Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: August 2007
The Perseids
Posted on August 12, 2007 in Daily Life
Ah, to live in a place where I can stretch out beneath the skies and watch the Perseids without interventions of clouds, smog, or bright city lights dimming the skyfall.
The Myth of the Hunting Frontiersman Debunked Again
Posted on August 12, 2007 in Folly Watch History
Late response to a comment by Dreaming Mage who has been identified as a spammer by Akismet (not my fault):
Though the argument probably has a great deal of accuracy to frontiersmen as well, as regards hunting. The early frontiersman that first expanded west of the original colonies mostly DID own weapons, and were so often attacked by Indians that they often lived in what were basically fortified communes. (see as an example the biography of Daniel Boone.)
But once they expanded beyond the Mississipi, frontiersman were mostly farmers and ranchers once again.
The myth of the early “territory” people being gun-toters is definitely false. Very few of them owned handguns, except (and this may be where that myth came from) for the lowly cowboy. Most of them OWNED handguns, and nearly none of them knew how to use them, because they hadn’t the money or time for practice. The handguns were just attractive trinkets. They mostly stayed in the saddle-bags or in their locker at the ranch because wearing a handgun at best was inconvenient, mostly you would have to check it in at the Sheriff’s office when you went to town; in the towns where that wasn’t so, wearing it could get you killed.
Oh, another place that myth may have grown from is that the 19th century ranchers HATED eating their own beef, it was for money, not food. Most ranchers employed a hunter (a specialist) to bring in game for the crew.
Mage
Daniel Boone was an exception, a professional hunter, one who got attacked by Indians a great deal probably because he provoked them. If you read carefully, he used his gun rarely, preferring to use his knife to finish the kill as did most “frontiersmen”. These were a decided minority — probably not even 1%.
American guns of the time were terrible. They could not shoot more than 20 or 30 yards because of their length and their heaviness. They weren’t true rifles in that the barrels weren’t bored, but made of two halves soldered together. The Kentucky frontiersmen who turned out for the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 were not the men of legend: the battle was in fact won by the cannon the Americans were able to bring to bear on the British columns, both from land and from sea. (Andrew Jackson so much as said so in his report to Washington.) When they entered a shooting competition with a group of gentlemen shooters from New Orleans, they were trounced.
You employ a liberal definition of what constitutes the “frontier” that allows you to pull examples mostly from the period after the Civil War as if they were contemporary to the period I describe. After the Civil War, the ownership of guns did increase. The reasons for this are complex and include the availability of surplus weapons plus the impact of the industrial revolution plus the popularity of the legend of the hunting frontiersman. This is the era of bad men and outlaws. But were they the norm even then? Hardly. Gun enthusiasts like to focus on the criminals and lawmen of the age, but again, they are a decided minority. The overwhelming number of people who settled the West (and you can’t really draw a neat line in the period after the Civil War as to when the frontier ended and the period of settlement begins) were peaceful farmers and ranchers. They didn’t ride down into town looking for a fight. Outlaws were always fringe people (why do you think they called them “outlaws”?), yet you fall into the trap of treating them as “the way the West was” when they were actually the way most of the people in the West weren’t. It’s the old Twentieth Century romance of the horse opera playing out in the guise of real history.
If Daniel Boone and Natty Bumpo enthralled their contemporaries, it was because they were unusual for their times. They were the Jason Bournes, engaged in a rare calling. I imagine that someday there will be romanticists of our own age, who see secret agents on every porch as you see shootouts happening all the time. I highly recommend Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture as a work by a professional historian who actually did the research rather than rely on a oaters and legends passed on without proof.
The Matriculated aren’t like You and Me
Posted on August 11, 2007 in Psycho-bunk
A review of the literature and a few independent checks on the validity of these results show that the use of this population may misrepresent how the rest of us feel.”What if you studied 7-year-old kids and made inferences about geriatrics?” asks Robert Peterson, a marketing professor at the University of Texas, Austin. “Everyone would say you can’t do that. But you can use these college students.”
Prof. Peterson scoured the literature for examples of studies that examined the same psychological relationships in students and nonstudents. In almost half of the 63 relationships he examined, there were major discrepancies between students and nonstudents: The two groups either produced contradictory results, or one showed an effect at least twice as great as the other.
In a follow-up study, not yet published, Prof. Peterson demonstrated that even college students are far from homogeneous. With help from faculty at 58 schools in 31 states, he surveyed undergraduate business students across the country and found that they vary widely from school to school. That means a professor studying the relationship between students’ attitudes toward capitalism and business ethics at one school could reach a sharply different conclusion than a professor at another school.
“People have always been aware of this issue,” Prof. Peterson says, but many have chosen to ignore it. A 1986 paper by David Sears, a UCLA psychology professor, documented the increased use of college students for research in the prior quarter century and explored the potential biases that might introduce. In the meantime, the use of college students has, if anything, risen, researchers say.
