The House of David

Monday, January 30, 2006

Stargate: The Abortion

I just rented the pilot of Stargate: Atlantis. I have to say, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica have spoiled me. But it's a decent enough little intergalactic frolic. The DVD advertised a Stargate game, "The Alliance", which looked to be an interesting addition to the universe which I've been following since that movie in 1994.

But it looks like MGM have killed it. The game does seem to have reached a higher state of development than did, say, "StarCon"; but MGM got spooked and let it die on the vine.

Mind, the legal circus around that game isn't helping much either. And it was damn stupid for those guys to burn the video game trailer on the DVD. D'oh! But still, based on this review, the game was almost done minus a few bugs.

And it looks like it was good, too.

Phooey.

posted by Zimri on 21:04 | link |

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Cinematic duds

I'm currently reading Fiasco by James Robert Parish. It's a summary of infamous box office bombs from 1960 to 2001, which caused such damage that they restructured how Hollywood was run.

The end-date serves to save Alexander and The Adventures of Pluto Nash from the public floggings they deserve. The book also spares Heaven's Gate, on the grounds that its story is better told elsewhere.

The damage was at times more apparent than real. Some of these managed to make back their investments eventually. Cleopatra turned a profit some decades after it came out. Waterworld famously transformed from disaster to modest profit soon after its release overseas. I wouldn't be surprised if even Battlefield Earth managed to eke out a profit in the pothead circuit. But they were so disappointing on their initial North American release, and so jeered by the press, that they left a stigma upon those involved.

Some of these movies aren't even all that bad. The studios killed Cutthroat Island after two weeks of release. From 1995 to 2002 (when Pluto Nash came out) that Geena Davis pirate epic was the biggest loser in history. And then Pirates of the Caribbean came out and everyone stepped all over each other rushing to see that At least I have Pluto Nash to point at now, when people laugh at me. Poor Geena. I also didn't mind The Postman so much but even then I figured it demanded an editor who wasn't Costner. Last Action Hero was also badly edited, and also had promise (it has I think made money by now).

The book has a list of Box Office Disappointments for its second Appendix. Some of them were like Waterworld in making money overseas: the execrable Chronicles of Riddick being a case in point. Others will come as a surprise to their fans: just from 2000 on, Almost Famous, Bamboozled, Donnie Darko, Ghost World, Igby Goes Down, Matchstick Men, Punch-Drunk Love, Requiem for a Dream, and Rules of Attraction were all released to yawns from audiences. I bet Hollywood wishes it could deliver a bad review to the public on occasion.

My personal least favourite was Ishtar. I saw it on an aeroplane. It was painful.

posted by Zimri on 01:11 | link |

Other Constantine notes

Constantine's character is written so as to be a Chandler gumshoe. Keanu Reeves figured that the way to perform this role is to mumble most of his lines. I can't hear anything he says. This is bad for a movie which relies so much on exposition.
The movie's angel Gabriel is an androgynous woman... which is how she was portrayed in the earliest sources. Props to that.
Gabriel is a cross between Christopher Walken's evil Gabriel in The Prophecy and those renegade angels in Dogma. I guess people took the Enochian (and Qur'anic) view of the devils as rebel angels, saw that Satan / Iblis had made the jump already, and then picked on Gabriel as the next in line. Maybe these Christians are pissed that Gabriel delivered the Qur'an to Muhammad after delivering the good news to Mary.
The movie also stole its idea for the extra Biblical chapters from The Prophecy. I'm catching further acts of larceny from The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, The Exorcist, Blade, and From Dusk Til Dawn.
The bookish character who is looking up 1 Corinthians 17-21 has his finger on the wrong verses. I feel sorry for the poor sods who spent all that time writing nearly a whole printed page worth of angelology in Latin, only to have the actors screw it all up.

All in all: It doesn't do too badly at building a world, but it miscues in its execution. If there is a sequel it had better go direct to video.

posted by Zimri on 00:51 | link |

Saturday, January 28, 2006

1 Corinthians 17

I've been watching Constantine, a sort of Raymond Chandler noir film but concerning angels and demons. I haven't finished it yet but I have reached a point at which it is worthwhile pausing.

In my copy of Jerome's Vulgate, the Latin Bible, 1 Corinthians ends at 16:24. The movie claims that the book goes on to chapter 21, and diplays a segment of chapter 17 in Latin.

Christian Spotlight gave the movie a reserved thumbs-up to the movie, which surprised me. Still, I'm guessing the Spotlight isn't Catholic. A good Catholic reviewer would have emphasised and approved the movie's powerful anti-suicide message, which this reviewer did not. Also, I suspect that Catholics would not have minded as much as did the reviewer about the movie's assertion of missing chapters in Scripture - particularly "fantastical" ones.

Protestants are borderline Muslim when it comes to scripture, but most Christians aren't Protestant. The Catholic and Orthodox denominations understand that their shared canon is a Church production, and that even the books we do have must be interpreted via Church tradition. For instance, the "Book of Watchers", 1 Enoch 1-36, was Scripture to Saint Jude; and it is still the foundation for Church angelology, although it is currently absent from all Bibles except for the Ethiopian.

A missing chapter or five between 1 and 2 Corinthians, in particular, is more likely than unlikely.

