The Euro to Be a Failed Currency?

Now I find this extremely dang interesting. According to a column in the April 21, 2008, issue of Forbes magazine, there is some possibility that the whole common currency thing in Europe is failing. That is to say, the Euro will fail and the countries over there will revert to their old currencies, i.e., the franc, the deutsche mark, the lira, etc. Who knew?

The writer, Avi Tiomkin, is described as a "macroeconomic adviser to hedge funds." The gist of his argument is that different countries want and need different things economically, and it is these tensions that will ultimately lead some countries to abandon the euro and return to what they used before. He begins the column stating that

It is only a matter of time, probably less than three years, until the euro experiment meets its end.

He also states that

Along with the steep selloff that will precede the disintegration of the high-flying euro, other markets will be shaken.

He then goes on to recommend that investors should

Gradually start to hoard dollars and short the euro. Another strategy is to sell investments in Italy and Spain and buy German fixed-income assets.

I don't know about you but this is the first I've heard of this. Not that I'm some big investor to take measures to prepare, but I never dreamed something like a currency in use in such a large area even could fail. You live and learn, I guess. I know I'll be watching with interest in the next three years.

A Digression Just To Make Some Money

I'm going to do this just because I can. If you're not interested just ignore this particular post. Besides, making a bit of cash this easily is pretty dang interesting to me.

Everyone is familiar with PayPal, right? That company that lets you send and receive money via the Web? Well, they now have competition. Apparently Steve Case, one of the cofounders of AOL, has started this thing called Revolution Money Exchange, and for everyone who signs up before May 15 gets an immediate $25 in their account to spend, withdraw, or whatever they want to do. So you can't lose, right? And I checked it out--they are legit. They're a registered bank and you do have to give them your social security number, as you do with any bank account. Then, if you refer anyone else to them who signs up you get an extra $10.

So here's the link. Just click on the image to get started. Do it if it appeals to you. Either way, I'll be back to regular posts after this one.

When The Jews And Muslims Were Friends

I mentioned last time that I was reading Christianity and Islam in Spain, A.D. 756-1031, by Charles Reginald Haines, and that the Jews of Spain aided the Moors in their conquest of that country. Here's some more on that subject.

The persecution of the Jews by the Gothic Spaniards naturally made them the implacable enemies of the Christians. Being a very numerous colony in Spain--for Hadrian had transported thither many thousand families--the Jews gave the Arabs very effective help in conquering the country, both by betraying places to them, and garrisoning captured towns while the Arabs went on to fresh conquests. Consequently the relations between the Jews and Moslems were for a long time very cordial, though this cordiality wore off in the course of time. . .

In France the prejudice against the Jews shewed itself very strongly among the clergy, though Louis I and his wife Judith favoured them. They were generally ill-treated, and their slaves were induced by the clergy to be baptized. Thereupon they became free, as Jews were not allowed to have Christian slaves. But it must be admitted that the Franks had reason for disliking the Jews, as it was well known that they sold Christian children as slaves to the Moslems of Spain.

Wow. That last remark is one of the things I often find most interesting in reading old texts. This is one of the things that makes Haines especially interesting as a writer. He shows his prejudices openly and yet still manages to view the overall picture with amazing objectivity in light of his prejudices. Did the Jews really sell Christian children to the Moors as slaves? I have no idea, but it sounds like one of those urban legends that everyone knows but no one can prove or find a source for. Still, considering how badly the Jews were treated it wouldn't surprise me if it happened at least once or twice. Vengeance leads people to do pretty outrageous things some times.

Anyway, all things must pass and a bit later Haines notes that:

The good understanding between the Jews and the Arabs with the gradual process of time gave place to an ill-concealed hostility, and at the beginning of the twelfth century there seems even to have been a project formed for forcing the Jews to become Moslems on the ground of a promise made by their forefathers to Mohammed that, if in five centuries their Messiah had not appeared, they would be converted to Mohammedanism.

Of course, when the Christian retook Spain the Jews were in a bit of a bind. The Christians still hated them and now they had the added impetus of the Jews' collaboration with the Moors. Interestingly, the Jews of Toledo appear to have pulled a fast one in 1085 when the Christians reclaimed that city. Says Haines:

They waited on Alfonso and assured him that they were part of the ten tribes whom Nebuchadnezzar transported into Spain, and not the descendants of those Jerusalem Jews who crucified Christ. Their ancestors, they said, were quite free from the guilt of this act, for when Caiaphas had written to the Toledan synagogue for their advice respecting the person who claimed to be the Messiah, the Toledan Jews returned for answer, that in their judgment the prophecies seemed to be fulfilled in Him and therefore He ought not by an means to be put to death. This reply they produced in the original Hebrew. It is needless to say that the whole thing was a fabrication.

A little fast footwork there, wouldn't you say?

Eventually, the Inquisition murdered and drove out all the Jews from Spain, with the exception of those known today to have continued their rituals in private while publicly accepting Christianity. The remaining Moslems were also killed or driven out, and you have to give Haines credit that he states, "The story of the treatment of Jews by Christians is indeed one of the darkest in the history of Christianity."

