Meditations On St. Matthew's Passion

I saw Bach's St. Matthews Passion performed this past weekend at Bethany Lutheran Church in metropolitan Denver, feature the St. Matthew's Chamber Choir, the Baroque chamber orchestra (forgive me if I have not gotten the name exactly right, I am writing from memory), a guest choir of high school sopranos and tenors, and expended ranks of chorus and orchestra performers, a director and several solists selection especially for this performance.  It was a big production.  And, this bow to the deep reformation heritage of the piece was balanced by the modern touch of a recent manga adaptation of the Stations of the Cross blown up into massive posters around the church. 

(This was not the only big Passion performance in town.  A performance of St. John's Passion, a work of a similar scope and scale was also being performed in Denver this weekend). 

The entire 3 hours and twenty minute performance in the original 18th century German covers Chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew (based on Martin Luther's translation adapted to the phrasing necessary for a vocal work) which run two to eight pages in a Bible depending on font size and page size covering the four day period from the Tuesday before Easter (i.e. after the events that are part of the Palm Sunday narrative)  through "Good Friday", but not the Easter story itself (along with some Lutheran hymns and some devotional poetry).

When it was originally performed in Germany several times from about 1726 to 1846 (my paternal ancestors or their relatives very likely saw it performed before leaving for America), a sermon was delivered in between the first and second part.  It would have taken the better part of a day to perform together with a sermon and a presumably longer (perhaps lunch length) intermission. 

This quintessentially Baroque Lutheran oratorio is very intense, deeply spiritual, and precisely crafted, but passionate, not so much. Bach was also most definitely not a believer in the show don't tell school of storytelling.

(A footnote: One of my distant relatives grew up in the same town a Bach and would have been a classmate or peer of his with some connection to that family.)

A Police Procedural Narrative Core

Taken so slowly, one of the narrative aspects of the story that struck me was how much it is a police procedural.  The narrative Gospels give intense attention of the criminal justice process that went into the crucifixion of Jesus, carefully noting who was to blame and why. 

There are prophetic and theological glosses that are thicker in Matthew and Luke and the incomplete (and earliest) accounts in St. Paul's Epistles than in Mark, and thicker still in the Gospel of John and some of the extra-canonical accounts of the Passion, suggesting that much of the material was interpolated and interpreted by later authors from the bare framework that they received to which they added what they felt followed logicially.

Tabor's perspective, in which the important part of the Passion for the Jerusalem based dynastic movement reaching out to fellow Jews and continued by James the Just was the fact of the death, facilitating a succession from hereditarily ordained Jesus (through both paternal and maternal lines) to his brother James, rather than a resurrection attoning for all of mankind's sins, casts an interesting perspective on the story that the Gospel narrative structure does something to support.  For them, the key points were to establish that Jesus had indeed died, so that James was entitled to succeed him, and to show the injustices on Earth of a process that they sought to replace.

Echos of Tobit

I was also struck by a detail of the St. Matthew's Gospel which I had forgotten and supposedly fulfilled a prophecy of Jerimiah, that the disciple Judas returned the 30 pieces of silver paid to him to betray Jesus to the authorities by kissing him before committing suicide, and that the Temple authorities reached a consensus that the funds should be used to pay for the establishment of a potter's field. 

It was striking to me this time, because one of the few (and non-canonical) religious texts attributed to the Jesus movement shows a striking similarity to the apocryphal Book of Tobit (which I also read recently) and Tobit was distinguished in his piety and charity in particular by securing proper Jewish burials for men who would otherwise not have received them. 

Thus, it suggests that this kind of "memorial gift" may have been quite in tune with that of the Jesus movement, even though disposal of the remains of the dead in accordance with Jewish law is mostly something that Gentile Christians following Paul see as part of the Old Covenant to which they were no longer compelled to adhere.

An anti-democratic parable

Another feature of the story that comes up in Bach's retelling is the very anti-democratic political message of the Passion. Saint Matthew's Passion is at its base a vivid case of a man being executed based upon the nearly unanimous popular will of the people who overcome the misgiving of the non-democratically appointed Governor appointed by a distant Roman Empire over a restive, recently acquired territory. 

It seems through the mists of time that the Jerusalem Jesus movement was something of a constitutional monarchy with a hereditary monarch who took counsel was a very broad based of leaders in the movement at various levels a bit like a House of Lords or College of Cardinals.  But, the leading sects of Christianity, with its insistance on celibate clergy or at least celibate Bishops, took paths of succession that were neither hereditary nor democratic that blended Last Will and Testament models and self-perpetuating board of directors models.  True democratic governance of the church doesn't appear until the Reformation and while it surfaces among Calvinists and Puritans and Anabaptists, is not nearly so well established among Lutheran and Anglican components of the Reformation.

The capacity modern Christian conservatives to see democratic capitalism in a religion that has never been democratic and indeed has at its core an anti-democratic parable, and that repeatedly decried the evils of wealth and property, is nothing short of astounding.

Anti-democratic sentitment filters it was into Saint Matthrew's Passion at three levels - the circumstances of the Gospel's author, the circumstances surrounding Bach's composition of the work, and the circumstances surrounding its restoration as a core piece in the classical repetoire after it had been all but forgotten in the early 1800s.

Emperor Augustus, who figures in the Christian nativity story, reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE, was the first Emperor of Rome after five centuries in wihch it was in principle and name, at least, a Republic. Military rule, coups and family influence rather than modern democratic elections often determined who would rule Rome, but before then it had not been formally conceived as a monarchical empire either.  Tiberius, whom the Passion story recounts as the Emperor at the time, was the first ruler of Rome to prove that the Empire was more than a mere name by taking office in orderly succession from Augustus.  Caligula and Nero, two of the most despised rulers of Rome in all of classical history (tradition has it that Saint Paul, the most notable early evangelist of Christianity to the Gentiles died in prison in Rome during Nero's reign), cemented the capacity of the Empire system of put rulers in place notwithstanding grave personal flaws that would have prevented them from taking office, or at least from holding it, during the Roman Republic.  Early Gentile Christians made peace with an unbeatable Empire rather than aspiring to overthrow its temporal power, after a wave of martyrs failed in that revolutionary effort.

By the time that the canonical Gospels were written, the Empire was firmly established with a dozen or more successions of Emperors, and the Rome Empire had been in place for three and a half centuries when the Republic faded to no more than legendary history when Emperor Constantine who took office in 324 CE promptly made Christianity the state religion of Rome (it had become a leading and perhaps even dominant religion in Rome much earlier but was so divided by internal quarrels between Christian sects that it struggled to consolidate power until Constantine decisively backed the strongest participant in those struggles).

Bach was an establishment figure in Lutheran Europe who survived on the patronage of secular and sacred princes before any kind of democracy was in place anywhere but Iceland and perhaps parts of Switzerland and a few pirate villages and free cities. 

At the time that Bach composed the Saint Mattew's Passion, the most notable instance of Republican rule was during Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Republic in England from 1649 to 1660 when the monarchy was restored after a decade that displayed purely democratic rule unchecked by the aristocracy and monarchy in a very poor light.  In principle, the supremacy of Parliament and the rule of law in England was established in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and English Bill of Rights of 1689, a  generation before Bach wrote the Passion, but in practice, the British monarchy and aristocracy had still not completely transitioned into a purely symbolic rule during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) (from whom reigning Queen Elizabeth is only four generations removed).

While the St. Matthew's Passion was composed before the French Revolution, democratic lynchings for political purposes echoing those of Cromwell's England that were commonplace in revolutionary France and these events would have been fresh in the minds of audiences watching it when St. Matthew's Passion was revived in the early 1800s after it had gone unperformed for almost two generations after the initial two or three productions in the years running up to the generallly failed democratic revolutions of 1848.  At the time of its revival elite anxiety over a new round of democratic uprisings and mob rule was tangible, and the Republican experiment in the New World was still an unproven and unstable enterprise constantly divided by tensions between the Southern cash crop agrarian, international trade based slave economy, and the Northern early industrial economy.

By the time that democracy was no longer predominantly seen as something other than mob rule to be terrified of, Bach's oratorio was firmly esconced in the repetoire of sacred classics that had lost any political messages they may have had at critical moments in their histories, a torch then passed to nationalist anthems like Finlandia.

