Thursday, June 10, 2004

Posted here Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 9:16:23 PM     Ancient education - how did it work? Here is Erasmus getting ready to tell us about Folly http://www.ccel.org/e/erasmus/folly/folly.html But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the argument may offend to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practiced even by great authors:  when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates extolled tyranny; Glauco, injustice; Favorinus, deformity and the quartan ague; Synescius, baldness; Lucian, the fly and flattery; when Seneca made such sport with Claudius’ canonizations; Plutarch, with his dialogue between Ulysses and Gryllus; Lucian and Apuleius, with the ass; and some other, I know not who, with the hog that made his last will and testament, of which also even St. Jerome makes mention. How did he learn so much, what way of taking notes, of remembering?   ********

Posted here Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 6:56:14 PM     Highly recommend Chalmers Johnson's (author of Blowback and the very recent The Sorrows of Empire.) talk on Bush, empire, militarism and Kerry. http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1486 excerpt Having said all this, let me nonetheless end by noting that the political system may not be capable of saving the Republic. It is hard to imagine that any president of either party could stand up to the powerful vested interests surrounding the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies. Given that 40% of the defense budget is secret and that all of the intelligence agencies' budgets are secret, it is impossible for Congress to do effective oversight of them even if it wanted to. This is not something that started with the Bush administration. The Defense Department's "black budgets" go back to the Manhattan Project of World War II to build atomic bombs. The amounts spent on the intelligence agencies have been secret ever since the CIA was created in 1947. The stipulation in article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution that "a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time" has not been true in our country for more than fifty years. ********

Posted here Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 4:38:05 PM     Slate on Reagan and the rise of Bin Laden http://slate.msn.com/id/2102243/ ********

Posted here Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 1:22:37 PM     New Ice age, global climate picture http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995094 As long as humans do not mess it up, the Earth's climate is set at fair for the next 15,000 years. That is according to information extracted from the oldest ice core ever drilled. The Antarctic core is the first to reach as far back as a warm period with characteristics similar to our own interglacial. So it should help make more accurate predictions about when to expect the next deep freeze. The ice core, drilled from a feature in central Antarctica called Dome C, is around 3 kilometres long and 10 centimetres wide. Changes in the relative proportions of hydrogen isotopes in the ice layers allow scientists to compile a complete record of Antarctic temperatures going back 740,000 years. The core shows the waxing and waning of eight ice ages. Most critically for making predictions about our climate, it is the first core to record a period known as Termination V, around 430,000 years ago. Getting warming and cooling accurate, and seeing the hurrying or delaying effects of either, will be a driver of society, probably for the rest of humanity's life. The problems I see are two 1. paying attention tends to support technocratic centralist governance. Are we really ready for star trek? 2. it tends to support precluding other directions. For example, to understand that the earth has a cycle supports business, because business thrives on change and providing tech solutions to material issues. We could have opted for other directions, for example, a society focused on the deep understanding of poetry, so that all children memorized, structures were known, and the history fussed over. Humanity should be flexible enough, but may not be, to chose its path wisely. This does not mean pretending that climate change isn't real, but it does imply a shifted interest. After all, which is more real, poetry, or that the sun will eventually go out? ********