Terrae Incognitae

A CNN headline yesterday stated: Farewell Starman: World mourns loss of a musical giant. The person mourned was David Bowie, dead at 69, a transformative figure in Rock Music. I did not recognize the name at all—but it brought an echo. I knew at least one famous Bowie, Jim Bowie, the American nineteenth century adventurer, he who’s famous for the Bowie Knife. And I’ve known about him since I was ten. That was in Europe, but I was a great admirer of American heroes and much wishing I had a knife like Bowie’s. The David I’m talking about was born just about then.

I didn’t recognize the name because, like most people, I have terrae incognitae in my life. The great majority of them, in my case, have to do with the arts, particularly the popular arts, and especially pop music—or the institutional aspects of the movie business.

But when the “world mourns” one is inclined to look a little closer. Well, today I learned that David Bowie, who was born in London on January 8, 1947, was born as David Robert Jones. In his early musical career, he went by the name of Davy Jones, a name that no doubt meant to echo Davy Jones’ Locker, thus where drowned sailors gather after death. Our David, however, had a problem. In the highly competitive world of Rock, another Davy Jones, Davy Jones of the Monkees, was also on the musical stage. To differentiate himself from that competitor, our David changed his name to David Bowie and—here’s the rub—he renamed himself deliberately after the famed Jim Bowie of the knife. The link in my mind that sprang up over that last name was not just a coincidence.

Yesterday also threw a brief light on another of my unknown earths. News also came yesterday of the Golden Globes Awards. Bowie perhaps had prepared me for a minor shock. I realized that I knew nothing about that award either. The Oscars were familiar (the Academy Awards), but Golden Globes? Well, the Oscars have been around since 1929, the Golden Globes “only” since 1947—the year of Bowie’s birth. The Movie Industry is better known to me than Rock, but not well enough to arouse a desire to follow its annual rituals of recognition. And that, rituals of recognition, in part illuminate my own ignoring of large segments of art.

The arts were at the very center of my interest in youth. As I studied them intensely, I became aware of something. There came a time—beginning somewhere in the Renaissance but certainly maturing by the time of the early twentieth century. An invisible Curtain descended. On one side of it, the object celebrated by the art was the total focus of the activity; on the other side of that Curtain, it was the technique used (expressionism, pointislism, etc.) and later the artist who became the focus; innovation and transformation became a badge of achievement; the art itself slowly became a mere means by which the artist became visible to the World. Having made that discovery, I grew quite indifferent to those terrae of the arts in which this transformation was reaching its climax and gradually transforming itself into a means for achieving fame and wealth.

Those 25 Basis Points

The U.S. GDP clocked in at $17.968 trillion last year—a right rather huge, indeed almost unthinkable number. But the business news throughout 2015 concerned agonizing reflections on whether or not the Federal Reserve would actually raise the Federal Funds Rate, and if yes, when and by how much. Let’s look at this for a moment.

The Federal Funds Rate (FFR) is the interest charged by the Fed to lend money to banks, usually for a short period of time. The banks borrowing this money then have more to lend. If the FFR rises, money gets more expensive; if it drops, money gets cheaper.

The Fed has a target rate for such lending. Until December 16 of last year, that target was a range from 0 to 25 basis points. What those are will be explained in due time. The range exists because Fed lending can vary in price between those two number. Last December the actual rate charged averaged between 13 and 15 basis points up to December 16. Then the Fed changed its target range to 25 to 50 basis points. In other words, the average of all lending had to fall somewhere at or between those numbers. Since the increase, the actual FFR rate has been around 36 basis points, thus significantly less than the maximum of 50. For a look at December results, see this table provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (link).

So how much is that 25 point increase the Fed finally decided to institute? The best way to explain that is by reference to a percentage point. Everybody understands that a percent is one hundredth part of something. 1% of a dollar is a penny. Now each percent could also be divided by 100. In that case each percent would have 100 parts. And each of those parts would have a name. And that name is the Basis Point. So there are 100 basis points inside each penny.

Now just as a trillion is difficult to grasp (never mind nearly 18 of them) so also a basis point is quite invisible—a minute portion of a penny you might be able to scratch off with a very hard knife. 25 basis points are, therefore, a quarter of a penny.

When we increase the quantity of money, those basis point start having meaning. On $100 it’s a quarter, on $1,000 is $2.50, on 10,000 it’s $25. But, of course, when you borrow millions daily, it actually becomes quite visible. What about 25 basis points of that $18 billion? Well, on that amount those basis points produce a charge of $45 million. But, when I think about it, that won’t even buy me a single nuclear submarine; we’re talking billions of dollars per unit there…

The Three Kims

Korea came to be divided in 1948, thus before the Korean War began. That division came about because the two victors of World War II, the Soviets and the United States, divided the country into uneven halves: the bigger but mountainous North and the more advanced but smaller South. The victors, to be sure, would rapidly evolve into ideological opponents. But perhaps the more telling part of the situation was that the first of the Kims to which my title refers, Kim Il-Sung (1912-1994—Kim is the last name), became the premier of North Korea in 1948. Something in his genes or makeup—together with the ideological conflict which the division of Korea represented—has produced one of the more curious phenomena in international relations: here is a tiny country, representing 0.35 percent of the world’s population; it exist in a kind of independence by using now one and now some other of the Great Powers of the world to side with it (more or less half-heartedly always), so that it can remain unaligned—while the ruling class, i.e. the Kims and their followers, can live in luxury while the population is poor.

Concerning that poverty, let me contrast South and North Korea. The North has more land (120,540 square km) the South has less (100,210 sq km). The North has fewer people (24.9 million), the South has more (50.6 million). The north has a GDP of $15.4 billion ($621 per capita); the South has $1.39 trillion ($27,513 per capita).

Concerning the Kims, they have been able to retain power over three generations. Kim Il-Sung was followed by his son (Kim Jong-il (1941-2011)) and by his grandson (Kim Jong-un, born 1983)—and the Young One seems as able as his elders in playing the same game of chicken, threatening the Great Powers—and the rich Korea to his south; this has kept the population poor, in great anxiety of war or terror, and the Kims in regal comfort.

Kim the First exploited tensions between China and the Soviets; Kim the Second oversaw the development of nuclear weapons—permitted to do so because firm action to prevent it would have involved high risks of war between the U.S., China, or Russia. Kim the Third, well aware of what the real game is, is now making his own contribution by exploding what may or may not have been an H-bomb.