1 Corinthians describes itself as a letter from Saint Paul to the flock at Corinth in Greece. Of Paul's letters, those to the Colossians, to the Ephesians, the second of those to the Thessalonians, and (especially) the Pastoral Epistles are considered bogus; the letters to the Corinthians are considered among the authentic ones. David Trobisch in Paul's Letter Collection proposed that 1-2 Corinthians, along with Romans and Galatians, formed the core of Pauline epistles authorised by Paul himself under his own hand.

Trobisch also, however, noted that 2 Corinthians 2:3-4, 9 referred to an earlier letter which might have grieved the Corinthians; and 7:8 to an "exceedingly severe letter". No-one finds the letter to which these verses refer within the text of 1 Corinthians. Trobisch thinks that Paul intended the letters to the Corinthians to be read not as two letters, but seven:

1 Cor 1:10-4:21
1 Cor 5:1-6:11
1 Cor 6:12-16:24
2 Cor 1:3-2:11
2 Cor 2:14-7:3
2 Cor 7:4-9:15
2 Cor 10:1-13:14

For Trobisch, 2 Cor 7:8 is referring to the letter of 2 Cor 1:3-2:11 and 2 Cor 2 is referring to itself. However most biblical scholars, like Wil Pounds, think that a "severe letter" has gone missing from between 1 and 2 Corinthians.

In Constantine, 1 Cor 17-21 exists as a text which the demons have preserved. They didn't preserve it very carefully, because some Latin printing press has printed it up for our heroes, complete with scary lithographs. This chapter is further appended to the Vulgate of Isaiah 1:1-23, thus forming a florilegium of passages rather than a Bible for its own sake.

Anyway, here is the text of "1 Cor 17" visible on screen, as best I could transcribe it.

Amor enim patris modo Satanae possessionis, atque potestatis et voluptatis eius excessus fuit. Atque in lumbis et ex lumbis eius conceptus est filius. Filio de quo fierit damnatio mundi. Hoc modo solo homines orbis terrae verum latum suorum, certam vocationem, verum dolorem sub calce veri Domini explere poterunt per potestatem veri fili poterunt.
Animas enim suas homines in fornace semper ardente sub pedibus verorum angelorum invenient.
Filius in lucis ardere Patris conceptus, in umbra eius qui cecidit naturus est, nec unquam luce creatoris contaminatus est. Et lux ignis veri sui patris flammae ardentes in cordibus hominum erint.
Peccata patris modo peccatis fili excessa erint.
Mammon erit nomen eius qui caput patris percutuit. Vires suae desuper patrem descendunt et potentia sua tanta erit ut lucem soli extingueret. Et tenebrae super Terrae et super homines descendent.

Now, given that I have not translated any Latin in some years now, and given the transcription above, I see this as:

Because: the love of the Father only by possession of Satan, and by his [the Father's?] power and pleasure, may be exceeded. And the son is conceived in and out of his loins. From the son of whom will come the damnation of the world. [...]
Because: they find the spirits of these men in an ever-burning furnace, under the feet of the true angels.
The son to burn in light is conceived of the father, in his shadow who kills (or, falls) is to be born, nor is ever contaminated by the light of the creator. And the light of the true fire of his father, burning flames in the hearts of men are.
The sins of the father are only exceeded by the sins of the son.
Mammon is his name, who strikes the head of the father. [...] And shades fall over Earth and over men.

Now, my transliteration is doubtless wrong, and its translation worse still and incomplete besides. But I can read enough of it to see what it is.

The above warns of no earthly peril to man, like a sin or temptation. This is an angelology such as exists in the Book of Watchers (Enoch 1-36), on the assumption that some demon might take physical form. Paul did receive the occasional vision of the spirit realms, but "1 Cor 17" at least was not part of any letter delivered to the good men of Corinth, severe or otherwise. If Paul had delivered such a letter, it would have caused a panic, and then Paul would have received a visit from the men in white togas.

The good news about this chapter is that at least the movie isn't trying to foist it upon us as actual scripture. The Passion of the Christ on the other hand...

posted by Zimri on 21:00 | link |

Friday, January 27, 2006

The spirit of Salieri

On this 250th anniversary of something or other to do with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, I was just going to point to Antonio Salieri.

Salieri was born in Italy but did all his work in Vienna, and during his life most Europeans considered one of the German composers. Nonetheless, a misguided German nationalism picked up on some blog-level innuendo from an immature Mozart and before anyone even had a chance to appreciate Salieri's work for its own sake, we all had to sit through character hit pieces like Amadeus.

It does seem an irony that a man who taught Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert how to become three of the best composers known to humanity could go down in history as the patron saint of jealous mediocrity.

If anyone was jealous, it was Mozart. He'd applied as music teacher to the Princess of Württemberg; Salieri got the job instead. Mozart himself must have realised Salieri's skills given that Mozart entrusted his son to him.

Much of Salieri's work survives to this day. In a reverse irony, That Movie succeeded in reviving interest in this maligned composer. (Kind of like how Peter Jackson introduced us to Anne Perry... although unlike Salieri, Perry really did do what they said she did.)

