrific fire and explosions were supposed to 'have changed everything' the way the Triangle garment factory fire of 1911 led, finally, to vastly improved safety standards in American factories.

We should stop. Stop..... and think about enforcing the laws we have, and passing tougher laws about safety practices in factories like this one.

My dad worked handling radioactive nuclear waste products at Hanford; he was a radioactive waste expert, an inorganic chemist. I learned from him, from stories he told me, that safety must come first. Though Daddy used to joke about OSHA, Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration, harassing him and made fusses over the height of railings and such, but he was damn glad they were there, keeping an eye on safety. .

OSHA has been gutted in recent decades, defanged, so that they cannot force factory owners to keep their workplaces safe from accidents like this.

This same week, three people died and dozens were maimed in a bomb blast in Boston, Mass. This horrified us as it was carried out willfully by young, deluded terrorists. We cannot do anything quickly about terrorism, young men going mad and building bombs that maim children and other civilians - or what we can do, will mean re-organizing the governments of the world. Some of us are working on that, all sorts of organizations. .

But death and destruction like the ones in West can be easily prevented.

In any town in this nation, we should examine how safe our schools and housing are, and how close they are to hazards like this one. We fret about sexual predators living near our schools; how about fretting about ticking time bombs like this factory? We must insist that that more inspections are done, fines are increased, and that OSHA has the power to shut down factories that are run in a dangerous way.

And NO city planners should get away with placing schools, homes, apartment buildings and nursing homes so close to a factory that they could easily blow up . The death toll could have been much, much higher; they got lucky, and they had well trained, selfless fire fighters working that terrible blaze. We got very lucky in West. As ordinary citizens, we can petition our government to restore the powers of OSHA, and demand that factory towns are a lot safer. This is a task any single citizen can take on, by writing letters, - real letters, not emails- to your representatives, and demand that there be safer practices in place.

This is where ''government red tape''' saves lives..both in better city planning, and demanding safer workplaces for all.

The Boston bombers, The True Believer, and the odious experiment

2013-04-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

The Boston bombing has made me think of a great book and an odious experiment, both of which might help explain the strange behavior of the bombers.

I believe they committed their atrocity in the belief it would somehow make the world a better place. How's that for irrationality?

In 1951, one of the great books of the 20th century hit the shelves. It was The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman who had become an independent scholar by reading and thinking.

Eric Hoffer explored what sort of person joins the mass movement, loses the sense of self-preservation that most of us have, and causes them to commit inhuman acts and sacrifice their own lives.

Hoffer said that "the fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure," and needs the movement to give meaning to his or her life. A movement gives such a person a way to act that makes their life heroic rather than insignificant.

And what if it hurts others? Well, if they are part of the movement, their sacrifice is appreciated, and if they are not, they don't matter. They might even be the enemy.

In a profile done when he competed in a Golden Gloves event at Salt Lake City, we have this portrait of Tamarlan Tsarnaev:

Tamerlan says he doesn't drink or smoke anymore: "God said no alcohol." A muslim, he says: "There are no values anymore," and worries that "people can't control themselves."

When he died in a shootout with police, he was asserting his values and his value. His body reportedly had multiple gunshot wounds and a blast injury. No doubt he believed that he was going out in a blaze of glory. To give significance to the story of his life, he killed random strangers, thinking somehow he was acting heroically.

But how could he kill people who had done him no harm, because they were participating or watching an American event? Why did he do something most of us wouldn't do if directly ordered to?

The experiment I thought of was Stanley Milgram's experiment in authoritarianism, which has often been misinterpreted but seems to support Hoffer's view.

In the Milgram experiment, done in 1963, one subject (actually an actor) was hooked up to electrodes, while the actual experimental subject was put in charge of administering shocks. The idea was to see if Adolf Eichmann's defense, "I was only following orders," reflected the psychology of normal people.

The subjects were led to believe they were participating in a learning experiment. Here's the Wikipedia description:

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.^[1]
At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.^[1]
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:^[1]

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.^[1]
The experimenter also gave special prods if the teacher made specific comments. If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on." If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."

Although the experimenters assumed that between zero and three percent would follow instructions right up to the final, massive, 450-volt shock, in practice, 65% did.

Milgram wrote an article about it, Perils of Obedience, and did a documentary film, Obedience.

He found that it mattered whether the experimenter was dressed in a lab coat or ordinary clothing, whether the experiment was done in a high-status building or a run-down location. These were matters of perceived authority.

But Milgram did 20 variations on the study. In the one where the "teacher" was simply ordered to go on, none did. The high rate of compliance went with appeals to the greater good -- as in, "it is absolutely essential that you continue."

Because while people will rebel against simply being ordered to comply, they will commit the most monstrous acts for the march of progress, or the moral improvement of mankind. We do our worst when we are convinced that we are acting for the best.

I'm sure it was the same for American interrogators who used torture, for the people who flew aircraft into the Twin Towers, and for Eichmann himself.

In his television series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski had a moment when he squatted in Aushwitz, plunging his hand into the sodden ashes, and as they ran through his fingers, quoted Oliver Cromwell:

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".

He was talking about the 'scientific' racism of the Holocaust, but it can apply to every doctrine, every movement. The cure for certainty, he felt, was empathy:

"We have to touch people."

So, like, filler words, you know? They uh, mean something

2013-04-15T13:45:00.001-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

So, verbal tics like saying "like" every time you introduce new information, or beginning an expository speech with "so," have received their share of ridicule, but now research shows that they actually mean something.

Herbert Clark of Stanford University and Jean Fox Tree of the University of California at Santa Cruz researched the meaning of words previously deemed meaningless, and considered verbal stumbles.

They were called disfluencies, and considered errors be no less august linguist than Noam Chomsky.

In a recent interview, Clark called them "conversation managers."

The speaker has to keep track of the content of what he or she is saying and of interactions with the other(s) in the conversation. It turns out that if you introduce a new topic without an "uh," it's harder for the person you are speaking to to process the information that would have followed the "uh."

Fox Tree, quoted in the same article, points to the fact that teachers discourage this sort of speech. And yes, it can get annoying if someone is nervously resorting to conversation managers to delay getting to the point or conceal the fact that they've lost the plot, but uh, all languages seem to have them, so they must have a purpose.

Martin Corley and Robert J. Hartsuiker, in a 2011 study, gave subjects a task manipulating objects, sometimes preceding the information with a pause or the word "uh," and sometimes not. The result?

Participants were quicker to respond when a name was directly preceded by a delay, regardless of whether this delay was filled with a spoken um, was silent, or contained an artificial tone.

Now, I spent an important part of my boyhood in Maine, where I developed a style of speaking that involved pauses, but did not rely on "uh." When my family moved to the West Coast, I found that if I paused, left-coasters would assume I was done talking and jump in. I had to learn that the syncopated cadence of New England would be misinterpreted in the Northwest, where the expectation was for a steady speech cadence. People would interrupt as I paused to prepare the listener for new information.

In short, I had to learn to say "uh."

In The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis has it that "They use everything about the hog except the squeal."

In language, the squeal is not wasted.

My encounter with Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (updated)

2013-04-13T23:01:00.002-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

I have been dodging The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for forty years...though it was written over a hundred years ago, and set in the South before the Civil War. The problems the child Huck faces come too close to home for me.

A thousand reviews of this book are written every year, but a lot of them miss the point I got from Huck Finn. The message I got from of the book was the experience of looking at adults through Huck's eyes, and finding them wanting.

It is merciless how Twain points out their inhumanity to Huck, to Jim and to each other. The most extreme case is Huck's father (though many who write about this book overlook this, and think the treatment of Jim the slave to be worse).

You can read The Prince and The Pauper, an easier book to get through, (and another favorite of mine) to encounter a similar father, in both the father of the 'pauper' and Henry the Eighth. Twain relies there on what the reader would know about Henry the Eighth, and then contrast the two fathers, and show that they, too, are identical in the ways that matter, not just their sons.

