First, from the category of absolutely appropriate pairings and the unlikely beauty where it’s not expected, we’ve got Tom Waits doing a reading of a Bukowski poem:

Secondly, from the world of cool ideas that are really pretty damn depressing if you think about them, I’ve got this clip of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about why we might not be as smart as we think we are, and the possibility that we might just be too dumb as a species to understand the universe:

I’d love to see Dr. Tyson sit down over a beer with (Dr.) Peter Watts and talk about some of the intelligence/consciousness stuff from Watts’ book Blindsight.

(That clip, by the way, is from the end of Cosmic Quandries, and the whole program is on YouTube–it’s a fun 90 minutes, if you have them to kill.)

Thirdly, from the category of “sometimes advertising is like your dad trying to talk street”, we have this absolutely magnificent vintage IHOP ad:

Fourth, and finally, we have Noam Chomsky being interviewed by Israeli media, shortly after he was denied entry to Israel. I don’t think there’s much point in adding commentary to this one–for anyone interested in listening, the interview speaks for itself. I will say, though, that Chomsky’s a much more patient man than I am–although I expect he’s had a lifetime of practice with these kinds of questions, and this kind of tone.

Of course, this doesn’t really make me feel any better. Criminal charges might, though. Or I could find some way to help.

1. The designer’s site is worth a peek as well.

I can, though, point out a few things that might help people really understand the magnitude of the spill–when you start talking about millions of gallons, in the context of an entire ocean, it’s hard to picture it. And when it’s all very far away, it’s easy to ignore it.

For most people, looking at something like this doesn’t really help you understand the magnitude of the problem:

So let’s try to first put the size of the problem in context: the people at IfItWasMyHome.com¹ have whipped up a little Google Maps application to allow you to overlay the current size of the spill on a map of anywhere, which can help make the size of it more real.

So, if the spill were happening at my house, it would cover an area that would encompass all of the most populous parts of southern Ontario, and would also stretch into the US, essentially covering Buffalo and a good chunk of the U.P.

More disturbing is looking at what this spill would look like if it were happening in my former home of Halifax–the spill covers an area on the same scale as the entire province of Nova Scotia…

I’ll put a couple more examples after the jump, for places where I know some people who will read this are.

Maybe that’s helped with understanding the size of the spill, but what about the “if I’m not in Louisiana why should I care?” problem. We could discuss the ecological impacts, and the interconnectedness of ecology, etc. Or we could look at more direct personal reasons for people to care.

While the major media is just starting to really get interested in questions like “how will this effect Florida“, I think that’s actually a bit near-sighted, and I’ll show you a single image which I think explains why quite concisely–visualization to the rescue again:

There’s another way visualization can help people understand the problem, of course, and it’s both simple and effective, and speaks perfectly well for itself.

And here it is over Melbourne, Australia:

1. Yes, I am exactly enough of a language pedant to be disappointed that it isn’t IfItWereMyHome.com. I can live with myself.

I also like to think of myself as an ethical person. People who know me may be snorting now, let me draw a careful distinction. I believe I have a system of ethics that allows me to determine what actions are required, justifiable, or desirable in all kinds of circumstances. These actions may not align with the societally expected set. That doesn’t make me unethical, it just means I’m out of step with society¹–no surprise there. I attempt to hold myself fairly stringently to this system–although, as you might expect given the first paragraph, the system itself is always under review in light of changing understanding of myself, or new information and ideas.

I also like to think of myself as a decent person. Maybe not all the way to “good”, but “flawed and means well” at least.

Most of the time I can hold all three of those views at the same time.

As long as I don’t think about Peter Singer.

For a number of years now I’ve been struggling with him. Or to be more precise, with some ideas from a short paper of his from before I was even born. And when I say struggling, I really mean “ignoring the ideas as much as I can, and trying to find ways around them–with no success–when I can’t”.

While Singer makes a heavier use of the word ‘moral’ than I would like in the paper² there’s a run of logic in it that I can’t refute at all, and which I have no answer to. Rationally, I should change my behaviour substantially in order to remain decent and ethical, given that I understand what he says, and don’t see a hole in it. But I haven’t. So *pop* there goes my three-part self-image.

The paper is called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, and it lays out the grounds for a particular strain of consequentialist ethics. It’s not terribly long; you can probably read the whole thing in a few minutes. It’s the implications that take a lot of time.

Let me just call out the bits that so thoroughly destroy my self-image.

He starts with “the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad”. I can’t find fault in that.

Then he says:

if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent

While I might state it differently (without so much use of the word ‘moral’), the principle there is one I can’t fault.

And, really, as soon as you recognize those two things, the conclusion kind of follows: As long as there’s rational grounds to believe that giving will reduce tragedy, you’re ethically obliged to give right up to the point where it hurts you.

You can read Singer’s development, which is a little more subtle, and nuanced, but what I take from it is this:

1) If I can give up a dollar and it causes a kid somewhere in the world to not starve, I should do that, unless I need that dollar to prevent some equivalent tragedy.
2) After I give up that dollar, if I believe giving another one would save another person, I should do that too, unless I need that dollar to prevent some equivalent tragedy

A little bit of induction there and it seems obvious that the ethically correct course of action is to give until either giving won’t help anymore (which, given the state of the world, probably doesn’t apply to anyone who’s not on the billionaire list), or you get to the point where you need money to keep you & your dependents fed/sheltered/clothed/etc. And it’s hard to argue for much even there above subsistence level–can I really say that my kid wearing new Levis instead of Wal*Mart specials, or Value Village second-handers is worth the lives of the 30 to 70 nominal starving kids who I could save with the cost difference?

But let’s set that argument aside, and just draw the line at disposable income. I’m not a saint, after all. Forget about mortgages, groceries, clothing, etc. How do I justify the other things? How can I buy the next beautiful limited edition book for my collection when I know that lives could literally have been saved with that money? How can I spend a pile of money buying CDs, or comics, or a big ol’ plasma TV?

I’ve got no answer.

None.

Zip.

In fact, I can’t even argue the point that I’m just “failing to be good” rather than actually being bad, because Singer wrapped that up as well:

The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral categories are upset. The traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money are known as “charities.” These organizations see themselves in this way – if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your “generosity.” Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned. People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look “well-dressed” we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called “supererogatory” – an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

I’ve looked at all the obvious arguments, and find them to be cop-outs.

There’s the practical one–”you can’t get your money to where it will save people anyway”/”charities are scams”/etc. That doesn’t invalidate the point, it just means I am also ethically obligated to work to ensure that there is an efficient channel to get resources to where they can prevent tragedy.

There’s the Romantic one–”you can justify books/music/art because without capital-A Art, life isn’t worth living”. Sounds good. Not sure the mother of the starving kid would agree. Certainly not sure I have any ethical grounds to make that call.

There’s the everyone-else-is-doing-it one. Singer takes that one apart himself, in the paper, but even if he didn’t my own personal ethical system doesn’t allow me get a pass just because everyone else isn’t living up to their responsibility.

There’s Corbett and the “it’s too hard to expect people to actually do, so there’s no obligation” thing. That’s some weak sauce right there.

There Pettit and the “if I’m one of a million people who could give a dollar to save a kid’s life, when he dies I’m only responsible for 1 millionth of his death” line. I’m afraid that smacks to me of trying to define around the fact that I could have prevented the death with my dollar. It’s the kind of rationalizing you do when you don’t like what you know is the right thing to do. Or put another way, the fact that in a “fair” world I shouldn’t have to be the one to spend the dollar, doesn’t take away the fact that I could have saved the kid, but I didn’t.³

There’s especially the “but I can knock holes in a lot of Singer’s other extreme positions, so he must be wrong” one, which my brain keeps trying to sneak by me from time to time. Sadly I keep remembering that the point isn’t who presented the argument, it’s the validity of the argument.

And so on. Half of the paper is Singer knocking down some obvious ones, but believe me, I’ve been through hundreds, and none of them have held water yet.

So here’s the thing: Given the axioms I work with, I can’t see the hole in what Singer says, but I’m not changing my behaviour. I’ll keep giving what I’ve always given to various charities–around 10% of what I make, sometimes net, sometimes gross, which seems to be enough to assuage my conscience most of the time–but not all my disposable income, and certainly not up to where it hurts. I’m still going to buy books. And I’m going to do it knowing all of this.

Which means that from time-to-time, and on a pretty regular basis if the years since I first encountered Singer’s arguments are any guide, I’m going to be cognisant of the fact that I’m not rational, ethical, and decent: that I fail at one or more of those things EVERY DAY⁴. And every now and then, I’m going to look at my house, and my car, and my TV, and my shelves of books, and see them not as things to be proud of, but as obscenities that record a myriad of preventable tragedies.

1. And actually, on the whole there are probably as many cases where the results of my system are more onerous than the consensus ones than the other way around
2. I am always unhappy with the connotation that ‘moral’ somehow has to do with Good/Evil and thus with some kind of absolutes, which is why I tend to stick with ethics and Should/Shouldn’t, which are more amenable to the paradigm paradigm.
3. I do think, though, that thinking about this should make it pretty obvious that an ethical society would deal with many of these cases of preventable tragedy via collective action–indeed, if the shift that Singer postulates from “charity as optional good act” to “failure to give as shameful act” were to happen the collective action would be internally motivated–in order to most effectively distribute resources. Viewed in consequentialist terms, an effective socialist society would be more ethical than individualist capitalist (or libertarian) ones.
4. And note here, that his doesn’t mean I’m throwing out my ethics and just going nuts–just because I know I’m failing here doesn’t mean I’m going to start murdering people, or whatever. You might think that was obvious, but some people have countered Singer with an argument that setting the bar where he sets it means people will fail, and then give up on the whole concept of ethical behaviour since they see themselves as ethical failures already. Balderdash, I say.

