Primitive superstition wins again as a good man is murdered

Tragic news out of Guatemala.

A RESEARCHER for a London University has been burnt alive by violent mob after being accused of practising witchcraft in his homeland.

Domingo Choc Che, 55, an expert on traditional herbal medicine, had been working with a team from University College London (UCL), before being set upon by a group of men in his native Guatemala. The violent group accused Mr Choc Che of causing the death of a member of the community after he had given medicine and for carrying out a ceremony on the grave.

Disturbing pictures shows huge plumes of smoke bellowing from the victim who desperately tried to save his life by running through the field.

Moments later Mr Choc Che collapsed and died at the scene before emergency services were able to attend.

. . .

The Mayan medicine specialist had been working as a collaborator on a UCL pharmaceutical project ... The scientific project involved researching biodiversity use of Mayan medicine in Guatemala.

There's more at the link.

I was very sad to read that news, but not surprised.  In any primitive culture, anything that doesn't fit the traditional narrative is regarded with suspicion and distrust.  From attacks on medical teams trying to use modern medicine to treat Ebola in Africa, to the burning alive of suspected "witches", to the murder of albinos in Tanzania to obtain their body parts for shamanistic rituals and "medicine", to the "cargo cults" of the Pacific, the problem of primitive, uneducated, non-scientific (or rather pre-scientific) culture is rampant in much of the Third World.

The biggest problem is not that such lack of understanding exists:  it's that those from a modern scientific background can't understand or appreciate the depths of superstition confronting them in such places.  They don't take enough time or trouble to understand local beliefs and attitudes, or to explain what they're doing and why.  They simply press on with their studies and research, because they don't want to "waste time" explaining what they know locals are unlikely to understand.

That's what leads to tragedies like this.  Because the locals feel ignored and "left out", they naturally put the worst possible interpretation on what they see the outsiders doing.  If that threatens the foundations of their belief system or culture, they're going to do something about it.  In this case, Mr. Choc Che was the victim of that response, with locals assuming his medicines had caused the death of the sick person he tried to help.

I experienced similar reactions in primitive African society.  I learned early on that one couldn't just hand out medicines.  It wasn't safe if improvement didn't result.  Rather, it was best to take the sick person to another location, where they could be treated by doctors and nurses without having suspicious family members hovering over them, ready to lash out at any sign that things weren't going well.

For those of my readers who may venture "off the beaten track" for any reason, tourism, research or whatever, please bear that in mind.  You're on someone else's turf.  You're the intruder, the outsider.  You can't assume that you're welcome, or that you're understood, or that you're free to do whatever you please.  Conformity to local customs and expectations is at least polite.  It may, at times, help to save your life.

Peter

Memorial Day

Let Sergeant McKenzie speak for all veterans, and for all wars.

To those who stood their ground beside me, and did not come back . . . I remember you.  You are not forgotten.

Peter

Saturday Snippet: Marriage proposals, noble and ignoble

Back in 1984, English author Rosalind Miles published a book titled "Modest Proposals:  or, May I Call You Mine?"

It's a light-hearted look at marriage proposals, real and fictional, down the ages.  My mother bought it when it came out, and had a good laugh over it:  and, when I was next at home, I did the same.  When I immigrated to America, I brought it with me as part of my library, so my copy is particularly well-traveled - from England, where it was printed and published, to South Africa, to the USA.

Here are a few excerpts.

The ideal proposal is a magical moment, a peak of ecstasy amid a whirl of impressions of beauty - ballgowns and roses, passion and palm trees, with the strains of heavenly music wafting in the distance.  But many people's experience falls far short of this ideal - they get the strains without the music.

Alida Baxter, for instance, found that her marriage proposal could hardly have occurred at a less propitious time and place.  As she ruefully confesses in her autobiography, "Flat On My Back":

I wouldn't be married at all if it weren't for that stomach upset I had in 1969.  I was run down, and being proposed to through the lavatory door caught me off guard.

Yes, well, it would, wouldn't it?  In fairness the Baxter swain had been doing sterling work nursing his inamorata through a combination of Montezuma's Revenge and the Black Death, on what was supposed to be a jolly holiday in Spain.  When language broke down with the Mediterranean medico, he even carried devotion to the extreme of miming her complaint for the doctor's better understanding - which was, in fact, diarrhea!