Both boys in that book feared their father's violence and mercurial temperament. Twain proposes a 'better world', and attacks the class system, by showing that the boys were identical (he does this in Pudd'nhead Wilson, too, check that novel out) All three boys, the prince, the pauper, and Huck, look out at the world and show it up to the 19th century reader and the readers in our time, to be a cruel place full of lies.

In Huck Finn, the fear he has for his father is the great shadow that lies over the book. Other adults are wicked, hypocritical and foolish in turn, and show their lack of humanity toward JIm, the slave, and Huck. But the boy's fear of his father in chapter four is what makes this book great in my eyes. This is the one of the first times in fiction, that I know of, that an alcoholic, violent parent is depicted without mercy in fiction, from the point of view of a child. I can only think of Dickens parents or adults to compare,and the rawness of the effect of strong drink is not as clearly laid out. (In say, Great Expectations, it is just 'madness' that affects Miss Haversham)

It is the terror that Huck feels that makes reading this book so difficult. .

For all the adults who have forgotten, this is the terror a child feels when they fear their parents. For a child of two alcoholics, like myself, this is where I put the book down, and could not finish it, for many years.

Twain has slipped in a dagger. It is Huck's father who is the second subversive figure, here, next to the outrageous and anarchistic character of Huck, himself. This father is the greatest argument to give a gallows laugh over the ''rights'' of parents over their children. Anyone who works in Child Protective Services should read this chapter, before thinking of returning a helpless child to an adult to has been drunk and abusive.

Reviewers miss that this book is a great rant in favor of the right's of children (as well as blacks).

Huck's resistance to 'civilizing', his desire to loaf and just be, his smoking (!!) captures the secret heart of all who might come across this book.

How many of us as kids wished to ditch books and just be outside, playing? To go nowhere, and just see what turns up? That Huck is completely illiterate, and did not mind too much, but could hunt and fish really well and take care of himself in the wild makes him even more outrageous. This book is revolutionary, an open call to freedom to anyone who comes across it. Many fictional characters in many books have been modeled on Huck. The first I read was the runaway boy in My Side of the Mountain, who lives in the wilds of the Catskills for 2 years, very like Huck .

The parents and educators who examine The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn rail about all the uses of the 'n' word in this book, which is used to good effect to show how badly black slaves were regarded by whites in the Antebellum South.. They usually miss how bad Huck's father is, and that he is right there in the text for the children to see, and to remember, and compare to the authority figures in their own lives.

Even if their own parents are sober, the child reading the text might have an older brother, a bully in school, uncle or aunt like Huck's dad, or a teacher they are terrified of. Every child knows a violent person who has power over them. . . . ..   . There are so many adults that act like Huck's dad; he is almost a stand-in for parent, and if not parent, the state and government itself. But we, like Huck, think that this is normal, Huck's father slips by the modern reader, as we are anxiously looking at how the black character Jim is presented.

The subversive nature of Jim, who seems to be the only rational adult in the book, sets up Huck's father as his foil. Huck's father is the subhuman here; that is the most subversive quality of this book, contrasting with Jim's humanity and kindness.

Huck's dad is a very believable character, if you are familiar with the habitual drunkard, who has fallen into the degenerate state of advanced alcoholism.

Huck describes his father as a man hairy, ragged, ruined by drink, seemingly older than his 'middle age', which was probably about 35.

He is pale from the misuse of his body, dirty, illiterate, and angry. Huck is terrified of his father; this is made clear, that he fears him showing up and taking him away all in very his rough prose. that preys on his mind that is father will show up and he knows no other adult will understand, and prevent this.

This is the modern feel of this book; it is the eternal typical experience for the child of an alcoholic, in all eras.

No matter how awful the parent, the child is the parent's property, even if the child is in danger of his life. This is true in 2013 as it was in 1840, say. Huck is going about in fear, and has no one to help him, even though he supposedly has 'guardians' to look after him.

The brilliance of this books is that Twain shows the father's remnant of his humanity, in that he kept his son close by him, ostensibly because he wanted to extract money from his guardians; but from the text, it was evident so that the father would not want to have to be alone. He must have loved the boy, but would never say so, or act like it by rational standards.

While he had his son with him; he had removed him from his guardians and from school, the father maintained a fabrication of a household; functioned better, hunted, cooked, lived in a shack; but when he was by himself, the father roamed the land a homeless person, drinking and gambling and getting into fights with people over and over, barely functioning as a rational creature. His son was his reason for living, even though it was a parody of life, as he lived only to drink. Huck can't see this, as he grew up with his dad, and thought this was a kind of normal. Normal, even though he was beaten daily, and badly, and kept locked up. When he is not locked up, he and his dad hunt, and fish, and quietly hang out in the wilderness together. In the text, he recalls his father telling him about how to get by in life - the rationale on stealing things like chickens, for example.

This detailed description of Huck's dad, both bad, very bad, and good is what makes this great literature.   The conversation between Huck and his dad in Chapter 5 could have been written yesterday. Twain dared to put a realistic violent drunken parent on the page, the sort of parent who, no matter what you do, you are wrong; as in real life. And the child as property, to perhaps kill if they think that is what they want to do, when they are in that mood. And, above all, the child has to listen to them.

Huck's father is what makes this book subversive, and is the hidden subversiveness. Childhood as slavery. No one wants to say 'this book should not be read' when this book challenges the right of fathers, parents, to batter their children. People are looking at the wrong part of this book to suppress, not the use of the 'n' word, but the depiction of the real world of a child of an alcoholic

The most common analysis of this book say that Huck will end up like his father, when he grows up. It is us to the reader, reading about Huck's friendship with Jim, and his open skepticism, his wit and his scorn of the hypocrisies of adults, to hope that he will not.

To hope that there is hope for change in the human heart.

For John's take on this book, look here:
http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-huck-finn-means-to-me.html

Stateless income, global capital, and the death of empires (Rethinking liberalism)

2013-04-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Via Ugh, at Obsidian Wings, we learn of the delightful term, "stateless income." It is a product of global capital, and one reason for the parlous condition of the international system. (It's not in his post, but in the comment section.)

Ugh, who is a Washington, D.C., tax attorney, comes at it from the fact that no one really seems to want tax simplification. That's because of the old, old story of those who want tax favors being the ones who can afford the lobbying muscle to actually effect the tax code. The more complex the code, the harder it is to see who's bought a favor.

And stateless income is certainly a part of this particularly annoying bit of corruption, but it's also a part of a larger trend.

The American Revolution started in 1776, the same year Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published. Capitalism was in its gestation, not even its infancy. Most politicians were either physiocrats or mercantilists. The physiocrats tended to be planters, who valued that philosophy for two of its major tenets: That all value came from the soil, and the lasseze faire idea that government should leave business alone. The latter was attractive to planters whose wealth was built on slave labor, because even at the time of the revolution, people like George Mason were saying that slavery was immoral.

Mercantilists, on the other hand, were natural empire builders. They believed that the state should work with business to increase the wealth of the nation, and in many cases, that meant getting colonies to supply raw materials for manufacture in the home country. India could grow cotton, for example, but it was shipped to the British textile mills. Gandhi rebelled against this, telling Indian men that they should spin and weave their own fabric.

Of course, it would be far more profitable for the cotton mills to be in India, where the labor was cheaper and the transport costs of the raw material less. And had the mills been in India, the people who lived their might actually have been able to afford the fabric.

But under the mercantilist system, the most profitable parts of the process were to be in the home country. The result was that the taxes needed to support the very expensive business of maintaining an empire were paid by the companies that benefited from the empire.

But the most envied positions in business are monopolies and free riders. If you can't swing the monopoly -- and starting with the Grange movement after the Civil War and culminating in anti-trust legislation, societies became increasingly hostile to monopolies -- the next best thing is to be a free rider.

This is inherent in the nature of public goods. For example, the most frequently used example of a public good is the lighthouse.