What part of this headline makes no sense?

Syrian Civil War: CIA assisting in secret program to arm rebels.
 

- Denver Post, Page 1A, March 25, 2013.

Gated communities are a mixed blessing

"[G]ated communities do lower the odds of experiencing a residential burglary even when controlling for housing unit factors such as tenure, income, and geographical location as well as individual characteristics such as age [and] race." . . .  [but are] at greater risk of other crimes, such as intimate partner violence, bullying, or violent assault in or near the home, because the victim is "locked in" with the offender. . . [and] at great risk from minor offences, such as vandalism committed by bored and over-controlled adolescents.
 

From here citing Lynn A. Addington, Callie Marie Rennison. Keeping the Barbarians Outside the Gate? Comparing Burglary Victimization in Gated and Non-Gated Communities. 30 Justice Quarterly (2013 in advance of printed edition) (as an aside, the title of the journal, which is published six times a year, is not entirely accurate).  Co-Author Callie Marie Rennison is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado ––Denver.

Gated communities also shift opportunistic burglaries to neighboring communities and can impair first responder response times.

The study uses an expansive definition of gated communities that includes not only tradition high end suburban enclaves but also middle and low income gated communities such as gated apartment complexes, trailer parks and public housing projects.

Both the risks and benefits of gates communities, however, must be taken in perspective. Residential burglaries are rare and gated community residence is not a leading risk factor for domestic violence.

According to a 1999 study in the New England Journal of Medicine (Demetrios N. Kyriacou, Deirdre Anglin, Ellen Taliaferro, Susan Stone, Toni Tubb, Judith A. Linden, Robert Muelleman, Erik Barton, and Jess F. Kraus, "Risk Factors for Injury to Women from Domestic Violence" 341 New England Journal of Medicine 1892-1898 (December 16, 1999)) (blockquoted material not in the same sequence as in original):

Domestic violence is the most common cause of nonfatal injury to women in the United States. . . . Women at greatest risk for injury from domestic violence include those with male partners who abuse alcohol or use drugs, are unemployed or intermittently employed, have less than a high-school education, and are former husbands, estranged husbands, or former boyfriends of the women. . . The 256 intentionally injured women had a total of 434 contusions and abrasions, 89 lacerations, and 41 fractures and dislocations. In a multivariate analysis, the characteristics of the partners that were most closely associated with an increased risk of inflicting injury as a result of domestic violence were alcohol abuse (adjusted relative risk, 3.6; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.2 to 5.9); drug use (adjusted relative risk, 3.5; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.0 to 6.4); intermittent employment (adjusted relative risk, 3.1; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.1 to 8.8); recent unemployment (adjusted relative risk, 2.7; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.2 to 6.5); having less than a high-school education (adjusted relative risk, 2.5; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.4 to 4.4); and being a former husband, estranged husband, or former boyfriend (adjusted relative risk, 3.5; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.5 to 8.3).

Civil Unions Bill In Colorado Signed

Governor Hickenlooper signed Colorado's civil unions bill yesterday.  It takes effect on May 1, 2013.

Onion Once Again Painfully True

Follow your passions, in your spare time.

Twinkies Worth $410 Million

The discontinued Twinkie and related snack cake brands have been sold in a bankruptcy auction for $410 million to a pair of private equity firms, over the objections of Hostess labor unions.  The new buyers plan to get the snacks back on store shelves within about six months.  Some of the sale involves snack making factories and equipment, but most of the value of the transaction is for intellectual property, principally trademark related goodwill for the brands and the trade secret recipes.  The funds will add to the pot of funds used to pay the bankrupt company's creditors.

The Wonderbread and Nature's Pride bread brands together with twenty bakeries were bought by one of the company's competitors for $360 million.  The Beefsteak brand of bread was sold to another competitor for $31.9 million.  The Eddy's, Standish Farms and Grandma Emilie's bread brands were sold to a third competitor for $30.9 million.  A hearing on the sale of the Drake's Coffee Cake, Ring Dings and Devil Dogs were sold to a fourth competitor for $27.5 million is set for early April.

The total debts scheduled in the bankruptcy are about $1.47 million with much of this owed to secured creditors in amounts of hundreds of millions and the union pension fund.  These liquidations of large chunks of the business will net a bit more than $860 million, in addition to any asserts that were associated with any of the brands.  So, secured creditors and priority creditors (like the bankruptcy law firms) are likely be paid in full, general creditors are likely to receive a meaningful number of cents on the dollar, subordinated debt (about $100 million) will probably receive nothing, and the shareholders will almost surely be wiped out. 

To whom is the debt owed?  "Hostess lists the Bakery and Confectionary Union Pension fund as its largest creditor, with a debt of $994 million. Hostess is also behind in payments to a long list of suppliers, such as Cargill."

Given that the union bears considerably more than two-thirds of the brunt of any undervaluation of assets in the bankruptcy, it isn't too surprising that it was especially concerned about an undervalued sale.  Most of the company's bonds had been bought up by hedge funds at a discount who were more risk tolerant regarding the outcome of the banikruptcy than the long term holders of those bonds.  They were fine as long as they purchased the distressed bonds at a low enough price, and the bulk of the long term bondholders with less risk tolerance had already decided to cut their losses by selling out to the hedge funds.

The company's union will have to successfully unionize the operations of the new owners if it wants to continue to exist for any purpose other than linger implementation of the bankruptcy court's order.  It has been busted.  Management claimed that excessive demands from the union forced the bankruptcy, but the great disparity between the auction price and the amount of the company's debts casts serious doubt on that conclusion.  A declining market for junk food, rather than labor-management relations seems to be the most likely cause, even if union demands may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

Elite Athletes Are Cognitively Distinct

Elite volleyball players are in general better at multi-tasking, focusing on relevant details in complex situations, and "executive function."  In short, elite volleyball players are the antithesis of people with ADHD.  (I am reluctant to make the conceptual leap to "elite athletes" made in the materials below, because different sports may call for different skill sets.  An ability to manage complex sensory input, for example, while helpful in volleyball may be irrelevant for marathon runners.)

The study of 87 top-ranked Brazilian volleyball players, some of them medalists in the Beijing and London Olympics, and 67 of their nonathletic contemporaries also found that being an athlete minimized the performance differences that normally occur between women and men.

Female athletes were more like their male peers in the speed of their mental calculations and reaction times, while nonathletic females performed the same tasks more slowly than their male counterparts.

Overall, the athletes were faster at memory tests and tasks that required them to switch between tasks. They were quicker to notice things in their peripheral vision and to detect subtle changes in a scene. And in general, they were better able to accomplish tasks while ignoring confusing or irrelevant information.

Female athletes had significant cognitive advantages over their nonathletic counterparts, advantages that minimized the subtle speed differences between them and the men. The female athletes were faster than their nonathletic peers at detecting changes in a scene and could more quickly pick out relevant details from a distracting background. Their performance on these and the other tasks was on par with the male athletes, whereas nonathletic males consistently outperformed their female peers.

"I think we have learned that athletes are different from us in some ways," said University of Illinois psychology professor and Beckman Institute Director Arthur Kramer, who led the study with graduate student Heloisa Alves. "We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life. They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than nonathletes. I would say these were modest differences, but they were interesting differences nonetheless."

Non-athletes excelled at only one of the cognitive tests the researchers administered. In this test, called the stopping task, participants were asked to type a "Z" or "/" key as soon as they saw it on a computer screen – unless they heard a tone shortly after the character appeared, in which case they were told to refrain from responding. Non-athletes tended to be faster in cases where the tone never sounded, while athletes were better at inhibiting their responses after hearing a tone.  The ability to inhibit a response is one marker of what brain researchers call "executive function," the capacity to control, plan and regulate one's behavior[.]

From here.

Why Does Psychosis Manifest When It Does?

Psychosis, a somewhat dated term of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, two of the most serious mental conditions each of which has a well established hereditary pattern and biological basis (and may have partially common genetic origins), generally manifest in late adolescence or early young adulthood.

The best guess of neuroscientists and psychiatrists is that this happens because of a major transformation in our brains at that point in life.

