We had one of those rare but prized visits from my sister, last night. I made a dish whose recipe allegedly dates to Julius Caesar and his invasion of Gaul. Though no documentation confirms that tale, if a dish so fine were as old as that it would be small wonder!
The knife my sister is holding, used frequently for butchering duties here, is a Kabar Next Generation. It's also a good swimming knife.
There are lots of recipes for the dish online, so I won't bother to type it out. The bread was also fresh made. It's essentially a simple white bread, but with milk substituted for the water; less 1/4 cup of the liquid, for which I substituted an egg. That gives it a much richer flavor and crispy golden brown crust, which is ideal for dinner rolls.
A good time was had by all.
Coq au Vin
SSADM
Here lies what’s left of Michael Juster,
A failure filled with bile and bluster.
Regard the scuttlebutt as true.
Feel free to dance; most others do.
It's good to know that we have men of intelligence, spirit, and who remember the ancient things. Unfortunately, the article ends, he as other civil servants know "that their political masters would never really stop playing a bloody game of ambition and small-mindedness."...why no one’s content
with either what they’ve done or fate has sent,
yet they applaud men taking other trails.
“O lucky businessmen!” the soldier wails,
his body weighted down by age and shattered.
Yet whenever southern winds have battered
his boat, a businessman will surely cry,
“Can’t beat the army life! Don’t you know why?
Two sides will clash, and in a flash you’ll see
a sudden death or joyous victory.”
And thus, in spite of men of such quality, here we are.
Did Vikings Wear Horned Helmets?
Not sure I trust their expertary, but I thought I'd toss it out to see what you all thought.
A Good Sharp Edge
There's some fair practical advice on offer in this little bit of a song.
A second song of worth, from the same young gentleman.
The Tide
Two stories of interest about women and Islam. The more important is from Saudi Arabia.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.Parzival's remarks to Gawan, that "it was better to trust women than God," may well be true in this case. But if it were really God, perhaps he sent you the woman whom you find you can trust. (Remember the story about the preacher and the rowboats!)
For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.
According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.
The less important story is, of course, the beauty pageant. Yet it is not completely unimportant. As I remarked in the comments to Jim's post at BLACKFIVE, the photos of this young lady are 'why they hate us.' That's the whole thing in a snapshot.
I hope that the young woman in Saudi Arabia will not be harshly punished, since apparently she was captured. It is an exercise of a basic human right to resist tyrannical authority; or perhaps we might better say that it is a high calling to do so. Note also in the story the discussion of the Kingdom's first co-educational institution, "with no religious police on campus." That produced shockwaves, which will likely not end soon.
UPDATE: See also this post.
Beatus Vir
To Monteverdi we owe a substantial part of the transition from early music to the Baroque. Here is a motet, whose words are from the Vulgate.
There is also this "Madrigal of War," which was inspired by this sonnet, which was in turn composed by Petrarch.
Another Post on Mind/Body
Arguing against my position is this author from the Chronicle of Education, defending the new Atheism. I don't think he does a very good job of understanding the position being argued by his opponents:
After all, there is no evidence that consciousness and mind arise from anything other than the workings of the physical brain, and so those phenomena are well within the scope of scientific investigation.That's really not what is being argued; what's being argued is that even complete proof on this score wouldn't alter the question. It's not that science should not answer these questions, but that it cannot. By all means try!
This part of our discussion below is on point.
Well, if we were talking about medicine, I'd be inclined to agree that it would be an odd position to believe that spirits caused physical diseases.That's not an argument about what science should or should not do; it's an argument about what it can and cannot do, not what it may or may not do.
What we're talking about, though, is consciousness -- that direct experience of reality that normally leads people to believe that they have a mind; and which opens for us the realm of experiences that very often lead people to believe that they have a soul. These beliefs are based on intuition about our direct experience: if that doesn't rise to the standard of scientific evidence, it is at least empirical.
