Only the Monarch Knows

“Spring must not be permitted to arrive without notice”—to echo what I said in 2013. Every year this day gives me occasion to try understand again why our tilted axis causes the lengthening and shortening of days—and the two midpoints of this recurring cycle produce equal nights and days. On this day also, without fail, I wonder how, under current theories of planetary formation, we explain why our axial tilt exists at all. We watched a good documentary yesterday on Nova titled “The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies,” read Monarchs. Their navigational abilities are still not understood and never may be. Two great puzzles in succeeding days. What bumped the earth in some long night millions of years ago to make it tilt in its rotation?

Nigeria’s North-South Divide

This is the second post on Boko Haram; the first is here.

The seventh largest country in the world is Nigeria, with 183.5 million people. That is not a secret, of course, but not exactly the impression one has from news reports—especially when the issue triggering coverage is a renegade band of terrorist insurgents, like Boko Haram. Appropriate images for that context in the media are desert landscapes or tribal people in traditional dress. (An analogous pictorial representation of the United States would be to show pictures of Navajo festivals in Arizona.) Here we’re likely to see men in robes drumming or landscapes—like the following photo; it shows the north-east of Nigeria where Boko Haram originated…

…rather than cityscapes like the second image, which shows Lagos, a city of 17.5 million people, located kitty-corner, you might say, from Boko Haram, thus in the extreme south east corner of the country.

To give that huge population some dimension, I repeat, from the last post, that Nigeria is only about a third larger than Texas. Its population per square mile is 515, that of Texas 100 (the United States has 91 people per square mile).

The country—measured in area—is roughly split in half between a more or less secularized southern and a predominantly Muslim northern half. The two major parties of the country, however, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP, with its base in the south) and the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC, with its base in the north) both hold secularist ideologies. PDP is the dominant party; it has won every presidential election and therefore rules the country. The two maps above tell the story; the first shows areas where Sharia law is being actively followed; the second shows areas controlled by the PDP (which has ruled the country under democratic arrangements since 1999, and its opposition, the CPC. The Islamic culture, with a decided disinclination to participate in democracy, has no meaningful representation at all. Yet all the news that really reaches us here is focused on a tiny third element, Boko Haram. Tiny? Yes. Its core is a mere 10,000 people. They are attempting to implement the Islamic conception of politics, thus central religious rule from the top by a caliphate. 

The time-line that I show here, extending from Nigeria’s independence to the current time, illustrates how the Muslim insurgency arose just three years after a difficult time of succeeding military dictatorships and civil conflicts—thus as soon as a Western type democracy began to take hold. Great powers participated in the Civil War, with Britain and the Soviet Union backing the Nigerians, France aiding the Biafran regime.

That regime, shown to the left, lasted a mere three years, but while it existed it occupied almost exactly the same territory as Nigeria’s earliest-known kingdom, the Kingdom of Nri, founded in 1000 AD. The area of Biafra corresponds in our time with the oil-rich region of the Niger river’s delta.

Soon after 1999—and Nigeria’s embrace of western-style democracy—a northern Sunni fundamentalist and preacher, Mohammed Yusuf, founded Boko Haram in 2002. His aim was to impose Sharia law over the entire region, including but not limited to Nigeria. He lasted seven years and was then arrested and killed. His deputy, one Abubaka Shekau took over and continues in his place, as best we know, although reports of his death keep surfacing in Nigeria at intervals. Most of Boko Haram’s more major activities have been largely confined to the Borno State at the tip of Nigeria’s north-east corner.
----------------
Image credits:

Borno landscape: Wikipedia, "Boko Haram" (link).
Lagos: Wikipedia, "Lagos" (link).
Political Map: Nigerian Muse (link).
Map of Sharia Law: Wikipedia, "Boko Haram" (link).
Biafra: Wikipedia, "Nigeria" (link).

Dipping a Toe into Lake Chad

A thought I’ve had over the years is that today—and presumably fated to last for a few centuries more—a process will be unfolding right under our eyes much resembling what “went down” in Europe during the last centuries of Roman rule and continued long thereafter. That process is the transformation of Africa.

A current phenomenon that can lend some anchorage for investigating how good that thought of mine may be are the troubles assigned these days to the Boko Haram insurgency in and around Nigeria. Even a cursory look immediately reveals an extraordinary complexity not made even faintly visible by current news coverage. If I take myself as an ordinary modern, I know virtually nothing about Nigeria, never mind the regions immediately touching Lake Chad on its eastern edge—which is the current center of the insurgency; in fact today is the first I’ve ever even heard of Lake Chad. To correct that I present a map of Nigeria and point to the upper right corner where Lake Chad colors the screen blue. As you can see, a part of the lake is in Nigeria, specifically in the Borno region which has its capital in Maiduguri.

