What’s in the news (leaving why for another day): an aging rock star is talking to her mother on “the other side”; the millionaire creator of a famous TV sitcom talks about his mother’s constant worry that he would end up poor; a journalist who is permitted to work in North Korea ten days a month (and live to report it) concludes that the people of North Korea are “just like us”; a British prince and princess are living apart, and happy with the arrangement; a poet is killed in Cairo; a mummified monk, said to be, not dead, but in a deep meditative state, is found in a cave in Mongolia; an American politician is receiving perks from wealthy donors, and responds, “I try to squeeze all the juice out of the orange that I can”; ‘revenge porn’ (posting nude photographs of former girlfriends on the web without their permission) is found to be illegal; a famously disgraced cyclist adds to his disgrace by getting his girlfriend to take the rap for him when he hits two parked cars while leaving a party; India is trying to reclaim [sic] yoga; two teenagers were fined for offering to shovel snow from neighbors’ sidewalks for a small fee because they didn’t get a license for selling their services; a Texas third-grader is suspended from school for telling a friend he could make him disappear by using a power ring; the first pagan temple to be built in one thousand years is consecrated in Ireland.
***
Everything in nature (every ‘thing’) is both (both!) wavelike and stuff-like. Everything. You, me, water, hydrogen gas, the diamond set in your ring, light, everything. Indeed, waves are particle probabilities! and the wave characteristics of matter explain the structure of atoms! What’tha?!
***
This is what I heard to day, on a YouTube video (“Singularity 1 on 1”), an interview with one Jerome Glenn, a futurist of some sort. Glenn claims that he’s read or heard about the magnetic fields of the earth weakening (I forget the source, but I’ll see if I can find it), and that this has nothing to do with the reversing of the magnetic poles, which supposedly happens every seventy-thousand years or so––and that this weakening would mean that in five-hundred years or so, we would be (in Glenn’s words) toast, which is his argument for putting more resources into space exploration, because we have to get the fuck off this planet (when I say ‘we’ I don’t mean any of ‘us’ of course).
OK, I looked it up, on weather.com. The flip is every 200,000 to 300,000 years, and we’re 700,000 years past due! And the weakening of the magnetic field is progressing at 5% per decade, 10-times faster than expected!
I don’t want to be an alarmist, but jesus.
***
Looking from the outside in, the earth has a crust, a mantle, and a core (itself divided into an outer and an inner section). Somewhat paradoxically, the deeper you go, the more relevance for life on the surface. So, it’s the core that keeps the show on the road, and the source for the magnetic field that surrounds the planet and protects us from the solar winds, preventing our atmosphere from blowing away. The core also warms the planet, the outer portion containing hot molten material, the inner, solid iron, which rotates, with a temperature equal to the surface temperature of the sun.
But there's a concern. Over the course of the past century, the force of the magnetic fields has weakened by about 10%. No one knows why. And there’s an area in the southern Atlantic where it’s weakened by 30%. That’s one thing. The other is, every 700,000 years or so (I think that’s right), the poles switch polarity. This is due to occur again soon (anywhere between now and the next 1,500 years). At this point in time, the scientists don't know what this is going to amount to, but just for starters think of migrating birds (and many species of fish) that depend on magnetic fields for navigation. And of course there are all those satellites circling the earth we depend on. Some wonder if the 30% reduction of the fields in the southern Atlantic is a harbinger of all this happening sooner rather than later.
I rarely think about the earth beneath my feet. Maybe I should.
***
“I am not in the world, the world is in me.”
That’s from a little talk by Deepak Chopra I came across recently (I know practically nothing about Deepak Chopra), and it struck me, resonated, as these things sometimes do. That’s all.
Enjoy.
***
Otto Rank was a non-physician psychoanalyst, a onetime member of Freud’s inner circle. His idea for a core principle of personality involved a tug-of-war between a so-called life force and a death force. The life force is a pull toward individualization, the death force an attraction toward conformity. Both are inevitable and must be managed, which will result in most cases in a compromise––you can’t have it both ways––for during one’s life course there will always be this tension (anxiety, and even fear on occasion) that one is loosing, on the one hand, one’s individuality, or on the other one’s sense of community and belonging.
***
I’m Such a Hairy Guy...Don’t Know Why
Researchers have asked and asked the fossil record: How is it that a relatively weak, slow-moving creature such as ourselves make it in the first place?
Finally, an answer: hair––that is, the lack thereof—hardly any when you compare us to, say, lions and tigers and such.
Back in the day, when we, like all the other animals, were as likely to be eaten as doing the eating, some local genius figured out that the best time to hunt would be when those that normally hunted (you!) were taking a break. Lions and tigers and such took their breaks in the heat of the day, because, by some lucky accident of nature, they needed to pant in order to expel heat, and in order to pant they needed to remain stationary––rest in the shade of a banyan tree as it were––because they couldn’t pant and run at the same time.
