A Devilishly Smart Pope

A DEVILISHLY SMART POPE

One of the books I'm reading now is John D. Barrow's 'The Book of Nothing'. The subject is  a look at the concept of 'nothing', the void, emptiness, zero, the vacuum and so on. There's actually quite a bit to say about nothing, and book ranges from a history of the mathematical sign for zero, through the 'philosophic concept' of nothingness, to the idea of the vacuum in physics, its explanation by the 'ether' and the eventual overthrow of that concept. Temperatures (absolute zero) and the place of the vacuum in quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology come on stage, and the book ends with a return to the philosophic concept itself. Yes, quite complex, and I've barely gotten to chapter 2. Nice to have a roadmap to a blank space. I'll be reviewing the book when done.

But one of the matters that did come up was the story of Pope Sylvester II, one of the few admirable holders of the keys of Peter in the Middle Ages. This is a story appealing enough to shove its way to the front of the 'Molly Line'. Sylvester II was born Gerbert de Aurillac (945 - 1003). He reigned as Pope from 999 to 1003. Yes the Pope in the Chair during the turn of the millennium. The world didn't end, and Gerbert/Sylvester was definitely one of the more capable Popes of the age. A lot of his accomplishments were political and hardly bear mention here. Defending the property of the Church. Playing off one ruler against another though he was usually in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor of the time.  The politics of Italy at the time were particularly chaotic, and once both he and the Emperor had to flee Rome during one of the revolts. He even tried to reform the Church's organization and reduce abuses such as simony, concubinage and nepotism. This was an Herculean task, and even with the assistance of St. Jude (the patron saint of the impossible) the Church remained just about as corrupt as always. He did, however, succeed in significantly increasing the Church's title holdings. Maybe this goal was in direct contradiction to the idea of making the Church into a more 'Holy' outfit. He also played a major role in the Christianization of Eastern Europe, appointing Metropolitans for both Poland and Hungary, and in the later case naming that country as a 'Kingdom'. Thus the Crown of Hungary became dependent on the Papacy.


His political accomplishments were minor compared to his intellectual contributions to European culture. He had early on spend considerable time as an envoy to the far more civilized Muslim states of southern Spain, and he turned his natural curiosity to good effect there, absorbing much of the culture of Andalucía. When he returned to France he was appointed head of education for the Archdiocese of Rheims, and from there he significantly elevated the clerical level of education throughout the French Kingdom.

 When his patron died he was considered the natural successor, but the Capetan monarchy had other ideas, and a relative of the King was appointed in his stead even though Gerbert was a supporter of Hugh Capet whose reign marked the end of the Carolingian dynasty. Barrow has this matter somewhat confused as he lists this Episcopal position without mentioning that Gerbert's appointment was overthrown. Consistent with the political level of the time the King's appointee was later removed because of suspicion of treason to his sponsor. Gerbert who initially was himself accused of treason to the House of Capet was reappointed, but this was challenged and his appointment declared invalid. When he did finally become Pope he pretty well washed his hands of the matter by declaring his competitor as the legitimate Archbishop. Barrow also confuses another appointment of his, as Archbishop of Ravenna, supposing him to be the 'Abbot' of Ravenna. All this is quite forgivable as the politics of the time, clerical and lay, were by their very nature confusing.

Gerbert was lauded for his scholarly contributions in a number of fields. He became the tutor of both Emperors Otto II and his son Otto III, and, as mentioned above, he was elevated to the Papacy with the support of the latter. Gerbert was a true polymath. He was the accepted authority in the liberal arts in his day and a major influence on theology. He was also something of an engineer, designing a hydraulic organ that didn't require air to continually be pumped in as it played. He is also credited with advances in the art of clock making due to one which he designed for the Cathedral of Magdeburg. Even this is confused. Some sources such as the 'Catholic Encyclopedia' say that he was the inventor of the pendulum clock. Others say that his clock was mechanical but weight driven rather than using a pendulum. Still others say that his clock was actually simply a sundial. It was, however, in the field of science and mathematics that he made his greatest contributions.