The entire northern territory of Nigeria, reaching down to below where the name of the country is actually printed, is populated by Islamics. They constitute just a shade over 50 percent of total Nigerian population; Christians are 48 percent, the rest adhere to what we might call pagan-style beliefs.

The first kingdom known to history in this territory, named after the Niger River (see inset), was the Kingdom of Nri, located just to the east of the Niger’s delta. It was founded by the Igbo people who, today, represent the second largest ethnic grouping in the country. The year was 1000. At is farthest extension north, the kingdom reached to about Enugu, thus a small part of today’s Nigeria. A century later the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which became Islamic around 1068, covered large parts of Chad and part of today’s Nigeria; the Nigerian portion corresponded directly with the Borno region—and the Islamic influence expanded from there west and to the south—but not very much south.

Those earliest developments in effect set up the conflict which today’s events still echo as the conflict between Boko Haram and the Nigerian central government. There has always been a north-south tension within this realm, the North always more populous and poorer, the south always richer.

To underline the complexity here, be it noted that Nigeria has 250 ethnic groupings—the largest of which are the Yoruba (west), the Igbo (east), and the Hausa (northern Islamics). These and other groupings speak 512 different languages—and it is therefore not surprising that English is the country’s official language. English. Not French. And that is because Nigeria figures in colonial history as first governed by the Royal Niger Company (1886), then by the British Government (1900), and finally—until the United Kingdom granted the country its independence in 1960—becoming in 1901 a British Protectorate and thus joining the British Empire.

I began by referring to the Roman Empire—the fall of which then set in motion a vast Medieval process of nation building, also building nations out of countless tribes and ethnicities, all of which strenuously fought the process. The role of the Romans in today’s process was played by the British Empire. After it withdrew in 1960, the process began in earnest. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Boko Haram, the name of the insurgency, translates as Forbidden Teaching (haram being forbidden, boko meaning culture, teaching, heritage—the word thought by some to have been derived from the English word “book”). Here we have a situation of a younger culture actively resisting the decadent overhang of an older one—while pursuing with the brutal energy of youth something of a biological imperative to multiply and to cover the earth.

For those who like to have some size comparisons, Nigeria (with 366,000 square miles) is significantly larger, but in the same ballpark, as Texas (with 269,000). Lake Chad (with 521 square miles of area) is greater than Lake Saint Clair in Michigan (430) and smaller than Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana (with 631 square miles).

This, so far, a small toe dipped into Lake Chad. I may return to enlarge upon this at a future time.

Policing Yard and Drive

The activity I’m about to describe is familiar to all viewers of mystery series. The viewer will see a long line of policemen moving across a landscape side by side and poking the ground with sticks or clubs for clues. In those mysteries this seemingly happens instantly—as soon as some vital thing (like the murder-weapon or a lost child) needs to be found. I often marvel at the power of the Hero Detective who can summon up such masses of uniforms just minutes (seemingly) after the need arises.

In the Army they used to call this “policing.” We were marched out and made to move across open terrain every other morning or so—the object being to pick up litter. The word, of course, goes back to the Latin politia, civil administration—and its deepest root is the Greek polis, or city—a place where massed humans make a mess. Indeed “police” is powerfully associated with order, keeping and restoring it.

This is the nasty season hereabouts—and policing is in order. The snow has almost entirely disappeared and revealed the junk, branches, and litter it had covered over. My own policing was of the solitary kind, just one old man picking up branches and the occasional littered package or candy wrapper the wind had blown on the yard. Done quite voluntarily—without the usual grumbling that accompanied policing in the Army. All in the name of order. I wonder if they still do it in the Army—the same way we used to do it. Is it a fit activity for “warriors”? We were just soldiers in my day—with every fit male subject to service. In what now seems ancient times, soldiers were called even more carelessly GIs, an acronym for “general issue.” Not bad for people who won a world war. Back then you could herd them out there. These days that “policing” may well be hired out to companies, some even listed on the NY Stock exchange.

It looks a little better out there; and with Spring just four days away, it already feels like Spring, but the smell is not yet here.

