Death To Roaches

This week in particular, I have reason not to like roaches. So I was particularly charmed by this article on parasitic wasps that a commenter pointed to.

Some people seem to think this is a sign of a cruel God, or no God at all. But from where I sit, the roaches had it coming to them. (And as a habitual roach smasher, I obviously don't have any issue with roach death and suffereing -- though in all honestly I doubt a roach experiences much of either. Of course, I tend to take it to wasps too...) Here are some highlights, though for the sake of any readers who may be eating I haven't pulled in any of the pictures. Click through to see the full glory of it all.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Formalisms, Biology, QM and more...

Michael over at Sacramentum Vitae had an interesting post up the other day with the evocative title At The Science Prom In Your Underwear, which was in turn a further discussion of a similarly titled post over at ZippyCatholic.

Zippy's essential contention is that evolutionary theory is not a formalism (such as the Coppenhagen school of QM) but rather a general interpretive framework of events. The comments section on Michael's post is worth reading, if only to see if I've completely got out of my depth in trying to discuss QM, define science, and so on.

The Oracle of Starbucks

Think you know your personality type? Think again. The Oracle of Starbucks will tell you all you need to know about yourself (and then some) when you describe your Starbucks order of choice.

I rarely go to Starbucks (if I ever have an urge to drink coffee I can rely on Darwin to brew me a fine cup), so I had to search my memory for what I ordered last time I was there, but I think it was a tall tazo tea in some kind of orange flavor.

Behold the Oracle's wisdom:

Personality type: Pseudo-intellectual

You're liberal and consider yourself to be laid back and open minded. Everyone else just thinks you're clueless. Your friends hate you because you always email them virus warnings and chain letters "just in case it's true." All people who drink tall tazo tea orange are potheads.

Also drinks: Sparkling water
Can also be found at: Designer grocery stores

Darwin opted for a tall straight espresso.

Behold the Oracle's wisdom:

Personality type: Asshat

You carry around philosophy books you haven't read and wear trendy wire-rimmed glasses even though you have perfect vision. You've probably added an accent to your name or changed the pronunciation to seem sophisticated. You hang out in coffee shops because you don't have a job because you got your degree in French Poetry. People who drink tall straight espresso are notorious for spouting off angry, liberal opinions about issues they don't understand.

Also drinks: Any drink with a foreign name
Can also be found at: The other, locally owned coffee shop you claim to like better

H/T Fructus Ventris

Islam's Martin Luther: Mohammed Wahhab?

The other day I ran across a link to an old Jonah Goldberg column on NRO about the oft-stated need for an 'Islamic Martin Luther'. Jonah is a much smarter guy than his flip style and pop-culture references might lead one to believe, and his analysis is interesting:

I know Americans tend to think that being anti-authority means being liberal. But by almost every definition of the Left today — to the extent such definitions are applicable — the Protestant reformations and revolts were conservative events. Protestants were not rebelling against the oppressively theistic rules of the Church, they were rebelling against the Church's worldly compromises in regard to those rules. (Think of the selling of indulgences — a modern-day liberal would love such soak-the-rich scams.) Martin Luther was motivated by piety, not by secular liberalism. The Catholic Church was burning books and heretics pretty selectively by the time of the Reformation. The Protestants adopted the practice wholesale.

If you travel around peace-loving Switzerland, for example, you'll discover that a couple of centuries worth of art is simply missing, because Protestant iconoclasts burnt it in giant bonfires to fuel their fondue-pots of religious fervor. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, has a very nice art collection, which includes depictions of lots of pretty-naked ladies and a few naked pretty ladies....

Which brings me to Islam.

The fact is that the Arabs have had their Muslim Martin Luthers and John Calvins. One was the 18th-century Mohammed Wahhab, founder of Saudi Arabia's austere version of Islam called Wahhabism....

In the latest issue of The National Interest, Adam Garfinkle notes that "The Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam is neither traditional nor orthodox. It is a slightly attenuated fundamentalism that dates only from the end of 18th century. . . . [A]s recently as 50 years ago the large majority of Muslims considered Saudi Wahhabism to be exotic, marginal and austere to the point of neurotic."