Gerbert was credited with a number of innovations. He introduced the abacus to Europe, and also the use of the Arabic/Indian number/decimal system. Both were necessary foundations for the later rise of commercial enterprises in the Renaissance. Hard to do proper accounting with Roman numerals. Not that they were always appreciated. In 1299 the decimal system was outlawed in Florence supposedly because it was more vulnerable to fraud. The worry about this matter delayed the adoption of decimal numbers in northern Europe until the sixteenth century. For Gerbert, however, they were a Godsend, and he was the foremost expert on mathematics, geometry and astronomy of his day. Much of this was based on what he had learned in southern Spain even though he was creative enough in his own right.

He is credited with the reintroduction of the 'armillary sphere' to western Europe. This is a 3D model of the heavens, and fitted with viewing tubes it was an early prototype of the telescope. It should be noted that such a sphere would imply that the Earth itself was a sphere. Not that the idea of a flat Earth was universal in Medieval times, but it was common enough even though the use of spheres such as this proliferated.

Barrow's book corrected a misconception of my own, one that I had held for more than a few years. I knew that Sylvester II was a remarkably educated and knowledgeable man well ahead of his time. I also knew that one of the medieval Popes had been dug up from his grave and the corpse put on trail. I'd always assumed that the uncommunicative defendant was Sylvester. During his lifetime and after his death rumours circulated that he was in league with the Devil, that he had even constructed a bronze head that would answer questions posed to it. Sort of an early robot I guess. I assumed that this was the reason for the exhumation. Wrong I was. The corpse was that of one Pope Formosus, and the charges were much more mundane. After the guilty verdict was pronounced the hapless cadaver was chopped to pieces, burnt and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. That will teach him.

The accusations of witchcraft would certainly be a likely medieval explanation for Sylvester's brilliance, but no - he stayed in the ground. Not that he rested easily though. The legends of his life followed him into the grave, and typically they are also confused. One legend says that when a Pope is due to die that Sylvester's bones rattle in the tomb. Another says that the walls of the crypt weep on the sad occasion. I guess there's no reason they can't both be right.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR- CHINA:

A NEW WAY TO ORGANIZE:

The communist/capitalist rulers of the Peoples' Republic of China have recently been challenged by a grass roots movement of striking workers at Honda manufacturing plants. Fearful of the spread of this workers' rebellion, outside of the official Communist Party unions, the government has actually conceded to the workers' demands. the reason for this is detailed below. The workers have managed to go beyond the official trade unions and coordinate their actions via the internet. It's an interesting though. Personally I have always favoured established radical anarchosyndicalist unions whatever their disadvantages. In some situations, however, where it is impossible to maintain alternative unions it is still possible given modern technology for a mass movement to grow, as it has in China. Here's the story from the New York Times.

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In China, Labor Movement Enabled by Technology
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER

The 1,700 workers who went on strike at the Honda Lock auto parts factory here are mostly poor migrants with middle-school educations.

But they are surprisingly tech-savvy.

Hours into a strike that began last week, they started posting detailed accounts of the walkout online, spreading word not only among themselves but also to restive and striking workers elsewhere in China.

They fired off cellphone text messages urging colleagues to resist pressure from factory bosses. They logged onto a state-controlled Web site — workercn.cn — that is emerging as a digital hub of the Chinese labor movement. And armed with desktop computers, they uploaded video of Honda Lock’s security guards roughing up employees.

“We videotaped the strike with our cellphones and decided to post the video online to let other people know how unfairly we were treated,” said a 20-year-old Honda employee who asked not to be named because of the threat of retaliation.

The disgruntled workers in this southern Chinese city took their cues from earlier groups of Web-literate strikers at other Honda factories, who in mid-May set up Internet forums and made online bulletin board postings about their own battle with the Japanese automaker over wages and working conditions.

But they have also tapped into a broader communications web enabling the working class throughout China to share grievances and strategies. Some strike leaders now say they spend much of their time perusing the Web for material on China’s labor laws.

Wielding cellphones and keyboards, members of China’s emerging labor movement so far seem to be outwitting official censors in an effort to build broad support for what they say is a war against greedy corporations and their local government allies.

And it might not be possible if the Chinese government had not made a concerted effort in the last decade to shrink the country’s digital divide by lowering the cost of mobile phone and Internet service in this country — a modernization campaign that has given China the world’s biggest Internet population (400 million) and allowed even the poorest of the poor to log onto the Internet and air their labor grievances.

“This is something people haven’t paid attention to — migrant workers can organize using these technologies,” said Guobin Yang, a professor at Barnard College and author of “The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.”

