Archive for the 'France' Category

Ran across some information about a project to create an open-source Jacquard loom. A Jacquard has the ability to weave elaborately-patterned fabrics by controlling each individual warp thread in the weaving process. Machines that can handle a large number of threads are pretty costly…numbers I’ve seen are in the $30K-60K range…and there are evidently a lot of hobbyists and small businesspeople who would like such a loom but are unable to afford one. Hence, the open-source loom project.

The Jacquard is important in the history of technology, and I’ve been intending to write about this topic for a while. A good source is Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, by James Essinger. (I’m not a weaver, so hope that those who are will forgive and correct any inaccuracies or incorrect use of terminology in this post.)

Traditionally, the weaving of patterned fabric was a very labor intensive process requiring that for each throw of the shuttle, a number of cords must be pulled or not pulled in order to lift or not lift specific threads. Essinger estimates only 1 inch of fabric per day, for a weaver and his assistant, could be produced–so these fabrics were definitely luxury goods.

Read the rest of this entry »

A man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him

–Alexis de Tocqueville, from the preface to his The Old Regime and the (French) Revolution. (Via PowerLine)

Translations of this passage differ: the one quoted above is from this version. A different translation renders the phrase as “contempt for one’s country.” The actual French phrase used in the original is son pays. Either way, the point is pretty similar.

The thread of previous Worth Pondering posts starts here.

(Another in my historical trivia posts – this is a cross-post from my book-blog. The Pig War features in my latest book, Deep in the Heart … along with a lot of other relatively unknown mid-19th century trivia.)
The Pig War was not actually an honest-to-pete real shooting war. But it did involve a pair of international powers; the Republic of Texas, and the constitutional monarchy of France. And thereby hangs the story of a neighborhood squabble between a frontier innkeeper and a gentleman-dandy named Jean Pierre Isidore Dubois de Saligny who called himself the Comte de Saligny. He was the charge d’affaires, the representative of France to the Republic of Texas, arriving from a previous assignment the French Legation in Washington D.C. He had been instrumental in recommending that France extend diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Texas, but one might be forgiven for thinking that some kind of 19th Century Peter Principle was at play . . . for Dubois turned out to be terribly undiplomatic.
Read the rest of this entry »

About a week ago Instapundit linked this Wikipedia article about the higher-education bubble, noting especially the point that William Bennett predicted the bubble back in 1987. The post reminded me of some interesting and rather prescient comments that Peter Drucker made about education in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity. A few excerpts:

Resources and expectations:

Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy…Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters and salespeople, indeed even farmers…Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modern world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man.

This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of…Signs abound that all is not well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing–and will keep on going up–the taxpayers are getting visibly restless.

Credentials and social mobility:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.

Dangers of “elite” universities:

One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…

It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post I had linked to the Internet Archive.

I recommend one book that you’ll find there, The French Revolution by the historian and satirical writer Thomas Carlyle. Besides the HTML version the IA also offers the book in a number of other formats.

Carlyle’s prose is very much a matter of taste. If you are interested in the subject matter and enjoy his eccentric and heavily metaphorical style of writing you are in for a real treat.

Wandering around a soon-to-be-closed Borders bookstore, I run across a glossy magazine dedicated to the G8 summit in Deauville-France (May 2011). The above is a cell phone photo of the cover. I have no idea who publishes the magazine. There are ads inside for airlines, hotels, cars, public policy institutes and various international businesses and governmental agencies. The US Chamber of Commerce and Eurochambers/The Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry are two such examples. Turns out that some of the articles are pretty interesting.

The cover makes me laugh, though. It’s an illustration of various national leaders and their relative small size contrasts with the large conference table. Individual nations, suboordinate yourselves to the glory of the international collective of business and governmental interests!

Maybe I’m getting a tiny bit carried away here. I’ve always had an active imagination thanks to the reading of novels and, well, an inherently busy mind. Yoga, music, meditation, book reading: all of it calms me down. Modern urban – or semi-urban – life is filled with irritating sounds and sirens and sitting in traffic and noisy trains with vaguely scary looking passengers….

So I am going to miss browsing Borders, getting a coffee, and shaking my head at the variety of periodicals. A magazine for everyone and everything. A Special Forces magazine sits right up front along with Mother Jones, Foreign Policy and the Hudson Review. Wait a minute, shouldn’t that one be in the back row?

What do you suppose the existence of a G8 magazine says about our society? Nothing remotely reassuring, I imagine. If debt ceiling drama seems incomprehensible, it’s likely because a certain percentage (not all, to be fair) of our politicos spend considerable amounts of time skimming vapid briefs and dopey position papers while flipping through G8 Magazines as they jet between constituent meetings, summits, conferences and hearings. And that’s their body of knowledge on a given subject.

