It occurred to me the other day to figure out what’s the deal with dungeons & dragons.
Sounds like a kind of nerdy thing that I would have been into, if I had been a little younger. I was completely nuts for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That would seem to be relevant. I remember I read it through for the first time when I was about thirteen. that was 1969. I’d been through all of Jules Verne and plenty else by then. My whole life, I’ve been out there. But I was never plugged into a network, or maybe I was plugged in but to the wrong network, like a 60hz appliance plugged into a 50hz world.
I read Lord of the Rings for the second time in 1974, putting my time in suspension to good use, I think. I’d gone through the entire science fiction aisle at my town’s rinky dink library, and I’d taken to riding my bike over to the nicer libraries in the neighboring towns, Wantaugh had a really nice facility I thought, and Massapequa’s facility was old and funky, worse than ours in a way, but with a more eclectic collection. I couldn’t find anything I liked, but I did find Ezra Pound’s Cantos. What a brilliant wacko. Imagine a 14 year old nerd trying to make sense of that stuff.
My favorite authors of the time were Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Herbert and the occasional brilliant piece of others like Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Clifford D. Simak, which I found mostly by following the lists of Hugo and Nebula award winners.
So one day I asked the web, “What d&d character am I?” Turns out there’s a page for that.
But before I go on, I also found out lots of other people were asking that same question, and many of them were interesting.
So, the first thing is that one point of a role playing game, is that you assume a character and interact with other people, likewise assuming their own characters. So there’s another barrier to entry, not only am I from another generation than most people who know anything about this kind of crap, I fall short in another way. Even the biggest geek out there at least seems to be able to participate in some kind of community. Each to their own, I guess. What few friends I do have are old and antisocial, just like me.
The next thing to bear in mind is that your character doesn’t have to reflect your actual personality or values. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. Where’s the fun in that?
But after thinking it over, the interwebs told me I was a chaotic good human strong fighter. Sounds good. Anti-establishment. Value oriented. Strong. Hm. I can be that.
It even gave me enough to jog my creativity, and I allowed myself to imagine and research a backstory:
The Asturs were the Celtic Gallaecian inhabitants of the northwest area of Hispania encompassing a portion of the Mountains of Cantabria to the west, and facing the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea to the north. It is an ancient kingdom dotted with Roman ruins and traces of human activity from the Neolithic, Megalithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. Cantabria has iron, and Asturias is home to a few gold mines, making it very interesting real estate.
In Roman times, Cantabrian and Asturian fighters were renowned, having fought as mercenearies against Rome for Hannibal and later for themselves. They were expert with short sword, lance and cavalry. Their tactics were so innovative and influential, they entered the Roman martial lexicon in terms such as the ‘circulus cantabricus’ and the ‘cantabricus impetus’. Cantabrians were among the very few ever to have acquired a Roman standard in battle.
The medieval Kingdom of Asturias was overrun by nobles and ne’er-do-wells retreating to the mountains from the advancing Moors of the great Caliphate.
I imagined myself the rightful prince of Asturias, deprived of my birthright through intrigues by my scheming cousin, Alfonso, King of Leon, who had designs on my lands, and my beloved .
My name would be Juan-Gaspar Santiago Asturias de Cantabria. I roam Gallaecia, Brittany, Normandy, England and Wales, a chivalric knight, romantic and brooding of character, landless but leige to no lord, righting wrongs and doing good when I can.
Author: dev7
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what d&d character are you?
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Getting Your Head Screwed On Straight
From time to time, I like to take a bike ride at lunch.
Two years ago this month, in the midst of a death march through the holidays, my buddy Charles Ramsay pointed out to me that there were some decent bike trails out behind a neighborhood nearby our new offices. They weren’t obvious, but he used to live there, so he knew the ins and outs. You are here:
We went out for a few crazy rides taking a a break together between long shifts in the lab, where the team was giving birth to a new machine. I knew that’s what we were doing, because I had been midwife to many other machines before. I was glad to do it, and my many years experience in the business tells me, that just like when a baby is being born, there’s a time to push, and God damn it, when that time comes, someone has to shout “Push!” That was my role at that moment in time. But it never fails to be intense and like I said at the time, I learned a long time ago that getting out and blowing off some steam was the only way I knew how to keep my head screwed on straight.