We all know that the Wahhabis, like their Taliban pupils, are fanatical iconoclasts. But it's rarely noted that they have always been fanatical iconoclasts. In 1925 Ibn Saud, the patriarch of the current Saudi dynasty, ordered the destruction of all the tombs, monuments, and shrines in Mecca and Medina. Crowds of fanatics destroyed the graves of Mohammed's family and even his house. Mosques were torched. Traditional Muslims barely stopped the Wahhabis from destroying Mohammed's grave itself.

This runs completely against the stereotype of "conservative" Saudi Arabia, until you think of mobs of similar "reformers" burning Catholic churches and artwork all across Europe (though I can't see Christians of any denomination seeking to destroy Christ's tomb)....

I think Goldberg correctly latches onto one of the key contradictions in traditional English/American discussions of the Reformation. Because many in the modern secular English speaking world consider themselves heirs on the Enlightenment, and because in Protestant England the Reformation came to be seen at the beginning of the abandonment of 'Romish Superstition', the established myth seems to be that the Reformation was itself full of Enlightenment-style thinkers. Yet Luther and Calvin would have unconditionally consigned to hell much of what the Enlightenment stood for. In their own way, the reformers had more in common with medieval piety movements turned heretical (like the Fraticelli) than with Voltaire and Rousseau.

What modern commentators are really wishing for is an Islamic Bishop Spong.

Dreher on Spiritual Fatherhood

Rod Dreher's blog is one of those that, while I certainly don't always agree with it, I keep on BlogLines just to see what is said. Thus, the other day I ran across this post on spiritual fatherhood:

Not long ago, I thought about how rarely I have ever looked upon the pastor at any parish where I've been worshiping as any sort of spiritual father, or an authority figure in all but the minimal sense. That is, I've only been able to take him seriously as "magician or ritual functionary," because there is very little if anything fatherly about him. Clerics these days -- and I'm not just talking about Catholic priests, so cool your jets, you usual suspects -- too often comport themselves as Best Buddies, or mere Therapists. Maybe it's just me, but I've always thought that there was something really wrong, and ultimately undermining, about being part of a spiritual community that had no spiritual father....

Now, this is certainly not the first time that I've run into someone worrying that priests these days aren't filling their necessary roles as father to the parish. But since Dreher concluded his post with a request for comment from others on whether they felt they had experienced spiritual fatherhood in their churches (Catholic or otherwise) I started thinking, What exactly is 'spiritual fatherhood' anyway? Come to that, what exactly is 'fatherhood' or 'fatherliness' in the more general sense?

Lately I've been having a lot of odd memory moments in which, while dealing with the girls, some memory from my own early childhood suddenly comes back with the realization, "Oh, that must be what was really happening." In many ways, after just over four years on the job, I still feel like I'm just 'faking it' until I 'really' know how to be a father. Increasingly, however, I realize that this isn't just some introductory stage, this is the real thing. And indeed, when I expressed the feeling that I still hadn't figured fatherhood out to my own father, just a few months before his death, he replied that after 27 years he still felt like he was faking it as well. And the end of the day, fathers are just men who have kids. And we try to muddle on through and do the best job that we can at raising our children, setting a good example, bringing them up in the the love of God and Church, and teaching them however much or little we know.

This is not to say that 'fatherliness' is not an important attribute. It's just that I very much doubt that many people feel fatherly in the stereotypical sense that many of us have culturally ingrained. That doesn't mean that your father should be "Best Buddies, or mere Therapists", but rather that as a father you often look fatherly to your children when you don't feel fatherly yourself. Fatherliness is perhaps more a product of the difference in age, experience and understanding between father and child than it is a trait specifically possessed by the father himself. I try to explain things and mete out justice to my children as best I can, yet feel like I have none of the gravitas that my father did. Yet, it may well be that my children think I do. And that they, in turn, will feel like they are all at sea, muddling along as best they can, when it comes their turn to be parents.

How does all this apply to priests? Well, a priest has a far more difficult job, in that he's being asked to provide a sort of spiritual fatherhood to people who are often his own age, or indeed older. And a priest is, after all, at the human level just a guy who has been ordained. Certainly, becoming a priest must be a life-changing event (as is having a child) but at the same time a priest must look back to his youth and his childhood and think, "I'm not really a different person than I was before -- how can I possibly provide the 'fatherhood' that people expect of me?"

