historical equality

According to Rick Santorum,

... America was born great. … What makes the saying on the Great Seal — e pluribus unum — true? Out of many one, what is the one? It is that, that we are a people who are children of God. We are seen as equal. I mean, the idea that all men are created equal, that was unheard of. Women created equal to men? No way! What society did that exist? Rights? Equal? No way. Why was that? Because we are children of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And we were all made in His image.

Others have already pointed out the lack of equality in the original Constitution, and the struggles it took to change that.  I'd like to address a different point.

"What society did that exist? Rights? Equal? No way."

Sorry, Rick, but you are as wrong about world history as you are about our own.  Let me introduce you to the ancient Persians, who made equality a cornerstone of their society until religious fundamentalists took over and messed it up for everyone. 

It all started with a guy named Cyrus.  Not the first Cyrus, he was okay, but it was the second Cyrus who was The Great.  First he built an empire, the big challenge being taking out the Babylonians, the super-power of their time, by finding the one vulnerable porthole in their superfortress and destroying their capital.  Seriously, it was a total Star Wars move and he didn't even need the force, just his (one and only, monotheistic) god, Ahura Mazda.  While he was there he set their slaves free and sent them back to their homes.  (Your guy Jesus?  We're pretty sure his ancestors were part of that group.  No telling if the Jews would have survived in Babylon long enough for him to be born if it wasn't for The Great, but if they did, without The Great's help, it's hard to see how they would have managed to make the trip back to Palestine in time to be conquered by the Romans.  In which case, Jesus would have been born in Iraq, Paul would have spread the word in Iran and India, and Christianity would have been an Eastern religion.  But I digress.)

The Great didn't earn his name just through conquest, though, he earned it as a ruler, and particularly through law.  This one:

 That's the original Bill of Rights.  Written in Akkadian around 539 BCE, it reads in part:

Now that I put the crown of kingdom of Iran, Babylon, and the nations of the four directions on the head with the help of (Ahura) Mazda, I announce that I will respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of my empire and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them while I am alive. … I never let anyone oppress any others, and if it occurs , I will take his or her right back and penalize the oppressor. … I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation. … I prevent unpaid, forced labor. … everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate other's rights. ..No one could be penalized for his or her relatives' faults. I prevent slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such traditions should be exterminated the world over.

So, freedom of religion and culture, civil liberties, property rights, freedom of movement, and the abolition of slavery. Not too shabby on the equality front.

But wait! There's more!

What about women, you ask? Well, truth is we don't know all that much about the condition of women in The Great's empire. In fact, the only records we have that address the status of women are those of the royal court and the (equivalent of the) federal payroll for the capital city.

We know court women controlled their own property, which in some cases included extensive estates throughout the empire; they traveled freely, on their own, to visit their properties; they competed with men in athletic events; they sponsored religious rituals on an equal footing to men. And while there weren't any ruling empresses, the second in command throughout the empire (after the emperor himself) was a woman - the ruler's mother - and when he was off fighting wars or otherwise unavailable? She had authority equal to his.

That payroll record is even more interesting. Women were paid the same as men for the same job classifications except for the very lowest: the women who worked as pack-mules, carrying heavy loads, made less than men who did the same work. But for jobs where brain matter mattered, the pay was the same. And women were found all the way up the payscale, as engineers, managers, and artisans. Also soldiers; there were women in the Persian army throughout the imperial period. The only exception to equal pay was the bonus paid to pregnant women. Oh, and they had paid maternity leave.

One last point. That bit about, "No one could be penalized for his or her relatives' faults." You might want to discuss that with your church leaders. They could learn a lot from The Great.

You see, Rick, the ancient Persians were not the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were very nice to those children. But they had rights and a better record on tolerance and equality than we do. To pretend otherwise is nothistory.

Recent weather history

Nine months ago, April 14-16 2011, a massive tornado outbreak hit the American southeast, killing over 40 people.  There were at least 178 separate tornadoes in 16 different US states.  Two weeks later, April 25-28, there was an even larger outbreak, with at least 359 tornadoes and 343 deaths.  That time, they hit 21 states.