Now a man who'll mime diarrhea for you in front of a grinning foreigner is clearly a man of many parts, but a sense of timing was not among them.  He waited until his true love was philosophizing from the depths of the bathroom about the division of the Spanish nation into sadists and masochists - 'the sadists manufacture the toilet paper, and the masochists use it' - and chose this tender moment to pop the question.  As she says herself:

There can't be all that many people who've received a proposal of marriage through a lavatory door and I sometimes consider ringing up the Guinness Book of Records, but perhaps an ex-nurse friend of mine has the edge on me.  Her husband proposed to her after she'd given him an enema.

. . .

Of all prospective fathers-in-law, the most sorely tried must have been the father of Olivia Langdon, the best beloved of Samuel Clemens ('Mark Twain').  Clemens was a great admirer of women and by common consent at his best in their company:  'he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say, and their pretty defiances', recalled one of his friends.  But he fell in love deeply only once, with the beautiful Olivia, as he confessed to his clergyman's wife:

I am in love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the world.  I don't suppose she will marry me.  I can't think it possible.  She ought not to.  But if she doesn't I shall still be sure that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and be proud to have it known that I tried to win her.

There were tremendous obstacles in the way.  Although now so admired as a leading American writer and humorist, Clemens had had a rough life working and tramping in the Mississippi region, and traces of it survived in his manner ever after.  He was casual and irreverent;  he didn't give a fig for parlor protocol, and would make himself a terror to maiden ladies by putting his feet up on their tables and draping his loose-jointed legs over their chairs.  He was also an incorrigible prankster, and nothing was safe from his sense of the ridiculous.  More seriously, he had no position and poor prospects.  Stern Mr. Langdon was not about to entrust his daisy-flower to such an unpromising reprobate.

But Clemens was a smart man.  As soon as his feelings for Olivia were noticed on a visit, he was asked to leave.  But someone had removed the bolts from the back seat of the family station wagon - so when the horse moved off, the passenger was tumbled out of the back.  His resulting 'concussion' meant that he had to be carried back into the house, and nursed back to health - by Olivia!

Olivia herself was soon won.  But her father was unconvinced.  Finally he proposed that Clemens should provide some character references to establish his suitability as a husband.  Clemens wrote at once to half a dozen worthy citizens who had been on good terms with him earlier in his life.

Naturally any friend of Clemens would share his roistering sense of humor.  All his references obliged with outrageous replies stressing his rambunctious history and claiming that he would make about the worst husband since Blackbeard.  Clemens was summoned to the Langdon house to hear the verdict passed on him by his 'supporters'.  In his own words:

I couldn't think of anything to say.  Mr. Langdon was apparently in the same condition.  Finally he raised his handsome head, fixed his clear and candid eye upon me, and said, "What kind of people are these?  Haven't you a friend in the world?"

I said, "Apparently not."

Then he said, "I'll be your friend myself.  Take the girl.  I know you better than they do."

And so the day was won.

. . .

A proposal is a paradox - just as it can be the liberation of a woman, it can also be the clanging of the trap door for a man.  The state matrimonial has not always had a good press.  Marriage is an institution, said Oscar Wilde, and who wants to live in an institution?  His view received some support from Ogden Nash in a wry poem called "I Do, I Will, I Have":

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
never forgetsam,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,

it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.

. . .

A very human story of a man's ambivalence, hesitating on the threshold of this great moment and undecided whether to go forward or back, is Jack Benny's courtship.  His girl loved him and had given him every sign of her feelings.  When he told her that he was leaving town, she blurted out, "If you were a gentleman, you'd ask me to go along with you!"

The effect that this simple line produced was devastating.  The great comedian, who had this effect on so many other people, himself literally fell on the floor and rolled about, laughing his head off.  Naturally somewhat miffed, our heroine lost no time in getting herself engaged to another man.  But as soon as her engagement was made public, she says:

... the phone rang.  It was Jack. "I hear you're getting married."

"Yes, I am," I replied.