I have since explored most of these trails many times and feel myself very fortunate to be able to take an occasional long lunch break when time and the weather permit, and get out and test myself against the hills and rock outcroppings of central Texas. When I do, I always return a new man. The world and I are both the better for it, believe me.
So the other day, while Anita was in the hospital, and I struggled through another work day, I decided to take myself out for a ride. She always told me to take my phone, in case of emergency or whatever, but this time, I actually did. She was in the hospital, after all. But that’s another story.
But then I thought, since I have my phone, I might as well try to take a few pictures of some of the interesting features of this ride. Here’s a few shots of the Regent Hills trail:
For the most part, its just a fun ride and an excuse for a good workout, but some of these features can be pretty challenging.
Later on Charles showed me this map he had drawn (his kid named some of the trails):
Trail biking is a great physical activity. Its exciting and good for you and fun to get out there and enjoy the great outdoors. But like one time I told Anita, trail biking around here is a lot like skiing. Just instead of riding up in the lift, you get a damn good cardio workout on ascent. And you get a thrill similar to skiing on descent, except instead of fluffy white snow, you have jagged rocks to help you keep your concentration.
Overall though, its a really sweet ride. Try it sometime.
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The Battle of Britain
Today is January 1, 2011.
We had a fine Christmas with the kids around us, and we’re really feeling the love.
My pretty little wife is as cute and lovely as the day we met. We’re as much in love today as any two people ever were. Our love is the kind of love you read about, some poor people only get to dream about. But we’re living it, baby, every day!
We got some stuff going on in our lives that really ain’t all that good, but taking things one day at a time, in spite of everything, these days are still pretty sweet.
…
I find myself listening to Churchill more and more, maybe even a little obsessively.
I’m focused in on this period from 1940-41, when after the inglorious fall of France, and before Stalin switched sides, Britain stood alone in the world against Hitler. Through the fall and winter of 1940 the people of Great Britain withstood a punishing bombardment of their ports, airfields, factories and even populated centers, all the while lacking any means of retaliation. These days I sometimes think of ourselves as if we were Londoners under the blitz. Churchill said at the time that “the British people would withstand the merciless onslaught with grit and determination and in the sure knowledge that they would survive and ultimately prevail against the cruel menace.”
Later, after many dark days, but when the hour of victory finally seemed to be approaching he allowed himself to admit that “it would have been a rash man then who could put down in black and white exactly how we were going to do it.”
So without getting too philosophical or anything, when the road is dark and the times are hard, all we can do is focus our entire energies and concentration on the immediate task at hand, sometimes with little more than our own faith and courage to sustain us.
As they say, its always in God’s hands, and sometimes it just takes times like this to remind you.
Merry Christmas, and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to all! -
Right on brother, Right on for the darkness
This post is probably not going to be about what you expected.
For reasons that don’t matter, I got myself thinking about Curtis Mayfield, who died on this day, December 26, 1999.
Sometimes I’m just overcome when I think about it. He was just an artist, a performer, writer and music producer. He wasn’t important like a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Or was he?
He is credited with first infusing the power of the civil rights message into black popular music coming out in the 60’s. And he wasn’t a musical phenomenon like Stevie Wonder or a bona fide preacher like the Rev. Al Green, or whatever comparisons you want to make. He was unique.
But the latter part of his too short life was filled with tragedy. He was paralyzed from the neck down in an accident in 1990, and lived for ten more years, having various parts of his body amputated from diabetes and declining health before finally passing in 1999.
His last album, “New World Order” was released in 1996. Somehow he managed to produce it, despite his paralysis.
The thing that messes me up is when I ponder the total waste and tragedy of the 60’s and the way the whole thing has been chewed up and digested and barfed back into our mouths like the applesauce baby food so called recollections of conventional wisdom like “Forrest Gump” and “The Greatest Generation” make it out to be. You forget how much hate there was out there, how they played dirty, and used every tool in their toolbox to discredit and destroy any leader who came up to challenge the way things were. And if they couldn’t scare you into quitting, and if they couldn’t destroy your credibility, they just killed you. You can pick and peck about this one and that one, but just step back and look at how many poor bastards somehow wound up dead. Civil rights workers found dead. Churches burned down. Car accidents. Plane crashes. Its hard to figure, but it sure seems like a lot of the assassinations and mysterious deaths involved people of a particular persuasion.
