November 2007 archive

In a party desprately in need of a hero, we now know who that hero is.  Of course, some of us knew who that hero was all along.  Some of us have paid attention to what the man has been saying, what he has stood for and what he means to do in the future.

This link will bring you to Presidential Candidate Selector.

It’s interesting and surprising. It may show you which candidate best matches your views.

Hello everybody. I’ve been in Boston these last few days and just back home at 5:30pm. Hope all is well here.

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In an article today over on MSNBC, national affairs writer Tom Curry wrote a piece titled “Judiciary Committee approves Mukasey – Latest in a string of setbacks for Bush administration foes”.

Some news and your afternoon Open Thread.

1. The situation in Pakistan remains fluid. Here’s a brief rundown of what’s going on:

   • Reuters – Benazir Bhutto says no talks with Musharraf. “Bhutto said she was going to Islamabad for a meeting of the opposition Alliance for Restoration of Democracy.”

   • AFP – Ousted Pakistan judge urges anti-Musharraf uprising. “Sacked top judge Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry called on his countrymen to save the constitution, prompting authorities to sever mobile phone coverage in parts of Islamabad as he addressed a meeting of lawyers by telephone.”

   • CNN – Pakistan’s courts locked down. “Baton-wielding police fought with lawyers outside courthouses in Islamabad and Lahore again Tuesday, arresting dozens more as they enforced… Pervez Musharraf’s crackdown on judicial activism… ‘Don’t be afraid of anything,’ Chaudhry told the lawyers gathered in Islamabad. ‘God will help us and the day will come when you’ll see the constitution supreme and no dictatorship for a long time.'”

   • AP – Opposition leader flees house arrest. “Imran Khan, a former cricket star and now the outspoken leader of a small opposition party in Pakistan, released a statement on Tuesday through his ex-wife, saying he has fled house arrest and gone into hiding.”

   • AP – Pakistan protests UN chief’s statement about imposition of emergency rule. “Pakistan lodged a protest against Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s statement expressing great concern at the imposition of emergency rule and ‘strong dismay’ at the detention of hundreds of human rights and opposition activists, Pakistan’s U.N. Mission said Tuesday.”

   • NYT – Bush Urges Musharraf to reverse course but signals no penalty if he doesn’t. “Mr. Bush also praised General Musharraf as a ‘strong fighter against extremists and radicals.'”

2. In America’s forgotten occupation, The Guardian reports MPs and children killed in Afghan suicide bombing. “A suicide bomber today killed at least 50 people, including five MPs and several children, in northern Afghanistan. The attack took place as a parliamentary delegation was visiting a sugar factory in the town of Baghlan, 95 miles from the capital, Kabul. The bomber was on foot and blew himself up as the delegates entered the factory. The death toll was particularly heavy as large crowds had turned out to greet the MPs, who were on an economic factfinding mission. Many of the dead were schoolchildren. If the number of fatalities is confirmed, the attack would be the deadliest in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion.”

3. Ethnic cleansing is well underway in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times reports 2.3 million Iraqis reported displaced. “Iraq’s displaced population has grown to 2.3 million people, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society said Monday on the heels of a warning by another humanitarian aid group that border tensions are exacerbating the plight of those who fled north to escape sectarian violence. The Red Crescent report says an additional 67,000 families left their homes in September, continuing a pattern that has multiplied the number of displaced people more than fivefold this year. About two-thirds of the total are younger than 12, the Red Crescent said.” And how many of those children will grow up with a deep-seated ‘grudge’ against the occupying nation and their people and soldiers?

4. More bad news for rain-soaked south Mexico. BBC News reports a Landslide buries Mexican village of San Juan Grijalva. “Rescue workers in Mexico are searching for at least 16 people reported missing in the southern state of Chiapas after a landslide buried their village. The village is the latest victim of heavy rains which have flooded 80% of neighbouring Tabasco state, leaving at least 500,000 people homeless. At least 20,000 people are still trapped by floodwaters and many people are still waiting for aid supplies.” As many as 30 people could be missing in the landslide. According to the AP, Mexican officials described the landslide as a “mini-tsunami” and village residents said they “had been awakened by a rumbling roar and the sound of rocks rolling down from surrounding mountaintops” in the middle of the night.

   “It was a roar, like a helicopter was passing overhead,” recounted farmer Domingo Sanchez, 21. “We didn’t know what was happening, and then we went outside, and there were cracks opening the earth,” he said, apparently recounting the initial collapse of a nearby hillside into the river. “We ran up the hill … but soil kept coming down on us.”

   The New York Times reports that As floods ebb in south, Mexico tends to displaced. “In Villahermosa, the state capital of Tabasco, lines up to seven hours long formed at government relief centers as tens of thousands of displaced people waited to pick up water, milk, food and medical supplies… Yet in parts of the city on Monday, life went on as if its inhabitants had not just been through the worst flooding in its history… Those who could — even some in shelters — returned to work. Schools that had not been damaged reopened for classes.”