"Well... the last month or so, I've been thinking about you... And if ever I WANTED to get married, I'd like to marry you... but I DON'T want to get married..."

"Well, that's fine for YOU," I said sarcastically, "but I'M getting married."

"Look," Jack went on, "... I really do think you're much too young to get married... But if you ARE going to get married, why don't you marry me?"

Without missing a beat, I said, "Fine."

"Well then," Jack said, "let's get married this Friday - BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND!"

There are plenty more stories in the book, many of them highly amusing.  It's long out of print, but used copies are freely available.

Peter

In Memoriam: Chuck Taylor

Back in the late Southeast Asian unpleasantness, a.k.a. the Vietnam War, Chuck Taylor was a Captain in the US Army's Rangers.  He saw combat, was wounded, and came home with medals for valor in action.  In other words, he was the real deal, not an REMF or a "PowerPoint Ranger" (to use a more modern expression).

As such, I always gave extra weight to his opinions on self-defense equipment, tactics and training for civilians.  Not many instructors can boast that sort of real-world background, and being a combat vet myself, I naturally regard it as important.  (There's nothing quite like getting shot to remind you that you're neither invincible nor invulnerable.  How do I know this?  Ask my wife, who's had to pick shrapnel out of my old scars on more than one occasion.  As Clint Smith - another Vietnam combat veteran - has been known to observe, "Incoming fire has the right of way!")

Taylor was the first Operations Manager at Gunsite, the legendary shooting school founded by the late, great Jeff Cooper in Arizona in 1976.  He went on to found his own school, the American Small Arms Academy.  Some of its courses are still taught by Defense Training Associates.  He was also a member of the US National Team of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC).  Taylor taught civilians, law enforcement and military units for decades, passing on what he'd learned the hard way in combat and the techniques he helped develop in civilian life.  He was the founding editor of SWAT Magazine, still regarded as one of the premier firearms periodicals, and used its pages to convey much of the same instruction to its readers.

Some felt that Taylor was too rigid and dogmatic in clinging to what he'd learned by experience in combat, rather than being open to new technologies and techniques developed since then.  On the other hand, I think he was spot on.  To this day, I remain skeptical of "the latest and greatest thing since sliced bread".  If a new technology comes along that promises to make self-defense easier and more reliable, I want to have that thing wrung out six ways from Sunday, and proven in the field, not just in the laboratory or on the training range.  (Red dot sights are a good example.  Early models were all too prone to run their batteries down or suffer breakages just when you really, really needed them.  By the late 1990's and early 2000's, those initial teething troubles had largely been overcome, and they became so useful as to be almost indispensable.  The US Army and Marines have subsequently bought hundreds of thousands of them, with good results.)

Taylor was adaptable enough to change his views after such new technologies were proven.  His earlier books and articles reflected his initial attitudes about such things, but people reading them today often fail to take account of his later work, where he recognized their value after taking the time to prove (and im-prove) them.  He retained my respect as a man who'd "been there and done that", and therefore knew what he was talking about in a very practical, experiential way that most instructors can't match.

Sadly, Taylor passed away earlier this month, after only a year of retirement to relax and enjoy himself.  He joins Jeff Cooper, Ray Chapman and other stalwarts of the 1970's and 1980's on the Honor Roll of those who've made a tangible difference to the art and science of defensive shooting.  More and more of their colleagues are leaving us as age catches up with them.  The shooting world will be much poorer when the last of them has passed.  So vast an accumulation of practical, empirical knowledge can't be replaced, and can't be reduced to mere words on paper.  (That said, some of Taylor's books are still available, and are worth reading, IMHO.  Many of his articles are also out there, some available online.  He was particularly well known for his "torture test" of an early-model Glock 17 pistol, which has fired several hundred thousand rounds yet remains perfectly serviceable and reliable.)

May Chuck Taylor rest in the peace he so richly earned through his service to his country and the shooting community.

Peter

Your feel-good video of the month

A construction operator took a few moments to make two kids very happy.

I don't know if his employer gives a public relations award to worthy employees, but if they do, his name should be on it.  Well done, sir.

