Category: From the Old Server

Tudor Parfitt, an English academic, schlepped all over southern Africa trying to figure out whether or not the Lemba people were, as some of them claimed, in fact Jews.  He wrote up his travels, circa 1990, in Journey to the Vanished City.  This was no easy task due to the fact that the Lemba have been illiterate for many centuries (if not forever) and therefore all of their history had to be obtained in person-to-person interviews.  There are some parallels between the situation with the Lemba in Africa and the Indians and Mormons in the U.S.  According to the book, southern Africa was never inhabited by literate people and for the most part never inhabited by people who built any buildings more substantial than a grass hut.  When whites came to southern Africa they encountered tribes living in grass huts but also an extensive ruined stone city called “Great Zimbabwe”.  They didn’t want to believe that ancestors of the blacks whom they were oppressing had been capable of advanced civilization and therefore a popular explanation was that people from the Middle East had come down to southern Africa at some point, built Great Zimbabwe, and left.  The theory made some sense in that Arab slave traders had been operating up and down Africa’s east coast for many centuries and had colonized substantial parts of the Horn of Africa.

Where’s the parallel with the U.S.?  There are massive ceremonial centers built of earth in the Ohio River Valley and up and down the Mississippi (Cahokia, Illinois being the largest).  Europeans displacing American Indians did not want to believe that the people whom they were pushing aside had ever been capable of much.  Various theories were promulgated in the early 1800s as to who might have built these impressive structures.  The Book of Mormon is an explanation that posits immigrants from the Middle East (tribes of Israel in fact).

The book is interesting as a travel adventure and it is also interesting as a reflection of attitudes about the country of Zimbabwe circa 1990.  A black South African university professor is quoted:

“I don’t think the Africans are a vengeful people.  Look what happened in Zimbabwe.  The whites always said there would be a blood-bath if the blacks won the war, but not so. … If redemption and peace can come to Rhodesia after years of one of the bloodiest wars, it can come here.”

[Oh yes… the Lemba.  If you don’t want to read the book it turns out that DNA studies carried out in the late 1990s indicate that they have some Middle Eastern blood.  Their oral history points to an origin in present-day Yemen.  There were Jews in Yemen until they were pushed out by Arab riots in 1948 (they took refuge in Israel, some of them men with two wives, thus becoming some of Israel’s only legal polygamists).  Of course there were Arabs in Yemen.  The handful of Lemba traditions that are Middle Eastern could be either Muslim or Jewish.  So the question remains open…]

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Just finished a Dover Press book entitled Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts.  Good for putting the discomforts of present-day travel into perspective…

Mushullam Ben R. Menahem in 1481:

“And even if you escape all these dangers [bandits on the road, Muslims who like to kill Jews, etc.] yourself it often happens to people that the horses on which they ride die, or they are nearly dead when they reach Jerusalem, because of the brackish water they drink, and the great heat and the dust which comes into their mouths, and the sand in which they go up to the knees in great pain and also because of the want of food and the long journey…”

Once you got to Jerusalem there wasn’t all that much to see compared to what greets modern-day travelers.  Obadiah Da Bertinoro 1487:

“Jerusalem is for the most part desolate and in ruins.  I need not repeat that it is not surrounded by walls.  Its inhabitants, I am told, number about 4,000 families.  As for Jews, about seventy families of the poorest class have remained; there is scarcely a family that is not in want of the commonest necessaries; one who has bread for a year is called rich.”

Just getting to the vicinity of present-day Israel was a long process.  Obadiah continues…

“… every year Jews come in the Venetian galleys and even in the pilgrim ships, for there is really no safer and shorter way than by these ships.  … The Galleys perform the journey from Venice here in forty days at the most.”

Worth a trip to the library but not a book with which you’d want to clutter your house in the long run.

