4 July, 5 July and Adam Smith

The New York Review of Books on line has a blog by Steve Pincus that translates the economic terminology of the 1760s into the economic terminology of the 2010s. The 13 colonies rebelled against Great Britain because of British austerity policies. As of this writing, it looks like the Greeks are rebelling similarly against the Eurozone: the NO vote is ahead.

Here's a quote from the blog that shows Adam Smith's prescience:

Had the British government pursued measures to support the colonies, rather than austerity policies that retarded their growth, Smith believed, the American economy would have been so dynamic that in “little more than a century” the “seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself” to its most economically dynamic region: North America.

Which is exactly what happened except it wasn't a united empire any more.

TED talk: The Forgotten History of Autism

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_silberman_the_forgotten_history_of_autism/transcript?language=en

At 12:30, Steve Silberman said:

One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.

What if you are on the spectrum and you wish you were more social? The TED "rate" option needs "misleading" as a possible selection.

Double Entendres to Groan Over

From an article in Quanta Magazine about the evolution of birds from dinosaurs:

“A bird didn’t just evolve from a T. rex overnight, but rather the classic features of birds evolved one by one; first bipedal locomotion, then feathers, then a wishbone, then more complex feathers that look like quill-pen feathers, then wings,” Brusatte said. “The end result is a relatively seamless transition between dinosaurs and birds, so much so that you can’t just draw an easy line between these two groups.”

Yet once those avian features were in place, birds took off. Brusatte’s study of coelurosaurs found that once archaeopteryx and other ancient birds emerged, they began evolving much more rapidly than other dinosaurs. The hopeful monster theory had it almost exactly backwards: A burst of evolution didn’t produce birds. Rather, birds produced a burst of evolution. “It seems like birds had happened upon a very successful new body plan and new type of ecology — flying at small size — and this led to an evolutionary explosion,” Brusatte said.

From the Wikipedia article on Eugene Francois Vidocq:

By age fourteen, he had stolen a large amount of money from the cash box of his parent's bakery and left for Ostend, where he tried to embark to the Americas; but he was defrauded one night and found himself suddenly penniless. To survive, he worked for a group of traveling entertainers. Despite regular beatings, he worked hard enough to get promoted from stable boy to playing a Caribbean cannibal who eats raw meat. He could not stomach this for very long, so he switched to a group of puppeteers. However, he was banished from them because he flirted with the young wife of his employer. He then worked some time as an assistant of a pedlar, but as soon as he neared Arras, he returned to his parents seeking forgiveness. He was welcomed by his mother with open arms.

Contrary to What the Anti-Semites Say, Israel is Prussian, not Nazi

The Thirty Years War was the Holocaust of the Germans.

Before World War II there were eighteen million Jews. After World War II there were twelve million Jews.

Before the Thirty Years War there were fifteen million Germans. After the Thirty Years War there were ten million Germans.

Prussia suffered worse than the rest of Germany. The suffering of the Prussians in the Thirty Years War was comparable to, albeit less than, the suffering of the Jews of Europe in World War II. For example, Berlin was destroyed and half the people of Berlin were killed. Following the Thirty Years War the Prussians said "never again" and built an army strong enough to make any potential invader think twice. That is why Voltaire said that Prussia was an army with a state rather than a state with an army. It worked. The only potential invader who thought twice, invaded anyway, and got away with it was Napoleon, but world-class military geniuses don't count.

Prussian militarism (1740) eventually morphed into Nazism (1940).

Contrary to what the anti-Semites say, Israel now (relative to other democratic states)  is like Prussia was in 1740 (relative to other monarchies), or even earlier, not 1940. We Israelis must never ever get to 1940.

The Sages Should Have Looked in the Mirror. Rabbis Should Too.

Pesahim 49b describes how much the Sages and amei ha'aretz hated each other. I will give the Sages the benefit of the doubt and attribute their hatred of amei ha'aretz to being a response to the hatred of the amei ha'aretz to the Sages. But there is no indication in Pesahim 49b of why the amei ha'aretz hated the Sages so much.

For that we need to turn to the most famous am ha'aretz, Jesus of Nazareth.

