There has been a lot of controversy regarding the proposed integration of ‘Intelligent Design’ into current biology curriculum. Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that all life on Earth was created and designed by an intelligent designer. Subsumed by this hypothesis, although not clearly stated, is that most proponents of Intelligent Design believe the intelligent designer to be the most intelligent designer, namely God. It is proposed that in the name of impartiality, Intelligent Design be taught along side Darwinian Evolution in biology classes.

We have two choices in trying to argue against this hypothesis. First we can show that the hypothesis is false by counter claims of design flaws. Next we can show that the hypothesis is an inherently un-testable hypothesis which thus belongs in the realms of philosophy or theology, but not in science. I will argue that while the first approach of finding design flaws is enlightening, it misses the issue. The issue is that for something to be taught in a science classroom it must somehow relate to a testable hypothesis: testable by experiment.

The temptation for someone who is versed in biology when approached with Intelligent Design is to quickly point out all of the design flaws that they know of. There are many examples to pick from but the most commonly offered are design flaws in (human) joints, most notably the elbow and the knee. One of my personal favourites is the prevalence of people with eye glasses which suggests there is a possible design flaw in the maintenance of a spherical shape of the eye. Biologists quickly offer up their favourite design flaw hoping to see a recantation of Intelligent Design. To their dismay, they get answers like: “We do not know the design of the intelligent designer. Perhaps non-spherical eyes are beneficial in some other unknown way, or the knee was some sort of design trade off against some other more beneficial feature. However, the sum of all the trade offs is the ultimate perfect design, designed by the most intelligent designer, God.” The frustrated scientist then returns to his beaker and the Intelligent Design guru returns to his pulpit or to the White House which are increasingly indistinguishable.

The reason that the hypothetical scientist and the theologian talk at cross purposes is that they both have failed to realize the bar of entry to science: a testable hypothesis. In life there are testable hypotheses and un-testable hypotheses. Some un-testable hypotheses are:
1) In absence of an observer, human or otherwise (i.e. a tape recorder): If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a noise? Yes or no?
2) Suppose all of history started 5 minutes ago with all of our collective memories implanted at that moment.
3) All good in the world is a work of a benevolent God, and all problems people experience are the result of God working in mysterious (good) ways.
More topically:
4) The wonder and beauty of the living world is the result of an intelligent design and all counter examples such as fossils, design flaws, evolutionary proofs, are just the result of our inability to grasp the grand design.

The common thread that runs across all four statements is the fallacy of an unprovable statement. It is this same thread that many stitch together to form a rip stop nylon fabric of belief. Statements 1 through 3 would likely be widely accepted as topics for a class on philosophy or theology. Statement 4 is no different. It is an inherently unprovable statement which has no place in science.

Many have said that science is a religion unto itself. I have often said that the only reason our language has two words for science and religion is that we sorely misunderstand both. They are both searches for the truth. Science is an ideology based on the Scientific Method and the instrument of that method is the experiment. Science allows for discussions of all things provable, even if they are not yet proved. Take for example the Superstring revolution in physics. It is currently unproven; however, scientists are building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland which should have sufficient power to create ’supersymmetric’ particles which would confirm the theory. What experiment does Intelligent Design proposes to validate its hypothesis? How does one experimentally prove something was designed? Even if such an experiment could be constructed, how then does that disprove that the designed item was not self designed and thus (perhaps), not intelligently designed?

Confused? The notion of a self designing design is especially hard to understand on a planet where we (most) see a clear distinction between human made and natural objects. [However, it is a distinction I do not see because humans as part of nature.] Just the same, the notion of a self designing design is crucial to evolution, and while complex, its power is compelling. If you are confused and interested pick up a good book on the subject or take a course. However, if you are presented with Intelligent Design, ask for a proposed or executed experiment published in a reputable scientific journal. Darwin had to go through the same efforts of the before his works were accepted. There is an established process in place and it has been put in place by an intelligent design (irony intended). The designer is certainly not God and its intelligence is often arguable, just the same it has served us well so far.

In summation, scientists are, by definition, very inquisitive people who would love to have conversations about many different theories and possibilities. The price of admission to such a conversation is to bring with an experimentally testable hypothesis. All other discussions belong in a different classroom.

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Ahmadinejad wearing his trademark white jacket and pointing to the Farsi phrase Ma Mitavanim (We Can) on a blackboard.

Canadian Link:  http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/full-episodes/#clip185688

US Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=231561&title=reza-aslan

Reza Aslan was interviewed on the Daily Show on June 24, 2009 lauding the response of Barack Obama during the recent and ongoing revolution in Iran.  Aslan notes strong parallels to ‘79 noting that this revolution is likewise a battle for the future of Iran.  Starting at time index 4:48, Aslan applauds Obama’s response:  “Thank you God for President Barack Obama” says Aslan.

“Obama played this perfectly.  During his campaign Iran never left his mouth.  This worked to the disadvantage of Ahmadinejad’s because he couldn’t use his ‘America is going to attack any minute now’ rhetoric.”

Aslan notes that Ahmadinejad’s campaign slogan was “Ma Mitavanim” which is Persian for “Yes we can”.

Responding to opposition calls to make stronger statements or take stronger actions in regards to Iran Aslan warns:

“The US has a long sordid history of meddling in Iranian affairs. … If you want to pu and end to this movement, this revolution tomorrow, let’s listen to Bill Bennett, let’s listen to John McCain.”

Aslan recommends that the US continue its current approach.  “The best thing that we can do is shut up.”  He goes on to say that “Obama has changed the equation in that region.  He is taking the long view on issues, looking ahead 10 years from now.”

Aslan is certain that Iran will emerge a different country from what it is now, but he is concerned as to what form of change will come.  “Iran is on a precipice between North Korea and China; with isolation and militarization on one hand and a preservation of the oligarchies while opening to commerce and contact on the other.”

When asked what US citizens can do to help the revolution, he suggests encouraging and pressuring the EU and UN to act who do have influence in the region.  As for the US, he contends “you have to have a relationship with someone in order to punish them more.  … We have no influence there.  … We can’t punish them any more.  What are we going to do sanction them more?”

—

Reza Aslan’s most recent book is “How to Win a Cosmic War”:
http://www.rezaaslan.com/cosmicwar.html

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Film Review of “Babel” — Spoiler Warning (however this movie was written spoiled)

– An alternative view

Biblically, Genesis Chap 11 tells of the story of humans who sought to build the tower of Babel such that they could reach God. God then responds by confounding their speech and understanding of one another and spreading them all over the world. This is the Genesis account for the origin of religions and races.

If the movie “Babel” has anything to do with its biblical namesake, in this case, God makes all the people of the earth extremely stupid. First we start with a couple in marital trouble as a result of the recent death of one of their newborn, likely from SIDS. This brainy couple decides to take a trip to Morroco (without the remaining kids) to solve their problems: stupid.

Compounding this stupidity, a Morrocan father procures a rifle to help rid his flocks of jackals. He gives the rifle to his stupid young children who decide to test the efficacy of the weapon on passing tourist busses. On this bus is? Yup you guessed it, the stupid couple with marital troubles. Who gets shot? You guessed it, the wife from this couple. Now some would look upon this as an artistic study of cause and effect. I look on it more simply: Stupid people shooting at stupid people is simply natural selection at its finest.

But wait, one would think this expose of stupidity would suffice for a two hour and twenty minute film, but there are more stupid entaglements. The rifle was originally given to a local Morrocan by a Japanese hunter. This Japanese man recently had his wife commit suicide and he stupidly leaves his younger (deaf and mute) daughter alone for great spells of time such that she needs to compensate by seeking sex from any and every available male. In the films most unbelievable stroke, she fails on every attempt. I have the fortune of living in a male body and as such am qualified to inform you that this would never occur.

But wait again, there’s still another stupid entaglement. The housekeeper of the stupid maritally challenged couple has a wedding to attend in Mexico. She was originally promised the day off, but upon hearing of the tragic string of events which happened to her stupid employers, she’s informed that she won’t be able to get that day off. What follows is a screenplay that could be accomplished by going to Taco Bell and using 8.5″ x 11″ stock as toilet paper to clean up.

She takes the kids, American citizens, into Mexico with her. The kids experience the cultural diversity of a Mexican wedding, at first seeming to enjoy it. Things go awry when stupid people allow a drunk driver to drive the kids and Nanny back to San Diego. The rest is just too hard to believe; first that it could actually happen and next that the screen writer wrote it. The driver is hassled at the border. He panics and runs the border with the police hot on his tail. He abandons the children and the Nanny in the desert with promises to return. (He was likely fleeing the scene of a crime in screen writing.) The Nanny and children are left to fend for themselves in the desert when he never returns. Eventually they are picked up by the border patrol and the children are returned unharmed, and the Nanny is deported. I am a critic of US Immigration Policy, however, not in this case.

In the end Babel is an example of Oscar seeking formulaic writing. The formula is simple: create an appearance of meaning, when, in fact, there is none. In so doing, you automatically embarass any critics of the film by allowing the argument that they are simply dullards who can’t grasp the great meaning of the film. The truth is far more simple in this case: Stupid people understand stupid people very well and are able to write a painful two hour and twenty minute discertation on the interactions of stupidity.

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Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

AID · aig · ale · America · artist · author · cent · CHIEF · Coming · Deconstruction and Criticism · drugs · economist · Economy · God · Harvard · head · http · ILS · Impostor Syndrome · Ivy League · Jacques Derrida · John Lennon · Julian · Julian Jaynes · Karl · king · lehman brothers · logic · Martin C. Winer · Martin C. Winer June · Minnesota · MIT · OJ · Oxford · Princeton · professor · quote · Ralph Waldo · RAM · Red · Rome · Stephen Colbert · The Colbert Report · video · Wallace Stevens · Walter Kirn · Walter Kirn (Doubleday) · writing

Randall Mills Holding A Hydrino Reactor

BlackLight’s physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water – Jul. 2, 2008.