Peter

A fascinating tale of obsession, teamwork and undersea exploration

The New Yorker has a very interesting (and very long) article about a man's obsession with reaching the bottom of the deepest point in every ocean, and how he set about it.  In the process, he built - as a private venture, using his own money - the only vessel in existence certified to dive to any depth, anywhere on Earth.

Here's a short excerpt.

Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone. It was the shape of a bulging briefcase, with a protruding bulb at the bottom. This was the pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet in diameter, which was sealed off from the rest of the submersible and housed the pilot and all his controls. Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom.

Sunlight cuts through the first thousand feet of water. This is the epipelagic zone, the layer of plankton, kelp, and reefs. It contains the entire ecosystem of marine plants, as well as the mammals and the fish that eat them. An Egyptian diver once descended to the limits of this layer. The feat required a lifetime of training, four years of planning, a team of support divers, an array of specialized air tanks, and a tedious, thirteen-hour ascent, with constant decompression stops, so that his blood would not be poisoned and his lungs would not explode.

The submersible dropped at a rate of about two and a half feet per second. Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot reached the midnight zone, where dark waters turn black. The only light is the dim glow of bioluminescence—from electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and toothy predators with natural lanterns to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in these depths have no eyes—what use are they? There is little to eat. Conditions in the midnight zone favor fish with slow metabolic rates, weak muscles, and slimy, gelatinous bodies.

An hour into the descent, the pilot reached ten thousand feet—the beginning of the abyssal zone. The temperature is always a few degrees above freezing, and is unaffected by the weather at the surface. Animals feed on “marine snow”: scraps of dead fish and plants from the upper layers, falling gently through the water column. The abyssal zone, which extends to twenty thousand feet, encompasses ninety-seven per cent of the ocean floor.

After two hours in free fall, the pilot entered the hadal zone, named for the Greek god of the underworld. It is made up of trenches—geological scars at the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates—and although it composes only a tiny fraction of the ocean floor, it accounts for nearly fifty per cent of the depth.

Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the pilot had gone beyond the theoretical limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells collapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five thousand feet, he began releasing a series of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. If there were any imperfections, it could instantly implode.

The submarine touched the silty bottom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old Texan named Victor Vescovo, became the first living creature with blood and bones to reach the deepest point in the Tonga Trench.

There's much more at the link, including many photographs.

It's a pretty amazing story about a man driven to achieve what had never been done before, and the team he assembled to do it.  It's very long, but I think it's worth the time it'll take to read it.  Highly recommended.

Peter

Saturday Snippet: a remarkable woman who lived, loved, traveled and wrote widely

So far in this series of posts I've put up excerpts from a book by a particular author.  Today, I'd like to vary that format by putting up excerpts of reviews and newspaper articles dealing with the late Lesley Blanch.  She was unique, with a personality and outlook on life that defied convention and drove her to wander the East with a gimlet eye for adventure and history.  She lived to the ripe old age of 103, and was still writing her autobiography when she died.  (It was later completed by her goddaughter.)

One of her best-known books is "The Sabres of Paradise", a life of 19th-century Caucasian leader Imam Shamil, the so-called "Lion of Dagestan", and a history of his people's decades-long resistance to the eventual Russian domination of their land.  Much of the recent history of terrorism in Chechnya, Dagestan and nearby areas can be traced back to the events she described.

A little-known fact is that this book provided much of the inspiration (and the language) for Frank Herbert's famed SF novel "Dune", the first winner of the then-new Nebula Award (and joint winner of a Hugo Award, back when that prize actually meant something in literary and science fiction terms, before it was corrupted by social-justice-warrior political correctness).

Let's begin with excerpts from a couple of lengthy discussions of her life.  The first is from the Guardian, written a couple of years before her death.  It's titled "Time Traveler".  In it, the man who shaped and formed the rest of her life is described.  She never divulged his name.