Ambiguous Independence

While I am on March 15—and gauging how time has changed (see last post)—I might note that today is Hungary’s Independence day, originally marked in 1848. As a little boy in Hungary, that day left a very big impression on me—of the full-chested, patriotic sort. The 1848 Revolution had thrown off the Hapsburg rule, but I was living under a Regent then who, at least symbolically, represented a royalty somewhere. That Independence only lasted for a year—put down with Russian help—so that Emperor Franz Joseph I was back in power in 1849. But we weren’t informed of such fine details in grade school. Still, to this day, no March 15th ever passes without memories of those emotions of collective unity, whether real or imagined. I also remember my trip to Europe as a young American soldier which took place in 1956—right in the middle of the second Hungarian revolution, also put down by Russian forces. The feelings relate to an ideal world never actually discoverable under our actual skies. The contrast is known as growing up.

The Assets: Cancelled As Soon as Shown

We are watching The Assets, described as a period drama, thus the dramatization of a real event, the CIA’s identification and arrest of Aldrich Ames as a CIA mole in 1994. This is a superbly made series, available from Netflix, originally shown by ABC in 2014. It has a kind of paradoxical feel to it because the Cold War had as good as ended, ended for a time, at least, and another major thing, the War on Terror was about to launch. Yet in the bowels of the intelligence services, people were obsessedly engaged in doing what John le Carré had first unveiled.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Assets—as a marker of how time has changed—is that  ABC cancelled the series abruptly. Its pilot episode had the lowest ever viewership in the 18-49 demographic among the big three networks. A death sentence. Too sophisticated, too complicated. All that stuff, you know… Yesterday.

It's Pi-Day!

This being year 15 in the Twenty-First Century, most of us in the general public became aware today, for the first time ever, that based on a tradition inaugurated by the San Francisco Exploratorium, a museum, in 1988, there is such a thing as Pi-Day every March 14th. That is because that famous number, begins 3.14159926…. This year only, the number of the year itself, ignoring those thousands, is an echo of π.

This led me ponder how π came to be discovered. I opened my Excel and started to play with ratios. To the toying mind, the ratio is relatively easily discovered. If you already know the circumference of a circle and its diameter, dividing the first by the last produces that magic number. Back before such wonders as Excel, the early geometer could use string and two sticks to draw a pretty good circle in sand—and then use more string to measure circumference and the diameter. Matching those strings will yield π more or less—in round numbers 3—but the circumference string will be ever-so-slightly longer. Early on the ratio calculated was 22/7th, which yield 3.1428… These days we know π out to 13.3 trillion digits—but using 3 or 22/7 will get there for pie-baking purposes. If we have a diameter or 4 inches, the formula

     Circumference = π * d

will yield 12.566 inches. If we substitute plain 3, the result will be 12 inches; if we use 22/7, the result will be 12.571 inches.

The value of π, however, was in calculating the actual Area of the circle. This was initially done by overlaying a circle with a polygon—from squares to up to 96-sided figures (Archimedes) and then calculating the area by calculating the area of the polygon—which is at least straight-forward. Eventually, by examining results so discovered, not least the ratio of those areas to the radius of the circle, yielded the understanding that if the area is divided by radius squared, we get the same number as we get by dividing the circumference by the diameter. Therefore the formula for the Area is….

     Area = π * r²

Worth noting here is that π required measurement before it came to be revealed. Circumference was easy, but area required major efforts to approximate the circle with shapes that have definitely measurable angles—as shown in the graphic from Wikipedia (link):

Herewith, finally, some ratios of a circle’s measurements just for the fun of it.

				Some Ratios
r	d	C	A	C/(r+d)	A/((r+d)/2)	C/r	C/d	A/r		A/d		A/r^2
1	2	6.283	3.142	2.1	2.1	6.283	3.141593	3.142		1.571		3.141593
2	4	12.566	12.566	2.1	4.2	6.283	3.141593	6.283		3.142		3.141593
3	6	18.850	28.274	2.1	6.3	6.283	3.141593	9.425		4.712		3.141593
4	8	25.133	50.265	2.1	8.4	6.283	3.141593	12.566		6.283		3.141593
5	10	31.416	78.540	2.1	10.5	6.283	3.141593	15.708		7.854		3.141593
6	12	37.699	113.097	2.1	12.6	6.283	3.141593	18.850		9.425		3.141593
Formulas:					Symbols:
Circumference = pi * d					r = radius		C = Circumference
Area =  pi * (r*r)					d = diameter		A = Area

Much fun in an entirely open-ended way—to play with these ratios. That the numbers don’t come out clean, and that even after trillions of digits π does not yield a repeating series of decimals, makes me think of God’s sense of humor.

