Infiltration!

I joined Facebook at the urging of a friend and spend very little time on it. In one of the occasional bouts of activity at the direct urging of my friend, I joined a series of groups.

One of those groups was nothing I would find objectionable (amazingly rare) and so I joined it. I had better things to do for several months than spend time on Facebook (lying on the floor of my apartment motionless for hours on end is more enjoyable) but a return stimulated by curiosity about the JIDF brought me back.

For a slight diversion, the JIDF is the Jewish Internet Defense Force who took over a few pro-Islamic Terror Facebook groups. Relevant to this is that Jihadist or anti-Semitic activists hacked or took over various previously innocent groups.

Sadly, one of them was the one I was in but I never noticed it until today. The last change made was a week ago but I am still filled with shame at my lack of vigilance. Nonetheless, I have seen my bit of the online proxy war.

Small Link

I find this website quite interesting.

It provides a somewhat different European perspective (like most Europeans, I regard most Americans as sub-par in terms of intelligence) that deviates from the usual leftist myopia.

Money Grubbing Idealists

I am amazed at some of the ego-boosting measures that go on in even supposedly hard-headed organizations. I signed up for an organization and a few weeks later, and admin specialist handed me an "award" for signing up.

Apparently, some people still haven't heard of motivation crowding. That is the phenomenon that people can only operate on so many motives before one has to disregard some. Even if all motives draw one in favor of one action, some motives will be forgotten.

If you try to recruit people based on honor, that is one motivation. If you try to recruit them bases on self-improvement, that is another. If you try to recruit them based on financial benefits, that is yet another motive. At some point, constant iterations of all of these will crowd another out.

If you try to motivate with a nice salary, college tuition, bonuses, service, adventure, and self-improvement, the theme most iterated will be viewed as the focus for participating. Even if one motive is very strong, its relative weight will decline with every instance that another motive is focused upon. The result is that if you try to motivate people based on money, you will will have people primarily focused on money even if they joined for other reasons.

In some professions that may not be such a bad thing but in others, the psychological side is much more important as one faces extreme situations. The problem is reduced if the benefits are given but not frequently mentioned.

Sadly, this escapes even the more professional organizations and the variety of effects this creates is interesting to watch but not to work in.

Occasions for Dress

It is interesting to observe the various movements within culture. One of these is clothing. The old manners are giving way to new ones and one of these is the degree of formality an occasion can tolerate.


The concept of a child going to school in suspenders, white shirt, black pants, and leather shoes is unthinkable in certain parts of modern society. Such a child would be subjected to horrendous pressure to get him to change into what they view as more appropriate for the occasion. For many, an adult version would be glaring at anyone who would dare to wear a suit into a bar. The expectation of the appropriate degree of casualness is enforced with an opprobrium not deployed in other aspects of life.

No longer is there even just one scale of casualness but many. It used to be little more than two decades ago that one need only wear jeans to be considered casual, now the process has become far more complex. The theoretical simplicity of casualness used to be that work clothes were dirty, dress clothes for Church and social occasions, and home clothes whatever was decent and clean. No longer is that the case. People must now find jeans with the proper rips, fading, dyes, and other paraphernalia to demonstrate their superior gaudiness.

Formality, then a practice refined by expense, is now easily achievable thanks to cheaper fabric and rising living conditions. Ironically, as formality becomes ever more affordable, fewer and fewer people dare to dress that way. Perhaps it is the fear of becoming an "organization man" and of losing one's individuality in the society.

The result is that there is/are one or at least very few ways of being formal but many different and complex ways of being casual. The failure to be sufficiently casual can haunt some people for years as their peers judge them based on that standard.

For me, I rebel against the casual by becoming formal. Life is worthy of respect.

Spam, the African Specialty

I am sometimes surprised at the effort that goes into some of the spam or information theft schemes I run into. The ones that get past the spam filter are frequently entertaining in their quality and delightful in their language.

This is likely due to many of the people writing them using a more formal English education imparted during the British colonial period. This superior understanding of the English knowledge interestingly sets them apart from legitimate offers by their very correctness of language. The expectation used to be that information thieves would be distinguishable by their bad spelling and poor grammar. That is no longer the case among at least a small sample.

My "offers" had ranged from an offer of financial aid from a king in Yorubaland, a need to quickly transfer money out of a bank in Sierra Leone, a desperate need for companionship by a very rich woman, winning a UN lottery, and a bank account of a dead miner in South Africa.

These are all quite entertaining if approached in the right way. Clearly, someone has at least been trying to craft initially plausible cover stories and doing so with a better grasp of written English than I can muster. It has gotten to the point where I expect to see errors in my departmental e-mails but open spam messages just to read the delightful English.

Are these people intended thieves? Yes. Are they enjoyable writers? Yes. It is almost sad that these people are spending more time trying to steal from me and others instead of trying to write a book.

Mind Games

It is amazing how sometimes philosophical papers can be so vapid and yet unexpected media can be more acute.