The answer, perhaps, is the same as for biological fathers: Muddling through. Trying to provide wisdom and discipline as needed. Being honest about your limitations, without taking the cowardly path of "I just don't know, you'll have to figure that out for yourself" unnecessarily. At the least, a priest can be an honest, prayerful and hard working man. Some parishioners, seeing the priest as being vastly more knowledgeable about the faith, may see in his teaching and guidance the image of a father (or more precisely, a dim reflection of The Father.) Others may see him as just another man, who (as we all do in different ways) has an important part to play in God's plan and Church.

Most of us, as we mature, come to see our parents not simply as The Parent but as people, with strengths, weaknesses, foibles and motivations not so very unlike our own. Indeed, the Bible acknowledges as much and more when it enjoins the son (in Ecclesiastes, is it?) to respect his father and mock him not, even if in age his wits should fail him. Thus, it should perhaps not be surprising that as adults we sometimes find it harder to experience our priests as fathers in the sense that we remember our fathers from childhood -- full of stern wisdom and justice, loved, feared, but often not fully understood.

Uncommon Dissent

I have been amused to discover that I have, so far as I can tell, been banned from commenting on William Dembski's intelligent design related blog Uncommon Descent. If nothing else, this should assure that I spend online goof-off time more profitably than endlessly arguing with the ID supporters there.

I can't say I'm particularly hurt, as one's blog is clearly one's own to do with as one wishes, but it does seem rather odd that a group whose mantra is "teach the controversy" has an official policy of designating commentors as "trusted" or "potential trouble" (which includes all those who don't fully accept ID theory), and holding the opposition comments for review before posting. They're also pretty clear that they ban people whom they are tired of hearing disagree with them -- indeed their editor was so kind as to tack threats of immanent ban onto most of my comments that did get through.

Nevertheless, it does give me a wonderfully dangerous feeling to have been designated as unsafe for the good believers over there. So if you see me swaggering around intoning "Arrrrr" and looking vaguelly piratical, you shall know why.

Bedside Manner

It was a hot and muggy evening, Friday night was. All the windows in the house were open in hopes of catching some stray breath of air. Not that it was working -- even with the hole the girls poked in the screen of one of my bedroom windows we couldn't get any breeze.

Even a cooling shower couldn't cut the heat. I emerged from the bathroom, towelling myself off, and then I saw it. Something large and leggy, perched upon the headboard of my very own bed. A roach. I gave an involutary shriek, and IT BEGAN TO FLY.

Darwin shoved me out of the room so my squeals would not further disturb the winged intruder or the sleeping baby (who, thank God, was in the cradle and not on the bed) and then retreated to the bathroom to finish brushing his teeth. I stood in the hall, shaken and wet and (having dropped my towel in the mad rush from the room) without a stitch on. Eleanor stood sleepily in her bedroom door.
"What are you doing, Mommy?" she asked.
"I'm just looking for clothes," I lied. She acknowledged this unquestioningly and went back to bed.

I sat on a bed in the girls' room, listening to the drama unfold in my bedroom. Shortly I heard a large crack and a steady mantra of profanity. A moment later, Darwin came out bearing the baby.
"The roach went behind the headboard," he said, "so I tried to shift the bed by the footboard so I could get behind it. And the bedframe broke. So I tried to pull it by the headboard. And it broke there too. And the roach has disappeared. So I brought you the baby so you two could settle down in here."

The thumps from the other room soon put Baby back to sleep, and my desire to get dressed was overcoming my dread of suddenly meeting the roach again, so I joined Darwin. Sure enough, there was the large wooden bed frame we'd bought a few weeks before our wedding, leaning drunkenly on a diagonal, the bottom right rail and the top left rail splintered off from their respective moorings. We spent the next hour disassembling the bed and cleaning underneath it (a monumental task) but the roach was nowhere to be found.