[R]emarkable changes occur in the brain as it prunes away neuronal connections and makes the major transition from childhood to adulthood.  Irwin Feinberg, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the UC Davis Sleep Laboratory [tells us], "Our outcome confirms that the brain goes through a remarkable amount of reorganization during puberty that is necessary for complex thinking."  Feinberg explained that scientists have generally assumed that a vast number of synapses are needed early in life to recover from injury and adapt to changing environments. These multiple connections, however, impair the efficient problem solving and logical thinking required later in life.

From here.

A study together with two related prior studies of the same children described in the linked story above tracked EEG readings of sleeping children over ten years (for two nights ever si months) has directly documented this transition taking place.

EEG fluctuations during the deepest (delta or slow wave) phase of sleep, when the brain is most recuperative, consistently declined for 9- to 18-year-olds. . . . This led the team to conclude that the streamlining of brain activity — or "neuronal pruning" — required for adult cognition occurs together with the timing of reproductive maturity. . . . [S]ynaptic density in the cerebral cortex reaches its peak at age 8 and then begins a slow decline. The recent findings . . . confirm that the period of greatest and most accelerated decline occurs between the ages of 12 and 16-1/2 years, at which point the drop markedly slows.

"Discovering that such extensive neuronal remodeling occurs within this 4-1/2 year timeframe during late adolescence and the early teen years confirms our view that the sleep EEG indexes a crucial aspect of the timing of brain development," said Feinberg.

Psychosis, the leading theories to explain it hypothesize, happens when defectively thin connections between different parts of the brain lack enough capacity to distinguish between true sensory signals and noise, leading to cognitive hallucinations as the mind tries to make sense of mere random noise, or emotional whiplash as false triggers for mood changes cascade into intense mood swings that have no real environmental basis. 

In childhood, the excess of synapes in place before adolescent pruning of synapses provide enough excess connective capacity to make adequate signal-noise distinctions in the brain.  But, when this excess synaptic capacity is pruned in adolescence, the too thin connections that remain can no longer do their job and the descent into psychosis begins.

The finding also have relevance for educators and parents. 

The synapses that survive the pruning the adolescence are the ones the brain sees being used at the time.

Some kinds of learning, perhaps foreign language learning, mathematics, musical ability and the task of being able to override "what you think you see" to draw what you actually see, all require considerable brain plasticisty that is at its peak from ages eight to twelve, and may be profoundly more difficult to master at age seventeen and beyond.  Our peak learning capacity may be in the late elementary and middle school years, with our ability to learn many kinds of things greatly diminished by the time we are college aged.

Given that developmental reality, it may be foolish to focus immense economic resources and attention of the best higher educational system in the world, while leaving elementary and middle school education to happenstance with far less attention and far fewer resources.

The Class Divide In Marriage

College-educated women typically have their first child two years after marrying. The high school graduates as a group have their first child two years before they ­marry.  In a statistic that runs counter to the image of unmarried mothers as reckless teenagers, the study said 58 percent of first births to women who have graduated only from high school are out of wedlock.
 

From here based upon a study entitled Knot Yet.  The study, which attempts to profile the costs and benefits to delaying marriage, opens with this observation:

The age at which men and women marry is now at historic heights—27 for women, and 29 for men—and is still climbing. The age at which women have children is also increasing, but not nearly as quickly as the delay in marriage.  

Median age at first birth has been lower than median age of marriage since about 1989, when I graduated from high school.  According to the study 48% of all births today are to unmarried women.

The biggest factor seems to be the declining capacity of men without college educations to provide a middle class life.

[T]he economic foundations that girded marriage in the mid-twentieth century have collapsed. In 1970, a man could count on finding a blue-collar job that paid an honest wage, where he could continue to work until he retired on a comfortable pension. At that time, a quarter of Americans, almost all of them men, still worked in the manufacturing sector; another significant percentage were in sectors requiring little formal education, like construction, mining, or utilities. The large majority of workers had, at best, a high-school education; college was financially unrealistic and largely irrelevant to their stable, decent-paying job. By their early twenties, or even their late teens, they were ready to support a family. . . .

For years now, men without a high-school diploma have had little hope for a stable job that could support a family. Obtaining a pension is like winning the World Series. Now, especially since the Great Recession, the same hard luck has come to those who have completed high school. In 2010, the national unemployment rate for people sixteen to twenty-four with only a high-school diploma was 24.6 percent, compared to a rate of 8 percent for the college educated.. . .

Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that growing numbers of Middle Americans are postponing marriage to their late twenties or thirties, or foregoing marriage altogether, as they search for jobs that will provide them with a middle-class lifestyle.

Women in the workforce, meanwhile, have seen their economic prospects improve dramatically since the 1970s and are now more likely to be college educated than men.  For example, in 1970, the percentage of law school students who were women was less than 5%, now at least half of law students are women.

UPDATE:  A quick observation as a footnote.  As is often the case a study that makes perceptive observations about the nature of the problem often veers off course when proposing solutions in a somewhat cursory conclusion.  I didn't recap its policy recommendation even though some of them may be sensible,  because they draw so heavily of matters beyond the scope of the study.

One point that is often missed when marriage policy is addressed that bears considering and caution in making any recommendation, however, is that most pro-marriage policy solutions are quite indiscriminate.  They encourage getting married and staying married in a way that is very ambivalent about the quality of the marriage itself.  The same policies that keep couples together in the face of external financial stress or simply getting "bored" of each other or feeling that one can find a more perfect soulmate also keep couples together in situations that most outsiders would consider abusive either physically or emotionally, or otherwise problematic in ways that justify the end of a marriage.

Even policies that were designed to make that distinction, like the fault based divorce regime did a poor job in practice of making those distinctions.

On the other hand, both domestic violence and child abuse are often correlated with financial stresses and marriage instability.  So, reducing financial stress on families could strengthen marriages and in the process undermine the external pressures that predispose people in those difficult situations to resorting to domestic violence and child abuse which may be seen as inferior tools that some people resort to when their families are falling apart anyway. 

For example, one recent study found an extremely strong link between severe domestic violence leading to felony criminal charges and actual or suspected infidelity by a female partner (this was present in almost every single such case in the Washington State county where the study based on discussions in recorded phone calls made by incarcerated men was conducted).  But, if women in financially secure families are less likely to have affairs, and men in financially secure families are less likely to worry about affairs whether or not this is mere paranoia, then greater financial security might greatly reduce serious domestic violence.

Similarly, poverty and the presence of a stepparent or non-biologically related adult in a household with a child are the two greatest risk factors for child abuse and neglect.  Financially secure families that stay in the same marriage that produced the couple's children greatly reduce both of these risk factors.

Zippers Can Be Dangerous

More than five thousand men a year end up in the emergency room with zipper related genital injuries.

Life As A Night Owl

A post entitled Zombie days and Vampire nights aptly describes what my life as a notorious morning hater is like at its worst phases.

[My] research is waking me up at night at random times (lets say 3 or 4 in the morning) and then I have trouble going to sleep. In a certain sense, this must be how vampires feel: completely alert and awake at night with a clear vision of what needs to be done and and how to do it (this is a typical romanticized version of vampires, which do exist in nature, but look nothing like count Dracula, which is the typical class of vampire that this post refers to).

This wakefulness at night has profound consequences for my days at work. Basically, I’m not getting enough sleep and I walk the corridors with a slight headache and a characteristic lack of brain function during the day. Essentially, the only thing that keeps me separated from being a true zombie is that I’m still technically alive and my body parts are not falling as I shuffle by in the corridors.

Getting a sufficiently high dose of caffeine is not doing the usual trick. So if you see me walking around like zombie: don’t worry. It’ll be fixed during the midnight hours.

Austerity Measures Contract GDP

Austerity measures, like cuts in government spending, in response to recessions, only make things worse and reduce GDP.

Lower Taxes Still Don't Create Economic Growth

One of the most widely made economic policy claims, usually by Republicans, is that lower taxes lead to economic growth.

In fact, there is no empirical evidence to support that claim despite numerous studies attempting to show that this is the case.  Instead, the average impact, to the extent that there is any relationship between overall taxation burdens and economic growth, is that higher taxes lead to slightly stronger economic growth.