Politics
That land full surely hastens to its end
Where public sycophants in homage bend
The populace to flatter, and repeat
The doubled echoes of its loud conceit.
Lowly their attitude but high their aim,
They creep to eminence through paths of shame,
Till fixed securely in the seats of pow’r,
The dupes they flattered they at last devour.

—Ambrose Bierce

If you’re not from Halifax, the odds are you don’t know what this is all about. A capsule summary would be that there once was a community, called Africville, on the Halifax peninsula whose population was almost entirely black–the people came from a range of different origins¹, but the community was apparently originally created for Black Loyalists in the years after the American War of Independence, and running right up to the War of 1812. In the 1960s, the community was razed and the population forced to relocate. There are some different flavours of official story behind it–some stuff about public safety and the community being an eyesore²–but my read of the information I’ve seen on it suggests that it was essentially the growing city of Halifax wiping out a marginalized³ community in order to get room for commercial expansion, and to build a new bridge to Dartmouth. (During my time in Halifax, there was also substantial residential development within the loose boundaries of the area–lots of condo complexes with harbour views going up.)

From a recent article‘s short background:

According to a collection of photographs assembled by the Government of Canada, Africville was “deemed an eyesore” by the city council of the day, and its residents were scattered to different parts of Halifax and the province.

It is commonly pointed out that while the residents of Africville paid full city taxes, they didn’t receive running water sewage or other city services.

Today it is generally acknowledged that racial discrimination was at the heart of Africville’s destruction.

For a less “capsule” take on the history, I refer you to CBC’s archives, specifically the Africville: Expropriating Black Nova Scotians topic, which has some good details, including a number of video clips from the times in question. The man-on-the-street racism question is particularly interesting.

Shortly after I arrived in Halifax–around 2002, I think–discussions started in earnest about some kind of reparation program.

And it looks like that process finally reached it’s head tonight with formal ratification of an agreement between the city and the community’s representatives⁴:

Halifax regional council has ratified a deal that will see former residents of Africville and their descendants receive an official apology — four decades after the City of Halifax razed the black community to make room for a bridge.

…

The society accepted the offer from the municipality on Saturday. Steed-Ross, one of the founding members of the society, wouldn’t reveal the details of the offer. According to one published report, it includes a $3-million payout and about one hectare of municipal land. There is no money for individuals or families.

On Sunday, the federal government announced $250,000 for the Africville Heritage Trust, which will help design a museum and a replica of the community’s church.

Read more

Apparently the Mayor will issue the apology tomorrow morning, along with details of the agreement. I think I’ll listen to the Halifax CBC Radio feed tomorrow.

1. The Nova Scotia Archives have a great site for a concise history of African Nova Scotians that covers this stuff, as well as interesting stories like the mass migration of Black Loyalists to Sierra Leone, and the story of The Book Of Negroes.
2. Yeah, no racist code there. And, of course, the slum conditions weren’t the result of an ongoing system of discrimination or anything. Sigh.
3. Actually my read is that the community wasn’t just marginalized, but that there was a sizeable slice of the population who were quite happy to break up and move the black community. It’s ugly to see stuff like this happening within a couple of decades of my lifetime; within my parents’ lifetimes.
4. Actually, there’s a whole other thing about whether or not the group legally represents the community, but I’m not going to get into that.

What you’re looking at there is a list of the 32 most common passwords from among the set of more than 32 million users of RockYou. The top item, ’123456′ was used by more than 300,000 users.

We don’t normally get to look at actual user data in sets this large, but one benefit of the recent privacy breach at RockYou is that researchers get a look at the data (and we get to see some of the aggregate results).

Of course some caveats will apply when drawing conclusions from the data. For example, while the site apparently has 32 million users (or at least there are 32 million accounts, which isn’t quite the same thing) I think we can assume that the nature of the site (as far as I can tell from a quick inspection it’s for making slideshows that you can embed into social media? Something like that?) results in some self-selection effects in the pool of users. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the site skews heavily towards a particular demographic, so that kind of thing would need to be taken into account when reaching any conclusions about the data.

It’s probably also likely that people would consider a password to the site to not be a “high security” item, as compared to say a banking site, or a blog/facebook/whatever. So for at least some users the password selection algorithm would only speak to their behaviour at site the perceive as “low risk”–you can’t draw conclusions about behaviour of users in all situations from what they do at RockYou.

Even with those caveats in place, though, the list says a few things. Most of the passwords are painfully simple. None of them contain symbol characters or mixed case. The ones that do mix letters and digits are the single dumbest examples of a password you could make by doing that. None of that particularly surprises me–it’s what I would expect. Most of the users probably open attachments in email from people they don’t know, and some of them probably think they’re getting a bunch of illicit money out of Nigeria.

What does surprise me a little is the set of first name passwords, and their rankings. I might have expected to see those, but I think I would have expected them to occur in the same order that the names occur in population–they’d be either the user’s name, or the name of someone special to them, presumably, and over a data set this large that should tend towards to same rankings as the names. So why is “nicole” the first one? Why “daniel” next?

I wish I thought “rockyou” being the top ten was a general result–people giving the devil horns to computers–but I’m afraid that at a site called RockYou that one’s probably a gimme.

“chocolate” I can accept–it aligns with my understanding of women. “FRIENDS” I suspect is again site-specific. But what’s up with “babygirl” and “monkey”? Lots of new parents making slideshows for the family? “soccer” one assumes is also a ‘functional’ choice–used for soccer slideshows?.

“tigger”, I admit, confuses me.

Apparently to crack a site like this I won’t need rainbow tables. A dictionary of 5000 common passwords would get me into over 6 million of the accounts:

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

The explanation for this that the researchers offer isn’t a shock:

Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.

“Nowadays, we have to keep probably 10 times as many passwords in our head as we did 10 years ago,” said Jeff Moss, who founded a popular hacking conference and is now on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “Voice mail passwords, A.T.M. PINs and Internet passwords — it’s so hard to keep track of.”

I guess that makes sense. Particularly for what’s probably viewed as a “low risk” site by anyone in the user population who even passingly thinks about security. Still, I’m a tinfoil hat guy, so for me passwords need to look like ’6D@HOyf]PoF’ or I get nervous.

And I need to have a different password for every site I’m going to use as more than a one-off–as a paranoid I would worry that if I used the same password in different places that system operators from one place could misuse the information to access my resources at another site. I actually saw this happen a fair bit in the old dial-up BBS days before the Internet¹.

Of course I can’t remember passwords like that for the hundreds of places I have accounts, so I make use of Password Safe (there are lots of equivalent tools–this is just the one I happen to have started using years ago, and it works). It’s a pain in the ass, but that’s the deal with security–it’s a trade off between risk and ass-pain.

While I understand that most people wouldn’t want to be bothered with something like that, I do wonder why we haven’t seen more wide-spread adoption of the site-specific password generators that use a master key to hash up a password for any site based on the site name. People don’t have to understand how the things work, or what a hash algorithm is–all they would need to know is that whenever they press the “password fill” button they need to enter their master password, and the computer will fill the field with the site specific password for that site. To the end user it’s functionally equivalent to using the same password everywhere, but the level of security is vastly improved. There are Firefox plugins that implement this now–things like Password Hasher or PwdHash–but I wonder why something like this isn’t just built into the browsers.

If it were, a leak like RockYou’s wouldn’t have presented the same kind of issues–yes, the malefactors would still have everyone’s RockYou passwords, but there wouldn’t be any issue of being able to reuse those passwords to get access to the users’ resources on other systems.

And we wouldn’t have this embarrassing list to look at.

1. Yes, I have been a geek a long time.

Some of the arguments seem to run along the lines that bankers may not be competent to recognize risk, and that therefore they may not charge an adequate risk premium for risk they are taking on, which can result in some of the kinds of problems we’ve seen lately with high risk mortgage debt causing an avalanche of financial woe.

This is certainly credible, especially if you’re a cynic who tends to think that most people are pretty incompetent.

Of course, it turns out you don’t necessarily need to be particularly cynical, since current research seems to suggest that in areas like debt securitization, it’s effectively impossible to determine the level of risk you’re taking on, or to determine later if something like a CDO was structured with a higher real degree of risk than it was represented as having. The research says this kind of analysis is an NP-complete problem, which is not the same thing as “impossible”, but is close enough for sloppy discussion. Given those findings you can hardly blame a banker for not assigning the correct risk to a CDO.

(You can perhaps blame them for not knowing that they were dealing with something they didn’t–and possibly couldn’t–understand. There’s no shame in not being able to solve an NP-complete problem, but there’s not a lot of excuse for pretending you know the solution, and making decisions based on your faulty solution, when you don’t.)

What strikes me the most out of the whole discussion though is this quote:

The person most willing to take on risk is the one unaware he is doing so. He charges no risk premium… The resulting market equilibrium is that the guy who is unaware of the risk ends up loaded with it. Then the music stops.

This was offered in the context of explaining how some bankers ended up carrying much more risk than they thought they were, but I think it’s much more poignant if you consider not the banker but the investor, who has even less chance of assigning risk correctly than a financial professional, and who stands to lose their savings and not just a bonus.

