Last month, I posted a blog on the theory that, based on both common sense and historical precedent, the way to bring about the end of Islamic Fundamentalism (and its associated terrorist tendencies) is to teach people to read.
Interesting developments have been transpiring in Islamic North Africa, where a grass-roots civil rebellion (with organization and publicity being managed primarily through Twitter, Facebook, etc.) brought about the resignation of an autocratic sovereign. While Tunisia is not an Islamic fundamentalist state (although it is 98% Muslim), it does share a great many tendencies of such states: weak economy, high unemployment, brazen corruption (to the point that the former government was often referred to as a 'kelptocracy'), widespread poverty, and extensive stratification of society, with the usual associated marginalization and "civil rights violations."
The people of Tunisia recently decided that they'd had enough, and protested (read: rioted) at levels sufficient to compel the President (who had been in place for decades, through the instrument of sham elections where his was often the only name on the ballot) to not only yield his seat, but also to flee the country. While it seems unquestionable that the protesters got a boost from extraterritorial interests, this change of power is remarkable in that it was CIVIL, and involved no overt action from anybody's military. Almost always, such sweeping changes in nations' political structure are based on military muscle, either from a foreign conquerer, or (much more often) through an internal coup d'etat. Ousted Tunisian President Ben-Ali himself came to power following a military coup in 1987. It is in fact exceedingly rare for PEOPLE to successfully take on their own government.
But it has happened.
Events in Tunisia show signs of shaking things up throughout the nearby world. Similar riots have happened in Algeria, and there has been widespread civil unrest in Jordan and Egypt as well. In Egypt, protests have included people setting themselves on fire, hypothetically emulating Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisia merchant who tacitly started the riots with a similar act, after Tunisian police confiscated his produce cart. Safe to say that the Muslim world as a whole is paying attention to what's been happening in Tunisia, and leaders are wondering how avidly their own populace is watching events.
Here's the part that I find interesting: like many Arab states, literacy in Tunisia has historically been very low, including the period (up until 1950) where it was a French protectorate. But since Tunisia gained sovereignty in 1950, every generation has seen marked increase in literacy. Among the youngest generation for which census information is available - those born in 1980-1984 - over 96% percent are literate in Arabic, and about three-quarters can read French as well. Even among women - almost always marginalized in Muslim states - over 90% are literate in Arabic, and 70% are additionally literate in French. (Ken Walters, International Journal of the Society of Language 163 (2003), pp. 85-87.) These numbers are superb for a tacit third-world country, and this is the demographic - the middle segment of the populace, currently in their 20s and 30s - who are the driving force behind this rebellion against an autocratic regime. Educated people in Tunisia decided that their government really DOESN'T know better, and did something about it.
So, as I was saying before. If the United States (and/or the world as a whole) wants to cut down the power of monolithic, autocratic, fundamentalist states, we should make every possible effort to teach people living under those states to read. It takes generations, but it works.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Astrological Drama
Every few years or so, people in the media get around to noticing things that are new news to them, but which essentially amount to the ideas that water is wet and that the sky is blue. This week, there's apparently some big to-do about how the dates for the Zodiac have changed. About how, for example, someone who has always considered themselves to be a Virgo might now be a Leo, or any of the 11 other retrograde changes in someone's sign (Leo to Cancer, Cancer to Gemini, Gemini to Taurus, Taurus to Aries, etc.).
This is not really a big deal or cosmic event, and any astronomer and/or astrologer - be they amateur or professional - will just roll their eyes and sigh when the concept is mentioned. But journalists looking for readers tend to not know or care about actual facts, so they find a way to make it into a big deal when they can't find anything else to write about. Gotta love human nature, eh?
In any rate, the tacit "change" in the dates of astrological signs is the result of something call the Procession of the Equinoxes, which has been going on since the formation of our solar system. Over the course of a year, the sun moves through the entire 12 constellations of the zodiac in the sky, and traditionally your "sign" would be the constellation in which the sun stood on the day of your birth. Historical consensus is that the zodiac was developed by the Babylonians, about 3000 years ago. At that time, the start of Aries (which was the first day of the astrological year, and also the first day of spring) was measured by two astronomical events that essentially coincided. First, the sun - in its progression through the constellations that it makes (roughly) every year - passed from the area of stars that marked the constellation Pisces into the area of starts that marked Aries. Second, on about the same day, the sun crossed the ecliptic from south to north, which it does once every year, at the spring equinox. In ancient times, that day was called the "First point of Aries," and marked both the start of spring, and the start of the period where the sun was in the constellation Aries. Because the position of the sun and earth and stars in their eternal dance all lined up in that way at that time (3000 years ago), it was deemed important, and was set as the starting point of the Zodiac.
The problem is that we measure years based on the position of the earth relative to the SUN, rather than relative to the STARS. As we measure calendar years, the defining points are not the location of the sun in any given constellation, but instead are the equinoxes and solstices; the changing of the seasons. Because of the physics of planetary movement, there is a slight discrepancy between one calendar year (the time it takes the earth to make one complete orbit of the sun) and one "sidereal" year (the time is takes for the sun to make one complete circuit through the sky's constellations).
What this means is that there is a slight change in the position of the sun relative the the stars from year to year, called the procession of the equinoxes. For example - and as above - 3,000 years ago, the sun (when viewed from earth) passed from the area of the constellation Pisces into the area of the constellation Aries on about March 20, the vernal equinox. But if you happen to be paying attention to the sky this year (2011), the sun doesn't pass from Pisces into Aries until around April 18, weeks after the equinox (which is still on March 20). This is because in the last 3,000 years, the procession of the equinoxes means the stars behind the sun have slowly changed position, by about one degree every 72 years.
So the question is what day does someone's "sign" begin or end? Way back at the creation of the zodiac, that was an easy answer: the first day of Aries was BOTH the spring equinox, and the day that the sun passed from the constellation Pisces into the constellation Aries. But with the procession of the equinoxes, those two events no longer coincide: the spring equinox is now on March 20, but the sun doesn't pass from Pisces into Aries until April 18.
Most western astrology is (and has always been) based on the position that the start of the zodiac year (and the first day of Aries) is the spring equinox, rather than the date that the sun actually passes from Pisces into Aries. Since the equinox essentially always happens on March 20, and since the passage of seasons are much more noticeable here on earth than the movement of distant stars, we generally measure the zodiac the same way we measure years: by the SUN, not by the STARS.
So, the sun probably will not be in your "sign" on your birthday this year. But the sun was probably not in your "sign" on the actual day of your birth either. Since the calendar year and the zodiac year differ by less than one day every 70 years, the location of the sun relative to the stars on any given day is about the same today as it has been for decades. It's only when you measure time in centuries or millennium that the procession of equinoxes results in changes that the human eye can discern.
Periodic articles about signs "changing" reflect this difference in dates of the two central astronomical events: the equinox and the passage of the sun into the constellation Aries. All of the posts you see about the "new" dates for various signs are simply the dates that the sun is present in the various constellations. Use of those dates to define astrological signs ignores a central point of tropical astrology, which is that the first day of Aries is BY DEFINITION the spring equinox, with the other signs following in their various turns. Eventually, the procession of the equinoxes means that we will get back to square one, where the sun moves into the constellation Aries from the constellation Pisces on the same day as the spring equinox. But it is going to take a while, since the procession of the equinoxes makes one cycle every 26,000 years. We still have about 23,000 to go before we're back to that point.
In the meantime, your "sign" is still the same, so long as you apply the same definition of "sign" as you've been using your whole life, which is almost certainly based on the equinoxes. Regardless of the position of the stars bearing the same name as the "sign," Aries - by definition - starts at the spring equinox. If you want to calculate your sign based on the position of the stars rather than by the position of the sun (which is called the sidereal zodiac, as opposed to the tropical zodiac), then you can change your "sign." But even then, you've been that sign for your entire life, and the only thing you're actually changing is the definition you apply.
Hopefully I'm making this clear. But if not, the overwhelming point to take away from all this is that a slow news day will cause bored writers and columnists to try and make a big deal about pretty much anything, including astronomical/astrological points that have been in place since before any of us were born.
This is not really a big deal or cosmic event, and any astronomer and/or astrologer - be they amateur or professional - will just roll their eyes and sigh when the concept is mentioned. But journalists looking for readers tend to not know or care about actual facts, so they find a way to make it into a big deal when they can't find anything else to write about. Gotta love human nature, eh?