The movie's best contribution was probably in illustrating that culture matters. There was something about 18th century Vienna which, unlike anywhere in the past century outside (maybe) China, cultivated compositional genius. And much of that was thanks to Salieri.

posted by Zimri on 16:58 | link |

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Time to make the donuts

What I didn't realise about that SNL sketch (or "skit", in American), was that the Jesse Jackson impersonator's "time to make the donuts" comment was a reference to an old Dunkin Donuts ad - which, I am told, won a "Clio" from the advertising community.

The actor in that ad, Michael Vale, passed away in December.

Sigh. And I was just trying to look up references to the sketch, too... plus I'm not even much of a donut-eater.

As homages go, though, the SNL sketch was beautiful. I wish Michael Vale were still around to see it.

May God bless and keep you, Michael Vale; may his light shine upon you and grant you peace.

posted by Zimri on 20:46 | link |

You can't oppose a war while supporting the troops who participate in it

While I was scrolling through QandO's archives, I came across yet another link to Joel Stein. Stein recently said that he does not support the troops fighting in Iraq. As he explains, this is the logical extension of an anti-Iraq-war stance. If you don't support the war, then you can't support the warrior's decision to serve in it; or even to leave oneself open to be asked to serve in it. You might sympathise with the man, but you can't support the soldier.

Fercryinoutloud, what would an anti-war activist say to the soldier? "I hope you all help us win!" is a support-the-troops sentiment, so that's right out. If you don't believe we can win, such a statement is hypocritical. The maximum "support" you could give would be to say, "please make it out alive". This isn't support for the man as one of the troops.

Currently Stein is being alternately praised and damned. Most serious Leftists and Rightists are praising him for his intellectual honesty. Even I'll do that much. Leftists who seek political power in this mostly Red-State nation, of which last year's Presidential candidate John Kerry comes foremost to mind, are wishing he'd stayed quiet about it. Rightists argue either on the "my country right or wrong" standpoint (to which I do not adhere) or the "okay, jerkoff, then come up with some decent reasons to be anti this war" standpoint (to which I do).

QandO points out that one can hold to serious reasons to oppose this adventure. One lady I know who is far smarter than I will ever be, but less idealistic, thinks that invading Middle Eastern nations to convert them to the American Way of Life is "stupid". Andrew Sullivan (who has mentioned this from time to time) hates the manner in which this endeavour has been carried out. I would venture, given her family history, that this lady feels much sympathy with the enlisted soldiers; and Sullivan supported Kerry in '04, an insult to our enlisted men on a personal level. But on the plane of theory: this lady cannot support the troops, and Mr Sullivan can.

Joel has come part way, at least to admitting the unpopular obvious.

You can't oppose a war while supporting the troops who participate in it.

posted by Zimri on 19:23 | link |

Fire ants

Count me as a member of the Fire Ant Brigade. Qando would rather eat 'em offa stick than support Honorable Gentleman Blunt as House Majority Leader. And the dessert cart... rolls on.

Unfortunately my congressman, John Culberson, foolishly jumped on the Blunt bandwagon early. Hopefully he will change his mind. People on the blogosphere whom I respect tend to prefer Shadegg, so that seems fair enough.

I just don't like bullies. Call it a flaw in my character.

Dear Congressman Culberson: please reconsider...

UPDATE: Thanks to Qando for giving me the shoutout. The Political Teen is the guy who recorded the thing for those who lack TV sets, like me; the recently resurgent Saturday Night Live deserves the kudos for coming up with the Dessert Cart Sketch; and then there's Mayor-in-absentia Ray Nagin, bless him, who keeps SNL humourists in business.

posted by Zimri on 19:07 | link |

Euxine

Recent advances in genetics and paleontology have made it possible to construct the outlines of a pre-historical chronology for the human race.

The first such event would be the births of two genetically distinct African peoples from the tribe of "Mitochondrial Eve", 200000 years ago. Then there was the exit of the descendants of one of these from Somalia to the Yemen and thence all along the Arabian Sea, maybe 70000 years ago. 60000 years ago, came the eruption of Lake Toba, which killed everyone in India and nearly everyone else east of Africa's Rift Valley. Following this was the first great wave of colonisation, including the initial population of the Americas by the true Amerinds, and that of the Pyrenees by the Basques; coupled with the replacement of parahuman Neanderthal Man. In 18000 BCE the Ice Age ended, although in 10500 BCE Lake Bonneville drained into the Atlantic and created the "Younger Dryas", or maybe "Frost Age", until 9400 BCE. Apparently there was another cold snap in 6200 BCE, although I haven't researched this. More modern times subsequently saw the spread of other mitochondrial types into Europe, including the "U" type's descendent "K" associated with the Etruscans; and of the Na-Dene peoples from Alaska into the American West. (A partial timeline here. Note that no so-called "Indo-European" language would arrive in either Europe or India until after 3500 BCE.)

Many consider the last great prehistorical event to be the "Noachide Flood". It is claimed that this event, unlike the others, was transmitted by oral histories into the first written legends. This theory is testable, in that there should be traces of such a catastrophe in an area important to Mesopotamia. And just such a flood event has been proposed: for the Euxine Sea, known today as the Black Sea, in 6400 BCE. According to William Ryan, the Black Sea was 140m below sea level during the Pleistocene, and its flooding into its present Atlantic water level occurred over a couple of years. There was a lot of noise made about it during the early days of the WWW, and it was generally accepted by us catastrophists up to 2001.

