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M. Porcius Cato

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Blog Entries posted by M. Porcius Cato

  1. M. Porcius Cato
    From Wired Magazine:
     
    "We've reached an age where egotism is considered too much work. Why discuss your hopes and fears when you can just post the results of online tests, show cartoon versions of yourself and collect "friends"? It's a good thing Anais Nin wasn't a blogger, or instead of a steamy tale of sexual awakening and creative fervor, we'd just know that if she was a Ninja Turtle, she'd be Raphael."
  3. M. Porcius Cato
    Nobiles ("the known") were the senators whose family-members had climbed the highest rungs of the cursus honorum. How many modern-day nobiles are in the US Senate? After the death of the nobile-st Senator, Ted Kennedy, somebody bothered to publish the results, and the results are good news for New Men like Nixon and Obama: US Senators with family-members in the Senate have never been lower.
     
    Check out THIS graph to see the dramatic fall from the 1st Congress to the 101st.
  4. M. Porcius Cato
    This was an interesting article, and I'm always very thrilled to see quantitative analyses of Roman history. That said, it seems like the article ignores an important insight gained from the many previous attempts to understand what caused the changes that occurred in the late Roman empire. That insight is that the variables that appear to explain change in one part of empire (e.g., the Western empire) fail to accurately predict what happens in another part of the empire (e.g., the Eastern empire).
     
    So suppose the authors' theory is right: climactic change causes disease, famine and war. If so, the theory explains their observations of climactic change occurring with the Germanic migrations in Central Europe. So far, so good. But what about the rest of the empire? The theory predicts that there would be much less climactic change occurring in North Africa and the Levant, which were relatively healthy, prosperous and peaceful during this period. But that prediction seems highly unlikely to be right. In North Africa, for example, there was massive desertification and shortages of water, leading the agricultural frontiers of the empire to move back toward the coasts. Yet, the empire was fine in North Africa throughout this period of climactic change, and it only began to decline when the same Germanic people that invaded central and western Europe made it to North Africa, where they busied themselves impaling babies and butchering children (which I'm sure the authors would argue is just a rational response to climate change....)
     
    The history of North Africa, then, presents a real problem for the theory. That is, given climactic change, we have an equal likelihood of experiencing disease/famine/war (like Central Europe) or continuing health/prosperity/peace (like North Africa). Framed that way, the article totally loses its Cassandra-like punch regarding modern climate change. Framed another way, however, we could observe this: given massive migrations of violent, anti-GrecoRoman foreigners, we have a much greater likelihood of experiencing disease/famine/war (like *both* Central Europe and North Africa).
     
    When you look at the *whole empire*, and not just a fragment of it, you come away with a very different historical lesson. Namely, the most likely threat to civilization isn't climate change but cultural change, specifically people starting to act like those early Germanic hordes. Of course, I'm sure no one in New York, London, Madrid, and Moscow could possibly imagine that there's a group of armed fanatics who hate the Greco-Roman way of life....
     
    Anyway, that's my two cents.
     
    Source: Roman rise and fall 'recorded in trees'
  7. M. Porcius Cato
    The efforts of Hugo Chavez to hide Venezuela's continuing slide to dictatorship has become truly absurdist.
     
    According to the BBC, Chavez has vowed to expel foreigners who even accuse him of dictatorship, remarking "How long are we going to allow a person - from any country in the world - to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?" These comments came on the same weekend that Manuel Espino, president of Mexico's National Action Party, criticised Chavez at a pro-democracy conference in Caracas and characterized a plan by Mr Chavez to end term limits on Venezuela's presidency as a threat to democracy.
     
    I really wonder, is this pig-eyed Chavez so stupid that he has absolutely no sense of irony? I guess if you're president-for-life, you don't need a sense of irony.
  9. M. Porcius Cato
    According to this Voice of America piece,
    The wife of a Chinese dissident jailed for publishing articles on the Internet says she plans to sue U.S.-based Internet company Yahoo for allegedly helping to put her husband in jail in China.
     
    I hope she wins her case against those unprincipled yahoos, who are resuscitating the old Stalinist claim that capitalists would sell the Soviets the rope with which to hang them. Good on VoA for covering this heroic woman.
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