Fire Is a Tree Running in Reverse

Photosynthesis converts sunlight into chemical bonds; a fire converts the stored chemical energy into heat and light. Really fast.

Other fun facts about fire here. I had read about the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin in 1871, which started on the same day as the Chicago Fire but got little publicity though it killed 1,200 people, but I hadn't heard about either the Sultana steamship fire of 1965, which killed 1,500 recently released Union prisoners, or the Great Dragon fire of 1987, which consumed 20 million acres of forest in China and the Soviet Union.

I am sure that everyone reading this has heard about these 'occupy whatever' protests. I saw the one in Philadelphia (for some reason clustered around city hall, instead of say, the stock exchange). And the protesters were the usual middle class socialist brats.

You could not make this stuff up if you tried:

Occupy Philly is on the 15th Street side of City Hall. If you wish to make donations, the food station is on the JFK Boulevard side. They need disposable plates, cups, napkins and cutlery. Food donations of non-perishables like rice, beans and grains are appreciated; also fruit with skins, like apples and oranges. They don’t need any more salad greens at this time.

Salad. Greens.

I can't stop laughing.

Harry Reid Goes Pseudo-Nuclear

I thought, if he was going to do it, he'd do it to pass Obamacare. For reasons I can't fathom, the Senate Majority Leader elected earlier this evening to set a precedent permitting a majority to change a critical Senate procedure, by-passing the usual requirement for a super-majority. This is not quite an elimination of the filibuster, but could be used to achieve the same result.

Reid set this startling precedent, not to pass a crucial bill, but to prevent the Republicans from forcing a vote on the President's jobs bill. Why? Apparently to avoid having to admit that the Democrats do not have enough votes to pass the bill even by a majority vote. Why is that important? Apparently because the election theme for the next year is to be that the economy would have improved if the jobs bill had passed, and the only thing preventing passage of the jobs bill was Republican "no" votes.

A high-stakes play for a body that may be controlled by the other party after the November 2012 elections.

Mr. Williams goes to Washington

I don't usually post so many videos in one day, but this campaign ad is rather amusing.



I'd say this is a pretty good representation of the perspective of the small farmer -- say a guy just slightly bigger than the yeoman farmer, the kind of guy who could employ a few people on his farm.

Perfidy by the Police and the Department of Justice

What makes this case outrageous is not merely that the motel owners are accused of no crime.  It is not even that the basis for the case is a small fraction of one percent of the guests they have had, or that these few arrests of guests are stretched over twenty years.

The real outrage here is that the government would have prosecuted the motel owners if the owners had engaged in the kind of invasion of privacy necessary to prevent the arrests.  If they had gone snooping in on their guests' privacy, listening to their phone calls, and otherwise undertaking the steps necessary to be sure that absolutely no illegal activity was happening there, they would be guilty of violating numerous laws.

The Federal government here is acting as what would -- if anyone but government did this -- be a criminal racketeering operation, allowing the local police to avoid state laws preventing this practice.  For the local police, the sin is perfidy.  They are flying the flag of state and local laws, which they have taken oaths to enforce.  In fact, they are intentionally sidestepping those laws for their own profit.

Tempus Belli

The Italians have the best sports.



The website of this group is here; it promises that this year's reconstruction held to rigorous standards of historical accuracy for the period of the wars from 1360-1410.  Clearly the Republic of Geona was a major plot element for the event, given the heraldry.

These things remind me of an old discussion of ours, which sadly is not available currently because of the loss of the old comments system.  The posts that inspired it were here, here, and here.  They start with the Laches, an early Socratic dialogue, in which Socrates and his companions explore whether the sport of fighting in armor is useful for developing the virtue of courage.  They end with Miyomoto Musashi, the great Japanese duelist.

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

The Wall Street Journal collected a number of Mr. Jobs's sayings over the last quarter of a century. Here are his thoughts in 1985 about the future role of the Internet:

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people––as remarkable as the telephone. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

Eleven years later, on the optimism that leads people to suspect a conspiracy:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth. [Wired, February 1996]

Six years ago, on death:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Lothlórien

Almost every morning my Bing search engine greets me with a stunning image. This morning it's a cypress swamp in the George L. Smith State Park, Georgia. I thought at first those were forest fire flames in the background, but apparently it's just superb fall color.

Say it Ain't So, Bo.

Hank Williams Junior is socially unacceptable, now?

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When did that happen?  I'm thinking about 1979, during the last Obama administration.



The next thing you know David Allan Coe won't be thought presentable in polite company.

Pinker and Violence, Continued

John Gray undertakes to criticize the study we discussed earlier.

The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.