And it happens to be in an area where science has no final answer available, even in theory. For example: imagine that through future advanced brain scan techniques you could prove that the brain's state wholly determines our mental experience, and that we can control mental experiences by altering brain states in a reliable way.
Does that prove that there is no mind? Not at all -- what it proves is that the mental supervenes on the physical. The question of why we have the mental experience at all is still there.
It doesn't even address the question of where consciousness "comes from," because there's no way to determine if consciousness is arising from the brain, or if the brain is a receiver for consciousness. For example, imagine that you could now build an entire human being, controlling every aspect of their physical reality down to the quantum level. In theory, then, you should be able to produce two people who are actually identical: and, if the mental supervenes on the physical, they should have exactly the same mental states, and indeed, be thinking exactly the same thoughts.
Can you prove that they are, in fact, having the same thoughts? It turns out you can't actually even prove that they are conscious -- to the degree that we show that the mental supervenes on the physical, we run into what philosophers are currently calling the ZOMBIE problem. They may react predictably, even deterministically, in the way that a person experiencing consciousness does; but we can't really know if they are actually conscious at all. They may be physically determined, not "human." Our only reason for assuming otherwise turns out to be that same intuition that leads us to believe in the mind, and sometimes also the soul.
All that means is that these questions come down to articles of faith -- even at very high levels of scientific evidence, currently unavailable to us. That means the one assumption is no better founded, from an evidential perspective, than the other; but the intuition remains to support the idea of minds and souls. That fact seems important to me, but even if you are inclined to disagree, it remains the case that these questions appear to lie permanently within the area of faith.
Science can do what it likes, and ought to do whatever it can.
However, it needs to beware of its limitations. Imagine a science that appeared to show a hard determinism even at the quantum level. Would it answer this question?
What's more, because the powerful appeal of religion comes precisely from its claims that the deity intervenes in the physical world, in response to prayers and such, religious claims, too, fall well within the domain of science. The only deity that science can say nothing about is a deity who does nothing at all.No, actually, it would not. A God who had the ability to alter the world could, and maybe might, alter the world so completely that what appeared to be determined by physical forces was determined instead by divine will. A genuinely omnipotent God could alter the past and the future as well as the present.
It's fine to say, "Well, I don't believe in such a God." It's not important that you do; it's just the case that these questions are beyond the realm of what we can know for certain. Even imagining the best possible proof according to methods of scientific inquiry currently impossible, we find that the base question isn't resolved by any standard of proof we can imagine.
What remains is our experiences, and our intuitions about them. Those intuitions may be set aside or valued, as you prefer.
Archers
This is in the European Sculpture Court, which has some fabulous classics sculpture, including a Perseus holding Medusa's head, cast in white marble. The only reason I don't post it is, wonderful as it is, it doesn't come close to the one Grim posted a bit ago, which I think is in Italy. Some of my favorite Rodin sculpture is in this room, a section of the Burghers of Calais.
A Good Moment
I'm not sure which of these items I like better: the governor of California calls to end all state welfare, or this ad from Alabama:
Yes, Allah, he's serious. When a man from Alabama pulls out his lever-action in a political ad, he means business.
Robin Hood
I went to the new Robin Hood movie today, prepared to see Gladiator in cloaks; instead, I saw a genuinely remarkable and worthy film. I hope that all of you will take time to see it, but more importantly, that you will suggest that others should see it.
The new Robin Hood harmonizes perfectly with our current political situation exactly where it varies from the historical account. This may or may not be how it was intended, but it happens to be the case. King Richard the Lionheart is the old king, valiant but wasteful on foreign adventures. King John is the lying, prideful new king, who talks about unity and promises to bring all Englishmen together, then betrays them in order to seize greater power and taxes from the people. He is provocatively weak, inspiring a French invasion because he is clearly unable to lead. He is saved by William Marshall and Robin Hood, the former a military man who is trusted by all except the new King -- who detests him, but needs him 'whether he likes it or not.' The latter is an everyman, good at what he does, honest, brave, and foolish enough to believe that a king will appreciate his honesty.