The Three Kims are a fascinating phenomenon: how to exploit the tension between great powers by playing a game of nuclear arms. Such tensions, evidently, are built into collective human experience and cannot be put to rest no matter how the world changes. The situation now is vastly different than it was in 1948, but the Korean situation is unchanged. Global conflict, to be sure, is also in the genes, albeit in the collective genes. The last thing the Kims will ever do is use their weapons in warfare. Why do I say that? If they ever did, the Game of Kims would abruptly end. In the meanwhile, China might be persuaded to act more energetically by being granted certain title to the islands it is building in the South China Sea. But that could not be done without transforming the uneasy balance in Asia. Meanwhile the Jong-un is still young. He already has a daughter. Will a Kim the Fourth be soon waiting in the wings for yet another round of this game?

The Miniaturization of Flight

I learned today that around a million “drones” were packaged for this Christmas this year; indeed I saw a kiosk at a nearby mall busily demonstrating and selling them—the devices swirling around in the air. They came in two varieties: those with and those without a camera.

Miniaturization is probably part of all evolving technology, biological or mechanical. The most memorable for me are clocks: huge things that once needed tall towers—and brass bells to broadcast the time to those who couldn’t see the towers—or by night. Now watches are easily worn on the wrist. The radio figures in my memories too. The first one I saw as a child at grandmother’s house had a vast, black horn. Radios were big—pieces of furniture. One such—too nice to discard—still lives in our garage, and has so lived, protected by wrapping, for thirty years. Now radios have become small enough to fit into an ear.

TVs, computers, telephones. The list of objects miniaturized is quite long but, deep down, associated with humanity’s growing skill in making transistors ever smaller. Transistors are the fundamental amplifying and switching devices of electronics—and therefore central in communications and computation. The illustration included (from Wikipedia here), shows the diminution of the size in these devices. The last of these, a so-called small-outline transistor, has a an internal diameter ranging from 1.9 to 0.5 millimeters.  

When you think about it, the miniaturization of flight has taken rather a long time. It has required development of real-time radio guidance so that the “pilot” can constantly pinpoint the object’s location—and the locations of other objects in its immediate vicinity. Those problems have now been solved—although I wonder what millions upon millions of such devices—each using the limited wireless spectrum—will have on other forms of communication.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. For about $150 (that’s a little drone with a camera), our eyes can already take a ride although the beggar is still slouched on a sunny veranda.

One Tale Told, Retold

In 1977 we were in transition between Virginia and Minnesota. I was already in Minneapolis; the family was still in Fairfax, VA when Star Wars made its debut in March of that year. I went to see it at a drive-in movie on an impulse: an advertising placard caught my eye as I was driving to my temporary apartment. The film made a great impression on me—not its science fiction aspects, which were quite stunning, of course, but rather something that was altogether novel in the environment of that time. The film deliberately presented to our popular culture the transcendental aspect of reality, and did so in a straightforward, serious, and approving manner. It was the Force—which was with you.

I did not know then what has taken place since. The story has been retold seven times since then—with essentially the same plot and by archetypal character: Good versus evil, and the Good triumphant by the slenderest of margins.

In the transition between 2015 and 2016, another show, Downton Abbey, is beginning its last season on this side of the divide. It is another case of one tale, retold each season. Such a feat is possible if one’s drawn to the story by the characters; Downton’s characters have much more human depth than Star Wars’, to be sure, but the repeating plot, with endless variations, is once more a kind of departure from our flagging faith in Progress and return to eternal values. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We haven’t seen Season VI of Downton Abbey, but we’re fairly sure that its story line will faithfully echo all earlier seasons: same conflicts, same resolutions. One watches such shows not for the predictable plot but just to see how life unfolds, infinitely variably but ever the same.

Through Nature's Eyes

Green grass shows through half-hearted snow.

The sky is uniformly grey.

The evergreens are tall and dark.

The other trees are stark and bare.

A few new flakes began to fall,

Slightly angled in descent,

A while ago, as I looked out

Struck by silence and by the same,

The same old face of Nature,

Always there, moving or still,

Ever-changing yet stubbornly

Still the same, standing, lying down—

Like that grass under its frowning snow.

Now new snow is falling thicker.

A small gust sweeps a curl of it

Right off the roof. The house

Back there is still asleep,

Its windows dark, the blue tarp

Covering a boat still dully blue.

It’s January 1st out there,

A new beginning—but Nature’s

Eyes see just another day.

Overlooked Solstice

What with weather more spring-like than wintery this year, I managed to overlook the passage of the Winter Solstice in midst of last-minute Christmas preparations. It happened on December 22—and daylight lasted 9 hours and 4 minutes. Today, standing at the threshold of yet another year in our lives the day has already gained four minutes; and waking today at 7:28, it struck me odd that it was as light as it was. Was that perception genuine? Do four minutes make that much of a difference? Well, perhaps, some years they do. 2015 was not a bad here for us here, locally, but somehow it seems a good thing that we’re just about to wave the year good-bye…

St. Entrepreneur

Back in my childhood a boy, asked what he wanted to become when he grew up, would, as likely as not, say: “A locomotive driver.” The railway, alas, was still quite close to being the dominant, if fading, technology of the mid-1930s. The modern answer (according to this article) is strongly related to the overbearing presence of television: a large number of boys will answer “A football player” or choose some sports-related occupation; most girls will say “An actress” or “A singer” or select some activity in the field of entertainment.

I haven’t found the word “Entrepreneur” on any of these lists—and that because such an activity, when you look at it closely, has to be classified as a second, third, or forth tier layer beneath something else that has more meaning. One needs to have an idea of some kind—for a thing to make or a service to deliver—and in either case, that thing or service has to have a meaning for the person: baking fancy things, say, or caring for troubled people. The next layer is learning to do that thing, whatever it is. How to make money from it comes quite late in the development of what it is—and becoming an entrepreneur is just one of multiple choices in realizing the original idea.