Matthew 23

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: 2 “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3 So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. 4 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
5 “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries[a]wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6 they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7 they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

For the rest of Jesus' rant against the Pharisees, see the rest of Matthew 23. Whether Jesus was right is irrelevant. The important thing is that he is describing the Sages' popular image. The Sages should have worried mire about the extent to which they were responsible for that image and what they could do about it.

Note that Jesus isn't saying not to obey the Sages. He starts out explicitly saying that the Sages are the only authorities on Halacha. He is saying that you can follow the letter of the law while perverting the spirit of the law, 1200 years before RaMBaN invented the concept of "naval birshoot hatorah".

To a certain extent, Jesus' description of the Sages applies also to modern Rabbis, as documented by Failed Messiah http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/ inter alia.

The International British Conspiracy

What I am about to describe AFAIK never happened, but AFAIK is consistent with everything that is known to have happened. It may be useful as an antidote to the much more dangerous conspiracy theory of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Specifically, if you tell it to a believer in the International Jewish Conspiracy, to show him/her where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion really came from, s/he may consider my conspiracy theory to be more plausible and thus stop blaming *everything* on the Jews.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the leaders of Great Britain, notably the Duke of Wellington, decided that in order to keep Great Britain safe from a future threat of invasion from the Continent, Great Britain needed to rule the world. They figured that Great Britain itself was only strong enough to control the Eastern Hemisphere outside Europe, based on the continuing British success in expanding the zone of British rule in India, so they needed allies. The obvious ally to control the Western Hemisphere was the up and coming republic in North America, the United States of America, that shared a common culture with Great Britain and in any case had its own interest in keeping European powers, particularly Spain, from taking over the former colonies to its south that had taken advantage of the Napoleonic Wars to turn themselves into independent countries. To control Europe, they decided that the best allies would be the Jews generally and the Rothchilds specifically. They were impressed with how the Rothchilds had succeeded in cornering the Belgian stock market after the Battle of Waterloo. Furthermore, the Jews were the only European ethnic group that didn't have a specific territorial base in Europe and so were plausibly capable of ruling Europe generally and not motivated to betray their British allies.

The first part of the plot fell into place when President James Monroe of the United Staters of America announced the Monroe Doctrine. Everyone knew that the USA was not strong enough to enforce the Monroe Doctrine all by itself and that the real muscle behind the Monroe Doctrine was the Royal Navy. The second part of the plot was supposed to be the revolutions of 1848, but to the chagrin of the British and the Rothchilds those revolutions were suppressed.

The Rothchilds returned to their primary interest of making money, until the rise of modern European anti-Semitism towards the end of the nineteenth century. What really scared the Rothchilds was the Dreyfus Affair, that showed that even the Rothchilds' base in the liberal democratic French republic was vulnerable. They decided that they needed a long term backup plan just in case they would eventually need to leave France. They dusted off their old plans for ruling Europe and modified them to fit the current contingency. Turkish Palestine looked like a good choice for a replacement base outside Europe because it was inevitable that the great powers of Europe would eventually divide up the Ottoman Empire among themselves and Palestine had a historical connection to the Jews that would give the Rothchilds an argument for getting that piece of the former Ottoman pie. The Rothchilds chose as their front man for getting the "Zionist Project" going an Austrian jounalist based in Paris named Theodore Herzel.

Herzel organized a conference in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland of Jews who felt excluded from the various territorially-based nationalisms that were rising around them in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. The new Zionist movement had an open agenda and a secret agenda. The open agenda was to promote Jewish colonization in Palestine. The secret agenda was to plant Zionist agents at high levels of the governments of the various European great powers. The task of these agents was to lobby for giving Palestine to the Jews when the Ottoman Empire would finally be divided among the great powers. Otherwise, the agents were to do what was best for their respective countries, as though they were loyal citizens of those countries.

The only great power where this could not be accomplished was Tzarist Russia, in which everyone high up in the government needed to be Russian Orthodox. So instead, Zionist agents were to be planted in all the revolutionary movements. These agents would function as loyal revolutionaries who would work for the overthrow of the Tzarist government. Whichever revolutionary movement replaced the Tzarist regime then would have Zionist agents in place to lobby for giving Palestine to the Jews.