Christians Had Suicide Martyrs, Too, With Important Differences

Picture a religious sect willingly bringing death upon themselves, with the idea of becoming martyrs and ascending immediately to their heavenly reward. Meanwhile, those they consider their oppressors shake their heads and wonder what is wrong with these people that they do not seem to value life. That may sound like Iraq or Israel or other places in the Middle East today but it also describes what was happening in Spain in the 800s, and those seeking their own deaths were Christians.

Most educated people know that Spain was ruled for several hundred years by the Moors, before they were driven out and Christianity regained the upper hand. Now, as an aside, although I learned about the Moorish period many years ago it was not made clear to me until much later that these "Moors" were what we today call "Arabs," in this case, the Arabs of northern Africa. But heck, back then it was not clear to me that these "Hebrews" we learned about in Sunday School were what we today call "Jews." Learning and understanding are gradual processes.

It would be natural to wonder how the Christians fared under their Moorish masters during those centuries, and that is just the topic of the book I'm now reading, Christianity and Islam in Spain, A.D. 756-1031. Written in 1889 by Charles Reginald Haines, a Brit, this book displays the author's prejudices but on the whole is surprisingly objective.

For example, Haines makes the point repeatedly that despite the questionable writings of some Christians of the time, the preponderance of credible evidence shows that the Moorish kings were surprisingly mild and enlightened in their treatment of their subjects. Jews in particular led good lives under the Moors. It seems the Christians had treated the Jews so badly that when the Moors invaded, the Jews welcomed them and helped them in their conquest. But the Christians were not badly treated. As long as they obeyed the laws they were left unmolested.

This is not to say they were treated as equals, and had no valid complaints. Apparently it was somewhat similar to the way it used to be in the U.S., particularly in the South, where Blacks were second-class citizens and often were treated scornfully and with some malice by the Whites. But -- importantly -- they were not persecuted. They were left free to practice their religion as they saw fit. The exceptions were the occasional times when the Christians revolted and their revolts were put down violently.

The key in all this was the issue of obeying the laws. You could be a Christian and freely practice your religion, but then as now, the Moors/Muslims considered it an offense punishable by death to mock or scorn their god or their prophet. And in case you are repulsed by the idea of modern Muslims beheading their victims, rest assured that this is nothing new. Beheading was how it was done more than 1,000 years ago. Just part of the culture, apparently.

Along about 823 A.D., however, a number of Christian monks and nuns decided that their faith required them to point out to the Moors the error of their ways. The Moors had no desire to kill a bunch of people and tried to be lenient, but when their leniency only brought on greater insults and blasphemy their patience ran out and they obliged the would-be martyrs.

This stirred up a lot more clerics and eventually even non-clerical Christians to do the same. The movement built and finally subsided only after the leading recruiter for these would-be martyrs was himself put to death.

There are two essential differences between these martyrs and today's Muslim martyrs, who are also trying to serve their god and get an express ticket to heaven in doing so.

First, the Christian martyrs in Spain weren't taking anyone with them. They weren't causing death and destruction to anyone but themselves.

But secondly, and very interestingly, their fellow Christians did not condone what they were doing. The matter was debated in the high councils and it was agreed that anyone deliberately bringing death upon him or herself was not a true martyr, and did not warrant an express ticket to heaven. In fact, the act was deemed very un-Christian because it showed the sin of pride.

It was an abuse of words, said the party of moderation, to call these suicides by the holy name of martyrs, when no violence in high places had forced them to deny their faith, or interfered with their due observance of Christianity. It was merely an act of ostentatious pride--and pride was the root of all evil--to court danger. Such conduct had never been enjoined by Christ, and was quite alien from the meekness and humility of His character.

Returning to modern times, I recently read with interest an article that said that the very conservative Muslims may prove to be the undoing of the Muslim suicide bombers. It seems they feel that blowing yourself up without the approval of your parents or your spouse is a show of disrespect and does not conform with Muslim law. Maybe there's hope for the world.

Surrender Monkeys or Simply Realistic?

I've just started reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry into the Fall of France 1940, by William Shirer and very quickly came upon an interesting question. In the Prologue, Shirer recaps the stunningly fast manner in which French resistance failed and the German conquerors swept in. He makes this note:

Most demoralizing of all to army units still trying to fight were the efforts of civilians to prevent them from offering further resistance that might damage their homes and shops. At one village on the River Indre the local inhabitants extinguished the fuses of explosives already lit by army engineers to blow the bridge there and slow down the German advance.

OK, surrender monkeys for sure, right?

I don't know. When you think about it, they might have been doing something truly rational. The country is crashing down around you and, to quote the Borg, "Resistance is futile." If resistance is futile, why should you suffer worse consequences than you're already facing? Why risk having your home, your business, your family become targets of enemy artillery when the battle is already lost? Salvage what you can and hunker down to wait for better days.