The problem became evident when private industry tried to supply the crying need for lighthouses. They were a benefit to all mariners, but who would pay for the use of a lighthouse? It's lit or it isn't, and if someone else pays for the lighthouse, it's impossible to exclude anyone from the use of a lighthouse.

So, governments granted lighthouse owners the right to collect fees, and ended up enforcing that right. Essentially, it took the government to collect the fees to support a private lighthouse.

That solved the free rider problem, but then it became evident that the incentive for lighthouses was to crank up the fees and spend as little on maintenance as possible, an example of rent-seeking by a monopoly. This led to public demand for the state to provide better lighthouses.

Think about this in terms of public order. The British Empire, at tremendous cost in lives and treasure, maintained a relatively peaceful and lawful place to do business in India, and its merchant class brought profitable business to Britain that paid taxes to support the empire. But you can no more exclude someone from peace than from the spinning ray from the Fresnel lens of a lighthouse.

Ford was probably not the first, but in 1926 the company built plants to produce the Model T in India for the Indian market. Given how much help America had been in WW I (damned yanks, late to every war...) it was not politically practical to tell Ford to take a hike, and in any case, the age of empires was ending.

Ford was a harbinger of the age of global capital. It is an age in which companies have no loyalty to country. As Mitt Romney was wont to note, "corporations are people, too," but they are people without empathy, loyalty or conscience.

In short, a corporation is a sociopath. Unless, as with some small corporations like Twice Sold Enterprises, Inc., all the officers are one person, it cannot have the character traits we value in people. Lacking loyalty, patriotism is an emotion a large corporation cannot feel.

It is the perfect free rider, not caring about the unfairness of it taking advantage of a system it undermines by dodging payment for the service it enjoys.

At present, nearly half the world's military expenditure is spent by the good ol' USA, a country that comprises close to 25% of the world economy. The pax Americana is partially defrayed by the money paid by some other countries for the protection we offer. Japan, for example, pays about $2 billion a year to help maintain American bases on Japanese soil (well, mostly on Okinawan soil, which is a bit of a sore point with the people of the Ryuku Islands, annexed by Japan in 1872 and still treated as a somewhat separate people for matters such as who marries who.)

But it's becoming increasingly evident that America, like the empires before her, cannot maintain the world system. The expense is simply not paid by those who benefit.

There was much to despise in the old imperial system. The Sepoy Mutiny would hardly have happened in a harmonious nation were people actually liked being rule by foreigners. The competition between countries that had empires, such as Spain and Britain, and those who desired them, such as Germany and Japan, led to horrendous wars with enormous loss of life.

The systems that have replaced it -- the competition of the Cold War and the resented hegemony of the Pax Americana -- isn't necessarily any better. Granted, when a country asks America to leave, we do. (My father flew as a navigator/bombardier on B-57s, and we had to leave Laon in 1958 because De Gaul did not want any American nuclear delivery aircraft on French bases. Yep, it's as easy as that to get rid of us, just tell us to leave and we go.)

But is the world as safe as it was before governments of powerful countries started to realize that all that money spent on wars was never coming back?

Presumably, stateless income and free riders on the international system will at some point undermine the safety of overseas investments to the point where they are not a profitable investment. At the same time, if wars are not profitable, there may be fewer wars.

Links for this series:

Rethinking liberal theory 1: Thomas Hobbes, blasphemer and patriot
Rethinking liberal theory 2: The outlaw John Locke, terrorist, liberal, and advocate of freedom
Rethinking liberal theory 3: A compact to protect property, or a conspiracy to create meaning?
Rethinking Liberal Theory 4: John Milton and the many shapes of truth
Rethinking Liberal Theory 5: Adam Smith, moral philosopher of the marketplace
Rethinking liberal theory 6: Hegel, the end of history, and the triumph of the liberal idea
Rethinking liberal theory 7: Liberalism and individualism: The invention of the Util and the way west
Rethinking liberal theory 8 Property and freedom: Why language is the basis for the social contract
Rethinking Liberal theory 9: Physiocrats & mercantilists: The economic philosophies of the founding fathers

The power of forbidden words and the imposition of order

2013-04-07T13:04:00.001-07:00

John 1

King James Version (KJV)

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John The Baptist, by Anton Raphael Mengs, 1774

by John MacBeath Watkins

In several posts, (1, 2, 3) we've explored the way modernist writers and more playful genre writers have responded to the power of language. But it's always well to remember that our ancestors were at least as smart as we are, and understood things we are rediscovering.

I've often wondered what the above passage really means. From William Warner, University of California at Santa Barbara English Department:

The word for “word” here is“logos”, the Greek word for the indwelling logic, orrational order of things. But it also refers to and translated the figure of “Wisdom” from the Hebrew scriptures. The first 14lines of John 1 thread together three distinct ways of understandingthe productive power of God’s “Word”: creation,incarnation, and the communication of the “good news” of the Gospel.

There is, of course, a great deal more to Warner's analysis, and I recommend you click on the paragraph above to read more.

For our purposes, perhaps the most important thing here is that in this ancient text, John the Baptist showed an understanding of the power of language to organize our world and to carry forward the wisdom our ancestors had gleaned and incorporated into language.

Language gives us the symbolic categories we use to think. Just as any tool carries within it the range of things we can do with that tool, language both enables us to think and, unless we invent new language, limits what we can think.

And, of course, there are always those who wish to limit what we can think. When Thomas Aikenhead spoke about his atheist beliefs, the indictment on a charge of blasphemy read:

That ... the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra's fables, in profane allusion to Esop's Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.[3]

Well, as a recent anti-bullying campaign told us, words hurt. And hurting those who have the power to kill us can turn out to be an outstandingly bad idea.

Aikenhead came to understand this after he had been sentenced to death, and petitioned for a reduced sentence because of his youth (he was 20 when he was indicted) and the fact that he was a first-time offender. The court ruled that it would only consider reducing his sentence if the Church interceded on his behalf.

From Wikipedia:

The Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, sitting in Edinburgh at the time, urged "vigorous execution" to curb "the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land". Thus Aikenhead’s sentence was confirmed.[1]

Profane words have a mystery at the heart of them. They are words that no one is allowed to say, but that everyone knows. It's a bit like the Harry Potter books, where Voldemort "must not be named," but everyone knows his name, and it soon becomes evident this is because everyone names him. It's a bit like the prohibition against saying the name of God.

And the nature of profanity changes over time. We are far less sensitive about religion or sex now, but no one should say the word "nigger." Oops, I just said it, and now you know that forbidden word. And yet, by knowing it, have you become more racially insensitive than you were before? No, but if you use it, knowing it is a forbidden word, you are saying that you are, and by knowing the forbidden word, you know what using that word says about the speaker..

These words are made profane to put them outside of what is acceptable, but how can we know what is unacceptable unless we know the profane word? And some words are forbidden not because they are profane, but because they are sacred.

Forbidding the word is a way to make the symbolic category of thought it represents unthinkable. The sacred works a little differently from the profane. A powerful church could, by making the name of God unspeakable, make excessive familiarity with God unthinkable (Oh, Jehova? Yeah, I used to have a thing with Him. Tall guy, big beard, booming voice, a bit overbearing if you want to know the truth. He actually, and I'm not kidding here, this is God's own truth, had my buddy Abraham right on the point of actually murdering his own son. Well, that was the last straw, I said, listen, 'hova, you know I love you man, but you're turning this into a cult...)

When they start using the diminutive of your name, your authority is right out the window, I suppose. "They call me Mr. Tibbs" is several steps below "you are not worthy to say my name," but it is an effort to insist on dignity, on a recognition of power.

But while the realm of the profane continues to thrive, moving easily from sex acts and religion to race and sexual orientation, what words are now forbidden because they have sacred power? None I can think of in society as a whole, although there will always be sects that preserve this linguistic outlyer. Forbidding excessive familiarity is an exercise of authority. When there is no authority that can insist on forbidding its name, this may represent an increase in freedom or a loss of order. Which you see depends on which you value more.