But then Marine Geology, Volume 190 accepted for publication a tsunami of counterarguments. I missed all that, for which I am now kicking myself.

Some of that issue's claims have since been overturned, though. The Geological Society of America the following year held a conference, whose attendants announced further findings: here.

Akzu in 2002 CE had claimed that Black Sea waters were flowing the other way in the 6000s-5000s BCE; but in fact they were not, as Spezzaferri showed.

Confusing matters somewhat, it appears that an earlier flood - from 140m below sea level to 50m below - occurred in 14-11000 BCE, perhaps from the Caspian. What went on in 6600 BCE onward was a gradual shift from 35m below.

However, if we are to believe this, the water level was at 100m below as of 5100 BCE.

UPDATE 1/26: I I just checked up on The Long Summer by Brian Fagan, again. It was published in 2004. As I feared, the book didn't look at any sources for the Black Sea flood other than Ryan's book. No wonder I'd assumed this hypothesis was a settled consensus for so long. Sigh.

posted by Zimri on 17:18 | link |

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Hyperdrive

I hope I'm not the only one jumping up and down like a maniac on hearing accounts of Heim-Droescher Space. Although, the technique does sound awfully Event Horizonish...

posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link |

Monday, January 23, 2006

The meaning of Siffîn

I leafed through the beginning of Walid Phares's latest book at the local Border's. He thinks he understands what al-Qaida is all about and what we can do to stop it.

In that first section, he made a few errors. He confused the 'Ali-versus-Umar decision (~630) with the 'Ali-versus-Mu'awiya battle (~660). That much is forgivable as a typo. The real problem with this book on Islamic terrorism is that it did not handle the events of Siffîn.

That section told of the 'Ali / Mu'awiya conflict that 'Ali was the forerunner of Shi'ism and Mu'awiya that of Sunnism. This is totally false. 'Ali was the forerunner of no-one's cause but his own and (secondarily) that of the Kufan poor. Mu'awiya was is anything even more cynical: he wanted his Umayyad relatives to be in charge.

And while the battle did end with the victory of Sunnism, it did so despite both parties' intent. Mu'awiya suckered 'Ali into signing an arbitration agreement which laid out the common terms of negotiation. These were [1] "the Book of God" (i.e. mutually accepted bits of the Qur'an, plus maybe the Torah) and [2] "the commonly accepted practice" (literally: sunna). Mu'awiya could count on a base of secular support in his family; plus, by praying at Golgotha in defiance of Sura 4, he'd convinced Syrian Christians that he was as good as one of them. 'Ali was in charge of a ramshackle coalition of foreign converts (mostly anti-Arab), many of whom accepted the Book of God alone and rejected the sunna.

Walid Phares also didn't tell of how 'Ali died. It was the Kharajites wot dun it: those believers in the Qur'an alone, who had rejected any definition of "sunna" which smacked of compromise. 'Ali was the first victim, not of Umayyad tyranny, but of Binladenite fundamentalism.

posted by Zimri on 19:37 | link |

Albanian origins

The Indo-European family of languages includes a number of Eurasian languages, ranging from living (German) to dead (Tocharian) to isolated (Armenian). One such isolated language is Albanian.

Albanian counts, in some ways, as a rediscovered language like the aforementioned Tocharian and also Hittite. No-one recorded anything Albanianish in writing, nor did they speak any Albanian to someone who could, until several years after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It was only in the 1800s that it was even shown to be Indo-European.

Since it's not Slavic or Greek, presumably the language must be ancient. Given its current location - two juxtaposed dialects, of which the southern one is opposite the heel of Italy and adjacent to the very literate nation of Greece - it is a real puzzle to figure out how the Albanians managed to hide their language from everyone for so long.

We have record of Slavs from the early Middle Ages. Germans? All over the Balkans during Late Antiquity. We know pretty much exactly when the Magyars showed up. Even Basque, a non-Indo-European language in a more distant backwater, is known from Roman inscriptions and histories as "Aquitanian", the non-Gaulish third of Gaul.

I did some Wiki research to find out what I could.

It turns out that, during the late Roman Empire, there was a border between those regions where Greek was the literary language (from trade, I'm guessing), and north of it where people spoke Latin (from the army). This border is called the Jirecek Line. North of that line, the Byzantine Emperor Justin I was an Illyrian Latinophone, and the modern state of Romania speaks the "Roman" language to this day. South of that line is, of course, Greece today.

The Wiki authors have already deduced from this that the Tosk dialect of Albanian - south of this line - should have a lot more Greek in it and ancient Greek at that. It doesn't; like the Gheg dialect to its north, the language borrowed more from that Balkan variant of Latin which bequeathed to us Romanian.

From that, one must assume that on some mediaeval date, Albanians from the Gheg sector migrated south into the Tosk sector-to-be before contact was lost again between the two tribes. If there was ever a proto-Albanian in the Tosk sector, one with more Greek in it, it was overrun well after the fall of the Empire by the Latinising ancestor to Albanian as we know it now, and overrun almost completely.

It's even harder to argue for Albanians south of this line when one considers that the Greeks didn't know of any, any more than the earliest Albanian speakers knew any ancient Greek. Occam would say it were best to assume that the peoples in the Tosk sector under the Empire weren't Albanians at all.

