EclecticLip

Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider was the ninth book club selection.  It was selected based on a desire to learn about decentralized team structures.  A positive review on military analyst John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, also helped.

As of June 2010, it has proven to be one of the most cross-referenced texts in subsequent book summaries and discussion.

As always, if you consider the review useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book. 

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The Starfish and the Spider - summary

May 29, 2010 marks the 557th year since the fall of Constantinople, and with it the final vestiges of the Roman Empire (or “Byzantine Empire”, for you Philistines out there     ).

Tradition has it that Rome was founded on April 21, 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, a pair of half-divine twin brothers.  It seems that father Mars started off as an agricultural god but became something of a God-of-War, when the Roman Republic started on its multi-century project of conquering the known world… and then defending those conquests.

While the Rome in the West enjoyed 12 centuries of existence (ending on September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustulus abdicated to Odoacer) Rome in the East lasted another millenium.  As such, if one dates the magnificent Roman civil experiment to 753 BC, it survived in a myriad of evolving forms for well over two millenia!  And even then, Muslim conqueror Mehmed II declared himself Caesar of Rome upon his conquest!

Rome/Constantinople, April 21 753 BC - May 29 1453.  Passed away from invasion after a 2,206 year run.  RIP.

(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)

I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently.  It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago.  Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.

Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”.  This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world).  To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him.  Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 

Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.*  But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels.  The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries.  And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels.  Ah, the miracle of mistranslation! 

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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend.  If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area.  (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)

Seems Men’s Health spoke too soon in impugning Outback Steakhouse’s Aussie Fries (see earlier post here).

Armour brand pork brains in milk gravy contain more than 1000% of your daily recommended intake of cholesterol.  On the other hand, it is brain food.

(Hat tip consumerist.)

(more under the fold)

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I was reading a book on the Crusades, that jihadist period of European Christendom, to learn more about the events that doomed Asian Christianity.

Basically, Christianity had more adherents across Asia and Africa than in Europe until about the time of the Crusades — meaning that the heretical Jacobites and Nestorians  outnumbered the followers of the orthodox Catholic and Orthodox churches.  Jenkins suggested that the fall of Asian Christianity was due to the emergence of hardline Muslim leaders across Asia who weren’t as tolerant of the other Peoples of the Book (Christians, Jews) as prior leaders had been.  These leaders emerged at a time when the Islamic world was troubled by repeated Christian invasions from the West, and existentially threatened by Mongol invasions from the East.  It appears that when the Khans converted to Islam, they became the most intolerant rulers of all.

But back to the Crusades.  Professor Tyerman’s description of crusade recruiters made me think immediately of modern motivational speakers.  Only, instead of motivating their audiences to sign up for a follow-up course, they were trying to motivate them to pick up arms and travel for several months so that if they survived the trip, they could engage an enemy, on said enemy’s territory, surrounded by said enemy’s allies. 

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I’ve encountered a major fallacy in two fields, relating to the incorrect application of a steady-state assumption.  So I’m making it a category.

I’m going to say arguments suffer from a steady-state fallacy when they improperly assume that a present-day circumstance will carry over unchanged into the future.  Because over time, most circumstances do change.  People get older.  New technologies emerge.  Empires fall, and new ones rise. And so forth.
A few examples below the fold…

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…until at least the weekend.  Workday priorities and such.

Meanwhile, the following phrase from Christopher Tyerman’s Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades struck me as postworthy:

Ironically, for all its political success, the Albigensian Crusade failed to eradicate the Cathars, a task effected by the more pacific and reasoned methods [?!?!] of the Inquisition.  (p68, hardcover edition)

The more pacific and reasoned methods of the Inquisition?

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This semi-recent New York Times post is about DVD’s being unreadable four years after they were recorded.  It ties into one of my musings over the years — whether a medium’s information density is inverse to durability or recoverability. Or phrased differently, is the high storage density of electronic media a crippling strength, because the data becomes too “fragile”?
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The sturdy clay tablets of Sumeria have lasted thousands of years.

Paper and animal hide can store far more information per kilogram, but rarely last as long - if the Nag Hammadi Library or the Dead Sea Scrolls were stored in an area with any appreciable moisture (say, Vancouver, BC, Canada) they probably wouldn’t've survived the nearly two thousand years until rediscovery! Fortunately, copies are easier to make.

And electronic storage is the densest — but least durable — of all.  (Four years?!)

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There is a Zen koan which goes like this:

Show me the original face you had before you were born.

The idea of koans is to jolt the listener out of their preconceptions and perceive reality directly — to get past the transitory mental frames in which they live (as baker, parent, grandchild, recreational hockey player, Canadian, etc.) and perceive their true nature.  Or so I think. 

In Part 3 of A Fair Country (”The Castrati”) Saul argues that if our elites could understand what it is to be Canadian — as opposed to what it is to be not-quite-American (or not-quite-British, as was the case back in the day) — they could advance our country and culture, confidently. As it is, they represent our interests self-consciously, timidly; as if they’ve got empire envy.

To adapt the Zen koan, if they knew their original face — an open, Aboriginal culture in which a bedazzlingly diverse array of peoples live together and thrive together in peace and harmony — they wouldn’t be brow-beaten by an Imperial Inferiority Complex.  Like a lion confused it’s a sheep, re-discovering its lionhood (lionness?    ) would allow it to return to its full potential.

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Part II of John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country is titled Peace, Fairness, and Good Government.

It’s a play on the phrase Peace, Order and Good Government which appears in the Confederation-enshrining Constitution Act of 1867.  The phrase — an eminently pragmatic aspirational ideal — appears in many Commonwealth Independence documents.

A major point of Part II is Saul’s argument that the phrase was originally and consistently Peace, Welfare and Good Government. That’s the welfare-of-the-people, as in the English wellbeing, the French bien-etre, the classical Greek eudaimonia.  Saul notes this spirit is reflected in First Nations expression of the common bowl — an earthier analogue to the English term of the ‘commonwealth’.

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