I don’t know whether I’ve told this story before but back when I was actively competing in the martial arts, the highest-ranked woman black belt in the country at the time worked out in the same dojo that I did. I competed against her many, many times. My sensei, realizing I could and would clean up the mat with her unless told otherwise, directed me to go easy on her. I, of course, complied. She always beat me.

My experience is the source of my misgivings about women physically fighting with men, especially hand-to-hand.

Using weapons is a somewhat different story. When I was practicing kendo, a martial art in which men and women compete against each other on equal terms, one of our female black belts could go toe-to-toe with our best male swordsmen. Other than Sensei, of course. He’d reputedly been head kendo instructor for the Imperial Army and was unbeatable.

The story of the LA Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, apparently making racist comments in a recorded telephone message is the sort of outrage du jour that I don’t usually comment on here at The Glittering Eye. For more details see Joe Gandelman’s post. As usual, he has an extensive media and Internet roundup of comment on the incident. In this particular case I have a slant that I’m not seeing elsewhere so I thought I’d pass it along.

If you’re looking for an example of the problems money inequality in the form of unthinkably enormous wealth presents to a free and egalitarian society, look no farther. Mr. Sterling’s net worth is estimated to be in the billions. His views are scarcely a secret—some years back he was taken to court for them in a suit in which he prevailed, which may say more about our standards of justice than it does about the merits of the case. Other incidents, mostly on the public record, are being trotted out dutifully in the wake of the release of the tape.

Let’s consider for a moment what a just outcome would be. Mr. Sterling’s suspension, being forbidden to attend games or even go on the club’s premises, is scarcely a punishment at all. Inducing him to sell the franchise which he bought thirty years ago for something in the vicinity of $15 million and is now believed to be worth forty times that is even less of a punishment. The sale would net Mr. Sterling a neat half billion dollars. If that is punishment, I’ll have some.

The only punishment worthy of the name that the NBA can mete out is loss of the franchise, something that can be effected, reportedly, by a three-quarters vote of the owners. That appears to be off the table and the reasons reflect the NBA’s relative priorities. In the final analysis the NBA is much more concerned about a likely lawsuit, i.e. money and scandal, than it is about Mr. Sterling’s views. Large, wealthy institutions acting reprehensibly to preserve money and avoid scandal is something we have seen far too frequently in recent years.

What kind of freedom is it when you’re afraid to speak out for fear of loss of your livelihood, views that would have serious repercussions for someone of modest means have none for the wealthy, and there are different justices for the rich than for the poor? That’s the very definition of a class system.

Jefferson’s dream for the young United States was of a country in which most people did not have to depend on a by-your-leave from the lord of the manor for their daily bread and everyone was subject to the same law. How far we’ve strayed from that dream!

My dream is that we figure out how to reform our institutions in a way that more clearly reflects Jefferson’s dream rather than learn to accommodate to a class system.

There’s an interesting article over at The Daily Beast on why the stealth features of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter may already be obsolete.

Invincibility lies in the defense. It’s quite difficult to come up with an attack measure that can’t be countered especially when you’re an open society.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

You and Whose Army?

We can’t and shouldn’t bear the costs of deterring Russia alone. The ball is really in the Europeans’ court on this.

I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator or not. It’s a tool for assessing personal preferences, classifying people into certain personality types along four axes: introversion-extraversion (expression), sensing-intuition (perception), thinking-feeling (decision-making), and judging-perception (judgment). The MBTI classifies people along these four dichotomies into sixteen different types, i.e. ESTJ (extraversion, sensing, thinking, judging) and its opposite, INFP (introversion, intuition, feeling, perception).

The stereotypical engineer “type” is INTP (introversion, intuition, thinking, perceiving). After all of this exposition, here’s the point of this post: that’s also the characteristic type of musicians.

The university that I attended was divided into different schools: Arts & Sciences, Technology (engineering), Music, Speech, Journalism, and Business. Transfer between schools wasn’t particularly common but the most common transfer by and order of magnitude was between Technology and Music. The various performing ensembles like the university symphony, the wind ensemble, and the jazz ensemble, were composed primarily of students from those two schools.

Consequently, if you despise engineers but venerate musicians, you might want to reconsider your assumptions. They’re the same people.

Yesterday I mentioned that I didn’t learn the history I was taught in school and promised an explanation. This seems as good a time as any to explain what I meant. I’ve already told the story of how I learned to read. Once I had learned to read I jumped from illiteracy to reading mostly books intended for adults over the period of just two or three years.

One of the peculiar features of my self-directed reading was that I “binge read”. A bit the way some people binge view a television series on NetFlix or Hulu these days, I’d read everything I could get my hands on that had been written by an author. When I fell in love with H. G. Wells’s science fiction very early on, I read everything I could find that he wrote. I’d read The Outline of History by the time I was ten. Just about the same time I read the volumes of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization that had been written up to that point and some other popular and even scholarly history. I found Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire hard sledding.