• I would really like to believe the story of Denny & Peach is a vignette that accurately captures a bit of the wonder of the world. But even if it’s a fiction, it’s a lovely little one. Also, SWORD CANE!
• Same thing with this “big catch” story. I prefer to believe I live in a world where this could happen.
• Remember when the Chretien Liberals were just about to decriminalize pot? Think about that while reading this headline.
• Reading about the marshmallow test, and how it correlates to success in later life only validates all my theories about the need for parents and the education system to focus more on teaching the connection between cause and effect, and the predictable consequences of our choices. It also gives me some license to taunt my child with future marshmallows.
• You know what else the education system should focus on–providing an adequate basis for full participation in the public sphere. The primary goal should not be to produce people who are employable, but rather to produce citizens, in the full sense of that word, with their employability being a necessary byproduct.
• Reading a librarian’s carefully thought out, but strong, explanation of why he was rejecting a bigot’s request to remove a book from his library has restored a tiny bit of my lost faith in humanity. Librarians–you gotta love ‘em.
• More Hubble space porn.
• I’m fascinated with this Youtube video of an Italian cellist’s performance for two reasons: it’s a great performance of the piece, and the video is the work of 5 months of desktop video editing. I love that putting together something like this is a matter of basic video equipment, time and a desktop computer, not requiring access to special purpose tools or editing suites, etc. Someone sufficiently dedicated could do this as a hobby.
• Just in case it hasn’t sunk in yet that there’s more content available on the Internet than anyone could hope to consume a fraction of, go browse around the Free Music Archive.
• Of course there’s lots of different kinds of free content–you can’t possibly listen to everything that archive, but you can absolutely view at least thumbnails of all the sleazy paperback covers in this collection, or all the labels in this collection of vintage poison labels, or all the images in this collection of 20s French Art Nouveau images from a particular book, and you could even conceivably look at all the images in the Museum Of Bad Album Covers.
• I wish I had known where to find the Philosophy Pick Up Bar back when I was single.
• Today’s xkcd doesn’t make me feel particularly old–I might actually be too old for the optimal response to that–but there’s a story in Rolling Stone that really, really does.
• Sure we can pretend it’s all about getting people to do a little more exercise, but I’m all for it just from a perspective of putting a little art and fun into people’s lives. I especially like the idea of doing it as a transient feature–a bit of surreality that adds a tiny bit of beauty to the day.
• Apparently the Kindle is finally going to be available in Canada and lots of other countries, kind of. I was already not interested, just on the DRM basis alone, but even if I had been tempted I think Charlie Stross would have ended that for me.
• Yeah, I’m putting this story in my back pocket for use in comedic teasing of my Australian comrades when we all meet up in Boston next month.

What you’re looking at there is an attempt to visualize the results (so far) of a workshop run last year in Stockholm that attempted to define the boundaries of a “safe operating space” in which the ecosystem of the planet can operate without veering towards catastrophe.

The 28 scientists worked out nine categories that they were comfortable setting some safe boundary conditions on, and then attempted to see where we were now with respect to those conditions. So far they’ve evaluated seven of their metrics, and we’re outside the safe zone on three of them–significantly so in some cases.

They aren’t saying the game is over–the boundaries mark points where we are in danger of irreversible “tipping point” type change, but they don’t necessarily indicate catastrophe:

“The idea is to say, ‘Let’s put up some guard rails,’” says Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont. “Maybe the guard rails are for a slope we could have taken and survived, but maybe not. We owe it to human civilization to be more careful.”

I’m generally in favour of any attempt to define the ways we can effect our ecosystem, and to understand the potential consequences of those–at this point we as a species are already capable of making too dramatic a change without understanding what we’re doing.

Now, ironically, civilization has become so powerful that it can reshape the planet itself. “We have become a force to contend with at the global level,” as Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, puts it. Humans have changed the chemistry of Earth’s oceans, lowering their pH and causing ocean acidification. We are shifting the composition of the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide higher than they’ve been in at least the past 800,000 years.

Whether or not these limits are defined right, or are the most important ones, I’m not qualified to judge, but at a minimum they should not be ignored, and focusing some attention on them in the context of what kind of changes might move the ecosystem from an elastic change into plastic deformation seems pretty useful to me.

There’s lots more information about the workshop, and some counter-arguments, in the Yale Environment 360 article I pulled the picture and quotes from. There’s an even deeper level of information in the Nature.com special feature that the Yale article is based on–if you want the full story go there. In particular note that there are detailed commentaries on each of the boundaries available.

Looking at the visualization, I can’t help but wonder if Bostrom’s Great Filter–what I black-humouredly called the Doom Constant–isn’t possibly something ecological… Is it possible that civilizations that reach a certain technological point always (or at least a very high “usually”) manage to collapse their local ecosystem by unintended ecological side-effects of their “progress” before they expand beyond their local area of space? Or back to the zoo theory, is it possible that they just won’t talk to us until we learn to live somewhere without destroying it–I could kind of understand that, based on how I feel about student housing now that I’m a grown-up.

(Oh, and the post title, in case you didn’t catch the reference is a Walt Kelly nod.)

However, there’s one area in which I seem to have kept my beginner’s mind: appreciating the sky. The sky here never lets me down–at least not on the days you can actually see it. Several times a week I am literally stopped in my tracks just looking at how ridiculously beautiful it is.

It’s not a “living outside the city” thing, as I’ve done that before. I suspect it might be a “living near the ocean” thing, but I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that the clouds here don’t look like the clouds anywhere else–sometimes they look so perfect that my brain can’t parse them as real, and tries to convince me that the whole thing is a manufactured backdrop. Oh cognitive irony, that faced with raw beauty the only way my poor brain can interpret it is “it can’t be real, it’s too perfect”.

And the sunsets.

My God, the sunsets.

I was driving home the other night at sunset–I drive into the west to get home from the city–and realized that the entire sky was one ridiculous continuous rainbow, with the indigos and violets above me, fading into blues and then greens before me, and down into oranges, yellows, and reds by the horizon. There’s no way to adequately describe it; you just had to be there. I had to pull over to the side of the highway and just look at the sky for a while. Everyone else seemed to just take it for granted. (Maybe I am a little insane about this–certainly many people I know are tired of me going on about it–but if so, it’s a very pleasant kind of insane.)

And that was not a rare occurrence. This time of year it’s pretty common for me to be driving home into the sunset, and more often than not it just floors me. And it’s never the same show twice. In the parts of the year when sunset comes earlier, and I’m usually home for the show, it’s not unknown for me to sit at the dining room table, and just look out the large, west-facing, bay windows while the sun goes down behind the trees.

Tonight I stopped an took a couple of pictures, a few minutes apart, to try to illustrate the show. Do click through for the larger versions, to see something closer to what I saw–although these pictures really don’t do the real thing justice at all.

Here’s what I saw when I stopped in a little cul de sac beside the highway:

Walking over to look down the highway–towards my home–I could see this:

It’s like a symphony in purple and gold, isn’t it?

Then wait just a few minutes… until the moment when the sky absolutely catches fire, and then take more-or-less the same shots:

When the time comes for me to leave Nova Scotia, I’m going to miss a lot of things, and especially a lot of people… but I suspect the thing I’ll miss the most often is that feeling of being regularly knocked on my ass by the sheer beauty of the sky.

• I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway.
• I’ve seen some stories about tough people in the news, but Lubna Hussein is definitely in the top ranks. Arrested for wearing pants, and facing a possible 40 lashes, she quits her job with UN (to make it simpler to go to trial), and then shows up for her trial IN PANTS. Damn.
• I see that some research has been done into marriages between people with different financial styles–like say my spendthrift ways and the nigh-masochistic disciplined frugality of my wife–and it suggests that while such marriages are common, the results are not necessarily good. I’ll keep this around as something to point to the next time someone mocks our “his”, “hers”, “ours” financial strategy.
• I love how the major media seem to lag a half-decade or so behind the world, and then seem kind of surprised when they stumble on a “new trend” that represents the long-term results of a shift that started in the not-so recent (relatively) past. Like say this NYT article about how creative people are using the web to connect with their audiences and peers, and to build a “presence” rather than moving to the places where they could expect to find peers and an audience–like New York. No surprise to me.
• Everytime Jeff Ford writes more than three sentences about a book, I end up ordering a copy. I hope he uses this power only for good.
• The teenage boy inside me regrets that this technology did not exist when he was running the show. The father-of-a-girl part of me responds by looking around for a baseball bat.
• When I said I was a spendthrift up there, apparently I’m actually a bit of piker in that department. Compare me to say awesome photographer Annie Leibovitz, and I just look terribly bush league. She makes over three million dollars a year from her photography, and has somehow still managed to get herself over twenty-four million in debt. That’s some dedication to debt, right there.
• And the winner of this week’s quote-that-makes-the-speaker-sound-most-like-a-jackass award would have to be Jeremy Abelson. “In the New York dating scene, the men of finance are the lions, and the women of fashion are the trophies. We have to maintain the purity of the genetic lines.” Just reading that make me want to scrape him off my shoe.
• I admit, the web site of the Soul Storage Company had me confused for a few moments… until I saw Strathairn, and knew it had to be movie propaganda (I could believe Giamatti would be in on a straight-up joke site, but not both of them.)
• If you like Joe Hill’s writing, you might want to check out a short film the BBC is hosting, Pop Art, based on Hill’s short story.
• BibliOdyssey always brings interesting things to the table, but I was particularly caught by a recent posting of Celtic designs.
• Any hope I had that the Solomon Kane movie would be either a good adaptation, or at least a good movie, is now crushed.
• I’m still too busy loving that the Irish crown a goat as their king every year to even process the fact that the practice was at risk. I did search Google News and could find no confirmation that the goat actually made it on time. (via Eddie Campbell)
• The goat thing totally beat out the other “new of the weird” item that caught my eye recently: the arrest of some Aussie and Kiwi masons as sorcerers.
• While I, as an occasional language pedant, am well aware of the force of Muphry’s Law, I hadn’t previously been aware of its name.

