Observing The Mentally Ill

I got a link from Instapundit to an article bashing the usual and continued left wing idiocy and especially its connection to the recent flash riots. Comments like this one pop-up regularly in such posts.

It’s all just more evidence that liberals are mentally ill. They cannot figure out cause and effect. Logic and facts do not sway them from their ideas.

You want to see mental illness? Just ask a conservative about the Drug War. Their little contribution to the mess.

There is no better promoter of outlaw culture than a prohibition regime. In fact we have recent American historical experience to prove that proposition. Alcohol Prohibition 1920 to 1933. Even criminals hate criminals who take stuff from them. In fact stealing from criminals is a very dangerous occupation. But criminals who can deliver something the government won't allow? Those boys and girls get respect. Glorification even.

Most Americans don't worship law and government. The worshipers are going to have to get over it. I'd hate to have to Party Like It Is 1773 all over again. That goes for the worshipers of the State on the Right and The Left. I actually like the Lefties better because they don't hide their love. The Righties are clever though. "I hate big government except for..." is how they rally the troops. Seriously. What are we to think of a country that has declared war on 5% to 10% of its citizens on account of they have habits which some others find distasteful?

Those condemned to history are bound to repeat it.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Porn Bomb Is Exploding

Papertiger who has been a frequent commenter here left a comment at Classical Values that I found rather interesting. In that comment he left a link to an article on Internet Porn in the Muslim world.

Called fuhsha in Arabic, pornography is considered haram, or illegal, according to most interpretations of Islam, because it publically exposes a person’s awrah, the Arabic word for the zones forbidden from public eye. The debate over pornography, masturbation, and the line between the erotic and the pornographic is a serious one in the Muslim community. Muslims today are negotiating these issues much like the West started doing decades ago.

In fact, the porn found in the bin Laden compound was probably not even much of a surprise to the American forces who discovered it. Porn is frequently found by military teams who engage in “sensitive site exploitation” in raids on militant hideouts and safe houses, according to current and former U.S. military officials. All such finds are evaluated for use “in an information operation (IO) campaign to mold public opinion.”

Hours after the news of the porn stash, Christine Fair, a Georgetown University terrorism expert, wrote on her Facebook page, “Of course they found porn! Every damned jihadi loves porn.” Indeed, the “USG,” or U.S. government has become so accustomed to finding porn, she said, it has “media analysts” designated to analyze the porn looking for “messages.” They work on “document exploitation.

"The USG has recovered terabytes of the stuff from terrorist computers," Fair wrote, noting that "kiddie porn" is included in the mix. Current and former U.S. officials have acknowledged that porn featuring sex with animals also gets picked up regularly. Fair said the U.S. government has had to hire counselors to minimize the trauma to the many young twentysomething analysts poring over the porn.

That sounds like some really ugly stuff and a very no fun job. But there is some good coming out of all this.

“Interestingly and ironically,” says Safi, “some of the Muslim societies that are the most repressive toward women or that have the strictest gender segregations also have some of the highest rates of pornography usage in the world. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt rank as among the highest consumers of pornography worldwide. I think what is true of bin Laden, the Taliban, and many of these extremist movements is that there seems to be a link between the dehumanizing of women and the dehumanizing of the entire block of humanity, Muslims and non-Muslims included.”

Our Muslim communities are engaged in a cultural struggle, both spiritual and sexual, that can be illustrated by a paper titled “The Erotic and the Pornographic in Arab Culture.” Written by an Islamic scholar in Khartoum, Sudan, named Adil Mustafa Ahmad, the paper argues that the “erotic,” as “lofty, spiritual, high-minded” pursuits, “has always been accepted and admired by the Arab in literature," and says, “There is no reason why, with the gradual ongoing liberation of the Arab mind from past taboos, it should not enjoy a similar position in the visual arts.”

My thesis, propounded in a couple of articles I wrote in 2007

Defeated By Pornography

Jewish Porn Sweeps The Arab World

is that pornography would eventually destroy Muslim culture as we know it. I also said that for the West, what ever difficulties porn causes have already been dealt with. For the Muslim world the difficulties are just starting.

Early in the war I proposed flooding the Middle East with porn to liquify their culture. I thought it might be worthwhile for the government to do the job. What we have in actuality is much better. They are paying for it. Heh.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Fat City

In most other places in the world through most of history poor people were thin. Remember when Fat City used to be a good place? The poor in America are getting enough to eat. This is a miracle.

