G as in Good H as in Happy

Accurate, Relevant Communication = Love

December 31, 2004

Discussions of tsunami warning, or its lack, reflect the part that imagination, culture, initiative play in the crucial hours when fate's trajectory can be re-shaped.

The Wall Street Journal discusses how people know to discern the beginning of such disasters, and how to react. A humane goal is the concept of "tsunami-resilient communities," in addition to developing finer prediction instruments, and the political will to focus. A heartening example is

what happened in Vanuatu, in 1999. On Pentecost Island, a rather pristine enclave with no electricity or running water, the locals watch television once a week, when a pickup truck with a satellite dish, a VCR and a TV stops by each village. When the International Tsunami Survey Team visited days after the tsunami, they heard that the residents had watched a Unesco video prepared the year before, in the aftermath of the 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami disaster. When they felt the ground shake during the 1999 earthquake, they ran to a hill nearby. The tsunami swept through, razing the village to the ground. Out of 500 people, only three died. (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Lively intellectual curiosity and willing engagement with one's responsibilities, a state on the continuum with flow, is sometimes falsely thought to be a luxury, not a requirement. But without it, we fill a place only with emptiness, and deplete the vigor of those around us.  It is a state of mind to be cultivated. We can't know when it will make the difference.

The International Herald Tribune prose dissolves at the end here, but the general ambience of the CNTBTO offices is discernable.

Early on Sunday morning, powerful computers in a Vienna office building received seismic data on the earthquake that spawned the devastating tsunamis across south Asia - information that might have saved lives in the hours between the quake and the waves hitting the coasts of Sri Lanka, India and several other countries.

But the data streaming into the computers of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization served no purpose Sunday.

The 300 staff are on vacation until Jan. 4. The organization itself is still nothing more than a nascent group of seismic experts and bureaucrats who await signature or ratification on the test ban treaty from 11 more countries before they can officially act.

The organization uses a vast network of scientific equipment set up to monitor nuclear explosions, but as fine a measure of nature's force as devised by the humans who have proven so powerless before it.

What will the estimate be by January 4?

Inspiration to stay awake.  Service and survival depend on it, without  warning. Crisis and opportunity, thieves in the night. Nobody knows which night.

Update:
There is no per se blame in being en masse on vacation, even though the organization's budget is reputed to be $100 million annually.  Tim Blair and comments discuss parallel associated monitoring organizations, that sound more pointed and consistent in their oversight. The point is not finger-pointing, but what we notice about performance from which we can learn for the future. A question suitable always for New Year's meditation.

Further update: 
More, from India Daily, on communication,

United States Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could see it. But they did not know whom to contact. Indian Space Research Organization recorded the waves when it came on the surface of the sea but no one programmed the system to warn any one. The earthquake and Tsunami hit Sumatra hours before hitting Sri Lanka and India but no one cared to notify the authorities in those countries.

including the problem of evacuation and other radical intervention measures based on false positives.

Abrupt Chthonic Disaster Washes Hidden Cultures onto the Shores of the 21st Century

Remote [to many of us] places and long-untouched cultures have been flattened.

International volunteers, rebuilding, infrastructure, the systems, processes, machines that effect rescue and restoration, are substantially "developed-world" categories. 

For years, India has debated the ethics of disturbing the lives of the tribes to bring development.

Interestingly to the romantic Western ear, stricken residents express no theoretical attachment to their lands or way of life, now that homes and family are gone.

Patlo Ma, a 55-year-old tribal coconut farmer, was one of the thousands who arrived at the airstrip on foot. His extended family of 74 people had journeyed for two grueling days through the jungle.

"We survived the waters by climbing onto trees. And the last two days, we just ate raw bananas, tapioca and coconuts in the jungle," Ma said. He said he is ready for a permanent change. "We want to go to the city of Port Blair and live a different kind of life from now on."...An elderly woman is carried to a refugee camp in a makeshift hammock on the Nicobar Islands, an isolated outpost 900 miles from the Indian mainland. ..."Take me away, take me away from my village," mumbled Dyna Issac, 80, a withered woman who was suspended in a cloth cradle that her daughters-in-law carried on their shoulders. Issac, a member of an indigenous tribe, said she lost her sons to the tsunami that on Sunday created waves that lashed India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago of 500 bumps in the ocean.

"Our village, Sawai, has been completely swallowed by the sea," said Clara Issac, one of the women carrying Dyna, as they approached Indian officials to beg for help. "Nothing holds us back here now."