Yes, I know that since I don’t allow remote configuration of the router I was somewhat protected from the threat, but I was due for an upgrade anyway.

However, I do have to ask myself why I always think it’s a good idea to update the router firmware at 2AM–I think I have some foolish notion that it will just smoothly, although this has never happened historically, and will provide a nice “off to bed” sensation.

I have at least learnt to backup my router settings to a file on one of my computers before starting this. (And, actually, I have two different “emergency” routers lying around just in case I really mess things up–old routers that became obsolete, but which are still functional should I need to pull out the current one–something that I have had to lean on a couple of times.)

This time the upgrade seemed to go well, with the router reporting success and rebooting.

And then… well, let’s just say things got weird. The router came back up, but nothing could connect to it wirelessly–although the routers options all suggested that everything was fine with wireless, none of the wireless devices could detect the router at all (it is set to broadcast the SSID, etc) much less connect to it.

So I tried to old voodoo–which works way too often with Linksys routers–of unplugging the WAN connection, rebooting and letting things get stable, and then reconnecting to the world. Doing that got me a wireless signal from the router, but none of the machines could actually connect. Oh, and the wired ones–they connected and could see each other, but couldn’t see the outside world, nor could they access the router’s web configuration interface.

To make a long story short, I tried many things, each of which produced results that really made no sense, and none of which worked particularly well, before giving up and resetting the router to defaults (for DD-WRT). In that mode it came up immediately, everything working, but lacking all of my (quite significant) configuration.

And that’s where my having saved off the configuration backup came in handy–I restored that saved configuration, resulting in a system that to all appearances is identical to the initial system after the upgrade, with every setting and screen just as they were, and everything is now working and back to normal. Except that instead of going to bed at 2AM, it’s now 3:15…. sigh.

Sometimes this computer stuff is a little too voodoo, you know?

On the particular day of this incident, the material was about the Adam & Eve story, and the problems started when I asked about the wives. You know the question–it’s obvious to an 8-year old, and it’s a common one among people pointing out the irrationalities of faith in the literal text of the Bible–the one about “If Adam and Eve were the first people, and the only humans were them and their descendants, then where did their kids get their wives from?”

The problem, of course, stems from the very small set of possible answers:

1) There were other humans on earth who didn’t descend from Adam and Eve, from whom the wives were chosen
2) The wives were not human
3) The wives were also children of Adam and Eve (a.k.a. their sisters)

None of those is particularly palatable to most Christians, although some of them make for some great stories–particularly that second one.

Some particularly fundamentalist types will actually make long, serious arguments that Cain and Abel did marry their sisters and have kids with them, based apparently on the notion that it was OK because Adam and Eve were genetically perfect and the genetics problems that arise with incest are based on sin–or something–and get worse over time. As an aside, how strange is it that you can understand enough genetics to hack out that pseudo-science explanation and not understand that genetics can also prove the relation between humans and other species?

Much later, I was very thrilled to find that Clarence Darrow, who in many ways is a hero of mine, actually pulled this very same question on Bryan during the he was on the stand in the Scopes Monkey Trial.

You can read that in the transcript of Darrow’s examination of Bryan. Here’s my favourite exchange from that:

BRYAN: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.

DARROW: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.

Of course, Darrow’s examination of Bryan was eventually excluded, but he still accomplished his goals. In a note to H. L. Mencken, Darrow said, “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”

I think the whole theodicy question is a better way to disrupt the whole idea of a Supreme Being, since it isn’t dependent on the specific creation myth of Christianity. It has resulted in a lot more apologia–some quite interesting–from the religious, though. The Cain’s wife argument is less abstract, and thus more useful for debating, or irritating, people who are more literal in their interpretation of their mythological texts–I mean can you imagine the guy who made the crazy God’s perfect genes argument up there following, much less originating, something like this?

From time to time though, there are certainly things about the mother country that just embarrass the hell out of me. These often center around religious ridiculousness.

And this week’s certainly taken the cake in that department.

If you read Thursday’s story in the Independent, you’d think it was no big deal, just a bit of legislative business as usual:

MAJOR new legislation reforming the State’s libel laws and enabling judges to advise juries on the size of damages was passed in the Dáil yesterday.

The Defamation Bill, which also introduces a new crime of blasphemous libel, will come into operation after it is passed by the Seanad later this week and signed into law by President Mary McAleese.

Reading Friday’s story in the Irish Times though, starts to give a very different view, with some discussion of the bill not just as a change in the libel rules, but referencing the issue of a “crime of blasphemy”.

That’s enough to make me go read the wording of the bill. Let’s just ignore the libel bits and focus on the section about blasphemy. Prepare to be shocked:

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.

(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]

(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.

(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.

37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.

(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, © specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.

(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).

(3) Upon final judgment being given in proceedings for an offence under section 36, anything seized and removed under subsection (2) shall be disposed of in accordance with such directions as the court may give upon an application by a member of the Garda Siochana in that behalf.

Unless I have lost the ability to read English, that bill pretty much makes illegal a whole ton of things I would normally consider inviolate free speech, and gives the cops the ability to do warrantless² search and seizure of anything “blasphemous” based only on the “reasonable suspicion” standard. I’m fairly certain there’s a number of books on my shelves that would qualify, not to mention the fact that the contents this blog alone probably would have me facing, many, many 25,000 pound fines. I could theoretically mount a merit defense, for each one, but one raises ones eyebrow generally at those reverse onus laws, where the crime is assumed to be committed and the accused had to prove it wasn’t–especially when such proof is based on a subjective criterion.

Also, besides all the other reasons why this is ridiculous on its face, note that this encodes in law the notion that the crime is committed not based on the intent of the speaker, but based on whether or not someone feels outraged by what the speaker says. Talk about encoding the “thinnest skin” (or in this case “least rational”) principle in law. Yarg.

Today I’m thinking I’ll not be playing up my heritage, that’s for sure–not with Ireland essentially legislating the return of the Dark Ages.

Oh yeah, and I looked at the Globe & Mail, the CBC, The NY Times, and CNN, and there’s no coverage of this at all at any of them to date. It is making some news in the UK albeit in opinion pieces.

1. Face it, the rebels had better music.
2. Yeah, they court will issue a warrant, but it’s based on a pretty weak standard.

With that in mind, here’s a list of a few things that caught my eye during my little bits of hotel-room surfing after the child goes to bed:

• The Pirate Bay trial, and aftermath, has been keeping me amused for a while. The reveal that the presiding judge was a member of several copyright-protection groups was very entertaining, but the subsequent reveal that the judge assigned to check the first judge for bias had to be removed for… wait for it… bias, has my howling with laughter on the inside.
• The Surrogates was a decent comic from Top Shelf a while back–I enjoyed it. The trailer for the movie version makes me think the movie could also be quite good. I promise to try to evaluate the movie on its own merits and without reference to the comic, but I expect to fail.
• My still-suprising-me amusement with Cracked.com continues with their 7 WTF Military Weapons You Won’t Believe They Actually Built piece. As an aside, I was somewhat disturbed to find a basis in fact for the Nazi War Wheel.
• I am officially getting Really Fucking Tired of that special mocking irony. You know who you are. Some thing are So Bad They’re Good, and some things are just rubbish.
• I’m not sure who I want to show the Wu Note Project images to. I’ve got friends who know the Wu, and friends who would know what was being referenced, but I’m not sure those Venn diagrams overlap. Still, if you get it, it’s a lovely thing.
• Back in the day when my guardo camino and I decided to grab a flick our personal slang distinguished two basic categories of movies, depending on what state we were in. We either wanted to get a “thinker”–which basically meant any movie that featured quality writing and acting–or we wanted to get “something with explosions and boobs”, which category should be self-explanatory. It appears the internet has made that second category more efficient, removing the need for the movie infrastructure, and just reducing things to the real lowest common denominator. Men are so simple.
• Yet another reason to be proud of Wisconsin: deny your kid necessary medical attention in favour of waiting for divine intervention… GO TO JAIL. ’nuff said.
• Attention all those who think the private sector, and competition automatically results in better service and lower prices: Beer costs more in all-private-all-the-time Alberta than it does in monpoly-government-vendor Ontario. Just saying.

So, Dell guy (actually Unisys guy) did show up with the new hard drive today. He basically took one look at me and said “Here, I think you can put this in without me” and left. Admittedly, I could do it–it’s a Lego operation; my Mom could do it–but I thought it was kind of funny.

And then, miracle of miracle, I popped in the system restore disk, the computer booted into the restore environment, connected to the network, formatted the new drive, and restored itself from the image I made on Friday¹.

Of course when that was all done the machine wouldn’t boot, and I had to boot from an old XP install CD, drop into the repair console, and do the fixboot/fixmbr thing, but once I had done that the computer was back with everything in place–SO much easier than a fresh install. I still don’t believe it all worked, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to somehow drop.

So, I’m pretty happy with Norton at the moment.

On the other hand, I’m wondering if it isn’t a bit of an enabler.

I mean, a Microsoft based system builds up a lot of cruft over time, and this was always a kind of self-healing thing, in that it was more or less inevitable that eventually something would break and you’d have to do a clean reinstall. You never wanted to do that, but you just had to do it sometimes, and in the end, after the pain, you were always happier.

But with imaging tech, you can dodge some of those bullets. And so the “lifetime” of a particular machine setup gets longer. And with MS OSes that means “cruftier”. Ghost is enabling us to put off the purifying cleanse and purge, and to wallow longer in our crapulence.