Happy Anniversary

Two years ago today White Smoke rose from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel (link here). One person’s Friday the Thirteenth today is another’s occasion to celebrate the second anniversary of Pope Francis’ assumption of the papacy. I note here also how the days of the week wander as time moves relentlessly on. Two years ago this day was Wednesday. Next year it will be Sunday—what with the leap year inserting a day and leaping over the Saturday that waits in vain. Saturday will have its chance eventually—but not until 2021, the eighth anniversary of Francis’ papacy, if he lives that long (namely 85). What does one say on such days? Many happy returns?

The Office and the Holder

If I respect the office, can I then engage in blatant disrespect for the person who holds it? In actual practice, doesn’t one behavior very rapidly bleed into the other? Suppose we take this relationship—office and holder—and apply it lower down in the ranks of the world. When I was in the U.S. Army, it was certainly quite impossible to salute the commanding generally while standing at attention while loudly muttering “here goes an idiot with stars.”

I’m far from the only one who has noted that opponents of President Obama feel entitled to treat him with visible contempt, ascribed to his person, while nominally respecting the office. See, for instance, this February 25 column in the Daily Princetonian whose author, Ryan Dukeman, dates this behavior as beginning with Obama’s swearing in ceremony (link).

In actual practice open disrespect (however hedged in by phony distinctions between office and holder) brings in its train the cheapening and discount of authority—not least of the authority of that empty office too. This occurred to me when reading about the racist video made public by some members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at University of Oklahoma in Norman. ΣΑΕ was founded in 1856; its creed, entitled The True Gentleman, can be read here.

I learned from Arnold Toynbee early in life that culture is shaped by elites—and the great majority follow this lead by imitation—mimesis, in Toynbee’s words. What our elites do will, in due time, be echoed by the population as a whole. To be sure, minorities will be disgusted, will refuse to imitate, and in this process begin to form future elites. So there is always hope in the long run. As for today, I cannot help but feel that the attacks on Obama, in the name of political ideology, are heavily colored by racial bias—however outrageous that sounds in an age that believes in inevitable progress.

Fashions in Words

A discussion on spontaneity had me asserting that what the word had once meant in popular speech say in the time of World War II—namely untaught, natural behavior—has had an odd lift in the Age of the Media to mean something more. The word derives from the Latin sponte, of one’s accord, willingly. The new meaning carries the flavor as of a characteristic which rises above the behavior of ordinary humans. To make this point, I also tried to find a word that has lost rank in popular usage. Neurotic came to mind. It seemed to me that it had been on everybody’s lips in the 1950s. The word shrink arose in this context. I headed off to look at these words and Brigitte wanted me to look up shrink as well. Her feeling is that it has also lost status.

Google Ngrams to the rescue. Herewith the contrast between “spontaneous” and “deliberate”:

Spontaneous has certainly had a quite marked rise beginning circa 1925. The word peaked in 1982 but is still beating Deliberate in 2000. Deliberate, meanwhile, was at essentially the same level of usage as in 1800.

In the next one I contrast “neurotic” and “psychotic”:

My gut feel turns out to be right. Neurotic made a mountain that peaked in 1952—and its been downhill since. I used Psychotic as the contrast, which began rising later, peaked in 1972, and is now used somewhat more frequently than neurotic. Perhaps things are getting worse.

Shrink comes from head-shrinker, slang for psychiatrist. Plotting its use using Ngram is not much use because the short version can mean anything from physically shrinking something or the slang phrase, which may not be much used in written documents. Since 1940, however, that word has lost about 7 percent of its usage, so Brigitte’s feel is also justified.

Don’t Mess With Tradition

The U.S. Constitution is, surely, a well-known document across the world and, surely, there is a translation of it into Persian. No doubt that the powers-that-be in Iran fully understand what our President’s treaty-making powers are and, also, the extent to which they are hedged in. Those powers are put into this sentence (Article II, Section 2): [The President] “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided that two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

Well, evidently 47 Republican Senators here don’t believe Iran is fully in the picture. They have written an “open letter” to “the Leaders of the Islamic Republic,” which begins thus:

It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system.

The genius behind this letter is one Tom Cotton (R-AR), a junior senator. Its significance is that it represents an unprecedented action by a nominally conservative group in Congress to engage in foreign affairs directly—which is clearly what this letter (link) is trying to do.

I was still a young man in the Army when I learned (taking college courses on the side from a University of Maryland extension operating in Baumholder, Germany) that political designations can and do lose their meaning over time—thus that “liberal,” once heavily Tory, you might say, can come to mean something way-way to the Whig.