The delights of an Edwardian child's London paled ... beside the world opened up for her by a periodic visitor to the household, the mysterious Traveller. This never-named character, a part-Russian, part-Central-Asian friend of her parents (and possibly a former lover of her mother's) brought magic lantern slides of troikas in the snow and told tales of "Tarbagan Bator, the marmot hero of Mongol legend". He brought gifts to the nursery: "a chunk of malachite, or a Kazakh fox-skin cap (which smelt rather rank) and once a 'bunchuk', or standard, decorated with the dangling horse-tails of a Mongol chieftain". Journey Into The Mind's Eye describes how the Traveller enraptured her, how she became obsessed with the Trans-Siberian railroad, how he promised to take her on it one day and how that dream came to dominate her life.

The Traveller also took her back in time. He told of the Decembrists, aristocratic Russians who entered Paris in triumph after Waterloo. Ten years later they shattered the leaden calm of absolutist Russia with demands for reform and democracy. Tsar Nicholas crushed the revolt, and in so doing began the cruel century-and-a-half procession of internal exiles to the remotest regions of Russia's wild east. The church offered to facilitate annulments for the plotters' wives, but they chose to follow their husbands and suffered privation and exile with their men. These women and their journeys became Blanch's girlhood touchstone, leaving her out of step with the concerns of contemporaries and the agenda of schoolmistresses: "Oddly lacking in team spirit"; "moody and secretive" read the reports.

Blanch began reading Russian intellectual and diarist Alexander Herzen; to this day, she is never parted from a volume of his memoirs. Other favourites included Carlyle: "His treatment of the French revolution was extraordinary. The pace made you breathless."

The Traveller's silence during the war ended in 1921 with his reappearance at the Gare du Nord to meet 17-year-old Blanch, arriving in Paris for an educational break with a French governess. The two adults vied for control of the teenager's agenda: churches and royal monuments from one; Russian tea-shops, Cossack battalions camping in railway yards and a private recital by Rachmaninov from the other. Easter brought the dénouement. The Catholic governess refused to enter an Orthodox church, so Traveller and ingénue attended the midnight service unchaperoned. "Seeing the way the men spoke to him, and the manner in which the women looked at him, I now became aware of him as a stranger - as a man. It was most disturbing." A serenade by gypsy musicians at an after-hours restaurant, a kiss in the street and a tracks-covering note left at the hotel preceded Blanch's eager "ruin" in a Dijon-bound sleeping car as dawn came up over the French countryside.

After she had spent a year at convent school in Italy, Blanch and the Traveller convinced her parents to approve a "family" holiday in Corsica and the south of France "chaperoned" by the Traveller's Montenegran aunt and his two 20-something sons by different Silk Road mothers. This two-month idyll during which the boys referred to Blanch as "Mamasha" was, although she didn't know it, to be her last sight of the man who shaped her life.

There's more at the link.

Will Collins described her influence on Frank Herbert and his world-famous novel in a 2017 article titled "The Secret History of Dune".

Islamic theology, mysticism, and the history of the Arab world clearly influenced Dune, but part of Herbert’s genius lay in his willingness to reach for more idiosyncratic sources of inspiration. The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus.

Lesley Blanch, the book’s author, has a memorable biography. A British travel writer of some renown, she is perhaps best known for On the Wilder Shores of Love (1954), an account of the romantic adventures of four British women in the Middle East.

She was also a seasoned traveler, a keen observer of Middle Eastern politics and culture, and a passionate Russophile. She called The Sabres of Paradise “the book I was meant to do in my life,” and the novel offers the magnificent, overstuffed account of Imam Shamyl, “The Lion of Dagestan,” and his decades-long struggle against Russian encroachment.

Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”

Herbert is ecumenical with his borrowing, lifting terminology and rituals from both sides of this obscure Central Asian conflict. When Paul Atreides, Dune’s youthful protagonist, is adopted by a desert tribe whose rituals and feuds bear a marked resemblance to the warrior culture of the Islamic Caucasus, he lives at the exotically named Sietch Tabr. Sietch and tabr are both words for camp borrowed from the Cossacks, the Czarist warrior caste who would become the great Christian antagonists of Shamyl’s Islamic holy warriors.

. . .