Finally the bedframe was packed away in the garage for future repair or reworking, the mattress and box-spring were laid on the floor grad-student style, and Darwin had searched under all the furniture with a flashlight. At that moment Eleanor once again appeared. She was oblivious to the disappearance of the major furnishing of our room.
"What is Daddy doing?" she asked. Daddy went into the bathroom and nudged the clothes pile on the floor and the roach flew up at him. There was a strangled cry and Darwin grabbed the first shoe to hand and slammed the door to do battle with the Thing.
"Daddy's killing a roach, honey."
Behind the closed door there were thwacks and battle yells and bangings, and then a suspenceful silence. Then Darwin flung open the door: flushed, triumphant, bearing his enemy in a plastic bag. A big brain confers evolutionary advantages over sheer ugliness.

So now the roach is vanquished, the window with the hole in the screen stays shut, and we have no bed. The girls still haven't noticed, but the room certainly looks cavernous without the comforting presence of the comfy bed. Perhaps it can be fixed. Perhaps the headboard and footboard can be bolted to one of those metal frames. Perhaps we'll have to buy a new bed, or perhaps our mattress and boxspring will remain on the floor, grad-student style.

Damn roach.

Welcome GeneExpression Readers

As Razib mentioned, evolution is definately a recurring topic here, our wider mandate is essentially "whatever strikes our fancy".

A few recent posts on evolution are on the current main page. However, many more (pro evolution and contra creationism and ID) may be found in the evolution meta thread.

Islam and Evolution

Apparently poor old Darwin is quite the lightning rod in Islam as well.

Islam Online provides a fatwa on how Muslims should regard evolution.

A Muslim writer provides a different persective at the Guardian's online opinion outlet.

Re-reading Fellowship

Our reading copies of The Lord of the Rings were aged paperbacks, flaking and tearing, so a few weeks ago I purchased a boxed set of hardcovers on Amazon. And since there's nothing better to do with new books than read them, I started in on The Fellowship of the Ring. The mood of the trilogy is elegaic -- not so much "We stand on the shoulders of giants" as "There once were giants, and we shall never see their like again." Part of that, I think, comes from the presence of the Elves in Middle-Earth. The Eldar, as a race, are far older than men, and have a much more direct connection to the Valar across the sea. That gives them a greatness of soul and stature that the men of Middle-Earth can never hope to achieve, except for the few that have become intertwined with Eldar lore. The trilogy is set late in Middle-Earth's history, and there's a sense that now that the Elves are passing away, the days of greatness are over; man can never hope to rival the glories of the halcyon days.

Tolkien formally detested allegory, and so I think it's telling that the scenario he created is one that really isn't applicable to our own history. Though the standards of culture may vary, depending on the level of education and spirituality in a given historical setting, I would contend that there's never been a "golden age" from which we retreat in inexorable decline. There's no other species, or for that matter any particular race, that is somehow closer to creation and to the eternal verities and therefore setting impossibly high standards for art, literature, music, and architecture.

Different ages have different styles and priorities, yet I don't think anyone would hold that Stonehenge is somehow superior to a Gothic cathedral. Both a Gothic cathedral and the Empire State Building are the monumental architecture of their respective ages, yet both were built by men -- men whom we can study, understand, and aspire to equal. The cathedral, to my mind, surpasses the Empire State Building in terms of architectural transcendance and also in terms of sheer usefulness -- if we ever enter another dark age, the cathedral can still be used for its intended purpose while the State Building will stand empty with no lights or air conditioning to make it useable -- but that's simply because they were build for different purposes, not because one culture was superior to the other.

I'm not a member of the cult of Progress, but I don't ascribe to the Glorious, Irretrievable Past. No one age has a lock on truth, beauty and goodness. Mankind remains mankind, and that's why we're able to come to grips with the great ideas and glorious creations of men throughout the ages -- because we're all capable of participating in the eternal Now of God.

The Amendment We Love to Hate

The 18th amendment has got to be the most universally ridiculed element of our constitution. Everyone enjoys taking a good poke at it. I was reminded of this the other day when reading a Christopher Hitchens editorial against the idea an amendment against flag burning, wherein he said: "It is of course designed to be amended and made more spacious, and many brave people fought and died to make this point. But it should never be burdened with anything trivial or transient, such as the zeal of certain Calvinists to ban alcohol, or the horror of certain other people at the idea of homosexual weddings."