Inspired by the comments at Wal Mart CEO: "Shoppers Are Running Out Of Money"; There Is "No Sign Of A Recovery" and this video linked by a commenter.

The Truth Is Radioactive

In my previous post Reversed Opinion I made the following point:

This is like an intel project. You have to try to get the correct information out of a mass of conflicting data.

I assume the data is being fudged. Or totally fabricated. Or "corrected" if the truth gets out by accident.

Well that was just my opinion. Now the New York Times chimes in with this report.

The document also suggests that fragments or particles of nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools above the reactors were blown “up to one mile from the units,” and that pieces of highly radioactive material fell between two units and had to be “bulldozed over,” presumably to protect workers at the site. The ejection of nuclear material, which may have occurred during one of the earlier hydrogen explosions, may indicate more extensive damage to the extremely radioactive pools than previously disclosed.

“I thought they were, not out of the woods, but at least at the edge of the woods,” said Mr. Lochbaum, who was not involved in preparing the document. “This paints a very different picture, and suggests that things are a lot worse. They could still have more damage in a big way if some of these things don’t work out for them.”

There is a lot more information at the Times report. Worth a read. In any case things are worse than previous reports suggest.

So where is the urgency? Perhaps some cultural sleuthing is in order. Japan is a consensus society (for the most part). When everyone (or nearly every one) is in agreement action is taken. It is a pretty good system for slow moving events. But when things are moving fast by the time consensus is reached events will have changed the situation such that the consensus is no longer applicable.

And what does American culture have to say about moving quickly?

I would rather have a good plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now. - General George S. Patton

Under the current circumstance the American cultural bias is the better one. But you do not change thousands of years of culture in a day and a half. Or more to the point in this case - in ten minutes or less.

There Was No Sexual Revolution

Ross Douthat has a column up about Rethinking The Sexual Revolution. There is only one problem with his thesis. There was no Sexual Revolution. We did have loose women and Dionysian Parties. But Revolution? I don't think so.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1920s was about Demographics. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s was about Demographics. No amount of "culture" is going to change Demographic forces. It is surprising that a person supposedly as well educated as Mr. Douthat is entirely ignorant of the role of Demographics in male/female relations.

Here is a nice www site:

Demographics

Besides physics and politics this one also deals with sex:

A thermodynamic explanation of politics

And a nice book:

Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

And another one:

Living with Our Genes

To get your education started.

There was no "sexual revolution" there is population dynamics biology. But humans LOVE MEANING even where there is none. Or a different one. There is so much we "know" that ain't so.

H/T Instapndit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Overheard On The 'Net - 4

At Hot Air.

How have we come to the point where far too many see law school as a qualifying factor?
HakerA on October 4, 2010 at 12:14 PM

It has always amazed me that so many people think of lawyers as “smart.”

I worked for many years with engineers — brillant people who sometimes don’t speak with perfect eloquence. But now I spend more time with lawyers — who are all able to communicate beautifully, but usually can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag.

As politicians often say (in private):“There are only two things that matter in the world: perception and reality. And reality doesn’t matter.”

logis on October 4, 2010 at 12:41 PM

I really like that. Don't get me wrong. Lawyers are some of my best friends. But on this one I'm siding with the engineers.

How Many Has She Tricked?

Why do beautiful women get cheated on so much?

"Beautiful women are prey to men who want to use their beauty to elevate their own status. Because of their beauty they're used to being adored, and they are flattered by guys who go completely goo goo for them," explains relationship expert, Dr. Gilda Carle, who has treated many celebrities.

The problem is that those guys often don't see beyond their beauty and they don't like it when they wake up one day and see a real person, who has a real problem one day, whether it's a cold or emotional needs. This type of man looked for a woman to make up for his own ego deficiencies, and when he can't get enough of that, he looks elsewhere.

"Beautiful women may doom themselves to becoming cheating victims because they themselves have want a "charismatic and attractive love mate." They're often attracted to "narcissistic men." Think Tiger, Jesse, K-Fed for Britney, Tony Romo for Jessica Simpson.

Let me see if I get this. Beauty is no insulation from dysfunction. Giving or receiving.