The twist is that some of the ideas that were revolutionary back then are commonplace or even coopted today. Civil rights for all races. Equal rights for women. Environmental consciousness.
And while we still have work to do on all these fronts, no one any longer even tries to deny the objective. You don’t have no more Maddox or Wallace barring the doors to schools to keep the blacks out and down. Some might say the struggle has moved to a more abstract and cynical level, where as King said “they wrap themselves in the garments of love, and say that they’re loving, when they’re really hating.” And I’ll come out and say it: Haley Barbour and Pat Robertson are no different from Maddox or Wallace, just craftier liars with even less integrity, if that’s possible.
But in the end Mayfield remained or at least seemed hopeful. “It’s a new day,” he said, and his voice calling for “a change of mind of the human race” just breaks my heart, thinking that he was singing, laying there in his hospital bed.
“Right on brother, Right on for the darkness.” -
view from my window
This is the view from my office window. In the distance, across the intervening Barton Creek Greenbelt and Colorado River, you can see the skyline of downtown Austin, including the Capital. We like to joke, you can only see the right wing from here, but you’re not missing anything, because the Texas State Capital has two right wings.
Something about the optical effect makes it look microscopic in this shot, but to the naked eye, its actually seems closer. Another unfortunate optical effect obscures the half rainbow arching over the skyline, which to my eye was beautiful and evocative.
There is something about this city that arouses an affection. I can’t put my finger on it. Its kind of an insouciance, or maybe the feeling you get when you recall a lost love of your youth. That’s not exactly it, but close. Sometimes they use the word nostalgia, which literally means “homesickness.” Its a longing, but not for a “where” so much as for a “when”. I said at the time that someday I’d write about it, and tell the story, and God willing, I will still do someday. But then as now, my life was not my own. -
the map and the territory
I’ve recently become more and more interested in economics. for a variety of reasons. its fascinating, like a mandala. everyone sees what they want to in it.
there’s psychology, and sociology, and it matters, like food and jobs, and mom can’t even make apple pie if she don’t have apples or money to buy gas for the oven.
and there’s politics and these days, its almost a theology.
if you ask a some people, its like religion, and ronald reagan ain’t jesus, but maybe he is saint paul. the pharisee, converted. pointing the way to the one: that would have to be milton friedman, I guess, in this analogy. he did win a nobel prize (friedman, that is), but it turns out economics is also kind of like magic, you can be totally, 100% provably wrong, and still win a nobel prize in your field. you’ve got to love it.
so the basic idea is that we have these contending theories. there have been other theories in the past, but they have all been proven wrong. usually through the force of arms, it turns out, which would seem to be out of the field of economics, but no, its quite ecumenical. so flexible. it can accommodate any eventuality. it has to. that’s one of the many attributes it shares with theology.
one of these theories is that the market is the most efficient way to organize pretty much anything.
and that’s good as far as it goes, since the market relies on some very reliable forces: greed and self-interest.
but a free market is like an AI thing called expert systems. it works well enough, perhaps even optimally, but only within certain constraints. outside those constraints, a free market, like an expert system, is subject to catastrophic failure.
do I really have to cite chapter and verse on you at this point? oh, yes. another thing about economists is that their memories can be so astonishingly short.
now, the other idea is that we have rights and responsibilities as individuals, and we have other responsibilities as groups, organizations and societies of human beings. and to the extent that markets help us achieve our objectives and satisfy our responsibilities, that’s fine. but there are other things that we simply must do, be, and have, and markets don’t guarantee that these things come into being, so we as a society will them into being.
these include things like the military, schools, libraries, parks, volunteer fire departments, and so on. we used to have a word for it, we called it the “common wealth” or the commons. where we all shared the pasture. we helped raise each other’s barns. not for money, but because we were social minded. and at the bottom, we hoped that if we helped out when we could, should the need arise, we could expect help from others in return. basic human decency.
but there’s another word for that these days: socialism. ooh. how we hate socialism. its right there next to communism in our pantheon of isms. and we know we hate communism, because we fought a long and bitter war against it. the war was so long that the other side even forgot what they were about and morphed into something entirely different from what I’m talking about when I use the word socialism.
but unfortunately, most of us in the west have been brainwashed so thoroughly, that even volunteer fire departments are suspect these days.
like the man said, don’t confuse the map for the territory. -
banging on the bones
once, someone asked me what inspired me to take up the piano.
first of all, its more like a possession. I can’t live without it for long. but I don’t know. maybe its a family tradition.
