I read Andrew Sullivan every day, thus I was chuffed to see a link to an article on Colonel Henry Olcott, a founder of modern Sri Lankan Buddhism. The article, by Stefany Anne Goldberg, is full of some interesting and surprising details. I reproduce a few here.

Sri Lanka In Style is offering a tour package called the Sybaratic [sic] South Coast. In contrast to the Syphilitic South Coast tour, this is a luxury trip. Sybaritic has become a synonym for luxury, but it used to be a people. The ancient Greeks of Sybaris.

Sixteen years ago, yesterday, a 440 pound bomb tore through downtown Colombo. It killed 91 people, injured 1,400 and left at least 100 people blind. It also made the city recoil from itself, leaving the city center largely abandoned, only to slowly emerge today. It also made tourism drop by 40%, a figure that is also only now recovering, post war. More than anything, however, it just left people stumbling, bloody and reeling, onto the shattered streets of Colombo.

The last king of Sri Lanka was actually a Tamil. Sri Vikrama Rajasinha died in exile on January 30th, 1832. You can visit a memorial of sorts in the Ceylinco parking lot. Right now you can also watch the dubious heir to the Jaffna Kingdom on a TLC reality dating show.

I started this book, Religion In Human Evolution, which has a lot of ideas per page. Here’s one, that history is older than texts, thus older than 5,000 years and mixed with evolutionary biology. This I believe most sincerely to be true, but it’s still a rejection of an established view. Indeed, the time before text is often called pre-history, and many people are happy to let it dwell in mystery or myth.

To me, dragons make perfect sense. They’re dinosaurs. If I found a T-Rex skull, as proto-humans must have, it would look like a dragon to me. Awesome attracts awesome. If I didn’t imagine that this thing also flew and breathed fire, the next village certainly would. I mean, how do we know dinosaurs didn’t breathe fire anyways? Un-burnt dentition I guess, but still.

Author Royston Ellis is auctioning off his collection of old maps and prints this Sunday. He has stuff from the 1700s on up, and some look amazing. The one I want is the British soldier caressing a native lass before he ditches her, but I dunno how far I’m going to get with two thousand rupees in disposable income. Some of the other maps and prints look pretty fascinating, but I’ll go to see.

Do you know how humans dealt with economic crisis (crises? crisi?) in the past? They moved. They got up and moved. This great and constant migration out of Africa is why we’re here in the first place, or wherever you are. Yet this same type of migration is now illegal. But that’s just a consensual hallucination, and it’s not the way it has to be. And it may not be helping. Free trade is a widely espoused belief (though rarely practiced). Why not free migration?

I’ve been following Mike Duncan’s History Of Rome podcasts. They are awesome and I like them cause I can do repetitive stuff at work and still listen. I’m at around 140 BC. What’s interesting is that the roots of collapse seem to have set in. And it began with great success.

Why do civilizations collapse? I would posit that they, like humans, simply get old and die. Basically, they get cancer. 1/3 of women and 1/2 of men get cancer as they age. Broadly, cancer is when a group of cells exhibits uncontrolled growth, gradually killing the host. One theory of why civilizations collapse is much the same. A group of people begins growing their wealth out of control, eventually outgrowing the resources that the society has. That society eventually collapses.