Assuming you want to keep up with all this on a more mundane level you might like Cheater's Confessions. About 3 or 4 new ones every hour during waking hours. About 6AM to 1 AM EST. Their confessions run 51% male and 49% female. And you can vote and comment on them without registering. Sentiment mostly runs against the cheaters, but it is devastating to out and out scum. After reading a few you can see a pattern. The pattern of what is probably the most destructive behavior in any relationship. Dishonesty. And out of that we get juicy anonymous public confessions. Yum.

Below are some books on the subject to get you started or finished as the case may be. Which reminds me of some sage old advice. "A man is not complete until he is married and after that he is finished." OTOH if you are very lucky.....

Is It Still Cheating If I Don't Get Caught?

The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims

With more here.

H/T Instapundit and Extra Good - whose home page is Not Safe For Work.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Down By Half

The demise of the Pravda and Izvestia media is in full swing.

CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.

But the news is not all bad for them. Some of it is much worse.

Fox News had their best year of all time in 2009. Now that we’ve finished the first quarter of 2010, it’s clear FNC is showing no signs of letting up –they just finished their best quarter ever, in total day total viewers.

It was also the second highest rated quarter ever in prime time total viewers.

First the viewers go. Then the advertisers. The fact that Fox news is rising proves it is not the media. It is the message.

And that is not the only place where the message is ruining the media. The newspaper business is also troubled by a Death Watch. Time is not on their side. Well maybe the magazine is. But - No Fear. There is a magazine Death Pool too.

Think of my little magazine here. Depending on how you count it I gather 140,000 eyeballs a year. Or take the other place I blog, Classical Values. About 1,100,000 eyeballs a year. Nothing special really. But time is limited. And every minute a reader spends here is a minute not available for other media. After a while and with enough alternatives it is going to hurt. And hurt big.

I'm reminded of the Marxist long march through the institutions.

To few Americans is Antonio Gramsci a familiar name. That is to be regretted because the work of the late Italian Marxist sheds much light on our time. It was he who first alerted fellow revolutionaries to the possibility that they would be able to complete the seizure of political power only after having achieved "cultural hegemony," or control of society's intellectual life by cultural means alone.

Well they gained control of the culture all right. In fact they have strangled it to death. Good for them. They now control a corpse. And if you have watched Weekend at Bernie'syou know just how much trouble it is trying to keep a corpse animated.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Naked Dancing Girls

Trilogy: a nude awakening is a sort of play/happening that has a stage full of naked dancing girls. Hundreds of different ones all together. In the all together.

Trilogy is about many things: body dissatisfaction, dominant masculine hegemony, Germaine Greer.

Well, well, well. If male hegemony can get hundreds of women to dance nude on the stage, I'd say we need more of it.

And in case you need a how to, this book seems appropriate:

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Exotic and Pole Dancing Illustrated

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

The singing in the video is one of the best versions I could find on YouTube. I did like the dancing in this version better though.

The version in the above video is very good. It doesn't hold a candle to the version of Brush Up Your Shakespeare that was done by a traveling company about 15 years ago at the Coronado Theater in Rockford, Illinois. My daughter, who was three years old at the time, loved watching the play so much that she tried her best to sing along. Much to the chagrin of the other customers.

Since then she has spent a lot of time on stage at the Coronado as a member of the Rockford Dance Company. Her last performance was in The Sleeping Beauty.

If you want to brush up YOUR Shakespeare may I suggest The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Virginity Balls

I was reading the reviews at Amazon and came across one about the book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani that I found rather interesting.

Pisani has no patience for distraction, a major one being that AIDS is a gender / development / poverty issue. Pisani shows that this liberal idea, favored by a lot of NGOs and UN agencies and other donors is a distraction. First, it's a distraction because first, you may have the causality wrong (AIDS causes development / gender issues rather than the other way around), second, as shown in the book, even in Africa, that's not always the case, and third, because, again, that gets in the way of common sense prevention which should be the main focus, along with treatment for the already infected population. But again, focusing on women and children makes the AIDS issue more palatable to donors than those filthy whores, junkies and fags, so, Pisani and her colleagues at the AIDS Mafia, as she calls them, played that game too. After all, once you have the money, you can still get stuff done.

And, of course, I particularly enjoyed the chapter blasting the Bush administration and its faith-based initiatives and PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Although she does credit the Bush administration for putting money on the table, Pisani makes mince meat of the Bush and his religious nuts crowd for their hypocrisy and nonsensical attitude. She deals swiftly with Virginity Pledges and the creepy Virginity Balls and the whole family values crowd.

