Patronage is the classical method for funding the arts. And it is the future as well. This current age of reaping royalties via copyright restrictions is coming to an end. It was an aberration of our culture caused by the rise of mass media preceding the democratization of media through the internet. The result will be fewer millionaire artists and billionaire record moguls, but it will be better for our culture.

There are currently two hits for “Bible translation” on Kickstarter. Someday a major Bible translation project will be financed this “new” way, and the publishers will make their money from selling physical copies, not from licensing the translations. I’m looking forward to it.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Faithful readers may recall that my wife and I started a tradition that we would choose a book for each other in March. I lost a bet and got two books, but it was just as well. Of course this novel was long enough that I did not complete it until early April.

The Pillars of the Earth was a pleasant read. The first aspect which appealed to me was the setting. I really found the medieval England portrayed in the novel compelling. Reading about a totally different time and place can be quite thought-provoking.

But the real showcase is the cast of characters. Follett creates a lot of interesting and relatable characters. Prior Philip, Tom Builder, Ellen, Aliena, and Jack are all lovable in their own ways. And you love to hate the antagonists. Add in a good plot and some fascinating bits about historical architecture, and you’ve got a great read. Recommended.

Periodicals

• Scientific American March 2012 – Julian Dibbell reports on the developments of decentralized mesh networks. This article does a great job pointing out how the current access to the internet via ISPs betrays the intended “web” architecture. Mesh networking is seeking to correct that structural flaw.
• Harper’s April 2012 – Charles Glass writes a fascinating (and at times disturbing) report of the “private security” industry.
• Biblical Archaeology Review July August 2011 – I have gotten quite behind on this periodical. Luckily they are fairly short reads and there are not many issues a year. I’ve resolved to read one a month. As usual, this issues had some great articles and pictures.
• Tin House #51 – I am still so pleased with this subscription. A lot of great stories and essays in this one. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Robert Krulwich and Jab Abumrad from Radiolab.
• Harper’s May 2012 – I found the report on “The Decline and Fall of Public Housing” by Ben Austen to be really interesting. Growing up in Portland I did not know much about it.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I should be somewhat ashamed as a sci-fi fan that I had never read this novel. It is a classic, and for good reason. The premise is awesome, the characters and plot are superb. There is also the minor fact that Card seems to have made some strikingly accurate predictions about the future of technology and gaming.

As in The Worthing Saga, it seems Card intends the novel to make the reader think. It worked for me, and I found my mind returning to the closing action of the novel throughout the days after I finished it. I think some people may think the end is a bit of a curve ball, but I found it to be vintage Card. Recommended.

The Republican Party has decided to allow non-affiliated voters to vote for the office of Attorney General, Secretary of State, and State Treasurer in this Primary Election.

All I had to do was respond to get the GOP primary ballot, so I did. Of course this does not include the presidential primary nor the state nor federal congressional primaries. Yet I thought this a positive development, since I am on the whole supportive of “open” primaries, not getting to vote in many since I am not a member of a political party.

It was to my dismay that upon opening the special GOP ballot I found almost nobody to vote for. One candidate is running unopposed for the Secretary of State position, and no candidates are filed for the other two races. Thank you, Oregon Republican Party, for extending to me the special invitation to cast a ballot of zero consequence.

(I know that it is not the party’s fault per se that nobody filed for the races, and that they probably did not know the contents of the ballot when they extended the primary to non-affiliated voters.)

This seems to be a great opportunity for run-off style open primaries. The Democrats are internally contesting two of these three positions. Why not let the whole of Oregon vote on the entire slate of candidates? It seems silly to segregate the primaries by party when even the primaries are uncontested.