From that, we can say that Albania has a better claim to Kosovo than it does to its own southern half.

But before the 1400s, other questions come up. So the Greeks didn't know any Albanians; Macedon and Thrace didn't produce a literature extensive enough during the Hellenistic age and the Greeks were subjugated during the Roman Age. I can live with that.

The Romans owned the Adriatic from top to bottom, and had troops all over Dacia and Pannonia. Why didn't one of them record some Albanian, even obliquely like they recorded Aquitanian Basque, Raetic, and dozens of other obscure languages?
Why didn't the Byzantines or Serbs pay attention while the Tosk Albanians were moving south?
No Gothic German, Magyar, or old Turkic loans in Albanian... seems strange to me.

It sounds almost like the Albanian homeland is in what is Hungary today. If they were that far away, and managed to hide from the Germans, Slavs, and Huns, they might have ducked everyone's notice and moved into Kosovo around 1000 CE or so. From there, into the Tosk sector.

UPDATE 1/26: Mihai Ciocarlie has a good article, much better researched, which independently arrives at the same conclusion: that the Albanians came from further north than the average Greek or Roman could track. His essay goes a bit further; he tries the tracking himself. To which I can only say, good luck.

posted by Zimri on 17:53 | link |

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Lies for popular consumption

The Vatican's hit squad, Opus Dei, wants Da Vinci Code slapped with the British equivalent of the NC-17.

They figure that as anti-Christian propaganda (which it is) and as a pack of lies (which it is) the movie is unsuitable for the uneducated and impressionable.

Imagine if they tried that here. They'd have to go after The Distinguished Gentleman, which hinged on the discredited but once-fashionable claim that power lines cause brain cancer; they'd have to shut down Erin Brockovitch, for similar reasons; and anything by Michael Moore would be out the window.

If only!

posted by Zimri on 23:01 | link |

The problem with allies

Europeans occasionally bring up "Suez!" as their excuse for their fecklessness and bigotry.

Briefly, back in 1956 Israel invaded northern Egypt with the help of Britain and France. Israel had sound reasons for this (Egypt's local thug Nasser had blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba), and Britain and France figured that they had an interest in European hegemony over the Suez canal. But the allies failed to engage the Eisenhower administration in the US, which was then running for re-election. Eisenhower ordered the allies to desert the field. The allies slunk off and the Egyptian regime spun it as a victory.

In an alternate universe, Eisenhower could have said "Nasser did carry out an act of war against the U.N. sovereign nation of Israel, and Israel was in its rights to seek out whatever allies it could gather to get Nasser to knock it off. It's not like Nasser was a democratically elected statesman anyway. But hey, I didn't authorise this. You guys broke it: you bought it. Best of luck to all of you."

This would have salvaged European pride while keeping America out of the picture. Also, we'd have avoided the stigma of "keeping the world safe for Ba'athism" back when that pernicious disease was still in its incubation period.

On the minus side, it would have strengthened the hand of Islamists and communists in the Near East. As a second order contrafactual, there's a case to be made for letting the French do the West's dirty work, à la Algérie. But Eisenhower reasoned that the status quo was preferable to resurgent European meddling in an Arab world gaining in demographic power relative to Europe.

Still. The initiative was Europe's. Therefore, the blame is Europe's: in not discussing all this with Eisenhower in advance.

At least we're all agreed that the Mossadegh affair was damn stupid on the West's part, and that Britain and America were equally to blame for that.

posted by Zimri on 16:02 | link |

Axis mismanagement of the Balkans

Hitler invaded Stalin's Russia in 1941. This is often considered a folly on Hitler's part; but it was something the man had been planning all his life. The true problems with his invasion were in its execution. And none of the invasion's mistakes were more damaging than the time he initiated it: 22 June 1941, giving him insufficient time to secure Russia's internal networks before winter.

The reason for that, we were always taught, was because Hitler was bogged down in the Balkans that spring. And the reason for that was because anti-Nazi factions in the Balkans had taken over most of Yugoslavia and Greece, and were threatening the rest. Hitler had no choice but to intervene.

The ultimate cause was Hitler's ally in Italy, Benito Mussolini. He had invaded Greece the prior autumn, and was making a mess of things there. The Croats in Yugoslavia are Catholic and more-or-less pro-Mussolini, and the Bosnian Muslims there were anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler. (The 1943 Encyclopaedia Britannica mistakenly implies that the Croats supported Mussolini out of cowardice. If fact their Ustashe regiments proved very brave... on behalf of evil.) But there were also plenty of Orthodox Serbs in Yugoslavia, who have always viewed themselves as the borderguard of the lost Byzantine civilisation. They had no desire to see Mussolini control Greece, nor to see Hitler reduce fellow Slavs in Russia to serfdom. When the Yugoslav king made up his mind in March 1941 to support the Axis, the Serbs had him removed literally within the week.

Hitler was (just) smart enough to recognise this. Mussolini, not so much.

I do however wonder to what degree the Croats emphasised with the occupied Czechs and especially Poles. Maybe they expected that as Mussolini men they would receive a better deal.

posted by Zimri on 15:28 | link |

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Apocalyptic Shi'ites don't care about Mecca

Dr David Cook a few years back published a Darwin Press book, �Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic�, which was available on Amazon when I got it. But Dr Cook has some more �popular� accounts here and there.