Say Mao, for example.  To Pinker's assertion that 'we take it for granted that war happens in backward parts of the world,' Gray notes that this requires us to think of the entirety of Asia, post 1945, as backwards.

It's a pretty humbling and intense criticism, which is exactly what the argument merits.

For the Wall Street Protestors

'Of all the trades in Ireland, the begging is the best; for when a man is tired, he can stop and take his rest.'



I learned the song from Harry O'Donoghue, native born Irishman who these last few decades has made his living around Savannah.  I can't find his version of it online, but here's an appropriate song sung by him.  Like Savannah, the song is at least as American as Irish; in fact, it's a Bing Crosby tune.

My Father Sends

What Do [Those People] Want?

I see that, while I was gone, a number of "Occupy Wall Street" protests have been going on. This morning I ran across a Daily Caller article comparing the protest unfavorably to yesteryear's Tea Party rallies. I was amused to see that some Tea Partiers are mystified by the new protesters:

The “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement . . . has been described as the left’s response to the tea party. But do the two movements share any common ground?

According to Tea Party Patriots National Chairman Mark Meckler, the answer is an emphatic “no.”

“These are law breaking people,” Meckler told The Daily Caller. “We have nothing in common with them other than we are all American citizens. My read on the news is that they do not even know what they are protesting.”

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips agreed. “I see very little in the way of commonalities between the two groups,” Phillips told TheDC. “The Occupy Wall Street protesters act mostly as a mob, without any real coherent explanation of their grievances."

I hear more than a faint echo of the constant complaint against Tea Partiers: that they were mindlessly angry and didn't have any coherent notion what they wanted. After all, no one could seriously want smaller government, right? Because most of these people held on to their Social Security and Medicare benefits for dear life. And who doesn't want highways and firemen? So what are they doing in the street? They must simply hate black people. The National Journal sniffed, "The current movement seems more against things than for something. They seem short on data and practical recommendations and long on venting." A NY Times blogger charged that "the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government." A LaGrange citizen asked his local newspaper editor, "The Tea Partiers say they don’t like what the progressive movement has done to our country. What are they talking about?"

For that matter, I'm reminded of the time-honored question, "What do women want?"

I suggest that that phrase normally means something like, "I have a hard time imagining how anyone could seriously propose such a program, so I'm going to affect not even to be able to identify the program proposed." It's not an approach that will help us solve disputes among ourselves. In fact, the Tea Party's Mr. Phillips immediately contradicts his inability to understand the "Occupy Wall Street" agenda by complaining that the "protesters are upset about bailouts but they want to see that money used on more social programs" -- an agenda that I join him in opposing, but that nevertheless seems comprehensible enough. Tea Party Express co-founder Sal Russo did a better job, I think, of uncritical listening. He noted that the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters, like Tea Partiers, objected to crony capitalism:

“I think you find that the left and the right come together on that, kind of for different reasons, but come to the same conclusion that government ought not to be picking winners and losers.”

The Truth of Russia

Lars Walker's co-blogger Phil provides us with a story of the true and honest Russia.

Gumilyov had—like many of his peers—become enamored with the female poet Cherubina de Gabriak, and Voloshin stood in his way. It was soon discovered, however, that de Gabriak did not actually exist in corpus, and was instead a pseudonym manufactured by Voloshin and a then-unknown schoolteacher named Elisaveta Dmitrievna. The two had concocted the exotic alias in order to get two dozen poems published. Gumilyov, publisher of some of these poems, wound up penning amorous letters to de Gabriak, and he began receiving equally amorous responses. The offense could not go unpunished. This time, both duelists survived unscathed.

There is so much right with that description of the place, and the spirit of the people who live in that place.

Memories of Summer

Another summer is gone.  I did not much enjoy this last one, but that is a failing of mine; I should have done better with what I was given.  I did my best.  A son of Georgia does not love the summer as much as those further north in any case.

Yet it is gone, and with it that part of our lives that shall never return.  The autumn lies ahead, and for Southerners that is a fine thing:  cold cider and warm fires, and the turning of the leaves.  Still, for what I should have done and have not done, should have thought and have not thought, should have felt and have not felt, I pray thee mercy, Lord.

Requiem for a Sow

The great bears are, for reasons best known to scientists, given the adult names normally used for pigs -- boars and sows -- even though their kit are known as cubs.  Tonight one was put down:

A grizzly bear that fatally mauled a hiker in Yellowstone National Park was killed after DNA evidence linked the animal to the scene of a second hiker's death a month later, a park official said Monday. 

The decision to euthanize the 250-pound female bear was meant to protect park visitors and staff, Superintendent Dan Wenk said. 