My own bible on what conservative means is Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Early in that book Kirk places six canons of conservative thought. The sixth one states:

Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Later in the book, Kirk develops the meaning of Providence (properly with a leading cap) to mean respect for tradition which, in his view, is an imperfect but largely reliable structure that captures the higher intentions Providence implies. Now it is clearly a rather “hasty innovation” to produce the impression that Congress is an active participant in treaty negotiations—and that, in treaty negotiations a sovereign entity, like the United States of America, can and should present contrary positions to the negotiating partner, as in speaking out of both sides of the mouth.

A mere 21 years have passed since Russell Kirk died in 1994—and already one is mentally tempted to rewrite the title of his book (looking at today’s conservatives) as The Conservative Mindless. Not Kirk’s fault. Indeed he foresaw that “hasty innovation” can turn into “a devouring conflagration.” And one of those conflagrations, sooner or later, will produce the Man on Horseback chasing the Tom Cottons of this world into hiding—and even that horse is not too far away as the oil runs out.

Existential and Spiritual Judgement

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little….

In recent books on logic, the distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgement or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werturteil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgement. Neither judgement can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.

     [William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1]

I read this paragraph the first time ever on my first day in college—while waiting for the opening ceremony of our Freshman year to begin. I understood it, no doubt about it, but not the way I do now. Here is the methodological answer to many puzzles that involve matter and mind, body and soul, and so on. There is experience, and who can deny it. Then there is a judgement made of its meaning. And the “examined life” is a fusion of these two.

Locating Identity

One of my personal Eureka moments came many years ago when I discovered the mitochondria, the tiny structures that produce the energy used within our cells. Mitochondria have DNA of their own—separate from the DNA in each cell’s nucleus. In humans, and most other species that have mitochondria, these structures are passed on to offspring exclusively from the mother. Hence, tracking mitochondrial DNA, we can search ever backward in time tracing the maternal line. We haven’t found Eve yet, but it may be possible. Adam is quite untraceable.

This came to mind yesterday when I read about claims (still not fully accepted) that the caterpillar and the butterfly that it becomes may be of two different species that once joined forces for a kind of biological tour de force. My mitochondrial encounter years ago suggested to me that bodies are chemical civilizations—imperfectly uniting quite diverse strands of living things—and indeed coexisting only because they are a kind of community of separates rather than a seamless whole. Humans can only digest, for instance—and therefore live—because we host a diverse community of bacteria.

Our bodies, of course, do not remain the same even from day to day. Yesterday we retrieved all or most of our photo albums. Some of them have photos that go back to the nineteenth century. Pictures of ourselves show the enormous changes that have taken place in our own bodies—which in turn, all these impressions, shaken well in a blender, made me wonder what identity means—and how it might be located.

Amusingly that word, identity, derives from the Latin phrase idem et idem, best translated into our own “same-old, same-old.” Thus identity is sameness. But in the physical world nothing is ever, strictly speaking, the same—not even that hard, attractive spoon I use to stir the coffee which, by chance, we “abstracted” from a house we rented in Florida three years ago. Even that spoon has lost some mass in the meantime.

If we cling strictly to a materialistic explanation of identity, it turns out that the best explanation for identity is statistical. I am statistically much the same today as yesterday, and never mind the 50 to 70 billion cells that died since 10:23 yesterday, which—thanks to Summer Time’s arrival (even time changes)—is 11:23 today.

Approximation must suffice to locate identity in time and space; to locate it absolutely we must leave the reservation and, having reread Plato’s Phaedo, we must start to feel familiar with the concept that the human self is immaterial and indestructible; its relationship to DNA, cellular or mitochondrial, is rather loose and tentative. Which suggests the happy thought that when our next caterpillar breaks is chrysalis and emerges as a butterfly, a single gorgeous soul will flutter away even if generated by two species in cooperation.

The Caterpillar-Butterfly Problem

We spent part of the afternoon reading about the mind-body problem (in Times Literary Supplement, “Consciousness myth,” Galen Strawsom, link). This afternoon I came across another rather interesting problem—a kind of radical dualism between the caterpillar and the butterfly. A quite excellent outline of this issues is presented on the blog Gypsy Scholar here. What with our own extensive relations to both, caterpillars and butterflies, at least a reference to this matter is appropriate here—especially with snow inches deep on the dormant grass.

Mirth and Seriousness

The pleasure of reading the Father Brown stories arises because they combine two inner qualities that make life worth living no matter what is “going down.” (Odd to think that things are always “going down” and never “going up” unless what’s going up are rockets.) Based on my authoritative The Complete Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton wrote 51 of these. Alas I’m now reading number 49, and therefore, for a while, I’ll be done with them. I’ve been at this now since last July when I discovered the volume in an old box in the attic; it had last been open during our previous move; that move “went down” in 1989.