Both times, South Carolina was on the list of states hit.

When the candidates head down to SC on Wednesday, they may find voters who care a great deal more about climate change than those in Iowa or New Hampshire, and may not be as willing to support politicians who flip flop, censor books, pretend the evidence isn't clear enough for action, obfuscate with accusations of left-wing conspiracies, or flat out lie on the subject.*  It is even possible that experience of extreme weather will have turned voters liberal on environmental issues. 

I'm stocking up on popcorn for this one.


* If you don't feel like following the links, those are (in order): Huntsman, Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, and Paul.

Atlas didn't shrug ...

... he shared his talents and our world is more interesting and better engineered for it.  He did not hoard his ability, but used it to spark our imaginations and enable the abilities and creativity of others.  His career was a celebration of the individual.  He will be missed.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Not the senator from Massachussets, yet

I've discussed the principle of the common good, or the common welfare, here a few times - to my mind it is the fundamental underlying principle of the American system, it's what makes it all work.  Elizabeth Warren nails it:

notGalileo

I thought that Rick Perry’s comparison of climate change deniers to Galileo would get some traction, as it’s such an obviously ridiculous analogy.  As I haven’t seen much discussion of it, maybe it’s not as obvious as I thought.  So let’s look at the two in a kind of Madlib, fill-in-the-blank format.  I will have to make one small adjustment first: Galileo gets to be the climate scientists, not the climate change deniers.

Once upon a very long time ago, back in the:

1. 4th century BCE,
2. Industrial Revolution,

there was a theory.  The theory said that:

1. the sun and the planets rotate around the earth.
2. the sky is so big that we can keep pumping garbage into our atmosphere without causing any damage.

It wasn’t a very well-backed theory and a lot of scientists argued with it, but it was popular and a lot of people believed it.  They liked believing it.  It made them feel:

1. important.
2. safe.

There were some problems with this theory, though.  Little things like it didn’t match real world observations.  So:

1. epicycles were added to the orbits, to explain away the problems.
2. cities enacted the first clean air acts, banning the more obvious smog causing pollutants.

But this wasn’t enough.  So a new theory was developed; it was:

1. Tycho Brahe’s idea that the other planets rotate around the sun but the sun rotates around the earth.
2. the 1970s theory that pollutants would block the sun and cause another ice age.

Unfortunately, this theory didn’t match the real world either.  So another theory was found that matched all the real world observations.  This theory was called:

1. the Copernican or heliocentric model
2. global warming, though I prefer climate instability

and it argued that:

1. the earth and the planets all orbit the sun.
2. pollutants in the atmosphere cause a greenhouse effect where heat is trapped in the atmosphere, slowly warming the planet and disrupting world weather patterns.

This theory was developed in:

1. the early 17^th century
2. the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries

by:

1. two renowned scientists named Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
2. many well-respected climatologists.

Within a very short period of time, a very strong consensus developed among everyone with any credibility who looked at the data.  This time, the theory was right. It matched the real world observations perfectly and, over time, as more evidence came in from:

1. observations made with the newly invented telescope,
2. hundreds of researchers all over the world,

the new evidence was a perfect match for the theory.  In science, this is the real test.  Developing a theory that matches existing observations is great, but to be truly convincing, a theory must predict evidence that has not yet been collected.  This theory met that test and convinced everyone who relied on reason and science.  But not everyone does.  There were still skeptics, people who didn’t like the new theory, people who felt uncomfortable with change and preferred to rely on tradition and faith.  Some were ignorant and insecure, but others had self-interested motives to deny the new knowledge.  These people were afraid that accepting the reality of the earth’s functioning as a planet would weaken their power base.  They privileged their reading of the bible over facts and evidence.  They were:

1. the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church,
2. the leaders of evangelical Christian movements in the US and politicians who rely on evangelical votes,

and they saw this theory as undermining the literal received truth of the bible.  Their belief system was, they feared, too frail to survive having so much as one of its myriad of elements challenged.  They could have reexamined their understanding of their sacred text (the divine being said the sun rose and set because he was speaking in language his people could understand), they could have used the age-old ‘mysterious ways’ argument to claim that there is no need for faith and science to be in perfect synch (if the divine could allow the Holocaust, a little planetary movement should not be a big stretch).  But they didn’t.  They made the choice to take an absolutist position and attack science for its audacity in disagreeing with them.