“Usually we think of this kind of thing being used by middle-class youths and intellectuals,” Professor Yang said.

The Web and digital devices, analysts say, have become vehicles of social change in much the way the typewriter and mimeograph machine were the preferred media during the pro-democracy protests in Beijing in 1989 — before the government put down that movement in the June 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown that left hundreds dead.

A looming question now, in fact, is whether and when the government might seek to quash the current worker uprisings if they become too big a threat to the established social order. Already, the government has started cracking down on strike-related Web sites and deleted many of the blog posts about the strikes.

The instant messaging service QQ, which is accessible via the Web or mobile phone — and was perhaps the early favorite network of strike leaders because of its popularity among young people — was soon infiltrated by Honda Lock officials and government security agents, forcing some to move to alternative sites, strike leaders say.

“We’re not using QQ any more,” said one strike leader here. “There were company spies that got in. So now we’re using cellphones more.”

Analysts say they were smart to change.

“QQ offers no protection from eavesdropping by the Chinese authorities, and it is just as well they stopped using it,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a China specialist and fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. “QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.”

But the activists say they are getting around some of those restraints by shifting to different platforms (including a Skype-like network called YY Voice) and using code words to discuss protest gatherings.

For years, labor activists have been exposing the harsh working conditions in Chinese factories by smuggling cellphone images and video out of coastal factories and posting documents showing labor law violations on the Web. New and notable is that these formerly covert activities have become open and pervasive.

Last month, for example, when a string of puzzling suicides was reported at Foxconn Technology near here, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, there were online video postings reportedly showing security guards manhandling workers.

MORE ON FREE SOFTWARE:

In my previous blog on the article 'Free Software as Part of the Anarchist Toolkit' on the Anarkismo site I complained that the author gave too few references. Never let it be said that Molly is totally negative- just mostly. In a positive light here are a few extra references besides the Source Forge site that the article in question gives. All have also been added to Molly's links under the Other Interesting Links section.

*Free Software Foundation (produced in collaboration with UNESCO)

*Download.Com

*Freeware Files

And, of course, there's a Wikipedia article on the whole concept of free software. It contains many other references for the truly curious as well as giving a backgrounder for the neophyte.

"SET PHASERS TO COOK THEIR ASS"

CAPTAIN "GW" KIRK

The US military has recently unveiled a new "ray gun" that is supposed to be something new and wonderful in "active denial systems" and "non-lethal crowd control". The item is one of a trio of boondoggle projects that the US military has been throwing taxpayer dollars at in the past decade. One is a "bacterial squirt" capable of turning jet fuel into useless jelly. Another is the much mocked "gay spray" that supposedly turns enemy soldiers into homosexuals. Hopefully inducing them to stop and bugger each other before they overrun the position held by "dem true blue Gawd feerin Christian boys frahm Kansas". One fears for the boys from the USA if they are just too damn cute for their own good. Only female soldiers could save GW's butt then.

But getting back to the real world, this latest development, apparently $40 million dollars over the course of a decade in development, has been hauled out by the US Army public relations departments for demonstrations lately. Even though, like any good bureaucratic project, it was slated to be deployed in Iraq in 2005 and now will (hopefully, maybe, possibly, if enough congressmen are impressed) be ready to roll in 2010.

This directed energy weapon apparently sends a focused beam of what they call "millimeter waves" towards advancing enemies, crowds, taxpayers, those who don't vote Republican,etc which purportedly causes a "burning sensation" that will cause them to flee without any enduring injury by heating the first 1/64th of an inch of skin to about 50 degrees.

Molly really has to call a time out here. The military have gone to many lengths to give this part of the electromagnetic spectrum a new name in hopes that it won't be connected in the public mind with "microwaves" and all that that implies. "Milliwave" is hardly a widely used term to describe those parts of the EMS that lie on the border between infrared and microwave. Actually I've never heard the term before. The part of the EMS that these sort of waves lie in is usually referred to as the EHF(extremely high frequency) band of the microwave part of the spectrum. The purported "superficial" penetration of this sort of radiation is because, even though it has higher frequency and therefore more energy than photons in the usual microwave range (the average microwave oven operates at a wavelength of about 12 cm), the shorter wavelength means that it will interact with matter at a lesser depth.