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Just finished Derek Lundy’s Godforsaken Sea, a book about the 1996-97 Vendee Globe, a solo non-stop sailboat race from France down the west coast of Africa, around Antarctica, and back to France via the east coast of South America.  In the best case you’re by yourself for 100-150 days amongst some of the world’s roughest waters and highest winds.  In about half the cases you don’t make it back at all, leaving your capsized boat to sink while you bob about in a liferaft waiting for the Australian military to pick you up.  Gerry Roufs, a Canadian sailor in the ’96-97 race, vanished without activating his EPIRB, leaving behind a young wife and daughter.

Even if you get seasick just looking at a boat, as I do, and have never understood the attraction of “racing” along at 1/5th the speed of George H.W. Bush’s fancy powerboat, the book is interesting.  Sleep turns out to be a huge challenge for the competitors.  A properly captained boat maintains a continuous watch for (a) big waves, (b) other boats, (c) other bad stuff.  Sadly this isn’t possible with only one person on board so the next best thing is to sleep in short stretches.  It turns out the optimum rest in the minimum time for humans is achieved with 6-7 hours of sleep per day broken up into at least two periods.  Most people get their best sleep between 3 and 6 a.m. and then between 3 and 5:30 pm.  Sleeping for one long stretch every night is wasteful and may be a purely cultural phenomenon.  Note that some of the world’s most productive individuals, e.g., Winston Churchill, were known to supplement a short night’s sleep with an afternoon nap.  People in Buenos Aires must be doing this as well.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery, in Wind, Sand and Stars (a must-read, by the way), said that “the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”  As the sailing machines get more sophisticated and the world a bit smaller you’d expect sailboat races to become safer.  Boats are in constant satellite beacon, email, fax, and satphone contact with race officials and support teams back home.  If things go really badly the sailor can always activate an EPIRB and out come the Australians to pick them up.  Humans, however, apparently are able to factor in all of this new gadgets and use them to shave time off the records rather than increasing their safety.  A sailor with an EPIRB and a radar will go farther south, which shortens the distance around Antarctica but also greatly increases the probability of collision with an iceberg (maybe detected by the radar in advance) or some flat chunks of ice.  Sailors accustomed to the Australians’ heroic efforts have come to grief when they ran into trouble in Chilean waters, the Chilean Navy and Air Force being disinclined to take risks or even to initiate searches.  Lundy notes “Because the technology was there, because they could stay in contact with the world and call on its search-and-rescue resources when they needed them, the sailors did theings they might not have done if they hadn’t had the technology on board.  The reckless swings deep into the higher latitudes of the fifties, sailing fast through the drift ice, cutting the mileage to the Horn–these were all recent Southern Ocean tactics, adopted in the various BOC and Vendee Globe races.”

This human attitude is familiar.  For example, a friend is using my minivan right now back in Boston.  Someone in a big SUV ran into her little Honda Civic on the highway and then ran away.  The SUV driver was going 20 mph faster than all the other cars on a snowy miserable Boston night.  He probably felt safe with 4WD, antilock brakes, air bags, and seat belts, not to mention 5000 lbs. of extra bulk, and did things that someone in a simpler smaller car would not have done.  Insurance statistics show that antilock brakes haven’t lived up to originally high expectations for preventing accidents and saving lives.  People apparently factor the extra protection into their calculations and use it to push right back up to their previous limit for risk.  Reference:  “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons”, Richens J, Imrie J, Copas A, Lancet. 2000 Jan 29;355(9201):400-3.

In Redefining Airmanship, a book for flying nerds, the author cites a U.S. Navy study that found that total flying experience did not reduce accident rates.  Pilots who had more than 500 hours in the same type of airplane were safer in that airplane than pilots who were new to a type of plane.  But otherwise the pilots with tremendous experience weren’t any safer than young punks.  The very experienced pilots were indeed more skilled but they used their skill to take more risks and tackle more ambitious projects, pushing right up to the point where the statistical risk they took was the same as when they’d started to fly.

Back on the theme of the Southern Ocean, it has been summarized in fewer words:

Below 40 degrees south there is no law;
below 50 degrees south there is no God.

— Old sailor’s saying

I’ll be there on Tuesday (Ushuaia, Argentina, 54 49 South latitude).