But it’s hard to attack an abstract.  So instead they attacked the scientists.  They couldn’t reach them all; some they had no jurisdiction over.  So they left:

1. Kepler, who was not only in far off Germany but a Protestant
2. The European, Asian, etc. scientists

alone and focused their attacks on those they could hurt.  Not right away though.  Their first responses were actually encouraging.  The first real notice they took of the theory was in:

1. 1611 when Galileo lectured on the subject in Rome.
2. 1989 when Bill McKibben wrote the first popular (rather than abstrusely scientific) account of the evidence.

The most notable responses were:

1. a review of Galileo’s work by Jesuit mathematicians at the Collegio Romano, who granted it certification.
2. the first President Bush’s promise to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

Then they thought about it some more and decided it might be dangerous.  They tried to silence the theory by:

1. calling Galileo before the Inquisition and instructing him not to "hold, teach or defend" his beliefs; that he continued to hold them was evident to anyone who spoke with him on the matter, but the church left him alone as long as he kept those ideas out of the public sphere -- the original "don't ask don't tell".
2. blocking publication of federally funded research into the impact of climate instability, preventing NOAA and NASA scientists from speaking publicly, and censoring reports and websites.

When those efforts weren’t enough, they turned to discrediting the scientists by:

1. recalling Galileo to the Inquisition and excommunicating him, not for his belief in science, but for disobeying their gag order.
2. trolling through their emails looking for evidence of fakery, evidence they didn’t find, but that didn’t stop them from pretending they did.

Through these measures they manage to obscure the near-universal scientific consensus and convince the gullible that their position was anything other than an attempt to bully the truth into submitting to their political ambitions.

It’s almost as if they’re the same story.

Fixing nothistory sounds

Modernity impinges on our awareness in the most historical of sites.  This can be good: visiting a medieval city is far more pleasant is the tourism board hasn't gone all out to recreate the pong of untreated sewage and the adults you share the space with have bathed since reaching puberty.  The absence of plague-bearing fleas can also be counted as an advantage.  But what about sound?  There have been many attempts to recreate musical sounds of the past using period instruments in ancient structures.  Dr. Damian Murphy, a sound artist and lecturer in the Department of Electronics at the University of York, has recreated the sounds of sites that are no longer intact.  You can listen to music as it sounded in Coventry Cathedral before it was destroyed in the Blitz and druidic ritual complete with the resonance created by the once-complete circle of Stonehenge but without the sounds of the nearby highway here.

Nice rescue of nothistory.

NotSerious campaiging

Of the many threads of discourse on the results of the Ames Iowa straw poll, there are two that contradict each other entirely.  One is that the straw poll is a poor predictor of success in the nomination game and the other is that Pawlenty had to do well in the straw poll to be viable.

The first is based on history.  While there was a poll in 1979, it was a minor event with low turnout and not repeated soon.  So the history of the poll as part of the electoral scene starts in 1987.  Since I haven't seen it laid out in full detail anywhere else (it may have been, I just haven't seen it), here's the list of all previous placings versus nomination results (Republican only):

Year	1st	2nd	3rd	Nominee
1987	Robertson	Dole	GHWBush	Bush (3rd)
1995	Dole	Gramm	Buchanan	Dole (1st)
1999	GWBush	Forbes	Dole	Bush (1st)
2007	Romney	Huckabee	Brownback	McCain (10th)

Of the four significant Ames Iowa Republican straw polls, in two the winners became the Republican nominee, in one it was the third place candidate, and most recently, the guy who came 10th out of 11 won the nomination.   So how does coming in third spell doom for the Pawlenty campaign?  Not just third place, but one of only three candidates to break double-digits, putting him significantly ahead of most of the others. 