In any rate, the tacit "change" in the dates of astrological signs is the result of something call the Procession of the Equinoxes, which has been going on since the formation of our solar system. Over the course of a year, the sun moves through the entire 12 constellations of the zodiac in the sky, and traditionally your "sign" would be the constellation in which the sun stood on the day of your birth. Historical consensus is that the zodiac was developed by the Babylonians, about 3000 years ago. At that time, the start of Aries (which was the first day of the astrological year, and also the first day of spring) was measured by two astronomical events that essentially coincided. First, the sun - in its progression through the constellations that it makes (roughly) every year - passed from the area of stars that marked the constellation Pisces into the area of starts that marked Aries. Second, on about the same day, the sun crossed the ecliptic from south to north, which it does once every year, at the spring equinox. In ancient times, that day was called the "First point of Aries," and marked both the start of spring, and the start of the period where the sun was in the constellation Aries. Because the position of the sun and earth and stars in their eternal dance all lined up in that way at that time (3000 years ago), it was deemed important, and was set as the starting point of the Zodiac.
The problem is that we measure years based on the position of the earth relative to the SUN, rather than relative to the STARS. As we measure calendar years, the defining points are not the location of the sun in any given constellation, but instead are the equinoxes and solstices; the changing of the seasons. Because of the physics of planetary movement, there is a slight discrepancy between one calendar year (the time it takes the earth to make one complete orbit of the sun) and one "sidereal" year (the time is takes for the sun to make one complete circuit through the sky's constellations).
What this means is that there is a slight change in the position of the sun relative the the stars from year to year, called the procession of the equinoxes. For example - and as above - 3,000 years ago, the sun (when viewed from earth) passed from the area of the constellation Pisces into the area of the constellation Aries on about March 20, the vernal equinox. But if you happen to be paying attention to the sky this year (2011), the sun doesn't pass from Pisces into Aries until around April 18, weeks after the equinox (which is still on March 20). This is because in the last 3,000 years, the procession of the equinoxes means the stars behind the sun have slowly changed position, by about one degree every 72 years.
So the question is what day does someone's "sign" begin or end? Way back at the creation of the zodiac, that was an easy answer: the first day of Aries was BOTH the spring equinox, and the day that the sun passed from the constellation Pisces into the constellation Aries. But with the procession of the equinoxes, those two events no longer coincide: the spring equinox is now on March 20, but the sun doesn't pass from Pisces into Aries until April 18.
Most western astrology is (and has always been) based on the position that the start of the zodiac year (and the first day of Aries) is the spring equinox, rather than the date that the sun actually passes from Pisces into Aries. Since the equinox essentially always happens on March 20, and since the passage of seasons are much more noticeable here on earth than the movement of distant stars, we generally measure the zodiac the same way we measure years: by the SUN, not by the STARS.
So, the sun probably will not be in your "sign" on your birthday this year. But the sun was probably not in your "sign" on the actual day of your birth either. Since the calendar year and the zodiac year differ by less than one day every 70 years, the location of the sun relative to the stars on any given day is about the same today as it has been for decades. It's only when you measure time in centuries or millennium that the procession of equinoxes results in changes that the human eye can discern.
Periodic articles about signs "changing" reflect this difference in dates of the two central astronomical events: the equinox and the passage of the sun into the constellation Aries. All of the posts you see about the "new" dates for various signs are simply the dates that the sun is present in the various constellations. Use of those dates to define astrological signs ignores a central point of tropical astrology, which is that the first day of Aries is BY DEFINITION the spring equinox, with the other signs following in their various turns. Eventually, the procession of the equinoxes means that we will get back to square one, where the sun moves into the constellation Aries from the constellation Pisces on the same day as the spring equinox. But it is going to take a while, since the procession of the equinoxes makes one cycle every 26,000 years. We still have about 23,000 to go before we're back to that point.
In the meantime, your "sign" is still the same, so long as you apply the same definition of "sign" as you've been using your whole life, which is almost certainly based on the equinoxes. Regardless of the position of the stars bearing the same name as the "sign," Aries - by definition - starts at the spring equinox. If you want to calculate your sign based on the position of the stars rather than by the position of the sun (which is called the sidereal zodiac, as opposed to the tropical zodiac), then you can change your "sign." But even then, you've been that sign for your entire life, and the only thing you're actually changing is the definition you apply.
Hopefully I'm making this clear. But if not, the overwhelming point to take away from all this is that a slow news day will cause bored writers and columnists to try and make a big deal about pretty much anything, including astronomical/astrological points that have been in place since before any of us were born.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
The Threat of Manbearpig, and the Gore Effect
There are a great many things that threaten ongoing large-scale human life on this planet. Really, there are. All you have to do is spend some time watching the Discovery Channel or any of its progeny, all of which seem to base their marketing strategy on propagation and exploitation of paranoia. What with American's ongoing fascination with morbidity, they seem to be doing okay. After all, why would people tune in to something as boring as a CNN report on dozens killed and a hundred thousands homeless from flooding in Brisbane? What people really want to watch is an analysis about how a planet-killing asteroid could be hurtling towards the earth this very moment at 9 billion miles an hour, poised to snuff out all higher life on this planet. Who cares about economic calamity in Europe or rioting in Tunisia when there's programming available about possible ways that the Mayan end-of-time prediction might come to pass next year. Never mind mudslides killing hundreds in Brazil, don't you know that the entire Yellowstone caldera is poised to blow, plunging the world into a century of darkness? And lets not forget about bird flu. And swine flu.
Of course, the prospect of cosmic, geologic, or viral calamity notwithstanding, it's safe to say that the greatest threat to ongoing human life on this planet is probably humanity itself. This brings us to my my personal favorite extinction myth: global warming. My favorite because it manages to do the absolute most with the absolute least of any secular disaster theory in human history, and because - given that it's based on human activities - it can actually be parleyed into a tool to control peoples' minds and/or activities. I'm sure you've heard the sales pitch: "YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND AND BELIEVE THAT THIS IS A PROBLEM!!!" This expression is almost always followed closely by: "DO WHAT I SAY, OR ELSE OUR CHILDREN ARE DOOMED!!!" In fact, the latter usually follows the former so closely that no verifiable or quantifiable scientific support is ever offered proving that the problem exists at any more than a hypothetical level. But we can't dwell on that now, we don't have time! To stave off the calamity looming in the next century, we need to get people toeing the line we set RIGHT NOW!
Ahhh, human nature at its finest.
Regardless of what pundits say, the only scientifically verifiable point about the cumulative effect of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere is that they have kept Al Gore socially relevant well past his use-by date, by offering the masses nothing more substantial than fear-mongering and portents of dread. Good on him for avoiding actual work by recycling the same tactics of just about every fire-and-brimstone religion/personality cult in human history. And he does score points for coming through with some fuzzy-science reason, rather than the traditional tidings of the Second Coming, pending race war, or opposing the New World Order. That some scientists are willing to say that his tidings of woe are scientifically possible sets him apart from Charles Manson or Jim Jones, even if it doesn't set him any higher than Charles Manson or Jim Jones.
Unfortunately, all signs point towards Al actually believing the bullshit he's spewing, and - equally unfortunately - the nature of Al's bullshit means that he's unlikely to do us the favor of trying to hitch a ride on the tail of Hale-Bopp (google it). Alas, and in the true spirit of his Democratic Party roots, Al is going to save us from ourselves, whether we like it or not. All that we have to do is pony up billions to support his programs, change our entire lives and economy to match his green utopia ideas/ideals, and acknowledge that he's right and everyone else is wrong. And how could he be wrong? He was the one that took the initiative in inventing the Internet, for Gods sake!
What a fucking douche bag.
As recently as 25 years ago, the scientific community was abuzz with the possibility of a coming ice age. Whoops. But trust them, they've got it right this time! After all, a newly completed study has found that even if all industrial emissions of greenhouse gases cease by 2100, earth's sea-level will rise by 13 feet by the year 3000! Never mind that the best we can manage is an educated guess as to whether we'll get rain or sunshine next week. Never mind that we have no means whatsoever to even estimate locations, magnitudes, or paths of hurricanes or tornadoes that might happen next year. Trust us when we tell you that we're going to be totally fucked in 1,000 years, UNLESS WE ACT NOW.
If you want some hilarious reading, google "Gore Effect." It turns out that there is a statistical correlation between Al Gore appearing at an area to address global warming, and that area immediately or concurrently suffering unseasonably cold weather. I'm not asserting that there is a causal link between the two. That would imply the work of a Higher Power with a truly divine sense of humor, a point I'll not trumpet, even though I happen to believe it.