Further on this "time out", one of the major contractors on this project, Raytheon, built the first microwave oven way back in 1947. Whatayoudo when almost all your competitors can build a better devise at a lower price ? In a lot of cases the solution to this problem is "get a government contract" where price, quality and deadlines mean little if anything. Other contractors involved in this development include CPI (Communications and Power Industries) of Palo Alto CA and Veridan Engineering of san Antonio TX.

But back to the main story. This devise was demonstrated to the media at the US Air Force's Moody base in the state of Georgia early in 2007, and predictably elicited the usual oohs and ahhs from the mass media. Few if any bothered to investigate the military's claims for the "safety" of the weapon even though a lot of information is available on the internet. The military, for instance, claims that it would take up to 250 seconds (a little over 4 minutes) of exposure to cause actual burns to the target. Physicist Juergen Altmann of Germany's Dortmund University, on the other hand says that the "safety range" is more like 3 1/2 seconds and that further exposure of as little as 3 to 5 seconds will produce second and third degree burns. This would probably be fatal in the majority of cases as the area of the body exposed to a beam with a diameter of 3 meters is about 50% ie everything facing the beam. Pretty well anyone with 2nd or 3rd degree burns to 20% !!!! of the body is a candidate for the ICU. Twenty is less than 50.

The difference between Dr. Juegen's statement and the military statement comes from a very simple omitted fact in the case of the military. They assume that the beam cooks the skin to 50 degrees and that it stays at 50 degrees. Dr. Jurgen points out that the longer the exposure the greater the heat. Try it in your own microwave. The wavelength of the radiation there is always the same. Uh duh. Two minutes cooking is hotter than one minute.

Jane's Defense Weekly is of the opinion that this weapon will be of limited military use ie being only a "one hit wonder" to disperse crowds that might contain gunmen. They say also that it will likely be of limited civilian law enforcement use, though the ways of the world might suggest otherwise. Look for this toy to show up on US shipments to every dictator in the world who is "on the right side according to Halliburton and Falwell".

Many others have noted other possible side effects of this weapon that the military has been careful to avoid in its press releases. For one thing its purpose of "dispersal" is rather a hit and miss affair. Unlike a hot stove element there is no useful direction to flee from a weapon of this sort. Suddenly the half of one's body pointed towards the weapon seems like it is burning. It's the same no matter which direction you run until you manage to outrun the beam's range (or until you are properly cooked if they don't turn it off fast enough). Lotsa good stampedes with lots of deaths which would, of course, be blamed on the crowd itself. also the heat flux delivered by this weapon is much higher than that known to cause corneal damage in experimental animals.

The weapon would, of course, be next door to useless in the face of a real military enemy approaching with a dispersed formation and able to call fire in on the greatly exposed units transmitting such a beam. It is, however, of great use in attacks on unarmed civilians, and that will be its real utility should it ever really get off the ground. Like all too much of military technology this devise points towards a truism that many have expressed over the years. The real and permanent enemies of any country are not the temporary foreign countries called "enemies". The real purpose of a military is to shield the rulers of a country from their own people and not from the foreigner.

MOLLY NOTE:

A lot of the information for this blog was taken from the Global Security.org website, a place that nobody in their right mind could accuse of "left-wing bias". This website is basically "technocratic" in that it will report the pros and cons of various military technologies without engaging in ideological polemic as too many sources, both left and right(including this one), do. The overall tone is, of course, that the American Empire is a great and wonderful thing, but these people engage in very little wishful thinking in their reports and often give more than one side of an item. Well worth looking at.