Here is a selection of video clips from an excellent computer game.







These are but a selection from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Normally, one does not expect philosophy in their game but the plot written into the game is far above the standard to which such things are subjected to. The whole field of Science Fiction is more about understanding oneself in a more dramatic variant of the literary method coupled with more "hands on" approaches.

Unlike many who publish in Philosophy journals (or more accurately those trying to be interdisciplinary between Philosophy and Political Science), game producers see a benefit in being understood and erudition for them is more likely to mean reference to interesting ideas instead of field specific jargon.

One can only look at much of what is considered the "geek" part of American society and sigh at the missed opportunities such people are.

Diversity, We Hardly Knew Ye

One hears much in America and Europe about Diversity. The concept seems to be the assumption that all cultures are inoffensive to each other.

It seems absurd to talk of Diversity as simply the mixing of nice Indian exchange students or Chinese businessmen's sons seeking a career. When talking of a diverse society, people speak of them as ideal and tolerant places. Having lived in a few, my reaction is more skeptical.

This immediately becomes difficult to believe when one observes even just the effect of migrating to the US by Mexicans reared in a different culture. Where back in small villages in Mexico there were social controls on young men and a clear set of expectations and punishments, there are an entirely different set in the US. Young men needing to show that they are men pick up on the old show of force coupled with the urban underclass resentment and disdain for education of both rural Mexico and the underclass culture they are assimilating into.

A lack of education is far less problematic in a rural village and men have always needed to show they are independent. The difference is that a lack of education is a major hindrance to the urbanized and technological society that is the US. The different social evolution of Mexican society had its own means of restraining the violence of young men but the aversion of Americans to use force or to condemn a person disarms them in the face of such aggressiveness. The expectation in Mexican villages is that the larger community will know the troublemakers and being willing to deal with them in various ways. The more anonymous American society is averse to violating a person's privacy in such ways.

Every solution breeds new problems.

This gets to the heart of social evolution as the changes made to accommodate one problem alter the overall situation accentuate features at another part of the society.

Mexican society is the evolution of the myriad ways to deal with certain problems. Just as Russian engineering culture evolved radically differently from American engineering when approaching the same problems, the divergences are due to selecting a different technique to deal with the same problem. No technique or situation is identical and so they bring different effects that create yet more situations to deal with and thus does the circle continue.

When the social evolution of Mexican villages resulted in different attitudes than American social evolution demands. The result is a mutual disdain in some parts, a mutual meeting in others and a whole lot of stress everywhere else. The meeting in some parts is seen in the Mexican men who join the Marines and put their youthful aggressiveness to socially useful purpose. The hostility between Mexican gangs and Black gangs is famous and both attack the societies of each others trying to drive them out. The reason is partly out of hatred and partly out of trying to expand the social environment they can operate in. In other areas more educated Mexicans can use their numbers to invoke White Guilt and to pose as the defenders of the downtrodden poor Mexicans.

The downside of this diversity is that there is an ethnic conflict between poor Mexicans (most Mexicans are poor) and Blacks, there is a large Mexican underclass beholden to Nationalist feelings egged on by richer members of their community hostile to the larger American society. The effect is to create a large and dangerous division between faction of American society.

From Shrinkwrapped:

One of Murphy's laws that is germane to this discussion is that "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw." Simply put, when a system is deeply stressed, any flaws become fault lines. To the extent that we favor a status quo that minimizes individual differences in the interest of a social compact based on designed to provide the illusion of absolute equality, we are setting ourselves up for significant social problems.

Ultimately, when there are different ways of doing something, there needs to be a decision mechanism. If the question is if raped women should be comforted and helped in prosecuting their aggressors or if they should be stoned, a population divided between the two philosophies will not resolve the problem. They will not meet in the middle and say "fine, stone them but stone the rapist too". The two positions are irremediably opposed. If the positions of both philosophies are about equal, there will be a painful stalemate until demographics, conversion, or force resolve the dispute in the favor of one or the other. Diversity is no help if it can lead to an impasse. Diversity helps if it broadens perspective but not towards forcing rival factions.

All would describe Bosnia as Diverse. The mutual hatreds and suspicions entailed orientation towards different communities for protection. While people lived side by side, they also were suspicious of each other and anarchy gave opportunity for people's sadism against the despised other groups. Diverse? Yes. Tolerant? No.

South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation for its many peoples. What is less publicized is the brutal murders of members of different groups. Boers (White South Africans of Dutch heritage who dominated the old government) are subject to numerous murders such as an attack on a supermarket where several children were shot. All White South Africans worry about farm murders and attacks on urban homes. Zulus feel the anarchy in their poor outskirts where it is estimated that 1 in 2 women have been raped. Zulus hate the Shona who dominate the key families on charge of the ANC and who have been the only ones feeding at the political trough of the South African government. Coloreds are derided as white underlings and must show their racial allegiance by condemning Whites. Indians get the worst of it as they are not part of the White social network but are hated for their wealth and productivity. Somali immigrants are murdered by crowds.