So I'm not saying that there is a causal relationship between Al speaking and local cold weather following. I'm just observing that there is a statistically demonstrable relationship between the two. This is significant, since it's exactly those sort of statistical relationships that Al's minions rely on in creating their models and projections of future meteorologic trends and events. Nobody really knows how or why global weather works the way it does. Scientists just have documentation and equations which show that weather tends to follow certain trends, and that certain events tend to work (or at least portend) demonstrable changes on or in such trends. But if general statistical relationships can be relied on in forming weather projections, the Gore Effect (as such a relationship) indicates that we already have a solution for global warming. We just have to schedule more speaking engagements for Al, to enjoy the cold weather that tends to follow him. Reliance on the Gore Effect as a solution for global warming is about as scientifically supportable as asserting global warming as a realistic threat to humanity.
Science is a good thing, and can demonstrate all sorts of verifiable explanations for all sorts of observable events. But the fact of the matter is that when the goal is to assess actions and interactions of ANYTHING too large to be studied in the confines of a controlled lab environment, the greatest controlling force in most studies is the belief and expectations of whatever scientist (or other figure) is conducting the analysis. This is important to keep in mind whenever you hear hear analysis of weather, economics, politics, or relationships. In all of those areas, the interaction of the various forces drastically exceed our ability to comprehend the equation, much less interpret definitively the effects of changes in any single factor. While studies of weather, economic, politics, and relationships does enjoy status as sciences, there's a reason those fields are differentiable from fields like chemistry, physics, or any "hard" science where tests can be performed under controlled conditions. Absent the ability to test theories under controlled conditions, "sciences" are largely just educated conjecture based on statistical trends, rather than on demonstrable relationships.
Keep this in mind when reading the results of soft-science research studies. (Especially ones where the scientists proclaim that they found evidence to support their own pet theories, since such "studies" are almost always fudged to reach the conclusions the "scientist" wants to find.) Until human consciousness and intelligence grows large enough to encompass the equations as a whole, all those studies are just a step above astrology.
No denying the entertainment value, though.
Of course, the prospect of cosmic, geologic, or viral calamity notwithstanding, it's safe to say that the greatest threat to ongoing human life on this planet is probably humanity itself. This brings us to my my personal favorite extinction myth: global warming. My favorite because it manages to do the absolute most with the absolute least of any secular disaster theory in human history, and because - given that it's based on human activities - it can actually be parleyed into a tool to control peoples' minds and/or activities. I'm sure you've heard the sales pitch: "YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND AND BELIEVE THAT THIS IS A PROBLEM!!!" This expression is almost always followed closely by: "DO WHAT I SAY, OR ELSE OUR CHILDREN ARE DOOMED!!!" In fact, the latter usually follows the former so closely that no verifiable or quantifiable scientific support is ever offered proving that the problem exists at any more than a hypothetical level. But we can't dwell on that now, we don't have time! To stave off the calamity looming in the next century, we need to get people toeing the line we set RIGHT NOW!
Ahhh, human nature at its finest.
Regardless of what pundits say, the only scientifically verifiable point about the cumulative effect of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere is that they have kept Al Gore socially relevant well past his use-by date, by offering the masses nothing more substantial than fear-mongering and portents of dread. Good on him for avoiding actual work by recycling the same tactics of just about every fire-and-brimstone religion/personality cult in human history. And he does score points for coming through with some fuzzy-science reason, rather than the traditional tidings of the Second Coming, pending race war, or opposing the New World Order. That some scientists are willing to say that his tidings of woe are scientifically possible sets him apart from Charles Manson or Jim Jones, even if it doesn't set him any higher than Charles Manson or Jim Jones.
Unfortunately, all signs point towards Al actually believing the bullshit he's spewing, and - equally unfortunately - the nature of Al's bullshit means that he's unlikely to do us the favor of trying to hitch a ride on the tail of Hale-Bopp (google it). Alas, and in the true spirit of his Democratic Party roots, Al is going to save us from ourselves, whether we like it or not. All that we have to do is pony up billions to support his programs, change our entire lives and economy to match his green utopia ideas/ideals, and acknowledge that he's right and everyone else is wrong. And how could he be wrong? He was the one that took the initiative in inventing the Internet, for Gods sake!
What a fucking douche bag.
As recently as 25 years ago, the scientific community was abuzz with the possibility of a coming ice age. Whoops. But trust them, they've got it right this time! After all, a newly completed study has found that even if all industrial emissions of greenhouse gases cease by 2100, earth's sea-level will rise by 13 feet by the year 3000! Never mind that the best we can manage is an educated guess as to whether we'll get rain or sunshine next week. Never mind that we have no means whatsoever to even estimate locations, magnitudes, or paths of hurricanes or tornadoes that might happen next year. Trust us when we tell you that we're going to be totally fucked in 1,000 years, UNLESS WE ACT NOW.
If you want some hilarious reading, google "Gore Effect." It turns out that there is a statistical correlation between Al Gore appearing at an area to address global warming, and that area immediately or concurrently suffering unseasonably cold weather. I'm not asserting that there is a causal link between the two. That would imply the work of a Higher Power with a truly divine sense of humor, a point I'll not trumpet, even though I happen to believe it.
So I'm not saying that there is a causal relationship between Al speaking and local cold weather following. I'm just observing that there is a statistically demonstrable relationship between the two. This is significant, since it's exactly those sort of statistical relationships that Al's minions rely on in creating their models and projections of future meteorologic trends and events. Nobody really knows how or why global weather works the way it does. Scientists just have documentation and equations which show that weather tends to follow certain trends, and that certain events tend to work (or at least portend) demonstrable changes on or in such trends. But if general statistical relationships can be relied on in forming weather projections, the Gore Effect (as such a relationship) indicates that we already have a solution for global warming. We just have to schedule more speaking engagements for Al, to enjoy the cold weather that tends to follow him. Reliance on the Gore Effect as a solution for global warming is about as scientifically supportable as asserting global warming as a realistic threat to humanity.
Science is a good thing, and can demonstrate all sorts of verifiable explanations for all sorts of observable events. But the fact of the matter is that when the goal is to assess actions and interactions of ANYTHING too large to be studied in the confines of a controlled lab environment, the greatest controlling force in most studies is the belief and expectations of whatever scientist (or other figure) is conducting the analysis. This is important to keep in mind whenever you hear hear analysis of weather, economics, politics, or relationships. In all of those areas, the interaction of the various forces drastically exceed our ability to comprehend the equation, much less interpret definitively the effects of changes in any single factor. While studies of weather, economic, politics, and relationships does enjoy status as sciences, there's a reason those fields are differentiable from fields like chemistry, physics, or any "hard" science where tests can be performed under controlled conditions. Absent the ability to test theories under controlled conditions, "sciences" are largely just educated conjecture based on statistical trends, rather than on demonstrable relationships.
Keep this in mind when reading the results of soft-science research studies. (Especially ones where the scientists proclaim that they found evidence to support their own pet theories, since such "studies" are almost always fudged to reach the conclusions the "scientist" wants to find.) Until human consciousness and intelligence grows large enough to encompass the equations as a whole, all those studies are just a step above astrology.
No denying the entertainment value, though.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Religious History, And The Solution for Terrorism
The United States is having some ongoing minor problems with terrorism. And I use minor as a relative term, in that the terrorists - notwithstanding having had only limited success in waging any sort of meaningful "war" against the United States - have had some success in inspiring terror among the United States populace. Which is largely irrational, as the average American citizen is statistically much more likely to fall victim to death by carjacking or home-invasion than they are to international (or even domestic) terrorism.
For a variety of reasons, the terrorists attacks are not going to have substantial effect on United States, except for monies spent towards tracking down and killing the terrorists in question and/or those who aid or support them. It is a documented historical fact that when a nation/state intentionally wages war against the civilian populace of the tacit "enemy," they will almost always lose. I could go into great depth if anyone is interested, but to briefly summarize: It didn't work for the Romans in Germania. It didn't work for the English (under Cromwell) in Ireland (and indeed, still doesn't work). It didn't work for the Tamil Separatist Tigers in Sri Lanka (google it: the Tigers - not Muslim arabs - were the true pioneers of suicide bombing). It didn't work for the Americans in Vietnam. It's not going to work for Islamic Fundamentalists in America.
Even setting aside the historical precedent, all you really have to do is consider terrorism rationally. Terrorism is the intentional use of violence against non-combatants with the intention of winning political gain. But regardless of the political ends sought in the latter part of the definition, the former part of the definition precludes any meaningful success. How do you expect to prevail when you act so as to make every single man, woman, and child of a population into an overt and active enemy? How do you expect the fathers, husbands, and sons of such population to react in response to your efforts? When the game plan is to kill a nation's women, children, and non-combatants, why would anyone possibly expect the enemy to cower in submission, rather than to pursue the attackers to the ends of the earth by every means at their disposal? Unless the political end the terrorists seek is to inspire the enemy to kill the terrorists at any cost, the political goal - any political goal - of the terrorists WILL FAIL. For all the occasions that is has been pursued (which are many), the idea of terrorism as a means to an end overlooks critical and obvious aspects of human nature.