I never took lesssons, but I began banging around in high school. I switched to guitar in college. my roommate Chris’s little sister got a new guitar, and handed down her old one to me to play around with. she taught me my first song, too. you’ve got to admit, guitar is practical. its light. its portable, you can tune it yourself. and its not hard to plunk out a few tunes that don’t suck too bad.
but on reflection, I think it was hoagy carmichael who first got me banging the bones. go back and listen to an early cut of stardust, from back there in the 20’s, and then get back to me. there was a scene in a movie, I think maybe “to have and have not”, or one of those with bogey and lauren bacall and there was this dude with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, always with a drink nearby, and a goofy grin, just banging away, and it looked like he was really having a good time. looking back, I guess I wanted to travel through time, and hit on a young thing like laren bacall was back then, as well as learn to play.
hoagy was a pretty accomplished songsmith, and I still love that big easy whorehouse sound, but ultimately his repetroire just won’t sustain you for long.
I’ve had different inspirations over the years. at first, I thought donald fagen’s jazz rock fender rhodes deep chorus over/under style was the tops
(can you hear me doctor?). then I might have said it was keith jarrett who I most admired. he’s something else, like an alternate logic ((if the) misfits (wear it)). turns out I have a lot of trouble with my memory, and something about his pure improvisation appealed to me.
then years later I banged on a blues organ in a band for a while, and that’s a whole other thing.
but lately, I’ve had a kind of breakthrough in my thinking, and I’m kind of triangulating between vastly simplified polyphonic ideas inspired by bach’s cantata chorales and fugues, the few ones I can even think of approaching, bill evans’ brilliant “conversations with myself”, and joe zawinul’s ballads, like “a remark you made” or “from vienna with love” (see city on the hill, or for monica, or any of that other noise).
anyway, that’s where I’m going, or I think I’m trying to go with my music these days. -
alt.jesus
Being an alternative perspective on the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
A long time ago, I read a book. I spent a little while this afternoon trying to recollect, and I think it was The Gospel of the Essenes by Edmond Szekely, that my roommate Chris had loaned me. But I’m not sure.
I do remember the author struck me as a little kooky.
But in any case, the topic was an alternative view of the life of Jesus, as informed by a newly translated gospel discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late forties, but mysteriously kept secret by the official translators for reasons that are still not clear.
In the intervening thirty or so years, I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot more on this topic from a variety of sources. I especially loved Gibbon’s treatment of early Christianity for its refreshing skepticism and dry humor, as well as Will Durant’s deep and erudite series The Story of Civilization, and to the current subject, the volume Caesar and Christ. Of course I’ve read a lot more of the New Testament and the Torah, and as they’ve trickled out, I’ve read as many of the Qumran Scroll translations as I can, as well as those found separately, but by coincidence almost simultaneously, at Nag Hammadi, including the famous and formerly banned Gospel of Thomas — at least one of very books that had been enshrouded in such mystery back in the day.
The Gospel of Thomas is really just a collection of some of the sayings of Jesus, not tied together into any narrative, or any discernible order. That format itself gives it a kind of purity, and the document’s antiquity (Thomas probably preceeds the previously oldest known gospel by sixty years or more), gives it additional authenticity, at least to some.
Many of the sayings will be familiar to us all. Many scholars now think the canonical Gospel of Mark was at least in part based on something like Thomas, the hypothesized source called “Q”, and that Matthew and Luke were in turn based on Mark. But the unfamiliar quotes attributed to the teacher are most interesting for their peculiar character and subject. I recommend the interested reader research this subject on your own. Its a mind bender, that’s for sure. Start with a clear distinction between the two revolutionary finds, coincidentally both made in the late forties — that at Nag Hammadi in 1945, and the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947.
So, all that said, the following is not an attempt at a representation of anyone’s views, including my own. Its just a weird idea I had one time, perhaps inspired by a book like Szekely’s, but you have to admit, it kind of makes sense, when you think about it.
The first thing to know is that then, as now, Palestine was a contentious place. It was not considered particularly valuable real estate by the Romans, except maybe for its location. The locals were always quarreling and revolting. There had been continuous wars, civil and otherwise, and rebellions, since before Jesus’ birth, and more after his death, ultimately resulting in, among other things, the destruction of the temple.