Super.

Vive la France.

With apologies to all, I can’t resist posting the photos, the ones the Maitre d’ took, of Paris on July 4, 2006.

And here is the other

The view was spectacular and so was the food. The waiters were very complimentary to the girls. The one on the right is my youngest daughter; the other two are her cousins. We had two marvelous weeks, beginning in Bordeaux and ending in Paris. She is now working on getting an internship with the French aerospace company her uncle works for.

For those who are interested, I have begun blogging about a two week bike trip I recently took to the Pyranees at Life In The Great Midwest. It will probably end up being a fifteen or twenty part series so feel free to follow along over the next several weeks if you like.

For this blog I have a few short thoughts about how I felt as a tourist in southern France.
Read the rest of this entry »

The worst part about riding your bike through the Pyranees in southern France is the awful views at the top of the mountains. This from the top of the Tourmalet.

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I for one am delighted to know that we can now play around with the iridology of the sciences, using the software available on the Science-Metrix Ontology Explorer site to view which fields have journals which cross-link to journals in other fields…

Seriously — that lower image is of the Field Citation Wheel that you can find, suitably enlarged for easy viewing, on that site.

*

And it’s heartening for me to know, for instance — taking a closer look at the segment of that image that’s roughly east north-east — that scientific journals do have some links on their pages to works of theology or philosophy:

Engineering, you’ll notice, has more links than history, philosophy, theology, the social sciences (even counting them twice), economics, business, the arts and humanities combined.

My own field, theology, has to share its thin segment with philosophy, and you can guess how small the number of links to articles on Islamic apocalyptic probably are…

Which is, in part, why I wonder whether a project like the ETH’s Living Earth Simulator will really manage to map such things as, well, a possible outbreak of global jihadist Mahdism and its consequences.

*

But then I look at another gorgeous graphic from the same source, focusing in on a part of the network of knowledge that interests me, and I can just faintly make out, lower left, entirely isolated, the field of music…

What splendid isolation! That’s all of Bach, mind you – and all the Beatles, too.

*

Seriously, though:

• It’s fascinating to be able to see how the various branches of knowledge cross-reference each other.
• Visual data representation is a gorgeous, fantastic, field.
• Mapping the all-of-everything is an irresistable lure for keen minds
• I’m betting the humanities will prove to be at least as good at it as the sciences.
• And I recall, not without a pang of regret, the time when my beloved Theology was Queen of the Sciences, and one might converse with Abelard on the streets of Paris…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

It’s a very different approach…

I’ve been preparing to write up some of the episodes that represent how warm and close relations between Muslims and Christians can at times be – the meeting of St Francis with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, the period of considerable tolerance and artistic flourishing under Umayyad rule in Cordoba – and I have to say I’m getting very impatient to see this film:

.
If you would like to understand why the Qur’an (5:82) says:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.”

May I recommend you either read John Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith. Love and Terror in Algeria — or, when it opens in your part of the world, go see Of Gods and Men. Or both.

Wishing us all peace in the new year, decade, century…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

A quick search for “Mahdi” and “Mehdi” and “Twelfth Imam” in the 294 messages so far published in diplomatic Wikileaks reveals some references to individuals with those names, and a couple to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (spelled “Jaysh al-Madhi” in one cable by someone who is perhaps confused by the similarity of the name to that of Mahatma Gandhi), along with three cables in which Mahdism is touched upon.

1

09ASHGABAT1182 of September 16, 2009 reports a comment by an undisclosed source who is “adamant” that the US should not enter into direct talks with Iran’s leadership:

Not only, he insisted, is the Iranian leadership “untrustworthy,” and dominated by a group of “messianics,” who base crucial decisions about domestic and foreign policy on a belief in the imminent return of the “Missing” (Twelfth) Imam.

From my point of view, any foreign policy based on or strongly influenced by belief in the imminent return of a prophesied figure of good or evil, whether that figure be Moshiach or Christ or Mahdi, Antichrist or Dajjal, should be cause for concern: from a religious perspective, because messianic expectations are precisely what Matthew is talking about when he writes that “false Christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matt 24.24) – and from a secular perspective because such identifications have been made again and again across history, often with disastrous results (think Waco, think the 1979 siege of Mecca, think the Taiping Rebellion).

That’s why I’m interested in monitoring the various strands of apocalyptic thinking out and about in the world today.