That having been said, terrorism is a very real problem, and it would be nice to find some sort of expedient solution. Meaning a solution that doesn't require the expenditure of trillions of dollars, billions of soldier man-hours, and thousands of slain servicemen to implement. It is not practicable to kill every single terrorist who is inclined to air his grievances in public with high explosives, attractive as the option may be to the family members of World Trade Center fatalities.
Generally speaking, and setting aside political correctness in favor of honesty, most terrorist attacks against the United States grow from Islamic Fundamantalism. While Usama Bin Laden is a Saudi Prince, and while many of the upper leadership of al Queda are educated men pursuing socio-political agendas, they are not the ones blowing themselves up. They're too smart for that. The ones who do the killing (including killing themselves) are typically single, lower-middle class, highly religious men. The social structure of the middle-east means that there are an effectively infinite number of such men: they tend to be the younger sons of large families, without substantial economic prospects, and - failing substantial income - lack the ability to afford a wife and family. Their prospects in this world are not glowing or spectacular, and a long, happy life is often a fairy tale. Average life expectancy in Afghanistan, for example, is under 45 years.
Absent substantial prospects in this life, these men are fairly ripe for manipulation, based on the promise of better things in the next life. Enter the whole deal with rivers of honey and 40 virgins for anyone who dies in the service of Allah against the infidel. People want to believe it, so they toe to line. So long as there are people willing to blow themselves up to send the message penned by their socio-political controllers, terrorism is going to continue. The political agendas are ALWAYS going to be there, so the way to combat terrorism is at the grass-roots. Gotta either lessen the power of the Mighty, to ease their control over the masses, or else increase the power of the masses, to reach the same ends.
This is tough, since most Americans have problems even grasping the depth of the religious fervor involved. Notwithstanding our own frustration-based social problems (gangs, drugs, youth violence, etc.), most Americans cannot conceive of a life so frustrating, bleak, and devoid of prospects as to get us to entertain the idea of blowing ourselves up for God. Most citizens of western nations, hearing of frustration and angst as basis for that degree of motivation, will short-circuit to thinking that it's a crock of shit, and that the believers in question are simply nut-jobs. But even as a member of a "modern" society, there's no denying that it's easy to fall under the sway of charismatic people who tell you that everything is going to be all right and things are going to be wonderful, if you just read this book/follow this diet/blow up this Israeli cafe. American devotion to Tony Robins, Oprah, the Church of Scientology, etc., differs from Islamic fundamentalism only in two substantial respects. First, Americans are too comfortable and hedonistic to be in a rush to shuffle off the mortal coil as martyrs. And second, most Americans are educated and cosmopolitan enough to be skeptical about religious figures actually having some sort of hot-line to God, through which they receive holy directives.
But that wasn't always the case among western societies. Google "Crusades." Or "Spanish Inquisition." Or, more recently, "Jonestown." It is human nature to believe the unbelievable, especially where such efforts are required to provide explanation for the unknown and/or ill events. The ancient Greeks/Norse/etc. didn't know that lightning was the equalization exchange of static electrical inequalities between earth and sky. Thus, they needed Zeus/Thor/etc. to provide them with an explanation they could believe in. Likewise (and persisting through the present) there is the question "where do we go when we die," which is hands down, bar none, and without question mankind's greatest and most exploitable philosophical insecurity. It bothers us, so naturally, we enjoy (or at least tolerate) the company of those that tell us that things are going to be all right. Over time, and in an excellent example of human nature, the shamans and priests married their "knowledge" of arcane points to quality ritual showmanship, and gained enough adherents that they no longer needed to serve any actual purpose nor do any actual work.
Built upon the idea that they were closer to God than you were, and on the parallel idea that if you wanted to go to heaven, you'd better toe the line they set, the Roman Catholic Church was the central political force in Europe for about a millennium, holding at least as much sway over the day-to-day lives of the populace as does modern Islamic sects over their adherents. The really interesting part with the Holy Roman Empire was that through most of this period of dominion, people attending church on any given Sunday had only the vaguest idea of what was being said and done in all the elaborate rituals. Those rituals were performed in Latin and/or Greek. When readings were done from the bible, those readings were also in Latin and/or Greek, from books dating back to the early Christian empire in Byzantium, which was an outgrowth of Rome. Suffice to say that up until the 16th Century, the people sitting in the pews and filling the Church of Rome's collections plates generally didn't have a clue what was being said from the pulpit, except for the parts were they were told that they'd better listen up and do as they were told unless they wanted to burn in hell. Must've been believable. The priests clearly knew a lot of things that everyman didn't, and those rituals sure were elaborate. So people toed the line, and besides living their lives how the Church told them to, they also went to war because the Church told them to. Again, google "crusades."
But it didn't last, and the end came surprising quickly. Interestingly, the decline of the Church as the grass-roots power in Europe was not based so much on schisms within the Church as it was based on the removal of the centuries-old mysteries in which the Church had cloaked itself. It is not at all coincidence that the rise of Protestantism (and subsequent civil and holy wars in much of Europe) coincided with the first publications of bibles written in modern languages (notably Martin Luther's German translation in 1522 and William Tyndale's English New Testament Bible in 1525). Prior to this, and as above, substantially all bibles had been in Greek or Latin, including the first book ever to see large-scale mechanical printing, the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, which was in Vulgate Latin.
Availability of scriptures in common tongues led to interesting socio-religious developments, like people standing at the back of 16th Century church proceedings, reading the English translation of scriptures aloud, concurrently with the Preacher's reading in Latin, up in the pulpit. While such things would historically have resulted in the offender being set on fire, political developments outside the cloisters meant that such religious dissidents enjoying protection from On High. Specifically, England's Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and couldn't get the Pope to grant him one. So (in 1534) he told the Roman Catholic Church to fuck off, and founded the Church of England, with Himself at the head. To rally popular support away from the Roman Catholic Establishment, he needed to show the world that the Holy Roman Empire was mostly just a bunch of corrupt political hacks and autocrats hiding under vestments. (Google "Borgia.") Which was not hard. To do so, he supported and sponsored all sorts of covert and overt efforts to turn Christianity from some esoteric thing conducted in dead languages into something understandable and accessible to the masses. Although he is said to have regretted it later, his efforts to get laid with a different woman than his wife resulted in broad and systematic dissemination of the idea that the Roman Catholic Priests and Preachers didn't really have access to God or to the divine workings of the universe. They just knew another language. The subtext was that with the newly published (modern language) versions of the scriptures, people could still have faith, without the oppressive mandates of the Church of Rome. And, of course, Hank the Eighth could have his divorce, Papal approval or no.
As an interesting and relevant footnote, the publication of common-language translations of the bible spurred massive grass-roots intellectualism in Western Europe. Languages were standardized. (Especially in Germany, by the Luther bible; previous to its publication there were multiple German dialects, based on Germany's history as a loose affiliation of principalities, each with its own tongue. After 1522, Germans adopted a common tongue, so they could read the bible.) Literacy rates soared. Whereas only the upper-class could afford a full classical education to read the Bible in Latin or Greek, lots of people - down to artisans and tradesmen - could provide their children with the ability to read a "modern" language. And they did. To the point that a sizable portion of the populace became smart enough to be skeptical about any man claiming to be God's proxy. For people who can't read, books are magical. For people who can, they're just words on a page.
Besides the mean increase in popular intellect and related rise in educated skepticism, literacy would in turn lead to another domino falling: the rise of widespread literature to challenge the bible as humanity's tacit seminal written work. Shakespeare's father was a tradesmen (a glover), who would probably have been unable to send little Billy to Oxford to learn Greek (especially since Billy was the third of eight children). But Billy did learn to read and write at his local grammar school. You might say he put his skills to use.
Thus, in the late 16th century, the bible itself would come under indirect attack, since it was surpassed as the best read available. Historically, christianity was every bit as myopic as Islam in the idea that reading anything other than the scriptures was, at best, a waste of time ("Either it agrees with the bible, in which case it is extraneous, or else it disagrees with the bible, in which case it is blasphemy"). With the rise of literacy and literature (and with further development of the printing press), other stories arose to compete for readers' attention. Shakespeare was doing his best work in the late 16th Century, with the first published editions of Hamlet dating to about 1599. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the same period, and German literature (somewhat slowed by its still-diverse dialects) was developing as well, highlighted by the Baroque period and the early Faustian tales.