The term Virginity Ball is a new one to me and I was imagining some kind of modern day chastity belt. But that is not at all what Virginity Balls are about. So let us take a look at the wiki and see if we can learn something.

A purity ball (also known as a father-daughter purity ball or purity wedding) is a formal event attended by fathers and their daughters. Purity balls promote virginity until marriage for teenage girls, and are often closely associated with U.S. Christian churches, particularly fundamentalist churches. Typically, daughters who attend make a virginity pledge; a pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Fathers who attend pledge to protect what they view as their young daughters' "purity" of mind, body and soul. Proponents promote a strong father-daughter relationship as a means to affirm what they consider to constitute spiritual and physical "purity".

Well that is a little strange. Unless you know that the tree of knowledge that the serpent enticed Adam and Eve to eat from was not an apple tree. It was a fig tree. And what is that symbolism about? The fig looks like the genitalia of some females. Funny thing is that Eve ate the fig first. Kinky girl. Or as the cruder males among us might say. "Lesbians. Wooo Hooo!" But you know that Adam had to be one popular guy. He ate figs.

The meaning is reinforced by two of the Ten Commandments. Commandment Seven says, "Do not commit adultery." And that is further reinforced by Commandment Ten, "Do not covet your neighbor's wife."

So what is the meaning of all this? I think the Biblical context is that carnal knowledge can lead to social and ultimately physical disaster for nomadic tribes living on the margin. One social mistake - arousal of jealousy for instance - can destroy tribal unity and lead to starvation and/or murder. And in those days the rape of a daughter or even consensual - but unapproved sex - can destroy the tribal harmony necessary for survival. Daughters were property (even more so than male children) and needed to be protected to maintain their value. In cases of rape a traumatized daughter is going to be a large burden on the tribe and not an asset. Which is why cultures that are not far from the tribal state still do things like honor killings of raped females. The woman is officially made as guilty as the rapists because there was not enough wealth to deal with even potential problems. Harsh law. To go along with the harsh necessities of survival on the margins.

The thing is. We no longer (most of us any way) live on the margins. We can carry a lot of dead weight without catastrophic harm to our economics (just look at our government for proof of that. Although the new guy looks to be doing his best to introduce catastrophe). So the rules were changed (slowly). Murder for adultery was no longer necessary for tribal and intertribal harmony. Cities had different advantageous rule sets than those required for nomadic tribes. The first harbinger of that cultural change came some 2000 years ago. It seems nuts to go back to the old ways where the tribe was more important than the individual.

So the Purity Balls seem to be a throwback. However, you also have to consider genetics. Culture can change rather rapidly (a few hundred years even in times of slow communications) while genetics takes longer. And the rule of genetics is that humans are "designed" to get their genes reproduced. And having strange men impregnate your wife is not conducive to that. We see the remnants of that in our laws which consider catching a guy with your wife grounds for leniency in murder cases. Our genes are the product of many millenia of killing rapists and adulterers. And until our genes change enough there will be pockets of culture that are throwbacks to distant ages.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Lack Of Modesty

Breasts and popular music. Now there is a topic that grabs my interest. It seems to have grabbed the interest of Discover Magazine as well. Except we are not talking Lenny Kravitz. We are talking 17th Century ballads.

People who yearn for old-fashioned public decency might be surprised to talk to historian Angela McShane-Jones at the University of Warwick. In her studies of 17th-century ballads—cheaply printed popular songs bought and sold like today’s CDs—she found that the accompanying illustrations (above) often contained images of bare-breasted women. The perception of the bosom was quite different at the time, she says: “You see busty women representing innocence just as often as fallen ladies. And women of the court clearly had no modesty about showing their nipples.”

Ironically, extreme décolleté was the height of fashion in the very middle of Oliver Cromwell’s puritanical reign. Bared bosoms continued to cycle in and out of fashion during the 18th and 19th centuries, even amid Victorian prudery.

It seems to me that knowing obscenity when you see it is very dependent on the age you live in.

Me? I look forward to the return of the purity in dress styles so prevalent in Oliver Cromwell's time. Of course the American Bikini is not a bad substitute. We get not only breasts but bare arms, legs, and midriffs as well. Not to mention the occasional camel toe. So there are compensations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Money And The Women Who Date It

Women who date for money are finding it more difficult to get a date with the money they crave. But this is what really caught my eye.

