You May Be Right, I May Be Crazy . . .

This made me laugh.  Then, hours later, as I walked along a crowded sidewalk, I laughed again.  Some looked askance at me, but I am used to it.

Hidden History – Unit 731

Between 1932 and 1945 Japan killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 civilians in a series of biological weapons attacks. To put that in perspective, it is about twice the number that died as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the most deadly use of weapons of mass destruction in history and one of the worst crimes against humanity ever recorded. Most people have never heard of it.

It was orchestrated by a group called Unit 731. Unit 731 performed some of the most horrific experiments imaginable. Thousands of civilians and POWs were victimized. People were tied down, infected, and observed until they finally died. People were chopped up just to see how long it would take them to bleed out. Vivisection was commonplace. While the name Joseph Mengele has become a byword for evil, 731's leader, Shiro Ishii, is almost completely unknown.

This article from City Journal is a good introduction to this hidden history. Here's what 731 did when they wanted to learn how the diseases they had produced would spread:

The Japanese laced more than 1,000 wells in the area of Harbin with typhoid bacilli. They also inserted typhus into bottles of lemonade that children loved to drink in the summer, Harris reported. In Nanking, they distributed anthrax-filled chocolate and cake to hungry children. The Japanese discovered that packing fountain pens and walking sticks with deadly germs was a particularly effective way of secretly disseminating them.

Later the Japanese experimented with ways they could deliver germ warfare through aerial assault. They developed various bombs. At their most cartoon-like evil they even worked to infect fleas, put the fleas on bats, and drop them out of airplanes over target populations.

Why did they do it? Why kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people? Because they wanted to learn the best way to use biological weapons against the U.S. and Russia. They eventually developed a plan: Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. Kamikaze planes were to be loaded with anthrax and attack California. It was scheduled for September, 1945. Hiroshima was bombed in August.

Two questions might occur to you about now gentle reader. First, what happened to these monsters after the war? Second, why have more people not heard of this? The City Journal article cited above answers both questions. Nothing happened to those monsters, and the reason for that is the same as the answer to the second question. Because the U.S. wanted to learn the secrets of Unit 731. The most evil research program in history became a bargaining chip in the Cold War.

I think it's time that we add this chapter to our textbooks. The lessons of this history are too important, too powerful, and sadly too relevant to our own time to be lost.

Trivial Hoot Eleven

My goodness, it's been a couple of months since I posed a puzzler to my brilliant readers. This time I will challenge your smarts in the field of history. As always the first person to get it right will receive a big hoot and will join our roll of honor as a steely-eyed missile man or woman.

Edward V and Edward VIII have a few things in common. First of all, they were both named Edward. Second, they were both English kings. Third, they are both dead guys. But they also share another distinction. They are the only English kings that we can say this about. What is this unique shared quality?

Go Dog Go

The American Kennel Club now allows mongrels to participate in their dog shows. Shocking, isn't it? Is this the beginning of the end for purebred dog breeding, or will the AKC find some way to screw up mutts?

Our concept of breeding pedigreed dogs to established standards is a legacy of the Victorians, those wonderful people who brought us eugenics, colonialism, and industrialized child labor. People had been breeding dogs to select desirable traits for countless centuries, but it was in the nineteenth century that we first got the idea of breeding to a set of written appearance standards and documenting bloodlines.

Over the years, by focusing on these arbitrary standards, the AKC has caused dogs to be bred for looks instead of health. As a result we have animals suffering hip dysplasia and any number of other genetic ailments. So-called purebred dogs are far more prone to painful physical problems than good old mutts.

Rather than celebrating the fact that healthy dogs are being allowed to play in the AKC's dog park, mongrel owners should create their own club. Papers would be created to track the mutt's family background, proving that there is not a speck of pedigree contamination in the bloodline. Canine genetic diversity would be honored. Dogs of indeterminate origin would be celebrated for their essential happy, healthy doggy-ness, and stud books would be tossed into the ash heap of history where they belong.

Share and Enjoy

y06 '5owel '''eay 3fer47gldy/ Oops. Sorry, I was trying to type this entry with a towel over my head. I wanted to be fully protected in case my office should be invaded by the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Safe for the moment I see. Today is, of course, Towel Day, and a happy Towel Day to you, gentle reader. Today we celebrate the life and work of the great Douglas Adams by proudly carrying our towels for all to see. As you surely know, a truly hoopy frood always knows where his towel is.

Let me suggest a project for this day of days. Talk to your friends and colleagues about Towel Day. You may run across someone who has not yet been introduced to Douglas Adams. Often this is a sign that the person you are talking to is a bit of a dullard. Give them a chance. They may, in fact, be pretty hoopy but have been deprived of good literature through no fault of their own. Strive to Share and Enjoy. Tell your friend about Adams. Steer them toward good reading. In fact, you could give them a copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A paperback version is available for short money. If your friend reads it and loves it, then you know that he (or she) is as hoopy as you had hoped. What if your gift is not appreciated? Don't panic. You have learned that you needn't waste further effort on this person as he is irredeemably uncool.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going back under the towel. You can never be too careful with Bugblatter Beasts about.