It didn't take long for Russian intelligence to find out about the secret Zionist agenda. In self defense, the Tzarist government decided to destroy the Zionist movement. The chosen mechanism was to turn the European Gentiles against Zionism by convincing them that Zionism was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. To this end, Russian intelligence forged and distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The rest is history.

Postscript: The planting of Zionist agents in the Russian Communist party led, 40 years later, to an unforseen catastrophe for the Russians. When Stalin, who was inclined to paranoia anyway, discovered how much the Zionists had penetrated the Party, he went ballistic and purged, in addition to all the Zionists, a great many loyal Russian Communists.

Core Curriculum Tailored for Haredim

The Haredim of Israel are notorious for refusing to teach the core curriculum in their elementary schools and high schools. The worst consequence of this for Israel is that the Haredim wind up ill-equipped to work in a modern economy. The biggest deficit, with regard to employability, is the inability to understand English and do basic mathematics. The Haredim claim that Haredi adults who want to enter the job market can acquire these skills as young adults in special programs, but in practice the dropout rate from these programs is 50-80%.

Enter Keith Devlin. On 1/4/15 he posted, at http://devlinsangle.blogspot.co.il/, on the subject of teaching (abstract) mathematics to computer scientists:

Numerous studies have shown that if you test university students just a few months after they have completed a course, they will have forgotten most of the facts they had learned, even if they passed the final exam with flying colors. But that doesn’t mean the course wasn’t a success. The human brain adapts to intellectual challenges by forging and strengthening new neural pathways, and those new pathways remain long after the “facts” used to develop them have faded away. The facts fade, but the abilities remain.
If you want to prepare people to design, build, and reason about formal abstractions, including computer software, the best approach surely is to look for the most challenging mental exercises that force the brain to master abstract entities — entities that are purely abstract, and which cause the brain the maximum difficulty to handle. And where do you find this excellent mental training ground? In mathematics.

So here's a compromise proposal. Instead of trying to force the Haredim to teach English and mathematics in high school, get them to teach something that is consistent with their lifestyle but that prepares them to learn English and mathematics later. For English, teach Aramaic grammar and vocabulary, with vocabulary lists to memorize and with readings in midrashim, so they learn how to learn a foreign language. For mathematics, teach formal logic disguised as a method of analyzing a sugya in Gemara. Maybe it could be based on RaMBaM's treatise on logic. For all I know the Brisker method could be reformulated as an application of formal logic. That might reduce the Haredi young adult dropout rate to something tolerable like 20%. 

Google Translate and Yesterday's Post

I was wondering whether Google Translate would be of any use to someone reading yesterday's post who doesn't read Hebrew.

Here is the first passage, from Agnon's Tmol Shilshom:

בבליים אומרים שלא לשמוח, חלביים אומרים לשמוח. עירקים אומרים שלא לשמוח, תימנים אומרים לשמוח. מערביים אומרים שלא לשמוח, גורגים אומרים לשמוח. בוכרים ופרסיים לא נחלקו. פירשו הפרסיים מן הבוכרים, פרסיים אומרים שלא לשמוח, בוכרים אומרים לשמוח. אלו ואלו לא נחלקו שיש לעשות תשובה.

Here is how Google Translate mangled it:

Babylonian say they did not rejoice, dairy say rejoice. Iraqis say they did not rejoice, Yemenis say rejoice. Westerners say they did not rejoice, Gorgim say rejoice. Persian familiar not disagree. Bukharan interpreted from Persian, Persian say they did not rejoice, sellers say rejoice. Both are not disagree that to repent.

Here is my own translation, much more accurate even if not as elegant as a professional translator would do:

The Babylonians say don't be happy, the Aleppans say be happy. The Iraqis say don't be happy, the Yemenis say be happy. The Moroccans say don't be happy, the Georgians say be happy. The Bukharians and the Persians didn't disagree. The Persians split off from the Bukharians. The Persians say don't be happy. The Bukharians say be happy. Neither disagreed that we should all repent.