Humans, on the other hand, sweat to cool down, but can still hunt in the process. So in the heat of the day, while lions and their kind were in panting mode, our early ancestors were chasing down game, game like gazelles that themselves would be resting and panting if they weren’t being chased. Even today African Bushmen hunt in the heat of the day, sometimes running four or five hours at a stretch as they run down game.
I once heard an advertising executive comment that nothing you hear or see in an ad is an accident (he was commenting on the suggestion of a cross––a kind of shadow in the background––of a political ad of a conservative candidate). Physical anthropologists claim the same is true in our evolutionary development: nothing’s an accident. Much in our development, however, might be so encrusted with layers of culture that we fail to see the connection between, for example, a social practice and its biological substrate.
This story of the lion and the hair might be such an example. Today, few of us run to hunt down game, even in Africa, yet we run. There’s even a runners magazine. And of course there’s the Olympics Games. Cycling is a kind of running; maybe swimming is: back and forth, back and forth. And hair! Humans don’t take to excess body hair, especially females, who seem to be particularly adverse to the sight of a hairy male body. Some hair is okay, but not much. Recently I heard a young woman exclaim in discuss when she saw that centerfold in Cosmopolitan Magazine of Senator Brown of Massachusetts, “He’s so hairy!” I’m thinking she may have been reacting at a visceral level, “thinking” perhaps: This guy is pretty hairy. If I were to mate with him, I might be putting myself at risk—he could overheat in the hunt.
It’s a thought.
***
Annie Got Her Guns
Who knew this? The famous American sharpshooter, Annie Oakley, spent six years of her life in court over a falsehood perpetrated against her by that other famous American, William Randolph Hearst. In 1903, a Chicago paper owned by Hearst reported that Annie was destitute and in prison, allegedly having stolen the pants off a negro man in order to support her cocaine habit. The story spread like wild fire, because, not only was Annie the most famous girl/woman in American, she had carefully cultivated, and actually was, a paragon of virtue. The story eventually was published in fifty-five newspapers around the country. By 1910, Oakley had sued all fifty-five, winning all but one case. Hearst himself had to cough up $27,500 in restitution––$667,476 in current dollars. In the end Annie Oakley’s reputation was restored, although after lawyers’ fees and lost wages it is generally agreed she made no money. Still, she got her name back: Annie Oakley, Rifle Queen.
***
Unholy Ground
Washington’s continental forces moved into New York in April, 1776, to await the British, their own forces, along with many of the Loyalist families who had supported them, having evacuated Boston a month or so before, disappearing out to sea to god knows where (Halifax, Nova Scotia, as it turned out, which Washington of course could not know).
Fast forward to New York. About 20,000 people at the time, crowded into a one square mile area on York Island (read Manhattan), stately mansions along Broadway, the inhabitants described by one writer as “brisk and lively,” the women as “handsome,” but with so many Negro slaves running about that it “hurts a European eye.”
“Holy Ground,” a slum, located just west of the Commons, near King’s College, and owned by Trinity Church, was where some five hundred prostitutes plied their trade, many along Robinson Street, an area of gin shops and whore houses.
In this area, on April 22, just a few days after the Continental Army had arrived, the bodies of two soldiers were found, mutilated and castrated “in a barbarous manner.” With this discovery, all hell broke loose, with gangs of soldiers rampaging and tearing up the place. Several days later, “an old whore” was discovered, her body dumped in a privy.
Washington was not pleased.
***
Women go to war. We forget this. In the American Revolutionary War, thousands of women rode and walked and worked alongside the men: American women, British women, German women––yes, German women. And where there were women, there were children––hundreds, and hundreds––some arriving with their mothers, others born out of the conflict––sex goes on, business as usual. On the British side, the women were given half-rations, which was the custom, and the children half again of that. There is no evidence to the contrary that it wasn’t the same among the American or the Hessian troops. Others (prostitutes for example) had to fend for themselves.
This is interesting. Maybe not surprising. The units with more women (and children) in them lived in more sanitary conditions, ate better, and suffered less from disease.
Not all the women were virtuous of course (who can forget Eve?). Whenever possible, many would take advantage, stripping the wounded and the dying of their possessions. One had to live. One in particular, caught in a fencing operation, was given a hundred lashes on her bare back.
Women suffered through the same winters and endured the same marches. They were in the worst of the fighting, and rape was a common practice if caught by the other side. Not a few dressed as men, bore arms, and did their part in the killing. In the battle of Trenton, one American woman brought down a Hessian officer. A score settled? One can only wonder.
Want to know more? Read Walter Hart Blumenthal’s Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution, or Holly Mayer’s Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution.
