The Kudzu Files

How can you not want to hug a tree?

A lyrical essay by a friend...

Esther Czekalski
www.gaias-gift.com

The Closing Of The Western Mind

I finally finished The Closing Of The Western Mind, by Charles Freeman. It was a bit of a struggle, mainly because Freeman discussed so many isms that I kept having to go back and sort them out, especially after he got to the Christian era. I've seen some very enthusiastic reviews of this book, and a few negative reviews, although most of the negative reviews seemed to be by conservative Christians, who I would expect might not view this book fondly. During the first 4-5 centuries of the Christian church, many of the theological debates were settled by Roman emperors interested more in keeping order than with any particular religious conviction. And Freeman presents Constantine, one of the early heroes of Christianity, as less Christian and more god-diverse than he's been presented elsewhere. But it's interesting to see how some of the accepted theological underpinnings of contemporary Christianity were subjects of such intense debate among early Christians. The birth of the Church was not as easy and uneventful as you might think.

A logical follow-on to this book is one I read several years ago and enjoyed much more - A World Lit Only By Fire, by William Manchester. Where The Closing Of The Western Mind takes you to the beginning of the Dark Ages, A World Lit Only By Fire gives you Europe as it begins to come out. So if you read the first one, read the second one after it. You'll feel better.

Trackback spam

Just turned off trackbacks completely. After deleting another 50 or so spam pings (I think I shall coin the term "sping" for these), I decided it wasn't worth the effort, since the last legitimate trackback was a month ago. If I find a way to block spings, I'll turn trackback back on.

Emerald Mound

North of Natchez, just a few miles off he Natchez Trace in the southwest corner of Mississippi, is the second largest temple mound, and one of the largest Native American ceremonial mounds, in the country. It's called Emerald Mound, and it was used by ancestors of the Natchez Indians. The mound is 35 feet high, and the broad flat top covers 8 acres, with a large secondary mound at one end and a smaller mound at the other end. The broad flat area was used for ceremonies and possibly games and feasts. The mound measures 770 feet by 435 feet at the base. I visited the site late on a winter afternoon several years ago.

To give you a bit of scale, the white line in the center of the secondary mound in the distance is the hand rail of a double staircase. The top of the secondary is maybe 15 feet higher than the main mound. Archaeologists think a temple sat on top of the secondary mound. This picture was taken near the opposite end of the flattened top of the main mound.

This picture was taken from the top of the secondary mound, looking down at the end of the primary mound. It's about 50 feet to the ground below.

This picture shows the smaller mound, taken from the base of the secondary mound. It is believed the house of a priest was built on top of this small mound.

The Monk In The Garden

This is probably not a book I would have picked up on my own. I love science, and science books, but my interests have always tended towards the physical sciences - astronomy, physics, meteorology, oceanography. The closest I've gotten to biology has been some chapters in one of Stephen Jay Gould's books. (Considering I'm married to a high school biology teacher, this is maybe surprising). But my wife had to review this book for a class, and I started reading it. It's the story of Gregor Mendel, the monk who developed the concept we now know as genetics by raising and crossing peas through several generations, and gave us the terminology of dominant and recessive characteristics. But it's much more than that. It's the story of a man who faced crushing disappointment and bounced back, not just once but several times, and died thinking he never made an impact on his world. One of the best books I've read in quite a while. Written by Robin Marantz Henig.

Cybernetics

I found myself today, and this evening, needing to undertake a fast-paced review of cybernetics - and quickly remembered why I've never invested much time learning about it. An overly simple definition of cybernetics might be "comparative study of biological and machine processes in order to understand how they're alike and how they're different". And that's nice, as far as it goes. But the problem with delving very deep into cybernetics is that it's such a squishy field of knowledge. Or at least that's what it seems like to me. Someone, maybe Dave, will come along and tell me I'm completely wrong about this. But cybernetics seems to be, on different days, a brother to, a mother to, or a distant cousin to, systems science, and operations research, and even queueing theory. I'm not sure any of those have a definition firm enough to withstand a convention of doctoral candidates in any of several quantitative fields. I remember during my college days reading about a division of the College of Engineering at my university called Systems Engineering. But when I asked my advisor about it, he couldn't really tell me what they did there, much less whether any graduates actually found work. Not that it's a useless endeavor. Indeed, we would have a certain prefix deficit without it. And how should we then adjectivize this wonderful information age in which we live? But the best, or at least my favorite, comment about cybernetics came from this website:

"It may be that we haven't exhausted the potential of a science of communication and control, but I think at this point the burden of proof would be on the optimists.