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In the Israel Essay, under “Why do Muslims hate the United States?”, the following paragraphs seem relevant to this Argentina trip:

As with the preceding question we should step back and ask the more general question “Why does everyone hate the United States?” Everyone hates the U.S. because everything that goes wrong in the world today is the fault of the U.S. Our military consists of 1.5 million highly trained people and tens of thousands of machines capable of getting them very quickly to where they are needed. Yet though we claim to be interested in justice and human welfare we generally don’t bother to act to protect non-citizens. For example, impending genocide in Rwanda elicited the following quote from then-President Bill Clinton: “… I mention it only because there are a sizable number of Americans there and it is a very tense situation. And I just want to assure the families of those who are there that we are doing everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation to take all the appropriate steps to try to assure the safety of our citizens there.” In other words “We could use all of our airpower and troops to stop the Hutus from killing the Tutsis but instead we’re going to airlift American citizens out and then move on to the next issue.” An estimated 1 million people died.

Nobody is going to blame the Rwandan genocide on Ireland. They’ve only got 17,000 troops and a limited number of ships and cargo planes. Nobody is going to blame Denmark, with its 35,000 troops. But the U.S. military is strong enough to intervene anywhere in the world. People can blame, with some justification, anything that makes them unhappy on the U.S.

Ask Joe Foreigner what upsets him most about the U.S. Top on the list is the fact that the U.S. is too interventionist, swaggering cowboy-like with military power into complex international situations. Complaint #2, however, is that the U.S. failed to intervene in a particular situation that is near and dear to Joe’s heart. They hate us because we are too interventionist… except when we’re not inventionist enough. They also hate the U.S. because they’re so weak and their government essentially serves at our government’s pleasure. Consider how annoying it is to be an American voter, knowing that because you don’t have $50 million you don’t have any political power. Imagine how much more annoyed you’d be if you were a citizen of one of the European nations. Not only are your politicians corrupted by the local rich but if your society wants to do something that is contrary to a sufficiently important U.S. desire, the U.S. military might invade and turn your country into a possession, ruled by a colonial viceroy.

Joe Third World Foreigner has even more reason to hate the U.S. than Joe European Foreigner. Most Third World governments have no plausible claim to legitimacy. They have power because they seized power and because the U.S. has chosen not to overthrow them. If Joe Third World Foreigner hates his rulers, who are presumably skimming whatever they can take out of his pocket, it is only natural for Joe to hate the U.S. for enabling his rulers to remain in power.

In just a few days here I’ve encountered several Argentines who aren’t fans of the U.S. government.  For starters, these folks are angry because they blame their suffering under the military dictatorship on the U.S., which trained some of their officers.  I asked if they really thought it was possible for the U.S. government to control what happened half a world away.  Indeed they did.  What about Castro? I asked.  The U.S. has been trying to get rid of him for 40 years and hasn’t managed to do it.  True, an Argentine responded, but the U.S. has succeeded in making Cuba ridiculously poor.  Cuba, of course, is free to trade with and accepts tourism from the entire European Union.  So it doesn’t seem plausible to expect a U.S. trade embargo to cripple an ambitious hard-working people.  And most of the rest of the Caribbean is extremely poor as well, despite not suffering from any animosity from the U.S. government.

To an American this image of the U.S. government as omnipotent, right down to the smallest details of how other countries are administered seems odd.  We live admidst evidence of our government’s impotence to achieve its goals.  After 40 years of the War on Poverty the streets are filled with homeless.  After 20 years of Reagan’s stepped-up War on Drugs it is as easy to party as ever.  The FAA tried to build itself a new air traffic control computer system and the project went $billions over budget and more than a decade beyond its original deadline.  How could a government this incompetent in its own country prevent a determined group of foreigners from educating themselves, working hard, building industries, and exporting their goods to Asia and the European Union?