2

A little over a month earlier, on August 3, 2009, 09RPODUBAI316 under the sub-head “A Benevolent Dictator’s Fall from Grace” discussed the idea that the “Arab street” (both Sunni and Shi’a are mentioned) initially saw some Mahdist qualities in Ahmadinejad:

A Syrian journalist and blogger, who owns a media consultancy firm in Dubai, believes that many in the Arab street initially viewed Ahmadinejad when he came to power in 2005 as a “benevolent dictator.” Citing the tradition of the Mahdi, the media consultant argued that both Shi’a and Sunni Arabs are taught from early childhood to await the arrival of a strong and unimpeachable figure who will lead the Muslim world. The media consultant maintained that even secular Arabs view the world, albeit unintentionally, with this ingrained mindset. Our contact argued that Ahmadinejad played in to this narrative, and when Ahmadinejad arrived on the international stage many Arabs saw him, in contrast to their own flawed leaders, as a humble and pious man who was brave enough to stand up for his people and the greater Muslim world by confronting Israel and the West head on. However, both the intensely competitive campaign period and the forceful reaction by the Iranian people to the official election results have led some moderate Arabs to rethink Ahmadinejad’s true disposition. The election, the media consultant said, led some Arabs to understand that despite his astutely crafted and well-marketed image in the Arab world, Ahmadinejad is resented by many Iranians for domestic mismanagement, incompetence, and corruption. Because of this public fall from grace, so the media consultant told us, Ahmadinejad is no longer the “untouchable, holy figure” in the Arab world he once was — his flaws have brought him down to the level of the Arab world’s own imperfect leaders.

I’m reminded of the way that Steve Davis of Charleston, SC, among others, projected messianic qualities onto then-candidate Obama, when he wrote:

Barack’s appeal is actually messianic, it’s something about his aura, his spirit, his soul, that exudes enlightenment in the making.

I interpret Obama’s Lebanon, NH remarks as making light of that sort of projection (McCain’s video makes light of it, too), whereas Ahmadinejad appears to take his own status within the aura of the Mahdi all too seriously.

3

The last reference allows me to end on a happier note.

The French diplo Jean-Christophe Paucelle is quoted in 09PARIS1046 of July 31, 2009 on the topic of Ahmadinejad’s inauguration.

First he mentions that since non-Muslims had not been invited to previous inaugurations, European members of the diplomatic corps might not know which door to take if they wished to walk out on the ceremony, should such an action be called for… and then he discusses an additional reason why the French would attend the ceremony, despite the contested nature of the election:

Paucelle said that the case of detained French citizen Clothilde Reiss has also influenced the EU decision to attend the inauguration ceremonies. “We think she may be released soon, and we don’t want to create another irritant,” Paucelle said. “There are enough already.” He reported that the French have reason to believe Reiss may form part of a group of detainees likely to be released on the August 7 anniversary of Imam Mahdi. Paucelle noted that a letter released July 29 by Ahmadinejad supported the idea of granting clemency to post-election protesters during Mahdi celebrations. “The Iranians will need to take face-saving measures, and so she will likely transfer to house arrest or some other status,” Paucelle said. He added that, of course, she may not be released at all next week, but the French remain optimistic that she will soon be out of prison.

Clotilde Reiss was indeed not released on that occasion — but she was in fact freed somewhat later, on Sunday, May 16th, 2010.

Earlier this decade, it seemed that the French government was doing their best to oppose the United States. Someone asked me why.

So I struggled to come up with a way to explain my impressions concerning the foreign policy of The Fifth Republic at the time, finally settling on describing a child that stomped around in a fury, shrilly shrieking “We used to be a world power!” over and over again.

The reason why this image came to mind was due to the fact that France, like most European countries, had allowed their armed forces to rot away to the point that they had a terrible time projecting force beyond their borders. This loss of military ability corresponds to a loss in influence on the world stage. Instead of biting the bullet and increasing their commitment to building and maintaining a world class force of arms, the French under Jacques Chirac appeared to be determined to browbeat the United States into acting as a proxy branch of their own government.

The point to the overly long diatribe above is that regimes and cultures which have their own interests at stake are not inclined to listen to what you have to say if there are no consequences for refusing to negotiate.

Such dusty history sprang to mind when I spied this news article on the UK Telegraph server. It appears that two new aircraft carriers planned for the Royal Navy might just be the victims of budget shortfalls.

(Picture source.)

The top brass, desperate to save the carrier project, have proposed cutting the British fleet in half!

“In a final appeal to the National Security Council, Navy chiefs yesterday offered to make cuts that would reduce the senior service to its smallest since the time of Henry VIII.”

“The Navy has argued that having two carriers is vital if Britain is to retain its place as a top-rank military power.”

There is nothing quite like an aircraft carrier for getting hostile regimes to sit up and play nice, and it is true that the United Kingdom needs these carriers if they are to retain their present level of influence on the future history of humanity. And yet, reducing the fleet to such anemic levels would make it impossible for Great Britain to meet commitments in other areas.

You could say that the Royal Navy is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this issue.