Countless times I've been asked to explain "dating" to friends from Europe or the West Coast: the scrutinizing rounds of drinks and dinners, the game-playing, the jockeying for some sort of advantage. There's something deeply unappealing about the way New York women adopt the language of contracts when it comes to romance, wanting "commitment" instead of love. One friend, a financial adviser with plenty of cash, told me it showed "respect" for her when a man paid for dinner. Which I've never quite understood: If charging for the pleasure of one's company begets respect, why don't prostitutes get more of it?

A lot of it has to do with price. Bloomingdale shoppers get more respect than those looking for bargains at Big Lots.

H/T Instapundit

The Next Big Thing

In Secular Decline I looked at where we are in the business cycle. What I said basically was that semiconductors and the microprocessor advance were no longer providing excess profits. To a pretty fair extent the world has been computerized. Profit opportunities are declining.

So then comes the question: What will be the next big thing? The The Online Investing AI Blog linked has a nice graph of the business cycle. But let me cut to the chase.

Solar power. Fusion power. Mind-Machine interfaces. Nano-technology. Personalized medicine. Rapid prototyping.

They also mention "Smart AI-powered investing for the masses". Now I don't see how that can work. If they can identify above average opportunities reliably, the masses will all invest and there goes your above average opportunity.

As to the others. There are lots of opportunities in nano-technology. Which one? And yes, solar is probably one or ten breakthroughs away from being low cost enough to start capturing a lot of the electrical energy market. Except wind is currently lower cost and the cost reduction curve is more reliable. I can tell you, almost certain, that wind will become lower cost than coal fired electrical plants when wind turbines reach the 8 to 12 MW (peak) size. Right now the 5 MW (peak) size is just going into series production. That means that at the best wind sites the cost is below coal and at the worst it is above coal.

There are two problems with wind. All the best sites are in places (like North Dakota) where grid connections are sparse. And wind is intermittent. Which means that without storage its contribution is limited to about 10% of grid power.

Which points to two investment opportunities. The first company (GE? Westinghouse? Siemens?) to come out with 2 MV DC transmission equipment and 2 MV DC to AC conversion equipment (AC to DC is easy) will help bring wind from the upper Mid-West to the loads in the more populous states. It also gives rise to the possibility of wind going above 10% to perhaps 20% of grid power because of both wider generation averaging and load averaging.

So what is the second opportunity? Low cost very high power energy storage. Will it be batteries? Fuel cells? Flywheels? No one knows. What we know is that the technology will have low turn around losses (generation - storage - generation), very high energy capacity, reasonably long life (5 to 20 years), low losses over 24 to 72 hours of storage, and low cost per KWh stored (below 2¢ per KWh with the possibility of getting below .5¢ per KWh). A pretty tall order.

As for solar - because it is better matched to grid demands (high in the day low at night), and because of its greater predictability (when the sun shines) it can probably go to 20% to 30% of grid power before storage is a necessity.

In addition wind peaks during the low demand season of winter and sun peaks during the high demand season of summer. So the two forms of production are to a certain extent complimentary. However, solar peaks at noon and the load (air conditioning mostly) peaks at 3 PM. So economical 4 to 6 hour storage would be good. However, that storage would be mostly idle in the winter except for load leveling.

So what else will be needed? Smart grid equipment which can turn on and off loads like electric water heaters, refrigerators, and air conditioners to match supply and demand better over short intervals (say 15 to 30 minutes). If plug in hybrids become big they could be used for load leveling over short intervals as well allowing motor fuels (cellulostic ethanol?) to be used to arbitrage the high cost of day time electricity with the low cost of night time electricity. Everybody will become demand metered. And that is another opportunity.

Fusion power? There is no working prototype yet. Personalized medicine? Another 100 to 500 breakthroughs are needed. One of which is much lower cost genetic sequencing and the ability to produce required molecules in mass quantities (1 to 5 grams - which is a lot if you are making them a molecule at a time). Rapid prototyping? I saw a machine for sale a month or two ago that fits on a desktop that costs $5,000. A little pricey for a home that might only need 5 to 50 custom parts a month. And only good for small plastic parts in any case. To make such a system work you also need to be able to make metal parts too. Which means a small milling machine and a small lathe. Each of those is going to run another $5,000 or so with current technology and auxiliary equipment like clamps measuring tools etc.