I, of course, am wallowing with intent, so that’s OK.

1. Technically from the updated image I made this morning.

A study by the Ponemon Institute found that more than 59 percent of those surveyed kept corporate data after leaving their jobs. The survey, which was sponsored by Symantec, included responses from 945 adult employees who had lost or left a job in 2008.

The most commonly stolen pieces of information were e-mail lists and non-financial business information, taken by 65 and 45 percent, respectively, of the respondents who took something. Thirty-nine percent admitted taking customer information such as contact lists.

Well, I can honestly say I’ve never walked off with email lists, or customer contact lists. I’m not sure what “non-financial business information” is, but it sounds non-specific enough to cover nearly anything written down.

What I have seen done–but which I, of course, would never, never do, because it would be wrong–is for people to walk out of a software job with a whole lot of source code. I can imagine how people would see some value there; not in a cliched “commercial espionage” sense–there’s really no reason to buy a competitor’s source code in practice for most software domains–but in a “hey, I spent a long time figuring out how to X a Y, and when I need to do that again in my next job I’d like to have this to refer to” sense. Even then, though, I suspect that the amount of applicability to any other employment would be on a steeply declining exponential curve in time.

Although, now that I think of it, I do know of at least one case of a company formed by ex-employees of a development team, who wrote a product that was an add on to the product they had formerly worked on… which they subsequently sold back to the company that had let them go for a decent amount of money. I bet that’s one case where having walked off with the source paid off. I bet those guys feel dirty, though.

Of course companies trying to stop this stuff are pretty much wasting their time. Whether it’s source code or a customer list or whatever, you can’t really control it by any means other than legal restriction–there’s no practical way to enforce physical control of this stuff unless you’re going to adopt NSA-level controls, despite lots of companies and IT department wasting a ton of money and time on it: it goes on a USB stick, or gets emailed to an outside account, or uploaded to GMail, or read over the phone, or printed and slipped into a backpack, or whatever–and with the legal restrictions you’ve got to be willing to enforce it, and your restriction has to be, you know, legal.

I do note, though, that the article also found that 32% of the people they talked to said they still had access to systems and data after they were supposed to be terminated. That’s a ridiculously high number. Have none of their employers heard about provisioning?

Take, for example, that article in the Telegraph earlier this week about the American professor who claims that rap battles are a Scottish invention. Or, to be more specific:

Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of “flyting”.

According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.

Consider that griots, spirituals, work songs, the blues, etc, all offer believable, and to my mind more reasonable, explanations for the development of rap. Then consider that there’s a common, and pretty well accepted history of the dozens (and thus rap battles) that can be explained easily without needing flyting. Well, given that, I’m pretty comfortable calling the theory one of the bollocks things that float down the ‘tubes.

However, the idea of “flyting” is new to me, and bears some more investigating.

The article has a couple of paragraphs about it:

The most famous surviving example of flyting comes from a 16th-century piece in which two rival poets hurl increasingly obscene rhyming insults at one another before the Court of King James IV.

Titled the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, it has been described by academics as “just over 500 lines of filth”.

Now, you just know I’m going to want to know more about that.

And, of course, the Internet doesn’t let me down. First we can pop over to Wikipedia for an overview:

The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie, is the earliest surviving example of the Scottish version of the flyting genre in poetry. The genre takes the form of a contest, or “war of words”, between two poets, each trying to outclass the other in vituperation and verbal pyrotechnics. It is not certain how the work was composed, but it is likely to have been publicly performed, probably in the style of a poetic joust by the two combatants, William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, before the Court of James IV of Scotland.

And, it comments amusingly on the contents of the battle:

The content of the insults involves a wide range of strategies in mock character assassination, from the low scatological to the high political. Many accusations involve the capital crimes of theft, treason, and heresy, which, at moments (especially if the context was the royal court), add a potentially dangerous sense of political frisson (Kennedy goes so far as to describe the Dunbar coat of arms as being a noose with “Hang Dunbar” written underneath). Both combatants took great relish in describing the terrible punishments that would be meted out upon their opponent and the pictures evoked imply the proximity of instruments of execution in the medieval landscape as bleak as that in many images of the time in art.

Most of the insults thrown by Dunbar are returned or matched in kind by Kennedy, which gives the poem a balance in overall structure. The insults are graphic and personal, and were not necessarily arbitrary. Dunbar characterises Kennedy as speaking a barbarous Highland dialect, as being physically hideous and withered like a sort of living memento mori, as being poor and hungry, and of having intercourse with mares. Kennedy, by contrast, suggests that Dunbar was descended from Beelzebub, is a dwarf, and has no control of his bowel movements (to the point of almost sinking a ship in which he is travelling). Both cast doubt on the other’s poetic skill; Kennedy states that while he ascends Mount Parnassus to drink of the insiprational waters of the Castalian Spring, Dunbar goes “in Marche or Februere” to a farm pond and drinks the frogspawn. The satire may perhaps give us caricature impressions of the physical appearance and moral vulnerabilities of the two men, even if no actual portraits of either man are known to have survived.

After reading that, of course, I wanted to go read the piece. And again, the Internet has what I think I need, with a copy of the full piece available easily online. Since that link is to a Geocities site, and they tend to just vanish from the ‘net, I’ll stick a copy in this post at the end, so just scroll down now to see it.

Now, having had a chance to read the full piece, I have no idea what the hell is going on. Sure, I can parse some of it–I’m fairly certain that “wes nocht worth ane pair of auld gray sox” turns into “was not worth any pair of old grey socks” in current English–but most of it is just painful to look at. And I suspect that rather a lot of jokes depend on topical knowledge from the period.

This is where I want the Internet to provide me with a side-by-side modern English translation, with footnotes on the references. And this is where either the Internet failed me, or my Google skills weren’t up to the task: I couldn’t find a single modernised version of the text.

So I took another pass, reading the bits phonetically in a bad Scots accent, and large chunks are relatively comprehensible, but other bits remain obscure. I’ve really got to find a translation.

The bits at the end of Kennedy’s final reply are pretty understandable, though–the final curse out, and then the explanation of Dunbar’s family tree are entertaining. I quite like this bit:

Conspiratour, cursit cocatrice, hell caa,
    Turk, trumpour, traitour, tyran intemperate;
Thow irefull attircop, Pilate apostata,
    Judas, jow, juglour, Lollard laureate;
    Sarazene, symonyte provit, Pagane pronunciate,
Machomete, manesuorne, bugrist abhominabile,
Devill, dampnit dog, sodomyte insatiable,
    With Gog and Magog grete glorificate.

I think that accuses Dunbar of being a conspirator and traitor, a cursed cockatrice, a hell cat(?), a Turk, a pissed off spider, an apostate, a Judas, a jew, a Lollardist, a juggler (really?), a Saracen, a pronouncer of paganisms, an abominable buggerist, a devil, and an insatiable sodomite, among other things. Nice.

If you happen to know of a good translation, let me know. Otherwise I’ll put in on my list of things to keep an eye out for until I get a chance to look in an analog information repository. Or maybe Baba Brinkman will do it up modern style. (I’d also like a recording of a performance of this. At some convention I should totally try to talk Hal Duncan and Gavin Grant into it, with both doing their maximal Scots burr.)

THE FLYTING OF DUNBAR AND KENNEDIE

        Quod Dunbar to Kennedy

SCHIR JOHINE the Ros, ane thing thair is compild
    In generale be Kennedy and Quinting,
Quhilk hes thame self aboif the sternis styld;
    Bot had thay maid of mannace ony mynting
    In speciall, sic stryfe sould rys but stynting;
Howbeit with bost thair breistis wer als bendit
As Lucifer, that fra the hevin descendit,
    Hell sould nocht hyd thair harnis fra harmis hynting.

The erd sould trymbill, the firmament sould schaik,
    And all the air in vennaum suddane stink,
And all the divillis of hell for redour quaik,
    To heir quhat I sould wryt with pen and ynk;
    For and I fly; sum sege for schame sould sink,
The se sould birn, the mone sould thoill ecclippis,
Rochis sould ryfe, the warld sould hald no grippis,
    Sa loud of cair the commoun bell sould clynk.

Bot wondir laith wer I to be ane baird,
    Flyting to use richt gritly I eschame;
For it is nowthir wynning nor rewaird,
    Bot tinsale baith of honour and of fame,
    Incres of sorrow, sklander, and evill name;
Yit mycht thay be sa bald, in thair bakbytting,
To gar me ryme and rais the feynd with flytting,
    And throw all cuntreis and kinrikis thame proclame.

        Quod Kennedy to Dumbar

Dirtin Dumbar, quhome on blawis thow thy boist?
    Pretendand the to wryte sic skaldit skrowis;
Ramowd rebald, thow fall doun att the roist,
    My laureat lettres at the and I lowis;
    Mandrag, mymmerkin, maid maister bot in mows,
Thrys scheild trumpir with ane threid bait goun,
Say Deo mercy, or I cry the doun,
    And leif thy ryming, rebald, and thy rowis.

Dreid, dirtfast dearth, that thow hes dissobeyit
    My cousing Quintene and my commissar,
Fantastik fule, trest weill thow salbe fleyit,
    Ignorant elf, aip, owll irregular,
    Skaldit skaitbird, and commoun skamelar;
Wan-fukkit funling, that natour maid ane yrle,
Baith Iohine the Ros and thow sall squeill and skirle,
    And evir I heir ocht of your making mair.