Dissolved? Not entirely. There's an old joke that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate, and not everything associated with cybernetics has gone into solution. Caked on the bottom of the reaction vessel we find: A prefix which seems indispensible to marketroids; the occasion for a great deal of vaporizing in the social sciences and humanities; and a peculiarly navel-gazing sub-sect of systems theory, which isn't exactly God's gift to the advancement of learning in the first place."

Going back to my non-original stab at a definition, it seems that the main thing cybernetics has taught us is that biological processes and machine processes, and social processes for that matter, aren't sufficiently alike to engender any valid comparisons; or at least, maybe, that we aren't yet smart enough to draw any valid comparisons.

Steps

Old steps covered with dust
can mean neglect
or just that no one passed this way
and the vines that climb the columns
can show that no one cared
or perhaps that nature just didn't ask our opinion

Winter's lines

Winter's lines
read black on gray
bare words without feelings
speak their piece and fade to dusk
we know their meanings too well to wonder
we see their passing too quickly to act

The Two-Party Party

Since the election - since before the election - the left-leaning blogosphere has been in a state of constant murmur about the need for Democrats to re-evaluate, reprogram, reshape their image, their message, their policies. I joined in. Republicans are talking about a realignment of the US voting population. Some are proclaiming the beginning of a permanent conservative majority. One thing I feel safe in predicting is that they won't achieve that. One thing that 200 years of democracy has taught us is that Americans are committed to a two-party system. If the Democrats can't adjust their politics to something that voters want, voters will create a party to do that. Like I said just after the election:

the Democratic Party has to decide whether it's a party dedicated to competing and winning political campaigns at the national and congressional level, or whether it's just a collection of advocacy groups willing to settle for getting their issues discussed on the national stage. If it's the former, then they have to develop a set of core issues and values that define them, and that resonate with the American voting public

History also say the Republican dominance won't last long. That isn't necessarily good news for Democrats, especially the more liberal groups within the party. The issues around which voters will coalesce may not be traditional liberal issues, although some will certainly be. Health care will certainly be a major part of the political debate over the next decade, and polls repeatedly show that Republican policies aren't particularly popular. Education will continue to be very important to much of the voting population, and the increase of Federal intervention in the form of No Child Left Behind will draw much discussion. I expect environmentalism to reassert itself at some point, although not in the guise of the 1970s tree-hugger movement. And social security will be at the forefront of political campaigns for a long time to come.

Democrats can't base their survival on a strategy of saying "No" to President Bush and Congressional Republicans. If ranting about how unfair Bush's budget and policies are all they can do, then I have no use for them, and neither will the vast majority of the American people. If you don't like the Bush budget, propose an opposition budget. And make it a serious budget, not just one that plays off of Republican cuts and increases. If you don't like No Child Left Behind, propose something else. Sure, it will probably lose in both the House and the Senate. But when election time comes around, you'll have something you can wave as an alternative you tried to push. If the things you propose are the same old things, you'll quietly fade away, but at least you'll know what you died of. I'm tired of hearing liberals espousing the European response - how could Americans have done such a stupid thing. They didn't do a stupid thing, they picked the alternative they liked better, for whatever reason. If you don't like what they chose, offer a better one next time around. It took Republican conservatives 16 years, from 1964 until 1980, to hone their message and find the right standard-bearer. It might take that long for Democrats to do the same. But it's going to happen, and somebody will do it. History tells us that much.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

Sunset is an angel weeping

"Sunset is an angel weeping,
holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
make out what it's pointing toward"