So, what else is happening?

(by pyrrho for publishing jointly at MLW and DocuDharma)

Pythagoras: A Mathematical Universe

I will be using the print version of the Oxford “Dictionary of
Philosophy” to refresh myself for this series.

Links offered may or may not have been referenced to research this post. I
may or may not believe their assertions or have been exposed to them, but
they are given to ease your direct research further into Pythagoras. I try to
present them fairly and clearly. I am a skeptic myself, a relativist with
opinions on all these schools, and a tendency to eschew the doctrinaire side
of each of these schools, but as a skeptic, I’m equipped to give a philosophy
a fair shake. Myself, and tend to seek and emphasize the reusable tools each
school has to offer.

• Pythagoras at
  Wikipedia
• Stanford
  Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Pythagoras
• The Internet
  Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Pythagoras
• Pythagoras
  at History for Kids

Most of you will know Pythagoras from the Pythagorean Theorum, but
Pythagoras was not just a mathematician and geometrician. His mathematics was
not separate from his life and his ideas were not limited to mathematics. As
with all these ancient philosophies I am covering in this series, Pythagoras’
is also has a whole system concerned with how to live… a worldview. This
worldview is what I am looking at in this series, because these philosophies
serve as archetypes for worldviews, archetypes I seem to encounter daily, and
which you do to. Archetypes not fundamental, but nevertheless ancient and
soaked into us. The epicurean is looking for a pleasurable life, to find the
small pleasures and live simply Simply, perhaps, but still nearby these
pleasures. The stoic is more hardened, does not expect pleasure as reward and
even scoffs at it as such, being as indifferent to pleasure as they have
chosen to be to pain. The pythagoreans then are those that have their head in
abstractions. One imagines the sort that has had no time for epicurean
pleasures like meals, having been preoccupied with a logical proof. To these
sort, the sublime superiority of a mathematical pattern was and remains as
obvious as the rising sun.

Indeed, the followers of Pythagoras were prone to taking Pythagoras himself
as a god become human to teach mankind these sublime truths. I do not find it
surprising that such a man led to a philosophy including vegetarianism and a
semi-divine presumption. If that sound dismissive, I share the pythagorean’s
sensibilities, if more humbly so, with an eye to the errors it introduces
with its beauties. As for the nearly religious awe I can feel before a
mathematical truth, take pi, a ratio that relates, among other things, the
length of the side of a circle to the length of the sides of a square, such
that, if you were to take the width of a square, and the radius of the circle
having the same circumference as the “circumference” of the square, then the
relation between the two involves a number whose digits never end, which
cannot be finitely represented. To me that’s stunning, but that turning
square into a circle requires a transcendental number is not stunning but
fitting. It is sublime, divine, and while expected, only ironically. And that
the ratio is well named as a “transcendental” number is no doubt a product of
our shared if inexplicable love for the beauty of math and geometry.

Concomitant to this, however, is removal of the self from the material
world into the world of abstraction and the illusion that abstractions are
not even of this world. The pythagorean spirit, as archetype, might not even
concern itself with math or geometry, but some other family of abstractions.
But abstraction are made from material facts, from astronomy, from counting,
from imperfectly drawn lines in the sand, and from deducing concepts that can
explain the facts abstracted all at once. This has proved a practical and
rewarding endeavor, but it is a part of the loss of reason to consider an
abstraction so fine it’s not a part of this world. But now I have begun to
describe Plato… Pythagoras himself might in fact object, thinking the world
of mathematics imbued the world around us all the material reality it had for
us to perceive. If I may accept this archetype in such a light, it remains a
tactile abstractionism, we feel the mathematical world about us always. We
are not imperfect beings separated from this glory, but are abstract beauties
ourselves, actually made of it.

There have been several diaries on the devastating floods in Mexico in Jalisco and Tabasco.  The flood is frontpaged here and I thought I could crosspost a diary I sent over to Daily Kos where is is sadly falling flat.  Probably bad timing on my part, but here goes! link, link.  mariachi mama and mango on Ask a Kossak, community members in Mexico, have written asking for us to help but warned us to be cautious where to send money.  mango personally collected funds to redistribute in a regional flood in her area recently and many of her diaries were recommended.  This was great, but we can’t be sure that this will be as effective in a flood of this magnitude, with a million people displaced.  At that level, you need volunteers AND organizations that know what they are doing.  Over a million people are displaced, 40% children.  Many will have lost everything they own as well as their crops for this year.

Beowulf is a computer-animated fantasy film based on the classic epic.  Angelina Jolie plays Grendel’s mother, a lizardy creature who is basically nude but painted gold over her entire (computer-animated) body.

I was really surprised that I felt that exposed,” she said at a press conference for the film. “There are certain moments where I felt actually shy – and called home, just to explain that the fun movie that I had done that was digital animation was, in fact, a little different than [what] we expected.”

The film, which uses animation over existing film footage, was a new experience for the film veteran.
…from the Yahoo!News article