“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

  — G. K. Chesterton

It would seem that the same is true regarding our worship of fossil fuels.  As fuel prices skyrocket there has been a run on alternative energy ideas.  I’ve covered several on this blog. 

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/over-unity-cavetation-water-heater/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/thane-heins-perpetual-motion-free-energy-or-simply-releasing-a-brake/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/perpetual-motion-claim-if-its-a-hoax-its-a-good-one/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/solution-to-the-energy-crisis-aluminum-hydrogen-cycle/

This one, like that of Thane Heins breaks some laws of physics.  In the case of Heins, it was the Law of Conservation of Energy.  Randall Mills has broken some laws of Quantum Mechanics in suggesting that there is a lower energy state below the currently known ground state of hydrogen.  Mills terms such hydrogen atoms in this new lower energy state: ‘hydrinos’.

Electrons orbit the nucleus at well defined distances.  These distances (states) are finite, discrete or quantized as it were.  If an electron is excited by an influx of energy, it jumps to a higher state.  Conversely when an electron jumps to a lower orbital state, it releases some energy (a quanta of energy).  There is a theoretical limit to how low an electron can go in this scheme.  It’s called the ground state and it’s analogous to the lowest floor an elevator can go.

Hydrogen is the simplest, and most studied atom in modern science.  It consists of a proton and an electron.  It’s no wonder then that when Mills claims to have discovered a new ‘basement’ state below the known ground state that many physicists dismiss him out of hand.  If Mills is correct however, then this new ‘basement’ state could be used to cause hydrogen to release much more energy than simply burning hydrogen.

The crown jewel of science is the scientific method.  It avoids any political and otherwise human failings.  In short, can Mills produce this effect reproducibly and reliably.  The answer so far appears to be yes.  Mills’ company Blacklight has released prototype commercialized applications of his technology which are slated to be installed in power stations in 2009. 

During the interim, there is soft evidence which is also compelling.  Mills doesn’t want your money.  He has plenty of it in the form of $60 million in investments.  Mills also doesn’t want your help.  He has plenty in the form of an all star board of directors featuring many energy magnates.  All Mills needs to do now is to demonstrate his technology working on industrial scales.  He promises to deliver energy at 2 cents per kilowatt hour, whereas the current national average is 8.9 cents. 

This blog will continue to track events on this front.

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Update: There will be a History Channel special on this: “Quest for the Lost Ark” on March 2, 2008 at 8pm.

I was reading a recent article in Time magazine and had to double check that I was reading an article in the “Health & Science” section instead of a book review of the most recent Dan Brown novel. The article can be found here:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1715337,00.html

Since this generation suffers from a mass case of ADD, let me use bullets to demonstrate how Tudor Parfitt, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, reveals the Ark to be a multipurpose carry-all for religious relics which doubles conveniently in times of war for a cannon. Yes, you read correctly.

• A Southern African tribe called the Lemba claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. (They practice circumcision and call meetings using a rams’ horn.) No one believed them until it was discovered that the Lemba priestly cast had the same frequency of a specific marker to the Jewish priestly cast (cohens).
• The Lemba also claim to be custodians of the Ark of the Covenant. Based on the now verified first claim, Parfitt began to investigate this second claim.
• The Lemba call Ark the ngoma lungundu.
  • “The ngoma,according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a ‘Fire of God’ that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, ‘[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa.’”
• His search led him to the ancient city of Senna where Parfitt believes the Lemba and their ancestors may have converged where he uncovered several clues as to where the Ark may be today.
• His search ended at the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe where he found a drum like object, with remnants of the carrying rings and crossed reeds indicative of biblical origins.
• Neither Parfitt nor the Lemba contend that this object is the original Ark of the Covenant. The object was carbon dated to 1350 ad, which is some time after Moses. However, the Lemba folklore holds that the original ngoma destroyed itself and was rebuilt upon its own ruins by the temple priests.
• Parfitt contends that the Ark was in fact a drum which was a repository of relics and a cannon!

Don’t believe it? It’s hard to believe I admit, however, it is interesting to note that the Ark of the Covenant is brought into many Israelite battles at the head of the attacking force. Now do you put your relics at the head of an attacking force, or do you put your greatest weapon?

Truly the Lord hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us.” [Josh.2:24]

Still can’t believe it? I admit, I’m having similar trouble. Worshipping a weapon? I keep conjuring up images of “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”:

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Many discuss, argue and berate the contents of the big three religious texts: the Quran, The Old Testament and The New Testament.  Discussions have been going on for millenia about what is contained therein.  I’ve been more interested, indeed dismayed, by what is missing.  These books are held to be the writ word of God by the adherents of their respective faiths.  Now, if God be the author of these texts, I wonder how it was possible to omit some critical information.

Slavery:  All the aforementioned texts allow slavery.  Sure, they may put limits on it.  They may even dictate humane ways to treat your slaves, but slaves be they just the same.  It was humans, noble humans at least, that put a stop to the practice only not so long ago.  All of humanity has been enriched by the emancipation.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Environment:  “Be fruitful and multiply” the Lord of the Old and New Testament declares boldly.  But what of population control?  What of greenhouse gasses?  The Old Testament contains passages urging the ancient Israelites to bury their excrement outside of the camp to keep the place clean.  But what of the future generations?  Religious texts are supposed to be written for all generations.  Otherwise why should we at a later generation be compelled to abide by them?  So true, at the time of their writing, there was no concern for population control or emission of greenhouse gasses, but there would be for future generations.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Democracy:  Democracy isn’t the perfect solution; far from it.  Just the same it’s far better than any other system that’s come along so far.  Moreover democracies are largely peaceful compared to their predecessors.  So why then is there no mention of it in any of the religious texts?  Why is it a Hellenic invention?  Centuries of warfare might have been averted had democracy taken an earlier hold which it certainly would have if it were sanctioned by the big three religious texts.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Health:  The big three religious texts go to excruciating details into what can and cannot be eaten.  Restrictions of shellfish, rules for butchering methods and the like go on and on for pages and pages.  Yet on those pages we find narry a mention of things which are currently obvious.  How about a few words about high fat, high cholesterol diets?  How about a few words about not smoking?  Now this knowledge may not have been accessible to the people of the day but wouldn’t God know that?

Finance:  All religions have prohibitions against usury.  However, readers must be careful in that when they read these prohibitions they must realize that these prohibitions apply to lending with interest to someone of the same faith.  Lending to others, outside the faith is allowed.  So then what about financial disasters we’ve faced?  They were caused by manipulation of currency and powerful bankers taking control of our financial system.  How about some laws defining a fair monetary system?  How about laws preventing partial reserve banking ( a current system where banks lend money they don’t actually have on reserve )?  How about laws prohibiting the artificial contraction and expansion of the money supply which caused the Great Depression, the Great Inflation of the 70’s and now plays a major part in the current recession of 2008?  Now the people of the day may not have understood these concepts but wouldn’t God know that?

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There is much debate of late as to who is the patent holder on the term ‘Marriage’. Conservative heterosexual monogamists have put their moral stake in the ground claiming that ‘Marriage’ is their intellectual property. The proponents of a traditional definition can be subdivided into the religious, who claim divine rights to the word, and traditionalists that appeal to the naturalistic fallacy that the definition is as it ought to be, proven and tested by time.

First, let us set things straight. What is the traditional definition of marriage? The short answer is: one woman, one man, for life. Yet, is this the definition that both proponents of the traditional definition truly espouse?

Those religiously minded who claim a divine definition for marriage point you conveniently to the Bible. Yet, weren’t many of the biblical greats polygamists?! Clearly some historical modification of this divine lexicon has occurred.

The traditionalists have also modified matrimonial definitions over time. As recently as 1997, Ireland legalized divorce, reducing the certainty of the ‘for life’ part of the definition. Throughout most of recorded history, divorce was simply, ‘not an option’ yet it seems that societal needs have forced us to alter that definition.

So what the proponents of a traditional definition of marriage present as an immutable and timeless definition, turns out, upon closer inspection to be a shifting definition which is a product of the defining times.

Having knocked the moral ascendancy of the conservatives down a peg, we move on to possible solutions to this problem. Most people believe in homosexual marriage-style rights, leaving the word used to describe this solution as the only sticking point to be debated. They turn to homosexuals and say: what’s in a name? Wouldn’t ‘a marriage by any other name be as sweet?’ They give them the rights but just wish that they’d stay out of their lexical backyard.

Same sex marriage proponents contend this would be tantamount to the tenets ‘different but equal’ and point back to the inequalities such thinking created in civil rights history. While they have a point on this issue, I believe that the semantic battle for the word ‘marriage’ is a bid to gain popular acceptance and I believe that their opponents see it as such. I would like to see advocates for the broadened definitions of marriage speak to why homosexuality should be accepted in general. In dealing with the issues at the core of the debate they have the best chances of evoking understanding, hence change.

The main points at the core of the debate as to whether to accept homosexuality are: 1) is it natural 2) is it evil and 3) is it a choice or endemic? We’ll examine each point in turn.

First what is natural? There are two aspects to natural, first the examples taken from nature around us and next the notion that the way things are, even in the human (not natural) world are the ‘natural’ way they should be. Looking to nature we see some examples of heterosexual monogamy in say, the Bald Eagle. However, more often we see examples of harems (polygamy) and loose monogamy (infidelity, or pair bonding for only a few mating seasons). While the traditional definition of marriage does exist in the animal kingdom, it is a minority player amongst many other definitions of bonding. Further, in nature we see examples of homosexuality amongst, say, male mice who often make female sexual displays in high population densities. Thus to say that heterosexual monogamy is nature’s way is tunnel sighted and uninformed.