Here, of course, we see the other use to which the 18th amendment is consistently put: as a generic example of regulating something which clearly should not be regulated. Now, let me be clear, I think prohibition was a terrible idea, and it did lasting harm to our country both in giving support to criminal organizations that continue to exist to this day, and in destroying much of our native brewing heritage.

However, I think that writing off our country's misguided experiment with prohibition as "the zeal of certain Calvinists to ban alcohol" represents an excessive simplification which fails to do justice to the history involved.

The story of Prohibition really goes back a good hundred and fifty years before its ratification in 1919 (not coincidentally, only a year before the ratification of the 19th, giving women the right to vote). Gin was invented in the 1600s, and became wildly popular in Britain in the mid seventeen hundreds. Gin was domestically produced, and thus not subject to import tariffs, it could be manufactured using grain that was too low quality for beer production, and thus it was incredibly cheap. This availability of cheap distilled spirits came at the same time as the tumultuous beginnings of urbanization and industrialization, and the result was that by 1740 gin production was six times that of beer, which given the relative strengths of the two drinks suggested obvious problems. Beer was a healthful drink (more so than water, since boiling killed bacteria and fermentation kept more from coming) while gin was a fast way to forget your troubles. William Hogarth's Gin Lane (left) and Beer Street (right) engravings underscore moral reputation of each drink.

As urban areas exploded in the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s both in Europe and in the fledgling United States, massive alcoholism (on a scale which can scarcely be imagined now) became a major social scourge in slums crammed with recent immigrants, those who had recently moved from the country into the city, the poor, and the unemployed. With gin (and whiskey and rum) soaked slums came crime, violence, and domestic abuse, not to mention chronic unemployment.

In response to all this, a temperance movement sprang up (you see some of this in Dickens, though he was by no means a supporter of complete tea tottling) which first sought to encourage temperance, and later began to push for total abstinence. There was certainly a religious element to this, but in some ways the religious argument against drinking was played up to support the social desire to cut down on drunkenness -- very few Protestants condemned all consumption of alcohol prior to 1700, and few enough had a problem with it as of 1800. Beer and wine especially were generally seen a innocent table drinks.

As a political force, the push to legally ban all alcohol in the United States grew alongside the other great 19th century progressive movements of abolitionism and women's suffrage. Temperance was in many ways seen as a women's issue, since spousal abuse often went along with excessive drink. And somewhere along the way the desire to ban alcohol separated from the need to do so. By the time the 18th amendment went into effect, after World War I, the gin alleys and oppressive slum conditions of the 1840s had vanished for mostly economic reasons. Poor neighborhoods were still desperately so by modern standards, and drinking was still chronic among some groups within those neighborhoods, but conditions were not anywhere near as bad as they had been eighty years before. Perhaps, to be cynical, it only became feasible to ban alcohol nationally because there was no longer such a massive problem with alcohol consumption.

Whatever the reason, prohibition was unquestionably a disaster.

Update on Jack

Jack is still in the hospital...the poor child has a bladder infection right now. They did the MRI which still shows clear on all those spots he had in May...yeah!!!! The one gray area they aren't sure about is smaller, so that is good news too. Monday they put a C-line in his chest in preparation for the next step. I will explain this as best I can, but I'm not sure that I have this right. They want to put him on a machine where they filter his blood for stem cells. This will take a day. If they can't get as many as they need this way, they will withdraw some of his bone marrow to get more (very painful, I hear). They will take his stemcells and grow them in the lab. Then they will kill off his bone marrow and put the stem cells back into his body. By doing this, they are hoping to trigger his brain fluid to produce more fluid, hopefully without cancer cells. I don't quite get this...but I do know that Jack will feel rotten during this and he will have to be in the hospital for at least 6 weeks. Right now, they think they will probably be doing this in August. They can use his own stem cells because this cancer rarely leaves the nervous system...so there should not be any cancer cells outside of his nervous system.

This is all very hard on Jack's family, obviously -- please keep them in prayers as well.

Ten Questions for The Derb

A good friend recently described National Review writer John Derbishire as "someone I am currently trying very hard not to loath". I could say the same myself, except that sometimes I don't try hard and just go ahead and loath him. His writing on issues such as the Schaivo case and right to life issues in general remind one that Evelyn Waugh's Sgt. Hooper would have been of the same generation Derb's parents, and The Derb (as he is affectionately known) represents a much better educated step farther down the hole down which Hooper was so blithely marching.