And, a book with a broader sweep, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history. A stunning, riveting, book-without-peers of the pain and suffering endured by the participants on both sides of the American Revolution. If you ever thought you needed to read something about your nation’s history before you die, read this one. I also recommend it to non-Americans, particularly Germans, who lost thousands of their own children in the conflict.
***
I have to get this down, otherwise I’ll forget. Kant proffered the idea that we cannot know things-in-themselves, yet we cannot not live as though we don’t. After all, we can’t live as Humean skeptics––not even Hume could do that. Other things we can’t stop thinking we know, even though we know we probably don't––and probably never will: first cause, free will, an after life, g(G)od(s), all those things outside the purview of science yet (seemingly) somehow necessary if we are going to have a complete (if not completed) picture of the world. Does that make sense? Thank g(G)od.
***
There is a star moving toward us. I can’t remember it’s name. I’m assuming we’ll recognize it when we see it. It is several light years away, so the present generation, and the next, and the next gazillion, don’t have to worry.
But here’s the problem. As the star approaches, it will pass through the Oort Cloud, which is not just a cloud (of gas, the cloud part), but also an area filled with icy bodies, billions. Even though the Oort Cloud is about 2 light years from the sun, it is, cosmologically speaking, pretty much next door.
This is what will happen, in about 1.5 million years. As the star moves through the Cloud, it will naturally disturb the icy bodies of the Oort Cloud, sending many into our solar system, all over the place. Many of these are likely to reach the earth. Many will be large enough to penetrate the atmosphere of the earth and reach the ground, bombarding the surface. It is not an exaggeration to think that such an event will “clean house,” destroying, if not all, then most of life on earth.
Is it just me, or do others find this disturbing?
***
To understand the modern world, it’s helpful to go back to Aristotle, then work one’s way forward. Along the way back, it can be noticed that Aristotle (Aristotelianism) is captured by the Church, and used for its own purposes. The result was Scholasticism, an amalgamation of Judeo-Christian (but mostly Christian) doctrine and Aristotle’s metaphysics and psychology. The heyday of the Scholastic movement was from about the 13th century to the 15th, when (modern) science happened, in new and profound ways, like the discovery of the New World, the rise of a merchant class, to exploit the New World, and the fragmentation of Christianity, a process which continues to this very day.
Concerning the new science, Copernicus managed to move the earth from the center of the universe and replace it with the sun; Giordano Bruno convinced himself––though not others––that the universe is infinite (Bruno could provide no proof), and was burned at the stake for his trouble; Galileo rewrote the laws of motion, and for his trouble spent the last twenty years of his life under house arrest (he will be forgiven some 400 years later); and Newton turned everything (every thing) into math, and in the process provided a boon to the liberal arts for those (of us) not smart enough to fully grasp the new math. These processes continue.
***
Two stories I heard today:
If you were a precocious teenager, and 10 years ago you told your parents to take out a $400,00 mortgage on their home and buy Apple stock with it (and they were stupid enough to follow your advice), they would be worth 10 million dollars today. Hmmm.
In 1979 the Yale class of 1954 had a class reunion. Sometime during the reunion, the class decided to ask an investor to make a risky portfolio investment for Yale, with their own money, and they would give it to Yale on the class’s 50th anniversary. Sounded like fun, so they got a portfolio manager (his name was Joe McNay, look him up), and they put together $370,000, and they told McNay, Just have fun with it, go for broke––go broke, no big deal––take risks. He did. He decided to invest in Home Depot, Walmart, and internet stocks, and in 2004 he started liquidating, right at the peek of the market. And at their 50th class reunion they presented Yale with ninety million dollars. The question is, Is Joe McNay a genius? or just a lucky risk taker? How did he know what Walmart was going to become way back in 1954?
***
Certain concepts are used by military theorists to try to make sense of war-making as a human activity. Three of these are: strategy, operations, and tactics. The differences between them is one of scale rather than kind, sometimes making it difficult to discern where one ends and another begins. In general, however, strategy is concerned with war as a whole, operations with fighting in a particular theater of war, and tactics with engagements on a particular battlefield. All three have as their essential ingredient ends and means.
At the very highest level, strategy moves off into political decisions, concerning itself with the ultimate goal of the war as a whole (the so-called “grand strategy”); at the very lowest level, the level of tactics, the focus is on the minutia of engagements–– on the taking of a hill, the holding of a farm house, etc.
All take place of course in time and space and are driven by that most important fact about war, that two or more players are always involved, and that each are involved, not only with their own strategy, operations, and tactics, but with the strategy, operations, and tactics of their enemy––who, in turn, are trying to prevent the other side from fulfilling their goals. There is therefore in war a deeply conflictual element, from which arises war’s violence and unpredictability and general capacity for disorder.