Now the two qualities that makes me turn to Father Brown are seriousness combined with sense of humor. And these two qualities, when possessed and cultivated, make life worth living because seriousness requires a rational view of reality and a sense of humor lifts us above it into another region then the one where we’re obliged to live. That last is surely very true; yet it is almost blasphemous that in the endless tomes of humanity’s theologies I’ve never yet seen reference to God’s sense of humor—although it’s everywhere on display.

No matter what happened during the day, no matter the news—which tends to be deadly seriousness about things so trivial (like Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server) as to be comical—no matter how ill-wrought a seemingly promising new “series” on TV turns out; no matter the weather forecast, it has been a great pleasure and relief to make for bed with the last thing before sleep takes me away being one of the truly astonishing “mysteries” our friend in clerical garb, with his careworn umbrella, will solve somehow while never relinquishing even an ounce of his humility.

Sparrow in Flight

To those challenged by lack of patience we recommend hanging a bird-feeder. Ours made it out there, visible from the dining room, thanks to John Magee’s height and dedication to help feed the avian population during hard times. We’ve learned that by the time you get the camera, the bird sitting on ours will have flown away. To be sure, the first birds that found us were chickadees. They come swiftly, take a seed, and are then immediately back on the big bush to eat it. We decided to be patient. One of these days. Our camera is parked on the dining room table. In due course came cardinals, first the female, then her mate. Then sparrows in numbers. They are quite contentious. Finally even mourning doves showed up; they found that they were too big to eat comfortably at our restaurant, but the sparrows spill seed carelessly enough so the doves too have managed to get some food from the snow below.

The current picture, captured by Brigitte, is thus far the winner for March. It actually captures a sparrow in flight—and two others already feeding. A close look at the photo shows the flyer’s wings, moving to become almost invisible. They are really moving to become even barely perceptible.

Indeed, we didn’t even discover the flying sparrow until I’d put the photo on the machine and cropped it to enlarge the relevant display.

The image of the Chickadee comes from Wikipedia (link). The light conditions, and our little camera, are not up to taking so sharp an image, although we have one or two showing tail feathers and chickadees resting on the bush (the name of which eventually, after I learn it). At this time of year, we get busy preparing for Spring. A rather attractive humming bird bar, a Christmas present, is awaiting to be hung. And on our recent visit to English Gardens we at least fingered a package that promises to draw, with its content, both humming birds and butterflies. We shall see...

Game of Drones

I owe that title to a headline in our local version of the Erickson Tribune. Sometimes you see a headline that produces literal envy. I wish I’d thought of that! That article tells the story of drones, as it were, replacing the milkman and the UPS/FedEx delivery truck. My subject is the word’s etymology. We’re having another word-centered morning. The word that set us off on that, however, goes back into the past—and the origin of drone sort of capped our morning’s “round” (in the musical sense). Percept began, precept followed, and we ended on drone.

Percept surfaced late last night as Brigitte read an article titled Philosophy of Nature published by International Catholic University (link)—an odd word when stared at. We know it all too well in its verbal form, perception, but its noun form, meaning “a (thing) taken (in),” but with emphasis on that unsounded thing, is almost never used except in such philosophical context as in the referenced paper above. Per in this concept means “thoroughly” the cept comes from the Latin capere, “to take, to grasp.” 

In precept the pre comes from prae, meaning “before”; the cept is once more “grasp.” Thus “that which comes before,” presumably, we’re properly capable of grasping something. The word means a maxim, rule, an order, or instruction. Percept is solidly objective; precept is a quite immaterial “rule” or “guidance.” The preceptor, therefore, is a teacher or a guide.

Now for that famous drone. I have what follows from English Language & Usage (here). Evidently the drone has quite a history already; it’s actually older than I am. It originated in 1935 when the British Royal Navy demonstrated a remote-controlled aircraft in target practice. That plane was called DH 82B Queen Bee. A U.S. admiral attending that demonstration, one William H. Standley, returned home and there asked Commander Delmer Fahrney to develop something analogous for the U.S. Navy. It was Fahrney who originated the word by naming such flyers drones “in homage to the Queen Bee.”

By the time of World War II, two kinds of drones had been fashioned and were being tested: target drones to be destroyed and assault drones to do the attacking. In the dim future lay the drone that accidentally landed on the White House lawn and in the immediate future will deliver the papers—once targeting has been tuned up a little more.

