The Peristaltic Testator

Wonder why? Credit in part goes to Rewi Alley:

Rewi Alley could lay claim to many things——one of his biographical entries lists him as "writer, educator, social reformer, potter and Member of the Communist Party of China"——and is also undeniably the most famous New Zealander ever to have lived in China. He lived there fore sixty years, becoming a mythic figure in his own lifetime, an intimate of the Chinese Communist leaders, a man regarded by his admirers as almost godlike and by his enemies as a charlatan, a traitorous propagandist, a libertine, and a pederast.…

But in 1937, when the Japanese bombers struck targets in Shanghai and their troops overran the city, he fled. He went west, settling initially in the city of Hankou on the Yangzi. Here, the following year, in the company of Edgar Snow and his wife, Helen Foster (who was known as Peg Snow and by her nom de plume, Nym Wales), and the secretary to the British ambassador…, Rewi Alley sat down to help create a revolutionary new industry.

Since by now the Japanese either controlled or had destroyed almost all of China's major manufacturing capability, and since the Chinese military response to the mighty invading army was based on guerrilla tactics of harassment and surprise, why not organize guerrilla industry too? Why not build hundreds of factories which were light, flexible, and perhaps even mobile; which could operate in the far beyond of inland China; and which could simultaneously provide low-paid work for the locals and low-cost output for the national good? The idea——no one is entirely sure who at the meeting came up with the concept, but supporters of Rewi Alley like to say he did——was immediately and widely accepted as entirely brilliant. The Chinese government chipped in some money; international appeals were launched to ask for more; and an organization known as Indusco, or the Chinese Industrial Cooperative (CIC), was formally set up.

By happenstance the first two characters of this new organization's Chinese name were gung ho——and though there was no linguistic connection, the two words were very soon afterward adopted as a motto by a friend of Alley's in the U.S. Marines. They became the battle cry of this marine unit, and such were the unit's successes on the battlefield that the phrase——much like "Up and at 'em!" or "Banzai!"——slipped into American English lexicon.

(Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, Harper Collins, 2008, pp. 111-113.)

An effort to redistribute manufacturing becomes a company whose name becomes a battle cry.

From a book I just finished:

The funny thing about meritocracy is that the concept comes not from any coherent political ideology or sociological research. It comes from satire. In 1958, sociologist Michael Young wrote a book lampooning the then-stratified British education system. In it, he depicts a dystopian future where IQ testing defines citizens' educational options and, eventually, their entire lives—dividing the country into an elite ruing class of "merited" people, and an underclass of those without merit. The public loved the term, but lost the point. Almost immediately, the term "meritocracy" was cropping up in a positive light—particularly in the United States (we've never been great at detecting British sarcasm).

Young didn't take kindly to the public's positive adoption of his work. "I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book," he wrote in the Guadian in 2001, shortly before he died. "The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded)."

(Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017, p. 174, I emboldened.)

Reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano, where you could only work a non-manual-labor job or stay out of the military if you had a college education. It seems both have come to pass, sadly.

I had a moment of extreme coincidence the other day. I spent the early part of the day transcribing a bit of interesting info from Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism. ( Let me share the coincidence. )

( And now, let me rant. )

X-Posted to home_effinomic

In his latest book, The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer notes the problem of increasing yields in organic crops using the most obvious fertilizer source, one that literally falls out of farmers' asses:

So why has the world been unable to get its fertilizer together on this issue? What keeps composted humanure and urine from being a primary resource base for farmers struggling to replace dwindling inorganic sources of plant nutrients? Much of the reason reaches deep into the crawl spaces of the industrial world's imagination. People who object to composting human waste very often cite concerns about pathogens or odors, but it rarely takes long to reach the emotional level of a five-year-old clenching his eyes shut and squealing, "Ewww, ick!"

C.S. Lewis pointed out . . . that modern attitudes about dirt and biological waste have their source in what might be called biophobia -- a pathological fear of the realities of biological life, coupled with an obsessive fascination with the sterile, the mechanical and the lifeless. Biophobia guides the creation of human environments so sterile that, according to recent research, many currently widespread illnesses may be caused by excessive cleanliness. The same attitude, I'm convinced, drives the horror many people feel when faced with the prospect of eating food fertilized with composted (human waste).