In theory, as we move up the ladder from tactics to operations to strategy, success at a lower level would logically suggest success at a higher level, and ultimately to victory, although, in practice, particularly because of the the conflictual element mentioned, this rarely works out quite so neatly. Thus, there is a terrible paradox between tactics and strategy, where success at one of the lower levels can lead to defeat at one of the higher. For example, one of the greatest operational successes in the history of war, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, resulted, in the end, to the total destruction of the Japanese forces.
***
The war in the east (Second World War). As the Germans poised to invade the Soviet Union in June, 1941, they did so with the following: 3.2 million men, organized into 148 Divisions, 19 of them armored divisions, the rest moving largely by horse––over 600,000!––33 hundred tanks; more than 7,000 artillery pieces; 600,000 trucks; and 2,000 aircraft––the largest assembled army up until that time in human history. The object was not speed, not Blitzkrieg, the object was destruction, to pin down the the Soviet forces and kill them, kill them all, to take no prisoners.
***
Who said American history is boring.
James Otis, Jr. (1725-1783) was an eighteenth century Boston lawyer who, through his pamphleteering and politicking, was an important contributor to early revolutionary polemics. He undoubtedly would have played an even more significant role had he not succumbed to mental illness––probably schizophrenia, certainly a psychosis––before he finally and famously met his end by being struck by a bolt of lightening as he stood in the doorway of a friend’s house––a wish fulfilled, as the story goes, for he had reportedly once expressed to his sister that he should like to die in just this way.
***
I noticed some years back that children, indeed infants, have social security numbers. In my day, one got a number only after turning eighteen. I wondered about the practicality of this, considering the child labor laws, then moved on, not giving it a second thought, until today.
On Today, today, they ran a segment about two men, obviously foreign nationals because they barely spoke English, who had been using others’ (children’s) social security numbers to purchase things––one even drew out mortgage on a house, because (get this) banks commonly don’t take the trouble to match a name to the number; rather, they run a check on the number (only!) to see if it’s tied to a bad credit history. Not surprisingly, children have pretty clean numbers.
You would think the government would be right on this. Not so, because it’s so widespread [sic].
But it gets better. The children whose numbers have bad credit histories––because the individuals who stole them are being irresponsible and not paying “their” bills––are being hounded by collection agencies to, Goddammit, pay your bills! One two-year-old became so overburdened with debt that he had to declare bankruptcy (his mother was good enough to help him with the paperwork).
And it gets better still. The producers conducted a nationwide survey of some seven thousand social security numbers of children and found that 1 in 10 have been a victim of this scam. (I texted my daughter immediately; she’s running credit checks on my grandkids as I speak; who knows how much my upkeep is going to be down the road).
But you know, I have to hand it to those two guys. It takes some ingenuity, and guts to run such a scam––they don’t even speak English for Christ’s sake! Me, I don’t think I would be smart enough to scam the system in a foreign country, in a foreign language that I didn’t speak, or barely.
***
It’s not common knowledge, to my knowledge, that ninety percent (that’s 90%) of the native American population was one-tenth its size at the time of the American Revolution compared to what it was in 1492. John Winthrop, even in the first decades of the seventeenth century, took note that the native Americans were disappearing, and thanked God for it...divine providence, and all that.
***
..that the compound sentence is essentially two sentences joined by a conjunction; that it’s best put to use when ideas are logically related and equal, and when there is a need (a reason) to expand those ideas; that ‘and’ is overused to join compounds; that, surprisingly, compound sentences dominate the patterns of ordinary speech –– that we are compound speakers; that one can put a snap in a compound by using a short, simple sentence with a long one, although a good, balanced compound with similar length and syntactic structure is generally preferable.
***
The dean of a local university recently raised the ire of several of her faculty members in a faculty meeting by denigrating the speech of a recent Ph.D. recipient because the latter’s English was so heavily accented with the student’s native tongue, Spanish. Several of the faculty members walked out of the meeting in protest. What was going on here?
Perhaps the dean was a political conservative and irritated about integration policy, or the lack thereof. Perhaps she was a academic elitist and couldn’t abide the university’s entitlement policy favoring minority students. Perhaps she herself was hispanic, had made a concerted effort to learn standardized English, and felt like everyone else should. Perhaps all of these.
Whatever the case, it’s unlikely she was a linguist. Linguists know about these things, know how and why languages change––drift, as I’d heard one linguist put it. So the dean may have been justifiably concerned that her Standard English was under treat.
***
I recently heard another linguist make the point that each society has a prestige language. For us, that would be Standard (American) English (in England they once called it the language of the BBC, although I don’t know if that still holds). In Italy in the first century it was Greek, during the medieval period in Western Europe it was Latin, and for several centuries after the Norman conquest in England it was French––Norman French. (Here’s an old joke: English was born in England, got sick in America, and died in India.)
I suppose that someday there won’t be any English as we know it. If Chaucer were to return to England today he would probably do well to take an ESL (English as a Second Language) course to become reintegrated back into society. Shakespeare? Maybe not––although contemporary English still might be a struggle for him (payback time for all of us who have struggled with his English!).