Therefore it amused us much to learn yesterday that Rice University in Texas is gearing up to offer a major program in Entrepreneurship aimed at its enrollees—or to attract such (New York Times, 12/29/15). Now what part of entrepreneurship is teachable? Fundraising would seem to be one of those things—but what if the quite magical powers, such as Steve Jobs possessed, say, are not present? Is fundraising merely a learnable technique? Furthermore, as for technique, fundraising appears to be just one form of persuasion among others, and no doubt Rice already offers degrees in Marketing as part of its business curriculum….

To make this initiative sharply visible for what it is—chasing the latest fad—one can imagine the Vatican setting up a special University of Sainthood, implying that graduates will be almost certain to be canonized—as Rice’s program implies the high likelihood of becoming a billionaire at 21 upon graduation. Sainthood can be taught? To be sure. Let’s start with mortification. Hairshirt 101.

The Curious Ramadi Victory

The population of Ramadi in Iraq was around 456,000 in 2004; it housed an estimated 1,000 distinct clans, each with its chief.

What that population is today no one seems to know—and for a good reason. According to Iraqi News (link) 80 percent of the city had been destroyed even before the new allied bombings began; if anybody still lives there, the city is, ah, far from working. But back to numbers. The German Frankfurter Zeitung puts today’s population at 300,000—and one assumes that FZ expended no thought on that number; others, probably still highly dubiously, go back to a 1987 number: 192,000.  If we accept the last number (not that I do), Ramadi is about the size of Grand Rapids, MI. The few pictures we are shown (over and over and over again) only show half a dozen Iraqi army soldiers celebrating amidst dreary, empty ruins; a 2008 picture—from a time when two pairs of American boots are also shown—features four Ramadi citizens going about their business. Still using Iraqi News accounts, the government dropped leaflets over the city around December 26 urging the public to clear the city; but since then we’ve not been shown masses (192,000 is a mass) flooding into the desert trying to escape allied bombardment. And if they fled, where would they have gone? East of them is Fallujah (said to have been 326,000 people in 2010); Fallujah is still in ISIS hands. West, south, and north of them is desert. So what is really left of the governing city of Anwar province—beyond rubble?

A curious victory indeed. Ramadi is 79 miles west of Baghdad. Now its rubble has been liberated. Much closer to Baghdad is Fallujah, still under  ISIS control. Why did the Iraqi government target Ramadi first? Was it because it wasn’t either populated or functional? And how did they get there? Bypassing Fallujah which, like Ramadi, is on Highway 1 and on the Euphrates river. It makes one wonder what is really going on.

Untidy Apocalypse

End-of-year times always have at least a whiff of the apocalyptic about them—and no wonder. The Media feel obliged to compress the year just past into “reviews” and “highlights.” And the impact of these condensed disasters tend to reinforce the feeling that the center doesn’t hold—and never mind that Falcon 9 space rocket that actually returned to land standing up again—or is that a secular symbol of another kind of Return?

To change the image radically (but not really), we’ve observed, after out move to this lovely new house in Wolverine Lake, that this house has a hidden (occult is another descriptor) quality. We loose things and then, often for weeks, can’t find them again. One of those items was a favorite book entitled The Coming Plague, by Laurie Garret, subtitled “Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of balance” (1994). It has happened before; it happened again. I gave up searching and bought another copy. Now we have two, one present and new, another still occulted. Which brings us back to the theme—because, talking about that book again, we were again reminded of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I had to look up (again!) what those horsemen represent (Revelation 6:1-8).

They represent Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. And again I said to myself: Clean categorization is not one of the virtues St. John the Divine. Conquest typically strongly implies War—unless it was, say, Reagan’s conquest of Grenada in 1983. Therefore Conquest already implies War, so why waste a horse on it? For emphasis? The third horse, Famine, is symbolized by a rider holding scales, and the Revelation text speaks of measures of grain for a penny. Here the confusion is introduced by the interpreters of the revelation, not by its writer. The Third Horse could equally well symbolize Trade, what with pricing and exchange being its subject or, in modern terms, Capitalism. Finally, the last, pale horse is Death—which is equally already present in Conquest, War, and Famine—if the “famine” reading is taken as correct. Messy, messy, messy.

Now Brigitte and I were both at least intuitively sure that Plague was one of the horsemen—and were, again, disappointed—although some digging disclosed that an English clergyman, Edward Bishop Elliott, in 1844, issued Horae Apocalypticae, a commentary, in which he interprets the fourth horseman as the Black Death. There, finally we have the Plague.

But a cleaner updating of St. John the Divine would either forget the first or second horse and thus produce Three Horsemen: War, Capitalism, and Plague. Or keep all four and rename them Colonialism, Capitalism, War, and Plague. And if plague seems unlikely to the reader, we’d suggest a close study of Laurie Garrett’s book.

Slouching Toward 2016...

The cyber revolution is aggressively changing skill sets all across the age-groups of suffering humanity. Toddlers are already giggling over electronic toys; babies will soon be texting MA-MA before they can utter the sounds.

At the other extreme octogenarians (no doubt) have been known to pass on in dramatic episodes: falling down dead in too-stressful efforts to try to make a smart-phone call a great-grandchild.

Now, in Sweden at any rate, even criminals with traditionally the highest skills—the counterfeiters—must rise to even higher levels of skill. Sweden is trying its best to make all cash transactions, and cash itself, disappear (New York Times, today). The German language—for those lucky to know it—provides an indication of how far counterfeiting has come. Counterfeiters are called Falschmünzler, literally “false coiners”; the word counterfeit by contrast has the obscure root of “imitate maker.” Yes. Once upon a time the counterfeiter had to know fancy metallurgy to make coins that passed for the real thing. With the coming of paper money—which is, after all, a mere token of confidence—counterfeiters became experts in paper-making and printing. But now, at least in Sweden, the counterfeiter must become a master of the app, the device, and even of the bit and byte. Wow! Progress is infinite.

The Times tells us that Swedish banks no longer issue cash. If you want to draw money from the bank, better have a little handheld what’s-it ready… Or should we actually believe that? Is this, instead, a counterfeit story, one of the early products of an electronic keyboard programmed to write articles without human intervention?

The next revolution here might be to hold on to cash—and coins too, my little ones. I’m not forgetting you.

The Rocket's Red Flare

Echoing faintly Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner” (“the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”), Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX) managed something genuinely new yesterday. It sent a Falcon 9 rocket out into space carrying 11 satellites. After launching them up there, it fell back to Earth, in an orderly manner, righted itself in a neat vertical position, and slowed by its own flare landed standing up at Cape Canaveral, whence it had taken off.