Next we look to the idea that homosexual marriage is not natural since the heterosexual definition has been the prevailing one across the centuries. This is a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy which says that the way things are, is the way things ought to be. If we subscribe to the belief that the way things are is the way things they ought to be then we are forced to conclude that the world we currently live in cannot, and/or should not, be improved upon or changed in any way. Imagine if we all had subscribed to this belief, as many did, when it came time to review our ways in the face of slavery. Imagine again telling many suffering couples that they were stuck together for life because the definition of marriage was the way it was meant to be. Yet today we tell homosexuals that marriage is as it ought to be and if you want your rights, well then fine, but go do it on another page of the dictionary please. If we want the rights of deep, fulfilling, long term relationships to be extended to all humanity, heterosexuals must not drink the stupefying elixir of a ‘natural’ definition of marriage, because no such definition exists.

Is homosexuality evil? Well first, what is evil. To the religiously minded, they say evil is what God says is evil as given in the book of absolute truth. I’ve found that people who believe in absolute truths usually do so only because they are absolutely wrong. I admit that I have little respect or patience for those who derive their definitions of evil from a book and thus outsource their thinking. I dismiss them quickly for the same reason I scrape cold peas of my dinner plate, because they are cold and uninteresting. For those who are prepared to think about what good and evil really are, we come to the notion of utility. Good things serve a purpose and bad things do harm. This categorization is relative to a certain frame of consideration.

The ‘packages’ your dog delivers on the neighbourhood park are not good for you to eat, yet are gourmet meals to the community of flies. Thus the truth to the statement: “doggy packages make good eating” is relative to whom is speaking. In a thinking world, to show that homosexuality is evil, we must demonstrate that it is evil in one of two frames. We must prove harm to either homosexual individuals or to society as a whole.

To homosexual individuals, the main harm done to them by being homosexual is the lack of acceptance they receive. Many heterosexuals quickly point to the often ’sad’ lives some homosexuals end up living. However, to borrow from the poet Andrew Lang, they do this “… like a drunk leans on a lightpost, for support instead of illumination”. The truth is that heterosexual intolerance of homosexuality is the cause of the ’sadness’ they observe. Still, as acceptance slowly increases, we see many more homosexuals today live productive and successful lives. They do not necessarily live reproductive lives, but either do all heterosexuals.

To our society at large, homosexuality may have a reproductive impact, but on a planet of 6 billion, is this really an issue? If we really would like to have a discussion about harm, let’s talk about the harm of subverting this ‘evil’ impulse to be homosexual, only to have men live in a traditional marriage unhappily, hurting both himself, and his wife and perhaps children. Thus aside from the heterosexual discomfort it causes, there is no harm caused by homosexuality and hence it is not evil.

Finally, is homosexuality a choice? Why ask the question? We ask because if it is a choice, we can ask them to make a different choice. Well, homosexuality is a choice but only in the same way heterosexuality is a choice. Heterosexuals could choose to be homosexual if they really wanted to. What we refer to in common speak as a choice actually has two components, first a pressure and second a pure choice. When faced with an oncoming freight train, we have a tremendous survival pressure to move. Still we have a pure choice as to whether to move or not. Most of us would move. In the case of our sexuality there are pressures given to us by our environment, genetics and evolution and in the case of heterosexuals there are no other pressures which would cause us to use our pure choice to override this strong evolutionary pressure. In the case of homosexuals, societal pressures can cause individuals to use their pure choice to over-rule their evolutionary pressures. The fact that the natural pressure can be overruled does not suggest or imply that it should because most such individuals live lives with the constant stress of juggling conflicting priorities and are never truly at peace.

In order to determine the existence and severity of this pressure to be homosexual, being unable to jump into the minds of others, we need to empirically observe the effects. The empirical proof comes from asking: Why would any person willingly join a historically persecuted group if the pressure wasn’t strong to do so? Throughout history homosexuals have been shunned and forced to lead marginalized lives. This fact is common knowledge, thus it is impossible to state that homosexuals became or become homosexual on a flight of fancy.

So are heterosexual monogamists the patent holders on marriage after all? Why do homosexuals want the word so badly, even if they’ve already got the equivalent rights? Homosexuals want the word for the same reason that heterosexuals want the word, because of its meaning. It represents a deep, long-term, and socially recognized relationship between two people. Heterosexual monogamists claim to be the patent holders on marriage because tradition, the bible and nature have provided immutable and clear definitions of marriage that conveniently agree with them. None of that is true.

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PDF Version: AncientInjustice.pdf

Growing up, my Jewish education consisted of an after school program (‘cheider’ to the Yiddish inclined) while I attended public school by day.  On my walk to Hebrew School I would often try to marry the two bodies of knowledge from the two respective school systems.  A happy romance occurred around 1987 between the religious and secular bodies of knowledge.  As many may recall 1987 was the year of the big crash on the stock market.[1]  Debt and the economy were on the lips of many in those days.

In the secular world there was tremendous talk of personal and national debt, interest rates, unemployment and the like.  All the while, the Torah I was reading in Hebrew school was definitely running on about the sabbatical forgiveness of debt and the precept that “there should be no poor among you”. (Deut 15:1-4)  Now my mental image of the ancient Israelites was that of a pastoral, agrarian people.  With hindsight I can say that this image was only slightly misguided.  Despite the rumored grandeur of the Davidic kingdom, archaeologists hold that their society was more rural than urban.

But this left me with a theological problem:  I saw debt as a product of banks which were on city streets.  I failed to conjure an image of rolling agricultural fields dotted with banks and/or ATMs at the Temple gates. (Parenthetically, it turns out that if the Gospels have any historical veracity, there may have been just such an ancient equivalent of an ATM at the Temple gates.  More to follow shortly.)  Failing to imagine ancient banks, I was puzzled about what the ancient Israelites knew of debt and how then did this prescient warning against the accumulation of debt make it into the Torah?  I questioned my Hebrew school teacher along these lines and I was given the answer that ‘the Torah contained the writ word of God and all His wisdom.  It was written for all times and addressed all the problems that we would encounter until the end of days.’

Platitudes such as this are to young inquisitive men, such as I was, like drinking sea water when thirsty:  quenching only at first and then leaving you more thirsty than ever.  If my teacher’s answer was to hold water (pun intended) then there were conspicuous absences from the ‘writ word of God’.  Where were the foundations for democracy?  Where were the specific prohibitions against slavery (beyond the sabbatical release of Hebrew slaves)?  Where was the discussion about protecting the environment beyond the scant ordinances for burying excrement beyond the outskirts of camp (Deut 23:14)?  From those grandiose absences there were more mundane absences like: Where were the prohibitions against smoking and where were the prohibitions against high cholesterol foods?  My attempts to marry the religious and secular belief systems were thwarted by the absence of these secular guidelines which I had determined to be legitimate and necessary.  After a brief flirtation the attempted marriage failed in divorce with the judgment pronounced by my rationality decreeing that the Torah was not indeed the writ word of God.

Literalists may be tempted by the previous sentence to toss this work out of hand directly into the fire.  Indeed this may provide needed warmth to those suffering the effects of debt.  Just the same, with a bit of patience on both sides of the theist/atheist debate, I believe there is commonality to be found in the good intentions of the Torah.  While we may debate its authorship I will not debate that it was written with the best of intentions.  Further, I hold that it was written to describe an ideal rather than the actual practice of the day.  There is a common modern Israeli expression: “The synagogue I don’t go to is Orthodox.”  Similarly, I believe that the Torah describes an ideal set out for the people to follow which was likely, based on archaeological evidence, considerably different than religion actually practiced by the ancient Israelites.  Specifically, archaeology reveals the rampant practice of polytheism and idolatry up to the Babylonian exile.[2]  Biblical archaeology contends that the Torah was a compendium of tales written by a reformist movement railing against the practices of the day.  Setting aside the issue of biblical authorship, I will continue the discussion in the context of the good intentions of the author presently.

The now dubious authorship of the Torah made my original question even more pronounced.  If the Torah was not written by God, then who wrote it and how were the ancient Israelites aware of debt and its effects?  My research would lead me to the field of biblical archaeology.  I studied the works of William Dever and Israel Finklestein amongst others with the following results.  The ancient Israelites never conquered Canaan as told in the Torah canon.  They were instead Canaanites themselves who survived and replaced a decaying social order with a more egalitarian one.  For those interested in how I arrived at this conclusion there is a wonderful précis of biblical archaeology available on Public Broadcastings’ NOVA series: “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”[3]  There you’ll find a terrific summary of all the archaeological and scientific findings to date.  I only wish this series had existed at the outset of my research for it would have saved me much trudging through many inaccessibly written academic works on the topic.  Researching biblical archaeology was much like archaeology itself: sifting through piles of academic detritus to yield occasional relics and then putting the pieces together.

So, accepting for the moment that the Israelite race emerged from the nadir of the Canaanite civilization, Zephaniah 1:11 becomes ever more clear:
“The dwellers of Machtesh [, a quarter of Jerusalem,] howl;/ For all the tradesmen [nation of Canaan] have perished, All who weigh silver are wiped out.”
Two things are critical in this passage.  First the time of Zephaniah, well past that of the Canaanite era, and second the reference to the weighing of silver.  Zephaniah was not admonishing the Canaanites but rather the Jewish merchants of Jerusalem who were acting like Canaanites.[4]  As to the reference to the weighing of silver, silver was then as it is now, a monetary metal.  All throughout history, every society has been plagued by the manipulation of their currency leading to their ultimate downfall.  Economists call the process seigniorage gain.