Still, to a lot of people I'm pretty sure that just doesn't sit well. If the enemy doesn't have to pay a price for their aggression, what is there to stop them from continued aggression? Resistance may be a matter of losing the battle but winning the war. Isn't that what happened to the U.S. in Vietnam? We won a lot of battles, but at high cost and eventually public outcry over the deaths of so many of our young men led to disengagement and withdrawal.

So do civilians have a duty to suffer along with those in the military when it is a matter of defending your own country?

What all of this brings to mind for me is the decision my wife took some years ago when her son was on a dangerous and potentially deadly path. She stepped in and took action intended to ensure that he survived, action he hated her for at the time. Her thinking was very clear. He might never forgive her and they might never have a relationship again, but at least he would be alive. For the French civilians, this could be stated as "Retreat and live to fight another day." You can't fight another day if you're dead.

Today, the son is still alive, grown up, and grateful to his mother for her courage. Perhaps some of the very same Frenchmen who snuffed the fuses later joined the underground and exacted their vengence on the Germans. There really is very little black and white in this world. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

Craniology and the Size of Helen Keller's Head

I'm reading The Story of My Life by Helen Keller and just came across an interesting couple of passages. This part is taken from Anne Sullivan's letters.

Helen's head measures twenty and one-half inches, and mine measures twenty-one and one-half inches. You see. I'm only one inch ahead!

I thought at first I misread it and she was referring to height, but no, it was just as you see above.

Then, just a little further on, in a different letter, she writes:

She will be seven years old the twenty-seventh of this month. Her height is four feet one inch, and her head measures twenty and one-half inches in circumference, the line being drawn round the head so as to pass over the prominences of the parietal and frontal bones. Above this line the head rises one and one-fourth inches.

And then she just goes on, no further explanation needed--at least not for her intended reader.

I was amused and thought this might be phrenology, a debunked pseudoscience popular back in Helen Keller's times, but my recollection was that phrenology was the study of the bumps on the head. Looking a little further, I'm guessing it is actually craniology, explained in Wikipedia as "A large skull meant a large brain and high intellectual capacity, and a small skull indicated a small brain and decreased intellectual capacity."

Do you ever wonder what people in the future will look back on in this age and laugh about?

Jesus Was A Mushroom - My Final Take

It has been slow going as I've been reading The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross but I'm ready now to give my appraisal of the basic thesis. Which is to say, I don't have a clue. Let me recap.

John Allegro, the author, makes the argument that Christianity got its start as a subterfuge used by ancient Jews to hide their true religion from the Romans. He argues that they created an imaginary fertility cult based around the usage of the amanita muscaria, or "magic" mushroom. Then, by an ironic twist, the "fake" religion caught on and took on a life of its own. I think this quote does a good job of summing this up:

The whole point of a mystery cult was that few people knew its secret doctrines. So far as possible, the initiates did not commit their special knowledge to writing. . . . When such special instruction was committed to writing, care would be taken that it should be read only by members of the sect. This could be done by using a special code or cypher, as in the case with certain of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, discovery of such obviously coded material on a person would render him suspect to the authorities. Another way of passing information was to conceal the message, incantations, or special names within a document ostensibly concerned with a quite different subject.

Plant mythology, known for thousands of years over the whole of the ancient world, provided the New Testament cryptographers their "cover." . . . Those most deceived appear to have been the sect who took over the name of "Christian" and who formed the basis of the Church, the history of which forms no part of the present study.

So I repeat: I don't have a clue. The information Allegro presents seems well researched but I have a couple problems with it.

First, he bases the whole book on the foundation that a new understanding of the Sumerian language or some other translation capability allows researchers to grasp meaning that was not previously possible. Unfortunately, the explanation he gives as to the nature of this new understanding is, at least in my opinion, insufficient. What he says is:

The main factor that has made these new discoveries possible has been the realization that many of the most secret names of the mushroom go back to ancient Sumerian . . . For the first time it becomes possible to decipher the names of gods, mythological characters, classical dn biblical, and plant names.

Secondly, assuming this is all on the up and up, and there really is new information on which his thesis is based, there is no way that anyone who is not a serious scholar of ancient languages can judge his intrepretations. This stuff is so esoteric that there probably aren't 200 people in the world who have the knowledge to read what he says and challenge his hypothesis. The rest of us can only read what he says and say "That's an unusual and interesting argument but I don't have a clue about its validity."

Allegro makes the point that the book is written for the general public but perforce it was necessary to include a lot of technical data that would be outside the scope of the general reader. In my opinion, at least, he has failed to really reach the general reader. It may not be his fault. It may be that it is so esoteric that no one could cross that gap to really engage someone who doesn't have the background to evaluate what he's saying. But without the ability to evaluate the arugment, the only capability that remains is to plant the idea in the reader's mind and leave them thinking, again, "That's an unusual and interesting argument but I don't have a clue about its validity."

And that's where I leave it.