The claim that he needed to do well in Ames is more than just a talk-show meme; Pawlenty said in no uncertain terms that his campaign "needed some lift" from Ames and that, having not gotten it, his candidacy was no longer viable.  He also said his campaign was about getting his record of achievement before the voters.  Not about charisma or a vision for America, but getting his record out there.  That's a valid strategy, but it's a long-haul strategy.  It's going to take time for voters to get past the flash-in-the-pan candidates to see your worth.  That is incompatible with a strategy that depends on winning a popularity contest at the first state fair of the campaign season.  These are basic realities that any serious politician or handler knows.  Which makes me wonder if Pawlenty was ever in it to win.  Either he has really, really bad political instincts or it was all a game.  

What kind of game?  Well, it does occur to me that ex-presidential candidate Pawlenty is a much more bookable speaker than ex-governor Pawlenty.  He said himself, his campaign was not about a vision for America, it wasn't even about winning the presidency, it was about getting himself more recognition.  Which makes him more marketable.

Let's face it, politicians make a hell of a lot less money than the people they hobnob with, especially Republican politicians.  Compared to most of the big names in his party, he's a relative pauper.  Now is the perfect time to start building that fortune: his kids are about to start college and opportunities for Republican speakers are as good as they've ever been.  His local party offered him the chance to run for senator, but he's given them a definite no on that.

The way I see it, this all adds up to one thing: He's pulling a Palin, capitalizing on a failed foray into national politics by leaving public service for the service of Mammon.  The difference is, he meant to all along.  If I was one of his donors, I'd be pretty unhappy.

That's not ... what is that?

In my ongoing quest to provide historical context to contemporary issues, I could not possibly allow the latest incarnation of exploratory endeavor to pass without comment.  The platform of the Tea Party in Space* brings to mind a number of important historical precedents.  Alexander the Great's independent bid for world domination, taken with the reluctant permission of the Greek city-states, but not their financial backing, comes to mind as an example of the potential of individual initiative.  The voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama demonstrate the problems inherent in introducing the heavy hand of government into the quest for knowledge.  And yet, there is another precedent that strikes me as more relevant, more apt, more perfectly suited to this topic:

*I must be a sinner, for I covet that teacup.

That's notCommon Law on assault

There has been an astonishing new development in criminal law, or at least some lawyers are hoping to make it so.  The story, as told by a local news show:

The part I find appalling is that, after two men opened fire on a Philadelphia bus, aiming at the passengers within, their defense is that they should not be charged with assault because no one was injured.

What a fascinating legal principle: "No harm, no foul."

Except that's not how our legal system works.  We have a little thing called the Common Law system, based on hundreds of years of precedents, mostly from England.  How did that happen?  A series of what are known as "reception statutes" were enacted in post-Revolution America.  Some were legislative acts, some were court decisions, the rest were written into state constitutions.  Here, for example, is the New York one, enacted in 1777:

[S]uch parts of the common law of England, and of the statute law of England and Great Britain, and of the acts of the legislature of the colony of New York, as together did form the law of the said colony on the 19th day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, shall be and continue the law of this State, subject to such alterations and provisions as the legislature of this State shall, from time to time, make concerning the same.

By adopting English common law, with the right to make changes as needed, the new states avoided the legislative nightmare of having to create an entirely new legal system.  Given that the colonies the states derived from had also followed English common law, this meant they could keep their courts and legal systems as they were.  It was a practical decision, but also an ideological one; the newly independent states may no longer be subject to the British crown, but they still saw themselves as culturally and philosophically British.  And so, throughout the United States of America today, we still follow the British common law legal system.  Oddly enough, the words "no harm, no foul" are not found in that system.  Nor has such a clause been added by any American state.  Instead there is a legal definition of the term "assault" that goes something like this:

an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact

The key elements here are intent and apprehension of harm.  The video shows a bunch of very scared people running and ducking, and in one case crawling under a seat.  That pretty much covers apprehension.  As for intent, aiming a gun at someone and pulling the trigger satisfies that condition.  

There has been a great deal of abuse of the rule of law in the U.S. in recent years, most notably in areas where massive harm has gone unpunished.  Notions like "too big to fail" and the need for restitution does outweigh the need for prison corrupt our justice system.  They replace the notion of justice with harm minimization, a dubious concept in principle and even more dubious in execution.  But creating new definitions of criminal acts based on wishful thinking is not yet the common law for the common people, only the super-rich.