Heir I put sylence to the in all pairtis,
    Obey and ceis the play that thow pretendis;
Waik walidrag, and verlot of the cairtis,
    Se sone thow mak my commissar amendis,
    And lat him lay sax leichis on thy lendis,
Meikly in recompansing of thi scorne,
Or thow sall ban the tyme that thow wes borne,
    For Kennedy to the this cedull sendis.

        Quod Dumbar to Kennedy

Iersch brybour baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis,
    Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kynd,
Evill farit and dryit, as Denseman on the rattis,
    Lyke as the gleddis had on thy gule snowt dynd;
    Mismaid monstour, ilk mone owt of thy mynd,
Renunce, rebald, thy rymyng, thow bot royis,
    Thy trechour tung hes tane ane heland strynd;
Ane lawland ers wald mak a bettir noyis.

Revin, raggit ruke, and full of rebaldrie,
    Scarth fra scorpione, scaldit in scurrilitie,
I se the haltane in thy harlotrie,
    And in to uthir science no thing slie,
    Off every vertew voyd, as men may sie;
Quytclame clergie, and cleik to the ane club,
    Ane baird blasphemar in brybrie ay to be;
For wit and wisdome ane wisp fra the may rub.

Thow speiris, dastard, gif I dar with the fecht?
    Ye dagorie, dowbart, thairof haif thow no dowt!
Quhair evir we meit, thairto my hand I hecht
    To red thy rebald ryming with a rowt:
    Throw all Bretane it salbe blawin owt
How that thow, poysonit pelor, gal thy paikis;
    With ane doig leich I schepe to gar the schowt,
And nowther to the tak knyfe, swerd, nor aix.

Thow crop and rute of traitouris tressonable,
    The fathir and moder of morthour and mischeif,
Dissaitfull tyrand, with serpentis tung, unstable;
    Cukcald cradoun, cowart, and commoun theif;
    Thow purpest for to undo our Lordis cheif,
In Paislay, with ane poysone that wes fell,
    For quhilk, brybour, yit sail thow thoill a breif;
Pelour, on the I sall it preif my sell.

Thocht I wald lie, thy frawart phisnomy
    Dois manifest thy malice to all men;
Fy! tratour theif; Fy! glengoir bun, fy! fy!
    Fy! feyndly front, far fowlar than ane fen.
    My freyindis thow reprovit with thy pen!
Thow leis, tratour! quhilk I sall on the preif,
    Suppois thy heid war armit tymis ten,
Thow sall recryat, or thy croun sall cleif.

Or thow durst move thy mynd malitius,
    Thow saw the saill abone my heid up draw;
Bot Eolus full woid, and Neptunus,
    Mirk and moneless, wes met with wind and waw,
    And mony hundreth myle hyne cowd us blaw
By Holland, Seland, Yetland, and Northway coist,
    In desert quhair we wer famist aw;
Yit come I hame, fals baird, to lay thy boist.

Thow callis the rethory with thy goldin lippis:
    Na, glowrand, gaipand fule, thow art begyld,
Thow art bot gluntow with thy giltin hippis,
    That for thy lounry mony a leisch hes fyld;
    Wan wisaged widdefow, out of thy wit gane wyld,
Laithly and lowsy, als lathand as ane leik,
    Sen thow with wirschep wald sa fane be styld,
Haill, soverane senyeour!  Thy bawis hingis throw thy breik.

Forworthin fule, of all the warld reffuse,
    Quhat ferly is thocht thow rejoys to flyte?
Sic eloquence as thay in Erschry use,
    In sic is sett thy thraward appetyte;
    Thow hes full littill feill of fair indyte:
I tak on me ane pair of Lowthiane hippis
    Sall fairar Inglis mak, and mair parfyte,
Than thow can blabbar with thy Carrik lippis.

Bettir thow ganis to leid ane doig to skomer,
    Pynit pykpuirs pelour, than with thy maister pingill.
Thow lay full prydles in the peis this somer,
    And fane at evin for to bring hame a single,
    Syne rubbit at ane uthir auid wyvis ingle;
Bot now, in winter, for purteth thow art traikit;
    Thow hes na breik to latt thy ballokis gyngill;
Beg the ane club, for, baird, thow sall go naikit.

Lene larbar, loungeour, baith lowsy in lisk and lonye;
    Fy! skolderit skyn, thow art bot skyre and skrumple;
For he that rostit Lawarance had thy grunye,
    And he that hid Sanct Johnis ene with ane womple,
    And he that dang Sanct Augustine with ane rumple,
Thy fowll front had, and he that Bartilmo flaid;
    The gallowis gaipis eftir thy graceles gruntill,
As thow wald for ane haggeis, hungry gled.

Commirwald crawdoun, na man comptis the ane kers,
    Sueir swappit swanky, swynekeper ay for swaittis;
Thy commissar Quintyne biddis the cum kis his ers,
    He luvis nocht sic ane forlane loun of laittis;
    He sayis, thow skaffis and beggis mair beir and aitis
Nor ony cripill in Karrik land abowt;
    Uther pure beggaris and thow ar at debaittis,
Decrepit karlingis on Kennedy cryis owt.

Mater annuche I haif, I bid nocht fenyie,
    Thocht thow, fowll trumpour, thus upoun me leid;
Corruptit carioun, he sall I cry thy senyie;
    Thinkis thow nocht how thow come in grit neid,
    Greitand in Galloway, lyk to ane gallow breid,
Ramand and rolpand, beggand koy and ox;
    I saw the thair, in to thy wachemanis weid,
Quhilk wes nocht worth ane pair of auld gray sox.

Ersch Katherene, with thy polk breik and rilling,
    Thow and thy quene, as gredy gleddis, ye gang
With polkis to mylne, and beggis baith meill and schilling;
    Thair is bot lys and lang nailis yow amang:
    Fowll heggirbald, for hennis thus will ye hang;
Thow hes ane perrellus face to play with lambis;
    Ane thowsand kiddis, wer thay in faidis full strang,
Thy lymmerfull luke wald fle thame and thair damis.

In till ane glen thow hes, owt of repair,
    Ane laithly luge that wes the lippir menis;
With the ane sowtaris wyfe, off blis als bair,
    And lyk twa stalkaris steilis in cokis and hennis,
    Thow plukkis the pultre, and scho pullis off the penis;
All Karrik cryis, God gif this dowsy be drownd;
    And quhen thow heiris ane guse cry in the glenis,
Thow thinkis it swetar than sacrand bell of sound.

Thow Lazarus, thow laithly lene tramort,
    To all the warld thow may example be,
To luk upoun thy gryslie peteous port,
    For hiddowis, haw, and holkit is thyne ee;
    Thy cheik bane bair, and blaiknit is thy ble;
Thy choip, thy choll, garris men for to leif chest;
    Thy gane it garris us think that we mon de:
I conjure the, thow hungert heland gaist.

The larbar lukis of thy lang lene craig,
    Thy pure pynit thrott, peilit and owt of ply,
Thy skolderit skin, hewd lyk ane saffrone bag,
    Garris men dispyt thar flesche, thow Spreit of Gy:
    Fy! feyndly front; fy! tykis face, fy! fy!
Ay loungand, lyk ane loikman on ane ledder;
    With hingit luik ay wallowand upone wry,
Lyke to ane stark theif glowrand in ane tedder.

Nyse nagus, nipcaik, with thy schulderis narrow,
    Thow lukis lowsy, loun of lownis aw;
Hard hurcheoun, hirpland, hippit as ane harrow,
    Thy rigbane rattillis, and thy ribbis on raw,
    Thy hanchis hirklis with hukebanis harth and haw,
Thy laithly lymis are lene as ony treis;
    Obey, theif baird, or I sall brek thy gaw,
Fowll carrybald, cry mercy on thy kneis.

Thow purehippit, ugly averill,
    With hurkland banis, holkand throw thy hyd,
Reistit and crynit as hangitman on hill,
    And oft beswakkit with ane ourhie tyd,
    Quhilk brewis mekle barret to thy bryd;
Hir cair is all to clenge thy cabroch howis,
    Quhair thow lyis sawsy in saphron, bak and syd,
Powderit with prymros, savrand all with clowis.

Forworthin wirling, I warne the it is wittin,
    How, skyttand skarth, thow hes the hurle behind;
Wan wraiglane wasp, ma wormis hes thow beschittin
    Nor thair is gers on grund or leif on lind;
    Thocht thow did first sic foly to my fynd,
Thow sall agane with ma witnes than I;
    Thy gulsoch gane dois on thy back it bind,
Thy hostand hippis lattis nevir thy hos go dry.

Thow held the burch lang with ane borrowit goun,
    And ane caprowsy barkit all with sweit,
And quhen the laidis saw the sa lyk a loun,
    Thay bickerit the with mony bae and bleit:
    Now upaland thow leivis on rubbit quheit,
Oft for ane caus thy burdclaith neidis no spredding,
    For thow hes nowthir for to drink nor eit,
Bot lyk ane berdles baird that had no bedding.

Strait Gibbonis air, that nevir ourstred ane hors,
    Bla berfute berne, in bair tyme wes thow borne;
Thow bringis the Carrik clay to Edinburgh Cors
    Upoun thy botingis, hobland, hard as horne;
    Stra wispis hingis owt, quhair that the wattis ar worne:
Cum thow agane to skar us with thy strais,
    We sall gar scale our sculls all the to scorne,
And stane the up the calsay quhair thow gals.

Off Edinburch the boyis as beis owt thrawis,
    And cryis owt ay, "Heir cumis our awin queir Clerk!"
Than fleis thow lyk ane howlat chest with crawis,
    Quhill all the bichis at thy botingis dois bark:
    Than carlingis cryis, "Keip curches in the merk,
Our gallowis gaipis; lo! quhair ane greceles gais."
    Ane uthir sayis, "I se him want ane sark,
I reid yow, cummer, tak in your lynning clair."