***
...that 29,000 children have recently died in that area in the northeast of Africa, where they’re having that famine. Bad, right? But really, not that unusual, because something like 22,000 children die every day anyway, from malnutrition and the like...like war, and the like. The way I figure it, their little souls will not have had enough time to ripen, because (I’ve heard) the soul too needs time, to take root, as it were. And I’m thinking I need to send some money, but (I’ve heard) some of the money already sent is ending up in the hands of the local warrior class. That’s what I heard today.
***
Everything in nature (every ‘thing’) is both (both!) wavelike and stuff-like. Everything. You, me, water, hydrogen gas, the diamond set in your ring, light, everything. Indeed, waves are particle probabilities! and the wave characteristics of matter explain the structure of atoms! What’tha?!
***
This is what I heard to day, on a YouTube video (“Singularity 1 on 1”), an interview with one Jerome Glenn, a futurist of some sort. Glenn claims that he’s read or heard about the magnetic fields of the earth weakening (I forget the source, but I’ll see if I can find it), and that this has nothing to do with the reversing of the magnetic poles, which supposedly happens every seventy-thousand years or so––and that this weakening would mean that in five-hundred years or so, we would be (in Glenn’s words) toast, which is his argument for putting more resources into space exploration, because we have to get the fuck off this planet (when I say ‘we’ I don’t mean any of ‘us’ of course).
OK, I looked it up, on weather.com. The flip is every 200,000 to 300,000 years, and we’re 700,000 years past due! And the weakening of the magnetic field is progressing at 5% per decade, 10-times faster than expected!
I don’t want to be an alarmist, but jesus.
***
Looking from the outside in, the earth has a crust, a mantle, and a core (itself divided into an outer and an inner section). Somewhat paradoxically, the deeper you go, the more relevance for life on the surface. So, it’s the core that keeps the show on the road, and the source for the magnetic field that surrounds the planet and protects us from the solar winds, preventing our atmosphere from blowing away. The core also warms the planet, the outer portion containing hot molten material, the inner, solid iron, which rotates, with a temperature equal to the surface temperature of the sun.
But there's a concern. Over the course of the past century, the force of the magnetic fields has weakened by about 10%. No one knows why. And there’s an area in the southern Atlantic where it’s weakened by 30%. That’s one thing. The other is, every 700,000 years or so (I think that’s right), the poles switch polarity. This is due to occur again soon (anywhere between now and the next 1,500 years). At this point in time, the scientists don't know what this is going to amount to, but just for starters think of migrating birds (and many species of fish) that depend on magnetic fields for navigation. And of course there are all those satellites circling the earth we depend on. Some wonder if the 30% reduction of the fields in the southern Atlantic is a harbinger of all this happening sooner rather than later.
I rarely think about the earth beneath my feet. Maybe I should.
***
“I am not in the world, the world is in me.”
That’s from a little talk by Deepak Chopra I came across recently (I know practically nothing about Deepak Chopra), and it struck me, resonated, as these things sometimes do. That’s all.
Enjoy.
***
Otto Rank was a non-physician psychoanalyst, a onetime member of Freud’s inner circle. His idea for a core principle of personality involved a tug-of-war between a so-called life force and a death force. The life force is a pull toward individualization, the death force an attraction toward conformity. Both are inevitable and must be managed, which will result in most cases in a compromise––you can’t have it both ways––for during one’s life course there will always be this tension (anxiety, and even fear on occasion) that one is loosing, on the one hand, one’s individuality, or on the other one’s sense of community and belonging.
***
I’m Such a Hairy Guy...Don’t Know Why
Researchers have asked and asked the fossil record: How is it that a relatively weak, slow-moving creature such as ourselves make it in the first place?
Finally, an answer: hair––that is, the lack thereof—hardly any when you compare us to, say, lions and tigers and such.
Back in the day, when we, like all the other animals, were as likely to be eaten as doing the eating, some local genius figured out that the best time to hunt would be when those that normally hunted (you!) were taking a break. Lions and tigers and such took their breaks in the heat of the day, because, by some lucky accident of nature, they needed to pant in order to expel heat, and in order to pant they needed to remain stationary––rest in the shade of a banyan tree as it were––because they couldn’t pant and run at the same time.
Humans, on the other hand, sweat to cool down, but can still hunt in the process. So in the heat of the day, while lions and their kind were in panting mode, our early ancestors were chasing down game, game like gazelles that themselves would be resting and panting if they weren’t being chased. Even today African Bushmen hunt in the heat of the day, sometimes running four or five hours at a stretch as they run down game.