More on secularization

The quadrupling of the market share of adults who are non-religious from 5% in 1972 to 20% in 2012 accompanied by a 50.2% increase in population over that time period, means that the number of people who identify as non-religious in the United States has increased sixfold in absolute numbers over 40 years. 

This is an annualized growth rate in the number of non-religious adults in America of 4.6% per year over 40 years, and it has been fairly steady.  The change in the market share of non-religious people doubled in both the first twenty years and in the second twenty years, so the growth rates for both half samples are almost identical.

About 60% of non-religious people in America today were raised in religious households and personally decided to set religion aside.

Most religious denominations have substantial corps of full time professional missionaries and clergy, in addition to well organized volunteer organizations involving a substantial share of their active membership, substantial institutional resources of money and property, well honed sales pitches that have been decades or centuries in the making, and the advantage of starting out with a favorable status quo.

There is no corps of professional missionaries out there actively trying to convert people to be non-religious.  There are very few institutional resources or organized groups of volunteers devoted to promoting or maintaining a specifically non-religious lifestyle.  There are a few small secular community organizations, but almost none have more than 100,000 members within demographic that includes household with about 63 million Americans.  There are no well established scripts for the narrow task of encouraging people to become non-religious, or the broader task of living a non-religious life.

Stigmas are waning but remain real.  Legal protections of the rights of the non-religious have been on the books since the late 1700s, but have had practical effectiveness until the Warren Court of the 1970s.

Instead, this is a trend driven almost entirely by the force of pervasive ideas that suffuse our culture.

Mostly, secularism in the United States has been a grassroots movement of atomized individuals making personal choices that make sense driven by the force of ideas more than anything else in an increasingly scientific, global, tolerant, feminist, inclusive society in which the message of religious organizations are no longer credible and now seems more immoral than moral on key matters like the role of women and gay rights.  It also is taking place in the context of a society in which all institutions of civil society that require personal involvement have been eroding.  A fair amount of the shift is also a reaction and counterrevolution of ideas in response to increased political activism by conservative Christians.

The percentage of Americans who are non-religious will almost surely grow as young adults aged eighteen to twenty-four, a third of whom are currently non-religious, grow older and as the trend reaches a tipping point.  Another doubling in market share from 20% to 40% in the twenty years between 2012 and 2032 would not be out of the realm of possibility, although that may be a bit high.  Any model of growth in market share of anything needs to assume a logistic curve rather than exponential growth, but S shaped logistic curves tend to be steepest in the mid-range of percentages, so there is no good reason to think that the next twenty years will show substantial slowing of this trend.

About four times as many kids will grow up in non-religious household as did among people who are currently adults, while all of the factors that led 13%-14% of Americans who were raised in religious households in the last four decades to become non-religious will only grow more powerful.  People making that transition now face less of a social stigma, have more role models for living their lives, have more fellow travellers to provide peer support, and live in a world in which there is greater scientific consensus, there is a more global outlook, there is profoundly greater tolerance of gay rights, and gender equality is better established, than the world in which today's adults came of age.  It wouldn't be surprising to see as much as an 8%-10% shift in market share attributable to these factors over the next twenty years in addition to baseline established by today's young adults.

My children see this in the schools within the Denver Public School's district that they've attended in which most parents are non-immigrant, white liberals, who Generation X or younger, a population in which more than 40% of the population national is non-religious.  They have many peers who are either non-religious or who have a religious affiliation but aren't very actively involved in attending church or other religious activities.  Certainly, they know people who attend some kind of Christian church every week and are active in church youth groups and all of their relatives in my parent's generation are actively practicing Christians.  But, they know almost as many people who are actively practicing Jews as they do who are actively practicing Christians and they know or at least know of a few classmates who are actively practicing Muslims or actively practice Eastern religions.

This growth in the non-religious population is coming and will continue to come mostly at the expense of infrequently church attending Christians, particularly non-immigrant Catholics and mainline Christian churches.  The residual Christian population will include a larger share of immigrant populations, more socially conservative, more theologically evangelical and more doctrinally orthodox Christians.  The emerging red state, blue state regional and urban-rural divides in religiosity will grow greater.  Forty percent of liberals are non-religious, while only nine percent of conservatives are non-religious.  Liberals in the next generation will be far more likely to have grown up in non-religious households and will be far more likely to be receptive to the ideas that have driven so many liberals relative to conservatives to deconvert in the first place.

Twenty years from now, a majority (perhaps even a substantial majority) of white and Asian Democrats will probably be non-religious, while only a distinct although growing minority of Republicans will be non-religious.

Establishment Christianity as a baseline default assumption involving affiliation with formerly established national churches is disappearing.  The Christians who remain, in a context more similar to the early Christian church than last thousand years (ironically, with the exception of the pervasively evangelical Christian South where local denominations mostly strive to emulate the early Christian church).  They are once again becoming a minority with a distinctive culture and set of world views united against a world dominated by heathens and heretics, rather than an establishment universal membership institution.  There will be "marketing pressure" for residual Christian communities such as non-denominational churches to downplay the anti-scientific, homophobic, sexist and anti-government stances that helped prompt tens of millions of deconversions.  But, paradoxically, the people who remain and organize residual Christian institutions will be precisely those people who weren't turned off from Christianity as a result of those messages.

Apologists who argue that some of the ugly stereotypes about Evangelical Christian or conservative Islamic or ultra-Orthodox Jews aren't accurate in sourcing their unpopular views in scriptural and authoritative religious doctrinal statements are mostly wrong.  Saint Paul, the Quaran, and the Torah really do say the things that are totally unacceptable from the perspective of modern Western cultural norms.  The "moderates" include mainline Christian churches, to a greater or lesser extent the Roman Catholic church depending on the issue, Reformed and Conservative Jews, the more moderate traditional varieties of Islamic religious practice like the Alawites of Syria, the Sufis of Southern Pakistan, and many of the Muslim communities of Southeast Asia.  Each of these religious communities have tamed the ugly core of the religious tradition from which they evolved.   Each learned to utilized somewhat tortured interpretations of religious scriptures and doctrines that have become traditional, a pattern of ignoring or deemphasizing inconvenient truths about their religion's doctrines, and mediation of religious instruction through formally trained specialist clergy who have learned to navigate these paths of moderation.

For example, Islamic fundamentalism is more a product not of ignorance per se, but of rising literacy, which allowed ordinary people to bypass the interpretive gloss of traditional Islamic religious figures that used to mediate the messages of the Quaran and other authoritative religious statements like Hadith, to reach the hard core, rather than simply being an elite clergy driven trend.  Islamic fundamentalist leaders are people who got out in front of a parade that rising literacy had already brought about whose literalistic and unmediated or interpreted readings of these texts puts them in line with emerging movements driven by the force of ideas in the readings of these core materials without much of a gloss, even when they may take views that are minority ones among formally trained traditional Islamic religious figures (except in a few places like Saudi Arabia which is the hub of the Islamic world as a result of the commandment that Muslims make a haj that have actively coopted the global power associated with fundamentalist movement brought about by global improvements in literacy (but not sophisticated high level interpretive graduate school level moderating concepts) for soft political power reasons).

Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism has a lot in common with the highly unnuanced conservative take on economics that incorporates the overly idealized free market concepts taught in Econ 101 classes in high schools or entry level college surveys, but dispenses with the nuances and qualifications that more advanced classes add to that foundation.

Most non-religious people in the United States are not considered atheists committed to a metaphysically natural worldview philosophically.  But, they are also much more secular in their attitudes and beliefs on a whole host of subjects than religiously affiliated theists.  There is a great deal of room for an innovative religious movement to emerge and draw in both non-religious identifiers and affiliated but weakly committed Christians and Jews.  Although, I doubt that this population is very amenable to inclusion in a formal organization, as opposed to a decentralized movement or trend.  But, it isn't obvious to me what direction that might take and if it does take it may look more like superstition or folk religion than it does like organized Christian or Jewish denominationally organized religious bodies.

Secularism Faces New Pope On Day One

The Roman Catholic Church selected a new Pope today, a Cardinal from Argentina, the first South American Pope ever.  Another news story defines what may be his greatest challenge, at least in the American and European churches: secularism and declining adult adherence of cradle Catholics to their faith.

Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s, according to analysis of newly released survey data by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University. Last year . . . UC Berkeley researchers found that 20 percent of a nationally representative group reported no religious preference. That's a jump from 1990 when all but 8 percent of Americans polled identified with an organized fait

From here.

The percentage of Americans who are not religous has more than doubled since I was in college.  It has increased fourfold since 1972 (not too long after I was born). 

At this point 40% of liberals and a third of people aged 18-24 are not religious.  Only 8% of those surveyed were raised with no religion and just 3% self-identify as atheists. "Educational differences among those claiming "no religion" are small compared to other demographic differences."

"About one-third of Americans identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, one-quarter are Catholics (although 35 percent were raised Catholic) and 1.5 percent are Jewish."

Civil Unions Bill Headed To Governor In Colorado

The Colorado General Assembly has passed a civil unions bill (Senate Bill 11) which is headed to Governor Hickenlooper who is sure to sign the bill.  It was passed without any amendments in the state house.  The bill affords same sex couples (or opposite sex couples who choose to have a civil union rather than a marriage) virtually all of the legal protections and rights and obligations of marriage.

The bill will become law on May 1, 2013 (assuming that Governor Hickenlooper signs it later this month as expected), with Colorado then becoming the eighteenth state to have same sex marriage or civil unions (except that one provision relating to health insurance coverage takes effect January 1, 2014).

State Constitutionally Rooted Limitations

A state constitutional amendment adopted in a 55-45 vote in 2006 prohibited the Colorado General Assembly from passing a same sex marriage bill without a state constitutional amendment approved by voters, which is likely to be proposed in the near future. The bill also does not authorize civil union members to file joint income tax returns at the state level because the Colorado state constitution provides is derivative of federal tax laws.  The lack of full marriage status could matter for a variety of federal law purposes, such as immigration laws and federal tax laws.

Legislative Supporters

The bill was sponsored by State House Speaker Mark Ferrandino (D-Denver) and State Senator Pat Steadman (D-Denver), both of whom are gay men who have represented me in the Colorado General Assembly in the past (I've since moved and am no longer in either man's district).  I served on the vacancy committee that elected Steadman."  There are currently five gay or lesbian representatives out of sixty-five in the state house and three gay or lesbian senators out of thirty-five in the state senate in Colorado (all of whom are Democrats), a reasonable approximation of the proportion of Coloradoans who are gay or lesbian.

Republicans killed civil unions bills in two previous legislative sessions (as detailed here).  Twenty-six out of the twenty-eight Republicans in the state house voted against this bill this year.  In the state senate this year, fourteen out of fifteen Republicans voted against the bill.  Thus, the bill won the votes of 63% of state house lawmakers and 60% of state senators in addition to the support of Governor Hickenlooper, a Democrat.  All of the Democrats in the Colorado General Assembly and three Republican women (Representatives Cheri Gerou of Evergreen and Carole Murray of Castle Rock, and Senator Jean White of Hayden) voted for the bill.

White cited support for a gay niece and nephew in her part of the floor debate.  My current State Senator Linda Newell (D-Littleton) whose bumber sticker graces my car, said this vote was for her gay brother Bill who didn't come out until he was fifty years old.

The Woman Who Speaks A Mystery Language

Language Log is currently crowdsourcing a difficult question out of an International Organization for Migration office in Nepal.  A destitute woman who is a refugee is in Kathmandu, Nepal speaks and writes in a manner that officials there have been unable to identify with any known language. 

A writing sample and two sound clips, along with some additional information on the woman and her cirumstances have been provided. Click on the link to listen to the sound clip.  A copy of the writing sample is below the break (in this circumstance, reproduction is fair use for copyright purposes).  Many likely candidate languages have been ruled out; no identification has been definitively made by anyone.  The office's goal is to identify her place of origin or family ties in the hope that she may find a home and a support network.  So long as she is stateless, she does not even benefit from counsular assistance from the country of which she may be a national. 

More information about her background and analysis from experts concerning what her linguistic background could be appear below. 

I have taken the highly unusual step (for this blog) of disabling comments on this post, because this crowdsourcing effort is not just an academic exercise.  The point is to facilitate assistance a few minutes of assitance from many people in the blogosphere who have specialized knowledge for a real woman who is destitute, stateless and without family as a refugee in Nepal, so if you have anything useful to contribute in the form of a comment, please do so at the Language Log post linked above so that she may (indirectly) receive the benefit of your insights.    My own comments to that post (not reproduced below, because they aren't very authoritative) are limited to the written materials, as I lack the ear or expertise to discern anything from the sound clips with my own ears other than her mood and possible state of mind when they were produced.

Roman Catholic Church Color Challenged

You don't have to be an expert on the symbols and regalia of the Roman Catholic Church to know that Cardinals, who are a notch below the Pope and a notch above Bishops in the church hierarchy are distinguished because they wear red robes.

Only, they don't!  Watching the Cardinals file into the Conclave this morning on the several televisions displaying different channels in the lobby of my office building, one thing was clear on every channel.  A Cardinal's robes are totally orange.

Go figure.

A Generation Betrayed?

Two television adaptation of Sara Shepard's teen novel series, Pretty Little Liars and The Lying Game, and two L.J. Smith teen novel series television adaptations, The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle (see also by neither of these authors, TV series like Revenge and Caprica with a similar dramatic structure) all have a powerful theme that give them verve and broad appeal, in addition to their focus on secrets and lies. 

Each one plays up at some level in its plot structure the notion of intergenerational betrayal.  The middle aged parents of each ensemble casts of teen heroes and heroines have deeply betrayed or failed them and their generation. 

For teens, this captures of zeitgeist of a generation that feels that its been given a raw deal through no fault of their own.  For people in the generation of those parents, the reaction is more along the lines of reassurance that however badly we have failed our own children, at least we have not wronged our own children quite so severely, therefore we must be at least half decent parents by comparison.  It is a different appeal, but a real one.

The Economics Of An IPO

Goldman Sacks made more money in kickbacks from clients who were given a shot a getting underpriced IPO stocks than they did from their fees to the company itself.  This is a quite troubling business model and was probably pervasive.

Poor Southerners Pay More Taxes

While the federal government has largely stuck by the principle of progressive taxation, the states have gone their own ways: tax policy is particularly regressive in the South and West, and more progressive in the Northeast and Midwest. When it comes to state and local taxation, we are not one nation under God. In 2008, the difference between a working mother in Mississippi and one in Vermont — each with two dependent children, poverty-level wages and identical spending patterns — was $2,300.

These regional disparities go back to Reconstruction, when Southern Republicans increased property taxes on defeated white landowners and former slaveholders to pay for the first public services — education, hospitals, roads — ever provided to black citizens. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, conservative Democrats — popularly labeled “the Redeemers” — rolled taxes back to their prewar levels and inserted supermajority clauses into state constitutions to ensure it could never happen again. Property taxes were frozen; income taxes were held down; corporate taxes were almost nonexistent.

Practically the only tax that could rise was the one that hurt the poor the most: the sales tax. And rise it did, throughout the Deep South in the late 19th century, then spreading into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and the rest of the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Even liberal politicians weren’t able to buck the tide — just ask Bill Clinton, who as governor of Arkansas urgently sought new revenue to improve his state’s ailing schools and found the sales tax was the only politically viable option.

From here.

Should anti-democratic supermajority clauses in state constitutions be invalidated on the basis of equal protection or Republican government provisions of the federal constitutions?  Is it pertinent that these state constitutional entrenchments were enacted at a time when the electoral process was demonstrably racially biased in ways that have since been held to be illegal and unconstitutional?  Do we need to fully purge the South of its post-Reconstruction pathologies before the American democratic system can ever work properly?  Is there still a great deal of unfinished Civil War business that need to be justly resolved?

Also, does this help explain the strong anti-tax ideology of blue collar and middle income voters in the South that drives an overall anti-tax ideology of Republicans in general? 

Rank and file blue collar and middle income voters in the Northeast and Midwest aren't as concerned about taxes because they don't pay nearly as much of their income each year for them.

This ideological attitude of lower income Southern voters towards taxes driven by state and local taxation, in turn, may drive stances of federal taxes that don't make sense from a consequentialist point of view for Southern voters in federal elections.

Yet Another Major Benefit Of Asprin

Asprin appears to reduce the risk of getting a common kind of skin cancer in young women. 