A splendid time-exposure of the rocket’s landing is shown on today’s WSJ front page. It looks like a flame-sword from Star Wars. Right on time, you might say.

Bomb’s bursting in air is old stuff, going by the poem’s publication date, 1814. But a rocket returning for an upright landing, now that’s worth noting as an historic step in this galaxy, near at hand…

‘Tis the Season - of Clutter

“When stores are streamlined and aisles cleared, sales drop.” That quote comes from a New York Times Article today titled “Walmart Can’t Escape Clutter. Can You?” The premise is that aisles blocked by “specials” induce people to purchase more than they intend—and that when stores clean up their act, sales drop. Add masses of people (and they’ll be there on a Saturday morning, yesterday, when I went in search of three specific items); a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, my first choice yesterday, was so full that I had a quite distinct feeling of claustrophobia—strong enough to drive me out of the place. Next door here, at the Novi mall, stands a Jo-Ann Fabrics. I went there next. What a great relief. The aisles were wide, no “treasures” blocked my path. I wandered freely as if in a well-tended German forest. I found one of the items on my list. And on leaving, only six people stood in line ahead of me—waiting for one of six check-out counters to free up.

My next and last place was Sears. Out of season it is about as full as an out-of-the-way Tibetan cemetery, but this time it almost matched Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Taking a deep breath I entered the aisle I needed—and fitted in, walking sideways. But the product I sought wasn’t in stock. “Try our web page,” I was told.

So I went home after a single purchase accomplished at a store that, supposedly, was violating all the rules of modern shopping: you must have clutter-filled and crowded aisles. And got curious this morning. Well Jo-Ann Fabrics had sales of $2.1 billion in its last fiscal year publicly reported (ending January 2011). After that it went private—and had estimated sales of $2.4 billion in 2015. Mind you, it was growing just fine in previous years too. The store, by the way, is one of our all time favorites—and the nearest to us here is bigger. I suppose they needed more aisle space!

The Times article, written by an expert adviser to retailers, unwraps the mystery. Clutter and crowding induce people to forget why they are shopping and what they’re supposed to buy. In studies of customers the author shows that people interviewed after shopping don’t even remember half the items they actually bought. In-depth studies—of the sort of depth I only achieve in studying metaphysics—are not exactly necessary. One just looks at the faces of shoppers: they’re all in a narcosis. The author ends his article with this advice to shoppers: “Never shop tired, never shop hungry, and keep a list of shopping objectives.” Amazing advice. The author is evidently trying to destroy his own customers for studies, the retailers. To them he must be saying: “Clutter or die.”

For Octogenarians and Thereabouts

When I reached fifty, then sixty, and even later seventy, I could not even come close to imagining that the decades beyond those years could possibly present radically new experiences. Why just within the last month or so, I muttered to myself while raking or something similar: “I’ve never ever read any honest description, by someone of my age or thereabouts, of what it’s like in this strange territory near the borderzone. Why?” The answer was obvious, of course. What happens in that peculiar temporal territory is not the sort of thing you run home and tell everyone about.

Then this morning Brigitte, the ultimate Finder of Treasures, handed me a paper by Anthony Daniels, better known by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple. It’s titled “And Death Shall Have Its Dominion” and appears in New English Review dated December 2015. Dalrymple turned 66 in October of this year; thus he is quite young to have this experience of age already. But that he knows the trials and tribulations of advanced age—of that there is no doubt! None whatsoever. Lest there are others like me out there who’ve also wondered why such experiences are conspicuous by absence in the literary media, I hasten at once to give those interested a link to that article here.

I think that the article covers the whole territory in exquisite detail. Those interested will know what I mean. As for others, it might be well, perhaps, just to let it happen when, eventually for many, it will appear of its own accord.

The Mass Shootings Chart

The first time on January 9, 2011, next on December 15, 2012, I posted a chart of mass shootings on LaMarotte by decades beginning in the 1910s—thus a century of shootings in the United States. The first time I had to expend a lot of effort to build the series from multiple news sources—trying always to including only those that more than one source had actually mentioned. I labeled it a “rough count” for a reason. I’ve only included counts of shootings that involve more than four dead (except as explained below). Many recent lists include smaller numbers and therefore blur the line between “modern style” mass shootings and family killings (where, for instance, three people related people are murdered).

Herewith I show a version of that chart updated to include the San Bernardino shootings of this month. My source for the update is here. Today, halfway through the 2010s decade, we are showing 27 such shootings (versus 15 in the whole 2000s decade).  Since last publishing this chart, when the 2010s total stood at 16 events, 13 more mass shootings have been added.

A note concerning the chart. In preparing it, I had found virtually no press accounts for the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s but discovered the work of the Minnesota criminologist Grant Duwe and a chart, produced by Duwe, from which I took data for those “empty” decades; those decades are shaded in a different color. Duwe’s numbers show a higher incidence of mass killings than the press accounts, no doubt because Duwe counted all killings of more than four people, whatever the context, whereas the news accounts concentrate on public events that go beyond family (or crime-family) killings.

Ours are interesting times. During a visit to a near-by Meijers Grocery store—a big chain around here—I saw a sheriff’s sedan parked by one of the entrances and wondered if a) it was the first arrival at a first-ever grocery-chain shooting; b) it had been dispatched to guard the place; or c) it was just a sheriff’s deputy picking up a half-gallon of milk on his way home. Later, having picked up my Evening Primrose Oil, I saw the deputy at one end of the store assuring a woman. She seemed in some state of agitation. Was I just imagining her inner condition? Or had she seen something suspicious….

Global Challenge, Local Response

The biggest challenge of global warming is, indeed, that it is global. Its effects are quite easy to document these days with photographs—but locally, in most places in the United States, you can’t see sea level rising. What you can see, and quite easily, is the price of gasoline and changes in the cost of electricity on your monthly Detroit Edison (or equivalent’s) bill. The New York Times this morning speaks of “A Nation slip[ing] into the Relentless Rising Sea.” I wondered: What nation might that be? I learned that it is the Marshall Islands. I didn’t know that the Marshall Islands are a nation; I also only had a very vague feeling that these islands might be in the Pacific somewhere. The nation (Republic of the Marshall Islands) had an estimated population of 71,191 in 2009. You might call that the local population of a scatter of some 1,156 islands and islets—but, to be sure, the Marshall Islands are definitely part a globe with a total population of 7.3 billion. That huge population, to be sure, is made up of more than 100,000 such local clusters as the Marshall Islands. And in most of those local clusters, global warming is not viscerally, actually, obviously challenging.