I once heard an advertising executive comment that nothing you hear or see in an ad is an accident (he was commenting on the suggestion of a cross––a kind of shadow in the background––of a political ad of a conservative candidate). Physical anthropologists claim the same is true in our evolutionary development: nothing’s an accident. Much in our development, however, might be so encrusted with layers of culture that we fail to see the connection between, for example, a social practice and its biological substrate.
This story of the lion and the hair might be such an example. Today, few of us run to hunt down game, even in Africa, yet we run. There’s even a runners magazine. And of course there’s the Olympics Games. Cycling is a kind of running; maybe swimming is: back and forth, back and forth. And hair! Humans don’t take to excess body hair, especially females, who seem to be particularly adverse to the sight of a hairy male body. Some hair is okay, but not much. Recently I heard a young woman exclaim in discuss when she saw that centerfold in Cosmopolitan Magazine of Senator Brown of Massachusetts, “He’s so hairy!” I’m thinking she may have been reacting at a visceral level, “thinking” perhaps: This guy is pretty hairy. If I were to mate with him, I might be putting myself at risk—he could overheat in the hunt.
It’s a thought.
***
Annie Got Her Guns
Who knew this? The famous American sharpshooter, Annie Oakley, spent six years of her life in court over a falsehood perpetrated against her by that other famous American, William Randolph Hearst. In 1903, a Chicago paper owned by Hearst reported that Annie was destitute and in prison, allegedly having stolen the pants off a negro man in order to support her cocaine habit. The story spread like wild fire, because, not only was Annie the most famous girl/woman in American, she had carefully cultivated, and actually was, a paragon of virtue. The story eventually was published in fifty-five newspapers around the country. By 1910, Oakley had sued all fifty-five, winning all but one case. Hearst himself had to cough up $27,500 in restitution––$667,476 in current dollars. In the end Annie Oakley’s reputation was restored, although after lawyers’ fees and lost wages it is generally agreed she made no money. Still, she got her name back: Annie Oakley, Rifle Queen.
***
Unholy Ground
Washington’s continental forces moved into New York in April, 1776, to await the British, their own forces, along with many of the Loyalist families who had supported them, having evacuated Boston a month or so before, disappearing out to sea to god knows where (Halifax, Nova Scotia, as it turned out, which Washington of course could not know).
Fast forward to New York. About 20,000 people at the time, crowded into a one square mile area on York Island (read Manhattan), stately mansions along Broadway, the inhabitants described by one writer as “brisk and lively,” the women as “handsome,” but with so many Negro slaves running about that it “hurts a European eye.”
“Holy Ground,” a slum, located just west of the Commons, near King’s College, and owned by Trinity Church, was where some five hundred prostitutes plied their trade, many along Robinson Street, an area of gin shops and whore houses.
In this area, on April 22, just a few days after the Continental Army had arrived, the bodies of two soldiers were found, mutilated and castrated “in a barbarous manner.” With this discovery, all hell broke loose, with gangs of soldiers rampaging and tearing up the place. Several days later, “an old whore” was discovered, her body dumped in a privy.
Washington was not pleased.
***
Women go to war. We forget this. In the American Revolutionary War, thousands of women rode and walked and worked alongside the men: American women, British women, German women––yes, German women. And where there were women, there were children––hundreds, and hundreds––some arriving with their mothers, others born out of the conflict––sex goes on, business as usual. On the British side, the women were given half-rations, which was the custom, and the children half again of that. There is no evidence to the contrary that it wasn’t the same among the American or the Hessian troops. Others (prostitutes for example) had to fend for themselves.
This is interesting. Maybe not surprising. The units with more women (and children) in them lived in more sanitary conditions, ate better, and suffered less from disease.
Not all the women were virtuous of course (who can forget Eve?). Whenever possible, many would take advantage, stripping the wounded and the dying of their possessions. One had to live. One in particular, caught in a fencing operation, was given a hundred lashes on her bare back.
Women suffered through the same winters and endured the same marches. They were in the worst of the fighting, and rape was a common practice if caught by the other side. Not a few dressed as men, bore arms, and did their part in the killing. In the battle of Trenton, one American woman brought down a Hessian officer. A score settled? One can only wonder.
Want to know more? Read Walter Hart Blumenthal’s Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution, or Holly Mayer’s Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution.
And, a book with a broader sweep, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history. A stunning, riveting, book-without-peers of the pain and suffering endured by the participants on both sides of the American Revolution. If you ever thought you needed to read something about your nation’s history before you die, read this one. I also recommend it to non-Americans, particularly Germans, who lost thousands of their own children in the conflict.
***
I have to get this down, otherwise I’ll forget. Kant proffered the idea that we cannot know things-in-themselves, yet we cannot not live as though we don’t. After all, we can’t live as Humean skeptics––not even Hume could do that. Other things we can’t stop thinking we know, even though we know we probably don't––and probably never will: first cause, free will, an after life, g(G)od(s), all those things outside the purview of science yet (seemingly) somehow necessary if we are going to have a complete (if not completed) picture of the world. Does that make sense? Thank g(G)od.