Seigniorage gain is the process by which the minter (usually the government) gains on the difference between the face value of the coin and the actual value of the metal used to make it.  I often think it is the job of economists to construct palatable names for what in the end turns out to be sheer larceny.  Those unfamiliar with the term may be more familiar with the contemporary synonyms such as ‘inflation’.  Whatever you choose to call it, ‘a lemon by any other name would taste as sour’ and inflation, currency manipulation, or seigniorage gain is quintessentially a tax on the middle class leading to widespread debt, poverty and wealth inequality.  It is a fundamental violation of the biblical injunction to have “fair weights and measures” (Deut 25:13-16).

It is my supposition that it was an economic collapse brought about by currency manipulation which spelled the end of the Canaanite civilization.  I will support this supposition by reviewing the log roll of history vis a vis currency manipulation and the subsequent unfolding of the relevant civilization.  Biblical archaeology tells us that the proto-Israelites literally fled for the hills in the face of the collapse of the Canaanites.[5]  There they regrouped and sought to set themselves apart from the evils of their past.  After the dust had settled they returned with a renewed spirit and purpose to set out a more equitable system.  To that end they developed laws against the accumulation of debt and the slavery that results.  Those laws were later canonized in the Pentateuch around the end of the Babylonian exile (4th to 6th centuries BCE).[6]

Some 600 years later we know that these laws were largely being ignored and that corruption again loomed large.  We have the historical testimony of the gospels of Luke and John which recount Jesus’ banishing of the money changers from the temple gates.  Around the time of the year 0 CE Roman currency was the common currency in the holy land.  These coins typically bore the images of pagan gods and were unacceptable for use in temple worship.  At the temple gates, benches of money changers would exchange these coins, at predatory exchange rates, to Levite coins for use in temple services.  These same money changers would charge the Levites unreasonable rates to change these coins back into Roman coins such that the Levite priests could make purchases in the markets.  Jesus found the entire process abominable and forcibly drove them from the temple.[7]  Whether you believe the historical veracity of the gospels is beside the point here.  What is known is that currency manipulation was clearly on the mind of the authors of the gospels and the gospels were known to be written around this time (admittedly within 400 years).  As a pertinent aside, the word ‘Bank’ comes from the Latin for ‘bench’ precisely referring to this historical antecedent.[8]  I believe it is social disarray caused by the financial ruin of Israel which led to its overthrow by the Romans.  There is textual evidence for this in the bible itself:  Jeremiah 7:11 reads “Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”  Amos 5:7 reads “Ah you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course.”

It is an irony of history, if not a recurring leitmotif, that the very same financial snare which destroyed Israel also destroyed its captors.  In Hebrew school we all learned of the famous (infamous) “Judea Capta” coin.[9]  This coin depicts the pride of the Romans in defeating ancient Israel.  It is in the silver or precious metal content of roman coinage with which we can track the decline of the Roman Empire.  The backbone coin of the Roman economy was the Denarius which started out with a silver weight of approximately 4.5 grams.  Have you ever noticed the ridges on the edge of a quarter?  These same ridges were present on the Denarius and there intention is to make any shaving of the coin obvious.  This made it harder for individuals to debase the currency but the government was free to mint coins with less and less silver content.  By the year 274 CE under Aurelian’s reign the coins had almost no silver content at all.[10]  The causes of the fall of Rome are admittedly complex, including the outsourcing of their military defense to barbarian mercenaries.  Just the same, the economic decline of Rome is certainly one of the principle causes and is yet another exemplar of the debasement of currency leading to the debasement of the underlying civilization.

The collapse of the Roman Empire led the world into the dark ages.  The Christian religion took hold championing the cause of the poor all through these long dark ages.  Eventually a fair monetary system was developed called the tally stick system.[11]  Very strict Christian based laws against usury (interest) prevented any monetary abuse.  However, in the 1500’s Henry VIII, obviously unaware of the peril, deregulated the economy and allowed for certain forms of usury.[12]  The economic maelstrom unleashed destroyed the English economy.  In the wake of the upheaval and in the aftermath of the English revolution of 1642, the Bank of London was established.  Oddly enough, the initial shares were bought with no other currency than talley sticks.  The bank of England replaced this monetary system with their own manipulated (or ‘fiat’) currency.  Currency manipulation was now institutionalized in the form of this ‘Central Bank’ put in place to ‘protect and regulate’ the money supply.

Just around this time, gold was being used as a currency.  Carrying ones gold on their person could be cumbersome and moreover, dangerous.  A robbery could erase ones savings.  The goldsmiths of the day agreed to hold gold for consumers at a nominal fee and issued them a certificate which they could then use to redeem their deposits.  These little slips of paper were much easier to work with and in a very short time, the slips of paper would be used in transactions instead of gold.  The goldsmiths made an astute observation.  Not all of their clients came to collect their gold at one instant.  As such they could lend out some of the deposited gold at interest making money on money they did not really have.  While this seems relatively harmless provided customers do not all come for their gold at once, it is in fact at the core of everything wrong in the world today.  The fraud is subtle yet essential to understand.  By using gold that say a farmer had deposited to make loans, you are using the hard labour of the farmer to make money with very little labour.  In a nutshell, this practice siphons up the value of labour and puts it in the hands of the advantaged few who are in a position to leverage it.  This is the practice of fractional reserve banking with is with us to this very day.[13]  When a middle class family takes out a loan to get an SUV, the bank does not lend you their money.  They lend you the savings of an auto worker who drives a compact sedan.  The banker turns interest on money s/he never owned and drives a luxury sports car on the profits.  Such is the food chain of fractional reserve banking.  Bankers love the practice for obvious reasons.  Politicians love it because they can finance their projects without reaching for tax dollars.  Projects can now be financed with thusly conjured money with only a nodding concern for inflation and the ever growing national debt. The average person neither loves it nor hates it because they do not understand it.  Hopefully, that is, until now.

The Bank of England was aware of the practice of the goldsmiths but instead of outlawing it, embraced it.  As such they succeeded in protecting and regulating the money supply insofar as her citizens of wealth were concerned but all to the detriment of the English parliament and the general public.  The bank so bankrupted England that England was forced to place a heavy tax burden on its colonies.  The American colonies revolted to the cry against ‘taxation without representation’ in the war of independence of 1762.  By the end of this revolution, with the effects of the Bank of England in mind the Americans set out to “form a more perfect union”.  Into their new constitution section 10 forbids “…emit[ing] Bills of Credit; mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts…”.[14]  It was pursuant to this section that the United States was on the Gold Standard for most of its existence up until 1933.  The Gold Standard ensured that every bill was backed by gold.  Bills printed prior to 1933 were marked “redeemable in gold”.  After 1933 they were marked as only “legal tender”.  The founding fathers knew of the threat of a manipulated currency but that memory and warning was, as we now see, historically fleeting.

The Americans had the first and second Banks of America which again started to manipulate the currency.  Andrew Jackson famously put a temporary stop to the banking cartels saying: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”[16]  For a short while he succeeded.  From 1836 to 1913 the United States was free of a central bank and the currency manipulation they bring with them.

During this hiatus in central banking while financial crises persisted, inflation was flat.  That is to say that one dollar was worth one dollar for this interim period.[17]  This allowed for the accumulations of savings which is the true practice of capitalism.  Indeed by the early 1900’s bankers were concerned with the prevalence of self-financing of business development.  So concerned were the bankers that they sought to reassert themselves and in 1913, taking advantage of a recent (some say engineered) financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was born and central banking was reborn in America.[18]  Again too, the promise of the Federal Reserve was to regulate the money supply and again, so it did, to the advantage of the wealthy few.  As it has always been throughout history, currency manipulation manufactures debt and poverty.  Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by 95%.  Inflation has increased by 1929% (that’s 19 hundred and twenty nine percent!).[19]  The effect of this is that wealth inequality is now staggering.  As of 2001, in the U.S., the top 20% held 84% of all the wealth.[20]  For those who have trouble dealing with math, what this means is that if you are in the class of the remaining 80% (most of us are) then in a more fairly distributed economy – which would necessarily feature a fair currency – you would have approximately 5 times your current assets.

As common as monetary manipulation is throughout history, so too are the attempted fixes when the system gets out of whack.  A fiat currency (recall a ‘fiat’ currency is an ‘on faith’ currency) is a sort of monetary Golem: this time made of minted coins instead of clay.  Generally it functions impeccably as designed, siphoning wealth upwards but occasionally and often dramatically, it causes large financial upset.  When this Golem takes a swat at its banker creators the solution is to placate it with, yes, ever more printed or minted money.  This maneuver results in one of two results: 1) a temporary stabilization of the monster or 2) a hyperinflationary death when the monster collapses under its own weight.  Note that in either outcome, the best that can be accomplished is a temporary shoring up of the system.  Inevitably, the Golem collapses back into the imaginary ore it came from, only after raping the value of the land and passing it into the hands of the elite few.  Revisiting the economic death of Rome, Nero and other Emperors debased the currency via inflation fiddling and minting as it were while Rome burned.