South Africa is far from anybody's ideal of tolerance but is a very diverse place.

Washington DC is roughly 1/3 White and 2/3 Black. Neighborhoods are spread in between each other but Whites and Blacks mix very little.

Yugoslavia broke apart for obvious reasons. The once diverse USSR is now the somewhat less diverse Russian Federation and other states. Iraq is contending with its ethnic diversity in other ways.

Another thing to note is that Austria has long been considered a diverse society in contemplating its pre-WWI period. Autria then was a state encompassing Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, parts of Poland, and Transylvania. Sadly, Czechs were insisting on greater political power in Bohemia and the struggles over political power used National identity as a source of support. The effect was to heighten chauvinism. It should be remembered that Hitler was referred by critics as "the Bohemian" (he lived just across the internal border with Bohemia in Austria) as he had imbibed much of the worst of the political culture of Austrian Germans. The result of the struggle to keep Austria together led to a recourse to demonizing a third party (the Jews). Hitler made many claims about Jews dominating the Professions in Germany that were inaccurate as applicable to Germany but were accurate in Austria.

Hitler was as much a product of Diversity as is Tex-Mex fast food.

A few of Murphy's laws might be germain to the conversation.

Nothing is as easy as it looks.

This is applicable in that no culture is the same as its appearance. That Bosnia was a region that had existed for hundreds of years as one region under the rule of other countries did not mean it could remain integrated on its own.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Over time, there will be some idiot who might form any manner of group or movement. The relative proportions may differ but eventually some connection will be made. One does not normally think of Pakistanis and Punks in one sentence but there are Pakistani Punks in Northern England.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

This is quite common as various crises divert attention and resources away from one front to another. This permits activity that had once been suppressed. Serbs wanted to be free from Roman (Byzantine) rule and when Roman forces were diverted in fighting Muslim attacks in the East, the Serbs had the opportunity to defeat the residual Roman forces in the area and become independent. People take crises as opportunities thereby putting much more stress on the system.

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

No individual has a full understanding of a situation and bears into the old aphorism that "none of us are as dumb as all of us" when individual parts of an organization try to to work in different directions. Time will bring up the fact that anything that can go wrong will and there will always be a weakness that is not considered. Few thought that privatizing a large part of the US Army's logistical functions to private contractors would prove so expensive. The idea may have worked in the confined conditions of US bases at home but not when deployed in the middle of fighting in Iraq.

Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure.

This refers back to people having to make hard decisions. When Bosnia was fracturing along ethnic and religious lines, neighbors would face the problem that people they had known for decades would now spit at them and curse at them. The opportunity to achieve their differing goals tore people apart and pressure the various sides applied only made the hatred and violence grow. The habit of Muslim politicians to intimidate suspected recalcitrants made for a painful situations for Serbs in Muslim territory who were now victimized by Muslims seeking to prove their bona fides. The political pressure of having Muslims in Serb territory made Serb leaders decide that mass expulsions were their best option and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from where they had lived for hundreds of years with attendant recruits for the Muslim armies. Pressure from internal and external actors made people more desperate at optimistic in achieving their goals. They hoped to ride out the pressure by even more forceful acts that stimulated more hatred.

The first myth of management is that it exists.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

My response to these two is merged by their commonality in both expression and applicability. It is an error to suppose that politicians know enough to engineer a society. They are frequently average human beings (thus fallible) fulfilling a necessary role that is more to maintain the system than to cope with great stress. Usually, we do not need insightful leaders, just someone to be the ultimate arbiter. That means that while we cannot ignore the occasional burst of insight from a politician, we cannot count on it. They are working within they system they were brought into and frequently operated on the imagined society of their youth or propaganda, not life on the ground. They get ideas but these are frequently selected for their reinforcement of their current conception of life by similarly isolated people.

The Aquinas Axiom:
What the gods get away with, the cows don't.

This refers to the tendency of the rich to share a common culture of wealth. Among expatriates living in Eastern Europe, there is little distinction between American, Australian, Brazilian, Sudanese, Israeli, Pakistani, or Lebanese. They are bonded by their common luxury to a common popular culture oriented away from the concerns of survival that the rest of the population faced.

The wealthy also can afford to live in the fantasy that everybody is the same by virtue of living in segregated neighborhoods. Few places are as stark in this as Washington DC. The division between the White and Black parts of the city are very clear. Black parts rarely had lawns and if they did, any blade of grass would feel lonely. Garbage littered the streets and the signs of people unconcerned with order were evident. The White parts were distinctive by the cleanliness and order but also by their luxury and frequent orientation towards recreation.

As hostile as most of these Whites likely are to segregation, they accepted that Blacks and Whites (usually referred to as Poor by Whites for fear of offending) did not mix well and Public Transit did not reach far into White areas where higher-class commercial services were. A phrase the more polite Blacks used to describe Whites was that they were "not from around here" even if they had lived in the area their entire lives. The racial distinction was politely concealed but that detracted none from the animosity.