Via Mark Krikoran.

Addendum:  In the Saber-toothed Tiger Law of Life, The Diplomad  unpacks the intrinsic opposition of unchecked Nature to comfortable longevity.

Update:
The Intersection on Grandfather Hui: how unpredictable, how unstereotypical, how like yours and mine, the choices of our world-kindred may soon prove to be.

“So why didn’t you want to live close to your grandson?” I bleated.

“I don’t want to be a wise old man,” he explained.

Hui said he did not wish to be stuffed into the conventional notions that await the elderly. He was, he said, curious about retirement without “retirement.” He was happy to be a “friend” to his grandson. He just didn’t want to be his “grandfather.”

This is hardly the face of a wild-eyed cultural revolutionary.

When Lao Tsu said,

The five colours blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavours dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.

Might he have added (not least to the pontificating blogger)?

        Appearing as wise
        makes one foolish.

Orphans in a Loaded Boat

December 30, 2004

Eyeball to eyeball with the wave.

The water ... seemed to "stall, momentarily," he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining things."

Via Amy Welborn.

Following a snake to high ground, a neighbor's nine-year-old twins on her back.

"Strangely I felt no fear," Riza said.

Via Althouse.

From Jeffrey Hull:

...The sea recedes and seeks again its bed,
Retreating, giving up the land it won;
Its army leaving littered fields of dead
Sad limbs akimbo, silent in the sun.

The sullen sea its brooding counsel keeps
Beyond the cries of saddened shorebound men
What awesome powers harbor in its deeps
As quiet rolls the ocean swell again.

Diviners vainly seek to understand
Such cataclysmic turns of dreadful fate
And wonder why they cannot gods command
To spare the ones for whom they supplicate.

There is no reason good or ill to find
Why any given soul is swept to woe
Nor why one man is lame or one is blind:
Such mysteries are not for men to know.

Jeffrey Hull, 2004

A Little Late for Holiday Gift-Giving

Commission your own Bollywood-style portrait.

Via Mocoloco.

Stones cry out

The natural environment is not just a passive surface off which our perceptions glance.  Rather, according to Los Alamos physicists, it selectively advertises its characteristics, featuring the more robust and stable ones, the "fittest," that can tolerate our attention and foster agreement.

According to quantum theory, observing the world tends to change it.

...Every tourist who gazed at Buckingham Palace would change the arrangement of the building's windows, say, merely by the act of looking, so that subsequent tourists would see something slightly different.

Yet that clearly isn't what happens.

Contrary to the logical expectations implicit in this expansion of the theory, the munificence of our shared interactive experience is not threatened.

We're never in danger of 'using up' all the photons bouncing off a tree, no matter how many people we assemble to look at it.

Is this the Scholastics' moderate realism? What marks the scale threshhold between the quantum-microcosm "mush" states and the more-defined macrocosm?

Just about more than we here at Chez Dilys can get our shallow pink crania around, but suggestive and ingenuous.  Does Nature bat her eyelashes at all of us Perceiving Creatures, enticing our attention while nursing her vulnerable, miniature, transitory secrets?

Discussion solicited. Good_and_happy at yahoo dot com.

Via metafilter.

Plato, death, virtue, truth, music, politics

[Tsunami donation update: bloggers I trust recommend World Vision, established, huge infrastructure, good integrity ratings.]

December 29, 1004

A complex discussion kicked off in The Corner -- what erudite readers sometimes surface there! 

Long and rich, a tribute to Eric Voegelin's tribute to Plato.

The philosopher has no need of being a musician, but he loves music.  He has no need of [any profound thing], but he loves them.

[A] tyrant not merely wants to do evil or what he wanted, he also wants to be praised by everyone for what he did.  This praise is crucial, for it implies that even evil needs rational approbation.  Otherwise...the tyrant is utterly alone...

Alcibiades...refuses to listen and he immediately seeks to corrupt Socrates so that Socrates will not be superior to him in virtue. Alcibiades...takes positive steps not to know.  He does everything in his power not to acknowledge that he is wrong, even though he does know it.  He tries to corrupt the only source of virtue he admires so that he will have no model testifying to his corruption.

Socrates loved Alcibiades in his potential virtue but not in his corruption.

A society filled with students of law and medicine is already a sick society.  Many students continue to think that more law and more medicine will cure what can only be cured by a reform of their own souls. 