However, the investigation remains open, and officials might never know definitively whether the same bear that killed California hiker Brian Matayoshi on July 7 also took the life of John Wallace of Michigan in August. 

Evidence showed multiple bears, including the sow, were near Wallace's body but not if the sow made any contact with Wallace. The bear was allowed to remain free after Matayoshi's death because park officials said it was reacting naturally to defend its two cubs.

They did not grasp the truth behind what Edward Abbey said:  "If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”

These are not dangers to be mitigated, but dangers to be celebrated.  What's the point of a life of easy mastery, without terror or danger?  These are our great friends and allies, who call us to be what we might be:  and if we die, what of it?  We were going to die anyway.

Firebrand on Polygamy

Elise has posted her promised piece on polygamy, which is part of a series she has kindly named after me.  At least, I hope she is intending to be kind.

She ends this way:

"I do not object to gay marriage. However, I do not consider those who do object to it to be stupid, ignorant, bigoted, shortsighted, ridiculous, not worthy of response, or crazy. Instead I respect their position, acknowledge the validity of their concerns, and couch my position in terms of my own preferences and my opinion that legalizing gay marriage will not undermine the role marriage plays - or should play - in holding society together. This leaves me free to oppose legalizing polygamy when the time comes. I realize full well that when I do argue against legalizing polygamy, I will be denounced as stupid, ignorant, bigoted, shortsighted, ridiculous, not worthy of response, or crazy. I’ll have to put up with that but I don’t plan to give anyone grounds to also denounce me as inconsistent."

I guess it's good to avoid inconsistency, exceptis excipiendis.  I do not support "gay marriage," for reasons explored in great detail in the comments here, but which largely boil down to my sense that marriage is wrongly thought of as a contract, and rightly thought of as a kinship bond.  The idea that any two people should be free to marry is part and parcel of the idea that marriage is just a contract between two individuals, which exists for their pleasure and convenience and can be dissolved for the same reasons.  Only when we see marriage as the institution that it really is -- the formation of a kinship bond that unites bloodlines across generations -- can we correctly account for the duties arising from it that are owed to both previous and subsequent generations.  These begin with not divorcing, but certainly include structuring marriage so that it has at least the theoretical potential of producing a subsequent generation.

So, I have never been a supporter of this concept called "gay marriage."  However, one argument against it that I never found convincing was the slippery slope argument that gay marriage might lead to polygamy.

The problem wasn't that the argument might not be in some sense accurate, but that the argument was unprincipled.  By this I mean that it did not have a grounding principle for marriage that could explain what the institution was, or what it was for.  All it was doing was trying to use a less-popular change to undermine support for a more-popular change.

If marriage really is -- as Elise says -- just whatever we decide to call by that name, then there is no foundation for the institution at all.  If it is, as I say it is, a kinship bond that unites bloodlines across generations, then polygamy at least preserves the core of the institution in a way that "gay marriage" does not and cannot.  The slippery slope argument doesn't work, because "gay marriage" is already the bottom of the slope.

Which, I suppose, is reason for hope in a sense; once one has reached the bottom, at least things won't get worse.

I've been reading St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject, whose arguments are sometimes very good and sometimes quite dodgy; we'll take a look at his lengthy piece on the subject in a bit.  Let's talk about Elise's ideas first.

Protest!

Goodness knows there's a lot going on in the country that merits a protest of some sort, but this ought to be embarrassing to everyone involved.  InfoWars, a site well known for conspiracy theories, is the voice of sober reflection here.

The ignorance displayed in these interviews knows no bounds. The protesters just don’t get it. They are calling for the government to use force to impose their ideas, all in the name of bringing down corporations who they don’t realize have completely bought off government regulators. Corporations and government enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship – getting one to regulate the other is asinine and only hurts smaller businesses who are legitimately trying to compete in a free market economy that barely exists.

The zeal for totalitarian government amongst some of the “protesters” is shocking. One sign being carried around read, “A government is an entity which holds the monopolistic right to initiate force,” which seems a little ironic when protesters complain about being physically assaulted by police in the same breath.

That sign represents one of the worst ideas ever to come out of the academy; the entire history of free societies speaks against it.  Every instance of liberty flowering is an instance of the exercise of that right, not by the government of the day, but in its teeth.