The weather may be warmer, summers more hot, winters milder—on some small percentage of total days. There may be more flooding, more fires in seasons; more tornadoes and tsunamis. But these are familiar from way, way back and don’t come with such labels attached as: “Brought to you by Global Warming.” My point is that the hard link between the challenge and the local impact is not such as to energize all but those few clusters of humanity that are actually touched by a real impact—causing them to have to raise seawalls by hand.

At the same time, any effective response to Global Warming must begin at the local level—where mostly the challenge isn’t actually felt. And it must be paid for by the local citizenry resulting in such things as rising electric bills or taxes.

Not surprisingly Congress yesterday passed bills undermining the Administration’s attempts to control power plant carbon emissions just as President Obama is overseas at a Global Warming conference. And Jeb Bush, one of many aiming to replace him, opines that he would have avoided going to Paris because any deal struck there might impose costs on the American public. Thus we need only to read a national paper to know the local response to the global challenge. What this shows me is that there is a genuine limit to human abilities to control global change—whether human-caused on not. To some challenges—especially those with serious local impacts projected to 2050 or beyond—there will never be a local response except those what will be too little too late. Sometimes even modern man must experience what used to be called Fate with the sober realization that que sera, sera.

The Dalai Lama and the Brain Scientists

An interesting book: Consciousness at the Crossroads, edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston, and B. Allan Wallace. We got it because Brigitte chanced across an essay by Zara Houshmand a while back which very much impressed us. The book contains the discussion of a conference between the Dalai Lama and leading brain scientists. The interesting aspects of the book is the Dalai Lama’s own presentation of various differing Buddhist cosmologies—and the quite evident tension between the physicalist monism of the scientists and the subtle but very real dualism of Buddhism, never mind which branch is involved. Were it not for the Dalai Lama's own unquestioned world fame, even this attempt to “find commonalities” between the so-called Western and the Asian systems of belief would never have taken place. What we have here is a polite exchange. The radical split between these two views, however, is what makes reading the presentations fascinating.

A Knick in the Bokkers

We’ve been watching The Knick on disks, a series that features what had once been the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York City. This is an HBO production. What it is, above all, is an illustration of how the past is distorted by modern entertainment media. True: the main character of the piece, John Thackery, played by Clive Owen, is modeled on a actual pioneering surgeon, William Steward Halstead. Halstead was also, like Thackery, a cocaine and morphium addict—but his chief activity was at the Johns Hopkins in Maryland, not the Knickerbocker, located in Harlem, NY. The Knick features—alongside some bloody operations—a cigarette-smoking nun who doubles as an abortionist, a black surgeon to whom one of Halstead's innovations is ascribed, opium dens and naked Asian females on whom, incidentally almost (and at an hourly compensation) Thackery tries out some of his inventions. There is ample violence, graft, and slews of Irishmen presented, almost exclusively, as grafters and members of mobs. As one review had it—something for everyone. The amusing theological content (something for everyone, remember) suggests that the abortion-performing nun will get to heaven for at least some of her abortions—those where the women were pregnant on account of rape by the boss in a factory…. All this had me contrasting fondly remembered historical dramas by Granada Television. HBO, alas, is all Now! even in an historical recreation.

Albert the 1st

In a day and age in which science can even transplant a uterus, one can permit oneself to dream! My dream is that our next NASA venture will be to move the Planet Earth just enough closer to the Sun so that a year will be exactly 364 days—to the minute, nay, to the second and the nanosecond. With that we shall have made the year to last precisely 52 weeks (rather than a pesky 52.14285714). Leap years will have been abolished. The difficult we should do immediately; the impossible—getting rid of Friday the 13th—will take a little longer—unless we hit upon a genuinely creative fix and simply banish Sunday ever falling on the first of any month! No Sunday the 1st—no Friday the 13th. Logical, isn’t it. When Sunday would, under the old dispensation, falls on the 1st of the month, we would substitute Albert for it and simply shove Sunday to the 2nd of the month. Albert is for you-know-who.

The neat solution above has a little problem. It comes from the fact that when a common year (one with 365 days in our benighted times) begins on a Sunday, it also ends on a Sunday. And, surprising people like me, whom calendars generally baffle, a year beginning on Monday also ends on a Monday, and so on for all the days of the week. But if January 1 falls on Albert, what do we do with the last day of the year? Problems. Problems.

In the case of leap years, of course, a January 1st falling on Sunday, the year ends on a Monday what with that pesky February 29th pushing everything out by one. Similarly with all the other possible leap year starting days. 2015 started on a Thursday. Therefore 2016, which also happens to be is a leap year, will start on Friday.

Every common year starting on Thursday has three Fridays the 13th—in February, March, and November. Because, of course, those months start on Sunday. They ought to start on Albert. To help others carry on the future labors of getting rid of Friday the 13th, I herewith present a table for starters. We’ve got to get this whole business simplified. I think you’ll all agree.

Note please that in common years no Friday the 13th falls into July. The Leap year is also finicky: it features no Fridays the 13th in August. And also note, lest my entry title be forgotten, that in all the months shown for Friday the 13th, the first day of the month would be an Albert in my new calendar.

The New Energy

Seemingly intensifying troubles all over the globe—and just yesterday at the University of Missouri—produced the almost random thought this morning: global energy is rising—and it’s been going on for a while.

Behind that thought was the commonplace observation that uncontrolled, un-channeled energy almost always causes huge amounts of damage—as we know from tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like. Therefore what I’m observing across the world—be it in the middle-east, in Africa, and the Americas, not least a drum-beat of shootings, killings, and upheavals here—must be the consequence of extra energy.

But when I look at that, I noted that we’re in the gradual process of consuming what little is left  now of global hydrocarbon energy. By all accounts we should see the Age of Oil end by the end of this century. So where does this new energy come from?

