Jay Manifold

I Am a Barbarian

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Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Scott has hit another metaphorical grand slam with this one, a worthily disconcerting follow-on to his earlier work. I have previously read (in order of publication, rather than the order in which I encountered them) The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State, and Two Cheers for Anarchism, and found them congenial. Scott is particularly good at encouraging a non-elite viewpoint deeply skeptical of State power, and in Against the Grain he applies this to the earliest civilizations. Turns out they loom large in our imagination due to the a posteriori distribution of monumental ruins and written records—structures that were often built by slaves and records created almost entirely to facilitate heavy taxation and conscription. Outside of “civilization” were the “barbarians,” who turn out to have simply been those who evaded control by the North Koreas and Venezuelas of their time, rather than the untutored and truculent caricatures of the “civilized” histories.

By these criteria, the United States of America is predominately a barbarian nation. In the order given above:

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CP-1 Diamond Anniversary Meetup(s)

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“We are great and we are grand, we make bombs beneath our stands!”

 

I have decided to attend various events around the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 and will therefore be in Hyde Park for about 48 hours, from late afternoon Thursday 30 November to late afternoon Saturday 2 December. As of now, the one known gathering is lunch at Valois, 1518 E 53rd (Harper Court, just west of Lake Park and the Metra Electric tracks), at 1 PM on Saturday.

Others are possible, however. I will be at the physics colloquium on Thursday afternoon in Kersten (SW corner of 57th & Ellis) and was thinking vaguely of pizza at Giordano’s (on Blackstone just south of 53rd) afterward, which means 6-ish. I expect to spend much of both Friday and Saturday mornings prowling the bookstores on 57th, and should also be free after around 7 Friday evening, when what seems to be the main event wraps up at Mandel Hall.

In general, respond in comments, and graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) around here for official events.

Reminder: Chicago Safe Spaces Tour

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As a promised follow-up to the original posting, I’ll be conspicuously attired in something resembling this (but without the hood). Well, and pants, shoes, etc. Also, there is a slight chance that I will actually talk my way into the tour of what I am calling Pierce the Younger, but it is to end at 4 PM tomorrow.
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NB: Sunday afternoon is likely to be wet. I am investigating the availability of some kind of water-repellent device, ideally collapsible for easy transport and storage.

Poukisa Mwen Te Ale An Ayiti

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After 240 years of relative quiescence, at 4:53 PM local time on Tuesday 12 January 2010 the Enriquillo fault system ruptured near 18 °27′ N, 72 °32′ W in an M 7.0 earthquake, followed by numerous aftershocks, mostly westward of the mainshock hypocenter. Institutional functionality, or the lack thereof, in Haiti prior to the earthquake was such that there was no local seismometer network in place, so nuances of slip in the 2010 earthquake involving several associated faults have had to be inferred from kinematic models.
The Enriquillo fault itself forms the boundary between the Gonâve Microplate and the Caribbean Plate, but seismic activity along it is driven by collision with, and subduction of, the North American Plate. The entire fault system may have begun a new cycle of large earthquakes similar to those of the 18th century, in which case there will be several more such events with significant effects in Haiti and the Dominican Republic through, very roughly, 2080.
Around half the entire US population donated money for Haitian earthquake relief in 2010. I may not have been among them, but as initially recounted in this forum in April of 2011, I was drawn into restoration work in a computer lab and fixed-wireless network in Petit-Goâve, and have subsequently assisted in similar efforts in Musac (Mizak), La Vallée-de-Jacmel. Paging through the visa section of my passport, I now find an astonishing number of red ENTRÉE and blue SORTIE stamps from the Ministere de l’Interieur et des Collectivites Territoriales / Direction de l’Immigration. My God, I’ve been down there 16 times. What was I thinking?
Something like this …

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