Dune’s narrative, however, owes more to The Sabres of Paradise than just terminology and customs. The story of a fiercely independent, religiously inspired people resisting an outside power is certainly not unique to the Caucasus, but Blanch’s influence can be found here, too. The name of Herbert’s major villain, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is redolent of Russian imperialism. Meanwhile, Imam Shamyl, the charismatic leader of Islamic resistance in the Caucasus, describes the Russian Czar as “Padishah” and his provincial governor as “Siridar,” titles that Herbert would later borrow for Dune’s galactic emperor and his military underlings.

Again, more at the link.

Her goddaughter, Georgia de Chamberet, helped write her autobiography, "On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life", and completed it after her death.

de Chamberet also edited a selection of Blanch's reminiscences in a second volume, "Far to Go and Many to Love: People and Places".

In a 2017 article, de Chamberet described her impressions of Lesley Blanch.

Lesley and my artist-writer mother, Gael Elton Mayo, met in New York in 1951 through their Polish-Russian husbands. Both were exceedingly pretty and precocious. They remained close despite their gypsy lifestyles. When my mother died of cancer in 1992, my godmother became home from home.

Her little pink house in Garavan, on the French-Italian border, was surrounded by an aromatic Mediterranean jungle. It was filled with treasures from Lesley's travels: Russian icons, samovars, Qajar paintings and rugs from Persia and Turkey, exotica from India. Divans and the scent of incense and jasmine enhanced the atmosphere.

. . .

Lesley wrote longhand at a desk strewn with books and papers in the living room. On a visit in June 2001, she was fretting about the late delivery of an introduction for a reprint of Isabelle Eberhardt's Journals. So I deciphered her graceful writing and typed it up on my laptop.

For years she had spoken of writing her memoirs, and hopeful biographers hovered, but got nowhere. Lesley began to jot down fragments of reminiscences: working as features editor at British Vogue during World War Two with Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton; 1950s New York and Leo Lerman, Carson McCullers and Simenon; the golden age of Hollywood and Marlene Dietrich; traveller's tales about Mexico, Turkey and Afghanistan. I did not indulge in flattery, having observed what happened to people who "gushed". I occasionally made comments and asked questions, initially received with sharp-edged reserve. Then we began to look forward to our time together.

Lesley wrote and rewrote obsessively late into the night; hauling books out of the shelves to check names or places. She taught me a great deal about writing. I regret not asking probing questions: I was too respectful. But she had begun to open up: to push her meant she might snap shut.

. . .

Writing is an act of seduction. A writer and an editor working together on a book is like an affair, involving intimacy and trust. The editor is totally committed to the book, does everything possible to help the writer make it the best they can; and then they do everything possible to give the book and its author the greatest chance of success when published. After Lesley died, I was determined to complete the work we had started, and carry out her vision - made a little easier by her making me her literary executor.

More at the link.

Lesley Blanch died in 2007 at the age of 103.  You can read her obituary in the Guardian to learn more about her.  There's also more information in a Web site set up to celebrate her life and books.

I have several of Blanch's books in my library.  I particularly recommend the first two mentioned above (see the links provided).  You'll find a list of her books at Wikipedia, some of which are out of print, but all of which are interesting.

Peter

75 years ago today: Victory in Europe (VE Day)

On May 8th, 1945, the Second World War came to an end in Europe.  The date has become known as "Victory in Europe Day", or simply "VE Day".  Fighting would continue in the Pacific campaign against Japan for just over three more months, leading to "Victory in Japan Day" or "VJ Day" in August.

My father talked to me about "his war" several times, and my mother less often.  I wrote about my father's service some years ago, as he neared the end of his life.  While he was fighting overseas, my mother's war was spent on the "home front" in England.  Many of her nights were occupied with fireguard duties, standing on a rooftop with a bucket of water and a stirrup pump, watching for German incendiary bomblets to fall.  When one dropped onto "her" building, she'd have to put it out, right sharpish, before it could set fire to the roof.

Here's one small footnote to history that most people don't know about VE Day.  On this 75th anniversary, I thought it might interest you.

The celebrations, of course, were riotous. Britain had been at war for almost six years, and let off steam in fine style.

Let's remember, on this day, the tens of millions who died in that conflict.  My father never forgot his fellow servicemen who were killed, and my mother had her fair share of friends killed and injured by German bombs and the vicissitudes of war.