Incidentally, George R.R. Martin, the man whose novels gave birth to Game of Thrones, was a man I’d known slightly in my science fiction days. Once, while assembling an anthology of stories, he included one of my novellas in his collection. I still glow faintly from that close contact with future celebrity.

That’s the Wrong God, Abu Bakr

The current “take” on ISIS (the would-be Caliphate), is that ISIS has been seriously degraded, but that much work remains to be done. Most of that “work” is simply to enable the world to focus appropriate power to deal with this instance of public madness. Yes. That a reportedly tiny armed force, 30,000 people, could have caused so much havoc is indeed rather surprising. It illustrates the very degraded state of the military in the states of Iraq and Syria—but it is even more remarkable that a mere 43-year old Syrian, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, thought that he actually could form a caliphate and that such a venture could possibly succeed. So what’s the explanation of this phenomenon?

I think it rests on a belief—namely that God is actively engaged in this world and on behalf of various chosen people. And because God is God, those who hold this belief can sincerely attempt the quite impossible. They have nothing else to support their aims. To some significant degree, the belief also rests on quite deep ignorance, either actual or stubborn. At this stage in history, modernism is still very powerful and quite able, in due time, after it has managed to overcome its multiple distractions, to focus just a small amount of its available power on these fanatics. And then they will turn into history—and be rapidly forgotten.

It is reassuring to have recorded in the Christian tradition—which, alas, also features in its past a belief in a God who intervened and “chose” a people—some quite clear indicators that such a view is faulty. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Christ in John 18:36.  Then there is “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” Matthew 22:21.

First comes the worship of the tribe, then the worship of God. Endless problems have arisen from failure to grasp the distinction between these two kinds of worship.

Pick Your Operation

Does something like a TV remote fall into the “simple” category—or is it merely yet another instance of massive complexity miniaturized? More like the latter. Ours has to talk to our AT&T cable box yet in such a way that it also talks to our Sony TV. Three remotes live in reasonable harmony together in our living room. The Sony’s own, used sometimes to switch between Cable and DVD, AT&T’s to open up our Eye-on-the-World, and one for our Blu-Ray DVD which also doubles as a channel so that we can watch streamed movies. Sometimes, however, confusions arise. When that happens late at night, help must come from yet another look-alike, our Uniden telephone. It looks like a remote but uses AT&T’s telephone line to connect me with Tech Support in some such place as Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, where I can discover why it is that my AT&T-remote no longer works. Now the time-difference between here and Mumbai is such that at 1 am it is 11:30 am there. The distance is some 7,920 miles. Yet I have to cross that distance “virtually” to learn that to restore my baffled sanity, I need to press the ATT button on my remote (like two inches away) so that I can restore that remote’s functionality again. That simple? That simple. Suddenly everything is Okay again.

I hope I never become a nonagenarian. Then I might have problems with my live-in robotic surgeon the size of a small vacuum cleaner but with multiple extensible thin arms. The call to Mumbai ensues. “I have a terrible pain in my side, down toward the groin. I fired up the Robo-Doc and he wants me to pick from a menu. So far so good. But now that he’s diagnosed appendicitis, he insists that I press Ctrl-Alt-F9 on his keyboard to give him the Okay to operate. But when I do that, Robo-Doc says: ‘Lobotomy procedure authorized. Please lie down on the couch.’ I’m calling you from the closet. Robo-Doc is waiting out there. What’s wrong? Didn’t the F9 work? And how do I abort the whole thing?”

Notes on Excitement

Convergent experiences had me pondering “excitement” this morning. The pondering began the moment I cried an inward “Whoa, there! Let’s calm down.” The excitement actually began around 1:03 am last night when one of our e-mail accounts began to misbehave again. That account goes all the way back to the stone age of the Internet. Hence it rests now on some history in which Yahoo, Southwestern Bell Corporation, then SBC Global, then AT&T, the parent of all, and Uverse, which is some kind of ill-behaved youngest son of AT&T, all bore, and, indeed, still bear a responsibility. Last night nothing worked—and my longish “chat” with AT&T brought no helpful resolution. This morning (surprise but yet, also, no surprise), the unstoppable force had somehow managed to move the immovable object; the defective e-mail account now acted as if nothing had happened (except our sleeping late). But, hey, just give it time. No shortage of excitement around here.