Diversity here made a major difference. Blacks had conspiracy theories blaming Whites and sometimes Jews for their troubles. Whites could feel a condescending "compassion" from their large suburban houses out of the way of the many poor Blacks and isolated from them in their everyday lives. Even Apartheid South Africa likely had more interaction in daily life between Whites and Blacks. Whites living in comfort isolated from Blacks could then suppose a number of reasons for Black ills but the distance made accurate assessments near impossible. The anti-intellectual nature of Black leadership and the focus on emotionally absolving oneself from blame are key aspects of the Black culture there. General unwillingness to focus on anything other than entertainment was a major feature among Black children. The effect of this on a society is to produce poor workers who lack the mental focus to rise. The will to rise was also destroyed by the insistence on the impossibility of it.

Were the claims of Racism true? Yes, no one who has seen the unconscious reactions of a White in DC when a Black man approaches him would deny that it existed. The problem is that its effect is assumed to be much larger than it is in impeding individual growth. The mutual suspicion is just another price of Diversity.

With such a upbeat example to end on, lets end on these observations.

O'Toole's Commentary
Murphy was an optimist.

NBC's Addendum to Murphy's Law
You never run out of things that can go wrong.

Our Island History's Home

As one looks at the current state of England, one becomes both amazed and saddened by how such a once proud and stoic country turned into a poor and pale comparison to what it once had been.

The refusal of the British Home Office to permit the entry of Geert Wilders is hardly in the spirit of free and intense debate that once marked the British Parliament from the 1500s onwards. The worry of the official who barred him was that his film contained hate speech against Muslims. I hardly believe quotes of Islamic leaders and from the Koran and Hadith would be hate speech. The problem is instead a moral complacency mixed with cowardice.

The complacency is that there will always be an England recognizable as the one they have known or idealized, the cowardice is that they will not confront Muslim intimidation and even terrorists for fear of the public disruption it would cause.

Such sentiments are hardly new, Churchill confronted them in his day.

The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. But never will you have friendship with the present German Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.

What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure. It is to prevent that that I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence - first, the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly, the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.

We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands with which we shall no doubt be invited to comply. Those demands may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty. I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press, for it will be said - indeed, I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, in part direct but more potently indirect, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1189

The difference here is that unlike the 1930s, very few people today are willing to even think about the threat to the freedoms of people that stems from a totalitarian ideology such as Islam. One factor influencing this is that Westerners are almost exclusively from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Judaism and Christianity are religions of internal moral searching and condemn forced conversion and view such acts as despairing of any moral effect. Islam is vastly different in its focus not on inner spiritual obedience to God but to the submission of all public acts to Allah.

The societies based on the Judeo-Christian concepts of Morality (not as exclusive as the terms implies as almost all other religions agree) are inherently contradictory with those based on Islam. Islamicists recognize this as do some Westerners but States are not run by those people. Western governments are led by a usually incestuous class of leaders, bureaucrats, and journalists with a few public intellectuals to give it a veneer of respectability. Rarely do they look beyond good intentions as a basis for their policy and perceptions.

In this, the state of modern England is far different that in the 40s. Then the cowardice was from explicit self-interest that could be reasoned into fighting for its survival. Now it is a wilful blindness of those who fear excommunication from the society of the Bien Pensants. The social responsibility of the "great" and "good" will now be our suffering and potential ruin.

Churchill was not blind to the dangers of facing Nazi Germany, it is for that reason that his most memorable speech lives down today as the basis for many poorer imitators. He spoke of the situation with honesty and without any expression of false hope. He wrapped the truth of the bleak situation in the honor and glory of those who fight for right in the face of massive odds. And yet he communicated the threat of invasion, urban warfare and all the suffering that entails, as well as a perpetual war fought by the remainder of the British forces for the liberation of their once proud home.



He was a great statesman not only for his perceptions (which are revealed as all the more insightful than previously thought save when dealing with Stalin in personal meetings and with Yugoslavia) but in his ability to rouse people. To paraphrase Jim Hacker, "Sadly, we have no such people now for want of a comprehensive education to make up the wont from the Comprehensive Education."

Efficiently Off Work

As I wait for the inevitable rush to classes and the scramble to get work done afterward, it seems most annoying that people restrict themselves to working on a 0900-1630 schedule. Such a restriction on the end of the working day makes it very difficult to contact someone at work after the immobile parts of your own schedule are accomplished.

Despite that inefficiency, one must learn to bear in mind the inevitable problems that arise. People are not automatons and cannot work for too long before they loose the essential trait of creativity or spoil their personal lives (the motive for working in the first place). Exhaustion takes a great toll on efficiency even in non-physical tasks. Thus in that mindset, I must wait a few more days to get a person on the phone where working hours extended by a simple hour would solve my problem.