Peter

"How do you build a city for a pandemic?"

That's the question the BBC asks in an intriguing article examining how the size, structure, layout and systems of our cities may contribute to the spread of disease, and how they might be changed to prevent that.  It's a long article, and has a lot of "green" propaganda in it, but it also has some interesting suggestions.  Here are a few excerpts.

Modern cities weren’t designed to cope with life during a pandemic, and this upside-down way of living has turned them into “a disorganised array of disconnected bedrooms and studios”, says Lydia Kallipoliti, assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union in New York. This layout might have made sense when cities were internationally connected hubs filled with millions of people working, commuting, sightseeing, drinking, dancing and hugging one another without a second thought. But that world seems a long way off now.

The 21st Century has so far seen Sars, Mers, Ebola, bird flu, swine flu and now Covid-19. If we have indeed entered an era of pandemics, how might we design the cities of tomorrow so that the outdoors doesn’t become a no-go zone, but remains a safe and habitable space?

. . .

So making different use of our current spaces, implementing further sanitation and transitioning toward more room for pedestrians are all going to be key features in a pandemic-resilient city of the future.
But one of the biggest changes to our cities won’t be so visible as a fancy new building or a big new park, according to Davina Jackson, author of Data cities: How satellites are transforming architecture and design.

“Cities of the future are going to have to be designed to deal with completely invisible flows [like a global virus], and that’s where the data mapping comes in.”

She gives an example which brings us back to the urban gut of a city: researchers at the Senseable City Lab at MIT placed sensors into sewers to detect concentrations of illegal drugs and harmful bacteria in specific areas. A city built for a pandemic would likely be filled with hidden sensors to help map the spread of disease.

Another important aspect in building a city resilient to pandemics is thinking about how to source food ... She suggests that to reduce risk, our cities may need to become more localised and self-sufficient in the future. “If you had a city, for example, that could feed itself ... It’s not like each place has to be an island, but that there’s some kind of sense of balance and sustainability that you can see within your own settlement.”

There are already examples of urban farming feeding millions when there is little other choice. During World War Two Americans planted 20 million household vegetable plots, producing nine million lbs of produce each year and amounting to 44% of the US harvest, but the challenge of building a self-sufficient city is still a huge one.

. . .

Our homes will need to change too. In an effort to make them more energy and heat efficient, many workspaces, flats and apartment blocks don’t have operable windows. But if we are to going to be spending more time indoors, our houses will need to be better ventilated and offer more light, according to the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture’s Kallipoliti. She describes the need to avoid something called “sick building syndrome”, which is what happens “when buildings [are] entirely sealed and start recirculating pathogens through their systems”.

There's much more at the link.

I think a large part of the solution may be a greater emphasis on working from home or in regional centers, as we discussed yesterday.  If jobs can be done without requiring people to be concentrated in big cities and city centers, I think a lot of people will jump at the chance to move to smaller towns with a lower cost of living and better quality of life, and telecommute to their jobs from there.  That might be inimical to the "green city" advocates, who want everyone to occupy minimal space, use public rather than private transport, and be "less of a burden on nature" . . . but it'll be very practical.

Peter

Does marriage have value anymore, monetary or otherwise?

Aaron Clarey, a.k.a. Captain Capitalism, offers an intriguing look at whether dowries are something that may become part of the modern "marriage market" in the Western world, just as they were in the not too distant past (and still are in some other parts of the world).  I don't necessarily agree with his arguments, but I have to admit that he poses questions that require an answer.

If you don't know (or never knew) what a dowry was, it was a payment the father usually made to his would-be son in law to take his daughter off his hands and care for her into the future.  This was based on the premise that women did not work, would likely bear children, would stay home to rear said children, and would in a purely accounting sense be a financial liability to the family, earning no income.  And so, the would-be husband would be entitled, if not required, to some kind of financial recompense to take the financial liability of a woman off the hands of her father.

Fast forward 300 years later and I ask a very simple question;

How is it any different today?