The remarks on liberty, the place of the law in relation to it, and the rights of men are note perfect. Normally departures from history in historical films bother me; but not here, because there is other game afoot.
It's a tremendous movie, deeply enjoyable. Some of the music is fantastic, designed around the mandolin and drum.
I would not have expected it to be the best Robin Hood film ever made; but it may very well be that, and besides that, a great movie judged apart from its genre.
Confess
One of the hardest things to get smart people to do, whether philosophers or scientists, is to confess the hard limits to our knowledge. One thing well beyond the limits is what is called 'the hard problem' of consciousness: that is, why does it feel like we're conscious at all?
If we don't call it a miracle, it's not clear what else we might call it.
[H]ere we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us.The thing about the hard problem isn't that we don't know how to answer it. The important thing is that we can't even put firm brackets around what an answer would look like.
There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say that if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms....
The universe passed through its unimaginable first moment, first year, first billion years, wresting itself from whatever state of nonexistence, inflating, contorting, resolving into space and matter, bursting into light. Matter condenses, stars live out their generations. Then, very late, there is added to the universe of being a shaped stick or stone, a jug, a cuneiform tablet. They appear on a tiny, teetering, lopsided planet, and they demand wholly new vocabularies of description for reality at every scale. What but the energies of the universe could be expressed in the Great Wall of China, the St. Matthew Passion? For our purposes, there is nothing else. Yet language that would have been fully adequate to describe the ages before the appearance of the first artifact would have had to be enlarged by concepts like agency and intention, words like “creation,” that would query the great universe itself. Might not the human brain, that most complex object known to exist in the universe, have undergone a qualitative change as well? If my metaphor only suggests the possibility that our species is more than an optimized ape, that something terrible and glorious befell us—if this is merely another fable, it might at least encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.
Back from the Land of the Dead
I have returned from my short journey to California. Southern California has a particular beauty, which can help explain why there seem to be so very many people there. Some highlights from the trip included getting to sit with some Hollywood Marine recruits on the flight out, who were just on their way to boot camp; it was a pleasure to talk with them. In addition, I had one afternoon for looking across the bay at Coronado, and for driving past Miramar.
Now, as DB says, back to your regular programming.
Robin Hood, History Channel
Of course, I can still recite the entire song from the Disney version and I recall having a massive crush on the fox (read: cartoon) version of Robin Hood. Never was into Errol Flynn. I will enjoy seeing Russell Crow be him.
Robin Hood and Little John running through the forest, laughing back and forth at what the other one has to say; reminising this and that, and having such a good time; ooodalolly ooodalolly, golly what a day!
Don't worry, gang, Grim comes back soon and will be restoring the usual program.
Saber with Emeralds
Isn't it wonderful?
And while I'm at it...
Great Riots of US History
Todd Jensen writes to point us to his piece on ten great (or terrible) riots of American history. It's a short piece, but with description and video from the more recent of these shortlived uprisings.
Old door, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Faustina
As Hadrian died shortly after and Antoninus Pius assumed the throne, Marcus soon shared in the work of the high office. Antoninus sought for Marcus to gain experience for the role he would one day have to play. And with time, both seemed to have shared true sympathy and affection for each other, like father and son. As these bonds grew stronger Marcus Aurelius broke off his engagement to Ceionia Fabia and instead became engaged to Antoninus' daughter Annia Galeria Faustina (Faustina the Younger)in AD 139. An engagement which should lead to marriage in AD 145.
Also of interest:Faustina would bear him no fewer than 14 children during their 31 years of marriage. But only one son and four daughters were to outlive their father.
In AD 139 Marcus Aurelius was officially made caesar, junior emperor to Antoninus, and in AD 140, at the age of only 18, he was made consul for the first time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustina_the_Younger
Never listen to gossip!
Travels
I'm traveling this week. 
While DB continues to entertain us with Met photos, I may have less to say than usual.