(John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future, New Society Publishers, 2009, p. 114.)

Biophobia. At last, I have a dismissive descriptive to pepper my missives.

"Also, 'shit' does have quite a noble semantic history. It comes from words relating to 'separate,' and is apparently related to the word "'science.'"

So says Rose George, author of The Big Necessity -- Adventures in the World of Human Waste in an interview* by The Economist. If true, this might explain my interest in both science and shit.


*This link references the print review of the book. Ms. George makes the comment in the audio podcast, a direct link to which I could not locate due to The Economist's byzantine search restrictions. I say, grrr. . . .

Many words have meanings commonly accepted today but of unknown origin. I may have stumbled upon one such: pure.

For example, look at the Online Etymology Dictionary's take on "purify":

c.1300, "free from spiritual pollution," from O.Fr. purifier (12c.), from L. purificare "to make pure," from purus "pure" (see pure) + root of facere "to make" . . . . Meaning "free from extraneous matter" is recorded from c.1440. . . . (Emphasis mine)

Interestingly, the next entry below "purify" is defecate:

1575, "to purify," from L. defæcatus, pp. of defæcare "cleanse from dregs, purify," from the phrase de fæce "from dregs," pl. fæces "feces. . . ."

Some recent reading suggests the two definitions may be more alike than we would like to think. Remember, folks, many words in our randomly-gleaned junk pile of a language predate printing, coming from the tradespeople who, though extremely competent at their lives and the tasks that professionally occupied them, never read or wrote a word. The words they used were eventually written, but often only after being filtered through the author's zeitgeist. For example, since many of the writers in the Middle Ages were monks, words tended to be filtered religiously. A monk might, for example, take a word known well to the common people and use it poetically to impart a religious lesson or image.

"Pure-finders" in London refer not to those of a religious bent, but on people who collect dog turds, or "pieces of pure," and sell these to leather tanners:

The pure collected is used by leather-dressers and tanners. . . . The dung has astringent as well as highly alkaline, or, to use the expression of my informant, "scouring," qualities. When the pure has been rubbed into the flesh and grain of the skin (the "flesh" being originally the interior, and the "grain" the exterior part of the cuticle), and the skin, thus purified, has been hung up to be dried, the dung removes, as it were, all such moisture as, if allowed to remain, would tend to make the leather unsound or imperfectly dressed."

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, New York: Penguin, 1985, p. 143 (the articles comprising the book were compiled in book form first in 1851).

Here we see pure -- again, bits of dog shit -- used to purify the skins not religiously, but to make them "free from extraneous matter." "This is done to 'purify' the leather, I was told by an intelligent leatherdresser, and from that term the word 'pure' has originated," the quoted source specifies.

I don't know. Sure, in English "pure" as a piece of poop might reflect its part in leather purification; but what of "purify?" Leather tanning has been around a hell of a lot longer than most religions today. Perhaps the purity of the skins predated the purity of the soul. I find some comfort in realizing that the monks might have borrowed a term from the tanners, just as the word "test" came from metal workers and a glass lens refers to nothing more lofty than its shapely resemblance to a bean.

Of course, what other conclusion can one expect from the Peristaltic Testator?

Back in (IRRC) Philosophy 102, Logic, we learned the dirty little secret of Victorian literature. Sherlock Holmes sometimes got it wrong.


Seated to the Right,
An Entertaining Occassional Mis-Speaker

You see, he was widely quoted as presenting the conclusions he based upon evidence as a "deduction." That is incorrect. A deduction is specifically used to remove evidence or conclusions from consideration. For example, if Mary has a solid alibi for being elsewhere during the crime, and the time of the crime can be solidly established, one can deduce that Mary cannot have been the perpetrator.

However, when it came to reconstructing the scene of a crime, Sherlock's speciality, the addition of detail was necessary. One needed to know more than who didn't do it. One needed to know who did.

This, folks, requires induction.

Furthermore, when one induces based upon evidence, one does not "prove" anything. An induction is a speculative reconstruction based upon evidence; by definition, proof is deductive -- and therefore conclusive -- not speculative.

( Evidence of more. )