In this problem, keeping in mind the larger social limits of work brings cold comfort to my position but at least curiosity is satiated.

I have noticed that some power-mad people tend to have a certain demeanor closely related to nervousness. The ones I have observed also likely correctly perceive a lack of respect for them due to their being stupid, uneducated, or at the bottom of the pecking order. This is probably a product of their self-centeredness of their concerns and their self-identity as powerful in a group.

These people are capable of functioning in organizations at the lowest level but when they gain power, they tend to abuse their subordinates not for their subordinates mistakes but for their own failings as a "pick-me-up". They get annoyed when people don't make mistakes that they can jump on as a justification. The result is never good for organizational cohesion and morale.

It is understanding those who cannot handle power that is one of the more important lessons when coming up from the bottom. The general idea can be grasped with accounts of other people's life under such people but the lessons are far more firmly grasped when you yourself are under their thumb absolutely powerless.

The Drudgery of Art and the Flight of Mathematics

May my team never win a championship!

There is a tendency among academics to deride anything coming from a noted sports university. It has been quipped that it is doubly hard to get an article published if your school has won anything in the college football competitions. This is largely due to the not unreasonable assumption that an institution focused on winning championships will not devote the funds or care and priority to actual research or teaching that is needed to flourish. This is certainly true in some cases where professors have to waste time condoning the antics of stupid athletes allowed in only for their athletics and discarded as useless once they are of no more use in acquiring fame. Certainly they were not there for academics.

The financial drain that is college athletics (ostensibly they are self-supporting but the quality of accounting makes such claims dubious at best and attention is never calculated in any ledgers) puts other priorities such as equipment intensive research in a worse position but more creative fields less reliant on technology can proceed without too much trouble.

One frequently thinks of certain fields as being creative an others as simply needing persistence and discipline. That is true to some extent but in a way that is less likely to be thought of. Mathematics requires considerable persistence and discipline at the beginning but eventually becomes extremely reliant on the imagination of the mathematician to understand the varied relationships. Mathematics beyond the undergraduate level is an essentially creative field to the point where leading mathematicians can no longer do basic arithmetic without thought.

Art is traditionally considered a creative field but artists begin with ideas but then must devote much effort to finding taboos that have not been broken or ideas that have not been expressed and find their opening there. The actual disciplined approach of learning how to draw or use whatever medium is gone. Artists from former Communist countries now find work doing the portraits that American artists can't do as they never learned the technique. Instead of having much to work with allowing their imagination translate unto a medium, artists now have to find a message that is shocking or taboo enough (or incomprehensible enough) presented with the chicanery Barnum would envy. The "creative" process of art is thus turned into a tedious search for the as yet unbroken taboos (an ever diminishing supply) that will not get the artist killed or condemned but praised as a brave spirit among men who have never faced anything more dangerous than a ticket taker.

Creativity resides in different places than imagined and one can only marvel at the evolutions of such "creative" fields that turn them into turgid bastions of ideological rigidity that makes me long for the joys of Zhadnovschina.



Note: I do not really long for Zhdanov's return but art then was a good bit less political than it is here in 2009 and in America.

Watch What You Eat

Someone has remarked that Green parties are as watermelons. Green on the outside but red on the inside. I would note that when they spoil, they go black.

That is to say they become totalitarian not just in the Communist or Marxist sense but also they adopt some racial ideas that would get them labeled as Nazi had they not been members of the Left.

What One Sees

The myths a people tell are of great interest to anyone seeking to understand them. The same can be said of their symbols. Both build on an unspoken set of common ideas and history to give them their emotional power. Few would look in awe at Massadah if one did not understand the degree to which Roman Pagan rule offended the religious ideas of the ancient Jews and the glory attached to those who fight to the death.

The dusty chains of ancient slaving ports off the coast of Africa evoke powerful emotions among most non- African Blacks because it their culture and frequently their ancestors who were brought out of Africa as slaves. It is in that memory of their own slavery that they look upon such chains with horror. It is their interest in their own pasts or memories that drives one perception of History. Surely the slave routes overland were far more horrific than those by sea but so few survived and reproduced after the land treks that no Black culture was formed by them to lament their suffering.

So in seeing the symbol of such maritime shackles, one can see an image of the past and into the preoccupations of a group. The same can be said of Americans in general. The Western movie featuring one lone hero (or more recently the term protagonist removes any concept of the star being a good person) against the forces of either corruption or a staid order. The theme of the individual shaping society and being beyond its reach is a popular one in American culture. The theme of the "hip" young or tough people shaking up a conformist society is one that almost echoes the image of the American revolution fighting the Monarchist order.

While such an image is grossly misrepresentative, there is some justification by such an image for the individualist approach taken by some people. This is rarely if ever a conscious decision or idea but simply one of the many ideas that are beneath conscious thought that yet shape our judgements. Other societies that have less individualist myths tended to celebrate larger groups of protagonists in their myths and films. The complexity of keeping track of all of the characters in Anna Karenina is daunting while the difficulty in doing so for the latest thriller off the airport bookshelves is not even a task.