This adds to many large benefits in preventing cardio-vascular problems like strokes and heart attacks, and multiple kinds of cancers, which associated with fairly regularly taking low doses of asprin if you are at risk for those conditions.  Some of these benefits are cumulative with, for example, the benefits associated with regular moderate alcohol consumption and blood thinning drugs.  This remedies are attractive since they involve a cheap, over the counter drug whose day to day use on that basis has effects that are fairly well understood.  A common source of these benefits in the anti-inflammatory effects of asprin has been suspected as one possible reason for the benefit.

Variants of it were active ingredients in herbal remedies used in since antiquity based on willow bark and a certain kind of wild flowering shrub. It has been used in its current medicinal form since 1897 CE. 

Asprin seems likely that we are on the verge of starting to see asprin less like an ordinary medicinal drug and more like a vitamin that may also have drug applications when used in higher doses, but has value on a regime basis at some dosages in most health people as a means of preventing serious later life maladies. 

Launching and Retrieving An LCS Based Drone

The Problem

The U.S. military wants to build a medium-sized drone that it can fly off Littoral Combat Ship 2 (LCS2)-class ships. . .

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officials have put out a call for defense companies to submit designs for a drone that could carry 600 pounds worth of sensor equipment and fly between 600 to 900 nautical miles from its ship, according to an agency statement.

DARPA listed the requirements that they want to achieve with the new UAV. Below are those requirements:

• Devising a reliable launch and recovery technique that enables large aircraft operations from smaller ships, even in rough seas;

• Designing an aircraft with range, endurance and payload comparable to emerging land-based unmanned aircraft, while still meeting the demands of the maritime environment;

• Ensuring the entire system can operate with minimal, and preferably reversible, ship modifications and minimal personnel requirements for operations and maintenance; and

• Packaging the system to fit into the limited space aboard ships.

DARPA’s program manager, Daniel Patt, compared the new UAV he hopes to develop to a falcon that always returns. Patt said he hopes to have a demonstration prototype in 40 months.

From the Defense Tech blog.

A Solution

How does one manage it?

The key, I think is to launch and retrieve the drone not off the ship itself, but from a helicopter carried by the ship.

The Predator As A Stand-In For What Capabilities Are Possible With Drones



The familiar MQ-1 Predator drone is a suitable stand in for what is possible for a drone of the size class that the Navy is trying to purchase. 

A Predator has has enough range (675 nautical miles) and payload (1,100 pounds) to fit the requirements. It weighs 2,250 pounds and its stall speed of 54 knots.

A modified version with wings would fold up or in for storage inside the LCS when not in use for ease of storage could be managed within the design parameters. 

The LCS-2 has plenty of storage space to hold drones and related equipment for the launch, retrieval, maintenance and crew as well as living space for 35 crew members related to mission modules.

The mission bay is 15,200 square feet (1,410 m²), and takes up most of the deck below the hangar and flight deck. With 11,000 cubic metres (390,000 cu ft) of payload volume, it was designed with enough payload and volume to carry out one mission with a separate mission module in reserve, allowing the ship to do multiple missions without having to be refitted.

One Mobicon Flexible Container Handling System is carried on each ship in order to move mission containers. In addition to cargo or container-sized mission modules, the bay can carry four lanes of multiple Strykers, armored Humvees, and their associated troops. An elevator allows air transport of packages the size of a 20-foot-long (6.1 m) shipping container that can be moved into the mission bay while at sea. A side access ramp allows for vehicle roll-on/roll-off loading to a dock and allows the ship to transport the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. 

Helicopter Assisted Drone Launches

The key, I think, it to make use of one or two of the standard two Sikorsky SH-60R/s Seahawk helicopter's that are standard equipment on the LCS-2.

The Seahawk can carry of slung payload of up to 6,000 pounds (well in excess of the loaded drone weight for a drone in this class), can operate at elevations up to 12,000 feet, can climb at a rate of 1,650 feet per minute, has a range of 450 nautical miles at cruise speed, and as a maximum speed of 146 knots (more than two and a half times the stall speed of the Predator drone).



The launch system could be pretty straight forward.  First, get the drone in the air attached to a Seahawk moving at perhaps 120 knots at an altitude of a few hundred to a few thousand feet by clamps.  Then, release the retractable wings on the drone and release the clamps so that the drone would trail the Seahawk on a tow rope and fire up the drone' engines.  Then, release the tow rope holding it to the Seahawk.  The process would be similar to launching a glider, a process that almost every U.S. military pilot has encountered in the training process.  (As a footnote, military gliders were used for one way military transportation in World War II).



If the drone itself weighed 2,250 pounds, the detachable launch and retrieval clamp and tow rope system on the Seahawk could weigh up to 3,500 pounds. This is fairly realistic. Glider tow systems currently in use weight about 1.5 times the weight of the towed aircraft.

This is also similar in concept to a piggy back launch of an aircraft, illustrated below:





Aerial Refueling Style Airborne Retrieval Via Helicopter



It could be retrieved using computer controlled navigation systems similar to those used for aerial refueling operations, but with the helicopter serving the drone plane instead of visa versa, to pluck it out of the air with the Seahawk could be the primary mode of retrieval. 

A mid-air retrieval of a drone with a helicopter is not unprecedented.  Here is an U.S. Air Force image of this being done (caption from source):



CH-3 Mid-Air Retrieval (MARS) version with AQM-34 drone from 432nd Tactical Drone Group.

A videoclip depicting a similar drone retrieval in 1971 can be found here.  The program in question is discussed at page 25 of this book which notes that two variants of these system were used during the Vietnam War from November 1969 to June 1973.

The tow rope could first be used to hook the drone while it moved at not much above stall speed in a manner similar to a refueling hose on a specially designed hook on the drone.  Then the drone could be slowly reeled in (with computer operated flight controls in operation on the drone and synched to the helicopter to keep it on its docking course), could be clamped down and then could retract its wings before the helicopter with the clamped on drone lands.

Alternately, the final clamp down step could be skipped and the drone on the tow rope could simply retract its wings and be dangled by the helicopter onto the helipad on the ship and detached once the drone is on the deck and the line is slack.

This is the most technologically ambitious part of the concept (as explained here), but is neither unprecedented nor revolutionary.  There are patents for similar concepts that have expired and entered the public domain for such techniques.  The main difference between most historical cases of this technique and the one proposed here is that the drone is able to manuever in concert with the helicopter rather than simply falling out of the sky on a parachute.

Backup Retrieval Via Splash Landings With Removal From Sea Via Helicopter





As a backup, or if plucking drones out of the air proved too technologically challenging to make work in practice, the drone could have an ability to make a splash landing, either on pontoons, or with a parachute and huge life raft type inflatable with a locator beacon to splash land (like a space capsule inbound) and then use the SH-60 in lieu of a crane to pluck it out of the water and back to the LCS. 

The recon devices on the drone could be buffered against rough landings more easily than human pilots (and could even eject separately during splash landings with its own parachute-airbag-tracking beacon system allowing for a rougher landing for the rest of the drone).

Widely Adaptable To Most Naval Surface Combatants And Beyond

While simple, the launch and retrieval process would be a technical wonder that would become an iconic thing of beauty in the naval, if this approach were adopted, that would become symbolic of the Navy's surface combatant force's twenty-first century technical competence.  The system could also be relatively easily adapted to any other naval platform that carriers an SH-60 helicopter, which most naval surface combatants do.

The concept could be scaled to other helicopter models and used for Coast Guard cutters with carried helicopters and for civilan uses as well.  Nothing in the concept is inherently military.

The system could also be applied in land based applications with essentially no modification, allowing for drone operations out of forward operating bases without adequate field air strips (e.g. in mountainous or urban environments).

Barbaric Is As Barbaric Does

There are parts of the world that are still ignorant, barbaric cesspools that kill people for witchcraft and sorcery.  In Saudi Arabia it happens routinely under color of law.

March 7, 2013 - Last month, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, a 20-year old mother of two was stripped naked and tortured until she confessed to practicing sorcery. Then she was burned alive on the local rubbish dump in front of a crowd of fellow villagers.

