Christian Renaud's Blog

Need a breather?

I had the good fortune to receive this link from Ryan, a friend and colleague of mine who is working to synthesize new technologies and the world we live in with the daily practice of Buddhism.  I think this is a great start and a great idea.  Please pay him a visit.

Out of the box thinking

There is an anecdote that I have always enjoyed from the first bio I read of Hannibal Barca, of 'Hannibal ad portas' fame.  I heard another anecdote from my amazing wife today that is actually comparable in it's audacity, however (warning, disclaimer, warning) not proper nor condoned by yours truly in any way.

Hannibal:

A small but critical Kingdom in what is now Turkey was being assailed by the Roman Navy, and the king knew that a very-aged Hannibal had retired to a small home in exile there after the sacking of Carthage in the Second Punic War.  Although he had agreed never to wage war on the Romans as terms of his exile, the King sent an emissary to Hannibal to entreat his help in defeating the Roman Navy.  After much persuasion, he reluctantly agreed to assist. 

They led him to a bluff overlooking the scene of the battle.  The Romans had large (but slow), open and high-walled ships that they were using to ram the smaller and faster local ships.  When they couldn't catch them by ramming, their archers would fire through portholes in the side of the ships.  They were quickly making short work of the King's inexperienced Navy.

Hannibal stood there silently for a number of minutes, then turned to the emissaries and said 'Get some earthenware jars, fill them with poisonous snakes, and lob them into the Roman ships.' He then turned around and went home. The emissaries promptly relayed these instructions, and shortly thereafter the tide of battle turned as the Romans, unable to easily escape their high-walled ships, died from poisonous venom.

Needless to say, the Roman generals knew that the local king would never have had the brilliant insight with the snake-grenades.  They tracked Hannibal back to his home, where he saw them coming,  promptly took poison, and died.  A tragic end to an amazing career.

CIA:

Fast forward 2200 years, and there is an anecdote in See No Evil by Robert Baer, the basis of the film Syriana.  Baer was an active intelligence operative in the Middle-East, and was relating an story he had heard at CIA training camp (aka 'The Farm').  Another example of out-of-the-box-thinking, albeit very politically incorrect:

"One of the instructors at the Farm had told us a story of how, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the agency's skunk works had come up with the idea of filling a captured Soviet transport plane- Soviet markings and all- with live pigs and dropping them over Mecca, Islam's most holy city.  The idea was to light the Middle East's fuse and direct the blast toward the Soviet Union, whose influence had been growing in the area."

I wonder if being exposed to constant bloodshed catalyzes some innovation function in the brain. I am pretty sure two guys didn't think this one up in the stands of their kid's T-ball game.

Never in civilized conversation

I guess I am lucky we aren't at a cocktail party together, as I have discussed politics already today, and am now moving on to religion.  Does a blog fall under the old adage "Three topics to avoid at a cocktail party lest you want to start an argument: sex, politics and religion"?

Two related items. 

First, Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and the incomparable author of The Selfish Gene (which introduced the word 'meme' to my frequently-used-word-lexicon), just released a new book entitled The God Delusion.  The book's title pretty much sums up the topic, which takes a frothing atheist's view of the benefits and drawbacks of religion in historic and present society.  I try to read a balanced set of books on this subject (having just finished Jimmy Carter's excellent Our Endangered Values yesterday), so am looking forward to this insightful author's treatment of the subject.

Second, Baylor University just published a new study entitled 'American Piety in the 21st Century', which is a multi-year, broad-based study of the religious beliefs of the United States.  It touches on a number of issues including the type of God that people feel exists (benevolent, wrathful, etc.) as well as how people categorize themselves as believers (evangelical, born-again, etc.).  There are some amusing bits in there, including Americans who claim membership in denominations that are non-Evangelical and subsequently categorize themselves as Evangelical (in quantities greater than the aggregate of all Evangelical faiths, I might add).   

I think I may have seen these people vote.

All in all, an insightful read for all of us, and not just the 96 percent of Americans who believe in God.

(Update: 4:15p-  Just saw an excerpt from the book, which was so amusing I had to affix this postscript...."To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. ")