LINKOMANIA:
I've added another link to this blog under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. This is the UrbanRail.Net site mentioned in the previous post. The obligatory explanation follows.
There is little doubt that "technology" has its own dynamic, forcing society to follow certain paths even as the form of society determines what technologies will be developed and which neglected. A pretentious Marxist would style this sort of interplay of causation as "dialectical" so as to a)appear very smart and b)to obscure some other rather less savoury point that the Marxist wants to make. Both this sort of mutual determination, usually referred to in non-ideological circles as complexity and more formal "circular causation" are part of normal intellectual discourse and hardly need a buzzword such as dialectical to obscure their meaning.
The sociology ! of both Marxism in power and as an academic assembly line, as well as how "dialectic" became the butt of popular jokes in Eastern Europe under Stalinism gives more than a slight hint of how this obfuscation is much more a matter of a weapon of class rule or the aspirations of a would-be ruling class than clear thinking. It's always far better to say what you mean than to hide behind a pseudo intellectual phrase.
Be that as it may there are people in this world who are even fuzzier in their thinking than Marxists. I'll leave aside the neo-cons whose rule of the American Empire seems to be coming to an end and how they were captives of their own abstractions. That is an entirely different post (or 50). I speak, unfortunately, of some of my own "comrades" . There's a trend in modern North American anarchism popularly called "primitivism" that imagines that it has uncovered a much more basic form of "oppression/misery/hierarchy/etc..etc.,etc" than any classical anarchists have.
Some of these people(but unfortunately too few) have read their antecedents such as Shumacher, Illich and Ellul, but they haven't taken the lesson of the first two. They tend to follow in a debased form the manner of the latter. The first two always criticized "particular technologies" and often advocated alternatives. The latter usually based his writings on such a high plane of abstraction that he basically "meant nothing" in most of what he said. The saddest part of this trend is that some of them claim the "individualist anarchist" mantle via a presumed interpretation of Stirner. Now, I've read 'The Ego and His Own' more than once, and I can say two things. One is that Stirner should have been given an award for being an even poorer writer than Marx. It takes some doing. The second is that his book could have easily been boiled down to a few pages that basically stated that people are captives of their abstractions. Stirner called them "spooks".
A lot of modern day primitivism has a genealogy that traces back to an ill digested version of situationism, and, like the sits, they move in a world of thought where the real world rarely intrudes. At its best situationism is good poetry. At its worst it is word spinning in a self referential world that means nothing except the attempt of a self defined "elite" to "prove" how superior it is.
How this relates to "technology" is pretty obvious to be. There is no such thing as the "technology" in the abstract that primmies like to demonize while advocating other technologies and techniques. This is a "spook" in the full Stirnerite meaning of the word. The anti-technology rhetoric becomes a badge of distinction-and that is ALL that it is. When they lower their exalted selves to actually propose something they end up tailing ! so many of the people that they like to feel superior to. Growing a garden is great. This is despite the fact that the average primmie has far less experience and knowledge about same than a vast number of the normal people that they despise. Practically everything they propose is little more than a signpost for someone outside of their cult to notice their inferiority in practical knowledge.
That's all "individualist" stuff, and it certainly makes me hold my nose when reading their nonsense. What may be more important is that they have little-and usually nothing- to propose about how their dreams may become a social reality. Beyond joining their cult, of course. The whole matter reeks of religious proselytism rather than politics.
Which finally brings me to my point. The crowd cheers-the speech will finally be over. I have listed many scientific references in this blog for the simple reason that science is nothing more than amplified common sense. There's little doubt that there is a "sociology of science" that describes how theories come and go, but science has a little ace up its sleeve. It is one of the few-perhaps the only- human enterprise that has worked out a method of collegial self-correction. This method certainly contrasts with the methods of political theory, radical or otherwise where mistakes are usually not corrected but only explained away- at best.
Science's daughter "technology" certainly is so important that it has to be both noticed and commented upon -notice I don't use the buzzword "critiqued"; I have nothing to prove. But to be useful, or even interesting at all to people outside of a cult, the matter has to be specific. "Which" technology in which social setting ? I find the idea of urban rapid transit fascinating because I assume that people will continue to exist in their present numbers in the foreseeable future and I have no genocidal fantasies of reducing their numbers. I also assume that, while I might favour a population balance more screwed towards a rural dispersion that people have good reasons for choosing an urban living space- as almost ALL primmies do even while they spout their rhetoric. To me that's a given. retirement is when I move back to the country. Hence my liking for more rational-in many ways- methods of moving about a city. Urban rapid transit!
To my mind such a technology is libertarian in a much more fundamental way than jeremiads about the evils of our modern society. It CAN be accomplished. In the future I hope to find more such examples and highlight them here. "Technology" is neither good nor bad. it simply doesn't exist outside of the minds of ideologues. Certain techniques CAN be either good or bad. That is what anarchists should turn their attention to.
The crowd cheers and puts down its rotten fruit. The speech is over, and it lasted less than 1 50th of a Castro speech. Everybody files out, hopefully having learnt something. The speaker packs up and returns to the night, pleased with a attempt at style variation.