I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to measure the degree to which college students try to throw off the studies intentionally by making wild claims and statements of belief? I know that it was tempting to me at times, particularly if the study had a political ax to grind.
Photo: University researcher grilling student subjects as part of an experiment.
[tags]psychological testing, psychological studies, psychology studies, social psychology, psychology, guinea pigs, experimentation, psychological experimentation, college, students, college students, bizarre, psycho-bunk[/tags]
They Didn’t Dare Teach This in History
Posted on August 11, 2007 in History War
From Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, pp. 302-303:
…antimilitarism spread well beyond pacifist circles, as is indicated by the closing down of the militia in most states. Also notable in this regard were the repeated calls to close West Point military academy. As the Ohio legislative told Congress in 1834, an academy that taught the art of war was “wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius of our liberal institutions”. The legislatures of three other states — Tennessee, Connecticut, and New Hampshire — also passed resolutions calling on Congress to shut down West Point, and no less than the frontier hero Davy Crockett introduced one such resolution in the House of Representatives in 1830 condeming militarism as contrary to the genius of a free people. In 1844, the House came within a single vote of cutting off the academy’s appropriation. A great many Americans in the age of Jackson saw everything military and violent as a direct contraindication of democracy.
I have to add that West Point was the training ground for many who sought to destroy the Union in order to preserve slavery.
Today’s military — operated by the Bush/Cheney cabal — certainly functions to suppress and ignore democractic imperatives.
Everybody Wants to be the Elves
Posted on August 11, 2007 in Development
There’s a huge fight in the makings over the ownership of the North Pole, previously a region which nobody cared about. Denmark, Russia, and Canada have all made strong claims for ownership of Lomonosov Ridge:
- Russia planted a flag on the ocean floor beneath the North Pole
- Canada is building a new military base on Baffin Island and promises to aggressively defend its interests
- Denmark has rented the services of a Swedish icebreaker and is now checking the ocean floor for indications that the Lomonosov Ridge is connected to Greenland
- The United States finds itself in a predicariment because it has never ratified the UN accord which grants ownership of underwater territory to the country which can prove that that piece of land is part of its continental shelf.
This may be the defining fight of the last years of petroleum addiction and the first battle of the ages following Global Warming.
[tags]North Pole, Arctic Ocean, petroleum, Russia, Canada, Denmark, border disputes, border dispute, development, global warming[/tags]
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Name that Anteater
Posted on August 10, 2007 in Xenartha
There’s a new baby at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. and you have a chance to name it! Well, you get to vote along with hundreds of other net denizens on six names preselected from a list — three for girls and three for boys. And “Spout”, my perennial favorite is not among them.
At the End of Mania’s Hook
Posted on August 8, 2007 in Mania
Thought: the root problem with mania is sensitivity to suggestion not impulsiveness. We often use another term such as grandiosity or paranoia to describe our states of mind. We look at the shopping cart filled with lamb chops and say “It was an impulse”. It’s part of the issue, but where does the impulse come from? All those items dressed up in their pretty packages. They are placed to make people buy them and the people the sellers are looking for are us.
Be mean or cast a strange face and we become paranoid. Give us a self-esteem book and we believe that we can be anything we want. So we choose to be God. (I never liked being God. All that is screwed up in the world is because of You.) Say a prayer within our hearing and we grab our bibles and begin preaching from them. Or let us smell the slightest waft of incense and we shave our heads and become monks. Our impulsivity comes from our suggestability. We’re suckers, pure and simple.
[tags]bipolar disorder, mania, impulsiveness, impulsivity, conspicuous consumption, grandiosity, religiosity, paranoia[/tags]
Breast Implants and Suicide
Posted on August 7, 2007 in Personality Disorders Suicide
Seems that the rush to change one’s appearance doesn’t fix the underlying problem:
Women who receive implants for breast enhancement are
three times more likely to commit suicide, according to a new report that offered a sobering view of an increasingly popular surgery.Deaths related to mental disorders, including alcohol or drug dependence, also were three times higher among women who had the cosmetic procedure, researchers said.
The report in the August issue of the Annals of Plastic Surgery was the most recent to detect a higher suicide rate among women who had their breasts enlarged, providing a gloomy counterpoint to other studies that showed women felt better about themselves after getting implants.
While the study did not look at the reasons behind the suicides, senior author Joseph McLaughlin, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said he believed that many of the women had psychological problems before getting breast implants and that their condition did not improve afterward.
Previous studies have shown that up to 15 percent of plastic surgery patients have body dysmorphic disorder, a psychological condition marked by severe distress over minor physical imperfections.
People with the disorder have a higher rate of suicidal thoughts and rarely improve after plastic surgery.
