Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: December 2006
The Name’s Craig….
Posted on December 12, 2006 in Film
James Bond: Voda-martini.
Bartender: Shaken or stirred?
James Bond: Does it look like I give a damn?
Daniel Craig is simply the best James Bond ever and Casino Royale exactly what a Bond film should be.
Can We Try Pinochet Now?
Posted on December 11, 2006 in Atrocity
Some people just don’t deserve a decent burial. They deserve to be mixed with nitrates and used for fertilizer.
Next to the Pool
Posted on December 10, 2006 in Weather
Went to a Christmas party for Lynn’s Quaker Meeting. Spent part of the afternoon sitting in the strange, wide-open winter sun next to a pool. A friend talked about the envy of people in the northeast for our holiday weather. California was another of those sunny places, she said, except, unlike Florida, you can’t swim at night.
Child Abuse?
Posted on December 9, 2006 in Strange
A 27 year old mother had her 12 year old son hauled in for unwrapping a Christmas present too early. Rock Hill, South Carolina police charged the boy with petty larceny.
Friday Anteater Blogging – In Motion
Posted on December 8, 2006 in Xenartha
A nice piece of footage showing a pygmy anteater crawling around on a fellow’s shoulders.
Who needs cat or squid blogging when anteaters combine the best qualities of both?
Santiago Canyon: The Moon
Posted on December 7, 2006 in Driving
The moon was a silver coin falling from a canvas purse of cloud into the chaparral’s waiting palm.
Boris Godunov
Posted on December 7, 2006 in History
Boris Godunov’s name is familiar to lovers of the Mussorgsky opera reputed to be about the life of the Tsar. Godunov came to power after the last Rurikid monarch, Feodor I, died without heir. Much of the controversy surrounding Godunov’s ascension to the throne stems from the mystery surrounding the death of Prince Dimitri, Fedor’s half brother.
In the operatic version and in histories which favored tsarist autocracy, Godunov is thought to have killed Dimitri so he could become tsar himself. Godunov was a protege of Ivan the Terrible’s* Oprichnina, a gang of secret police who possessed immunity from all crimes. David Warnes’s Chronicle of the Russian Tsars describes them:
Mounted on black horses, and dressed in black uniforms and hoods, they carried on their saddles the twin emblems of a broom and a dog’s head, symbolizing their mission to rid the land of traitors. They had a strong incentive to persecute the wealthy since they received a quarter of the property of anyone whom they arrested. A second quarter went to whoever had denounced the victim, and the remainder to the tsar. Some historians have seen the Oprinchnina experiment as a device for destroying the boyars [Russian nobility] and replacing them with men who would be loyal to the crown because they owed their wealth and position to Ivan, but the selection of both victims and oprichniki cut across class barriers and appears to have been based on the tsar’s personal feelings. Those whom he trusted were invited to join the Oprichnina, and those whom he distrusted were liable to become its victims. Whole families were slaughtered.
Godunov had been selected for the Oprichnina in 1571. In 1580, he became a boyar and close personal confidant of Ivan IV. This influence led to his sister Irina becoming the wife of the tsar’s son and future tsar Feodor. Some say that Godunov was present when Ivan the Terrible assassinated his own son and that the he had tried to to protect the tsarevich from the enraged monarch. Under Godunov, the Russians expanded their influence into Siberia and established the Patriarchate, an orthodox version of the Papacy.
The nine year old Dimitri was found with a cut in his throat in his home at Ulgrich. Vasily Shuisky, himself the son of a notorious Oprichniki, determined that Dimitri had suffered an epileptic fit while playing with a knife. Rumors that Boris had engineered the boy’s assasination did not arise until after Godunov’s election to the throne in 1598**, seven years after the boy’s death.
Opposition to Godunov came from boyars disaffected with the new tsar’s insistance on absolute power for himself despite his lack of royal or noble ancestors. Godunov organized his own system of informers to counter his critics. In 1601 he purged many of his opponents.
This same year brought ecological disaster. Drought brought famine. Crop failures in 1602 and 1603 followed upon the drought. Amid starvation, epidemics, and social chaos, Godunov rose to the occasion with acts of charity and relief for the destitute of his empire. Nonetheless, hungry serfs and peasants revolted and joined the army of a man who claimed to be the dead Prince Dimitri. Godunov slapped down the challenge (though after the tsar’s death, the pretender came back and ruled for a short while). In 1604, the tsar suffered a stroke and died in April of the following year.
He had not asked for anything or done anything which had not been established as the right of the tsars by Ivan IV. His straightforward and generous response to the sufferings of his people showed him as a better man than many a ruler of his time and after. Unlike our contemporary, George W. Bush, he did not shirk from acts of charity. (One of the complaints against him was that he was too generous.)
We end up with a mixed picture of the tsar. On one hand, he broke the bright blood of his enemies all over the land. On the other, he did not adopt a traditional conservative approach when it came to natural disaster. We might see him as a Lyndon Johnson, mired in a Vietnam and trying to invent the Great Society, a product of Ivan the Terrible’s witch hunts. Godunov was no machiavellian: just a man of the moment who brought the Terrible one’s tools of empire to bear on the problems of his time, adding to them a sense of religiosity and compassion for the poor. He was a frightening if great ruler.
Runs on the Roads
Posted on December 5, 2006 in Development
If you’ve been worried about plans to build a new highway through your community, perhaps you might want to clip this article from Scientific American and share it with your neighbors:
Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues found that remote Ecuadorian villages had nearly one third as many cases of diarrhea than their more accessible counterparts. Diarrheal disease caused by Escherichia coli, rotavirus and the parasite Giardia spreads through contaminated food, water and by person-to-person contact. “Roads have been very important in allowing and facilitating the spread of everything one needs to set up an infection,” says Mary Wilson, a professor of population and international health at Harvard University, who was not involved with this study.
No and No More
Posted on December 5, 2006 in Journalists & Pundits Occupation of Iraq
Perhaps propelled by a hidden conservative hand, the media admits that it dispensed with actual journalism when weighing the need to intervene in Iraq, but nonetheless feels that it is important to brand as radical the electorate’s desire to get the hell out of the war.
Such moves are often justified in the name of “what did our boys die for?” I think I can answer this: they died to make the point that we should not squander their lives for reasons of panic or political maneuvering. They made it clear that they deserve more than a wasted effort. If we heed their message, future generations of soldiers will not be subjected to pointless service in pointless wars. This is the lesson we should have learned from Vietnam: now we should not hesitate to take it to heart.
Let’s bring our children home, to show them that we have matured as a nation. Let us make it possible for Congress to say “No” and “No More”.
Mental Illness and Political Affiliation
Posted on December 4, 2006 in Bipolar Disorder Campaign 2004 Civic Responsibility Conservatives Liberals & Progressives Psycho-bunk
As a model for facing reality, there are severe problems and pessimism inherent in the present conservative perspective that carry over into one’s management of one’s moods.