Still, just as one is about to write The Derb off as not worth bothering about, you read something genuinely good he has written. The science blog Gene Expression published a Ten Questions For Derb interview that I ran across yesterday which is very much worth reading, and includes the following:

5) Over the years I've seen the following comment (in some form) multiple times: So and so is "perhaps the second most pessimistic opinion journalist right now, after John Derbyshire...." Do you think this characterization of you is accurate? Or do you think everyone else is just unduly optimistic?

Well, it depends what you mean by pessimism. I am a religious person, in a very general way -- I believe there is a supernatural realm accessible to our minds, and more real (in some way) than the natural world, which is really just a play of shadows. The fact that the natural world is a pretty nasty place therefore does not depress me as much as it ought. A nearby supernova could extinguish all life on earth in a few hours, sure -- but if you feel in your guts that there is another place beyond this one, then that isn't the end. Somehow. So on the grandest scale, I am not really a pessimist at all. On the everyday scale, though, I acknowledge that most of our nature, life, & experiences arise from the natural world & therefore partake of its general nastiness, coldness, cruelty, and gross unfairness. Civilized life fences off the horrors to some degree, which is why I am a huge fan of civilization (see above), but the fences are fragile, and the Old Adam will break through them sooner or later. Not in my lifetime, please.

Ending the Revolution

I'd had a couple 4th of July posts in mind for yesterday, but didn't have time to actually put anything up, so here it goes...

The 4th of July is the primary patriotic holiday of our country, and yet the event it commemorates (the publication of the Declaration of Independence) was just the first step on our road to nationhood. Although the Second Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation were not adopted until November of 1777 and were not ratified until March of 1781 -- the year that the Revolutionary War was finally won, with the surrender of General Cornwallis in Yorktown. Yet the Articles turned out to be a fairly unworkable practical form of government, and Shay's Rebellion of 1786-1787 demonstrated that to many of the new country's citizens, armed revolt was still a standard form of political expression.

The ratification of the US Constitution in March of 1789 represented a significant step, creating a stronger central government with more clearly defined powers, and a model for federal constitutions to this day. Yet, whether the words on paper could be translated into a lasting and stable government remained yet to be seen.

To my mind, one of the major milestones was reached in 1794, when President Washington put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

The origins of the conflict rested in 1791, when the federal government, having assumed the states debts that had resulted from fighting the Revolutionary War, levied a tax on distilled spirits. In a move that was arguably quite unjust, the tax was $0.06/gal for large producers, but $0.08/gal for small producers, many of whom were small farmers in the far western areas of the 13 states for whom distilling grain into spirits was the only practical way to get their produce to market -- given the lack of transportation for getting grain to the eastern cities. The taxes stood a good change of putting many small farmers under, and loosely organized groups of revolutionaries first mounted protests, then began to rob the US Mail, disrupt federal courts, harass or attack tax collectors and even threatened to attack Pittsburgh, which was the westernmost big city in the area of the uprising.

On August 7th 1794, President Washington invoke the Militia Act to call up an army composed of state militias. He personally took command of this force of 13,000 along with Alexander Hamilton and General Henry Lee. With this force (nearly as large as the entire continental army during the Revolutionary War) they quickly supressed the revolt. Several ringleaders were sentenced to death for treason, but Washington pardoned them. Many of the small distillers moved out to Kentucky and Tennessee, which were essentially outside of federal jurisdiction, and settled down to become the most famous US distilling region. The tax on spirits was repealed in 1802.

In acting forcefully and bringing an end to trend towards local insurrections, Washington made it clear that politics, not armed rebellion would be the driving force in American history. In order for the rule of law to take root, the government must have a monopoly on organized military force -- lesson that the fledgling Palestinian state has yet to learn. The events of 1794 put our country well on the road to political stability and lasting peace.

Evolution in the Classroom

Never a fan of beaurocracy, I have never been impressed by statewide teaching standards, but it seems they do have their uses. For one Georgia teacher, citing standards allowed her to redirect the concern of parents and administrators about teaching evolution in her high school biology class to the state level, rather than having to fight the battle again and again herself:

"I thought I was going crazy," said Ms. New, who has won several outstanding teacher awards and is one of only two teachers at her school with national board certification. The other is her husband, Ward.