Than rynis thow doun the gait with gild of boyis,
    And all the toun tykis hingand in thy heilis;
Of laidis and lownis thair rysis sic ane noyis,
    Quhill runsyis rynis away with cairt and quheilis,
    And cager aviris castis bayth coillis and creilis,
For rerd of the and rattling of thy butis;
    Fische wyvis cryis, Fy! and castis doun skulls and skeilis;
Sum claschis the, sum cloddis the on the cutis.

Loun lyk Mahoun, be boun me till obey,
    Theif, or in greif mischeif sall the betyd;
Cry grace, tykis face, or I the chece and sley;
    Oule, rare and yowle, I sall defowll thy pryd;
    Peilet gled, baith fed and bred of bichis syd,
And lyk ane tyk, purspyk, quhat man settis by the!
    Forflittin, countbittin, beschittin, barkit hyd,
Clym ledder, fyle tedder, foule edder, I defy the.

Mauch muttoun, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous;
    Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet;
Chittirlilling, ruch rilling, lik schilling in the milhous;
    Baird rehator, theif of natour, fats tratour, feyindis gett;
    Filling of tauch, rak sauch, cry crauch, thow art our sett;
Muttoun dryver, girnall ryver, yadswyvar, fowll fell the:
    Herretyk, lunatyk, purspyk, carlingis pet,
Rottin crok, dirtin dok, cry cok, or I sall quell the.

        Quod Kennedy to Dumbar

Dathane devillis sone, and dragon dispitous,
    Abironis birth, and bred with Beliall;
Wod werwoif, worme, and scorpion vennemous,
    Lucifers laid, fowll feyindis face infernall;
    Sodomyt, syphareit fra sanctis celestiall,
Put I nocht sylence to the, schiphird knaif,
And thow of new begynis to ryme and raif,
    Thow salbe maid blait, bleir eit, bestiall.

How thy forbearis come, I haif a feill,
    At Cokburnispeth, the writ makis me war,
Generit betuix ane scho beir and a deill;
    Sa wes he callit Dewlbeir and nocht Dumbar.
    This Dewlbeir, generit of a meit of Mar,
Wes Corspatrik, Erle of Merche; and be illusioun
The first that evir put Scotland to confusioun
    Wes that fals tratour, hardely say I dar.

Quhen Bruce and Balioll differit for the croun,
    Scottis Lordis could nocht obey Englis lawis;
This Corspatrik betrasit Berwik toun,
    And slew sevin thousand Scottismen within thay wawis,
    The battall syne of Spottismuir he gart caus,
And come with Edwart Langschankis to the feild,
Quhair twelve thowsand trew Scottismen wer keild,
    And Wallace chest, as the Cornicle schawis.

Scottis Lordis chiftanis he gart hald and chessone
    In firmance fast, quhill all the feild wes done,
Within Dumbar, that auld spelunk of tressoun;
    Sa Inglis tykis in Scotland wes abone,
    Than spulyeit thay the haly stane of Scone,
The Croce of Halyrudhous, and uthir jowellis.
He birnis in hell, body, banis, and bowellis,
    This Corspatrik that Scotland hes undone.

Wallace gart cry ane counsale in to Perth,
    And callit Corspatrik tratour be his style;
That dampnit dragone drew him in diserth,

    And sayd, he kend bot Wallace, king in Kyle:
    Out of Dumbar that theif he maid exyle
Unto Edward and Inglis grund agane:
Tigris, serpentis, and taidis will remane
    In Dumbar wallis, todis, wolffis and beistis vyle.

Na fowlis of effect amangis thay binkis
    Biggis nor abydis, for no thing that may be;
Thay stanis of tressone as the bruntstane stinkis.
    Dewlbeiris moder, cassin in by the se,
    The wariet apill of the forbiddin tre
That Adame eit, quhen he tynt Parradyce,
Scho eit invennomit lyk a cokkatryce,
    Syne merreit with the Divill for dignite.

Yit of new tressone I can tell the tailis,
    That cumis on nycht in visioun in my sleip;
Archbald Dumbar betrasd the house of Hailis,
    Becaus the yung Lord had Dumbar to keip;
    Pretendand throw that to thair rowmis to creip,
Rycht crewaly his castell he persewit,
Brocht him furth boundin and the place reskewit,
    Sett him in fetteris in ane dungeoun deip.

It war aganis bayth natur and gud ressoun,
    That Dewlbeiris bairnis were trew to God or man;
Quhilkis wer baith gottin, borne, and bred with tressoun,
    Belgebubbis oyis, and curst Corspatrikis clan:
    Thow wes prestyt and ordanit be Sathan
For to be borne to do thy kin defame,
And gar me schaw thy antecessouris schame;
    Thy kin that leivis may wary the and ban.

Sen thow on me thus, lymmer, leis and trattillis,
    And fyndis sentence foundit of invy,
Thy elderis banis ilk nycht rysis and rattillis,
    Apon thy cors vengeance, vengeance! thay cry,
    Thow art the cause thay may not rest nor ly;
Thow sadis for thame few psaltris, psalmis, or credis,
Bot geris me tell thair trentalis of mysdeidis,
    And thair ald sin with new schame certify.

Insensuate sow, cesse, fals Eustase air!
    And knaw, kene scald, I hald of Alathya,
And cause me nocht the cause lang to declare
    Off thy curst kyn, Deulber and his allya:
    Cum to the Croce, on kneis, and mak a crya;
Confesse thy crime, haid Kenydy the king,
And with ane hauthorne scurge thy self and dyng;
    Thus dree thy penaunce wyth Dereliquisti quia.

Pas to my commissare, and be confest,
    Cour befoir him on kneis, and cum in will;
And syne ger Stobo for thy lyf protest;
    Renounce thy rymis, bath ban and birn thy bill;
    Heve to the hevyn thy handis, ande hald the still:
Do thou not thus, bogane, thou salbe brynt,
Wyth pik, fire, ter, gun puidre, or lint,
    On Arthuris Sele, or on ane hyar hyll.

I perambalit of Pernaso the montayn,
Enspirit wyth Mercury fra his goldyn spere;
And dulcely drank of eloquence the fontayne,
    Quhen it was purifit wyth frost, and flowit cleir:
    And thou come, Fule! in Marche or Februere,
Thair till a pule, and drank the padok rod,
That gerris the ryme in to thy termis glod,
    And blaberis that noyis mennis eris to here.

Thow lufis nane Irische, elf, I understand,
    Bot it suld be all trew Scottis mennis lede;
It was the gud langage of this land,
    And Scota it causit to multiply and sprede,
    Quhill Corspatrik, that we of tresoun rede,
Thy forefader, maid Irisch and Irisch men thin,
Throu his tresoun broght Inglise rumpus in,
    Sa wald thy self, mycht thou to him succede.

Ignorant fule! in to thy mowis and mokis,
    It may be verifyit that thy wit is thin;
Quhare thow writis Densmen dryit apon the rattis,
    Densmen of Denmark ar of the kingis kyn.
    The wit thou suld have had, was castin in
Evyn at thyne ers, bakwart, wyth a staf slong.
Herefore, fals harlot, hursone, hald thy tong:
    Deulbere! thow devis the devill, thyne eme, wyth dyn.

Quhare as thou said that I stall hennis and lammys,
    I latt the witt, I have land, store and stakkis.
Thou wald be fayn to gnaw, lad, wyth thy gammys,
    Under my burd, smoch banis behynd doggis bakkis:
    Thow has a tome purs, I have stedis and takkis,
Thow tynt cultur, I have cultur and pleuch,
Substance and gere, thou has a wedy teuch,
    On Mount Falconn, about thy crag to rax.

And yit Mount Falconn gallowis is our fair
    For to be fylde with sik a fruteles face;
Cum hame, and hyng on oure gallowis of Aire,
    To erd the under it I sail purchas grace;
    To ete thy flesch the doggis sail have na space,
The ravyns sall ryve na thing bot thy tong rutis,
For thou sik malice of thy maister mutis,
    It is wele sett that thou sik barat brace.

Small fynance amang thy frendis thow beggit,
    To stanch the storm wyth haly muldis thou loste;
Thou sailit to get a dowcare for to dreg it,
    It lyis closit in a ciout on Seland cost:
    Sic reule gerris the be servit wyth cald rost,
And sitt unsoupit oft beyond the sey,
Criant caritas at duris amore Dei,
    Barefut, brekeles, and all in duddis updost.

Deulbere hes not ado wyth a Dunbar,
    The Erl of Murray bure that surname ryght,
That evyr trew to the King and constant ware,
    And of that kin come Dunbar of Westfelde knyght;
    That successione is hardy, wyse, and wycht,
And has na thing ado now with the devile,
Bot Deulbere is thy kyn, and kennis the wele,
    And has in hell for the a chaumir dicht.

Cursit croapand craw, I sall ger crop thy tong,
    And thou sall cry, Cor mundum, on thy kneis;
Duerch, I sall ding the, quhill thow dryte and dong,
    And thou sall lik thy lippis and suere thou leis:
    I sall degrade the, graceles, of thy greis;
Scaile the for scorne, and shere the of the scule,
Ger round the hede transforme the till a fule,
    And syne wyth tresone trone the to the treis.