Really notInsane

Is Anders Behring Breivik insane?  I have no idea.  But I’ve heard the comment, several times now, that he must be because only the insane would imagine that a terrorist attack could garner support for their cause, rather than the other way around.  That’s nothistory.

There are plenty of examples of terrorist acts that have worked against the intention of the perpetrator.  Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the Alfred P. Murragh Building in Oklahoma City created sympathy for the federal civil service rather than the anti-government uprising he hoped for.  But there are also examples where terrorists have gotten exactly what they wanted.  Here are a few:

1181 Reginald de Chatillon-sur-Marne was unhappy with the fact that the Crusader states had signed treaties and settled into peaceful co-existence with their Islamic neighbors.  Not satisfied with possession of Jerusalem, he believed that all Muslims were agents of the Devil and that all good Christians should do everything in their power to eliminate the scourge of Islam from the earth.  So he got some followers and attacked a caravan of pilgrims on their way to Mecca.  The next year he attacked a ship full of similarly intentioned Muslims.  The problem for the Crusaders was that their entire mission had been founded on anti-Muslim propaganda, albeit most of it based on falsified information.  To denounce Reggie would require admitting that their own cause was false.  The atrocities themselves horrified the Islamic world, but it was the unwillingness of the Crusaders to do or say anything about them that convinced Saladin and his allies that the treaties were nothing but stalling tactics and that the Christians were, in truth, not reliable regional partners but their avowed enemies.  The Islamic world united behind Saladin and retook Jerusalem, which in turn ignited the third and some subsequent Crusades (the ones aimed at the Islamic world, that is; not the ones against Christians of non-papist inclinations).  A stable, amicable relationship was successfully turned into years of bloody warfare by the acts of a single terrorist leader.  The heads of the Crusader states played into Reginald’s hands by allowing the perception that they sanctioned his actions.

1932 The two major parties took 93% of the vote in the Japanese election, the militarists being relegated to an invisible portion of the “other”.  Three months later, an attack by junior naval officers in Tokyo left the prime minister dead.  The officers surrendered and turned their trial into a platform for their political views, the first major presentation of the expansionist, emperor-worshiping position.  The young, handsome, passionate officers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives for their beliefs garnered massive public support.  Petitions begging for leniency were signed in blood by hundreds of thousands of people.  To appease the newly energized pro-military forces, the new government was led, not by the head of the parliamentary party in the majority, but by military leadership which immediately recognized the territorial gains in Manchuria, legitimizing the army’s adventurism, and increased the navy’s budget.  The next election, in 1936, proved that the support was personal, not political, as the militarists still couldn’t break double digits or gain a single seat in the parliament, so the ideologues in the military did it all again with another terrorist attack that overturned the results of another election.  The militarization of Japan in the 1930s happened despite elections in which over 90% of the population consistently voted against expansion (the same results occurred in 1939 as well), because the government responded to terrorism with appeasement, with precisely the same results Chamberlain got over on the next continent.

2001 Is there anyone who doubts that the Al-Qaeda terrorists who took down the Twin Towers in New York got exactly what they wanted?  A decade ago, the overwhelming majority of Muslims in every country that takes polls had positive feelings towards the U.S.  Today, the U.S. is seen, at best, as untrustworthy and erratic, at worst as an outright enemy.  A decade ago, Muslim Americans were broadly accepted as part of the melting pot.  Today, there is a growing anti-Muslim industry that is prominent in the public discourse and making inroads into our government.  The terrorists wanted to turn Christians and Muslims against each other.  As horrified as we were by their actions, we gave them exactly what they wanted.  They succeeded, not because they were smarter than McVeigh or their cause was more just, but because we let them.  We played into their hands.

So far the Norwegians are not playing into Behring Breivik’s hands or trying to appease his co-believers.  So far, all accounts indicate, the backlash is promoting the Labor Party he was trying to overthrow.  But that doesn’t make him crazy for thinking it might have gone the other way.