Now when I asked my counselors how this (peace) might be brought to pass, Haman . . . declared to us that in all nations throughout the world there was scattered a certain malicious people, who had laws contrary to all nations and continually despised the commandments of kings, so that the uniting of our kingdoms, honorably intended by us, cannot go forward. Seeing this, we understand that this people alone is continually in opposition unto all men, differing in the strange ways of their laws and bringing about evil to our state, working all the mischief they can, so that our kingdom may not be firmly established: Therefore have we commanded that all those who are signified in writing to you by Haman . . . shall all, with their wives and children, be utterly destroyed by the sword of their enemies, without all mercy and pity . . .

Sadly the Jews were taking the blame for societal problems long before the rise of the Third Reich.

The way forward for Romney depends on the economy. For the longest time I did not think he had much of a shot against the President, but as I’ve said several times recently, the economy seems to be struggling, which gives Romney an opening.

It’s conventional wisdom now: if the economy is going good, the incumbent wins. I think that is really shorthand for the fact that US Presidential elections are controlled by forces which are much bigger than the particular candidates. The economy is the greatest of those forces, but there are other factors. I think we as politically ideological Americans feel somewhat embarrassed about this maxim. We don’t think our highest office should be decided on a single factor, especially one which seems so materialistic compared with the pure ideals of our nation. But we all know it is true, and these forces make the whole primary and general elections campaigns feel pointless and silly.

Therefore I am proposing that the electoral college be replaced with an index of economic indicators. Both the position and the trend of each element would be accounted for. Here is my preliminary list:

• DJIA/NASDAQ
• Unemployment rate
• Price of crude oil
• New construction starts
• Inflation
• The prime rate

No more fuss. Just get down to brass tacks and use empirical data to guide our politics. We could actually forgo an election unless the indicators determine that the incumbent should lose, saving the country billions. Anyone else in favor?

Pilate addressed them once again because he wanted to release Jesus. But they kept on shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!” A third time he said to them, “Why? What wrong has he done? I have found him guilty of no crime deserving death. I will therefore flog him and release him.” But they were insistent, demanding with loud shouts that he be crucified. And their shouts prevailed. So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted.

It seems that Pilate was at first trying to be judicious in his treatment of Jesus. After all, he did not find Jesus guilty based on questioning, and even deferred to Herod’s jurisdiction. In this he was being idealistic and principled. Yet in our society there would be a pejorative descriptor for personal conviction overriding the will of the public: antidemocratic.

However, due to a politic context of recent insurrection, Pilate was inclined to defer to the will of the people, so as to avoid trouble. In our society this would be the corresponding slur: populist. So in this both of the political ideologies failed. Pilate’s principled jurisprudence could not withstand the realpolitik of his situation. And the democratic agenda crucified the Lord of glory.

And that is one of the important lessons I glean from the passion week. Any political system, no matter how ingeniously devised, would have crucified Jesus. This is part of why I am so resistant to political ideology. It seems that without fail, the best of political systems will from time to time nonetheless bear wicked fruit. That’s the fallen nature of man. The question should not be, as Pilate asked, “what is truth?” But rather, “what is righteous?”

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

This is the novel which everyone is reading. I see it on mass transit as often as Harry Potter, the Twilight series, or the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in the past. My wife had been a fan of Suzanne Collins’ work due to being a teacher, and she had read this work quite a while ago, and has finished the entire trilogy.

I really loved this book, but I dreaded reading. The premise of violence against children at the hands of children is disturbing. It even inspired a rather lengthy post on the topic of violence in our society. In spite of the discomfort of reading it, I found the story quite compelling. It is a great narrative of how institutional violence can twist us out of our humanity. But, in spite of the pervasiveness of evil, we can resist it and nonetheless have hope.

I have high hopes for the rest of the series, and have been assured that I will not be disappointed. For what its worth, I saw the film and it was pretty good as well. Recommended.

My desire for the characters to survive without being corrupted by their situation drives my appreciation of this story. I recommend it, in spite of it being tough to read and watch. What makes the story most wrenching for me is that this hopeless, senseless bloodbath is perpetrated by children against children. Both in reading the book and watching the film, I felt a sense of dread as the prospect of such violence neared. I think most adults (especially parents!) feel similarly.