I was also an archaeology nut and read an enormous amount of both popular and scholarly material on archaeology, especially early archaeology and the archaeology of the Neolithic in the Near East, something that has remained an interest ever since. I read some of Schliemann’s books on Troy in translation. On some very narrow subjects in the field of the Neolithic of the Near East I think I own a copy of every word ever printed.

I read a lot of American historical biography and American history. And, my family being what it was, we discussed history as normal dinner table conversation. Consequently, I had the benefit of my mom’s and dad’s education, reading, and travels.

All of this was before I had taken a single history course in school. By the time I actually took history I knew enough to question the standard narrative.

And that’s why I was a poor history student. I had already been inoculated against it.

Somewhere around here I’ve got a fascinating little monograph on the ancient obsidian trade in Europe and Asia. As you’re presumably aware, obsidian is naturally occurring volcanic glass. One of the interesting things about obsidian is that by analyzing its chemical composition you can identify where the obsidian was originally found or mined.

When stone was the primary material used for tool-making, obsidian was in high demand because of its ability to take and hold a sharp edge. In the Neolithic of Europe and Asia it was traded over an enormous area and the monograph I mentioned discusses the extent and timing of that trade, determined by performing a chemical analysis of the remnants of obsidian tools found in various archaeological digs around the world.

As it turns out there was a critical obsidian shortage in Europe and Asia something around 8,000 year ago. That shortage drove people to experiment with substitutes for obsidian. They tried copper, then bronze. Later (and as copper became scarcer) iron and even later steel were used for the purposes once served by obsidian. Nowadays, you’re much more likely to hear somebody complaining “Where the heck is that hammer?”, invariably a steel hammer, than about the obsidian shortage.

Without that obsidian shortage in antiquity the world as we know it would not exist. I can tell very similar stories about agriculture, paper, or dozens of other materials and tools.

That’s what I thought of when I read this op-ed on world resources at the Wall Street Journal:

How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.

“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).

But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

We have not run out of everything and I believe that the likelihood that we will do is vanishingly small. Is is possible that we will? Sure. It’s also possible that when the sun goes down tomorrow night it will never return or that when you step out of bed in the morning you’ll fall through the floor, the molecules of your body slipping through the floor’s molecules. For some reason the same people who are worried about running about of everything don’t seem to be as worried about those other two eventualities. They still go to bed at night and get up again in the morning after, presumably, a good night’s sleep.

There’s not much to this post, just a kneejerk reaction to the title of Joe Conason’s column, “Now We Know: Economic Inequality Is a Malady…”.

I hope I’ve made clear that I think that the sort of income inequality that we have increasingly in the United States isn’t consistent with the kind of country I want this country to be. If not, let me repeat it. If not, let me repeat it. There’s room in the kind of country I’d like the United States to be for a very small number of very rich people, especially the ultra-talented, ultra-hardworking, and ultra-lucky. The epitome that sort of individual would be some sports figures, e.g. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods.

Most of the rest of the people should earn medium-sized incomes and the preponderance of the country’s wealth should be in the hands of people who earn such incomes, whom we refer to here as “middle class” although our social classes are very different than social classes as they exist in most of the rest of the world. That’s no fantasy. It’s what the United States was like when I was younger.

Aspirationally, I’d like us to think of each other as equals.

The awful thing about the discussion of income inequality Dr. Piketty’s work has inspired is that the prescriptions that are being offered won’t produce more income equality. In other words, they’re snake oil.

If the history that you learned in grammar school and high school was anything like the history that I was taught (but failed to learn for reasons I’ll explain some other time), it was a history in which Rome was the heir of Athens, England was the heir of Rome, the United States was the heir of England, and every event since about 1920 took place as a response to an American action or because America failed to act. I might have thought that after all these years no American believed that any more but in reading Lawrence Summers’s op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, I realized that the view is alive, well, and influential.

In that op-ed Dr. Summers sketches history from 1914 to the present, attributing World War I, World War II, the Viet Nam War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union primarily to American calculations or miscalculations. He culminates this highly America-centric view of history with what is, essentially, a pitch for world government:

I would suggest last that history teaches that no individual nation can be a guarantor of the stability of the system. It is only through the cooperation of nations, through the establishment of institutions, through the legitimacy that comes from convocation and dialogue, that firm and clear lines can be drawn and that others can be enticed in.

I can only surmise that Dr. Summers is now campaigning for the post of Minister of Finance of this hypothetical world government. If you don’t believe that’s what he’s getting at, allow me a question. Why does the world need a “guarantor of the stability of the system”. Stable systems don’t require guarantors. Only inherently unstable systems do.

Not only would I suggest a different interpretation of history, I’d suggest a different interpretation of the forces that underpin history, the forces that give history its impetus:

• States have interests and act to further those interests.
• The interests of states are often determined by the personal interests of their most powerful people.
• Consequently, the interests of states will inevitably be understood very imperfectly and may not further states’ actual interests at all.
• Also as a consequence of this, the people of most states don’t have a great deal of interest in the welfare of the people of any country other than their own (and only the welfare of their own people to the extent that it furthers their own welfare).

I would also add that government is only possible under one of two conditions:

1. Shared values
2. Overwhelming, crushing force

The world is barely ready for city government let alone world government.