Of course, the Church was not pleased at having lost its veritable monopoly over the actual content of the scriptures, much less with all that pesky free-thinking and intellectual skepticism that came from a literate populace. William Tyndale never lived to see any of these literary developments: he was arrested by Church authorities, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. Martin Luther was allowed to live, since he had a big enough following that he would be dangerous as a martyr, and had already been excommunicated (in 1521) prior to publishing his Germanic bible. In any rate, the damage had been done. People under the Church's sway started doing the last thing that the church wanted them to do: they stopped being impressed with the rituals and dogma, and started thinking for themselves. Less than 100 years from the Bible having been illegible to nearly all church-goers, church-goers were themselves creating literary masterpieces of their own.
When that happened, the end was inevitable, since the Church - ever fundamentally traditionalist - dug in its heels rather than bending to fit the times. In 1616 (ironically the year that both Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on the same day) Galileo went to Rome, to try and convince the Church that Copernicus was right about that whole helocentricism thing. He argued to the Pope that the Church should acknowledge such obvious scientific truths, regardless of what might be laid out in Psalms, Chronicles, and/or Ecclesiastes. Alas, alack, the Church didn't want to hear it. They had their hands full with upstart Protestant figures, culminating in Sweden's King Gustav Augustus, whose (Protestant) armies would shortly be rolling through (previously Catholic) central Europe, kicking that collective asses of the Catholic armies that were supposed to have God on their side. Needing to appear strong in the face of attacks on the Church and the Bible, and in the interest of preserving the monolithic image of the Catholic Church as the hand of God on earth, the Pope Decreed accordingly. Galileo spent most the remainder of his life under house arrest, with his published works declared heretic. This notwithstanding that his principles of a heliocentric solar system could be observed and verified by anyone, largely without even use of a telescope.
With the management of the whole Galileo thing, the Church utterly and truly lost the intellectuals of Europe. Turns out that you lose credibility when you demonstrate that you're full of shit. Hell, if the Church can't get a simply orbital ellipse straight, how they hell could they claim understanding of something like the immortal soul? In any rate, the end of the Church as the great power in Europe was fast coming after that, since the professional academics were responsible for providing educations for the upper crusts of society. You can imagine the sort of opinion they had of the Church and its tenets, when the Church Ordered that one plus one does not equal two. Safe to say that the people they were educating might have picked up on the idea that the Church might not actually be the divine conduit it claimed to be. So, while it would remain intact through the present, The Holy Roman Empire was done as the controlling power over people's lives. It yielded substantially all claims of sovereignty over both people and nations in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which treaties also included the western world's first codification of any substantial right to freedom of religion.
Applying these historical precedents to current problems in the Middle East: if you want to reduce religious fervor and fanaticism, the thing to do is teach people to read. Get enough people reading and writing, and the culture is going to wax skeptical about religious mysticism. They're going to create great literary works to surpass the ancient (cryptic and/or outdated) religious texts in the minds of the people. Get the people smart enough to ask pointed questions, to which they will not accept "because the Book says so" as an acceptable answer. However subtly it might be presented, the proposal that turns disaffected Arab men into terrorists is: "If you blow yourself up to kill people you've never met, you will go to heaven. Trust me." Honestly, should it really be difficult to educate people enough for them to be skeptical when presented with that message?
Alas, we don't seem to be making much progress, and might even be going backwards. If you rank the world's 180-some nations in order of their literacy rate, Saudi Arabia is 116th. Iran is 121st. Egypt is 148th. Pakistan, at 163rd, has about the world's lowest literacy rate outside of Africa. No figures are currently available for Iraq or Afghanistan, what with large-scale disruption of their education system from recent wars. But suffice to say that current breakdowns of the education systems and concurrent low literacy rates suggest that the next 20 years (at least) will find no shortage of disaffected Iraqi and/or Afghan males who follow the orders of their church without question.
With regard to dissemination in the Arab world of home-grown literature, the situation is equally bleak. The 20th Century did see a tacit renaissance of Arab literature (the nahda period), but the world's pre-eminent Muslim author is probably Salman Rushdie (google him), who has a death sentence outstanding in Iran, for heresy. For the most part, the Arab world has not had a great storyteller since Scheherazade. With low literacy rates, the likelihood of a transcendental author of the caliber of Shakespeare (or Cervantes, or Hemingway, or Murasaki, or Flaubert, or whoever) appearing is relatively small. Nobody in the past century has come close to challenging the Koran (formalized in 654) as the pre-eminent must-read for Arab citizens and academics alike. Doesn't it seem odd that 1400 years later, nobody has come up with something that people find more captivating? Maybe something can be done about that?
We can kill terrorists to no end. There are plenty of them, and current socio-economic trends - both in the Middle East and in the world as a whole - indicate that there will be a lot more coming. Setting aside individual terrorists, the defeat of Islamic Fundamentalis terrorism will necessarily take a long view, with progress measured in generations, rather than in years. But history shows that as history measures time, religions can fall rather quickly. It only took a few generations for the people of Europe to evolve from illiterate yokels, smiling, nodding, and toeing the line into educated skeptics living their own lives.
The fall of the Church of Rome started with people learning to read, from which grew religious skepticism, literary tradition, and - ultimately - the intellectual discrediting of the Church. Looking at the world today, terrorists tend to come from parts of the world with poor literacy, little or no secular literary tradition, and stunted intellectual communities.
Maybe there's a lesson here? Maybe a solution to terrorism as well?
For a variety of reasons, the terrorists attacks are not going to have substantial effect on United States, except for monies spent towards tracking down and killing the terrorists in question and/or those who aid or support them. It is a documented historical fact that when a nation/state intentionally wages war against the civilian populace of the tacit "enemy," they will almost always lose. I could go into great depth if anyone is interested, but to briefly summarize: It didn't work for the Romans in Germania. It didn't work for the English (under Cromwell) in Ireland (and indeed, still doesn't work). It didn't work for the Tamil Separatist Tigers in Sri Lanka (google it: the Tigers - not Muslim arabs - were the true pioneers of suicide bombing). It didn't work for the Americans in Vietnam. It's not going to work for Islamic Fundamentalists in America.
Even setting aside the historical precedent, all you really have to do is consider terrorism rationally. Terrorism is the intentional use of violence against non-combatants with the intention of winning political gain. But regardless of the political ends sought in the latter part of the definition, the former part of the definition precludes any meaningful success. How do you expect to prevail when you act so as to make every single man, woman, and child of a population into an overt and active enemy? How do you expect the fathers, husbands, and sons of such population to react in response to your efforts? When the game plan is to kill a nation's women, children, and non-combatants, why would anyone possibly expect the enemy to cower in submission, rather than to pursue the attackers to the ends of the earth by every means at their disposal? Unless the political end the terrorists seek is to inspire the enemy to kill the terrorists at any cost, the political goal - any political goal - of the terrorists WILL FAIL. For all the occasions that is has been pursued (which are many), the idea of terrorism as a means to an end overlooks critical and obvious aspects of human nature.
That having been said, terrorism is a very real problem, and it would be nice to find some sort of expedient solution. Meaning a solution that doesn't require the expenditure of trillions of dollars, billions of soldier man-hours, and thousands of slain servicemen to implement. It is not practicable to kill every single terrorist who is inclined to air his grievances in public with high explosives, attractive as the option may be to the family members of World Trade Center fatalities.
Generally speaking, and setting aside political correctness in favor of honesty, most terrorist attacks against the United States grow from Islamic Fundamantalism. While Usama Bin Laden is a Saudi Prince, and while many of the upper leadership of al Queda are educated men pursuing socio-political agendas, they are not the ones blowing themselves up. They're too smart for that. The ones who do the killing (including killing themselves) are typically single, lower-middle class, highly religious men. The social structure of the middle-east means that there are an effectively infinite number of such men: they tend to be the younger sons of large families, without substantial economic prospects, and - failing substantial income - lack the ability to afford a wife and family. Their prospects in this world are not glowing or spectacular, and a long, happy life is often a fairy tale. Average life expectancy in Afghanistan, for example, is under 45 years.
Absent substantial prospects in this life, these men are fairly ripe for manipulation, based on the promise of better things in the next life. Enter the whole deal with rivers of honey and 40 virgins for anyone who dies in the service of Allah against the infidel. People want to believe it, so they toe to line. So long as there are people willing to blow themselves up to send the message penned by their socio-political controllers, terrorism is going to continue. The political agendas are ALWAYS going to be there, so the way to combat terrorism is at the grass-roots. Gotta either lessen the power of the Mighty, to ease their control over the masses, or else increase the power of the masses, to reach the same ends.