The focus of many other myths is the community or the group. In Anglo-American tradition, it is usually the individual. This is by no means an absolute standard as there are variations. One sees a definite focus on the individual in the Odyssey by supposedly the same author as the more social Iliad. Blinding the Cyclops thus carries great symbolism to those who know the myth.

It is also easy to take the reading of a mind through symbols too rigidly. Some read into the symbols on US dollar bills signs of a secret conspiracy noting the eye and pyramid. What a better understanding of history would have told them was that the growing popularity of "Ancient" and "Mystical" orders usually only a few decades old flourished who made up their supposedly passed down ancient secrets. The most popular was the Masons.

They made up most most of their symbols and appropriated others from less than classical times. The pyramid with eye was one of the symbols they made up. How did it pass to the US dollar? It comes from the popularity of such societies in both Europe and America among the more radical minded people. Masons in Europe were generally very anti-clerical and the Catholic (and other ) Churches tried to crush the radical organizations. This hostility is one of the key origins of the hostility many people simply inherited towards the Masons. In America, the organizations were lightly less antagonistic towards the Church but they were still the meeting houses of radical social reformers.

Such men are naturally attracted to revolutions and the American revolution was no exception although Masonic lodges were split on the subject. Leading members of the more radical wing of the American Revolution were Masons and they decided to adorn their new country with their symbols. Their influence pretty much stopped there as their other goals were quite overt but opposed by a strong faction of opponents who did not like the socially transformative plans of Jefferson et al.

So in looking at such a symbol of America as its currency, once can take the magnifying glass of history and see the political struggles of so long ago. That streak of radicalism and idealism is not gone from American life. While politics may shift frequently, other cultural ideas are more enduring and so the symbols are still clues the minds of their users.

Grammar and Grimmer

It is perhaps a monument to the evolution of language that a worker at a fastfood restaurant (if it could be considered food or a restaurant) managed to confuse me in asking what I wanted for Breakfast in such a way that it sounded like "rifle". Given the lack of any "ifle" sounds in "Breakfast", that is no mean feat.

I would instead say that it is not a case of favorable evolution of the English language given that the general purpose is to be able to communicate. Some evolution is needed to encapsulate new concepts and simplify the means of transmission. To some extent this can be handled and the new terms and pronunciations assimilated. There however reaches a point where the differences are too great for an ordinary mind and the ability to communicate perishes in a flurry of unknown words.

Over time, languages separate an become new ones. Some look upon this process and see nothing amiss when dialects and variants appear. Admittedly, there is some ability to handle them and languages survive and are sometimes enriched by their dialects. Despite that, the argument that "if the point is understanding, the specifics of spelling and grammar (and to some extent pronunciation) do not matter" is worrying to all but the more complacent.

While languages can survive and others grow and appear, the process is rarely pleasant for those in that process. The suffering of the breakdown of the Roman Empire in the West was softened by educated men knowing Latin and Greek to communicate. In places where such skills were absent, the fall was harsher and the recovery took longer. The eventual growth of Latin into various Latinate languages such as French and Spanish began to divide the educated people from each other. The adoption of national languages instead of Latin did however ease to integration of most common people into civic life whose ignorance of Latin had little impact on their needs.

Languages evolve over time and interaction to the point where one language can split either according to social ties or linguistic ones. These are not always the same as the joys of modern Bosnia show. Serbo-Croatian is/was considered one language with two scripts. Despite some differences between the two, they would have been considered the same had it not been for the recent hostility between the two communities since WWII. Bosniak is now a language supposedly distinct from Croat (they are both written in Latin characters) and are written slightly differently for the sake of differentiation.

The question is if those differences are due to any major differences between the way Muslims (now categorized as Bosniaks) speak or due to dialects that overlap the different groups. Official Bosniak dictionaries contain spelling primarily of one dialect found in parts of Bosnia but is only one of the major dialects in the Former Yugoslavia. One dialect is spoken mainly in what is now Serbia, another in Croatia and southern and eastern parts of Bosnia, and yet another dialect in parts of Bosnia and parts of Serbia. The overlap with the various ethno-religious groups is more scattered than a purely "ethnic" approach would give.

The result is that A Muslim who feels no need to express his identity might speak his dialect and consider it Serbian. Another would speak the same and consider it Bosnian. Yet a third Muslim would speak a different dialect and still consider that Bosnian. The term "language" is thus used where the actual differences are slight.

The more applicable problems ensuing from excessive variety in a language is the near incomprehensibility that one suffers approaching Transylvanian or Swiss German. They are technically considered German but the pronunciation is so distant from most German that in practice Swiss and Transylvanian German speakers have to switch to a more understandable dialect for the sake of a regular German even understanding them.