Next it occurred to me that this New Energy is not of the fossil kind—or the candidates to replace it. Rather that it is new human energy chaotically “doing work,” and mostly destructive work, outside the old-fashioned institutional systems of family, markets, education, and government. Can we actually see it? Yes. We see its tooling almost everywhere except in the pools of swimming pools. That tooling is the cell phone. People use it taking the dog for a walk, driving, waiting for the doctor, while shopping, just before falling asleep and first thing after waking and on the toilet.

The cell phone, to be sure, is but the most visible icon of very rapid communication between individuals; it rests on digital technology and systems developed for its exploitation, most centrally the many different kinds of social media enabling people to form ad-hoc group that, when moved by some strong emotion of idea, take on the character of an institution of the old-fashioned, regular kind like a government or an army.

The difference between what I’ve been calling “old-fashioned” institutions and these new ad-hoc groups is that institutions require major investment, employees, work space, routine missions, and central administration. The ad-hoc groups have no office buildings, payrolls, or, often, recognizable leaders; but, often, they can actually function almost without titular leadership altogether. Rapid communication can gel into consensus; action then follows quite spontaneously.

The various emotions or ideas that move these groups may be quite innocent—like entertainment; but when the emotions are rebellion or opposition, they can and do become quite effectively aggressive and take over (often violently, as is the case with ISIS) all traditional institutions and come to dominate entire regions. The earliest of these groups were called flash mobs and date to the early 2000s.

The energy comes from the concerting of individual actions—individuals whom, before the cyber revolution, it would have taken monumental efforts to recruit to coordinate if they were physically close. Such efforts once took significant time to accomplish and could be relatively easily disrupted. The cyber revolution annihilates both space and time—space by being able to coordinate people at great distances and time by doing it in hours or days rather than months or years.  Open communications—on an unimaginable scale—make it almost impossible even to detect the formation and intensification of these groups until they have begun to act. There is also that first amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly to make action countering their destructive efforts difficult. At present this new energy looks like a permanent feature of modern life putting all sorts of institutions at risk. But stable institutions are necessary for order. It is order that has begun to yield—and will fill our media with chaos until a new order, after all kinds of transformations, once more takes hold.

War on Drugs Revisited

A story in the New York Times this morning, “White Families Seek a Gentler War on Heroin,” reminded us again of a lot older war, the First Opium War (1839-1842). The background to that war was this: Great Britain was growing opium in Bengal to sell to China—opium being one product for which the Chinese were willing to pay silver; they were, in other economic ways, essentially self-sufficient. The British venture produced an exodus of silver from China and a rise in Chinese opium addicts. The emperor decided to eradicate the traffic—adopting much the same general method we’ve adopted in conducting our own war on drugs. Britain resisted this imperial strategy. Hence by military power, Hong Kong became British and Great Britain also extorted rights to trade freely at five other ports, among them Shanghai.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime maintains statistics, if somewhat dated, on opium and heroin consumption world-wide. A graphic produced by UNODC, which I found here, is shown below:

If we take data for 2008 on opiate user in the United States, we get an estimate of 1.335 million users in that year or, expressed as a percent of the total U.S. population, 0.44 percent. Compared to that percentage (less than half of 1 percent), the problem appears minute—unless the addict is your child.

Virtually all heroin used ultimately traces back to Afghanistan—the country where 92 percent of all opium poppies were grown in 2008. Afghanistan’s share has dropped since then to around 83-84 percent. Curiously, as the following chart, taken from Wikipedia (link) shows, the only time when poppy production was seriously challenged in the last two decades was in 2001—when the Taliban were briefly in charge…

We’re looking here are the disconcerting effects on the mind of scale—tiny numbers and vast expenditures on wars (of all kinds)—at tiny places that produce global problems, and at the persistence of problems ultimately rooted in vast cultural movements which produce, wealth, crowding, stress…and substances that help some people cope—the wrong way.

The Great Inca Road

The National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian) has opened an exhibit, The Greak Inka Road: Engineering an Empire; it will be open until June 2018 (per WSJ, 10-20-2015).

My own interest in great highways is linked with my interest in civilizations; civilizations build road networks as a by-product of administering large areas; and these highways are usually the longest-lasting residues of such cultures; all of us Europeans have trod or driven on what once were Roman roads. A post of mine on South American empires is here. The Incas originated as a culture around 900 A.D. Their empire extended from 1438 to 1533—and would have lasted a great deal longer had it not been for those conquistadors. Most of the Great Inca Road was built during the period of the Inca Empire although parts of it predate Inca dominion.

The map I show is from Wikipedia (link). The system, a roughly parallel formation, has a coastal main highway (in brown) and a mountain route (in blue). The light-brown roads connecting these and branching from them were part of the system—with those crossing the mountains the most spectacular. The broken lines are today’s state borders.

Pondering this vast structure—and looking at many great pictures easily accessible by entering “Inca Road System” into Google Images—I wonder what some counterpart of mine, studying civilizations and their roads, will think of the remains of The Great American Road System two thousand years from now. Will he imagine that they were built by slaves? Such is the reflex belief we bring to the subject—although we know that most Roman roads were built by soldiers and, as best as we can determine, Inca road-building itself was based on something akin to military levies. Such levies are well known to us from medieval times—never mind the still vividly remembered draft….

An Odd Dilemma

The definition of dilemma, literally “two propositions,” takes its negative meaning from the fact that both propositions (or situations) must be unfavorable to deserve the name dilemma—yet we must choose one. Fine. But my use of the word is a little different here. Of the two propositions I have in mind, I view the first rather with approval; not the second; yet the second is the cause of the first.

The first is that since the end of the Great Recession (let’s assume that it lasted for two years, all of 2008 and 2009) has had a dreary aftermath that, so far, has lasted nearly six years. By dreary I mean that the economy, while it has grown, has grown from 2010 to 2015 at an annual rate of 1.4 percent whereas it grew from 2002 to 2007 at a rate of 2.9 percent. The measured item here is Gross Domestic Product expressed in constant dollars. The low GDP growth rate since the recession actually pleases me: 1.4 percent is much closer to the population growth rate, which is under 1 percent annually—yet it is higher than the population growth rate; we are growing, a little, but are avoiding what Alan Greenspan once labeled “irrational exuberance.”