As you might imagine, this was a catastrophic event and had many long-lasting practical as well as profound psychological consequences that reverberate in the world today (see the Roman-Jewish wars and Jewish cultural nationalism).
Another thing to know is that then as now, there were several strands of sometimes mutually hostile Jewish civilization and culture active simultaneously. As always, most folks were just trying to get by. It was hard times, and Roman rule chafed as you might imagine. Everyone hated the tax collector, who is viewed as the worst kind of traitor. But some folks decided it was best to just play along. These are maybe best represented by Herod Antipas (there are three different Herods in here, Herod the Great, appointed “King of the Jews” by the Roman senate after the Roman conquest of Syria and Judea, served essentially as a procurator of the province under the Roman general Pompey. The other two, his sons, Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas, tetrarchs or nominal kings of Judea and Galilee, respectively, but in fact more or less figurehead puppets of the Romans).
The Herods were Jews, but relatively secular, especially compared to some we will meet in a moment. They were versed in the scriptures, aware of the traditions and so on, and sensitive at a surface level at least, in a political way, to the mores and taboos of their people.
It was Herod the Great who rebuilt the second temple, but he is known in the Christian tradition mainly through his part in the story of the Magi and the massacre of the innocents [Matthew 2:3], oft retold at Christmastime. Most modern historians do not regard this as a historical event. Like many other stories in the New Testament, it is clearly a construction designed to reinforce a particular point of view by echoing stories of the prophets, like those from the Egyptian captivity, the plagues and the passover, etc.
But it is his son, Herod Antipas, by all accounts a relatively weak character, highly constrained by his situation vis-a-vis the Romans, who crosses paths with Jesus at the peak of his mission, or rather, unwittingly initiates it, through his involvement in the death of John the Baptist. Many of Jesus’ early followers had been followers of John, as Jesus himself was. And John’s death created a leadership vacuum that thrust Jesus into the fore, it would seem against his wishes, or at least prematurely.
It is actually John the Baptist who frames many of these issues and is really a more important figure than most modern readers can possibly ascertain from reading canonical Gospels alone.
John forms the bridge for us to another group, or actually set of groups, one of which we now know more about than any other, that is the Essenes. These were radical traditionalists, who so hated the Romans and more or less despised their secular counterparts, that they dropped out and hid in caves in the desert, living under a strict traditional interpretation of the scriptures, similar to a monsatic lifestyle. They longed for an end to Roman oppression and a return to the golden age, perhaps the era of king David, or more likely the theocracy we might find from the time of the Book of Judges, or the more recent Hasmonean period, for example.
John disappeared for long periods into the wilderness. It was remarkable how he could survive alone out there. But as we now know, he was not alone.
Remember, it was the Sicarii, a Zealot sect similar to the Essenes, who overcame a Roman garrison at Masada, a former redoubt of Herod the great, and held it against the Romans during one of the many uprisings of the era. In the end, they committed mass suicide rather than surrender, as we have seen many radical sects do in the succeeding millennia, up to recent times.
The third strand of Jewish culture at the time is what we today call “Hellenized Jews.” Such was Saul of Tarsus, a former persecutor of Christians, who changed his name to the more Greek sounding Paul, had never met Jesus, and had never even been to Jerusalem until after Jesus’ death.
It is known that Paul had a Greco-Roman grammatical education, he spoke and wrote Greek (poorly, according to Gibbon), and he used a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. There is no evidence that he knew either Hebrew or Aramaic, although the doctrinally correct position is that he did. Durant sometimes confutes tradition with fact and this is one of the areas where he, like many another good Christian, errs. Paul was, like his father, a Roman citizen — a fact he used at more than one critical juncture to escape legal trouble. He identifies himself as having been a Pharisee, which was more of a political party than anything else. In particular, the Pharisees favored hellenization and stood in opposition to traditionalists such as the Essenes, Sicarii and Zealots.
As Gibbon points out with great substantiation, much of what we now consider Christian teaching has absolutely no basis in anything Jesus or any of his apostles ever said or any other Jewish tradition for that matter, but seems to have been invented by Paul and his followers. Thus Gibbon says, what we today call Christianity should more properly be called Paulism. If you study traditional Christian dogma closely, Paul the so-called “apostle” stands not coequal with Moses, the prophets, or even Jesus. He supersedes them all. Where there is conflict, Paul’s words carry the greatest weight.
Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teaching may not have been invented in a complete vacuum, though. As Frazier and others have pointed out, there is much in Paul’s interpretation of the passion, death and resurrection, the tradition of the Eucharist, and much else, that seems to have its origins not in Jewish tradition, or Jesus’ teachings, but rather in Greek mystery traditions, themselves based independently on Egyptian mysteries such as that surrounding Osiris.
In deprecation of the Law of Moses in favor of the new covenant, as defined by himself, in declaring the supremacy of faith over deeds, in the definition of the sole standard for salvation as faith specifically in Jesus, Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ message has dominated and to a large extent defined Christian dogma. Paul said “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified.” [Romans 10:4]. But Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. ” [Matthew 5:17]
Good food for thought, but all that is preface.
The thesis of this proposed alternative view of the life of Jesus is that intentionally or not, Jesus’ teaching was viewed by the Roman occupiers and many secular and Hellenized Jews in as much a political context as a spiritual one.
There is evidence now that Jesus had some exposure to the ideas of the Essenes, and a number of the very earliest gospel texts surviving today were discovered in caves at Qumran, written, read and preserved by revolutionaries against the Roman occupation.
Imagine an undercurrent in the events of Jesus’ life and teaching informed by the presence of one or more secret societies of radical fundamentalist Jews.
Imagine the concern the authorities would have as gatherings of thousands flocked to hear the words of a rabbi, a natural and charismatic leader, knowing that uprisings were continuously breaking out, leading to a full blown revolution at any time. In fact, as we now know, one was imminent.
The arrest and trial are all performed under Roman auspices, and the mode of execution especially speaks to this thesis. Stoning was the traditional punishment for blasphemy, and some other religious crimes, and the Romans clearly had no problem with that, as Jesus himself saved a woman from death by stoning. By contrast crucifixion was a terrorizing mode of punishment used throughout the empire by the military, reserved particularly for the worst criminals — and revolutionaries. The most compelling argument of all is right there in the gospel. The crime for which the criminal is to be put to death was traditionally inscribed over the head of the criminal. Jesus’ crime: INRI. The Latin abbreviation meaning: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).
This form of execution was a terror and a direct challenge to any who thought they could rise up against the Roman occupation. The story on the face of it is plain: Jesus was put to death by the Romans for inflaming nationalist aspirations, inciting sedition and possibly revolution. Perhaps even Joseph of Arimithea, the mysterious wealthy character who “loaned” Jesus the use of his tomb was, like others, secretly a follower of Jesus, and like him was involved with such an underground movement, though he kept his involvement secret in order to maintain his income and a front for the organization. (Another possibility is that Joseph was a relatively well to do uncle, who had pity and affection for his unfortunate nephew.) Maybe the whole tomb episode was a ruse, and that members of the underground rolled away the stone in the night, rescuing the gravely wounded Jesus from the cave, spiriting him away to some secret place such as Qumran, to be nursed back to health or to die with as much dignity as possible. Maybe he even lost consciousness up there on the cross, and for all the world seemed dead. For a small bribe, he could easily have been pulled down, near death, and a burial could even have taken place. It was ancient times, after all, and being dead was kind of a gray area. Maybe he did survive for a little while, allowing visits from a few trusted souls, maybe as much as forty days or so. Its an expression, after all, meaning “a while.”
If you go back and read the story of the preparations for the last supper in the light of such an interpretation, some of the characteristics of an underground organization kind of stand out: “When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters and say to the master of the house, ‘The teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”‘ He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there.” [Luke 22:10]
And it was only a hundred years later, after the failure of three separate uprisings, the destruction of the temple, and in the context of a campaign to convert large numbers of gentiles of all races across the Roman empire, and after the break between Paul and his followers and the traditionalists, including all the actual apostles like Peter who continued to evangelize after Jesus’ death, but who maintained the supremacy of the Mosaic law, when the story as we now have it was revised to shift the blame to the Jewish religious leaders of the time. You can hear this in third person phrasing throughout the gospel, such as John 7:15, “The Jews were amazed and said, ‘How does he know scripture without having studied?’” It just doesn’t sound like a phrasing that a Jewish person himself would use, does it?
This editing was intended to redefine Jesus’ teachings to try to make sense of his death in the context of three failed revolutions and ultimate destruction of the temple, in order to remove barriers to evangelizing among gentiles, and to justify the centralization of authority and purging of dissent characteristic of what we now call the established church. -
issue clusters
Well, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not an undecided voter.