However “young adult” children are the target audience both of the books and the movie. I fear that the maturity of some may be lacking to understand the significance of the story. Case in point: I heard a few laughs burst from high-school-aged boys in the theater during some of the brutal killings depicted in the film.

Now do not get the impression that I am wholly opposed to the depiction of violence in the arts. I think at times it is necessary to tell a certain story, or convey a poignant message to the audience. Yet the default purpose of violence in media is entertainment, or worse: glorification.

We as a society are sensitive to violence in the media, though it can be somewhat confused. This past week I saw dueling headlines, some questioning whether The Hunger Games was too violent for its target audience, others alleging that fans may be upset because toned-down violence in the film lacks fidelity with the book.

I find no wonder that our society has these confused views on violence. After all, the same nation which celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day also celebrates numerous military holidays. Shocked by the concept of sending eighteen-year-olds to kill sixteen-year-olds? The same could be a characterization of our battles against the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Polite company may hem and haw at children playing violent video games or seeing depictions of war in film, but they constantly inform them of the necessity of such violence.

A fitting distillation of this contradiction is embodied in a hallway in the Portland VA Medical Center which hails the service of noteworthy underage military personnel. “Sorry son, you’re too young to enlist, so just go play America’s Army for now. But if you do manage to sneak in, we’re going to make a star out of you.” See? Confusion.

The Trayvon Martin scandal provides another opportunity to consider our nation’s attitudes towards violence. I will focus here not on the case itself, but on the so-called “stand your ground” laws which came to my attention as a result. To quote the relevant portion of the pertinent Florida law:

a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if: He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;

I am of course no legal expert, but these laws (which are on the books in twenty of these United States) seem to legalize dueling. I am only half joking about that. Deadly violence becomes the legally-justified first resort for those in conflict, and they need only claim their lives felt threatened to avoid judicial scrutiny.

I’ll offer an alternative vision of “stand your ground:”

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the evildoer. But whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well. And if someone wants to sue you and to take your tunic, give him your coat also. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to the one who asks you, and do not reject the one who wants to borrow from you.

At a crucial point in The Hunger Games, the heroine perpetrates a crucial act of non-resistance with a fellow tribute. In so doing she defies and enrages the powers that be, which is the catalyst for the next phase of the story. We as Christians must strive to “stand our ground” and eschew violence. In this we challenge the prominence of violence in our present society and hopefully prevent the downfall into the depraved society depicted in the film.

Enter Piwik, the free software analytics system. You can host it on a standard PHP/MySQL stack, so it is easy to roll your own. The data it collects stays with you. You can also configure it to provide better privacy for your readers, including anonymizing IP addresses and providing an opt-out feature. I installed it, loved it, and added it to all my sites. I am not storing the last two bytes of IP addresses, meaning the best I can do is narrow users down to a class B subnet.

So, yes, I am back on the analytics bandwagon.

Thanks to software, most of the work to create a sorted listed of Jesus’ vocabulary is trivial. I can easily make a frequency list of his words and remove common stopwords. The most challenging part for me was finding a source of the gospels from which it was easy to extract just Jesus’ words. I asked around, and found that the World English Bible XML contains a <wj> (i.e. “words of Jesus”) tag which delimits exactly what I need. So after a bit of processing, and thanks to NLTK, I was able to provide a basic list of Jesus’ most common words:

1. one – 221
2. father – 211
3. tell – 210
4. man – 196
5. God – 163
6. things – 163
7. come – 158
8. son – 149
9. go – 123
10. also – 113
11. know – 111
12. may – 111
13. kingdom – 104
14. see – 102
15. lord – 97
16. said – 96
17. therefore – 94
18. give – 93
19. heaven – 86

Based on the top of the list, I’d say Jesus was primarily talking about the good news.

I’ve shared the code.