This is tough, since most Americans have problems even grasping the depth of the religious fervor involved. Notwithstanding our own frustration-based social problems (gangs, drugs, youth violence, etc.), most Americans cannot conceive of a life so frustrating, bleak, and devoid of prospects as to get us to entertain the idea of blowing ourselves up for God. Most citizens of western nations, hearing of frustration and angst as basis for that degree of motivation, will short-circuit to thinking that it's a crock of shit, and that the believers in question are simply nut-jobs. But even as a member of a "modern" society, there's no denying that it's easy to fall under the sway of charismatic people who tell you that everything is going to be all right and things are going to be wonderful, if you just read this book/follow this diet/blow up this Israeli cafe. American devotion to Tony Robins, Oprah, the Church of Scientology, etc., differs from Islamic fundamentalism only in two substantial respects. First, Americans are too comfortable and hedonistic to be in a rush to shuffle off the mortal coil as martyrs. And second, most Americans are educated and cosmopolitan enough to be skeptical about religious figures actually having some sort of hot-line to God, through which they receive holy directives.
But that wasn't always the case among western societies. Google "Crusades." Or "Spanish Inquisition." Or, more recently, "Jonestown." It is human nature to believe the unbelievable, especially where such efforts are required to provide explanation for the unknown and/or ill events. The ancient Greeks/Norse/etc. didn't know that lightning was the equalization exchange of static electrical inequalities between earth and sky. Thus, they needed Zeus/Thor/etc. to provide them with an explanation they could believe in. Likewise (and persisting through the present) there is the question "where do we go when we die," which is hands down, bar none, and without question mankind's greatest and most exploitable philosophical insecurity. It bothers us, so naturally, we enjoy (or at least tolerate) the company of those that tell us that things are going to be all right. Over time, and in an excellent example of human nature, the shamans and priests married their "knowledge" of arcane points to quality ritual showmanship, and gained enough adherents that they no longer needed to serve any actual purpose nor do any actual work.
Built upon the idea that they were closer to God than you were, and on the parallel idea that if you wanted to go to heaven, you'd better toe the line they set, the Roman Catholic Church was the central political force in Europe for about a millennium, holding at least as much sway over the day-to-day lives of the populace as does modern Islamic sects over their adherents. The really interesting part with the Holy Roman Empire was that through most of this period of dominion, people attending church on any given Sunday had only the vaguest idea of what was being said and done in all the elaborate rituals. Those rituals were performed in Latin and/or Greek. When readings were done from the bible, those readings were also in Latin and/or Greek, from books dating back to the early Christian empire in Byzantium, which was an outgrowth of Rome. Suffice to say that up until the 16th Century, the people sitting in the pews and filling the Church of Rome's collections plates generally didn't have a clue what was being said from the pulpit, except for the parts were they were told that they'd better listen up and do as they were told unless they wanted to burn in hell. Must've been believable. The priests clearly knew a lot of things that everyman didn't, and those rituals sure were elaborate. So people toed the line, and besides living their lives how the Church told them to, they also went to war because the Church told them to. Again, google "crusades."
But it didn't last, and the end came surprising quickly. Interestingly, the decline of the Church as the grass-roots power in Europe was not based so much on schisms within the Church as it was based on the removal of the centuries-old mysteries in which the Church had cloaked itself. It is not at all coincidence that the rise of Protestantism (and subsequent civil and holy wars in much of Europe) coincided with the first publications of bibles written in modern languages (notably Martin Luther's German translation in 1522 and William Tyndale's English New Testament Bible in 1525). Prior to this, and as above, substantially all bibles had been in Greek or Latin, including the first book ever to see large-scale mechanical printing, the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, which was in Vulgate Latin.
Availability of scriptures in common tongues led to interesting socio-religious developments, like people standing at the back of 16th Century church proceedings, reading the English translation of scriptures aloud, concurrently with the Preacher's reading in Latin, up in the pulpit. While such things would historically have resulted in the offender being set on fire, political developments outside the cloisters meant that such religious dissidents enjoying protection from On High. Specifically, England's Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and couldn't get the Pope to grant him one. So (in 1534) he told the Roman Catholic Church to fuck off, and founded the Church of England, with Himself at the head. To rally popular support away from the Roman Catholic Establishment, he needed to show the world that the Holy Roman Empire was mostly just a bunch of corrupt political hacks and autocrats hiding under vestments. (Google "Borgia.") Which was not hard. To do so, he supported and sponsored all sorts of covert and overt efforts to turn Christianity from some esoteric thing conducted in dead languages into something understandable and accessible to the masses. Although he is said to have regretted it later, his efforts to get laid with a different woman than his wife resulted in broad and systematic dissemination of the idea that the Roman Catholic Priests and Preachers didn't really have access to God or to the divine workings of the universe. They just knew another language. The subtext was that with the newly published (modern language) versions of the scriptures, people could still have faith, without the oppressive mandates of the Church of Rome. And, of course, Hank the Eighth could have his divorce, Papal approval or no.
As an interesting and relevant footnote, the publication of common-language translations of the bible spurred massive grass-roots intellectualism in Western Europe. Languages were standardized. (Especially in Germany, by the Luther bible; previous to its publication there were multiple German dialects, based on Germany's history as a loose affiliation of principalities, each with its own tongue. After 1522, Germans adopted a common tongue, so they could read the bible.) Literacy rates soared. Whereas only the upper-class could afford a full classical education to read the Bible in Latin or Greek, lots of people - down to artisans and tradesmen - could provide their children with the ability to read a "modern" language. And they did. To the point that a sizable portion of the populace became smart enough to be skeptical about any man claiming to be God's proxy. For people who can't read, books are magical. For people who can, they're just words on a page.
Besides the mean increase in popular intellect and related rise in educated skepticism, literacy would in turn lead to another domino falling: the rise of widespread literature to challenge the bible as humanity's tacit seminal written work. Shakespeare's father was a tradesmen (a glover), who would probably have been unable to send little Billy to Oxford to learn Greek (especially since Billy was the third of eight children). But Billy did learn to read and write at his local grammar school. You might say he put his skills to use.
Thus, in the late 16th century, the bible itself would come under indirect attack, since it was surpassed as the best read available. Historically, christianity was every bit as myopic as Islam in the idea that reading anything other than the scriptures was, at best, a waste of time ("Either it agrees with the bible, in which case it is extraneous, or else it disagrees with the bible, in which case it is blasphemy"). With the rise of literacy and literature (and with further development of the printing press), other stories arose to compete for readers' attention. Shakespeare was doing his best work in the late 16th Century, with the first published editions of Hamlet dating to about 1599. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the same period, and German literature (somewhat slowed by its still-diverse dialects) was developing as well, highlighted by the Baroque period and the early Faustian tales.
Of course, the Church was not pleased at having lost its veritable monopoly over the actual content of the scriptures, much less with all that pesky free-thinking and intellectual skepticism that came from a literate populace. William Tyndale never lived to see any of these literary developments: he was arrested by Church authorities, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. Martin Luther was allowed to live, since he had a big enough following that he would be dangerous as a martyr, and had already been excommunicated (in 1521) prior to publishing his Germanic bible. In any rate, the damage had been done. People under the Church's sway started doing the last thing that the church wanted them to do: they stopped being impressed with the rituals and dogma, and started thinking for themselves. Less than 100 years from the Bible having been illegible to nearly all church-goers, church-goers were themselves creating literary masterpieces of their own.
When that happened, the end was inevitable, since the Church - ever fundamentally traditionalist - dug in its heels rather than bending to fit the times. In 1616 (ironically the year that both Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on the same day) Galileo went to Rome, to try and convince the Church that Copernicus was right about that whole helocentricism thing. He argued to the Pope that the Church should acknowledge such obvious scientific truths, regardless of what might be laid out in Psalms, Chronicles, and/or Ecclesiastes. Alas, alack, the Church didn't want to hear it. They had their hands full with upstart Protestant figures, culminating in Sweden's King Gustav Augustus, whose (Protestant) armies would shortly be rolling through (previously Catholic) central Europe, kicking that collective asses of the Catholic armies that were supposed to have God on their side. Needing to appear strong in the face of attacks on the Church and the Bible, and in the interest of preserving the monolithic image of the Catholic Church as the hand of God on earth, the Pope Decreed accordingly. Galileo spent most the remainder of his life under house arrest, with his published works declared heretic. This notwithstanding that his principles of a heliocentric solar system could be observed and verified by anyone, largely without even use of a telescope.