Fixing Memories

I'm back and (nearly) unjetlagged from my longish trip to France. I saw wonderful things but, unfortunately, learned that my sister and I are not congenial travel companions. I feel more strongly than ever that it's a mistake to take a lot of gadgets on a trip. It's too easy to get lost in the gadget instruction manual, or its malfunction, or its location, so that a convenience intended to facilitate fixing memories of striking views or events instead distracts us just when we should be looking at what's in front of us. Or a device intended to help us navigate instead monopolizes the conversation with irritable observations about its inconvenience or inadequacy. Or an invention that might keep us in touch with important news or information about travel arrangements or the history of important sites instead tempts to us stay head-down in a small screen, indoors, ignoring the actual purpose of the travel. It's possible for conversation to be entirely spoiled by topics like "Where's my camera? What happened to the memory card? Why won't it stay charged up? How do I turn off the flash function?" Within a few days I was tempted to throw all the gadgets out the window. All the pictures in this post are stock photos from the net, better than I could have snapped, anyway, and perfectly faithful images of what I saw.

My sister having managed to arrive without her driver's license or most of her credit cards, there also was far too much time given over to finding the offices of credit-card companies and attempting to obtain replacement cards from them. What's more, I would not willingly enter any tourism bureau or souvenir gift shop, but these were catnip to my companion. For ten days, I felt that anything and everything threatened to interpose itself between us and the things we had come to experience.

In spite of all this, I fulfilled my goal of soaking in very old and beautiful architecture from Paris to Bayeux to Bordeaux to Nîmes. We were typical squealing tourists at the first few beautifully preserved medieval town centers, until we realized with some shock that they were completely commonplace. Every few miles we would stumble on another chateau or fabulous old church. We saw cave paintings more than 25,000 years old. The famous Gorges du Tarn looked just like a steeply hilly drive northwest of Austin, if you added a lot more annual rainfall, except that every ten miles or so the limestone canyon walls sprouted a little cluster of Cinderella castles. We finished up with the Pont du Gard and several other Roman ruins in Nîmes before taking the train back to Paris and flying home. It's hard to overstate the impact of such antiquity on someone who grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Small street markets were everywhere. I may have eaten enough first-rate cheese, sausage, bread, chocolate, and duck to last me for a lifetime. The one thing I hadn't enough time to get jaded about was truffles: I brought home a small jarful that we're looking forward to cooking up into something soon.

And I'm sure my sister and I will begin speaking to each other again before too long.

Gnostic Heretics

While reading Medieval News today, I came across a story that will be interesting to those of you who have been following our discussion on polygamy, and particularly the sub-thread of the discussion related to interpretation of the Gospel passages related to marriage.

The story relates to a recently-discovered, second-century set of gnostic inscriptions, which may be the earliest physical-culture aspect of Christianity that we have.  They seem to be directly related the bridal-chamber imagery we've been discussing.

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,
[here] in our halls,  they hunger for the [true] banquets,
even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.
There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.

Now, this is a gnostic site, which means that from the perspective of the modern Christian tradition the inscription relates to a suppressed heresy.  Another recent discovery is the so-called "Gospel of Philip," which contains a number of the gnostic beliefs.  Scholars seem to be unsure what to make of these.

The mysteries of truth are revealed, though in type and image. The bridal chamber, however, remains hidden. It is the Holy in the Holy. The veil at first concealed how God controlled the creation, but when the veil is rent and the things inside are revealed, this house will be left desolate, or rather will be destroyed. And the whole (inferior) godhead will flee from here, but not into the holies of the holies, for it will not be able to mix with the unmixed light and the flawless fullness, but will be under the wings of the cross and under its arms... 

(Translation by Wesley Isenberg) 

"It's not quite clear what it [the bridal chamber] is, it's explained to some degree, but explained in cryptic terms in the Gospel of Philip, it's a ritual involving freedom and purification and union with the deity," McKechnie said.

You may wonder why the Gnostics were suppressed.  Gnosticism was the doctrine of salvation by knowledge, or as the Catholic Encyclopedia goes on to call it, "the dreadful sum of all heresies... a retrogression... the last throes of expiring cults and civilizations[.]"

Why?  Well, that's kind of hard to explain.  The core doctrines were these:

"[Gnostics] held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour."

That matter is a deterioration of spirit is a neo-Platonic view, though, which was a school important to many early Christian philosophers (and, actually, the very Christian and much-later philosopher Hegel ends up arguing something quite close to this view); that the whole universe is a depravation of the Deity is very similar to the writings of the neo-Platonist Plotinus, who nevertheless wrote a treatise against Gnosticism; and the desire to leave the fallen world and return to God the Father, led by the God-sent Savior, is of course the foundation of the entire Christian church.

Two core areas of dispute are the use of magic, and the evilness of the flesh.  Christianity is opposed to both doctrines, the first more obviously than the second.  Orthodox Christianity, though, expects the resurrection of the flesh -- and therefore is opposed to the idea that flesh, or body-dependent qualities such as manhood or womanhood, are wicked or undesirable.  Rather, they are part of the creation originally blessed as good.