Although horrific, this event was not unusual. The Constitutional and Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea has estimated that as many as 150 people accused of sorcery — mostly women — are murdered every year in just one of the country’s 20 provinces. Before they are killed, many suffer prolonged, public and often sexual torture. Two things made last month’s murder exceptional: it led to public outrage, and two alleged perpetrators have been arrested.

 - From here.

September 21, 2011 (LONDON) – A migrant worker from Sudan was beheaded by sword in Medina by the Saudi government for practising occultism on Monday, despite the efforts of international lobbyists.

Execution by beheading, Saudi Arabia (Amnesty International)

The Saudi Ministry of Interior announced the execution of Abdul Hamid bin Hussein Mostafa al-Fakki for the crime of "witchcraft and sorcery", which contravenes shariah law, according to the Saudi Gazette.
It was reported by the Egyptian news agency, Bikya Masr, that the court accused al-Fakki of "producing a spell designed to lead to the reconciliation of his client’s divorced parents."

Since al-Fakki’s arrest in 2005 and conviction in 2007 the London-based human rights advocacy organisation Amnesty International (AI) have been gravely concerned about his fate. 

Philip Luther, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa programme said al-Fakki was "convicted solely for the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and religion".

AI claim al-Fakki was entrapped by a member of the Saudi religious police claiming that he would pay 6,000 Saudi Arabian riyals (US$1,600) for a spell which would make his father divorce his second wife and return to the agent provacateur’s biological mother.

- From here.

12 December 2011 . . .

A Saudi woman has been executed for practising "witchcraft and sorcery", the country's interior ministry says.  A statement published by the state news agency said Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded on Monday in the northern province of Jawf. The ministry gave no further details of the charges which the woman faced.  The woman was the second person to be executed for witchcraft in Saudi Arabia this year. A Sudanese man was executed in September.  'Threat to Islam' BBC regionalist analyst Sebastian Usher says the interior ministry stated that the verdict against Ms Nasser was upheld by Saudi Arabia's highest courts, but it did not give specific details of the charges.  The London-based newspaper, al-Hayat, quoted a member of the religious police as saying that she was in her 60s and had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses. Our correspondent said she was arrested in April 2009.  But the human rights group Amnesty International, which has campaigned for Saudis previously sentenced to death on sorcery charges, said it had never heard of her case until now, he adds. A Sudanese man was executed in September on similar charges, despite calls led by Amnesty for his release.  In 2007, an Egyptian national was beheaded for allegedly casting spells to try to separate a married couple. Last year, a Lebanese man facing the death penalty on charges of sorcery, relating to a fortune-telling television programme he presented, was freed after the Saudi Supreme Court decreed that his actions had not harmed anyone.

- From here.

A Saudi man has been beheaded on charges of sorcery and witchcraft, the state news agency SPA says. The man, Muree bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri, was found in possession of books and talismans, SPA said. He had also admitted adultery with two women, it said.  The execution took place in the southern Najran province, SPA reported.  Human rights groups have repeatedly condemned executions for witchcraft in Saudi Arabia.  Last year, there were reports of at least two people being executed for sorcery. Mr Asiri was beheaded after his sentence was upheld by the country's highest courts, the Saudi news agency website said. No details were given of what he was found guilty of beyond the charges of witchcraft and sorcery. 

- From this 19 June 2012 report from the BBC.

A Snowy Day

Today is one of those days when the best thing to do is to catch up on laundry and vacuuming, and then to sit in front of a fire and read. 

Why struggle against a foot of slushy snow when you don't have to?

Tag, You're Dead

The United States military can deliver any level of lethal force to a vehicle or particular room within a building any place in the world.  The ordinance delivered now hits the target designed with almost perfect accuracy.  In places where it is mobilized to do so, it can strike within five to twenty minutes or so after a decision is made to strike.  Elsewhere, it could take up to as much as a few hours to organize a strike.

This reality dramatically changes the jobs of troops on the ground at times when they have a few minutes at their disposal to call in a strike, as opposed to responding to an attack in the immediate moment.  All that local forces need to have where the strike on a target the size of a vehicle or building will take place, is to have someone with personal knowledge of the situation to confirm that the target should be hit, and someone to mark the target appropriately.

This has profound implications for how it makes sense to organize U.S. military forces from an offensive perspective. And, someday, when the military opponents of the U.S. catch up with their capabilities, the U.S. will need to dramatically rethink how it can defend against these kinds of tactics.

Conventional v. Tactical Nuclear Bombs

The Largest Conventional Bombs

The largest conventional bomb currently in U.S. military service (the GBU-43/B MOAB informally known as the "mother of all bombs") introduced to the U.S. arsenal in 2003 and intended to be delivered via a modified C-130 military cargo plane (specifically an MC-130E Combat Talon I or MC-130H Combat Talon II) and has an explosive yield of 11 tons of TNT and weighs 22,600 pounds.  Fifteen have been made but none have been used in anger.  It is too large for use by U.S. fighter and bomber aircraft.

MOAB is a successor to the the BLU-82 Daisy Cutter, a very large bomb (although not quite so large) used to clear jungle for helicopter landings during the Vietnam War, and was used a number of times to shock and awe large deployments of infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq and to kill opponents in cave complexes (although it is not strictly speaking a "bunker buster" bomb).  The only larger bomb in military service nicknamed the "father of all bombs" is in Russian military service and reputed to have a yield about four times a great.

The explosive yield of MOAB is roughly equal to the explosive yield of the smallest tactical weapon every put into service in the U.S. which approaches the technological minimum size limit for a nuclear weapon. 

Most bombs in U.S. military service have yields of one ton of TNT or less.

The Smallest Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Tactical nuclear weapons are those intended to be used in military battles or for discrete objectives other than obliterating cities or regions entirely.

The Mk-54 Davey Crocket "recoilless rifle" round was used together with an M-28 120mm launcher with a 2 km range, or M29 155mm launcher with a 4 km range (basically mortars operated by a crew of three from a Jeep or armored personnel carrier) was first produced in 1956 and was in U.S. military service through 1968 at the height of the Cold War had a 51 pound W54 variant nuclear warhead as part of a 76 pound mortar round (excluding the launcher) that was 31 in. long with a diameter of 11 in. at its widest point.  This round was "very close to the minimum practical size and yield for a fission warhead." About 2,100 of these rounds were built.

The Mk-54 had a minimum explosive yield of approximately 10 to 20 tons of TNT, at the low end, about the same as MOAB but was not very accurate and in testing sometimes produced a larger than intended blast.  It would have delivered a fatal radiation dose to everyone within a 400 meter radius of the blast location in addition to a large explosive blast that flattened area area equal to about two city blocks and leaving residual radioactivity.  A test of this weapon in 1962 was the last atmospheric test detonation at the Nevada Test Site.

It is apparently technically infeasible (although given advances in technology since the last tactical nuclear weapons were designed this may only be for lack of military or political interest in this technological challenge) to make a tactical nuclear weapon so small that it has only a 1 ton of TNT yield about the size of a typical conventional bomb dropped by a U.S. fighter or bomber.  If it was feasible to do so and the weight of the weapon scaled to its explosve force, a nuclear bomb with that yield would be about the same weight as a gallon of milk.

U.S. military doctrine called for these weapons to be used to close "chokeholds" like the Fulda Gap mountain pass in East Germany or tunnels or bridges that could have provided access points for Soviet tanks into Western Europe.  No tactical nuclear device has ever been used in combat. 

Variants of the same warhead were also used in three other weapons systems:

Mk-54 (SADM) — variable yield 10 ton to 1 kiloton, Special Atomic Demolition Munition device

W-54 — 250 ton yield, warhead for AIM-26 Falcon air to air missile

W72 — 600 ton yield, rebuilt W-54 (Falcon warhead) for AGM-62 Walleye

The SADM was carried by a team of two special operations paratroopers in a backpack to the place were it was to be detonated to destroy major infrastructure and set on a timer with the soliders who delivered it leaving before it exploded.  It was cylinder about 16 by 24 inches) that weighed 150 pounds with a yield of 10 tons to 1 kiloton that could be adjusted (at least in theory) by the operator.  The other two variants were mounted in missiles on fighter aircraft

The two nuclear bombs that were used by the United States against Japan were dropped in Hirokshima (13-18 kilotons) and Nagasaki (20-22 kilotons) at the close of World War II, each of which destroyed an entire central city city with a single bomb, were roughly a thousand times more powerful than the Davey Crocket rounds. These are the only nuclear weapons that have ever been used for a purpose other than a nuclear test by any country. Subsequent nuclear weapons in U.S. military service were designed with yields of 100 to 25000 kilotons. "As a comparison, the blast yield of the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb is 0.011 kt, and that of the Oklahoma City bombing, using a truck-based fertilizer bomb, was 0.002 kt."