Here is the second passage, from the Mishnah:

יוסף בן יועזר אומר שלא לסמוך, יוסף בן יוחנן אומר לסמוך; יהושוע בן פרחיה אומר שלא לסמוך, ניתאי הארבלי אומר לסמוך; יהודה בן טבאי אומר שלא לסמוך, שמעון בן שטח אומר לסמוך; שמעיה אומר לסמוך, אבטליון אומר שלא לסמוך.  הלל ומנחם לא נחלקו; יצא מנחם, ונכנס שמאי.  הלל אומר לסמוך, שמאי אומר שלא לסמוך.  הראשונים היו נשיאים, והשניים אבות בית דין.

Here is how Google Translate mangled it:

Josephus says that rely maidenhair, Yosef ben Yochanan says trust; Yehoshua ben Perahia says not to trust, Nitai Arbelite says trust; Judah ben Tabbai says not to trust, he was telling count; Shemaiah said trust, Avtalion says not to trust. Hillel Menachem not divided; Menachem out, and entered appraiser. Hillel says trust, Shammai says not to trust. First presidents, and the two fathers court.

Here is Blackman's translation:

Jose ben Joezer says, Not to lay on, Jose ben Jochanan says, One may lay on; Joshua ben Perachiah says, Not to lay on, Nittai the Arbelite says, One may lay on; Judah ben Tabbai says, Not to lay on, Simon ben Shetach says, One may lay on; Shemaiah says, One may lay on, Abtalion says, Not to lay on; Hillel and Menachem did not differ, but Menachem went forth and Shammai came in; Shammai says, Not to lay on, Hillel says, One may lay on. The former were Presidents and the latter were Heads of the Court.

BTW I can empathize with Google Translate, which, like most readers of Agnon today and most readers of Fitzgerald 150 years hence, lacks cultural context. After my first fender bender here, when the woman in the garage said we had to wait for the appraiser, I thought she meant that we had to wait for some guy named Shammai.

The Tragedy of Culturally Specific References in Literature

One of the weaknesses of literature is that to understand a piece of literature totally you have to be immersed in the culture from which the literature came. If you aren't immersed in the culture you miss the subtleties.

I came across two examples in the last several days.

Last week I finished reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In chapter 5, somebody in Gatsby's mansion is playing a piano and singing "Ain't We Got Fun":

There is nothing surer
The rich get rich and the poor get children

In 150 years only scholars of American literature and popular culture will know that the real words were "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer".

Daylight Savings Time (שעון קיץ) started Friday so yesterday (שבת) I resumed my Daylight Savings Time Shabbat Afternoon reading of T'mol Shilshom by S. Y. Agnon. Book 4 chapter 1 has:

בבליים אומרים שלא לשמוח, חלביים אומרים לשמוח. עירקים אומרים שלא לשמוח, תימנים אומרים לשמוח. מערביים אומרים שלא לשמוח, גורגים אומרים לשמוח. בוכרים ופרסיים לא נחלקו. פירשו הפרסיים מן הבוכרים, פרסיים אומרים שלא לשמוח, בוכרים אומרים לשמוח. אלו ואלו לא נחלקו שיש לעשות תשובה.

Anyone immersed in ancient Jewish texts immediately recognizes this as a parody of Mishnah Hagigah 2:2:

יוסף בן יועזר אומר שלא לסמוך, יוסף בן יוחנן אומר לסמוך; יהושוע בן פרחיה אומר שלא לסמוך, ניתאי הארבלי אומר לסמוך; יהודה בן טבאי אומר שלא לסמוך, שמעון בן שטח אומר לסמוך; שמעיה אומר לסמוך, אבטליון אומר שלא לסמוך.  הלל ומנחם לא נחלקו; יצא מנחם, ונכנס שמאי.  הלל אומר לסמוך, שמאי אומר שלא לסמוך.  הראשונים היו נשיאים, והשניים אבות בית דין.

BTW this is the funniest chapter so far in the book. The parody of the Mishnah adds to the humor.

 Added 18/10/20: these two New Yorker cartoons also illustrate the point: