Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: September 2007
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Slugger
Posted on September 21, 2007 in Xenartha
Nice photo by David King showing a Taramandu in battle mode.
Winter Storm in September
Posted on September 21, 2007 in Weather
Pressure systems and winds tore clouds up into white and blue fistfuls that they then pushed south, out of British Columbia, over the Central Coast. Bits of that storm have wandered down here, while a hurricane down in Baja decides whether to meet them. They say that we will have rain. I’m dubious but hopeful. The outside temperature got colder than the air conditioner, so we turned it off. We might need the heater.
Noise about Spring’s Author
Posted on September 21, 2007 in Propaganda
Here’s a nice article about why Rachel Carson isn’t a mass murderer.
Dead Languages
Posted on September 20, 2007 in Fact-Dropping
From the point of view of three centuries ago, all this controversy about having English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese existing side by side seems silly. California used to be the most linguistically diverse region in the world. You could go from village to village to village and never hear the same grammar used twice. Thanks to the colonialization followed by the outright subjugation of the land, these languages died with the people who spoke them. Or else the pressure of time spent in American Indian schools led to the abandonment of the tongues.
Now scholars say that one language dies out every fourteen days. Here’s a map.
This Blog Post is Dedicated to Liz
Posted on September 19, 2007 in Humor?
Britney Spears Paris Hilton Owen Wilson Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie Ben Affleck Jennifer Lopez The Bush Twins O.J. Simpson Lindsay Lohan Kirstie Allie John Travolta Tom Cruise
Read here and tell her I sent you.
The War on Britney’s Drug Habit
Posted on September 19, 2007 in Addictions Bipolar Disorder Celebrity
I doubt that the decision of the Los Angeles court commissioner will put an end to Britney Spears’ erratic behavior. There’s evidence, he thinks, that Spears is using drugs. Like many, I still feel that her strange behavior — “shaving off her blond locks at a San Fernando Valley salon, attacking paparazzi with an umbrella and parading in her underwear — and without — for all to see” — probably indicates that she suffers from bipolar disorder, that these incidents are happening because she has stopped self-medicating. I agree that she is losing control, but there’s a kneejerk response by the commissioner, who should also be ordering visits to a psychiatrist to see if Spears’ condition responds to medication.
Just another instance in which the war on drugs may be leading us to an erroneous conclusion and failing to alleviate the symptoms of the underlying disease.
Open Forum: If you are bipolar and have self-medicated, tell us a little about that. Others feel free to ask questions.
Hitler’s Pagans
Posted on September 19, 2007 in History Myths & Mysticism Propaganda
From A History of Pagan Europe:
It is often written that Hitler’s regime in Germany (1933-1945) was Pagan in inspiration, but this is untrue. Hitler’s rise to power came when the Catholic party supported the Nazis in the Reichstag in 1933, enabling Nazi seizure of power. Many churchmen of both Protestant and Catholic persuasion were committed supporters of the Nazi regime. The belief that it was Pagan in outlook comes from propaganda during the Second World War. As anti-German propaganda, occultist [[Lewis Spence]] wrote:
The ancient faith of Germany and Scandinavia, popularly known as ‘the religion of [[Odin]] and [[Thor]]’, has been the subject of many a literary ecomium. To myself, as a student of Folklore and Mythology, it makes an appeal no more gracious and stimulating than any other religion of the lower cultus, and very much less so than those even of Polynesia or old Peru.
It is, indeed, only the fact that it is being resuscitated by extreme Nazi fanatics which makes it important at all, and, even so, it is worthy of notice only in a temporary sense, for with the downfall of Hitler and his caucus it will go the way of all artificially revived heterodoxies.
Himmler and Hess, two ‘extreme Nazi fanatics’, seem to have been active followers of an [[Ariosophical]] mysticism, promoting the future rule of the super-race. But Hitler himself said in 1941: ‘It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself.’
Spence wrongly connected National Socialist ritual, derived from Prussian and Austrian military custom, with Paganism, as ‘The Nazi Pagan Church’. Recent research by John Yeowell has shown that, far from being influential in Nazi Germany, Pagans were persecuted. Leading Pagans were arrested by the Nazi regime. For example, in 1936, the noted runemaster [[Friedrich Bernhard Marby]] was arrested and spent the next nine years in concentration camps. He was not alone. In 1941, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, many Pagan and esoteric groups were banned (including the followers of [[Rudolph Steiner]], the Ariosophists and followers of the religion of [[Odin|Wotan]]). Like other victims of Hitlerism, many Pagans subsequently died in concentration camps. (pp. 218-219)
Squeezing the Juice
Posted on September 18, 2007 in Celebrity Scoundrels
About three miles from our condo, Nicole Brown lays dead beneath a flat headstone, in a field of flat headstones, at Ascension Cemetery in Lake Forest. Here, O.J. Simpson began his famous flight from the law, freeway by freeway, to his home. Crowds cheered him from the overpass as he sped by. Eventually, he was acquitted of her murder though not exonerated by most. A sour taste covered the drooping tongue of the trial-watching television addicts and most said that he’d got away with murder.
Perhaps he will not get away with armed robbery and maybe kidnapping. If convicted, he could face up to thirty years in Nevada prisons. The Smoking Gun has provided details of his life in jail and background on the mastermind behind last week’s escapade. (Could Thomas Riccio become this episode’s Mark Furman?)
O.J. has complained that the reason why he took the law into his own hands is that the police no longer took him seriously. They would not look into the matter of the stolen memorablia. This leads us to ask if this could have been prevented. Clarence Darrow noted that one of the dangers of prohibition was that it denied bootleggers a civil court where they could seek legal redress for bad deals, missed deliveries, etc. When these things happened, they resorted to strongarm tactics and even murder. If guilty, O.J. should go to prison for this, but we should still ask if it could have been prevented by having law enforcement handle the case. Or was this a setup?
Watch to see if this defense plays at the trial.
Today is International Dadaism Month!
Posted on September 18, 2007 in Festivals
DADA!
See [[International Dadaism Month]] and [[Dada]].
Therapy
Posted on September 17, 2007 in Anxiety Uncertainty
Anyone else come out of a therapy session feeling that because something was nobody’s fault it’s all your fault?
Following the Tortoise
Posted on September 17, 2007 in Thinking
It’s just come out that what scientists believed to hold true about the nature of the neutron wasn’t true. Before recent discoveries showed otherwise, they held that the neutron consisted of a particle with a negatively-charged shell and a positively-charged core. Now it is known that the neutron consists of a negative shell and a negative core with a positive layer between. Enrico Fermi was wrong.
Does this mean that particle physics is going to collapse? Is it a defeat for science? No.
“Nobody realized this was the case,” Miller said. “It is significant because it is a clear fact of nature that we didn’t know before. Now we know it.”
The discovery changes scientific understanding of how neutrons interact with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. Specifically, it has implications for understanding the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity).
The strong force binds atomic nuclei together, which makes it possible for atoms, the building blocks of all matter, to assemble into molecules.
“We have to understand exactly how the strong force works, because it is the strongest force we know in the universe,” Miller said.
This goes back to what I said the other day about belief. Since 1947, physicists have believed in one version of the construction of the neutron. Now with new evidence, the smartest among them must adopt another, better version. They’ve come a long ways from [[Democritus]] who held that atoms were the smallest, indivisible unit of matter and will undoubtably go farther. That the knowledge brings them closer to the truth does not make it any less a belief: we cannot be certain that future discoveries will not cause yet another revision. For now, based on the evidence, this is the best model we have and it is probably better than the ones which have come before.
Everything we advance as a scientific principle must, because we are not omniscient, be held as tentative. We do not come born with the knowledge in our bones and we cannot obtain it instantly, by stretching our awareness into all places. Our existence is a little like [[Zeno_of_Elea|Zeno’s]] fable of Achilles and the tortoise. The tortoise — which might be called the truth — has a mile headstart. Achilles must catch up and pass the tortoise to win. Yet to get there, he must first get halfway there. And once he has accomplished this, he must move halfway yet again. Because there are an infinite number of halves to traverse, he cannot cover the mile. In the meantime, the tortoise has moved a little farther.
This does not work for the natural world, of course, but it may serve as an apt metaphor for Science. Our understandings take us closer to the truth, but there is always a gap to be covered halfway. So we go on, developing better and better models. We hold them as the best thing and, if Science has done its job as it has in the case of evolution, it serves as a better explanation than what has been said before. We believe our current models to be satisfactory enough to get us through the general problems of understanding the Universe. We live with uncertainty, however, and in that sense Science must be considered to be an aggregate of beliefs that do a better job of explaining than others.
As the story of the neutron shows, what we believe we know will, in some ways, change. That is where we can draw the division between dogma and Science: the beliefs of the former strive to remain unaltered while the second remain subject to new discoveries. It does not allow us to become stuck in erroneous views except by willfullness.
Belief helps us get by until we get a better belief. It pays to follow the tortoise.