Rawmowit ribald, renegate rehatour,
    My linage and forebearis war ay lele;
It cumis of kynde to the to be a traytoure,
    To ryde on nycht, to rug, to reve, and stele.
    Quhare thow puttis poysoun to me, I appelle
The in that part, preve it pelour wyth thy persone;
Clame not to clergy, I defy the, gersone,
    Thow sall by it dere wyth me, duerche, and thou dele.

In Ingland, oule, suld be thyne habitacione,
    Homage to Edward Langschankis maid thy kyn,
In Dunbar thai ressavit him, the false nacione,
    Thay suld be exilde Scotland mare and myn.
    A stark gallowis, a wedy, and a pyn,
The hede poynt of thyne elderis armes ar;
Wryttyn abone in poesie, Hang Dunbar,
    Quarter and draw, and mak that surname thin.

I am the kingis blude, his trew speciall clerk,
    That nevir yit ymaginit hym offense,
Constant in myn allegeance, word and werk,
    Onely dependand on his excellence;
    Traistand to have of his magnificence
Guerdoun, reward, and benefice bedene;
Quhen that the ravyns sal ryve out bath thine ene,
    And on the rattis salbe thy residence.

Fra Etrike Forest furthward to Drumfrese
    Thow beggit wyth a pardoun in all kirkis,
Collapis, cruddis, mele, grotis, grisis, and geis,
    And ondir nycht quhile stall thou staggis and stirkis.
    Because that Scotiand of thy begging irkis,
Thow scapis in France to be a knycht of the felde;
Thow has thy clamschellis and thy burdoun kelde,
    Unhonest wayis all, wolroun, that thou wirkis.

Thou may not pas Mount Barnard for wilde bestis,
    Nor wyn throw Mount Scarpre for the snawe;
Mount Nycholas, Mount Godart thare arestis,
    Brigantis sik bois and blyndis thame wyth a blawe.
    In Parise wyth the maister buriawe
Abyde, and be his prentice nere the bank,
And help to hang the pece for half a frank,
    And, at the last, thy self sall thole the lawe.

Haltane harlot, the devill have gude thou hais!
    For fault of puissance, pelour, thou mon pak the;
Thou drank thy thrift, sald and wedsett thy clais,
    Thare is na lorde that will in service tak the.
    A pak of flaskynnis, fynance for to mak the,
Thow sall ressave, in Danskyn, of my tailye;
With De profundis fend the, and that failye,
    And I sall send the black Devill for to bak the.

Into the Katryne thou maid a foule cahute,
    For thow bedrate hir doune fra starn to stere;
Apon hir sydis was sene thou coud schute,
    Thy dirt clevis till hir towis this twenty yere:
    The firmament na firth was nevir cler,
Quhill thou, Deulbere, devillis birth, was on the see,
The saulis had sonkin throu the syn of the,
    War not the peple maid sa grete prayere.

Quhen that the schip was saynit, and undir saile,
    Foul brow in holl thow preposit for to pas,
Thou schot, and was not sekir of thy tayle,
    Beschate the stere, the compas, and the glas;
    The skippar bad ger land the at the Bas:
Thow spewit, and kest out mony a lathly lomp,
Fastar than all the marynaris coud pomp;
    And now thy wame is wers than evir it was.

Had thai bene prouvait sa of schote of gune,
    By men of were but perile thay had past;
As thou was louse and redy of thy bune,
    Thay mycht have tane the collum at the last;
    For thou wald cuk a cartfull at a cast;
Thair is na schip that wil the now ressave;
Thou fylde faster than fyftenesum mycht lave,
    And myrit thaym wyth thy muk to the myd mast.

Throu Ingland, thef, and tak the to thy fute,
    And boune with the to have a fals botwand;
A horse marschall thou call the at the mute,
    And with that craft convoy the throu the land:
    Be na thing argh, tak ferily on hand;
Happyn thou to be hangit in Northumbir,
Than all thy kyn ar wele quyte of thy cumbir,
    And that mon be thy dome, I undirstand.

Hye Souverane Lorde, lat nevir this synfull sot
    Do schame, fra hame, unto your nacion!
That nevir nane sik ane be callit a Scot,
    A rottyn crok, louse of the dok, thare doune.
    Fra honest folk devoide this lathly lowne;
In sum desert, quhare thare is na repaire,
For fylyng aud infecking of the aire,
    Cary this cankerit corrupt carioun.

Thou was consavit in the grete eclips,
    A monstir maid be god Mercurius;
Na hald agayn, na hoo is at thy hips,
    Infortunate, false, and furius,
    Evill schryvin, wan-thryvin, not clene na curius;
A myten, full of flyting, flyrdom like,
A crabbit, scabbit, evill facit messan tyke;
    A schit but wit, schyre and injurius.

Greit in the glaykis gude Maister Gilliam gukkis,
    Our imperfyte in poetry or in prose,
All clocis undir cloud of nycht thou cukkis;
    Rymis thou of me of Rethory the Rose;
    Lunatike, lymare, luschbald, louse thy hose,
That I may touch thy toue wyth tribulation,
In recompensing of thy conspiration,
    Or turse the out of Scotland: tak thy chose.

Ane benefice quha wald gyve sic ane beste,
    Bot gif it war to gyngill Iudas bellis;
Tak the a fidill, or a floyte, and geste,
    Undought, thou art ordanyt to not ellis!
    Thy cloutit cloke, thy skryp, and thy clamschellis,
Cleke on thy cors, and fare on in to France,
And cum thou nevir agayn but a mischance;
    The fend fare wyth the forthwarde our the fellis.

Cankrit Caym, tryit trowane, Tutivillus,
    Marmaidyn, mymmerken, monstir of all men,
I sall ger bake the to the lard of Hillhouse,
    To suelly the in stede of a pullit hen.
    Fowmart, fasert, fostirit in filth and fen,
Foule fond, fiend fule, apon thy phisnom fy!
Thy dok of dirt dreipis and will nevir dry,
    To tume thy tone it has tyrit carlingis ten.

Conspiratour, cursit cocatrice, hell caa,
    Turk, trumpour, traitour, tyran intemperate;
Thow irefull attircop, Pilate apostata,
    Judas, jow, juglour, Lollard laureate;
    Sarazene, symonyte provit, Pagane pronunciate,
Machomete, manesuorne, bugrist abhominabile,
Devill, dampnit dog, sodomyte insatiable,
    With Gog and Magog grete glorificate.

Nero thy nevow, Golyas thy grantsire,
    Pharao thy fader, Egipya thy dame,
Deulbere, thir ar the causis that I conspire,
    Termygantis temp[t]ise the, and Vaspasius thine eme;
    Belzebub thy full brothir will clame
To be thyne air, and Cayphas thy sectour;
Pluto thy hede of kyn and protectour,
    To hell to lede the on lycht day and leme.

Herode thyne othir eme, and grete Egeas,
    Marciane, Machomete, and Maxencius,
Thy trew kynnismen, Antenor and Eneas,
    Throp thy nere nece, and austerne Olibrius,
    Puttidew, Baal, and Eyobulus;
Thir fendis ar the flour of thy four branchis,
Sterand the potis of hell, and nevir stanchis,
    Dout not, Deulbere, Tu es Dyabolus.

Deulbere, thy spere of were, but feir, thou yelde,
    Hangit, mangit, eddir-stangit, strynde stultorum,
To me, maist hie Kenydie, and flee the felde,
    Pickit, wickit, convickit Lamp Lollardorum.
    Defamyt, blamyt, schamyt, Primas Paganorum.
Out! out I schout, apon that snowt that snevillis.
Tale tellare, rebellare, induellar wyth the devillis,
    Spynk, sink with stynk ad Tertara Termagarum.

There’s a short write-up of the research at the APS site. Here’s a bit of it:

…individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another’s suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals’ RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner’s distress.

Analysis of the participants’ final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people’s tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

The short write-up isn’t great, and immediately set me to worrying about correlation versus causation (e.g. maybe people who end up with “high social power” end up that way because of some other factor X which also causes them to be less prone to compassion and empathy), so I went and found the paper itself¹. If you’re interested at all in the idea, you should give the paper a read–there’s some statistics in there, but you don’t need to be able to do the math to follow the paper. The discussion section in particular is interesting (and I was happy to see the explicitly state that “it is possible that the observed effects were due to other variables correlated with power that were not measured” in there.)

Here’s the key bit of the conclusion from the paper:

Our data suggest that social power attenuates emotional reactions to those who suffer. Higher-power participants experienced less reciprocal emotion (distress) and less complementary emotion (compassion) in response to another individual disclosing an experience of suffering, and they showed more autonomic emotion regulation as well.

So maybe the reason so much of what the people in power decide seems inhuman to me, is that being in that position of power, for one reason or another, means that they are literally incapable of the degree of compassion and empathy that I am capable of. (And, by extension, I would probably be less capable than people with less power than me.)

There’s some thinking to do about this bit of the discussion as well (I’ve edited out the citations for easier reading by non-academics):

These findings qualify the widespread idea that powerful individuals pay less attention to their social environment than do less powerful individuals. Our findings suggest that high-power people do not necessarily attend less to others; rather, they appear to be less motivated to respond to others. This conclusion is compatible with recent work on conflict indicating that high-power parties are not insensitive to their opponent’s emotions, but react selectively to these emotions when doing so can further their own goals.

I wonder also about the extent to which outsider status and “low social power” during the formative years would affect capability for compassion and empathy over a lifetime.

It also raises a bit of a question about what to do about it… but I guess we’d need to look at why, and not just what, before we could attack that.

1. I think you’re actually only supposed to be able to get that PDF if you’re a subscriber to the journal, since I couldn’t find a way to navigate to a page that linked to it on the journal site without logging in, but the link in Google’s search results gave it to me.