With the management of the whole Galileo thing, the Church utterly and truly lost the intellectuals of Europe. Turns out that you lose credibility when you demonstrate that you're full of shit. Hell, if the Church can't get a simply orbital ellipse straight, how they hell could they claim understanding of something like the immortal soul? In any rate, the end of the Church as the great power in Europe was fast coming after that, since the professional academics were responsible for providing educations for the upper crusts of society. You can imagine the sort of opinion they had of the Church and its tenets, when the Church Ordered that one plus one does not equal two. Safe to say that the people they were educating might have picked up on the idea that the Church might not actually be the divine conduit it claimed to be. So, while it would remain intact through the present, The Holy Roman Empire was done as the controlling power over people's lives. It yielded substantially all claims of sovereignty over both people and nations in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which treaties also included the western world's first codification of any substantial right to freedom of religion.
Applying these historical precedents to current problems in the Middle East: if you want to reduce religious fervor and fanaticism, the thing to do is teach people to read. Get enough people reading and writing, and the culture is going to wax skeptical about religious mysticism. They're going to create great literary works to surpass the ancient (cryptic and/or outdated) religious texts in the minds of the people. Get the people smart enough to ask pointed questions, to which they will not accept "because the Book says so" as an acceptable answer. However subtly it might be presented, the proposal that turns disaffected Arab men into terrorists is: "If you blow yourself up to kill people you've never met, you will go to heaven. Trust me." Honestly, should it really be difficult to educate people enough for them to be skeptical when presented with that message?
Alas, we don't seem to be making much progress, and might even be going backwards. If you rank the world's 180-some nations in order of their literacy rate, Saudi Arabia is 116th. Iran is 121st. Egypt is 148th. Pakistan, at 163rd, has about the world's lowest literacy rate outside of Africa. No figures are currently available for Iraq or Afghanistan, what with large-scale disruption of their education system from recent wars. But suffice to say that current breakdowns of the education systems and concurrent low literacy rates suggest that the next 20 years (at least) will find no shortage of disaffected Iraqi and/or Afghan males who follow the orders of their church without question.
With regard to dissemination in the Arab world of home-grown literature, the situation is equally bleak. The 20th Century did see a tacit renaissance of Arab literature (the nahda period), but the world's pre-eminent Muslim author is probably Salman Rushdie (google him), who has a death sentence outstanding in Iran, for heresy. For the most part, the Arab world has not had a great storyteller since Scheherazade. With low literacy rates, the likelihood of a transcendental author of the caliber of Shakespeare (or Cervantes, or Hemingway, or Murasaki, or Flaubert, or whoever) appearing is relatively small. Nobody in the past century has come close to challenging the Koran (formalized in 654) as the pre-eminent must-read for Arab citizens and academics alike. Doesn't it seem odd that 1400 years later, nobody has come up with something that people find more captivating? Maybe something can be done about that?
We can kill terrorists to no end. There are plenty of them, and current socio-economic trends - both in the Middle East and in the world as a whole - indicate that there will be a lot more coming. Setting aside individual terrorists, the defeat of Islamic Fundamentalis terrorism will necessarily take a long view, with progress measured in generations, rather than in years. But history shows that as history measures time, religions can fall rather quickly. It only took a few generations for the people of Europe to evolve from illiterate yokels, smiling, nodding, and toeing the line into educated skeptics living their own lives.
The fall of the Church of Rome started with people learning to read, from which grew religious skepticism, literary tradition, and - ultimately - the intellectual discrediting of the Church. Looking at the world today, terrorists tend to come from parts of the world with poor literacy, little or no secular literary tradition, and stunted intellectual communities.
Maybe there's a lesson here? Maybe a solution to terrorism as well?
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Self Help
Mexico is having some problems these days, largely as a result of it's inability to control criminal enterprises (read: drug cartels). The most extensive military services the Mexican armed forces has seen in years are happening right now, inside Mexico, in scenes not a lot unlike the pictures you see of peacekeeping Marines on patrol in Basra. Same basic job, and about the same risk: that someone you've never seen before, probably a misguided teenager, is going to toss a grenade at your feet, because he and his buddies have been told to do so by shadow criminal/political figure on high.
There are in fact entire cities which are under martial law, and these are not cities in the central-american hinterland. You can stand in El Paso, Texas, and see the fires burning in Juarez, just on the other side of the Rio Grande. They averaged about 7 murders per day there this year. Approximately 95% of crimes in the last three years remain unsolved. It's a fun town, and is just exemplary of the problem, not definitive of the problem. But for heavily policed areas, there's a lot of lawlessness. South of the Border, the maintenance of law and order is more wishful thinking than legitimate state of being.
Which is prompting an interesting grass-roots response, and the emergence of "self help" as an effective means of maintaining civil order. On September 21, 2010, a group of young men, masked and armed with assault rifles, stormed into a local seafood eatery in the Mexican town of Ascencion, in an attempt to abduct the 17-year old girl who was manning the register. The men - teenagers - were set upon by the local farmers and tradesmen in the restaurant and in the streets, who up to that point had been turning the other cheek to such sorts of lawlessness. But when they did finally rouse themselves to action that day, results were gotten. Some of the people in the vigilante crowds apparently suffered broken hands and wrists in the course of handing beat-downs on the would-be abductors.
Federal Police eventually arrived at the scene, pulled the suspects from the crowd, and locked them in the back of police vehicles. The crowd did not disperse. Although they did not attack the police, the crowd surrounded the police cars, chanting "KILL THEM! KILL THEM!" They refused to move out of the path of vehicles. They blocked the entry of other police vehicles onto the scene (including preventing helicopters from landing). They did eventually lose interest and allow the police vehicles to leave, but not until after the kidnappers died from the wounds inflicted on them by the crowds. In effect, the would-be kidnappers bled out there at the scene, sweltering inside the police vehicles. No charges have been filed against any members of the crowd.
Prior to September 21, Ascencion had suffered about 40 kidnappings in 2010, or an average of about one kidnapping a week. There haven't been any since then. Of couse, since the mobbing of the kidnappers on 9/21, the locals have dug a ditch around the town (too deep to traverse with any civilian vehicle), and erected a watchtower. They've instituted a neighborhood watch. As the main focus is to stop kidnappings, the game plan is simple: when citizens hear the big alarm on the tower, they drop what they're doing, walk out of the house, and stand in the highway that runs though the middle of town. They use their bodies to prevent people from leaving by the roadways, and the ditch prevents anyone from escaping (with, for example, a 15-year old kidnapped girl in their trunk) through other means.
There haven't been any published kidnapping attempts since then, and local honchos of the neighborhood watch say that if they catch anyone, they would turn those people over to the police. Of course, the kidnappers who died on September 21 were technically in the custody of police at the time of their deaths, so I don't think any would-be kidnappers would place a lot of faith in Due Process, should they get pinched. Especially since the body of a man suspected to be a local thief has subsequently been found on the edge of town in October.
I thought I would share all this, since it warms my heart to see people taking an active interest in local politics and law enforcement.
There are in fact entire cities which are under martial law, and these are not cities in the central-american hinterland. You can stand in El Paso, Texas, and see the fires burning in Juarez, just on the other side of the Rio Grande. They averaged about 7 murders per day there this year. Approximately 95% of crimes in the last three years remain unsolved. It's a fun town, and is just exemplary of the problem, not definitive of the problem. But for heavily policed areas, there's a lot of lawlessness. South of the Border, the maintenance of law and order is more wishful thinking than legitimate state of being.
Which is prompting an interesting grass-roots response, and the emergence of "self help" as an effective means of maintaining civil order. On September 21, 2010, a group of young men, masked and armed with assault rifles, stormed into a local seafood eatery in the Mexican town of Ascencion, in an attempt to abduct the 17-year old girl who was manning the register. The men - teenagers - were set upon by the local farmers and tradesmen in the restaurant and in the streets, who up to that point had been turning the other cheek to such sorts of lawlessness. But when they did finally rouse themselves to action that day, results were gotten. Some of the people in the vigilante crowds apparently suffered broken hands and wrists in the course of handing beat-downs on the would-be abductors.
Federal Police eventually arrived at the scene, pulled the suspects from the crowd, and locked them in the back of police vehicles. The crowd did not disperse. Although they did not attack the police, the crowd surrounded the police cars, chanting "KILL THEM! KILL THEM!" They refused to move out of the path of vehicles. They blocked the entry of other police vehicles onto the scene (including preventing helicopters from landing). They did eventually lose interest and allow the police vehicles to leave, but not until after the kidnappers died from the wounds inflicted on them by the crowds. In effect, the would-be kidnappers bled out there at the scene, sweltering inside the police vehicles. No charges have been filed against any members of the crowd.