If there is one thing this proves, it is that the United Kingdom is not ready to meekly slide down the slippery slope into insignificance. Let us hope that such resolve is enough.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

A while back I was going through all the books that line my shelves, culling some in order to make room for potential new entrants. Although I am trying to branch out a bit, a lot of the books are on military history, particularly of the WW2 and WW1 vintage (I am trying to read some more light-hearted materials).

One of the main participants in history of that era is of course the Germans and in particular the German General Staff. A lot of the books that had lain unread for a while related to various German military campaigns and biographies of their commanders.

As I sat looking at the stack of books going to various recyclers I started to think about how focusing on that era, and in particular the Germans, is so irrelevant to the world that we face today. I am not talking about war in the abstract or the fact that the Germans were excellent planners and professionals in many dimensions (although not all) which is always relevant, but the fact that today the Germans are such minor players on the world military stage and their past history, so to speak, is totally irrelevant towards future behavior.

I then noticed a news release about Germans being killed in battle… but they were German nationals killed by a drone attack working against coalition forces in the middle east! I realize that this is sensationalistic and under values the hard work and lives lost that the Germans as coalition members have suffered as part of their support in Afghanistan but still it was a jolt.

Here is the oddest thought of all… as Americans we have long made jokes at the expense of the French about their military prowess, with some foundation particularly the WW2 era. But today, which country is more likely to stand up for themselves in a time of crisis and utilize military power – I’d put my money on France, which still has entanglements in Africa and attempts to burn a fierce nationalistic pride, while the Germans de-emphasize national identity in particular a military outlook post WW2.

These books lining my shelves were telling me about the past, but not the future. There are many countries that will drive the future for military purposes, but the Germans aren’t one of them. While today our military is locked in struggles against terrorists and IED’s (as well as a civil war of sorts in Afghanistan) there certainly could be a showdown someday against an armed and organized nation state, whether it is Iran or China. It isn’t that the nation to nation showdowns, which have been pushed to the back burner in our current era, won’t come back – it is just that the players will be very different and while we may have a lot to learn from the past it is unknown how much of the WW2 experience in particular will be valuable for consideration.

I need to start over, and clear the shelves, literally as well as figuratively.

Cross posted at LITGM

The First World War, that is.

The Telegraph reports that Germany has made the final payment on its reparation obligations for World War I. (Actually, it appears that the payments being made by Germany since the end of WWII were not technically the reparations themselves, but rather repayment of bonds that were issued under Weimar to help fund the reparations. See this link.)

Read the rest of this entry »

This post, entitled Tea Party Has Elites on the Run, by Tony Blankley writing in Rasmussen Reports, is very much worth reading. It analyzes the Tea Party in light of the “remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning.

This very similar to the argument of Angelo Codevilla, both book form and article form.

Blankley goes on:

The tea party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by post-modern elitists. The movement’s central tenets — small government, decentralization of power and end to profligate spending — are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

RTWT.

BTW: This article about the Tea Party, by Jonathan Raban, from the usually Lefty New York Review of Books, from last February, is remarkable fair. Worth reading.

(I should mention that the NYRB’s review essays on historical subjects, including military history, are often very good. For example, this article about the French Foreign Legion by Max Hastings is very good. He warns “… only the foolish seek to romanticize this bleak, cruel fighting machine, loyal only to its own. ” But the foolish, myself included, continue to do so. And while we are at it here is Max Hastings’ list of the Ten Best Books About War. I’ve read five of them.)

[Photo credit: The picture above is from the Raban article in the NYRB.]

France says they are now at war with al Qaeda.

Well, sorta-kinda. Retribution military raids, really. No one is saying that France is going to go full bore on this.

Not that they really could anymore, considering how they have allowed their ability to project force rot on the vine in favor of social welfare giveaways to the voters. Unless they are conducting military operations inside their own borders, the options for France are kinda limited.

Creeping Sharia, via a commenter on this thread:
 

Whenever honor-shame rules assert themselves in civil society, the forces are badly matched unless the police is firm. In cases where the aggressors operate with impunity (essentially the situation in France), the pressure on civic communities will be either to get tribal (i.e., self-help justice), or to back off (which is what most français de souche are doing).
 
In this sense, it’s similar to the fall of the Roman Empire: tribal honor-shame, gang behavior coarsens the cultural scene and eventually brings down the rule of law as the areas where imperial writ runs retreat.
 
The parallel goes further. In the “experiment that got a little out of hand,” the Romans “invited” in the Germanic tribes and allowed them a legal advantage (a Frank or a Visigoths wergeld [manprice] was double that of a Roman. Similarly, the unofficial acceptance of Sharia puts the Muslim community at a tactical advantage in the daily conflicts.
 
This is how a civilization dies.

UPDATE: Richard Landes responds in the comments to criticisms of his Rome parallel.