The power of the profane forbidden word is there to set boundaries, the power of the sacred forbidden word is to buttress authority. I( cannot help but think the power of the profane is more important.

More on the strangeness of being human:

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/06/to-read-is-to-become-stolen-child.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-disenchantment-of-world.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/05/bicameral-mind-and-strangeness-of-being.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/05/structure-of-thought-and-death-of.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/11/ane-how-will-our-minds-be-rewired-this.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/07/sex-death-and-selfish-meme.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/11/stories-language-parasites-and-recent.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/god-language-and-structure-of-society.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/be-careful-who-you-are-more-on.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-strangeness-of-being-weird.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/night-of-unread-why-do-we-flee-from.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/03/night-of-unread-do-we-need-ethnography.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/03/when-books-become-part-of-you.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/04/drunk-on-milk-of-paradise-spell-of.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-power-of-forbidden-words-and.html

Drunk on the milk of paradise: The spell of the story, and the works of Pratchett, Holt, Fforde and Jones

2013-04-01T13:36:00.001-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

-- from Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, William Blake

In our series on the strangeness of being human, we've discussed, among other things, the seductive way stories shape us, the power of language to shape our thinking, and the flight from meaning by some 20th century writers.

One theme I'm seeing in some of the more playful literature is a self-consciousness about stories. I've just re-read Open Sesame, a comic fantasy novel by Tom Holt in which many of the characters are trying to escape from escapist literature (Ali Babba and the 40 thieves) into reality.

Holt is following in the comic fantasy steps of Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld universe is composed in part of the element narativium, which cases everything to turn into stories. And of course, Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next stories are about a police woman who goes into texts, becomes part of the world of the story she's read herself into, and has to foil the villain who has discovered that by going into the manuscript of a novel, he can change the story in all the books containing that story.

Diana Wynn Jones approaches this in more subtle way. In The Spellcoats, the main protagonist is a girl who can weave a story into a rug coat, creating an enchantment that can change the real world if the right spirit wears it. It is an allegory about the power of stories, rather than the more obvious approach the other authors I've named have used. All are playful in their approach to the problem. (Jones, by the way, was always published as a juvenile author, but I've noticed she is usually bought and read by adults.)

Contrast this with the flight from meaning that was such a powerful theme through much of the 20th century. Once the power of language began to be understood, some thinkers began to cry Beware! Beware!

From one of Samuel Beckett's letters:

Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

And, of course, Belgian Jacques Derrida worried about the "violent hierarchy" of signified over signifier, and Louis Althusser worried that the structure of language dictates what we can think.

These sincere efforts to do something with the insight that language is powerful, that it gives us the categories that we use to think, seem to me like a dead end. Inherent in Althusser's fear of the power of language and the structure of society it encompasses is the assumption that language is a prison.

But language can change. We change it by using it, playing with it, imagining new meanings for old words and inventing new coinages. The playfulness of writers like Pratchett, Holt, Fforde and Jones means they are not taken as seriously as the severely depressed Louis Althusser or the deliberately obscure Derrida, but they are doing with language and with memes what humans have always done, played with them and learned through play, which is the main way mammals learn.

It is as if the early pioneers, such as Ferdinande de Saussure, made the discovery of language's power, the next intellectual wave was a reaction of horror and fear, mixed with a desire to rebel -- "language, you are not the boss of me!" -- and we are now seeing people comfortable enough with the notion to play with it and laugh about it. I suspect we will learn more from those who play with the notion than we have from those who rebelled against the power of language. After all, language is a tool we created, and one we are not eager to abandon.

And it is not so easy to rebel against a tool. Beckett's attempts to undermine language fell into the trap he probably feared, that anything you can communicate through language is within the box called language. He did not escape it, he just enlarged the box, which is what creative people do.

More on the strangeness of being human:

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/06/to-read-is-to-become-stolen-child.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-disenchantment-of-world.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/05/bicameral-mind-and-strangeness-of-being.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/05/structure-of-thought-and-death-of.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2011/11/ane-how-will-our-minds-be-rewired-this.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/07/sex-death-and-selfish-meme.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2012/11/stories-language-parasites-and-recent.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/god-language-and-structure-of-society.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/be-careful-who-you-are-more-on.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-strangeness-of-being-weird.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/02/night-of-unread-why-do-we-flee-from.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/03/night-of-unread-do-we-need-ethnography.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/03/when-books-become-part-of-you.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/04/drunk-on-milk-of-paradise-spell-of.html

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-power-of-forbidden-words-and.html

Gay marriage, plural marriage, and the social contract

2013-03-30T15:40:00.001-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

The supreme court is faced with deciding whether we can have same-sex marriage. Whatever they decide, we will eventually get there, by politics if not by legal challenges.

The reason is that the meaning of marriage is changing. There was a time when it was difficult to live a moderately human life without marriage. You needed someone to work the fields and someone to spin and weave and sew clothing, someone to look after the household. As you aged, the only people you could count on to care for you were your children.

When spinning and weaving was generally done in the household, it took up much of the time of the wife. If you bought a suit from a tailor in colonial America, it would cost about a tenth to a sixth of a journeyman artisan's wages to buy an ordinary wool suit. Currently, a journeyman carpenter makes about $27,000 a year, so that would be equivalent to $2,700 to $4,500 for a wool suit. Land's End currently sells such a suit for about $300.

A silk suit would have cost three to five times as much, equivalent to about half a year's wages for our hypothetical journeyman.

Obviously, having someone in the home to spin, weave, and sew would have been very necessary for subsistence farmers, who had little cash income. Cooking, cleaning, and washing were more labor intensive as well.

The mechanization of textiles and of clothing manufacture and time-saving appliances around the home have reduced the value of work done in the home. As a result, in most households both members of a marriage work outside the home. A great deal of labor has moved from the family to the marketplace.

Children on a subsistence farm were not merely a joy, they were a necessity. Their labor around the farms on which most people lived was valuable, and their tendency to take care of their parents was the social security of most of humanity for most of its history. They could even bring in cash income. Abraham Lincoln's father rented him out as a laborer and kept all the money. Now, children are an expense, until they grow up and pay taxes to help defray the cost of maintaining their elders in retirement.

So for those who bemoan the loss of traditional marriage, I say that we no longer have that. Marriage has changed, and will change further. It remains a legal compact to merge your assets and help each other through life, but the economic imperatives of traditional marriage are gone, and the roles of those in a marriage have changed all out of recognition.

What remains is the social contract writ small.

We must reinvent marriage, because it is an important underpinning to society. An individual may exist alone, but until there are social relations, that person is not part of society. You need friends, allies, and family. And although you are born into a family, that doesn't last. You grow up and your parents die. You must either remain alone, or invent your own family.

Marriage is the legal framework we have developed for people to form families. With the advent of readily available and effective birth control, we have removed the biological as well as the economic imperative to have children. It has always been the case that a family could involve a barren couple, but in the economic world of the 18th century and before, this was considered a misfortune that made the couple poorer and less secure in their old age. Now, to be barren is for many couples a choice.

I suppose in time, mainly people who want children will reproduce, and humanity will consist only of people who are biologically programmed to want children and a few throwbacks to a time when all you had to want was sex. And, or course, those who do not reproduce but help relatives who do, thereby increasing the chances of their genes being passed on.

But we have no shortage of people. Whether you are inclined to credit the worries of those who say the world is in danger of overpopulation or not, it is difficult to maintain that the world is threatened by a shortage of human births.

Therefore, the value of marriage for its other functions in building a society should be our main focus, provided this focus doesn't detract from couples having and raising children. Sociologists are pretty well convinced that gay marriage does not pose a problem in this way, and in fact, children raised by gay couples seem to thrive, so the effect of gay marriage is to create more stable families in which children can be raised.

Additionally, the contract of two people to form a very small convoy with which to navigate life has got to help make society more stable. One of the larger threats to social order is single men. Not me personally, although I'm single I'm a baa lamb, but in general young, single men competing for honor are more inclined to violence than men who are married.

It's in the genes, and it's been going on a long time, as shown in this cave painting of reindeer butting heads.

The social imperative is to allow people to form households, so that they can stop butting heads with rivals and settle down.

Now, some have said that gay marriage opens the door to plural marriage. But while gay marriage serves the social purpose of getting young people to marry and settle down, plural marriage works against this, allowing those with more money to have more wives while many men are left our of marriage. (Or, in the case of polyandry, just reverse the genders.)

The little-known scandal of polygamist sects in this country is the phenomenon of "lost boys" -- boys pushed out of their community so that the older men running things can have more wives to marry. This is clearly not a good deal for either the boys or the women they would have married, who are deprived of choice.

Marriage is a microcosm of the social contract, in which you give up some freedom to enjoy the benefits of society. As we reinvent the institution, we would do well to keep this in mind, and look to the good or harm changes in the institution bring to the social contract. The great difficulty opponents to gay marriage are having is in showing that gay marriage does harm to society. I suspect opponents to plural marriage will have less difficulty, but if the issue is to be settled, that's the ground on which the arguments should be fought.

White-Jacket, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Razor's Edge: Masterpices of the Roman à clef

2013-03-29T18:44:00.003-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

On any average day, I sell one copy of Moby Dick, and one or two copies of 1984, if I have them in stock. Classic literature are the last books people will sell to me. I often tell people that I sell the same 100 or 200 'classic' titles over and over.

What I try to do (when asked) is suggest lesser known titles by well known authors. There are some fantastic books by these authors that are not well known and are rarely read.

George Orwell's book Down and Out in Paris and London is an account of the author's own decidedly unromantic adventures in Paris, sliding down into filthy poverty, and becoming a down and out impoverished dishwasher in Paris. Living in a cockroach filled slum in the inner city, Orwell documents the underside of Paris, not Hemingway's cafe society of the Lost Generation. This is the Paris of La Boheme, a generation or two later, but not much changed.

Living in a slum "packed with Arabs, Italians and and Poles," the residents drank heavily, smoked furiously, fought duels with knives. The bohemians were students, stonemasons, prostitutes, rag-pickers, construction workers (called "navvies") consumptive people down on their luck and dying by inches The neighborhood was also home to respectable middle class bakers and laundresses, keeping to themselves - so typical of a Paris slum, according to Orwell. The residents were packed in like sardines into filthy five story apartments, in narrow, unending streets, which had had cheap thin walled divides, to make tiny rooms so as to pack in more residents.

The best part of this book is the description of how he ended up starving, in desperate poverty. Robbed, losing his job teaching English, having to pawn his clothes to eat, Orwell sinks fast. His account of racking semi- starvation, of living on bread and cheap margarine, the boredom, till through a dissolute ex-Russian officer friend he gets a job as a plongeur, (what a great word for it) a dishwasher, after many travails.

They struggled together to get work, any work, wandering in rags in the streets of Paris.

This is a book that lends itself to being read aloud; the book starts with a resident being screamed at by his landlord for crushing cockroaches with his shoes. It is a believable life as a slum-dweller, and of the poor dishwasher and server.. For those who want to read descriptions of life in Paris, this is one of the best, and it is a world that has vanished there. It is frightening to read about how bad it could get, and while reading this book I was thankful for modern medicine which has cured 'consumption' (tuberculosis), and having food and rent subsidies for the very poor. The poor in this book literally drank themselves to death, to avoid thought, or starved to death living on scraps of bread, if the consumption or knife fights or being mugged did not get them first. These people, the 'proles' turn up in 1984, written 14 years later; Orwell's affection for them had remained.

The second half of the book documenting the life of a homeless man on the move in the London streets. tramps were not allowed to stay in a shelter by law more than one night, so they had to "tramp" to the next shelter. These characters might be more familiar to Capitol Hill residents, as we trip over street beggars every day when walking down Broadway. This is their lives from the inside, in the London of the 1930's.

This book is a Roman à clef, as Orwell probably cobbled narratives of several people as well as his own, to create this book, though it has the stink of reality to it. This is not evident on the surface, however, the book has the ring of truth:

But it doe not matter very much . This book is relevant to the modern reader. This is what life could be like for any of us, if not for the safety net of social services - and our own wits.

Those readers who hold "such people" in disdain would well read this book. Reading Owell's path to abject poverty in Paris is a must read, especially if the reader has read Orwell's more famous books. Orwell's distinctive voice as heard in 1984 can be seen here in nascent form.
I also would recommend Orwells unabridged 4 volume collection of essays, instead of the selected essays. The complete works are somewhat hard to find, but are worth hunting down. His political voice, not filtered by his novels, can be found here, and is indispensable reading.

White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, by Herman Melville, like Down and out in Paris and London, is a personal narrative. Melville adventures as a poor sailor making his way in the world, signing up for a fourteen month 'hitch' in the American Navy of the 1843, to get home from the South Seas back to the states.

The ships voyage on the Neversink, is brilliantly narrated, as are the characters of the hundreds of sailors on board, and the perilous trip around the tip of South America. Ships called frigates, warships of moderate size, needed that many men on board, as this was the age of sail when it took many men to handle the sails and man the guns on ships of this era. This account, which is semi-autobiographical is credited with stopping the indiscriminate and brutal flogging of sailors in the American Navy.

This book is Melville's most politically strident work, as it is severely critical of American Navy life. documents the horrible life of sailors in the American Navy, as they lived in wretched, cramped conditions. He also depicted the captain, who he called ''Captain Claret'' as a severe alcoholic with a violent temper. The 'white jacket' refers to the jacket Melville made from discarded canvas and insulated with rags. The quartermaster on the ship refused to give him paint to waterproof his coat, and he nearly froze to death in his wet cotton jacket, while being mocked as 'white jacket'.

It is generally believed White Jacket was directly responsible for ending flogging in the American Navy, a full generation before this ceased in the British Navy. Members of Congress received copies of the novel during the Congressional debate over the issue in the late 1840's, and flogging in the U.S. Navy was abolished that year. The real captain Melville had served under, Catsby Jones, was later brought up on charges a few years later and court-marshaled, though he returned to duty years later, after receiving a presidential pardon.

For fans of Billy Bud, this book is a mirror of that book, and resembles it to a large degree, but is a rather better book, as it is only a thinly veiled fiction of Melville's own experiences. I had a enthusiastic Marxist recommend it to me nearly 30 years ago, and I have been recommending it to my customers ever since.

The Razor's Edge, published in 1944, is also a fictionalized personal account. Somerset Maugham may have based the main character, Larry Darrell, on Christopher Isherwood, who he knew well, and who helped him translate the quote from a verse from the Katha Upanishad; "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard," Isherwood would later go out of his way in later writings to state 'he was not Larry Darrell" as he was annoyed that Maugham based 'Larry' on his life and travels.

Larry is a World War One veteran who is devastated by the death of a close friend in the war. He leaves for Paris 'to loaf' , living on a small inheritance, while his friends chase after status and money in the America of the early 1920's. Larry turns his back as a young man on any plans for a comfortable middle class life, abandoning his fiancee, wanting instead to 'work and think' in Paris, and to travel. This is a telegraphed reference to the flight of intellectuals to Paris of in the 1920's.

This novel follows the parallel lives of Larry and several of his friends over the next 25 years, as Larry ends up studying spirituality in India, then returning to England. Larry's life is contrasted by Maugham with the deeply unhappy lives of his friends, in brilliant thumbnail sketches. The choices they made to seek a material life of money, power and security; happiness slip from their hands. They age, sicken or fall into the horrors of drug use and debauched living .

This is a vivid brief tale life, and choosing security over the lure of the road. This author, who writes himself into the book, wandering in and out of the text, seems to have based all the characters on people he knew. One modern reviewer said it comes off as a 'collaboration between Henry James and Herman Hesse'. It is brilliant, and it was written generation before the 'Beats' such as Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote about the East and living unconventional lives in pursuit of knowledge. . .

De-extinction: Let's tamper with those forces we don't understand

2013-03-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Mama was a chicken, daddy was a rolin' stone.

Jack Horner wants to breed a chicken with dinosaur characteristics -- teeth, a long tail, arms, hands with claws, the whole works.

Of course, it means tampering with forces mankind does not fully understand. That's because he's a scientist. If he was tampering with forces mankind has written manuals about, he'd be an engineer.

And Horner's not the only one. There's an effort under way to bring back the passenger pigeon. We've got plenty of DNA, and it's not very old, because the last of the species died out only a century ago. There's a closely related pigeon whose DNA can be used to supplement the DNA we've got.

Some folks in Europe are trying to back-breed to the aurochs.the ancestor of cows, which has been extinct since 1627. Since we have plenty of cows, that's mainly a matter of breeding back to aurochs characteristics. A couple of Germans associated with the Munich zoo attempted this in the 1920s, and the result was a hardy breed called Heck cattle. They are smaller than the aurochs, but look like them.

The new effort can use the DNA of the aurochs and modern cattle to find the actual genetic makeup of the extinct species that has survived in its modern descendents, rather than rely on visible characteristics.

Are we playing God when we attempt such things? Well, most biologists are atheists, so they don't think that's possible, but they are alive to the notion that there are ethical issues to be addressed. But here's another aspect: Haven't we already played God in wiping various species from the face of the earth? Well, granted, we didn't do it because they were sinful, and we didn't tell them to build an ark or leave and not look back on pain of being turned into a pillar of salt, but that just shows we're less merciful and less rational than God.

The ethical questions have more to do with the question, what's in it for the animals involved?

Some techniques involve making animals with reproductive organisms that will produce a different animal entirely -- chickens with passenger pigeon gonads, for example. I'm not sure this is a problem for the chicken, who would live, mate, and reproduce in much the same way it would have with chicken reproductive organs.

But sometimes, the outcome isn't certain. A Pyrenean ibex cloned in an attempt to bring back the extinct species was born with malformed lungs and died after only 10 minutes of life. The science is imperfect -- that's part of what makes it science -- and perhaps the results will impress future scientists only about has much as Heck cattle.

And once we've brought back the obvious candidates -- mammoths, dodos, and other picturesque and recently extinct breeds -- we'll start going farther afield. How long until someone tries to bring back Neanderthal man? Or even homo heidelbergensis, the last common ancestor of homo sapiens and Neanderthal?

That's where it gets complicated, because we consider human beings ethically different from animals, and cloning humans prior to homo sapiens challenges our distinctions about what it means to be human. If they prove capable of anything we are, we won't have a problem calling them human, I'm sure, but what if they are somewhere between our capabilities and those of our simian ancestors? I don't picture us putting them in a zoo, where they would essentially be as much a freak show as Jack Horner's dinochickens.

This wants thinking about. Here's a TED talk on the subject, which I found via The Long Now Foundation

Lateen rig, or crab-claw? Building Meerkat, a very small catboat

2013-03-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

Well, it's nearly four months since my injury, and I'm in physical therapy now, so maybe I can actually start doing stuff again. One project that's been hanging fire is a new rig for Meerkat. If I can do that, I can probably install bookshelves.

But if I'm going to test-drive the titanium elbow bracing and the healed hand and wrist, what rig shall I build? My first thought was lug, but lately I've been thinking either a crab-claw rig or a lateen rig. The crabclaw rig is alleged to be very efficient, especially reaching. The lateen rig isn't efficient for the area, but its center of effort is low, and I could carry more sail.

Here's what the lateen rig would look like:

I suspect the rig is more efficient reaching than is generally thought, because you seldom see Americans setting a lateen on a reach the way these fellows did:

Those are San Franciso feluccas, or as the Fish Commission sometimes called them, "Dago boats."

Here's what the proposed crab-claw rig would look like, but try to envision a boom on the curved trailing edge, which is a little hard to draw with the software I'm using.

On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, a swearing-out

2013-03-19T17:19:00.002-07:00

by John MacBeath Watkins

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, I'd like to give a special swearing out ceremony for the man who did more than any other to turn a tragically misguided war into a complete fiasco.

Normally, this blog eschews rude language and tries to convey meaning in a polite, yet forceful manner. But when I think of what Donald Rumsfeld did to my country and to Iraq, I am unwilling to allow the courtesy I would extend a mere serial killer to restrain me.

Donald Rumsfeld, you sorry, incompetent son of a bitch, you played your little bureaucratic power games and decided it would be a good idea to prevent any planning for what would happen after we invaded, because you wanted to cut Colin Powell and the State Department completely out of any decision making, and because you knew the American people wouldn't back the war if they realized what would be involved in occupying Iraq.

We have the testimony of the man who would have been in charge of making such plans, Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division.

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

Here's a clue for the clueless: If the country won't back the sort of war you're going to fight, don't fight it. Pretending it's going to magically turn out right won't do the trick.

So, we didn't keep the peace after we toppled Saddam, and allowed looting and chaos. We disbanded the army without an orderly demobilization, which would have allowed us to take their weapons back, just sent them packing with guns and ammo and no job. We fired the key people who knew how the country ran because, to have a government job, they'd had to join the Baath Party. We made these mistakes because you prevented any rational planning before the invasion.

You fucking idiot, you cost countless lives, by which I mean that while we know how many Americans died in that misadventure, we don't know how many lives might have been saved by better planning, and we will probably never know how many Iraqis died because of the mess you created. Not content with participating in the lies the whole Bush administration was putting out to get us into that war, you had to make sure we had no plan for the occupation, and made sure that the whole sorry mess would turn the population of Iraq against us in a matter of months.

People like you are fond of telling us that hope is not a plan, but that's all you had, you pathetic asshole. I believe the Iraqi term for a person like you is Kus Omak.

I suppose a Japanese leader whose idiotic incompetence killed as many people as you did might commit seppuku. A Roman who served his empire as badly would fall on his sword. You haven't even admitted how badly you fucked things up. You damned fool, there's no way you could repay our country for all the damage you've done, but you could at least admit fault and apologize. You never will, because you care more for your personal pride than you do for your country.

If there is a hell, I hope you go to the deepest and hottest pit.

Find the truth with "How to Lie with Statistics"

2013-03-16T13:47:00.001-07:00

By Jamie Lutton

If you could read just one book, and become a brain surgeon, would you do it? Or read just one book, and become a fine chef, a astronaut, or a ballet dancer who could tour? Well, that is not possible.

To enter into any of these professions, you have to read many, many books, study very hard, take tests, write papers, and in the case of being a ballet dancer, this takes years of hard physical work and training, and starting out as a child.

But you can read one book, and begin to master statistics, and in fact, be able to cognate mathematical arguments in politics and society better than most citizens.

How To Lie With Statistics is that book. It makes my personal list of best non-fiction books of the 20th century. I have been compiling a list of favorites of mine, and this one keeps floating to the top. Other books, such as those by John Allen Paulos Innumeracy, Mathematical Illiteracy and it's Consequences and his A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper are also very good, but were written a generation after this book, in the 1990's. This book is the first, the best and the friendliest on how to conquer "Innumeracy''.

The thesis of this book is in it's title. This short book, at 139 pages, is a quirky, friendly introduction to statistics, written by a non-statistician, a magazine editor Darell Huff in 1954. This book tells how to understand and decipher lies and exaggeration backed by the misuse of statistics, by teaching a basic knowledge of statistics, using simple, funny examples and droll humorous cartoons.

Many people, otherwise well read and intelligent, duck trying to understand numbers and problems with numbers in them, once they leave school and are not forced to confront math problems as part of school work.

Most people avoid approaching even simple arithmetic without a calculator in hand, and can't do a lot of simple math in their heads, as they have been told they were 'bad' at math, and never tired to challenge that limiting assessment. They avoid using numbers, or learning very much about the use of math in the design and function of the modern world. And this cripples any understanding of statistics that are casually flung about in the raging debates in our society..