However, one need not look as far afield to find a terrific example of the hyperinflationary death of an empire.  Just recently, the Weimar republic died just such a death.[21]  In the 1920’s Germany forced under the WWI reparations act to make payments to the victor nations.  The victor nations, most notably France and England who were in their own financial distress due to – you may have guessed by now – their own currency manipulation, pressured the Germans to make good on their obligations.  The German coffers were largely empty and as a result they decided to print money to meet their obligations.  The German citizens were wary of the stability of their currency and began to hoard cash fearing a crisis.  Simultaneously the German creditors began to fear default on their loans and closed the taps of credit.  The German economy stalled and went into a brief bout of deflation.  The Germans did what every other economy has tried all throughout history to solve the problem:  they threw more money into the market to try and jumpstart it.  The German citizens feared for their nest eggs which caused them to attempt to convert any cash they had on hand to real assets.  This unleashed a torrent of cash on the market which immediately lead to hyperinflation.[22]  Hyperinflation is runaway inflation fueled by panic and distrust of the underlying currency.  A corollary to the loss of trust in currency is an inevitable loss of trust in the government that promotes it.  It was thus that the Weimar republic fell leaving a political vacuum in its wake which would soon be filled by the Nazis.  Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that: “It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”[23]  History will record that this is equally applicable to the cessation of belief in government.

Historians and economists alike may be quick to point out that there would appear to be a historic precedent for economic spending or stimulus as an escape to recession.  They undoubtedly would point to the Roosevelt era and the “New Deal”.  So hope filled were the citizens of the day that the New Deal was rhapsodized into the Great Depression era musical: ‘Annie’.  Daddy Warbucks swooned “I know the depression is depressing… But we’ll get a new deal for Christmas this year.”[24]  The character Daddy Warbucks was modeled after Paul Warburg.[25]  It was common knowledge at the time that this was so.  Warburg was one of the chief architects of the Federal Reserve which is the United States arm of the Bank of England.  The bitter irony here is that it was the Federal Reserve System which caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.  They were anything but the cure.  The famed economist Milton Friedman spent a lifetime promoting this interpretation of events.  On the occasion of his 90th birthday Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Fed said: “I would like to say to Milton… Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”[26]  While I believe that Roosevelt was well intentioned, he was fatally naïve.  His New Deal served only to confiscate all public monetary gold and transfer yet more power to the Federal Reserve to manipulate currency.  The hidden tragedy of the musical Annie is that while she shares a stage with the theatric Roosevelt and Warbucks (Warburg) singing their accolades as her saviour, she is actually praising the instrument of her orphan plight.  (Annie was orphaned due to the financial insolvency of her parents.)

While unwittingly kissing the hand that starves you may be tragic when it occurs on stage, it is far more tragic when it occurs in the real world.  It is still a mainstream notion that Roosevelt’s New Deal was what rescued the Americans from the Great Depression.[27]  Even though all through history, government salvation through spending has led to financial ruin at every attempt some still espouse the idea that it is possible to spend our way out of the damage wrought by currency manipulation.  Currency manipulation is good for bankers and bankers fund business schools which produce bankers.  It is no wonder then that currency manipulation which goes hand in hand with government spending ‘has’ to be a good thing.  If you want to be at the top of this pyramid scheme you have to support the bricks that build it.  In this light, when the financial meltdown of 2008 hit, how did the pyramid builders propose to deal with the ‘Gre08er Depression’?  You guessed it, with more government spending.

Journalists are already pointing out the similarities in circumstances between Barack Obama and Roosevelt.[28]  I believe the comparisons are justified and that Obama is, like Roosevelt, well intentioned but critically misguided.  Mind you, not only is Obama misguided but most people are ill aware of monetary policy and its implications.  Obama promises trillion dollar deficits running for the next many years.[29]  It is his hope that this massive spending will shock the economy back to life.  The only shock it can reasonably hope to achieve though is shocking the Frankenstein of currency manipulation to life to turn on its creator.  The only reason Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to work was that by the end of WWII, the US had developed tremendous manufacturing capabilities and the US was a burgeoning economy; the US emerged from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, not because of it.  The situation in this Gre08er Depression is different.  There is no new manufacturing potential, indeed it is declining.  The US is not a burgeoning nation but is instead a declining one.  Thus the only shock government spending is capable of producing on the US economy is an electrocution.

Growing up I had trouble relating to the ancient Israelites I was reading about.  I could relate only to their enslavement in Egypt which I read as an allegory for my forced attendance at school.  Beyond that, they were a people very far from me both spatially and temporally.  My time was dominated by discussions and anxious anticipation of new technologies and new scientific discoveries.  While I could ‘upconvert’ an ordinance to help a neighbour right a fallen cattle to a more modern equivalent of assisting ones neighbour with a crashed computer in general the setting for torah morality written in terms of cattle, oxen and sheep failed to connect with me.  I was always amazed then as to how these seemingly simple people understood concepts such as debt.  Most debt in modern times comes from securing shelter.  In ancient Israel this could be accomplished by erecting four poles and securing canvas.  So where did these biblical injunctions come from, what wrong were they trying to right?

In trying to answer that question I would have to journey through studies of biblical archaeology and general history.  After so doing, I have found a new connection with the ancient Israelites.  They were trying to solve a very old and fundamental problem:  how to govern a large group of people equitably while preventing corruption.  Currency is one of the fundamental cornerstones of any civilization.  It is fundamental to most of our interactions and if it is corrupt, so too will inevitably be anything built on top of it.  Disappointment then comes in reading the scroll of history with each entry echoing the previous:  “Empire rises with high ideals.  The high ideals erode under complacency.  Corruption then leads to inequality and fiscal malaise.  Empire manipulates the currency to buy time.  Empire runs out of time.”

The tenet of monotheism according to the bible started with Abraham.  What the Torah describes as a moment of epiphany is revealed by biblical archaeologists to in fact be a long arduous process which took several hundreds of years.  Key here is that a stated ideal can become a practiced ideal with exertion of effort over time.  It is thus to the commandment that we “should have no poor among [us]” that we must redirect our time and efforts.  I have recently come to a conclusion that the reformed Canaanite predecessors of the world’s ‘big 3’ monotheistic religions likely came to long ago; poverty is not the result of a lack of wealth but instead a lack of justice.

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[1]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
[2]   William G. Dever: “Did God Have a Wife?”
[3]   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
[4]   http://books.google.ca/books?id=sIWn6lYS-MQC&pg=PA171
[5]   Smith, Mark “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel” (pp 6-7)
[6]   McDonald & Sanders, editors of The Canon Debate, 2002, The Notion and Definition of Canon by Eugene Ulrich, pg 4
[7]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_money_changers
[8]   http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bank
[9]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_Capta_coinage
[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Michael_Rostovtzeff.2C_Ludwig_von_Mises.2C_and_Bruce_Bartlett [11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talley_stick
[12]  http://books.google.ca/books?id=pnszAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA8
[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#History
[14]  http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html
[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
[16]  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/andrew+jackson
[17]  http://www.economics-charts.com/cpi/cpi-1800-2005.ht ml
[18]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
[19]  http://postworthy.com/Worthy/ex/US_Dollar_Purchasing_Power_Decline/205.aspx[20]  http://mwiner.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wealthdistribution.gif
[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
[23]  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/malcolm_muggeridge.html[24]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vGeaqM33g
[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg#Legacy
[26]  http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm[27]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
[28]  http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
[29]  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-06-obama-economy_N.htm

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While it is true that the Hasidic fedora and the Mexican sombrero have only an incidental similarity, a recent discovery in the Mexican desert reveals that Jews and Latin Americans share a common history.

One might be only mildly surprised to find a kosher sushi restaurant in the heart of today’s Mexico City.  But, what if one found evidence of a Jewish presence in Latin America in the 8th century?  Dr. Donald Panther Yates believes that a stone found in Los Lunas Mexico is a remnant of the Calalus Roman/Jewish settlement.  The stone, seen here, contains a mildly abridged version of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) which is written in Phoenician script.

Here is a transliteration of the inscription as provided by http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/15_williamson.html

1.) I YHWH your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. This is a letter for letter match with the Mastoretic Text.

2.) Not YHWH to you gods other ones before my face.  Not will you make to you images or any likeness which in the heavens above or which in the earth under or which in the waters under the earth. Not will you bow down to them and not will you serve them for I YHWH your God a jealous (God) bring punishment upon fathers upon children on the third and fourth generations to those that hate me. And doing kindness to thousands to those that love me and keep my commandments. Highlighted portion is omitted.

3.) Not shall you take the name YHWH your God in vain for not will leave unpunished YHWH one who takes His Name in vain. Highlighted portion omitted

4.) Remember the day the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. And day the seventh is Sabbath to YHWH your God, not shall you do any work you and your son and your daughter your male slave and slave girl and your cattle and your stranger who in your gates for six days made YHWH the heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them and rested he on the day seventh therefore God blessed the day Sabbath and sanctified it. Highlighted portion is omitted.

5.) Honor your father and your mother that may be long your days on the land which YHWH your God is giving to you. Here is a complete match with Masoretic Text, but not the LXX).

6.) Not shall you murder. Word for word match.

7.) Not shall you commit adultery. Perfect match

8.) Not shall you steal Perfect match

9.) Not shall you testify against your neighbor there false. ( Match)

10.) (Not shall you covet house our neighbor) Not shall you covet wife your neighbor or his male slave or slave girl or his ox or his ass or all which is to your neighbor. Highlighted portion is omitted.

Dr. Yates has written a book which I have yet to read on the subject.  Clicking on the image will take you to the amazon.com site.

I’m adding it to my reading list, but in the meantime some appropriate music:

Mexican Classical Guitar – Hava Nagila.mp3 – Marichis

ale · America · cent · egypt · fed · God · guitar · html · http · Jews · king · MIT · mp3 · Music · Red · slavery · the fed

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

————————————————————————-

Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

Admiral · AID · aig · ale · artist · author · Cana dian Link · Case · cent · chat · chemical vapors · CHIEF · COBOL · Coming · critic · Deconstruction and Criticism · drugs · elementary school · energy · evolution · France · gloomy second-grade music teacher · God · Google · head · Honor Committee · html · http · Impostor Syndrome · Ivy League · Jacques Derrida · John Lennon · Julian · Julian Jaynes · Karl · king · life · logic · Minnesota · MIT · Music · oil · OJ · Oxford · pains · playground equipment · Princeton · professor · quote · Ralph Waldo · RAM · random · Red · Religion · Robert W. Knox · Rome · Rotary Club · stainless-steel slide · steel · Stephen Colbert · teacher · The Colbert Report · the TV news · video · Wallace Stevens · Walter Kirn

I’m currently reading: “Did God Have a Wife?” by William Dever. In it he mentions the literacy rate of the ancient Israelites.
From page 28:
“… Writing does not become widespread before the 8th century B.C., and then the coprus indicates only what I would call “functional literacy.” That is, a number of people could write their names, numbers and the names of a few commodities. But that is a far cry from being truly literate, able to read literary material such as we have in the books of the Hebrew Bible. It has been estimated that even in the Roman period, no more than 5 percent of the population was literate by the above definition. In ancient Israel the figure was certainly lower. That has important implications for the question I have raised here concerning how early the Hebrew Bible could in fact have been written, and whether ordinary people could have read it if they had had it.”

ancient israel · bible · British Columbia · cent · God · Israel · Israel I'm · israelites · literacy · William Dever · writing

News of the latest diatribe against Orthodox Judaism crossed my computer screen recently.  In his first book, R. D. Gold’s “Bondage of the Mind” attempts to lay out solid counter proofs against the supposed moral authority of the Orthodox.  In my 34th year of life this isn’t the first attempt I’ve seen nor is it likely to be my last. 

I haven’t read the book but I have read several reviews.  Some of the main points discussed are:

1. The Torah is a work of man, not the writ word of God.
2. The survival of the Jewish people throughout the millenia is remarkeable but not necessarily a work of God.  Many other peoples have survived in place for centuries
3. The Torah does not describe an ultimate justice citing the punishment of righteous king Josiah for the sins of Manasseh.
4. The problems of modern society are not related to a loosening of religious standards.  Religious standards themselves proscribe certain immoral behaviours.  Gold cites several examples including the Orthdox treatment of women.
5. Gold examines several controversial figures (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef) and several Orthodox scandals.  The subtext to his discussions would appear to be that the presence of controversial characters or scandals places the moral supremacy of the Orthodox under suspicion.

I can’t speak to Gold’s intentions in writing his book but I can speak to it’s anticipated effects.  It will and already has upset some of the Orthodox.  It may prevent some borderline candidates from becoming Orthodox.  It will not move many Orthodox to leave the ranks. 

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked…
– H. L. Mencken

That may sound as if it was intended as an insult.  Not so.  I, having been orthodox myself, fully understand the joy of belief.  Just the same, being a servant of the truth above all else, I must admit I was deluded during my stint of Orthodoxy.  There are no magic bullets that can be used to, in an instant, disprove Orthodoxy.  It isn’t a problem of logic, it’s a problem of psychology.  The fabric of belief is ripstop nylon which has been reinforced under centuries of attack.  Ripstop nylon in turn is the stuff of hot air balloons, full of hot air yes, yet they offer long peaceful rides just the same.  It’s only upon a paradigmatic shift away from Orthodoxy that one is able to look at the body of knowledge and notice many, not just a few, magic bullets of failed logic.  I have an armory of magic bullets at my disposal, which have come from a lifetime of reflection and re-evaluation.  I’ll share my favourite bullet.  It’s a subtle point but personally I find it undefeatable.

Orthodox Judaism holds two bodies of law to be of divine origin:  the Torah and the Talmud.  The Torah is the written law allegedly passed down to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Talmud is a compilation of the Oral Tradition.  In common law there exists the notion of Statutes and Regulations.  The former allocates the legislative authority and the latter are the laws created based on that authority.  Both reference eachother extensively and one is meaningless without the other. 

Orthodox Judaism likewise claims that the Talmud and Torah are inseperable.

The Gemara (also known as the Talmud or Oral Torah ), an explanation of the Written Torah, was given to Moshe at Sinai. Without the Talmud the Written Torah can’t be understood. There are a lot of critical facts and points that are only hinted at or not even mentioned in the Written Torah that were explained in the Talmud.
– http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

I agree that they are inseparable, in that the Torah makes little sense without the Talmud.  However, the Torah doesn’t mention the Talmud, not even once.  Now, not to be stereotypical, but Jews have no shortage of lawyers.  I find it very hard that God, the father of this nation, would write two bodies of law one of which contains no reference to the other.  It just wouldn’t happen.

The Orthodox, of course, disagree and claim that the following verse proves divine origins of both bodies:

And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them.
–  Exodus XXIV, 12.

Where is the mention of the Talmud?  It says the laws and commandments which I have WRITTEN.  Where is the mention of the Oral Tradition (Talmud)?  The Talmud itself tries to explain this away:

R. Levi b. Hama says further in the name of R. Simeon b. Lakish: What is the meaning of the verse: And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them?  ‘Tables of stone’: these are the ten commandments; ‘the law’: this is the Pentateuch; ‘the commandment’: this is the Mishnah; ‘which I have written’: these are the Prophets and the Hagiographa; ‘that thou mayest teach them’: this is the Gemara.  It teaches [us] that all these things were given to Moses on Sinai.
– Berakoth 5a -> http://www.come-and-hear.com/berakoth/berakoth_5.html

Am I to accept that an interpretation of God’s word is God’s word because a human interpreted God’s word to be God’s word?  If you’re confused by that previous sentence, it was intentional, and pretty much sums up my point.  To rephrase, you can’t claim that the Talmud is the divine word of God by interpreting the Torah in the Talmud to suit your purpose.  The only proof I’d accept is the Torah itself saying: “today I give you the oral laws and the written laws”.  Short of this, I say to the Orthodox when they play Moral Monopoly: “Do not pass Go, Do not collect 200 shekels”. 

author · berakoth · cent · Coming · divine authorship · divine origin · God · gold · html · http · ILS · Jews · Josiah · judaism · king · lawyer · life · logic · Manassehk · MIT · Mount Sinai · Orthodox Judaism · Ovadia Yosef · quote · R. D. Gold · Rabbi · sinai · Talmud · Torah · writing · written law

The State of The Union – As Seen on TV
Martin C. Winer

But first a word about how this article was written:  This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association.  This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics.  You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing.  Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster.  Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it.  I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story.   Read the article, taking note of the italicized words.  Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late.  Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle.  It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold.  Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class.  Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children.  The responsibilities are understandably far different.  Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts.  I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do.  Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item?  What was the counterparty risk?  Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)?  The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money.  Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something.  Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN.  Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration.  I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking.  Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face.  Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise.  I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer.  I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn.  Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer.  In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child.  Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense.  The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style.  I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it.  Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day?  Would my life be fulfilling?  I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’.  Well this held some promise now didn’t it?  At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth.  But just what were these pills I thought to myself?  “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself.  Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton?  What were these herbs and how were they discovered?  Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom?  How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else?  My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood.  I wanted answers, not questions.  Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like?  The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads.  Was the television intimating that my future would need these?  A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old.  A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right.  If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me?  I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age.  Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill.  There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day.  Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal.  Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month.  God bless Big Pharma.  I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month.  I was comforted that the future would be bright.  My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities.  With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease.  I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease.  I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now.  Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities.  I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS).  My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position.  I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur.  “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”.  I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint.  [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3.  Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often…  Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)?  Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case.  Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages?  Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy?  All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection.  The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what?  What would I do?  I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results.  The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes.  The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified.  I myself am not a gadget freak.  I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is.  I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices.  Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985.  Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator.  Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC.  As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity.  With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation.  The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame.  Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it.  The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple.  The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds.  I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle;  perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that.  Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job.  I wasn’t about to take any advice from them.  No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan.  There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects.  A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country.  Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century?  Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11?  There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties.  I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want.  For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama.  “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized.  I thought this had a familiar tone.  I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”  The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project.  This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN.  “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama.  It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister.  He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine.  The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again.  Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come.  A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers.  Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay.  I say enough taxing the middle class!”  Cheers and hurrahs followed.  My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping.  There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television.  PBS I thought to myself quickly.  That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma.  In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words.  I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways.    )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today.  Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights.  Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’.   Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage.  Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma?  The world seemed upside down.  Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it?  Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural.  In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep.  After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”?  I couldn’t make sense of my world.  I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks.  I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial.  It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered.  Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian.  Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian?  He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination.  I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie.  I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination.  Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown.  She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”.  She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive.  Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers.  Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room.  Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of.  The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice.  I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle.  John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…”  It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter.  Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed.  I knew nothing more of the future than when I started.  Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job.  But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future?  What would the economy be like?  I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions.  With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article.  Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.

9 to 5 · 9/11 · AID · aig · AK-47 · ale · allstate · America · american justic · Announcer · apple · arnold schwarzenegger · auto workers · bailout · bank · bankruptcy · bible · bill gates · blog · boniva · bubble · california · cancer · capitalism · Case · cent · chapter 11 · chicks who love guns · cialis · cluster · dca · dick cheney · dolly parton · eagles · Economy · Executive · extenze · Ezekiel 25:17 · free word association · gay rights · God · grease · head · Health · heart disease · home depot · homosexuality · hotel california · http · ibm · ILS · insurance · Internet · iphone · ipod · jack lalanne · Jackie Brown · jim lehrer · John Sebastian · John Travolta · juice newton · kim kardashian · king · lawyer · lazarus · levis · life · logic · maersk · maersk alabama · marriage · Martin C. Winer · MIT · mp3 · Music · nature · O. J. Simpson · obama · OJ · oklahoma · palm blackberry · piracy · pirates · President · Pulp Fiction · quentin tarantino · quote · Red · requip · rls · Robert Kardashian · Rome · Salma Hayek · sex · steve jobs · Tarantino · viagra · video · Vinni Barbarino · waterboarding · wealth · Welcome Back Kotter · writing

Intro:

You go to a ‘learning about the faith weekend’ or some such event expecting to be enlightened.  Up to the podium steps a bearded Rabbi whose face speaks of wisdom and learning.  Eagerly you wait for the inspiration you’ve been waiting for to believe.  Out of those lips flow an argument which is akin to a method of argument you’ve learned about in calculus class: induction.  Starting from a base generation which witnessed an event at Mount Sinai, this story has been passed down through the generations unchanged until it reached your ears.  A miracle!

The Argument:

Numbers 1:24-26 tells of 600,000 adult males that witnessed the giving of the laws to all at Mt. Sinai.  Since it is impossible to fake the simultaneous testimony of 600,000 adult males (approx 2-3 million all together) the story must be true.  Since your (Jewish) ancestors witnessed and passed on the story of God publicly giving us his laws, we must obey his laws and worship him.

Another plausible solution:

20,000 people witnessed a volcano and worshipped it.

20,000?

There is a confusion in hebrew between alluph (chief, master, family clan) and eleph (thousand).  They are spelled the same way since the torah (and most semitic languages) omit vowels.  As a result a redaction or copy error has led to the interpretation of alluph as eleph.  600,000 adult males in ancient egypt is just a historically ridiculous number.  For more info, visit:
reconciling-biblical-numbers-three-million-at-sinai-is-making-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill

Volcano?

Many descriptions of Mount Sinai sound more to me like a volcano than anything else.  The fact that the Israelites heard God’s voice in this may simply mean that they were frightened by the volcano and thought it was God’s voice?  Recall this is the time of sun worship.  It was common then to worship natural phenomenon and deify them.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Mount_Sinai#Biblical_description

Do I really believe Israelites worshipped a volcano?

I believe that the Israelites may have heard loud scary sounds at a volcano or some other natural phenomenon.
See, second part of:
http://extremegh.blogspot.com/2008/07/apology-to-rjm-chazal-destroy-kuzari.html

My point is that my alternative explanation is as plausible, if not more plausible than the Kuzari explanation.  Hence the Kuzari proves nothing.

Why should we care about debunking the Kuzari Proof?

“Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to…. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.” — W. K. Clifford

That’s why!

ale · bearded Rabbi · blog · CHIEF · egypt · God · html · http · Israel · israelites · judaism · king · kuzari · kuzari proof · mass revelation · MIT · Mount Sinai · Mt. Sinai · plausible solution · Rabbi · Red · sinai · Torah

—————————————————————————–

This preview rated ‘A’ for anyone not familiar with Star Trek:
A teaser from a good Star Trek movie: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Khan (Ricardo Montalban)

Khan (Ricardo Montalban) blames Kirk for the death of his wife and the hardships suffered by his crew.  The planet that Kirk had long ago planted the Khan colony on had suffered a major catastrophe, yet no one from came to check up on them.  A Starfleet expedition chances upon Khan who commandeers their ship bent on revenge.

Khan tries repeatedly to kill Kirk but only manages to maroon him.  Khan suddenly realizes that marooning Admiral Kirk serves his purpose better:

Khan: I’ve done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet… buried alive! Buried alive…!
(Kirk shakes violently)
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!
[echo]
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!

Khan!

—————————————————————————–

… and now for our feature … a review of J. J. Abrams’ “Star Trek”.

"Felicity": Keri Russell

Prior to the release of Star Trek XI, my only exposure to J. J. Abrams was when I flipped past his series “Felicity” in search of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” reruns.  Now I admit that there were moments when I tuned in to Felicity, specifically when it looked like Keri Russell was about to get naked.  But every time it looked like things were about to get interesting, Felicity went into a long soliloquy ruminating about the morality of it all leaving me with a case of ‘Clothes-off-is Interruptus’.  The rest of the show consisted of contrived plot twists all designed to elicit pouty and extended reaction shots.  In fact the one hour Felicity, stripped of the reaction shots would run around a minute and a half.  Is it any wonder that I desperately flipped channels seeking the scientifically shielded warp speed plot progressions of Star Trek?

When I heard that J. J. Abrams was set to produce and direct the latest installation in my beloved show, all I could think was “uh oh”.  I approached the movie with great trepidation and it only took a few moments into the film to realize that my fears were justified.  The antagonist of the film Nero is a Romulan who watched his entire race destroyed by a supernova.  The Romulans shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘stock bad guys’ because they bear almost no resemblance to the Romulans of Star Trek lore.  If anything Nero looks more like Vin Diesel than any other character.  Nero decides to take revenge on Spock and the Federation who failed to save his race from extinction.  By analogy, this would be like assaulting a competent doctor whose best efforts had failed to save a loved one suffering from heart failure.  It just doesn’t make sense; there is no motive for Nero to go after Spock and the Federation other than J. J. Abrams’ motive to write a movie.

Vin Diesel XXX

Nero Diesel Star Trex XI

The movie was wrecked for me right there.  The rest of the movie was filled to the brim with other such contrivances.  There was a giant drill which drilled into the planet before planting a device which created a black hole.  Why couldn’t they just create a black hole on the surface of the planet?  Because Abrams needed it to take longer so he could write in more reaction shots.  The black hole was created with mysterious (and convenient) ‘red matter’.  The red matter interacted with the green matter of the given planet producing brown matter which then collapsed into a black hole.  So we have black holes and brown matter.  This single sentence is perhaps the best summary of the entire plot.

Take for example the sword fight with Kirk and Sulu versus the stock bad guys on the deck of this great planetary drill.  This single sequence drearily occupied at least ten minutes of the running time.  What happened to their phasers?  They fell out of reach.  How did they fall out of reach?  Abrams had them written out of reach to foster the sword fight.  What happened to the explosive charges they had brought with them to destroy the drilling platform?  Abrams killed the chief engineer who carried them to make things more interesting.  Why didn’t they all have an explosive charge each?  Abrams wanted a sword fight.  Starting to get the picture?

The Drill that launched a 1000 reaction shots

So Abrams got his sword fight and Kirk and Sulu won.  They then destroyed the drilling platform which existed only for the purpose of the sword fight.  They were too late though and the planet Vulcan was destroyed anyways.  Why didn’t the few surviving Vulcans seek revenge against Kirk and Sulu for failing to save them?  Because that would have ruined Abrams’ movie.  Why did a surviving group of Romulans blame Spock for failing to save their planet despite his best efforts?  Because Abrams needed them to.

The movie was so chock full of similar cheesy contrivances and plot holes that I could swear Abrams was Swiss.  Take this slice of the Swiss cheese plot for example:  Abrams again has Kirk brandish his sword this time wielding it on a scantily clad Starfleet cadet.  Abrams fails in trying to play up on the Kirk-lothario theme of Star Trek.  Kirk of classic Trek was a man of many women because his heart only had room for his first love, his ship.  While it’s true that the Kirk’s bed welcomed the United Colours of the constellation Benetton, classic Trek did it all with style.  Abrams’ Kirk was nothing more than a man-whore frat boy on a teen series (say Felicity) as follows:

Like, okay.  So there they were in the dorm room with nudity on the horizon and in walks Uhura, her roommate.  Like, oh my God!  So like Kirk totally jumps under the bed while Uhura starts to like undress.  Like thank God the dorm monitor had been binge drinking Romulan ale or it would have been all their asses!  Uhura is down to her undies and bra before she catches wind of Kirk in the room.  She is like sooo embarrassed but she plays it cool and pouts proudly as Kirk like hops out of the room.  Is it like any wonder Uhura went on to be Communications Officer.  That girl is like built.  She could raise any admiral in Starfleet, totally!

I was furious: Abrams had turned Star Trek into Felicity Trek, The Next Reaction Shot.  Sure this ‘new’ star trek (sic) was set in an alternate timeline leaving the original timeline intact, but I was offended by its very existence.  I couldn’t figure out why I was so angry, given that Abram’s hadn’t killed Star Trek.  But it occurred to me that Abrams had done far worse than killing Star Trek:  He’d hurt it.  I feared that in spin offs he’d go on hurting it.  Abrams was set to leave Star Trek as he’d left so many other shows, marooned for all eternity in the center of dead plot lines, buried alive.  Buried alive.  My fists shook and I stared at the ceiling of the movie theater and screamed: “Abrams!”.

Admiral · ale · Case · cent · CHIEF · chief engineer · Communications Officer · constellation · dca · fed · Felicity · God · heart failure · http · ILS · J J Abrams · Keri Russell · Khan · king · Kirk · MIT · Nero · RAM · Red · Ricardo Montalban · Star Trek · Star Trek II · Star Trek XI · Sulu · the fed · Uhura · Vin Diesel · Wrath of Khan

Marx once said that “religion is the opiate of the masses”.  If one is to believe this graph:

it would seem to suggest that the poorer you are, the more inclined you are to be religious.  Perhaps it’s not so odd that most religious television programs are constantly begging for money.  However, they may do better by making their pleas for money to the aetheists instead of ‘preaching to the [poor] choir’ as it were.

Most interesting are the outliers on this graph.  The US is more religious than its overall wealth would suggest, so perhaps George Bush does indeed hear the voice of God.  Also note Kuwait which is highly religious and relatively prosperous compared to countries with similar levels of religiousity.