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Today is the first day of the trip away from Buenos Aires, the megacity of Argentina.  I’ve arrived at Iguazu Falls (staying at the massive Sheraton right in the park).  It is the closest thing in South America to Niagara but less straightforward and more complex.  The lush scenery of the surrounding subtropical jungle and warm mud-colored water is also quite different.  Puerto Iguazu is a backwater town of 28,000 people, steaming in the heat and humidity of the southern summer.  But really when you think about it every place in Argentina outside of B.A. is a backwater.  The negative consequences of having one huge city dominate a country are obvious:  congestion, traffic, pollution, high real estate prices.  But perhaps there are positive consequences.

In Argentina people move to B.A., if they aren

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My two Argentine friends in Boston generated a collection of invitations in Buenos Aires that could keep me occupied here in this massive city for two weeks.  One invitation was to attend services at a Reform-ish temple on Friday night.  The service itself was highly unusual from an American Jewish perspective.  Almost the entire time was taken up with lively singing by experts within the community and the congregation as a whole.  Everyone seemed to know each other.  Security was very tight.  I almost didn’t make it into the temple because my escort was unknown to the guard.  Fortunately she had her national ID card with a last name of “Cohen” to present.  Why the paranoia?

At first glance you’d think that Argentina’s Jews would be happy and complacent.  There has never been any violence directed at the Jewish community here from their mostly Italian- and Spanish-descended fellow citizens.  They escaped Europe’s war against her Jewish citizens.  You’d think that being on the other side of the globe from the Middle East would preserve Argentina’s Jews from the Muslim war against the Jews.  The 1993 bombing of the Jewish community center here in Buenos Aires, however, left a deep scar.  85 people were killed and 230 wounded in a car bombing that was never completely resolved.  Supposedly the money came from Iran and support from the local Iranian embassy but the actual killers were never identified.

It’s a tough situation when you’re already at the End of the Earth.  There is literally nowhere to run.

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A friend criticized me for being unsympathetic regarding a concern of hers that I thought was irrational.  She believed that a friend ought to care simply because another human being is apprehensive, even if that apprehension is not justified.  During this exchange it occurred to me that there is actually no reason for the layperson to be sympathetic or empathetic in any modern situation.

Three hundred years ago everyone had to know how to make soap.  Today we can run down to the store and buy Ivory or Palmolive.

Three hundred years ago friends needed to empathize with one another.  Today anyone who wishes to get sympathy for his or her troubles can simply buy it from one of the hundreds of thousands of trained professionals in the therapy industry.

Friendship isn’t obsolete of course.  Psychotherapists aren’t very entertaining so we might still rely on friends for amusement.  But why bother pretending to care about another person’s troubles when there are so many psychotherapists out there who actually do care, truly, deeply, professionally?

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Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India.  But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT’s latest big IT effort:  OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given).  During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system.  In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show.  A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them.  The answer:  “We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren’t worth considering.”

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word “Delhi”.  It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseWare was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT’s main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

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Sabin Willett’s Present Value cleverly rolls together a lot of themes that have been discussed here.  I read it in one sitting last night, following a massive family gluttonfest down here in Washington, DC.  Highly recommended.

[Fifteen years ago an Italian woman studying in Boston told me of her experience at Thanksgiving dinner with a local family.  “We Italians have a reputation for eating a lot but never have I seen people stuff themselves like pigs as here in America.”]

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I decided to push back the round-the-world trip and instead spend December in Argentina.  My flights into and out of Buenos Aires are fairly fixed but everything else is open and I would appreciate suggestions.  Here’s the plan so far…

Dec 10:  leave Boston.
Dec 11:  arrive Buenos Aires at 10:07 am
Dec 12,13: sightseeing B.A.
Dec 14:  Sunday trip to Colonia, Uruguay via ferry
Dec 15:  leave B.A. for Iguazu Falls, stay at fancy Sheraton with view
of falls?
Dec 17:  fly from Iguazu Falls to Bariloche (Lake District), rent car
Dec 25:  fly to Ushuaia (the southernmost town in Argentina), take a few tours
Dec 31:  fly from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires in time to catch 10:55 pm
flight to Miami

Thoughts?

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