"There is terror in numbers," writes Darrell Huff, the author of this book, and that can lead to a blind acceptance of averages, correlations, graphs, and trends that are vomited out by the government, big corporations and others that have a stake in swaying the voter and her pocketbook, and her vote.

This is unfortunate, because statistics and statistical charts, published online and in newspapers and books, are often used to 'strong arm' people to one point of view or another, or to support weak or specious arguments.

The ignorance about how these charts were derived can lead to the unscrupulous to fudge numbers, move or crop the 'x' and 'y' point on charts, and to confuse and misuse the 'mean' the 'median' and the mode',are among the best examples.

The garbled results are used to protect people in power, or to shore up a weak, wrong or even malicious arguments arguments of all sorts.   Statistics have been used to lie,and lie often, so much so that a famous cliche, attributed by Mark Twain to Benjamin Disraeli (though some say Twain himself made it up) that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics."

This short book, chapter by chapter, uses amusing examples to walk the reader through the meaning of the simplest technical terms used in statistical reasoning, and. arm the reader so they will not be taken in by the misuse of statistics where they encounter them in their daily lives.

It is "pleasantly subversive, and guaranteed to undermine your faith in the almighty statistic" according to the Atlantic, in their original review of this book.

Statistics and   statistical reasoning is a wonderful tool, but like any tool, it can be misused in the hands of the unscrupulous; perhaps someone who wishes to hold or seize power, gaslight or who wants to separate people from their money.

I read history and science books for fun, not fiction. Why this book and no other for the top of my list? Is that day to day, the modern citizen is bombarded with charts, graphs, correlations from theses charts and graphs, and trends that are breathlessly announced on every subject from the rate of diabetes in America to how the alleged moral decay of American teenagers, from one decade to the next. Often readers shut down and ignore the questions of the day - taxation, crime, pollution, as any deep knowledge of these issues require a bit of familiarity with statistics and numbers.

Many people, bright people who are readers blindly rely on elected leaders to make their decisions for them, instead of being able to 'crunch' the numbers themselves.

Huff sought to break through "the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind." The book remains relevant as a wake-up call for people unaccustomed to examining the endless flow of numbers pouring from Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and everywhere else someone has an axe to grind, a point to prove, or a product to sell. "The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify," warns Huff.

Although many of the examples used in the book are charmingly dated, the cautions are timeless. Statistics are rife with opportunities for misuse, from "gee-whiz graphs" that add nonexistent drama to trends, to "results" detached from their method and meaning, to statistics' ultimate bugaboo--faulty cause-and-effect reasoning.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this", or as the author puts more plainly that if 'b follows a, then a must have caused b' (page 87)

Huff's tone is tolerant and amused, but no-nonsense. Like a lecturing father, he expects you to learn something useful from the book, and start applying it every day. Never be a sucker again, he cries! Even if you can't find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere. There always is.

Go out and find a copy of How to Lie with Statistics. Whether you encounter statistics at work, at school, or in advertising, you'll remember its simple lessons. Don't be terrorized by numbers.

Jamie Lutton owns Twice Sold Tales, a Capitol Hill bookstore at Harvard and Denny, and writes, with her business partner John Watkins, for the blog Booksellers Versus Bestsellers.       .

Good read: He Died with a Falafel in his Hand

2013-03-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

by Jamie Lutton

Machiavelli in the Prince had a wonderful thing to say about desire. He defined for the ages 'de facto' vrs 'de jure' when talking about human behavior. De Facto is how people actually behave, and 'de jure' is 'the law' or how people are 'supposed' to behave, In his book, The Prince, Machiavelli has a lot of fun talking about how these two states deviate from each other.

I see this in what people actually read. A young person may say he or she is reading Dickens or maybe their school work, but actually the night before she is curled up with a SF book, a graphic novel or a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, say. The desire for a fun, 'evil' book rather than an uplifting 'good' book is just, then, part of human nature
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My hardest job is finding books that appeal to the people who come in the door. Often I get young people walking in my shop who are not in the habit of reading, whose eyes glaze over when surrounded with books in a bookshop. I ask them; what is the last book you read you really liked?

He Died With a Felafel In His Hand published by duffy and snellgrove in 1994 was a book I really liked.

It has no redeeming social qualities, except perhaps, to the eyes of an sociologist studying the behavior of young 20th century Australians just away from their parents, in shared housing accommodation. It is a true account, an autobiography, of a law student and sometime journalist living in one shared house after another in Australia for a number of years.   I had heard for decades that young Australians were a lot crazier and wilder than Americans; this book is one of the best pieces of evidence of that.

Here is a yarn about 'de facto' living, then, at its most decadent.

Heavy drug use, living in disgusting filth, clinical madness and lawlessness of all sorts, (from skipping out on rent and phone bills to identity theft) drug and sex orgies overheard, observed are all participated in and documented in this dark, funny believable autobiography.    The author, John Birmingham, has a fine talent for observation and pithy, colloquial writing in the slang of the young of Australian. in the 1990s. .

I find the author to be completely politically incorrect, as he documents the beyond wild behavior of both young people of both straight and gay men, and straight and gay women. Be warned!! You will not find any sober or uplifting people in this book.   I found, however, that his characterizations to be even handed and three dimensional. With a few words, he draws thumbnail, believable sketches of his housemates as they come and go. He does not let anyone off the hook.

His young straight men are uniformly insane, though he remarks that many went on to become 'movers and shakers'; lawyers, academics, etc.   His young women, esp. are often the sanest, soberest and cleanest people in the book. Though not always. The greatest scam, identity theft, is run by a woman in this book. But the reader should be warned beforehand that this book wallows in it's drug use, filth, depravity and fecklessness, and has absolutely no redeeming moral values in it. Young people at their laziest and most decadent, mischievous insane and wild run thorough this book.   It also is bloody, awful and horrifying in a few places. I am old and sensitive enough to flinch at a few of the stories in the account.

The back of my copy says "not recommended for landlords', but I would have to disagree. I think this book is a 'must read' call for any landlord. Esp the naive and those who wish to think the best of the dewy eyed young people who approach them to set up shared housing in property they own and control. It is important to exercise caveat vendor when renting to young people, esp. young men.   I also recommend books on commercial and industrial sabotage to business owners and managers who come in, for the same reason.

Myself, I read everything   from bad romance novels to physical anthropology and books on the evolution of sauropods. It is part of my job, so that I can review said books and steer people to the best in the field and avoid the unreadable and the junk. It is also my pattern for reading for pleasure. But like many people, I gravitate to books for my own enjoyment, from time to time, that make me shriek with guilty laughter, and shudder with horror at the same time..

I first read this book 10 years ago, reread it, and clung to my copy, though it was on line for over a hundred dollars at the time. It has come back into print now, and with a little poking around the book can be had for less than $5 on line. It is scarce locally; as a second hand bookseller I have only seen two copies in my career.

This book also make me realize what a goody-two-shoes I have been all my life. This sort of lifestyle may have been going on around me, in shared houses I never went to, or perhaps was never invited to join.   My brother handed me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a teenager, partly, I think to warn me as well as to amuse me. I did find the drug use in that book to be pretty horrifying, even though I can recite the first two or three paragraphs of that book by heart, just as I can recite poetry by heart. Hunter Thompson book is very like this one, but He Died With a Felafel In His Hand to be more believable. For example, the 'Samoan' in the book was actually a Chicano activist and writer, Oscar Zeta Acosta; I am sure a lot of other details were dreamed up; that is part of Thompson's notorious signature.

The best and most redeeming thing I can say about both of these books that they are well written. Like Oscar Wilde said, that is the whole point of novels, whether something is well written or not, not whether it offends . .