Stock Market Recovery Achieved

The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell for about fifteen months from its peak and then took forty-eight months to recover to its predecline level yesterday, for a total downturn length of sixty-two months.  A post-financial crisis employment recovery has not yet been accomplished, but this isn't too surprising as stock markets are a leading indicator and employment is a lagging indicator of business cycles.

Weapon System Mission Creep Strikes Again

It's that time again

Army procurement people are getting stupid again with its Ground Combat Vehicle program designed to replace the 1980s vintage Bradley fighting vehicle. 

Bradley fighting vehicles were used in the field over the last few decadees far more than M-1 Abrams main battle tanks because they didn't weigh 72 tons (a Bradley is about 35 tons), because they moved faster and more nimbly on ordinary roads where they operate 95% of the time, and because they still had some offensive punch (e.g. due to TOW missles), while being better armored than Humvees and Strykers.

The result we are starting to see is an animal designed by committee that will strain technical capabilities, will be a jack of all trades and a master of none, and will be very, very expensive when a little common sense could have done a much better job with the same amount of money and a much quicker delivery time as a result of less technologically ambitious goals.

The problem: 84 tons is too heavy.

Size matters.  But, big isn't always good.

Last fall, the Congressional Budget Office, projected that the GCV could weigh as much as 84 tons, making it heavier than an M1 Abrams and twice as heavy as the current Bradley.

Less Crazy Than It Seems

SCOTUSblog, a leading online source for breaking news regarding the United States Supreme Court, announced today that henceforth it would “eliminate the middle man” and simply start issuing its own precedential opinions.
 

From noncuratlex.com.

As crazy as this satirical post seems, it isn't as far from approaches to deciding cases that have been used in the real world to make real world decisions, as you might think.

In civil law systems around the world, the balance of importance between informed academic commentary and binding legal precedents in resolving close legal issues weighs much more heavily in favor of commentary than in Anglo-American common law systems.  Academics make more law than appellate judges do in those countries.  This process predated the comprehensive codification of the law in many of these countries by several centuries.  The earliest comprehensive modern civil code was the Code Napoleon, adopted during the French Revolution.  The process of "reception" of Roman legal treatises (mostly just digests of opinions of independent arbitrators collected for the use of lawyers and judges) as authoritative in resolving current legal disputes began about five hundred years ago, a millenium after the Roman Empire had lost all formal legal authority.

In the early days of the American Republic, influential commentaries on the British common law was used to state the prevailling common law rules at a time when many new states had few precedents of their own of any kind (let alone relevant ones), when library resources for lawyers and judges were scarce in the pre-copying machine, pre-word processing, pre-search engine era, and when the first law school graduates would not exist until about 1870.  Even if there were precedents were on point, lawyers and judges often weren't aware of them.

If all of this seems very strange, recall that U.S. courts routinely refer to a source of law prepared by academic and bar association commentators that is not reviewed or approved by any governmental body before going to print as one of the most powerful sources to resolve open common law issues in torts, contracts, property law, agency and a host of other fields.  These sources are called the Restatements and the Restatements routinely are given preferred treatment relative to persuasive authority like precedential decisions of sister state courts that aren't binding on a state court.  They are even frequently used as a partial basis for courts with the authority to shape common law decision making to discard binding but old common law precedents that reflect overall worldviews about an area of law that have come to be seen as outdated.

Other scholarly treatises are now and have historically been given great weight, particularly in unresolved areas of the law of the kind that the U.S. Supreme Court usually handles.

A large share of all countries of the world delegate the constitutional issues that the U.S. Supreme Court routinely decides not to a purely legal highest court of appeal, but to a special "constitutional court" whose members are chosen for the public respect that they can command and often have more diverse and semi-political backgrounds than appellate judges, a character shared with many leading bloggers.

One could do worse.  Under the Federal Arbitration Act, the law very strongly favors having dispute resolution done under procedures chosen by and by people selected by the party who drafted a contract of adhesion, subject to virtually no judicial review, with virtually no appeals (even for clear mistakes of law), an institutional bias in favor of the contract drafter, and no regulatory requirement that the arbitrator have any qualifications other than to be a literate adult.  Given a choice between that and SCOTUS blog, I'd take my chances with a bunch of self-appointed trade journalists over the status quo any day.

Mortality In Syria

About 70,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war over the last two years. 

This is about twice the violent mortality rate of the State of Chihuahua in Mexico, which has the higheste murder rate in the world (about 111 murders per 100,000 people, per year).

On the other hand, Syria has a population fairly close to that of the United States during its Civil War, which killed about 1,000,000 people, give or take, over five years, a mortality rate about seven times as high.  There were battles in both the U.S. Civil War and in World War I that killed that many people in a single day in a single location.  This is despite the fact that Syria's population is much more dense, that a much larger proportion of the population is in or near war zones, and that far more advanced military technology (e.g. jet fighters dropping bombs) has been used in Syria. 

I doubt that much of the difference in lethality between the wars of a century or two ago are mostly more lethal because of improved modern medical technology that is available now, although I'm sure that this has had some incremental effect.  A better tactical understanding of how to fight an insurgency or counterinsurgency or any kind of war for that matter, with modern weapons, which was absent in the wars of a century or two ago, is probably a bigger factor.

Cross Over Artists

Many singers and music groups in the U.S. crossover to a rock/pop genre from country-western, Christian, or Spanish language music genre.  Does the reverse ever happen?  If not, what does this imply.

Who Killed J.C.?

Who killed J.C.?

J.C. is in critical condition.[1][2]  You could argue that it is premature to investigate a person's murder before a body can be presented to establish that there was a death.[3]  Indeed, in the case of J.C., a prophet has foretold that J.C. will die and then that J.C. will be raised from the dead.[4] 

But, you would be wrong.  Dying declarations and contemporaneously recorded impressions of witnesses have been critical evidence in investigations to determine a cause of death for thousands of years in cases like this one.[3][4]

Initial efforts to assign responsibility for killing J.C. have been directed at a man who has a history with an apple that had a bite taken out of it that can provide access to the secrets of the tree of knowledge.[5][6]  And, I can't deny that he may deserve some of the blame.

But, honestly, I think that this case is more like Agatha Christi's Murder On The Orient Express, even if someone who is beyond the reach of justice is fingered as a scapegoat.  J.C. was probably killed through the combined actions of a group of people, not just by one man acting alone.[2][7]

The truth of the matter is that even I am partially responsible for killing J.C.[7]  I saw but ignored J.C. in the marketplace.[8]  I did not use my worldly wealth when asked to use them to glorify J.C. and gain access to the treasures that J.C. had to offer.[9]  I succumbed to the temptations offered by others.[10]  What can I say? 

Sequester Still Stupid

The best way to understand why the sequester is horrible policy is to recognize the options that President Obama's administration is denied in making the cuts in federal spending that take effect today.  A list of twelve of the most sensible budget cutting options that are not available to him are described below the jump. 

Republicans could have proposed making available as alternatives if they were really serious about cutting federal government spending in a sustainable way that minimizes cuts that reduce the quality of the services that the federal government is required by law to provide.  But, they want to undermine federal government operations as a matter of ideology.  So, instead, they have continued their campaign to indiscriminantly oppose all government spending without acknowledging that any of it has any value in order to thwart the ability of the federal government to conduct its day to day essential duties.  They are incapable of acting like responsible adults or a loyal opposition.

Cuts to federal spending as a result of the sequester don't resemble the kinds of cuts that an individual family or private business would make at all.  This across the board budget cutting tool prohibits the President from taking almost all of the approaches to cutting federal government spending without increasing taxes that make any sense.

Nuclear Power v. Hydrocarbons

There is a stunning difference in fuel volume between nuclear power and chemical power.