The second proposition is that the reason for our supposedly sluggish growth is not only domestic but also international conflict. Conflict has caused the erosion of public confidence and manifests in countless ways—and this despite low gasoline prices and gradually increasing employment—if only in the lower-paid segments of the economy. The adaptive growth pattern is pleasing; its cause, vast demoralization, is not. Therefore the dilemma.

In a way this situation illustrates the nature of real change—which is almost never by design but always by default. Just as drought produces those ugly cracks in dried out ground so social conflict produces adaptive attempts to form new, smaller, and more viable social entities. Unfortunately, to make the smaller, one has to tear the greater apart. Hence we have these nearly annual cliff hangers about public debt and government closings, cracks within and between parties, insane shootings at public events that are beginning to be almost casual—and, to be sure, hesitance by people to spend money on anything but the necessary stuff. Meanwhile, looking beyond our borders, much, much the same everywhere. If this goes on, yet more changes will appear in society. Some of them I will actually appreciate and value (as I do low-growth-GDP), even if their causes are rather sordid.

The Red and the Green

The subject today is neither an English-Irish conflict (Iris Murdoch’s novel of the same title) nor yet the clash between carnivorous and vegetarian diets (Le Vert et Le Rouge, a novel by Armand Chauvel). Rather it is about an annual event in this household, analogous to the autumnal equinox but always coming later—namely the day when The Plants Come In. This event is caused by early frosts; we’ve got good documentation of when that has happened since 2011. In that year the plants came in on November 11—the latest date in the entire series. Thus 2012: October 28; 2013: November 7; 2014: October 18; and now, 2015: October 16.

These dates always mark the first day of the move—and the effort usually takes several days to accomplish. Some plants are easily grouped together. We cover them with sheets held in place with clothes pins; they can easily survive a few hours of frost and then stay outside for several days yet until the cold sets in seriously or we grow tired of draping them each evening.

Above a couple of photos of the Red and the Green which, this year, got left out to fend for themselves: carnations and all but one, the biggest, of our jade plants. They’re enjoying the quite real warmth of the sun this morning.

The autumnal event, of course, is matched by a vernal counterpart—which also comes later, indeed usually two months, and counting, later: the day when The Plants Go Out. That day has been pretty much centered around May 5. That process also takes two days—because we’ve got a lot of plants to move. The heaviest go out first. We know: you get the hardest job done before you tidy things up with the little stuff…

Waiting for Coffee on Mars

Now we know that briny brooks flow down the mountain-sides on Mars. The news came yesterday in a paper in Nature Geoscience (link). The immediate speculation turned to the possible presence of Life on the red planet—not presently, presumably, because the water is way to salty to allow that—but a ways back in time. Good stuff for the science fiction writer, myself one such, only we’ve already been there. We’ve done it by imagination—and quite old knowledge that Mars has water; the planet has an ice cap on its northern pole. The NASA team used satellite-based instruments to discover the flowing brine. What strikes me as interesting, here, is our strong faith in our own theories of how life begins and then develops. All one needs is water, some heat, minerals, and lots and lots of time. Given these minima, Life’s sure to begin. Now as for intelligence, that’s a little bit more difficult. But I am sure that science, in its dogged determination, will one of these days discover the presence of coffee on Mars. That’s when I’ll get excited—knowing, as I do, that without coffee in the morning, my own intelligence is almost non-existent.

Shadow Moon

The earth would throw its reddish shade

Over that Mayan heroine

“Blood Maid”—whom we call “Supermoon”

These days (a new term for Luna

At her perigees)—when streaky

Clouds began to spread dense veils leaving

Unwelcome snaky dark-grey trails.

Then came a call from Pat next door

To say that clouds had now at last

Begun to fray. The Supermoon

Was in the sky again. Its diamond

Shine had now begun to wane as

Pac Man Earth’s dark shadow took the

First bite it would now swallow.

We sat in a deep pool of black

Between the house, garage, and the

Dark green of grass, the gazebo’s

Shapely silhouette—marked by faint

Solar beads of lights—ahead and

On high a mirage—a gaining

Moon its dark parts faint maroon.

It took a while until real light

Had fled leaving behind a shade

Of glowing red. Here was “Blood Moon”

Named so, they say, by our prophets

Predicting the Last Days. We read

The message, agreeing with the

Sky, and hoped that Light would yet

Return, if only by-and-bye.

Minding the Nones of July

We’re frequently reminded that an exercised mind retards the onset of senility. Minds aged eighty or thereabouts and higher tend to notice stories like that; the ballpoint marks the article for closer reading. Keeping the mind sharp is our excuse, hereabouts, for working crossword puzzles, as in “you learn something new every day,” e.g. that OREO is an almost indispensably useful word in crossword puzzles. Well, the other day, we had the following clue: July 7, e.g. Brigitte and I always do puzzles together; and what with our respective backgrounds, we fill in our respective gaps of knowledge and never fail to solve a puzzle. This time, again, we found the answer to that clue—but only by finding the other words that intersected with it. The answer was NONES. But what does that mean?

Nones, of course, vaguely hinted at the ninth canonical hour, but the clue was July 7. So how do we get from 9 to 7. To get an answer to that illustrates what might be called the useful activity of “extended crossword puzzle solving.” One has to research the subject. Well, Brigitte and I are both quite familiar with the Ides of March; assassinations of important people have a way of lingering in racial memory. We also knew that it was the 15th of the month. Oddly enough, as we discovered, counting backward from 15, with 15 being 1, the 9th day turns out to be the 7th. So if you count back from the Ides of July by nine, including that day in your count, the ninth (nonae in Latin) day will be the 7th.  Nones is always the 9th day of the month in the Julian calendar—but it falls on the 7th of the month only in March, May, July, and October—because the Ides falls on the 15th. In all other months, the Ides fall on the 13th and hence Nones is on the 5th of the month!