Part of Muslim apocalyptic is, of course, Shi`ite apocalyptic; which is the sort that Mahdi-Nutjob over in Iran is into. One Shi`ite mystic, al-Majlisi, taught that at the end of days, the qiblah - the direction of prayer - is going to move to Kufa. Back in the early Middle Ages, Kufa was the primary Shi�a city, as it was the capital city of the only recognised Shi`ite Caliph, the Prophet�s adopted son �Ali. At this time Karbala was a tourist spot and Qom & Najaf were nonentities.

And here's another underreported fact: the Ismaili Shi`a (called the Qarmatians, then) stole the Black Stone off the Ka`bah back in 900 AD or so. They took it off to the Arabian seacoast first, and then they brought it to Iraq and tossed it into a mosque at Kufa.

The Nutjob is an Ithna Ashari rather than an Ismaili; a believer in the 12th Imam rather than stopping at #7. But that's beside the point. Majlisi was Ithna Ashari too. The Nutjob is still an apocalyptic Shi`ite and apocalyptic Shi`ites see the downgrading of Mecca as a necessary step in the Islamic eschaton.

So if Israel is planning on nuking Mecca in retaliation for an Iranian strike: it wouldn't help. In fact I'd go so far as to say that the Nutjob is praying that Mecca gets nuked. A flattened Ka`bah would discredit Sunnism and mainstream Shi`ism both. The Nutjob's apocalyptic Shi`ism would be the only game left in town.

posted by Zimri on 23:51 | link |

Friday, January 20, 2006

Men have it bad?

Norah Vincent, lesbian and amateur sociologist, has published a book: Vincent disguised herself as a man and then went into the dating scene. Instapundit's wife Dr Helen then pointed to it, Instapundit then linked to her and, well, the rest is history. Or sociology. Or something.

Vincent seems particularly shocked that she was expected to prove "himself" far more as a man dating straights than she was as a woman dating lesbians.

I never did see that as a problem. I was an academic before I was a programmer, and I've had to take programming tests even after college. Proving myself is something I'm used to.

It helps that I'm shortish and thinnish, and that in the past I've dated women around my height or even taller. It's hard for them to see me as a threat, or even as a pig, if I'm not a threat and if whatever piggishness I come up with is of no account. Also, whereever I've run across a drama queen, I've been able to steer clear.

Where I have had problems with my dating life, it's not because of anything Norah Vincent came up against.

Okay, I'll talk: women need to be forthcoming about what issues they face, and to do so up front; they need not to carry a torch for their ex-flames - especially when said ex-flame and current flame are in the same room; they need not to push the guy away the day after Date One when Date One actually went well in their opinion; they need to resist the urge to take money from their boyfriends / husbands, especially when it's beyond what they need to survive.

Keeping faithful is helpful, too, of course, but since it hasn't affected me yet I didn't bother listing it. I've been faithful; and if anyone ever cheated on me, I never heard about it. Either ignorance is bliss or else I've been lucky. I can't say I care at this point.

posted by Zimri on 00:09 | link |

Saturday, January 14, 2006

The new Sassanids

To me, this move resembles the Persian Shapur's ouster of the schlerotic Parthians in the 3rd century AD, and reconstitution of the Persian Empire. What followed was a Persia so powerful that it irrevocably changed the composition and character of the Roman empire to its west. (Although failing miserably at taking it over, note.)

A more effective Persia back in 200 AD or so would have been fine. At least it would have kept the Huns away, while the Romans did their part in dealing with the Germans. The problem with Shapur and his buddies was that, instead of beating off the barbarians, they attacked Rome.

We need to be reconstituting Iranian resistance, this time to Ahmadi Nejad's nuttiness. In that light, I don't think it's productive for Bush to rail against "Iran" having the bomb. We should be saying that we don't want "Ahmadi Nejad" to have the bomb.

posted by Zimri on 20:02 | link |

Iran's defunct reform movement

I'd posted this at Ace's comment board, but it bears clarification here.

I'd recently read We Are Iran by Nasrin Alavi, a collection of essays on Iranian life and recent history as seen through the eyes of Farsi blogs from 2002 to mid 2005.

Back in mid 2005, average city-dwelling Iranians were apathetic (only about 15% of the population voted) but were happy to see someone run on an anti-corruption message. So when the populist Ahmadi Nejad, Mayor of Tehran, ran for office against mysteriously-wealthy politicians like Rafsanjani, Ahmadi Nejad won. If Ahmadi Nejad had said nutty things as Mayor, no-one noticed; at any rate people have to say whatever in public life when public life is so proscribed. It was only when it was too late that it turned out that Ahmadi Nejad was willing to say the same nutty things in power that he said when he wasn't.

The impression I'm getting from Alavi's book, and from what I've seen elsewhere and since, is that the "reform" movement consisted of an alliance between ethicist and secularist factions. The former faction was the popular one and the latter faction supplied the organisational skills for demonstrations and such (college kids, mostly). The clerical faction meanwhile consisted of an alliance between true believers and cynical criminals.