Living Our Dilemmas

December 28, 2004

Too disheartened by the recent disaster to blog normally and cheerfully.  Surely, a Good Happiness never consists of a deliberate turning away from our human dilemmas. Though here is an eloquent photo from the NYTimes. Rather than sending you there, so much human anguish, better not a voyeur.

Amy's question derived from Mirror of Justice asks what explanation we can make of a world in which tsunamis arise to wreak such devastation.

In some relevant respect, you might want to know that part of the mise en scène of a Biblical healing story (chapter 9 of the Gospel of John) has been uncovered in Silwan, an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem (link via Althouse):

Many of Jesus' acts are directly linked to Jewish rituals, and the miracle of the blind man is an example. According to the Bible, the man was undergoing ritual immersion in the Siloam Pool for entry into the Temple compound, and Jesus used the occasion to cure his blindness.

In the last four months, archaeologists have revealed the pool's 50-yard length and a channel that brought in water from the Silwan spring. In the past week, a section of stone road that led from the pool to the Jewish Temple was uncovered.

According to the story, walking down the street Jesus encountered a blind man.

He ...spit in the dust, made a clay paste with the saliva, rubbed the paste on the blind man's eyes, and said, "Go, wash at the Pool of Siloam" (Siloam means "Sent"). The man went and washed--and saw. Soon the town was buzzing. His relatives and those who year after year had seen him as a blind man begging were saying, "Why, isn't this the man we knew, who sat here and begged?"
The Message © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson

The most interesting part of the story (not, perhaps, for the man and his companions) is in the prologue:

Walking down the street, Jesus saw a man blind from birth.  His disciples asked, "Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?"

Jesus said, "You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.

Or, as the Authorized Version has it:

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

Having read this, notice how frequently in many contexts explanations are demanded, in anger or Theory-Of-Everything speculation.  Failure to explain to the satisfaction of the interrogator is denounced.  What is the motive?  Control and blame?  Distance? Rarely are explanations in the service of much; much less, "What New Good Thing Can Happen Here, even in the face of lack, loss, disaster, pain?"

The intelligence of asking:  What is the most intelligent question to ask here, now? Probably not chin-stroking debates on the Problem of Evil. Give. Love. Work. Pray. Do not refuse, in the name of happiness and safety, to weep.

Lost to Us

December 27, 2004

In sympathy, solidarity, and mourning with those hit so hard by the Sumatran earthquake. BBC map here.

Roland Buerk, a BBC reporter, lived to report from Sri Lanka:

 [A Town Called Unawatuna] We were still in bed in a ground floor room right on the beachfront when we suddenly heard some shouts from outside.

Then the water started coming under the door. Within a few seconds it was touching the window.

We very quickly scrambled to get out as the windows started to cave in and glass shattered everywhere.

We swam out of the room neck deep in water, forcing our way through the tables and chairs in the restaurant and up into a tree.

But within about 30 seconds that tree collapsed as well and we were thrust back into the water where we had to try and keep our heads above the water line....

We were swept along for a few hundred metres, trying to dodge the motorcycles, refrigerators, cars and other debris that were coming with us.

Via Althouse.

In the immediate aftermath there appeared to be no organized rescue or other assistance services.  Just ordinary people, doing their best minute by minute amid shock and loss.

Tim Blair promises early information for donation channels.

Update:
Tsunamiblog has links by which help can be sent, in addition to official US relief measures. "We live at the sufferance of Nature." Here are reports from Asia when it hit. Via Betsy's Page.

Remembering Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), poet of shipwreck:

...nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of Thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in? ...

Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;...

Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward...

and peace:

I have desired to go             
        Where springs not fail,    
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail      
        And a few lilies blow.         

And I have asked to be             
        Where no storms come    
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb    
        And out of the swing of the sea.

Truth in Toy Sales

December 26, 2004

Via Instapundit and many. Snarky innocence, a first-class and principled unmitigated hoot.  Christmas-classic, a wholesome parallel to the out-of-the-park tone of that Sedaris elf piece.

Sand in the Gears rediscovered is a great pleasure. We sure like the cut of his mental jib. This week's  quote: "As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." (Joshua Billings) Tony Woodlief, as best anyone could tell, crowned as a good and happy father, palpable grace found in the course of a circuitous journey. And yes, we'll phone before we visit.

Update:  More good Woodlief Christmas here. Tony Woodlief is the president of The Mercatus Center, a research institute at George Mason University.

Via Dean's World.

 

It's over. Almost. Soon. This Year.

Santa:
Has had it;
As serial killer;
Waiting for Godot;
Negotiating meltdown.

Via Althouse.