More information can be found here:

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258

AID · bush · choir · George · george bush · God · http · king · Kuwait · levis · marx · opiate · php · RAM · Red · Religion · United States · wealth

My high-school English teacher taught us a module on the holocaust.  As part of the module we read ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel in addition to some other texts on the subject.  I remember quite vividly the stark transition of Elie Wiesel from an optimistic Torah student to a hardened realist by the end of the war.  At the beginning of the book he was discussing the notion that there were many pathways into the Garden of Eden (heaven).  By the end of the book you were left wondering which pathway coincided with the horrible events of the Holocaust.

I myself, like the young Wiesel, was an optimistic student of Torah.  I was convinced that everything would be alright and that the events Wiesel had endured would soon be redeemed by the imminent return of the Jewish Messiah.  Nothing would or could shake my faith or at least, so I though.

At the end of the module on the Holocaust, our teacher brought in a slide show.  He was a tour leader for ‘March of the Living’ which is a tour of high school students to the concentration camps of Europe followed by Israel.  I saw images of soap made from human bodies and fabric made of human hair.  These images attacked my shield of faith violently but the attack was repelled.

It was only when my teacher got to the image of the mausoleum shown above that I felt my shield give way a little and the sharp edges of that image met with flesh.  The damage was not done in a single instant.  The initial damage felt more like a pin prick, but like glass shards in carpet fibers, over time they wear into the pile until the underpad is exposed and bare.

My initial thoughts were defensive: “Perhaps there were the ashes from the wood included with the ashes of the bodies, accounting for the large volume?”  I had seen cremation urns however, and had previously remarked that the volume of ashes was remarkably small.   I had many other such attempted defenses but they all failed.

Again, the reaction to this image was anything but immediate.  It was a slow process which occurred over several years.  Whenever I hear God exalted and people sing the virtues of religion, this image was in the back of my mind.

This image just didn’t mesh with my view of the universe — a universe with a caring God that would soon make everything alright.  Some things once done, can’t be undone, no matter what the explanation.  When I decided that there would be no explanation that I would accept for the mausoleum at Majdanek, I was forced to conclude that there could be no active caring God.  That one image changed my entire world view.  I’ve never been the same since.

cent · counting · Elie Wiesel · Europe · Garden of Eden · God · holocaust · http · Israel · majdanek · Messiah · Red · Religion · teacher · the Star · Torah

The Kuzari Proof is a famous proof of the validity of Judaism and is commonly used in outreach programs to convince estranged Jews to return to the fold of observance. (1) It was developed originally by the 11th century poet Yehuda Halevi as a response to the loss of Judaism’s monopoly on monotheism. It was designed specifically to prove that the Jews had a unique theological gift: the direct and public revelation of God to all the ancient Israelites at Mt. Sinai. (2) In recent years, the ‘proof’ has been offered as a proof of many things. Most commonly it attempts to prove: the existence of God, His revelation to the ancient Israelites at Sinai, His authorship of the Torah, and the resulting inerrancy of the Torah. My purpose is not to argue for or against the veracity of any of the above claims, but instead to show why the Kuzari proof is not a proof of any of them. Part of the search for truth entails the culling out of implausible options. It is my hope that the de-legitimization of the Kuzari proof will lead the observant and the secular alike to come closer to the truth.

The Kuzari ‘proof’ has been proffered in several forms and incarnations but the gist is as follows:
1) 3 million Jews witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai. (3)
2) Starting with the witnessing generation, one generation has told the story to the next, leading us, in the current generation, to be inductive witnesses to this event.
3) It is impossible to fake a large public event and its subsequent intergenerational transmission (with inferred acceptance) as described in steps 1 and 2, thus the original event must have happened.
It would seem to be common sense that events with many witnesses cannot be faked. However, history has taught us that many who have invoked ‘common sense’ have been frustrated by how rare indeed a sense it is. Needless to say, I find many problems with this ‘proof’. I will take each in sequential order.

First, I address the ‘3 million Jews witnessed the revelation’ claim. In logical discourse, one cannot assume what one is trying to prove. You cannot assume that the Torah is inerrant in order to prove that it is inerrant. The 3 million figure (or 600,000 adult males to be more precise) comes from the Torah. (4) One cannot use this figure then, to prove that there were 3 million witnesses to an event which then makes the Torah inerrant. To do so is to construct a tautological proof, or in lay terms… a self-validating statement. The statement “if it rains, it will be raining” is syntactically valid, but is semantically meaningless, in that it is tautological. The proof of the inerrancy of the Torah cannot be made by using statements that require the Torah to be inerrant. In short, we do not know, independent of the Torah claim, that there were 3 million witnesses at Sinai, hence the proof falls apart right there.

Next we look at the ‘witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai’ part of the first statement. As I can recall from my Hebrew school days, the voice of God at Sinai was so powerful it could ‘tear the soul from your body’. I also remember descriptions of smoke and fire similar to the poor Technicolor animations of the DeMille classic depicting the same. (5) Now Joan Rivers has a voice that in my mind can tear the soul out of my body as she as she squawks and screeches about the stars’ fashions at the Oscars. I am in no particular hurry to worship Joan Rivers nor Cecil B. DeMille. What I mean to get across comedically is that special effects capable of being produced cheaply these days by Industrial Light and Magic and the good folks over at Lucasfilm hardly proves God for me. A simple retort might be “but no one believes the fantastic stories and special effects of today to be true”. Tell that to the people who suffered mass panic and hysteria at the radio transmission of Welles’ “The War of The Worlds” in the 1938. (6) In summation, as we build here, for statement 1, we have 3 million unproved witnesses witnessing something they say was fiery, scary and spoke with a loud voice. If one were to tell a Kuzari adherent of UFO sightings, they would likely start to ask questions as to what other explanations could explain this phenomenon: why not here too? (7)

Now we look at statement 2, specifically at the part which says: starting with the witnessing generation, we have an unbroken chain of transmission. The ’starting with the witnessing generation’ part is key. It says that it is impossible to get a generation (a large group of people) to accept anything as an accurate account of history which was not known to be an accurate account history. Yet when you poke a Kuzari adherent for proof of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt you quickly get this response: “The Egyptians did not record their defeats.” (8) Well hang on a second here, does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the greater than 3 million Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? (9) So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? The answer cannot be, if we are to have a sensible conversation, yes in the case of the Egyptians and no in the case of the Israelites. It also cannot be the answer that the Egyptians were embarrassed by defeat and thus motivated to accept the faked history because we cannot know if the Israelites also were not embarrassed by some historical event and thus were motivated to accept a revised history of unique divine revelation. Recall, we cannot assume the Torah as an accurate account of history to prove that the Torah is an accurate account of history. Keeping our eye on the ball, it is NOT the issue here whether or not there were slaves in Egypt, nor is it the issue as to what the actual history of the region was. The issue is that you cannot, at once, claim that you both can and cannot cause a large number of people to accept a false history. The Kuzari proof and discussions of the Kuzari proof are fraught with these sorts of asymmetric applications of explanatory logic. You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

Next we address statement 3, the inerrancy and incorruptibility of generational transmission of this revelation. Note: this statement is really just a summation of points 1 and 2 where the true Kuzari argument rests. Many people have accused the Torah of suffering from ‘broken telephone’ transmission. The orthodox authorities have correctly retorted that they have proof, archaeological no less, that the Torah has shifted perhaps 2 or 3 letters at most during all of its transmission. Parenthetically, for those keeping score and who just noted an asymmetrical application of explanatory logic, a gold star to you. You correctly noted that all of the sudden archaeology IS an acceptable proof that the Torah has not changed through the generations, yet archaeology IS NOT acceptable as proof that there were not Israelites in Egypt.

If the Torah did not significantly change over they centuries, which is a statement I will accept due to archaeological supporting evidence, the question becomes: why would any people accept the Torah as history, as the ancient Israelites seemed to, if its contents (the description of the revelation at Sinai) were not known to be true? In typical rabbinic style, let me answer a question with a question: Why would the multitudes that accepted the Gospels as gospel, accept them unless they knew somehow that Jesus had indeed miraculously fed the multitudes fish and loaves of bread as the gospels describe? (10) “After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ ” (John 6:14) (11) The problem here exists in yet another asymmetrical application of explanatory logic. If you cannot pervert a generational transmission of a miraculous event, then adherents to the Kuzari proof must by definition, accept that Jesus fed the multitudes by miracle. To be clear, I am not saying whether Jesus fed the multitudes or not, nor am I proving or disproving a revelation at Sinai, I am simply saying that the evidence of cultural widespread acceptance of an event as a miracle cannot be the proof of Judaism because it proves antithetical Jewish and Christian miracles at the same time.

In summation we see that the Kuzari proof is a failed proof because of fundamental flaws in logic. The two main fundamental flaws are assuming that which is trying to be proved and asymmetrical uses of explanatory logic at the convenience of the argument. The Kuzari proof is an attempt to prove the divine revelation at Sinai which, in turn, is a cornerstone of Jewish faith. (12) For the orthodox that appear vexed at the decline of Judaism, the message is clear: The rest of us will accept what you have to say when you provide cogent proof. The Kuzari proof is not cogent and the burden of proof is on you.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuzari

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1 http://ohr.edu/special/books/truth-6.htm
2 http://www.talkreason.com/articles/kuzari.cfm
3 Numbers (1:46) There were 600,000 adult males generally leading us to conclude a total population of 3 million.
4 ibid
5 http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=2047
6 http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa102302a.htm
7 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9923316/
8 http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/2053
9 The number of Egyptians must have been greater than 3 million if the biblical account is true because it would be impossible to subdue and enslave a population of 3 million Israelites with an equal or smaller number of Egyptians.
10 http://www.gardenofpraise.com/bibl43s.htm
11 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%206:1-15
12 Aish.Com – Rediscovering The Revelation

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