Mornings are also “paper” times—another occasion for excitement. Will the paper have been thrown? In these exciting times our papers, which include the Detroit News, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times—are delivered by three different route operators; no single carrier ever just brings one. The reason for that is that the giants of the media make use of the lowest-cost ways of getting their paper to our door, using different carriers on different days. Generally it all works well, but now and then, say once a month, the Thursday paper gets delivered on Friday or no paper comes at all. Therefore the trip out to the drive, partially blocked from view by the car, is a case of excitement rising. Will there be a paper? If not, agitation. But if the paper is there, the agitation’s just postponed. Because reading the paper brings new negative emotions caused by content that never pleases; my critical faculties turn that displeasure into a feeling of my own superiority (If I ran that paper, that crap wouldn’t be there!). But feelings of superiority on the cheap are, well, not exactly helpful in polishing my own humanity…

The biological function of excitement is to induce some things to attract, some things to repel us. Very effective. The institutionalization of this excitement is also a method of drawing customers to anything and everything. The best kind of excitement is one which threatens—but not us personally. Doom and gloom—but no need to start grabbing the family papers. We can just watch people staring at burned down homes where their papers have all just vanished. A feeling of superiority arises? Perhaps not—or we don’t allow it. Most of us think—there but for the grace of God go I.

In nature, to be sure, excitements of the sort that literally clog the media (everything is breaking news) are relatively infrequent. But in communities addicted to the media, excitement is constant. That, in turn, produces a strange sort of continuous state that distorts reality. So, indeed. Whoa there! Let’s calm down. Boredom, it turns out, is a highly desirable state. It releases the attention which, if effort is made to direct it, may come to be focused on that which really matters. Like making the bed. Or mopping all that salt off the tiles by the entrance…

Code Napoléon Recalled

A year away from another general election, the focus is back on money again. And once again ventures are being launched to reform the funding of the electoral process. This, of course, is a bottom-up venture in a day-and-age when the acceptance of our fundamental laws lies back some 238 years (the Constitution having been ratified in 1788). Since then law in the United States, case law governed by precedent, has grown enormously and represents a vast morass piled high enough to make a Himalaya. At a minimum, some constitutional amendment will be required to bring about the change reformers hope to achieve. Such an amendment requires two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and must be ratified by three-fourth of all states. Even if such a change passes, the accumulated precedents of nearly two-and-a-half centuries will be applied to its interpretation in practice—which is a way of saying that fundamental effective change from the bottom up is virtually doomed at the start.

Just a short time after the Constitution was ratified in the United States, the Napoleanic Code was established in 1804—but its earliest draft dates to 1793. This summarily wiped away the vast accumulation of many different versions of French Mediaeval law: a radically fresh start. The name that come to be attached to it tells us that it was top-down. That code itself was modeled on Justinian’s reform of Roman law, completed in 533—which tells us the size of that mountain of morass Napoleon had to cause to disappear…

The Code was—like its time—rational to a fault. It was, by design, intended to avoid the features of case law; thus it prohibits judges introducing a general rule, thus enlargement of the laws, because this constituted, in the eyes of framers, legislation by judges (Article 5). This also meant that precedent (stare decisis*) is not a binding feature of French law. But…

But, of course, no law, no matter how new and clean, can actually anticipate all of the cases that will be brought before judges. Every code is missy, as we would say nowadays, and therefore judges would be faced by cases in which the proper fit of the existing code would not cover the gaps. To prevent judges from avoiding such problems by not dealing with them. They had to use some part of the Code to apply it to the problem in the gaps. They were required, therefore, to engage in interpretation  (Article 4; for text of Articles see this link). In effect, therefore, the French Code, although intended to prevent legislating judges, also compelled them to interpret the law one way or the other so that the net effect is that French jurisprudence de facto works the same way as common law—although its judges are denied the favorite game played on Law & Order, our TV series, which often features a major hunt for precedents.

Which is a way of saying that reform, however good—and it is best if it is a brand new start—will gradually turn into another yet another new morass. Morass will pile on top of morass until it begins to seem like a mountain. The very shortest version of the French Code today has 3,000 pages; there is also an “expert” and a “mega” version (the last available on a searchable CD ROM).

Now tunneling beneath that mountain with a (probably small) popular movement of reform—and introducing say a few pages more stuff at the very bottom, i.e., as part of the Constitution—say regulating how money may be spent on elections—will barely be noticeable by the money itself which, like water, can penetrate any kind of mountain of morass at any point and cumulate wherever it wishes.

But for a small reform, likely to last, say, two hundred years, one does need a Napoleon.

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* Stare decisis et non quieta movere. To stand by decisions and not to disturb the undisturbed. Thus to use case law established by previous cases and to respect their conclusions as law.