But I am a divided voter. Life is not binary, as much as certain parties would have us believe it is. But on the other hand, reality forces us to make choices. So there you have it.
Like everyone else, I am not totally delighted with my choices this election season. I don’t agree with every position one party claims in their platform, and I do agree with some things the other party claims in their platform. Of course, I believe that for the most part, they’re both mostly saying whatever it is they think is most likely to get them elected, given the apparatus of which they are a part, and the biases of their supporters, and so on ad infinitum.
One way to think about politics, and complex issues in general is as a multidimensional matrix. (I guess I just lost 80% of you. oh, well).
[I have a discussion of this topic among my audio journals somewhere… todo insert cross reference to audio blog]
The dimensions of this matrix correspond to your views along an axis corresponding to what pollsters sometimes call “issue clusters.”
The social aspects of health care finance might be an issue cluster. And our opinions around this cluster, like all others, vary depending on our life experiences including our own health and financial situation as well as those close to us.
But the point is that our views on this topic are largely if not entirely independent of our views on some other topics such as national security, for example.
Often there are linkages, as practically everything has some economic implications, from tax policy to immigration.
But the point is that if you listen carefully, you find that there are almost as many different collections of opinions around issue clusters as there are people.
So if you think of all these dimensions, you can visualize them a couple of different ways, I like to think of a hyperdimensional surface.
[todo insert cool graphic here]
but anyway, today it occurred to me to scour the presidential candidate’s web sites first for their ideas of what would be significant issue clusters for visitors to their sites, and second, for their ideas about those issues. and two exercises came to mind: first, assuming they were being entirely sincere and candid, how well did the views espoused mesh with my own? I thought of a distance metric per issue cluster, resulting in a distribution, visualized as a curve maybe, where the columns correspond to the issue clusters and the distance from the axis would represent the distance of the candidate’s views from my own on that topic.
[insert another cool graphic here with explanation for example.]
so you could imagine someone who was a perfect match for me would yield a flatline, but most likely you’d see some kind of bar chart or the like where some matches were close and some were wildly diverging. (or am I describing a singles dating service? maybe I am. maybe modern politics isn’t as different from dating as we might wish to think. hey! maybe match.com should get into the political consulting business?)
maybe if you need it to boil it down to a single dimension, you could sum or average the distances.
but even the juxtaposition of taxonomies can be interesting. johnmccain.com has this breakdown:
The Economy
Health Care
National Security
Education
Iraq
Climate Change
Veterans
Immigration
Values
Second Amendment
Judicial Philosophy
Ethics Reform
Natural Heritage
Space Program
its fascinating. for example, foreign policy doesn’t rank as a top level category. the whole concept is framed as national security, which immediately puts you in a defensive posture, when you think about it. or look at his judicial philosophy. he uses all these phrases: “John McCain believes that one of the greatest threats to our liberty and the Constitutional framework that safeguards our freedoms are willful judges who usurp the role of the people and their representatives and legislate from the bench.”
wow. for those of you who don’t know, that’s code. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to translate it, but it shouldn’t be too hard.
oh the other hand, there’s http://www.barackobama.com/
perhaps characteristically, it seemed pretty wordy. But here’s his taxonomy:
Civil Rights
Defense
Disabilities
Economy
Education
Energy & Environment
Ethics
Faith
Family
Fiscal
Foreign Policy
Healthcare
Homeland Security
Immigration
Iraq
Poverty
Rural
Service
Seniors & Social Security
Technology
Taxes
Urban Policy
Veterans
Women
notice the list is quite a bit longer, but also that although the sequence implies a priority ordering, after looking at it, it turns out to be simply alphabetical. that’s kind of smart/dumb, if you know what I mean.. should I assume then that he is going to run cabinet meetings alphabetically? “.. now hold on tom, I know you have a crisis over there in xenobiology or whatever, but let’s stick with the order… go ahead agriculture guy.”
but then note what lakoff calls the “framing” of the taxonomy. it sets the stage for what you know is going to be coming — where do you stand with respect to national security? no one is opposed to it. the questions are all in the what, why and how. on the other hand, how are defense and foreign policy different subjects? do you see, the fact that they’re treated as separate topics is an implicit answer to an unasked question right there.
think about it.