As late as early last year, the kooks and crooks were stuck together and the secular / reformists looked to be winning against them.

Now, thanks to "I'm a Mahdi Nutjob", it looks like there's been a realignment. The true-believing clerical faction has co-opted the anti-corruption faction. What Ahmadi Nejad is planning next seems clear enough. He's going to hound the secularists out of existence. He'll also make an example of a few of those crooks who remain insufficiently loyal to him. The other crooks (including, I submit, the worst ones) will hide, to show themselves again when the internal jihad (mihna?) is complete.

Anyway, this is why Iranians like Farouz Farzami have committed actual treason against Iran's legal government; demanding that Western powers intervene in Iran, up to and including invasion. She is telling us the obvious:

Iran's reformers are losing. That is, they've lost all the major battles and now they're exposed to their enemies.

Those Iranians who would make Iran a peaceful and secular member of the family of nations are telling us that they no longer have the power to make it so. They are less united, smaller, and - now - less popular than are the craziest of their clerics.

posted by Zimri on 18:47 | link |

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Blonde joke! Blonde joke!

See, there's this...

Uh...

Okay, let's let The Daily Brief tell it. His delivery is so much better. I mean, the joke he quoted is.

Heh. I laughed, anyway.

posted by Zimri on 18:57 | link |

Friday, January 06, 2006

Britain's own drunken Kennedy

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy cuts out alcohol: Filed: 21/09/2004 in British notation.

Two months ago - which by my reckoning is not before 21 September 2004 - he quit again.

*hic*

posted by Zimri on 19:21 | link |

Monday, January 02, 2006

de minimis curo

I've been running out of stuff to type about. (I think I've typed as much as anyone could type, or care to read, about that Emperor Leo fiasco of the 460s AD.)

There's one essay I've written, but it's one of those essays which loses friends and influences no-one. That essay was about why I use insults to handle Outsider Pre-Human Intelligent Design advocates, or "OPHIDians" for short. (I can't use "IDiots" as a pejorative because "Intelligent Design" is broad enough a category to include humanity as the designer.) But I was just going to end up insulting moderates, so I've been holding back on it.

But I can use this down-time to let loose on one set of moderates who are getting my goat right now. They're the sort who use the term "de minimis" to denote a judicial decision which is wrong but bearable. It refers to "de minimis non curat lex": on minimal things the law cares not.

"minimis" is one of those passive-voice weasel words which our professors always used to tell us not to use. To whom is it "minimal"? Really what they mean is that it's bearable ... to them. It's not so bearable to us; or, even if it is, it comes without a promise to refrain from imposing less bearable burdens upon us in future.

Ditto Eugene Rostow's weird proposition that we already assume an established religion, not founded by Congress, called "Ceremonial Deism". The holy synod of Ceremonial Deism is the US Government; they can define some statements of dogma (one God, masculine, creator of all, approver of state policy) and then the dogma can't be challenged - because, as an expression of Ceremonial Deism, the dogma isn't religious by definition.

Anyway, if this stuff is so "minimal" and "ceremonial", why is everyone making such a fuss when we suggest it be taken out? If being "under God" didn't matter to Congress as of 1954, why did it vote to push it in? If something is meant to be "minimal" and "ceremonial" to party A, yet is so important to party B, it stands to reason that this thing is not "minimal" after all.

It's really important that they get the jizya, but if we object to giving it then we need to lighten up.

Humbug.

Labels: secularism

posted by Zimri on 20:16 | link |

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Dithering away an empire

I've been reading Bryce-Jones's Fall of Rome lately. Again, it's on the theme of "Late Antiquity" as a Dark Age, at least in western Europe.

Bryce-Jones argues that the western Empire had been collapsing and its material culture degrading for centuries before 535 CE. That year saw a worldwide civilisation-ending disaster, and Bryce-Jones unlike Heather knew it as such. Bryce-Jones did not use David Keys's Catastrophe, but he did use a 1996 predecessor of it which made similar claims as the disaster affected the Mediterranean. Bryce-Jones agrees that the disaster was real and that it was bad, but claims that much worse happened to Europe in the 14th century without a collapse of civilisation. His emphasis on a fifth-century decline, before the disaster and its sixth-century effects, agrees with what I've seen of the relative strengths of the two sides of Empire through the fifth century CE.

As Spengler's review noted, Bryce-Jones notices that Italy had been falling behind the East and that North Africa had remained static. As of 400 CE Rome clearly lacked the material requirements to safeguard the Mediterranean from northern barbarians.

But I'm thinking now that the Mediterranean could still have been secured - if from Byzantium. The Romans under Constantine I were already reorganising the Empire from there in the fourth century. Perhaps they just needed to go a bit further.

Constantine and his progeny could have ordered by fiat that the Mediterranean provinces were now a "Byzantine Empire" or maybe "Koine Empire", and that its administration should henceforth be conducted in Greek. North Africa then would pay its taxes to Constantinople rather than to Rome. Rome would retain a symbolic presence as a classical Delos or modern Geneva. Spain would be ruled from a Greek-speaking Carthage as a buffer, and the Gallic coast's frontier would be pulled back to the Massif Central. In the meantime, Constantinople would retake / retain Dacia and the Black Sea coast, plus Danube. To paraphrase the unstated justification for NATO: this arrangement would be for keeping the Mediterranean in, the Goths down, and the Huns out.