Mind machine interfaces? Another 1,000 to 5,000 breakthroughs required.

Now what can we say about all these things? Progress is being made and some day in the next 5 to 20 years each will cross the 2% penetration threshold where they take off rapidly. OTOH there is danger too. If you can make your own molecules in a well stocked home lab, virus making is just a few computer codes away.

How will man, with his hunter gatherer brain, with all his passions, survive such access to power? That is the $640 trillion dollar question.

Marriage In Decline

Sara at Pal2Pal has a post up about the rage on both sides of the political spectrum over gay marriage. I'm not going to rehash the details. If you haven't heard the arguments especially with respect to the Mormon involvement in California's Proposition 8 read what Sara has to say. She has a long quote from Jonah Goldberg on the matter.

I'd like to look at a different aspect. The so called driving force behind the anti-gay marriage stance of so many: marriage is in trouble.

Jonah is right about marriage being in real trouble.

But guys wanting to get married to each other is the tail end of the horse. The real problem is divorce. Of course with so many divorced “leaders” in the Republican Party he can’t touch that.

And what is the answer to divorce given the current landscape (birth control, women in the work force, labor saving appliances, etc.)? Later marriage. Which would tend to argue for the Jewish solution: promiscuity in youth - fidelity with age. It is no longer true that Jews have the most pre-marital partners by a large margin so maybe society is working towards something Jews figured out a long time ago. The age of first marriage is creeping up in the general population. This is good.

So what is the cause of divorce? The washer-dryer combo. The electric iron. The automatic dishwasher. The old division of labor re: house hold chores no longer favors a lifetime commitment. Especially among youth who haven’t had time to figure out who they are.

Here is some very interesting source material on the subject:

Marriage In The Age of The Pill

Marriage In The Age of The Washer-Dryer

Excerpted from the book The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.

Cultural Maintenance

Now here is a story about a country that is serious about protecting its culture.

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean prosecutors on Wednesday demanded a popular actress who tried to overturn the country's law that criminalizes adultery be thrown in jail for a year and a half for having an affair, local media reported.

South Korean enacted its adultery law more than 50 years ago to protect women who had few rights in the male-dominated society but critics say now it is a draconian measure no longer fit for a country with an advanced civil and family court system.

Actress Ok So-ri's case has created a sensation in South Korea after she admitted to an affair with a singer and called on the country's Constitutional Court to overturn the statute that can send a person to jail for up to two years for adultery.

The first rule when dealing with any court is to never admit anything.

Ok's lawyers were also not immediately available for comment but they have said in a petition to Constitutional Court: "The adultery law ... has degenerated into a means of revenge by the spouse, rather than a means of saving a marriage."

Last month, the Constitutional Court said adultery damaged the social order and therefore was a criminal offence.

I wonder if Liz Taylor movies were ever popular in South Korea? That was one busy lady in her prime.

Sea Trade Cultures

I was discussing an article I posted at Classical Values, The al-Ameriki Tribe (also cross posted here at P&C), with some commenters and made this brilliant (well you know my opinion of myself) comment.

Only a moral people can have successful revolutions. Private property has to be a core value or the result is a degeneration into wholesale thievery. Socialism.

I think being a sea trade culture is critical. It tends to impose honest dealings across cultures and tribes. Tribal or factional cultures tend to degenerate into thievery.

So I thought to myself, that is an interesting line of thought. What is the influence of sea trade cultures on politics? So you know the first thing to do is to see if any one had written anything on "sea trade culture". Nothing. Zero. Bupkiss. Searching - "sea trade" culture - is a little better. About 117,000 items. Anything interesting?

I did find something on littoral culture.

The collapsing of Oceanic culture and politics, the affinities of community and the energies of colonial resistance has me thinking of the deforming imperial visions running through seascapes and littoral cultures. Gifts, affinities, and ships point me to not the land and sea, but to the Àscapes themselves. This, as theorist Kenneth Olwig reminds, is a derivation not unlike that of friendship or citizenship, which is clearly to note that it is a community notion. Thus a seascape is primarily and necessarily founded upon a community of memory, custom, and practice. This is a divided notion—between the place of memory, custom, and community, and that of the imperial power to view, from a dominant vision, "seascapes" themselves; in considering our themes we are radically implicated in these apparent disjunctures between the local and the global or imperial.