Scientific Heresy?

Here's an opinion piece in New Scientist that posits what has become a radical notion: that questioning science is not blasphemy.

I should have thought this obvious, but it clearly is not. Those who raise serious questions about received wisdom are ostracized, insulted, and tarred with the epithet “denier,” a word that carries the moral baggage of “holocaust denier.” The question is not addressed; the questioner is attacked.

If those who hold opposing views are treated as if they are heretics, and if great scientists like Freeman Dyson can step out of the mainstream and be treated as vile apostates, then science is becoming our culture's newest religion. And not the open, welcoming religion of the vibrant, loving church down the street, but the oppressive closed-minded religion the like of which persecuted Galileo. Which is, if this isn't too obvious, rather ironic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “the faith that stands on authority is not faith.” I would say that the science that stands on authority is not science. Science is supposed to be a method of seeking truth. Those who engage in that pursuit must be free to question, to dissent, and yes, to be wrong. Otherwise, science is not science at all.

Ineffable

I just read Karen Armstrong's A History of God and it is going right onto my to-be-re-read pile. I knew it would be going there when I was only about a third of the way through the book. I was standing in a crowded subway car reading. At the stop before mine a woman who had been sitting across from me got up to leave, saying “that's a great book.” I agreed, telling her that it had got me thinking in new ways about the history of religion. She said that she wanted to read it again. I told her that I thought I would too.

A History of God is not, in fact, a history of God. Nor is it a history of religion, per se, but a history of the concept of God as considered by the three major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Armstrong begins at the beginning, in the years before the concept of the one God took hold. Our species has always worshiped and wondered about the spiritual matters, the world beyond our senses and the mysteries of existence. It is a defining characteristic of mankind. Built into our DNA, we are creatures that seek God.

All three faiths see Abraham as the progenitor. It was he who began to worship one God. As an old man he heard the voice of God and began to follow him and him alone. Who was this one God? The Bible tells us that Abraham did not know the sacred name of the Lord. He called him “El Shaddai.” Here Armstrong asks a question. Was El Shaddai, the God of Abraham, the same God as the one worshiped by Moses and his followers in the desert? She tells us that scholars think that El Shaddai was a local Canaanite deity.

What was so unusual about worshiping one of the many local deities? Nothing, really. What was unusual was the exclusive covenant Abraham made. He worshiped his God and his God alone. Even more radical, when he moved he and his family continued to worship his God. He refused to pay fealty to the local gods. This was the great difference, this idea that God could more universal, greater than the small regional gods all around them.

By the time of Moses God had become something wholly other. While Abraham's grandson Jacob could have a literal wrestling match with God, such a concept would have been blasphemous to the Israelites who followed Moses. God had developed into a being of such unimaginable power and majesty that He could not even be contemplated in mere human form. He would appear as flame or smoke. To look upon him was more than a man could bear. Moses, who spent time with Him, was physically changed. His face glowed with such light that he had to wear a veil so as not to cause injury to those who encountered him.

What happened to the relatively simple deity of Abraham? Had he evolved? Did he change? Of course not. But as man changes, grows, and becomes more capable, his concept of the divine changes. Armstrong traces a history of these changes, comparing and contrasting the different strains of faith and understanding in its three major expressions. It's a fascinating journey.

Recently the book has been criticized by scholar Stephen Prothero who says that Armstrong stretches to find commonalities that don't exist and ignores significant differences. This strikes me as being deliberately obtuse. Armstrong is careful to point out differences, explaining that core dogma of each faith can be seen as being blasphemous to the others. She also points out the significant splits within those faiths as different groups of people at different times followed their own path toward understanding. What is remarkably similar is the experience, as articulated by some adherents to each religion, of the ultimate, of the feeling of the divine and the sense of the numinous. Those who have have followed the paths of their faith or who have broken new ground within that faith will describe a deep, profound experience that transcends dogma. She writes that it “seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy, and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the ONE, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are naturally and endlessly sought by human beings.”

The faiths evolve as man grows. Some adherents follow a path of reason, others of dogma, and some of mysticism. All seem to have their place and all have enriched the history. But Armstrong is not an uncritical observer. She uses the example of St. Bernard's persecution of Abelard to demonstrate what religion can become when dogma rejects reason. She writes of the differences between the mystical, imaginative approach and the path of pure reason.

In the end I see the greatest wisdom in accepting the imaginative power of mysticism while employing reason and engaging in the centuries long conversation that is tradition.

The concept of the divine changes and grows as man himself changes and grows. Now we are in a new age, an age different from all others in history. Today, belief in God is a matter of personal choice. Faith is no longer an societal given. Each generation must create its own imaginative concept of God. God is a subjective experience; he cannot be described by a formula that is universal for all. Our concept of Him is transformed by our own personal religious experience. I wonder what the next generation's expression of the divine will say about Him. And us.

Silence

I've been kind of quiet here lately. I've been dealing with some demons. Things should be getting back to what passes for normal shortly.