Prior to September 21, Ascencion had suffered about 40 kidnappings in 2010, or an average of about one kidnapping a week. There haven't been any since then. Of couse, since the mobbing of the kidnappers on 9/21, the locals have dug a ditch around the town (too deep to traverse with any civilian vehicle), and erected a watchtower. They've instituted a neighborhood watch. As the main focus is to stop kidnappings, the game plan is simple: when citizens hear the big alarm on the tower, they drop what they're doing, walk out of the house, and stand in the highway that runs though the middle of town. They use their bodies to prevent people from leaving by the roadways, and the ditch prevents anyone from escaping (with, for example, a 15-year old kidnapped girl in their trunk) through other means.
There haven't been any published kidnapping attempts since then, and local honchos of the neighborhood watch say that if they catch anyone, they would turn those people over to the police. Of course, the kidnappers who died on September 21 were technically in the custody of police at the time of their deaths, so I don't think any would-be kidnappers would place a lot of faith in Due Process, should they get pinched. Especially since the body of a man suspected to be a local thief has subsequently been found on the edge of town in October.
I thought I would share all this, since it warms my heart to see people taking an active interest in local politics and law enforcement.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Big Bang News
According to Yahoo news, a big leap forward happened in science recently, in that scientists at CERN were able to create AND CONTROL an anti-matter atom for an appreciable period, purportedly long enough to perform qualitative analysis of the atom and its interaction with other forces. While it is possible that these recent published findings will go down the trail blazed by Pons and Fleischmann (google them), recent lab results are reported to include creation and substantial maintenance of a complete anti-hydrogen atom. This is a big step.
For those of you not of the science-fiction geek sect, anti-matter has been a favorite hypothetical sci-fi power source for years, particularly for things like interplanetary and/or interstellar travel. The theory is that when anti-matter comes into contact with "normal" matter, both are annihilated in toto, releasing energy on a scale offered by Einstein: The energy generated equals the mass of the matter consumed times the square of the speed of light. Since the speed of light is a really big number, this annihilation of matter results in a LOT of energy compared to the amount of material involved in the reaction. Hypothetically, only a relatively small amount of anti-matter would be enough to push an object from one star system to the next in a space of time measured in periods shorter than geological epochs. The starship Enterprise, for example, has at its heart a matter/anti-matter reactor, and even legitimate scientific theorists who posit ideas for travel between star systems (some of which are pretty interesting; google 'Alcubierre drive') generally concede that anti-matter is one of the few reactions known to man that would produce sufficient energy to reach the required velocities, and/or to generate the exotic matter/energy fields needed to simultaneously exploit and not fall victim to pesky little things like the gravimetric effects of relativity.
Here in the real universe (at least on this planet) anti-matter spent decades as a fantasy substance, where it was theorized to exist, but remained unobserved. Then it spent years at a hypothetical substance, as scientists were able to create anti-particles (anti-protons, anti-neutrons, etc.), but fell short of creating an actual atom. The first complete anti-hydrogen atoms were first created in 2002, but nobody could really be sure, since too short an interval existed between the creation of the anti-atom and its subsequent annihilation. While the energy levels in the observed reaction (i.e., the annihilation) supported that what was being generated was, in fact, anti-matter, nobody could trap the anti-atoms long enough to perform any detailed scientific analysis. That's the problem that's being worked on currently, with results being gotten. By freezing the anti-atom down to just half a degree above absolute zero (-272.5 degrees C), scientist have been able to create and trap complete anti-matter atoms for periods measured in actual seconds.
Rationally speaking, anti-matter as an energy source is horse-shit, and will remain so for at least a few more generations. Generating anti-matter takes vastly more energy than is released by the matter/anti-matter reaction that follows - notwithstanding the direct application of Einstein's matter/energy conversion rate - even before you consider the energy costs of cooling the anti-matter to near absolute zero to trap the atom. Barring some amazing breakthrough that makes the stuff easy to produce and store, we're going to keep burning oil for fuel. Hell, we can't even figure out a way to produce normal hydrogen cheaply and efficiently enough to use it as an energy source, much less anti-hydrogen.
But in theory at least, analyzing anti-matter will provide insight into the nature and properties of matter itself, in the literal sense. Meaning that science here on earth is seeking to explore the circumstances and context of how matter is actually created and/or destroyed. Did Ben Franklin know what he was getting us in to when he went and flew a kite in a thunderstorm? Who knows where this might lead us.
For those of you not of the science-fiction geek sect, anti-matter has been a favorite hypothetical sci-fi power source for years, particularly for things like interplanetary and/or interstellar travel. The theory is that when anti-matter comes into contact with "normal" matter, both are annihilated in toto, releasing energy on a scale offered by Einstein: The energy generated equals the mass of the matter consumed times the square of the speed of light. Since the speed of light is a really big number, this annihilation of matter results in a LOT of energy compared to the amount of material involved in the reaction. Hypothetically, only a relatively small amount of anti-matter would be enough to push an object from one star system to the next in a space of time measured in periods shorter than geological epochs. The starship Enterprise, for example, has at its heart a matter/anti-matter reactor, and even legitimate scientific theorists who posit ideas for travel between star systems (some of which are pretty interesting; google 'Alcubierre drive') generally concede that anti-matter is one of the few reactions known to man that would produce sufficient energy to reach the required velocities, and/or to generate the exotic matter/energy fields needed to simultaneously exploit and not fall victim to pesky little things like the gravimetric effects of relativity.
Here in the real universe (at least on this planet) anti-matter spent decades as a fantasy substance, where it was theorized to exist, but remained unobserved. Then it spent years at a hypothetical substance, as scientists were able to create anti-particles (anti-protons, anti-neutrons, etc.), but fell short of creating an actual atom. The first complete anti-hydrogen atoms were first created in 2002, but nobody could really be sure, since too short an interval existed between the creation of the anti-atom and its subsequent annihilation. While the energy levels in the observed reaction (i.e., the annihilation) supported that what was being generated was, in fact, anti-matter, nobody could trap the anti-atoms long enough to perform any detailed scientific analysis. That's the problem that's being worked on currently, with results being gotten. By freezing the anti-atom down to just half a degree above absolute zero (-272.5 degrees C), scientist have been able to create and trap complete anti-matter atoms for periods measured in actual seconds.
Rationally speaking, anti-matter as an energy source is horse-shit, and will remain so for at least a few more generations. Generating anti-matter takes vastly more energy than is released by the matter/anti-matter reaction that follows - notwithstanding the direct application of Einstein's matter/energy conversion rate - even before you consider the energy costs of cooling the anti-matter to near absolute zero to trap the atom. Barring some amazing breakthrough that makes the stuff easy to produce and store, we're going to keep burning oil for fuel. Hell, we can't even figure out a way to produce normal hydrogen cheaply and efficiently enough to use it as an energy source, much less anti-hydrogen.
But in theory at least, analyzing anti-matter will provide insight into the nature and properties of matter itself, in the literal sense. Meaning that science here on earth is seeking to explore the circumstances and context of how matter is actually created and/or destroyed. Did Ben Franklin know what he was getting us in to when he went and flew a kite in a thunderstorm? Who knows where this might lead us.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Dear Santa...
For Christmas this year, I would like:
A pony (or just a saddle for Griffin)
An Ipad
Fable III for Xbox 360
Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 for Xbox 360
Rusack Vinyards 'Anacappa'
Digital calipers (on sale at thinkgeek.com)
Clothes that CB approves of
New digital camera
'Darkwar' by Glen Cook
'Lost' Seasons 4, 5 & 6 on DVD
A big-ass gaudy walking stick to go with my pimp suit
Bulk .45 ACP ammo (cheap stuff for plinking)
A mechtechsys.com carbine upper for a Glock 19 receiver
Hank Burgoyne II's head on a platter
A good dress watch
Membership at Desert Sportsman
An electric sander (Dewalt makes a nice 1/4-sheet pad sander)
New candle for my office (something with an oceanic theme. Or else dryer-sheet scented.)
A pony (or just a saddle for Griffin)
An Ipad
Fable III for Xbox 360
Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 for Xbox 360
Rusack Vinyards 'Anacappa'
Digital calipers (on sale at thinkgeek.com)
Clothes that CB approves of
New digital camera
'Darkwar' by Glen Cook
'Lost' Seasons 4, 5 & 6 on DVD
A big-ass gaudy walking stick to go with my pimp suit
Bulk .45 ACP ammo (cheap stuff for plinking)
A mechtechsys.com carbine upper for a Glock 19 receiver
Hank Burgoyne II's head on a platter
A good dress watch
Membership at Desert Sportsman
An electric sander (Dewalt makes a nice 1/4-sheet pad sander)
New candle for my office (something with an oceanic theme. Or else dryer-sheet scented.)
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