Equally to note is the critical observation that these "ships" are indeed literally "ships." That is, they are continuously mobile and negotiated constructions, bearing meaning yet dependent upon the familiars who create them—if we strongly consider such terms as "citizenship," with all of its evocations of the ship of state, we see uniquely how it is very much a question of "representation." In the image then, to represent the seascape, is also to struggle with the notion of representation—the politics of community, accountability, and voice, and the struggle over those seascapes which are unrepresented, which have no "ships," whether communities evoked, rights to be enjoyed or demanded, or mobile cultures in which to participate.

Typical academic speak. I think what he means to say is that seafaring has a rather definite culture attached to it. In other words he has restated the premise without adding any information.

I have done some more searching and haven't found anything like Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power On History" with respect to the influence of seafaring on politics and actual culture (as opposed to giving it a name - littoral culture - and letting it go at that). As far as I can tell what the scholars mean by "littoral culture" is that people have boats. There is no attempt to unify cultural/political constructions that are a result of such a culture. How does it influence law? Levels of trust? Clan behavior? Identity? It looks like a wide open field of study.

I have taken a look in some past articles on the advantages of safe trade routes to the general welfare in Decline and Fall and Desolation Row and
Makers vs Takers. But none of those touches on the effect of seafaring on politics and culture. I'm going to have to give this some more thought and research and see if I can add to the body of general knowledge.

Moral Relativism Wins

The New York Times has a bit up on the Canon (Culture) Wars and how they have affected academia. It centers around a discussion of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.

Here comes the punch line. And on the first page too!

All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a “loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy.” Nussbaum, who panned Bloom’s book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, “the main area of conflict is trying to make sure that the humanities get adequate funding from the central administration,” Nussbaum wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Our nation, like most nations of the world, is devaluing the humanities vis-à-vis science and technology, so constant vigilance is required lest these disciplines be cut.” Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and New Yorker staff writer who serves on Harvard’s curriculum reform committee, concurs: “The big question for humanists is, How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists? That’s been tough, really tough.”

The Professor is complaining that the people think the Humanities have no relevance. If she is a liberal she should be cheering that moral relativism has won. If no judgments can be made no need to teach judgment, eh? I guess the downside of that bothers the Professor. Isn't it ironic, just a bit, don't ya think?

Bloom was wrong about Rock 'n Roll though.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tim Leary And Ron Paul

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine takes a look at Timothy Leary.

Never too comfortable with politics (he dismissed student activists as "young men with menopausal minds" and proclaimed that LSD stood for "Let the State Disintegrate"), he nevertheless hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1988 for the very buttoned-down Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul (now a congressman from Texas).

I voted for Ron Paul for President. in 1988.

I got reminded of the Gillespie article by this Althouse article.

"Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different." LSD folkhero Owsley speaks. More:

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement....

He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library.

Those were the days of competing chemists. The Jefferson Airplane was supposed to have a Shell Oil chemist who grew his own ergot. It wasn't called Bezerkeley for nothing in those days.

Well just to get in the mood I have a Dead version of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away on in the background.

Oh yeah. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul.

However, I'm leaning Fred Thompson these days.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Rapid Social Change

I was doing my daily read of LGF and came across an interesting item on the Burka Band. An all girl band from Afghanistan. The music is kind of a bland techno, but the words of social commentary are in english and the visuals are interesting.

So I went looking in the comments to see if I could find out more. Commenter Peacekeeper gave a link to this site: Girl band in burka.

Here is the most interesting quote from the article.

The Burka Band has never performed in Afghanistan and at the moment the band is not active. During the Taliban regime music was totally forbidden, and women were not allowed to work. To sing in public could carry a death sentence. Today the country is still very conservative, and there is no market in Afghanistan for the Burka Band's music. The band members have to wait for a European or American record label to help them if they are to make a whole album one day.

- I'd like to play again, but right now it is not possible. Last year there was a big bomb at a concert here in Kabul , and lots of people are still against female singers because the religous leaders condemn it. It will probably take 10 years before we will have real girl bands here in Afghanistan , says Nargiz, who now works in an international organisation in Kabul.

From no music allowed to all girl bands in 10 or even 15 years is amazingly fast progress for a culture.

Given that this song was popular in Germany in 2003 it means that Afghanistan is well on the way to becoming at least a semi-modern country. It also points out the irresistability of Western and especially American culture. The old ways are dying.