***
There is a star moving toward us. I can’t remember it’s name. I’m assuming we’ll recognize it when we see it. It is several light years away, so the present generation, and the next, and the next gazillion, don’t have to worry.
But here’s the problem. As the star approaches, it will pass through the Oort Cloud, which is not just a cloud (of gas, the cloud part), but also an area filled with icy bodies, billions. Even though the Oort Cloud is about 2 light years from the sun, it is, cosmologically speaking, pretty much next door.
This is what will happen, in about 1.5 million years. As the star moves through the Cloud, it will naturally disturb the icy bodies of the Oort Cloud, sending many into our solar system, all over the place. Many of these are likely to reach the earth. Many will be large enough to penetrate the atmosphere of the earth and reach the ground, bombarding the surface. It is not an exaggeration to think that such an event will “clean house,” destroying, if not all, then most of life on earth.
Is it just me, or do others find this disturbing?
***
To understand the modern world, it’s helpful to go back to Aristotle, then work one’s way forward. Along the way back, it can be noticed that Aristotle (Aristotelianism) is captured by the Church, and used for its own purposes. The result was Scholasticism, an amalgamation of Judeo-Christian (but mostly Christian) doctrine and Aristotle’s metaphysics and psychology. The heyday of the Scholastic movement was from about the 13th century to the 15th, when (modern) science happened, in new and profound ways, like the discovery of the New World, the rise of a merchant class, to exploit the New World, and the fragmentation of Christianity, a process which continues to this very day.
Concerning the new science, Copernicus managed to move the earth from the center of the universe and replace it with the sun; Giordano Bruno convinced himself––though not others––that the universe is infinite (Bruno could provide no proof), and was burned at the stake for his trouble; Galileo rewrote the laws of motion, and for his trouble spent the last twenty years of his life under house arrest (he will be forgiven some 400 years later); and Newton turned everything (every thing) into math, and in the process provided a boon to the liberal arts for those (of us) not smart enough to fully grasp the new math. These processes continue.
***
Two stories I heard today:
If you were a precocious teenager, and 10 years ago you told your parents to take out a $400,00 mortgage on their home and buy Apple stock with it (and they were stupid enough to follow your advice), they would be worth 10 million dollars today. Hmmm.
In 1979 the Yale class of 1954 had a class reunion. Sometime during the reunion, the class decided to ask an investor to make a risky portfolio investment for Yale, with their own money, and they would give it to Yale on the class’s 50th anniversary. Sounded like fun, so they got a portfolio manager (his name was Joe McNay, look him up), and they put together $370,000, and they told McNay, Just have fun with it, go for broke––go broke, no big deal––take risks. He did. He decided to invest in Home Depot, Walmart, and internet stocks, and in 2004 he started liquidating, right at the peek of the market. And at their 50th class reunion they presented Yale with ninety million dollars. The question is, Is Joe McNay a genius? or just a lucky risk taker? How did he know what Walmart was going to become way back in 1954?
***
Certain concepts are used by military theorists to try to make sense of war-making as a human activity. Three of these are: strategy, operations, and tactics. The differences between them is one of scale rather than kind, sometimes making it difficult to discern where one ends and another begins. In general, however, strategy is concerned with war as a whole, operations with fighting in a particular theater of war, and tactics with engagements on a particular battlefield. All three have as their essential ingredient ends and means.
At the very highest level, strategy moves off into political decisions, concerning itself with the ultimate goal of the war as a whole (the so-called “grand strategy”); at the very lowest level, the level of tactics, the focus is on the minutia of engagements–– on the taking of a hill, the holding of a farm house, etc.
All take place of course in time and space and are driven by that most important fact about war, that two or more players are always involved, and that each are involved, not only with their own strategy, operations, and tactics, but with the strategy, operations, and tactics of their enemy––who, in turn, are trying to prevent the other side from fulfilling their goals. There is therefore in war a deeply conflictual element, from which arises war’s violence and unpredictability and general capacity for disorder.
In theory, as we move up the ladder from tactics to operations to strategy, success at a lower level would logically suggest success at a higher level, and ultimately to victory, although, in practice, particularly because of the the conflictual element mentioned, this rarely works out quite so neatly. Thus, there is a terrible paradox between tactics and strategy, where success at one of the lower levels can lead to defeat at one of the higher. For example, one of the greatest operational successes in the history of war, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, resulted, in the end, to the total destruction of the Japanese forces.
***
The war in the east (Second World War). As the Germans poised to invade the Soviet Union in June, 1941, they did so with the following: 3.2 million men, organized into 148 Divisions, 19 of them armored divisions, the rest moving largely by horse––over 600,000!––33 hundred tanks; more than 7,000 artillery pieces; 600,000 trucks; and 2,000 aircraft––the largest assembled army up until that time in human history. The object was not speed, not Blitzkrieg, the object was destruction, to pin down the the Soviet forces and kill them, kill them all, to take no prisoners.