For the reader who likes dark, debauched and funny stories. like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I can recommend this book without reservation. Unlike Hunter Thompson's obviously embellished tale of a sport's journalist's road trip to Las Vegas with a 'Samoan' companion, He Died With a Felafel In His Hand has stink of plausibility to it. Say, maybe 80 percent of it is true..
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Meeting The Goddesses of Kunyang, Okinawa

2013-03-13T13:41:00.001-07:00

The Goddesses of Kunyang

Note: The recent death of a friend's mother reminded me that our mothers are often remarkable people whose experiences should be remembered, so I got my mother to write about her experience meeting a living goddess.

by Marjorie Watkins

In Kunyang, the northernmost province of Ryukyu, which means Floating Dragon, I found the goddesses of the Kyu Shin Du, the Old God Way.

This is how I found them. It was in 1967 as a US Air Force officer’s wife stationed at Naha, Okinawa.

In the entrance hall of the Culture Center in Naha, hung a picture of several women dressed in white and with white headbands kneeling on banana leaves in a shelter roofed by more banana leaves. I felt an instant, mystic rapport with them.

“They are goddesses of the old religion,” the Center’s director told me. “They will preside as priestesses at their annual religious festival.”

“When? Where?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

At that time I edited a small magazine for Air Force families. I explained that this aspect of Ryukyuan culture would intensely interest my readers and help Americans better understand Okinawans.

She told me the goddesses would meet at Shioya Bay in northern Okinawa, on a weekend coming up. There was—and perhaps still is—a small resort at Okuma few miles north of Shioya Bay where military families could go for a weekend or a few days rest and relaxation.

I made a reservation for our family for that holy weekend and equipped myself with several rolls of film. Parking my husband and children at Okuma, and with a copy of my magazine tucked under my arm to act as my passport, I set forth to seek the goddesses.

Driving toward Shioya Bay, I picked up a boy in school uniform. He was hitchhiking back to his boarding school in Naha.

“Why are you here, Meiguo gaijin?” He asked politely in Japanese.

I explained, in Japanese, that I was looking for the meeting of the goddesses at Shioya Bay.

“You will never find them by yourself,” he replied. “But I will show you where to turn off.”

He directed me to a one-lane track through tall grasses. I certainly would have missed it had I not picked up that schoolboy. The track led me, in my big green American car, into a tiny village square. That was as far as I could drive. I asked one of the villagers if I might leave my car there.

He consented, and directed me to a path that led from that village along a waterway to another village on the shore of what looked to me like a lake. It was Shioya Bay, so called. Once it must have been accessible by boat from the East China Sea, but now a road with a low bridge and the growth of vegetation between the road and the Bay walled it and the villages on its shores from sight and sea.

Purely on instinct, feeling the goddesses drawing me, I followed a footpath to and through a couple of villages. I entered the last village, another cluster of unpainted houses, this one on a lakeshore, and began walking uphill between them. A man fell in beside me, greeted me as “ne-san”, sister, and asked why I was there. It was not often, he said, that an American came to Shioya Bay. (Ne-san in Ryukyu was an honorific; in Japan it’s what you called a waitress to summon her to your table, almost an insult. I took it for the honorific he meant it. We were speaking in Japanese, but nowhere near Tokyo.)

I told him I sought the goddesses of the old religion who I’d been told were having their annual high holy meeting.

“That won’t start for hours,” he said. “Please come and rest at my house until then.”

We sat on his porch with his wife and a couple of their children, getting acquainted and eating fingerling tree-ripened bananas from the tree beside the porch. They tasted a lot like strawberries.

His wife produced a photo of the family for me to remember them by. From their house we looked downhill to the bay. We watched narrow dragon boat race, each speeding over the water propelled by many yellow oars and looking like a brightly colored centipede

At last we began to see people singly and in small groups coming up the hill and going on past the last house, and into the woods.

“It is nearly time,” my host said. “Just follow the people. They are going to the matsuri.”

I joined the throng, and we came to an open structure about the size of a carport. Cement block pillars held up its grass thatched roof, and women in kasuri cloth kimonos and white headbands sat in rows on three sides. Each had a small lacquered black table about four inches high in front of her. On it were small rectangular rice-flour buns and saki glasses.

I thought I was the only white woman there, but no! Another white woman approached me, and introduced herself as Rae, the wife of the head of the Voice of America station in northern Okinawa.

People stood around in little groups talking very quietly or just waiting.

“The ceremony can not start until Shigeko gets here,” Rae said. “She is the Noro priestess. These women in the ashiagi are family priestesses, one from each family in the village.”

At last the noro arrived. Her Japanese name was Shigeko Oshiro, and she worked at the Voice of America radio station when she was not being the high priestess of the area.

Then the people standing around knelt in the grass-thatched shelter before the kneeling goddesses. Some communicants were men. Each in turn received a sip of saki and a bun to take home to their family altar. Not a word was spoken. It was a simple and ancient ritual, similar to a Christian communion service, but silent.

Shigeko became my friend. She had written a book, and gave me a copy. It was in hiragana script, a 98-characte Japanese syllabary. Back in Naha, I took the to a translator at USCAR, but he could not translate it—too many Rhukyuku words.

Shigeko spoke no English; but we shared a common tongue in Japanese. She taught me a few words of Ryukyuku, the words connected with the Kyu Shin Du, the Old God Way, and about the Family of Seven Gods, Nana nu Yazaku, Seven’s Family.

Noro is a Japanese word. Ryukyuku is such an old language that its words contain no letter ‘o’; Ryukyku speakers say ‘nuru’. A Japanese anthropologist whom I also met at the Shin Du Kyu matsuri told me he was there to learn about the old religion because it was the spiritual ancestor of Shinto.

“All the gods are women,” Shigeko told me. “The highest ‘kami’ is the Ufu nu Amu (high praying mother), the Mother Goddess. She is the daughter of the king of Ryukyu. Only now there is no Ufu nu Amu. Now the only goddesses are the nuru, the wakanuru (young goddess), and negami (sister goddess) also the bi nu gami, the goddess of beauty. And the orange goddess who tosses oranges to the people for their health in winter. ”

To me, coming from a culture in which there is only one god, and that god male, the concept of a family of gods, all female seemed intriguing. The first daughter in each family inherited the position and duty of family priestess. She was not to marry, but to spend all her time praying for her brother who would be out fishing on the China Sea in his black-painted dugout canoe. Storms could come up suddenly bringing high winds and big waves that could swamp his canoe.

(To see what these boats look like, look here.)

Okinawa is about 5 degrees north of Hawaii’s latitude. At Itoman port, I met a fsherman who had been so often sunburned that his skin had turned almost as black as his canoe. He would have nothing to eat while fishing but some of the fish he caught, and eat them raw. He needed all his sister’s prayers to come safely home with a good catch of fish for the family to eat with their rice and greens, and for his wife and sister to sell in the market

In each village, one house, at the uphill edge of the village, was the ‘nun du ruchi’, the “pray girls’ house”. Before each matsuri of the Kyu Shin Du, the nuru, or kami,.of each family would stay for five days of fasting with only an opaque white, low-alcohol rice wine to drink. This would encourage the divine spirit to enter her when she and the other kamis went up the hill to a creek near the ashiagi and baptized themselves by pouring water on their foreheads. Then they were no longer their everyday selves, but incarnations of the goddesses.

I wonder if people living in that northernmost province of Okinawa still call it by its Ryukyuan name, or still worship in the Old God Way.

Shigeko said her niece, who was to have been her successor, didn’t want to be a nuru. She wanted to be a hairdresser. She might even—goddess forbid—have joined the Nichi Ren Buddhists who were then evangelizing the young people of Kunyang.

It’s been over 42 years since the day I met the goddesses. The Ryukyu Islands belong to Japan now. The province is called by its Japanese name, Kumi Gami, as it was then to everyone except the people who lived there.

Buddhism has probably supplanted the old religion, but I hope that somewhere north of Naha, three hot dusty hours by car, goddesses of the Old God Way still live. The Kyu Shin Du produced, a culture in which all women were respected. Our world needs cultures like that.

A map of Okinawa