Slavic eventually was one language and one finds traces of it in the various Slavic languages where there are numerous similarities between Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Ukrainian and Serbo-Croatian (interestingly, Romanian also has many slavic import words and possibly grammar although this is strenuously denied by many). A similar process is taking place in Arabic so that an Arabic speaker from Morocco is essentially incomprehensible for an Iraqi unless a more common dialect is used such as Egyptian Arabic.

The use of Television has substantially eased comprehensibility between dialects either by homogenizing them or by broadcasting both enough that people learn both. One the other hand, the idea that understanding is achieved easily can lead to divergences that begin the process again.

In my view, one can choose a rigorous enforcement of received pronunciation, a rigorous enforcement of spelling, or a clear division between terms. One can still operate with two but not on one. Each then may be considered non-essential and so some conclude that enforcing them is irrelevant given that the common language is usable with just to. The problem is that people cannot decide which two. Many people do not bother with maintaining a common pronunciation having judged already too divergent to enforce or "racist" and oppressive of other cultures using the same language. One cannot then chastise a person for badly mispronouncing "breakfast".

As for spelling, people grow weary of the enforcement of spelling and grammar seeing it as an impediment to quick communication. Misspellings are then seen in messages sent by University professors who see the task of communicating whatever his intent is being unhindered by a need to maintain consistency of spelling. The process simply encourages a division between a formal language and a common language (the lack of which has been one of the more distinctive aspects of English). Already many students have difficulty reading long passages of books using the common terms of a few decades ago and we of today find it requires specialization to read Middle English and Shakespeare's spelling are politely updated for the sake of legibility.

The overlap of terms becomes problematic at points. While this is not the most polite example, it is a very acute one. The term "Ethnic-Cleansing" is frequently used yet rarely defined. Is it, as some use it, mass murder of members of an ethnic group not of a scale to warrant the term genocide and with the intent to intimidate survivors? Is it mass expulsions with the threat of force is people stay? Is it the exclusion from the standard of a society such as the revoking of citizenship? The term has been used in describing the Croatian actions in the Krajina in which people incapable of fleeing were found later with their throats cut even when they were elderly incapable of posing a military or demographic threat to Croatia. Serb mass expulsions of Muslims with the occasional demolition of a house were also called ethnic-cleansing" even when few people actually died. The term has also been applied to the Croatian citizenship laws that revoked Croatian citizenship from non-Croats and thereby made life very difficult for anyone so living in Croatia.



When is the term clarifying? When GEN Rose and several journalists discussed the devastation in Gorazde, they used the term ethnic cleansing. The damaged houses were used by GEN Rose but he used the term with the understanding that it could mean mass murder or intimidation. An article in the Slavic review used the term to describe Croatian citizenship laws. Each use intends to present with clarity but placing each term next to the other does not clarify. Certainly GEN Rose in no way intended to say that the destroyed houses were the result of an administrative process and Mr. Hayden likely did not intend to say that Croatia was destroying Serb houses and killing them in Zagreb (which was taking place but not the consideration of the article). The term is thus too broad to be of use. Instead the terms "mass killings", "intimidation", and "administrative harassment" provide the information and specify what exactly is taking place.

Understanding requires any two of the three but ability to jettison any one inadvertently results in the abandonment of all even if all three are maintained perfectly. All three provide some degree of redundancy that allow some failures in all of the areas but which still allows people to understand each other. In that spirit, I wulod lkie to odrer smoe hsah bonrws peslae.

Understandable? Only if one believes that the mind only pays attention to the first and last letters of a word and one has the patience for anagrams in everyday life.

A Class in Classics

I remember with fondness the learning of the old Greco-Roman myths.

I learned the concept of cauterization of wounds from Hercules fight with the Hydra, whirlpools from Charybdis and Scylla, and the dangers of inspecificity from the tale of King Midas. Such little lessons are the congealed ideas of a long ago time who bring to the modern mind enjoyable settings to timeless lessons.

As I grew, my childhood schooling was far too fragmented to get a classical education (even had the US or French systems even offered them) and that is something I have ever since attempted to remedy. Sadly, little can make up for the lack of learning Thucydides at an early age or Herodotus slightly later. They are enjoyable authors but the rush of life once one has left secondary does not allow much for anything other than work related or pure entertainment in reading.

In all things there will be regret for that which was not done but this is one of the greater sadnesses of my life.

The Book Less Seen

One frequently hears the injunction not to judge a book by its cover. Nonetheless, when handling actual books, used bookstore owners frequently do so. The whole romance novel genre has a tendency towards certain types of images on covers and the size and format is what gave rise to the term "pulp fiction".

Thus it is understandable how The Road Less Traveled: A new Psychology of Love (a book on psychology) was stacked with western romance novels in a bookstore in Bucharest, Romania. He likely had no training in Psychology other than that obtained by seeing people every day and the cover depicted a rose. Such covers generally are romance novels in the Western press hence the placement with other such novels.