Having discovered this, we learned that Roman naming of the days was rather awkward. The Romans only had three “named” days, Kalends (the first day of the month), Nones (5th or 7th depending on the month), and Ides (15th or 13th, again depending on the months). All other days were defined with reference to these three. The following table shows the naming conventions, which seem very hard to remember for us, for the month of July:

1st	Kalends (of July)	17th	Day 15 before Kalends
2nd	Day 5 before Nones	18th	Day 14 before Kalends
3rd	Day 4 before Nones	19th	Day 13 before Kalends
4th	Day 3 before Nones	20th	Day 12 before Kalends
5th	Day 2 before Nones	21st	Day 11 before Kalends
6th	Day before Nones	22nd	Day 10 before Kalends
7th	Nones	23rd	Day 9 before Kalends
8th	Day 7 before Ides	24th	Day 8 before Kalends
9th	Day 6 before Ides	25th	Day 7 before Kalends
10th	Day 5 before Ides	26th	Day 6 before Kalends
11th	Day 4 before Ides	27th	Day 5 before Kalends
12th	Day 3 before Ides	28th	Day 4 before Kalends
13th	Day 2 before Ides	29th	Day 3 before Kalends
14th	Day before Ides	30th	Day 2 before Kalends
15th	Ides	31st	Day before Kalends
16th	Day 16 before Kalends	1st	Kalends (of August)

The Romans used a standard annotation to name a day. Lets take the 13th of July here. They would write that as “a.d. II Id. Iul.” Spelled out: “ante diem II, Ides, Iulius.” Ante diem  stands for “day before”; it amuses me, however, that A.D. was used in calendars once—and still is, but with a different meaning. Iulius, is, of course, our July. The phrasing on the day immediately before the named days (e.g. July 14) was “prid. Id. Iul.”; the prid. is pridie and means “the day before.”

Keeping track of the days, particularly in the second half of each month, was rather a chore, it seems, best left to scribes who had desks with appropriate writing instruments on which to record time's passage.

Now, knowing that it takes such exercises to ward off the onrush of senility makes you kind of wonder just how bad senility really might be…

It's a Gamble

What with Donald Trump suddenly so very visible in the Media, Brigitte got to wondering just where gambling is classified in the U.S. economy and, furthermore, just how big it actually is. An earlier post here, measuring the advertising industry as percentage of Gross Domestic Product was in the background of this question. How does the gaming “industry” compare to advertising? No doubt, to be sure, matters of chance were on her mind too—in view of the rather awkward fact that she managed to break an arm when, accidentally, slipping as she got out of the shower…

Well, gambling is part of Amusement, Gambling, and Recreation Industries (NAICS 713), specifically NAICS 7132, Gambling Industries. As best as I can determine, the industry’s revenues in 2013 were a shade over $33 billion, amounting to 0.2 percent of GDP in that year. Advertising, by contrast, was around 1.03 percent. Advertising is barely visible—and gambling is too small to see.

But if you go to Atlantic City and stand before the Trump Taj Mahal, especially when it’s lit up for the night, you get an altogether wrong impression of gambling’s importance—or Donald Trump’s as a presidential candidate. To be sure, if Trump triumphs, in both of his ventures—to get nominated or to rescue the Taj Mahal from bankruptcy— it will at least prove that our times are reaching the highest improbabilities even for a truly crazy state of the world. As for Brigitte, she’s got a few more  days before the present (sea-foam-green?) cast gives way to the (oyster-beige?) last one and the process of relearning to write with her right hand can be taken up in earnest…

Neglected Typographical Symbol

In my handwritten diary the other day, I wanted to refer to a section of a book using the Section symbol. The attempt turned out to be something of a mess. I was doing it from memory, and my memory produced an image as of a 8 but with a little head on top. The symbol I was trying for in shown on the left, indicating that my memory was on the right track but now quite there. It is known as a double-S; indeed one person, known as Quora User, suggests that in handwriting one should try first writing an S and then another overlaying the first starting at about the mid-point of the one already written..

The double-S designation is also supported by its Latin designation, signmum sectiones—which, happily, provides the right sound as well. The mark is quite heavily used in legal documents but is otherwise essentially notable by absence in all other kinds of writings—unless one’s reading a nineteenth century work.

A Very Fine Distinction

Word-lovers will, I think, appreciate what I stumbled across last night. I was reading Volume II of Phantasms of the Living, a classic in parapsychology by Edward Gurney et al, the real focus of which, broadly speaking, is telepathy; in detail it is filled with reports of people seeing apparitions, usually associated with the death of the person seen. Phantasms was the result of the first effort to conduct research by the Society for Psychical Research after its founding in 1882. In every meaningful regard, it is a classic and laid the groundwork for all future research in paranormal studies, not least its very rigorous reliance on statistical analysis of findings.

The story of the book itself, in a modern context, is amusing in its own way. I’m reading Volume II in the original, you might say: print-outs from a gigantic PDF produced by direct photocopying of the original. That task was then followed by digitization of the image, both tasks performed by Google. The actual reprint of the book, made from the digitization, turns out to be essentially unreadable.  The text has been reprinted—but without any attention paid to layout. Footnotes are reproduced as paragraphs wherever they fall—not at the bottom of pages—and without change in typography. New Chapters begin simply as new paragraphs in  the middle of pages. And so on. The photo images I’m reading, however, are clear, sharp, and laid out with the meticulous care applied in 1886.

Now to my little discovery. It comes from Chapter XIV, p. 58 of Volume II. It is yet another case (Number 239) of an apparition, written by one J. Merrill. In the commentary on the vision, Mr. Merrill says:

Moreover, I used the Scotch word ‘wraith’ instead of ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit,’ as I had an idea that the former word was applied to appearances before death.

The comment is added because the subject revolves around this issue: was the person whose apparition had been seen dead at the time—or still alive? Mr. Merrill thought it was best to assume that the answer was “still alive” hence the use of the word wraith. Well, I didn’t know that there was such a distinction expressible by choice of word.

Indeed, it turns out, there is. My 1961 unabridged Webster’s International provides the following as its first definition: “1a an apparition of a living person in his exact likeness seen usu. just before his death.” The word is further defined as a “ghost” in 1b—but the first definition agrees with Mr. Merrill’s sense expressed in 1885.

Webster’s does not indicate a Scottish origin, but Online Etymology Dictionary does; that source, however, says nothing of the fine distinction in J. Merrill’s mind.

Now for those who have little interest in obscure words, never mind phantasms and such, this post is presented, also, as perhaps of some future value. Ever wonder how people in their very late 70s and 80s spend the ample time and leisure they have from housekeeping, gardening, and shopping? Here you have an example. Words, particularly for those who’re almost-wraiths (there ought to be a word for that too) are a great source of amusement, indeed of merriment. Merriment, incidentally, finds its rooting in mirth.