If there was a time young women were not a financial liability, but an asset, it was the boomers and Gen X'ers.  These women were workers, they were employed, and they did take care of themselves.  But today's generation of young women (who are also at the age of marriage) do not present young male suitors a similar financial proposition or condition.  Matter of fact, most young women today are horrifically bad financial liabilities, and any young man who commits to them risks tanking his own finances.

This isn't primarily due to young women not working.  They most certainly do, and at labor force participation rates higher than any generation of women past.  But the financial liability nature of most young women today is due to student loans and the education scam that destroys their finances.  Young women ... are lured too easily to go $120,000 in debt for worthless liberal arts degrees that offer them no employability.  Worse, the indoctrination they receive in college weaponizes them against men, instead of making them partners and lovers in life to help one another.  And with the repeated indoctrination that women should NEVER rely on a man, the end result is not only often a girl who is a financial risk, but is a girl no man wants.  Indebted, talentless, unemployable, and ideologically programmed to be against men, marriage, family, and love. Even women trained in STEM, who are eminently employable, are often times indoctrinated to be antagonistic towards men, increasing the risk of divorce, adding a huge legal risk to a financial one as well.

Traditionally, logically, and "accountingly," such a proposition would require some kind of financial compensation for the legal and financial risks of committing to a modern day western woman.  And today, young men (or any man) is well within his rights to demand such a modern-day dowry.  But since most boomer and Gen X fathers have no money (and are likely financially compromised through matrimony as well), demanding a dowry today is moot.

. . .

Most men simply cannot afford to take on that risk, and even with a dowry the non-financial risks are just as costly and daunting as the financial ones.  Yes at the same time, men are biologically programmed, nay, compelled to want to get married and have kids. And so what is likely going to happen is what's been happening for quite some time now - men are balking.  They're going to punt.

The increase in cohabitation and the abandonment of marriage is a sign of men waking up and eschewing the legal and financial risks marriage presents to them ... And such marriage-avoidant behavior will continue as the internet educates men about the unacceptable legal and financial risks marriage presents to them (or, frankly, they just saw their dad get butchered in divorce court).

And so what we've seen this past 20 years, certainly the past 10 will continue. With no "theoretical dowries" and marriage being such a bad deal, more and more men will simply leave the marriage market because they can't afford it.

There's more at the link.

Modern marriage is weighted heavily against a man in our legal system.  I'm aware of one situation going down right now, where a divorced father, with legal custody of his children, has seen his former wife simply take them and refuse to return them.  She's gone so far as to interfere with his bank accounts, file false charges against him, and try to wreck his life, out of spite and vindictiveness.  I repeat - she has no legal right to custody of the children, but because she doesn't want him to have them, she's more than prepared to use them as a weapon against him (including lying to them that he doesn't want them any more), and destroy his reputation in the process.  What's more, law enforcement authorities appear powerless.  They've told him to get yet another court order for them to enforce, ignoring those he already has.  I don't understand that.

When men see that sort of thing happening, and realize that our legal system is predisposed to believe the mother rather than the father, is it any wonder that many men are afraid to commit themselves to a relationship that may have those consequences?

There's also the very real problem that a hyper-sexualized society, where a "hookup culture" has taken root, is anything but the ideal climate in which to foster traditional marriage.  When both partners in a marriage come into that relationship with a past history of dozens, if not scores of lovers, and probably having lived with several of those partners, how can they pretend that there's anything unique about their relationship?  There isn't.  They're just going through the motions they've been through many times before.  There's nothing "special" to bind them together, because they've done it all before.  When it comes to arguments, they can put each other down with comments like, "Oh, so-and-so was much better at that than you are!"  There's no foundation of "special" intimacy on which to build, because intimacy is no longer special.  It's been trivialized.

Perhaps, if a dowry was required prior to marriage, both sides of the equation would realize that it signifies the value of their relationship in monetary terms.  Perhaps they might then attach more intrinsic value to marriage, instead of seeing it as an arrangement that may, or may not, endure, depending on one or the other party's whims.  To me, of course, there's also a deeply spiritual element to marriage;  but that's not shared by many people, so I won't emphasize it here.  I'll simply note that I think it's essential.

Aaron Clarey poses some very good questions, that force us to confront unpleasant realities, and which deserve answers.

Peter