Funny, You Do Look Jewish

Yesterday morning finds me where it often finds me, sitting in a subway car, heading off to work. And since I'm sitting in a subway car heading off to work, I'm doing what I always do when so situated, I'm reading a book. Just now I'm reading Hooray For Yiddish! by Leo Rosten. It's an interesting, funny book and I'm enjoying it greatly. As the train is clicking along and my pages are turning, I see that a man is approaching from the other side of the car. He's looking at my book. I know what's coming.

He wants to know where I found the book, which is long out of print. I tell him that I bought it years ago. I had read Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, picked up this follow-up somewhere, and sort of forgot about it until I ran across it the other day. He introduces himself. He's an attorney. He tells me what temple he belongs to and begins to mention things I know little or nothing of. I have to interrupt him.

“The thing is,” I tell him, “I'm not a Jewish guy.”

He's surprised. I understand. The thing is, I do look Jewish. Something about my face. My beard, certainly, but there seems to be more to it. I just look, I don't know, Semitic.

It's happened to me before. Sometimes it's funny. Years ago I was sitting in a Denny's, eating ham and eggs. I was reading a book about Judaism. Why was I reading a book about Judaism? Because it's interesting and I'm ignorant. I find that when I read about something I become slightly less ignorant while the subject becomes yet more interesting. So there I am, Beardy Ben-Beardface, eating my ham and reading my book, when my waiter stops, sits down, and asks me some polite questions about my faith. Since it wasn't my faith and since I had only just started the book, there really wasn't much I could do but commend him on his curiosity.

That was kind of fun. Having kids sing Hava Nagila as I walked by was less pleasant, but still kind of funny. Having a drunk start talking about how greedy “the Jews” are while looking at me in a crowded subway car was not funny at all.

But this particular subway ride wasn't too bad at all. My new friend asked me why I was reading a book that would seem to be of limited interest to a gentile. I told him that the subject is fascinating and Rosten is a heck of a writer. He agreed. I also told him that it wasn't the first time someone had made his mistake and alluded to one of the more unpleasant encounters. He shook his head knowingly. He knew.

“Anybody who is different, people will pick on,” he said. He told me about a girl in his office. She's Asian. He heard people giving her a hard time because of it, making fun of her. “Makes me sick,” he said.

I understood. We've seen that aspect of humanity. Me the Christian. He the Jew. But right then we were both of the same tribe.

Intolerance

Would you boycott a bookstore because it hosted an author you disagreed with? When did McCarthyism become part of the mainstream? Before we patronize a bookstore should we investigate their loyalty to what we believe to be correct? “Are you now providing or have you ever provided a forum for members of this party or that?”

In order for this thing called America to work it requires open forums that allow free expression. It also requires tolerance, even of those beliefs that we may despise. Without that the Bill of Rights is meaningless. Intolerance is un-American.

Another Good Bookstore Closes

Dammit.  PhiloBiblos reports that Rodney's Bookstore in Cambridge is closing.  Central Square is decaying before our eyes.

To Facebook or Not to Facebook?

A couple of weeks ago I set up a Facebook account. I did it more out of curiosity than anything else. I wanted to know what this thing was. I'm still not sure.

I didn't do anything to make my presence known, but some friends found me anyway.

I've only been looking at the thing for a little while, but I'm not all that sure I like it. The user interface seems to be poorly designed. When I want to change privacy settings I have to do a lot of clicking. And it's not all that intuitive. I've tried to use a couple of applications, but some of them don't work right. I've been told that when Facebook updates its system it can cause some apps to fail. That's pretty clumsy right there.

Then there are the privacy concerns. Just scanning the web today I see articles in PCWorld, The New York Times, and Bloomberg. ZDNet has lots of stuff, including an article on how to secure some measure of privacy on Facebook.

The more I look at it, the more it seems to me that the people who run Facebook are not to be trusted. Their business model seems to be one of exploitation. The users of Facebook are not its customers. They are its commodity. That's true of any successful social media network or any free web service. The real customers are either advertisers or people who are paying for information about users. Services I like to use seem to understand the balance between making money from the paying customers and keeping the users happy and secure.

I found this piece, advocating quitting Facebook altogether, thought provoking.

My question is, should I just lock down my account or should I kill it? I link some of my Tweets to Facebook, so my friends who don't use that service can see what I'm saying. It's nice to see what friends who don't Tweet or have blogs are thinking about. For that, if nothing else, Facebook is kind of nice. Other than though, I don't think I'm going to use the service very much. It's just a little too creepy.

I Met a Superhero!

It's true!  I met one of my all-time favorite superheroes, Zatanna.  For some reason she was hanging around a comic book store.  I assume there was some sort of magical skulduggery going on that she needed to monitor.  Whatever, she was very nice and she's even prettier than her pictures.  I, on the other hand, am just as not-pretty, which may explain why this is the first picture of me I've posted here.  She didn't say "Kool ekil a gninnirg toidi," but she might as well have.

To Boldly Go Across the Universe

I just saw this on Byzantium's Shores and had to share.  Two of my favorite things in the world, Beatles and Star Trek.