I’ve been sick as hell since returning to IN. I used to get this sort of thing much more often in CO–office buildings are filthy things. I’m just now getting my senses about me. I’ve also gone cold turkey on the Ambien, so I expect these late-night posts will become common again.

This is where my banner photograph was taken.

Bobbitt:

All the significant legal characteristics of the State—legitimacy, personality, continuity, integrity, and, most importantly, sovereignty—date from the moment at which these human traits, the constituents of human identity, were transposed to the state itself. This occurred when princes, to whom these legal characteristics had formerly been attached, required the services of a permanent bureaucracy in order to manage the demands of a suddenly more threatening strategic competition. (p 81)

The strategic competition mentioned is the advent of artillery which rendered city walls obsolete, requiring large standing armies for the defense of a territory.

Thus this irony gave birth to the modern state and its unique problem, its problematic relation to the elusive status of legitimacy: only a State, however rudimentary, could provide the prince with the infrastructure necessary to maintain expensive mercenaries, but once this infrastructure was erected, it could also provide others with the means of exercising the power they had seized, and legitimate their doing so.

Colorado Springs.

A typical Colorado day: beautiful / ridiculous storm / beautiful again.
Working. Reading The Shield of Achilles (subtitle: War, Peace, and the Course of History). It is too quotable for a definitive blog treatment. I’ll settle for the most recently read passage:

It would be good to have a Bush Doctrine or a Clinton Doctrine, spelling out precisely for what reason and in what contexts the United States will compel other states by force, not only because the public in a democracy has a right to such an articulation of purpose, but also because without such limiting guidelines, compellance has a way of bringing forth countervailing force. (p. 14)

Bush can’t even articulate the reasons for an actual application of force, no less a general strategic doctrine. This excerpt came from a section where Bobbitt justly mocks the feeble statement of US international strategy: deterrence, compellance, reassurance. (Deterring who? From what? How? “Deterrence” as a general strategic aim is about as useful as a war on an abstract noun.)

In the shadows of Boulder Creek

Man on corner of Broadway & Arapahoe with hand painted sandwich board: Kerry throws like a girl (other side: Hillary = serial killer)

Street musicians: thirteen-year-old girl on violin; alto sax bebop; your old piano teacher

Black man with gold teeth and corn rows trying on kimono

Saba & Unagi at Sushi Zanmai; Belgian Ale at Walnut Brewery; Night shift at the eBay data center

Hotel. Ambien.

That, by the way, was the first post from my new laptop– an HP dv4170. Best Buy finally gave me credit for the lost one, counting depreciation. Still, I was able to get quite an upgrade for a few hundred bucks. This is a beauty. I much prefer the layout to the equivalent Toshibas, and the construction is solid.

Teaching basic Electricity and Magnetism this semester, I have often dwelled on the central role the understanding of EM waves played in the modern physics revolution. This article does a fine job of capturing that, as well as the sort of wonder that makes a scientist. There’s no better symbol of modern physics’ mastery of nature than the bomb. It is wondrous and terrible–an astounding feat of engineering (modern fusion bombs even more so), a dramatic realization of profound knowledge, and an undeniable force in shaping the present world order. You can’t deny it.

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to ovecome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. (A. Einstein 1918)