Mania, it seems to me, often grabs for a material solution to a psychiatric problem and when it is disappointed, destroys itself.
I wonder if the same thing happens for customers of penis-enlargement techniques?
[tags]breast implants, suicide, bipolar disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, plastic surgery, depression, mental illness[/tags]
Kneejerk Fascism
Posted on August 7, 2007 in Occupation of Iraq
If our troops and goodwill towards the people of Iraq matters so much, why is the wRong trying so hard to discredit stories about atrocities?
Sweet Maryjane is a Bitch
Posted on August 7, 2007 in Addictions Bipolar Disorder College Uncertainty
The news that marijuana increases the risk of psychosis does not surprise me. I believe that my first episode was ignited by the coals that burned in the bowl of a bong, coupled with a few sadists who used my altered state as an opportunity to [[brainwashing|brainwash]] me into a neat little [[paranoia]].
In those days the word in the dorm hallways was that [[marijuana]] was a harmless high, a belief that has persisted into this century. Students who avoided alcohol would smoke a joint. Psychology professors would add a disclaimer for it when they discussed illegal drugs. Word was that it was safe. I knew from my own experience that it wasn’t, that it twisted my equanimity into paranoia and forced me to live through a strange aeon of despair. But my insistance that the hype was wrong, that it had done damage to my brain and upset my state of mind were dismissed. I avoided those who even talked about it.
My war stories about the drug come from my Sophomore year in college, mostly, though I did some before that. When I filled out my form for my first roommate, I asked for a nonsmoker. My roommate filled up a hash pipe. When I challenged him, he said “Well, this isn’t tobacco.”
I fell for that line. The next year, I became so involved that I sometimes showed up to classes stoned. After the incident where a guy used my suggestibility to torment me, I entered my Stonewall Period where I did not talk to people who used drugs. Some months after the incident, I ran into one of the fellows. I just walked past. “Oh, so you’re still sulking over that,” he said.
I believe that my first serious psychoses were triggered by that little experiment. My girlfriend at the time was a psychology major: she thought that my fear of pot was excessive. And I have to say that given the context of the time, it was. Everyone said that pot couldn’t hurt you. I felt that it had. I went beyond this, however, to believe that anyone who even mentioned the words marijuana, pot, joint, or the name of any other drug was Evil, that they wanted to tempt me into drug use. There seemed to be a grand cosmic conspiracy to torment me. So I was paranoid but the basis of the paranoia wasn’t wrong: pot could really fuck up your brain.
I still remember a few incidents that came out of the highs. My most memorable was a vision I had on Thai Stick when I saw several levels of Buddhas, one on top of the other, endlessly up into space. When I read about a similar vision that a Buddhist monk had several years later, I was not surprised. Hours of meditation, I have since learned, can invoke similar effects. I had been reading a great deal of [[Buddhism]] back then and even though I had never read of this before, the threads were there to weave a tapestry like that of the monk.
To save myself, I chose a life barren of joy and fun interaction with others. This, I believe, compounded my illness. The scariest incident that arose occurred when I was working in the library between semesters. I developed the belief that the world wasn’t real, that I could predict the next thing someone would say. Now I suspect that my brain had neatly bifurcated so that one part lagged behind the other. When I sought help at the school counseling center, the therapist did not even for a moment suspect psychosis but suggested that I get more to eat.
I do not doubt now that I was misserved by the ignorance of the time. Psychological residencies took place in mental hospitals where only the most severe patients were admitted. When a functioning psychotic such as himself presented himself, the disease was ignored. So, too, were the effects of that one recreational psychotropic so popular that you could all but buy it from local drug stores. Today I would not recommend anyone who had a history of family mental illness to smoke it. I wish it were as legal as tobacco or alcohol so I could sue the dealers for the damage they caused me.
But that would do little to nothing to heal the bitterness I feel towards those who denied that smoking pot had anything to do with the miasma into which I was propelled afterwards, who rebutted on tenuous grounds the experience of my own brain.
[tags]bipolar disorder, marijuana, psychosis, psychotics, college, drug-use, drug abuse, mental illness, Thai stick, addiction, addictions[/tags]
Dream
Posted on August 7, 2007 in Dreams
I’m living in a house with a roommate who likes to sit down at the dinner table and hold a gun to my head, threatening to kill me.
A Marsh is Full of Egrets
Posted on August 6, 2007 in Biomes Photos Travels - So Cal
Yesterday, we took another trip to the Upper Newport Bay Nature Reserve. Due to the crowds and the signage, I couldn’t get close to the land for some nice closeups as I had three weeks ago. The water water everywhere kept pricking me with memories of the flood we had last week. The air, however, smelled cleaner than the rugs which are still drying out.
At one point, we saw a cluster of egrets and herons that I am told make regular use of the place. Other than that the birding was pretty lame and the wildflowers sparse. This has not been a good year.
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