I was reading Aesop’s fables to the kid. I was quite surprised to read, “near the beginning of our era a Buddhist collection that had come west by Alexandria was combined with that of Demetrius and later turned into Greek verse by Valerius Babrius. A Greek prose version of Babrius was accepted for centuries as the original Aesop. The habit of summing up the lesson of the fable in a ‘moral’ at the end seems to have come in with the Oriental contribution”. (Harvard Classics, book 17, my house).

All manner of despots invoke the sovereignty argument like it’s something sacred. It’s not. It’s actually bad. To look at what sovereignty is, look at the incoming nuptials of Prince William and Kate. Not them, but their ancestors. William’s ancestors – until World War II – married not for love or even proximity but in incestuous sovereignty. The House of Windsor was then the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a German house. What unified Europe was not the self-rule but selfish rule by a set of elite families that transcended nationality.

The best policy for any aspiring dictator is birth control. If you aspire to be the father of a nation, you might want to limit the number of mouths to feed. If you don’t, there’s a high probability of revolt. If you look at the map above, youth (under 25) make up around 50% of many countries. Those countries are also prone to revolt. If you think about it, young people are strong, they can stay up all night and they have little to lose. If they don’t have numbers it’s possible to suppress them, but if they have more than 50%, resisting change will be tough. It’s a common idiom that change only comes when old people die. You could add that change also comes if there are enough young people to retire them.

My friend at Notes from Ceylon has written a defense of colonialism. His argument seems to be that colonialism was not all bad and may have, on the whole, been a good thing. This is contrary to the Piers Brendon book he’s reviewing, which characterizes it as a global suck. My view is sort of like that towards a child borne of rape. It came from a bad place, but you can’t help but love the child.

To quote the Beatles, I used to get mad at my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved. Yes I was mean, but I’m changing my scene, and I’m doing the best that I can. This in lyrical form, is kinda what many social scientists are saying about large groups of humans beating and killing other humans. It’s getting better all the time. There is a steady decline in both the quantity of lethality of war. We are now living in what may be the most peaceful time in history, yet the weird magic mirrors trick of mass media makes it look like the most fearful.

Getting a kid to bathe is often like asking them to be flayed alive, but perhaps they’re on to something. We’ve gotten so used to modern conveniences that we’ve forgot that they’re modern and think these things are eternal. As an example, showering daily and using deodorant. It seems a necessity, but it was not always so, and it may not be even now. Some people in America are now bathing less, according to the NYTimes, and they’re not all hippies. Frequent showers and use of deodorant may be a social more worth discussing to see how much it actually makes sense.

I’m reading this new Kaplan book, so forgive me if the blog reads like a disjointed review. He speaks very highly of the Omani sultan (dictator in its non pejorative sense). However, he asks, “what happens if – or when – power shifts to a less vigorous or enlightened one? Then such extreme centralization can signal disaster… Nondemocratic countries like Oman often evince efficiency when things are going well, but when problems arise in such systems the population, especially if it is young, can become quite restive.” That is, democracy is not always better in the short run. To serve specific ends, despots are often in order.

If the Europeans hadn’t colonized Sri Lanka, we’d probably be a Muslim country. The clash of civilizations is that old. Europeans and Muslims fought over the Indian Ocean and Europe won. That, however, was only one round of many. In his book, Monsoon, Robert Kaplan cites a myth about the Portuguese Prince Henry: “Henry began to plan a grand strategy to outflank the Islamic world from bases in the Indian Ocean. Thus, Prince Henry, this myth continues, developed an obsession with India.” He goes on to say that this myth is a true reflection of the unconscious strategy of the time.