While their may be depths unseen in an unostentatious cover, frequently the cover actual serves a similar function to the title in that it conditions the expectations of the reader. Few would pick up a copy of a historical work on the Gulags if the cover depicted Mikey Mouse. The actual practice of life is such that people need to simplify and generalize to acheive a moderate efficiency and comfort. Using covers as yet another means of classifying books uses visible traits to correlate with less visible ones (the genre) serves to make the life of the bookstore owner easier.

Thus in that vein, we may judge a book by its cover but be aware that the cover itself says little.

Historical Alzheimers

First of all, a joyous Christmas.

I am routinely amazed and irritated by the supposed "best and brightest" of Western society. This is not so much the semi-aristocratic divisions they make but the degree of culture and competence of those making the distinctions.

One easily gets fed up with entire fields when respected people in them make very simple mistakes. James Barber wrote a book in which one example was the refusal of Herbert Hoover to institute welfare policies. This is galling as economic historians have seen that he did institute several such policies as well as those favoring unions and the like. The historians in favor of such policies praise him for his foresight and those opposed revile him for bringing on or aggravating the Great Depression. The only place where one finds the claim that Hoover did not intervene in the economy is in the electoral propaganda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who tried to present himself as a radical transformer of the economy and society compared to Hoover.

This was not hard to find but nonetheless the claim remains in the most recent version of his textbook that has for many decades been taught in University classes. The simplicity of such a mistake indicates a failure to research properly. Sadly, this is not the only case. In studies of international relations, long papers have been written about the impact of air power on diplomacy but then fail to note major land offensives. A little common sense and memory would have avoided such blunders but they are made by "respected" people who are not questioned on what contradicts common sense and precedent.

I certainly believe that some division between the cultured and educated compared to the less civilized. The cultured core can exert its influence and guide a society and preserve the norms, direction, and preserve ideas and learning beyond daily stresses and collapses. Nonetheless, as education means less and less in the West, the ability to assess such a privileged position is oriented not around contribution to society but around alternatively wealth or ideological objectives.

Gone are the days when a student was expected to learn the classics, the great wars of the Greeks, Romans, and others. Through such studies, an understanding of a complex situation with real human actors and intents is formed. Now, the recipe approach to History results in such normal and human interactions being reduced to a simple formula that almost never captures even the basic situation. The quality of modern Western political discourse when invoking History gives the same effect as seeing The Merchant of Venice reduced to an episode of the Simpsons (worse exists but I have never watched such shows hence the lack of a more apt comparison) with the vocabulary of supposedly educated men being reduced to what most children surpass in primary school.

There are several factors that I can find for now.
The lack of memory is a crippling problem in any analysis. One may compare a situation to WWII. Many people resort to a Munich Analogy but the validity of a comparison also depends on the similarities between the situation and WWII. One notorious example is many describing the 1991-1995 Bosnian war as a relapse of WWII. That is not far from the truth. The suspicions and goals of all three groups evolved primarily from WWII and all three sides invoked images and ideas from WWII in bother their domestic and international propaganda (often taking place in Bosnia but aimed at foreigners). The problem was that the lack of memory (ie. remembering that Croats and Muslims hade predominatly been allied to Nazi Germany and commited a very entheusiastic genocide against Serbs and Jews) meant that the similarities blamed Serbs for being supposedly the revival of Naziism wheras others with a longer attention span remembered the dubiousness of certain claims.

If you cannot remember data, your theories may be perfect but your result will be wrong due to insufficient or false input. Nonetheless, the whole cult of "self-development" and modernism scorn memory. This is also applicable in the small scale. I learned the Pi number at the behest of my father and since first grade have been noted for a good memory and making connections otherwise impossible without a better grasp of multiple things at once. LTGEN Ion Mircea Pacepa was taught to memorize the phone book and as a result could recal events from years ago providing him with valuable information much more easily.

Such a poor memory results in a strengthening of the bias in favor of immediate circomstances. If one has barely learned of the Punic Wars or of Celtic human sacrifice, it is much harder to formulate arguements against Neo-Paganism when they claim Paganism was kinder than Judaism or Christianity. In many cases, people simple buckle out of a lack of information leading to an inability to formulate an arguement.

The blind narcissism is the worst aspect. The human mind naturally endeavors to protect its ego and so subtly misinterpets things in its favor. The direct approach of building self-esteem has resulted in a habit of approaching History as a cookbook (why do I need to study it?) or as a morality play in which they are the hero (the habit of fighting WWII over again in completely unrelated circomstances) and as a result, such things badly distort History. The cult for understanding can also be subborned into "understanding" such peoples as the Indian allies of France in their wars against the British. Such studies simply are sympathetic portrayals that try to hide the massacres such allies commited against British settlers in an attempt to create an image of the author rising above the conflicts of the past. The result is instead a different kind of distortion but even less respectful of the people of the time.

In short, I hate the idiots of the Western intellegentsia. At least the function as a repositiory of ideas is still handled by the status of those who protect such ideas is in the isolated counter-establishment.