Bruce Cockburn, "Pacing The Cage"
Photograph by Joyce Ward

Buying Health Care

I've gotten embroiled in a mini-debate with Steve Verdon on Outside the Beltway over health care costs and access - well, it looks like a mini-debate from my side, anyway, I suspect from his perspective it's more like a cat toying with it's prey (I thought I was in a mini-debate, but my latest comments aren't showing up on OTB). But I had a question that was going to make my comments far too long, and I didn't want it to come off as a blog argument. I keep hearing how a system like Canada's would explode health care costs here, and how we can't afford universal health care. Now, I'm not necessarily saying we should have a Canadian-like system. But it just seems to me that we already pay a fortune for health care, and I wonder if we're getting what we're paying for. I've been looking for per-capita cost comparisons between the US and other countries, and here's what I've found:

In 1998, the US spent $4178 per person. That's the highest in the world. Switzerland is next at $2794, then Norway at $2425, Germany at $2424, and Canada at $2312. We spend a higher percentage of our GDP - 13.6% - versus 10.6% for Germany, Norway's 8.9%, Canada's 9,5%. And for all that, our infant mortality is significantly higher - 7.2, compared to Germany's 4.9, and Canada's 5.2.
Source: Bureau of Labor Education, University of Maine

I found another comparison, of health care administrative costs, between the US and Canada. This was in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 (abstract here), and reported that the US spent $1,059 per person on health care administrative costs, while Canada spent $307.

So - if other countries with universal or nationalized health care systems can do it with 60-70% of our per capita cost, why can't we somehow do this? What's making our obviously not-really-adequate system so expensive? Some are going to say lawsuit abuse. I've seen figures that estimate tort reform and the ensuing relief from lawsuit abuse could save as much ast $100 billion dollars - but we spend something like 1.4 trillion dollars, so that best case would only reduce costs by about 6%. We'd still be far, far above the costs of other countries.

So, I go back to my original question - are we getting what we're paying for? There are something like 40 million uninsured. Providing these people with grants of $2500 per year to buy insurance would cost about 100 billion dollars. That sounds like a lot - until you realize that a savings of about 6% per year in our current health care costs would cover them. And since many of these are families who could group their insurance, the cost would probably be less. Now, I'm not proposing that this is a workable approach - it's an overlysimplistic, off the cuff musing - just pointing out that we're spending enough money now to provide health care coverage for every peron, if we could just figure out how to reallocate the expenditures.

(Beltway Traffic Jam)

Clear Skies Reconsidered

One of the major environmental initiatives proposed by the Bush Administration during the first term was the Clear Skies plan. It was roundly criticized by environmental groups. But David Whitman wrote a long article in December's Washongton Monthly that's caused me to stop and think that maybe the criticism was off-base. Here's an excerpt, but go read the entire article for yourself.

"It is hard to find a leading environmental advocate who has not denounced Clear Skies, the Bush administration's bill to reduce power-plant pollution. Clear Skies headed the Kerry campaign's list of “The Bush/Cheney Top 10 Environmental Insults,” and has been repeatedly assailed by green activists for gutting the historic Clean Air Act. Al Gore has said that Clear Skies should be renamed “Dirty Skies.” The proposal has become a prime exhibit for those who delight in examples of Bush doublespeak.
Yet this vitriol seems strangely at odds with the express goals of the legislation. Clear Skies requires utilities to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury by about 70 percent by 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency projects Clear Skies will prevent the deaths of 14,100 Americans a year—akin, in a sheer body count, to saving the life of every person who died from HIV in the United States in 2003. "

Kudzu Flower

I'd be willing to bet you didn't know kudzu even had a flower. But it does, and it's really a pretty neat flower. The picture on the left is the kudzu flower.

Harry Does Something New

I made my radio debut Tuesday as a guest on Felder Rushing's Gestalt Gardener radio program on Mississippi Public Radio. That's me on the left in the picture above; Dr. Dirt, on the right, is Felder's co-host. (Felder's website is here; there's a great article about Dr. Dirt here; and if you just have this overpowering desire to hear the sound of my voice, you can listen to the program at PRM's Gestalt Gardener archives site.) It was a pretty interesting time, I've never been inside a radio studio before. And we didn't really talk much about stargazing, so maybe I can get a return engagement some time to do that.

Trackping Spammer Hell

Spammers are using a new method to spread their crap - trackback pings. 40 pings last night. To clean the mess up using MT and mysql:

delete from mt_tbping where tbping_title = "online poker";

(or "online casino")

I guess I need to look for a plug-in to block trackback pings now :-(