"It takes a lot to stand up and be willing to have people angry at you," she said. But Ms. New did. She repeatedly urged her supervisors to read Georgia's science standards, particularly S7L5, which calls for teaching evolution.

On May 5, 2005, she filled out a complaint to initiate a grievance under state law, writing that she was being "threatened and harassed" though "I am following approved curriculum." She also wrote, "If we could get together within 24 hours and settle this and I feel I have support to teach the standards, then I would tear it up."

Suddenly the superintendent was focused on standards. Mr. Moye called the state department's middle school science supervisor and asked about evolution. "Obviously the State Department of Education supports evolution," Mr. Moye said in an interview.

Obviously? So why call? "I wanted to be sure," he said. "Let's make sure what these standards are."

He added: "I feel strongly about the Georgia standards. I think it's very important. Obviously we'll teach standards; that's the law. We will do everything in accordance with the Department of Education."

And parents' rights? "I explained to parents that we're following the state standards," Mr. Moye said. "I said, 'You can believe what you want, but we have to teach the standards.' If they're upset, they can take it up on the state level."

The superintendent, principal and Ms. Greene all praised Ms. New's ability. "The lady's an excellent teacher," Mr. Moye said, adding, "Maybe she felt like the school system didn't support her. We certainly support her."

Ms. New said that from then on, including the entire 2005-06 school year, she had no problem teaching evolution. "What saved me, was I didn't have to argue evolution with these people. All I had to say was, 'I'm following state standards.' "

All other things aside, it seems to me that there's a value to knowing about a controversial topic like evolution, even if you don't yourself ascribe to it.

Caveat Emptor

We went to Half-Price Books yesterday looking for birthday presents for a party today, and were reminded why we don't often step inside its shelved walls -- it's too hard to escape unscathed. Along with the two presents, we emerged with four books for our own family:

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (old hardcover with library cover)
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (Everyman edition)
Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White (1942 hardcover, in excellent condition)
The Illustrated Book of Myths by Philip Neal (Dorling Kindersley)

All wonderful finds! Most things at Half-Price Books are so reasonably priced that we find ourselves saying, "Well, one more won't hurt..."

RequiesCAT in Pace

Our condolences to the family of the Opinionated Homeschooler on the death of their cat, Big Dave.

He soon had a neighborhood reputation as scourge of the canines. Once, a woman let her leashed toy dog wander up well onto our lawn to do its doggy business. I was just opening the door to ask her not to do that, when a large gray blur streaked out of the bushes and went for the dog. Big Dave was all over that dog like a cheap suit. The woman stared, uncomprehending, while I grabbed for what looked like the midsection of the cat and pulled him off the poor trembling creature. I apologized--"He doesn't like dogs in his yard"--she apologized, we removed our respective animals from the scene; I'm guessing she probably curbed the dog properly from then on.

I hope they say that of me when I'm gone

Review: Guests of the Sheik

Taking advantage of my long weekend, I just finished reading Guests of the Sheik, An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Not nearly as dry as its subtitle suggests, the book is the story of the author's 'honeymoon' in a Shiite tribal settlement circa 1958, or as the intro describes is:

I spent the first two years of my married life in a tribal settlement on the edge of a village, in southern Iraq. My husband, a social anthropologist, was doing research for his doctorate from the University of Chicago. This book is a personal narrative of these years... The village, the tribe and all of the people... are real as are the incidents. However, I have changed the names so that no one may be embarrassed, although I doubt that any of my women friends in the village will ever read my book.

The writing is quite transparent, and you come away knowing little about the author and her husband's opinions (you briefly hear about her husband arguing with some of the men in the village who are convinced Marxism represents the ideal future for Iraq, and there are some friends of theirs who are missionaries whom she visits several times), which in some ways simply serves to make it seem more as if you yourself are immersed in the tribal world in which she lived for two years. In this sense, it's a very good way to get a feeling for what tribal Islamic society was like in Iraq fifty year ago, without the layers of editorializing that most authors seem to feel is necessary in such exercises. Though the author clearly prefers her own culture to that she is immersed in, this is not a book about the suffering of Islamic women, or the possible liberation of Islamic women, or how Islamic women are really better off than their western peers. It's simply about what these particular women's lives were like, a life which is in many ways very alien to Westerners, and yet which clearly is set within the same universal human nature which we all share.