***
Who said American history is boring.
James Otis, Jr. (1725-1783) was an eighteenth century Boston lawyer who, through his pamphleteering and politicking, was an important contributor to early revolutionary polemics. He undoubtedly would have played an even more significant role had he not succumbed to mental illness––probably schizophrenia, certainly a psychosis––before he finally and famously met his end by being struck by a bolt of lightening as he stood in the doorway of a friend’s house––a wish fulfilled, as the story goes, for he had reportedly once expressed to his sister that he should like to die in just this way.
***
I noticed some years back that children, indeed infants, have social security numbers. In my day, one got a number only after turning eighteen. I wondered about the practicality of this, considering the child labor laws, then moved on, not giving it a second thought, until today.
On Today, today, they ran a segment about two men, obviously foreign nationals because they barely spoke English, who had been using others’ (children’s) social security numbers to purchase things––one even drew out mortgage on a house, because (get this) banks commonly don’t take the trouble to match a name to the number; rather, they run a check on the number (only!) to see if it’s tied to a bad credit history. Not surprisingly, children have pretty clean numbers.
You would think the government would be right on this. Not so, because it’s so widespread [sic].
But it gets better. The children whose numbers have bad credit histories––because the individuals who stole them are being irresponsible and not paying “their” bills––are being hounded by collection agencies to, Goddammit, pay your bills! One two-year-old became so overburdened with debt that he had to declare bankruptcy (his mother was good enough to help him with the paperwork).
And it gets better still. The producers conducted a nationwide survey of some seven thousand social security numbers of children and found that 1 in 10 have been a victim of this scam. (I texted my daughter immediately; she’s running credit checks on my grandkids as I speak; who knows how much my upkeep is going to be down the road).
But you know, I have to hand it to those two guys. It takes some ingenuity, and guts to run such a scam––they don’t even speak English for Christ’s sake! Me, I don’t think I would be smart enough to scam the system in a foreign country, in a foreign language that I didn’t speak, or barely.
***
It’s not common knowledge, to my knowledge, that ninety percent (that’s 90%) of the native American population was one-tenth its size at the time of the American Revolution compared to what it was in 1492. John Winthrop, even in the first decades of the seventeenth century, took note that the native Americans were disappearing, and thanked God for it...divine providence, and all that.
***
..that the compound sentence is essentially two sentences joined by a conjunction; that it’s best put to use when ideas are logically related and equal, and when there is a need (a reason) to expand those ideas; that ‘and’ is overused to join compounds; that, surprisingly, compound sentences dominate the patterns of ordinary speech –– that we are compound speakers; that one can put a snap in a compound by using a short, simple sentence with a long one, although a good, balanced compound with similar length and syntactic structure is generally preferable.
***
The dean of a local university recently raised the ire of several of her faculty members in a faculty meeting by denigrating the speech of a recent Ph.D. recipient because the latter’s English was so heavily accented with the student’s native tongue, Spanish. Several of the faculty members walked out of the meeting in protest. What was going on here?
Perhaps the dean was a political conservative and irritated about integration policy, or the lack thereof. Perhaps she was a academic elitist and couldn’t abide the university’s entitlement policy favoring minority students. Perhaps she herself was hispanic, had made a concerted effort to learn standardized English, and felt like everyone else should. Perhaps all of these.
Whatever the case, it’s unlikely she was a linguist. Linguists know about these things, know how and why languages change––drift, as I’d heard one linguist put it. So the dean may have been justifiably concerned that her Standard English was under treat.
***
I recently heard another linguist make the point that each society has a prestige language. For us, that would be Standard (American) English (in England they once called it the language of the BBC, although I don’t know if that still holds). In Italy in the first century it was Greek, during the medieval period in Western Europe it was Latin, and for several centuries after the Norman conquest in England it was French––Norman French. (Here’s an old joke: English was born in England, got sick in America, and died in India.)
I suppose that someday there won’t be any English as we know it. If Chaucer were to return to England today he would probably do well to take an ESL (English as a Second Language) course to become reintegrated back into society. Shakespeare? Maybe not––although contemporary English still might be a struggle for him (payback time for all of us who have struggled with his English!).
***
...that 29,000 children have recently died in that area in the northeast of Africa, where they’re having that famine. Bad, right? But really, not that unusual, because something like 22,000 children die every day anyway, from malnutrition and the like...like war, and the like. The way I figure it, their little souls will not have had enough time to ripen, because (I’ve heard) the soul too needs time, to take root, as it were. And I’m thinking I need to send some money, but (I’ve heard) some of the money already sent is ending up in the hands of the local warrior class. That’s what I heard today.