This was basically Byzantine Emperor Justinian I's programme in the 530s AD, and is I think what Emperor Leo was planning in the late 460s. But those were reactions to demographic and military changes that had been ongoing ever since the third-century arrivals of a serious Germannic threat and of a strong Persia. The Byzantine shift could have been (and I think actually was) predicted in the fourth century. It is possible that political concerns, such as the nostalgia of Rome, prevented the Romans from acting on it until Alaric's visit in 410 CE.

An excuse for Byzantine action here also existed around then, when the usurper so-called Constantine III took Britain and northern Gaul away from Rome. I'd say in hindsight that Constantine III should have kept his gains, signed a treaty with Honorius and Theodosius II, and "looked to his own defence" against the Germans and Huns. But he was too greedy and died too early in any event. His empire-fragment fell to the Visigoths.

The Theodosian dynasty did act to turn Rome into a puppet "empire" soon after 410 CE, but in a confused fashion which failed to protect Spain and North Africa from the Vandals. Certainly by the 460s the jig was up for Rome, with the Byzantine state aiming at carving out its own provinces from the German conquests. (Here Bryce-Jones joins the others in not understanding what Leo was doing.) But when the Byzantines finally succeeded in reorganising the place, in the 530s, natural disaster came and ruined it all.

If the Byzantine hold on the Mediterranean had been more consistent and long-standing, its prosperity would have lasted longer and it would have been easier held against outsiders.

posted by Zimri on 17:33 | link |

Surviving hypocrisy

I was looking over Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other, concerning the Peloponesian / Athenian War of the late 400s BC. It is interesting that Athens, homeland of democracy and innovation, lost against Sparta, homeland of serfdom and tradition.

One possibility is that repressive regimes find it easier to justify repression abroad. When Athens forces its will upon other nations, liberals think "hypocrisy" and some will come out and say it. When Sparta does so, everyone already knows that their claims to be doing it for liberty will be hypocritical, no-one will speak out, and there won't be any public liberals anyway.

Democracies, then, have to explain themselves as doing what they do for a greater cause, have to be open about it, and have to subject their decisions to a free electorate. The executive branch in this situation must make its case in the name not of the nation but of the leaders in charge. It is a temptation to do so in the name of the nation rather than of the leaders, especially once the nation has begun to waver in its resolve.

This becomes a problem if the electorate contains a significant proportion of decadent, disloyal, and/or dastardly people. Not even a government can get through to a people who refuse to listen. In this case, even if the government's policies are not hypocritical, the nation's quiet traitors will disseminate propaganda claiming that it is.

Which brings us to part two.

When a good government rules over wicked people, this government has lost its mandate. It has become an empire like any other, however benevolent its original intent. The end result is tyranny (if the government wins, as in ancient Rome) or decay (if the people win, as in modern Europe). This result is more pithily stated: "people get the government they deserve".

I fear that this is happening in the US now.

That is why John Adams then, and Richard Santorum now, say that a free state has an interest in promoting private morals. Or, if the people prevent this, why Robert Heinlein says that the franchise ought to be limited to those who have proven their patriotism through military service.

posted by Zimri on 15:38 | link |

Intelligent design is a fact

Intelligent design, as applied to a given species, is the thesis that this species did not develop from its progenitor in accordance with natural processes. I see two ways one can test for this in nature.

On Earth, biological organisms do their organising by means of instructions in each cell to perform that cell's task in service to the whole. These instructions are encoded by means of the DNA molecule, with A, C, G, T taking the place of the 0, 1 in your computer's software. So far, it is currently assumed that these instructions are either random or else serve the purpose of some gene or other.

But it is already known that this is not always the case. Two exceptions are husbandry and signature.

A gene may be rewritten to serve the purpose of some other species entirely. The genes for wheat and certain herd animals are cases in point. There is no way a chicken, say, could survive in the vast majority of habitats in which chickens are now found. That chickens are so widespread now is evidence of intelligent design of the chicken species. Humanity is the Intelligent Designer of chickens. (To a certain extent, humanity is also the Intelligent Designer of humans. Some recessive genes are deliberately bred out of the gene pool as dangerous. Other genes, as markers of a losing ethnic group, are - one might say - chlorinated out of it.)

Or, a gene may be a signature. Someone might encode various suras of the Qur'an into ACGT code and inject it into an embryo. Then that creature's descendants would be intelligently designed by a messenger of Allah, so to speak, and all who looked into that species's DNA would have to admit that this could not be created by nature.

All examples of design leave clues as to their designer. The designers of the chicken did so in order to eat chicken. The one who might infuse DNA with the Qur'an would do so in order to send a message to other intelligent colleagues; who exactly did it, and why he did it if not for his own selfish use.

Therefore, intelligent design is science. It ought to be taught as part of an evolutionary curriculum, particularly in agricultural schools. It is also a fit topic for archaeologists, historians, and sociologists. In fact it's already being studied, as the Economist almost points out in its summary of the wheat genome.

But as long as there remains no evidence of extrahuman husbandry or tinkering against base human or any prehuman-animal DNA, intelligent design has no place in palaeontology.

posted by Zimri on 15:37 | link |