If you have an interest in everyday Islamic culture, this book is well worth reading. My only two frustrations with it are that a) it's fifty years old, and I very much wish I could find something similar written within the last ten or better yet within the last two years and b) a more detailed follow-up chapter would have been really interesting. The author's husband, at least, returned to the village for a time ten years later, and the author remained in correspondence with several of the women in the village. Given some of the ways in which Iraqi culture and politics changed over the ensuing fifty years, I've be really curious to know how those changes played out at the ground level, in this particular Shiite village.

Two things particularly struck me. One was that alien customs often aren't as much so as they seem. The author is surprised at the how strongly the women she meets feel about only marrying men within their own tribe. However the reason gradually becomes clear, in her descriptions of the verious engagements that take place. Since in traditional Islamic culture (at least as played out in that time and place) a man and woman were not supposed to meet face to face until their wedding day, marrying a man from your own tribe gave a woman a back-door way of selecting her own husband. Since boys and girls of the tribe all played together until age 11 or 12, a woman would know all the men close to her own age fairly well. A number of the women in the tribe had specific men among their set of old playmates that they had picked out as a hoped-for future spouse, an arrangment which could then be made by the woman's family.

The other insight that struck me was the extent to which it is very hard to overcome cultural barriers. Near the end, when the author and her husband have moved to Bagdad to do some library research before leaving Iraq, the sheik whose guest they have been comes to visit Bagdad and invites them out to a Western nightclub. The sheik vacations in Lebanon in the summers and considers himself able to appreciate Western ways. Yet he sees them through his own lens of interpretation. Seeing the couples dancing to American music, he remarks of the shamelessness of the tarts cavorting with their clients. The author is on the point of explaining that these are just ordinary people, many of them married couples that the author know from the embassy and various engineering firms, when she realizes this would really do very little good. The sheik already has set very clearly in his mind what constitutes a tart, and claiming these women as acquintances will only diminish them in his eyes, not exonerate the dancing couples. By living according to tribal custom for eighteen months, they have shown themselves to be respectable people in the eyes of the village, but that hasn't served to make the villagers think any better of western culture, merely convince them that a few westerners are decent because they follow tribal customs.

Blog Lite?

Darwin has today and tomorrow off, so posting may be light until Wednesday as we do some family-ish stuff together. Such as lying around wondering how all our energy managed to transfer itself to the girls, watching our Netflix stuff so we can finally send it back, bottling beer, and some home improvement. Perhaps we'll put up something of substance soon, but I give no guarantees.

Until then, I'll leave you with Eleanor's favorite joke.

A duck walks into a bar and asks, "You got any grapes?" The bartender looks up from drying glasses and says, "No, and we don't serve ducks here. Get out."

The next day, the duck comes back and says, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "No, we don't got any grapes, and I told you we don't serve your kind here. Get out!"

The next day the duck shows up again and asks, "Got any grapes?" The bartender starts to get mad. "No!" he shouts. "And I don't serve ducks! If you come in and ask for grapes again, I'm going to nail your webbed feet to the bar!" And he throws the duck out.

The next day the duck walks in and asks, "Got any nails?"
"No," says the bartender shortly.
"Good," says the duck. "Got any grapes?"

Calculated to crack up a four-year-old!

To Breed or Not to Breed

We're enjoying a quiet holiday weekend here in the Darwin household, but so that ye may know we (or at least our tireless source of leads) are not slacking, here's an interesting article from Commentary Magazine about the trend towards childlessness among married couples in the developed world.

Though you've doubtless seen such things here before, this one is interesting (among other things) in that it provides some primary source material quotes from ancient sources during the Greek and Roman demographic collapses, when the elites lost the will to reproduce.

Ours, moreover, is hardly the only age or civilization to experience a demographic crisis. “In our own time,” wrote Polybius in roughly 150 B.C.E., “the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birthrate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit.” The reason for this decline, he believed, was decadence. “For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear children born to them, or at most as a rule one or two of them, . . . the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.”