Doctor Justice Declares a Caliphate : the Saga grows vast

Doctor Justice Declares a Caliphate

or,  If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em

We were bemused at the ease with which a ragtag of runaways, renegades, and Zarqawiite thugs  could propel themselves to regional prominence, and declare their supremacy over the whole Umma of Islam.  And instead of being laughed off the stage, they have received bay`ah from group after group of former rivals (killing those that did not submit).

With a keen eye appropriate to their craft, the  Accounting Department of WDJ Worldwide Enterprises said:  Y’know, there might be money in this sort of thing.

Accordingly, as the long arm of al-Baghdadi  does not yet reach into our home state, we have decided to solidify our base, before it’s too late.  Thus, Doctor Justice, together with his hardy band of few but fanatical followers, hereby declares the

 => Riemannic State of Suburbia <=

a.k.a.  Riemannistan.

Its capital shall be the cul-de-sac wherein we dwell (Married People’s Circle);  our AOR, all the lands in which the Peano Postulates hold good.  

The state religion is Cantorian Realism;  public punishments for apostate Nominalists will be exemplary and fun to watch.

Dr Justice, wisely rendering judgment

 unto his subjects, beneath an oak 

Herewith our immediate, non-negotiable demands:

* Unlimited rights

* Egg in our beer

* A land corridor through Prussia

~

Fun Facts about Riemannistan:

*  Official language:  Latin

*  National anthem:  “Desolation Row”

*  State bird:  what do you think?

Notitia Dignitatum

Recent cabinet appointments :

*  Dr Massey :  Oberreichslateinmeister

*  Carlos the Pirate:  Minister of Marital Affairs

*  Abu-Yahya al-Irbî :  Proconsul for Greater Jordan (includes all territories  claimed by the ISIL)

* Commander Buckwalter:  Minister of Misinformation, and Lord of the CAStLe

Honoris causâ :

*  Named U.S. wifeperson :  First Lady

*  Airman Bob :  Jihadi Performer of the Year [Note:  This position, being istishhâdi, is filled anew periodically.  Applications welcome.]

*  Fluffy the family hamster : Emblematic Animal (to appear on all stamps and currency issued by the RSoS)

Positions still unfilled :

* Ambassador to Azawad

* Chargé d’affaires for the Ottoman Empire

* Court poet

[Update]

The cursèd infidels of the next cul-de-sac over, “Chunky Chipmunk Way” (and here I am barely making anything up:  our town is full of cutesy street-names) have refused to swear bay`ah to Sultân Dawûd, and have set up a counter-caliphate !!!  This means war -- War to the knife!

Chunky Chipmunk delenda est !!!!

[Update, Bastille Day 2014]  Evidently inspired by Dr J’s bold proclamation of a local cul-de-sac-based Caliphate, another would-be imam has claimed a somewhat neglected slice of Africa:

The imam with his seven year-old daughter, Princess Emily,

showing off the flag that their family designed

as they claim a piece of land in the Eastern African region of Bir Tawil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-man-plants-flag-claims-african-country-calling-it-kingdom-of-north-sudan/2014/07/12/abfbcef2-09fc-11e4-8a6a-19355c7e870a_story.html?tid=pm_pop

We welcome this new sacred territory, and have offered an alliance to Imam Jeremiah, to wage Holy War against the infidels of the so-called “caliphate” of Chunky Chipmunk Way.

(BTW, those dead-enders over at Chunky Chipmunk  are also pretty sloppy about recycling.  War to the knife!)

[Update 9 August 2014]  Doubtless inspired by Riemannistan’s righteous Holy War against the kuffar of Chunky Chipmunk Way (a.k.a the Dâr al-Harb), Obama has finally got his man-card back, and is going after the sole entity that can challenge America’s hegemonic rule -- The Islamic Caliphate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-expands-airstrikes-against-islamic-state-militants-in-northern-iraq/2014/08/09/1014c018-1fb7-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html

[Late-breaking updeate -- Dispatch from the Front]   The raging battle between Riemannistan and the accursèd infidels of Chunky Chipmunk Way (upon whom be grease) has reached a stage of entrenched positions, of the sort familiar from the early years of the Great War: our territories are now separated by an impassable barrier composed of around half a dozen or so  orange traffic-cones.

Meanwhile, our supply lines and economic base have firmed up, relative to those of the foe.  Our yard sale last weekend did wa-a-ay better than theirs did, judging, not so much by the quantity as by the quality of the visitors who dropped by (their SUVs are tacky;  ours are swank).   We even sold an entire, only slightly wrecked swingset (Jenny having outgrown it -- she’s in second grade now)!  Match that, you Gehenna-dwelling Chunkies !!

~

Update: Riemannistan hosts refugees

[Dateline Riemannistan -- Associated Press]

Cousin Pete will be camping on our sofa for a few days.  His common-law wife Midge threw him out of the house.  The Riemmanic Caliphate is dispatching a crack diplomatic team to negotiate.

[Rolling update -- 30 August 2014]

In a stunning development, the exciting new Caliphate of Riemannistan has firmly established its diplomatic creds.

Armed with half a dozen red roses (plus a recycled gift-card from Pete), the Riemannistan emergency team arrived at the fortress-like headquarters of Ms. Midge [surname, age, weight and cup size  withheld by request].   After a tense quarter of an hour of high-level negotiations, the team returned to the lofty caliphal palace of Riemannistan, bearing a chilled six-pack of Pete’s favorite brew, sent over by Midge in appreciation of the roses.  “So you remembered our [editors: common-law] Anniversary, you old you, you” she wrote in an accompanying bordereau.  --  “Uh -- yeh, for sure!” replied a startled Pete, upon reading the note.

[Update 8 September 2014]  Naysayers are now ganging up against  the Imam of Bir Tawil:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-mans-claim-on-african-landis-unlikely-to-pass-test/2014/09/07/8bfac456-2ef9-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html?hpid=z5

We of Riemannistan offer our unstinting solidarity to the oppressed rulers of Bir Tawil, and a big shout-out to lovely Princess Emily.

Her Royal (knee-)High(-to-a-grasshopper)ness

Princess Emily

~

Geopolitical ruminations

 

Initially, the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq) was nothing but a rump entity around Falluja, over-grandly calling itself an ‘emirate’.  Later, Fortuna smiling, it essayed a power-grab, re-styling itself ISIL, adding the Levant to its self-arrogated AOR.  Finally, having won de factor power in large swaths of both, is proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” (with ipso facto global pretentions).

It now strikes us that we of Riemannistan have been overly modest.

At present, Riemannistan consists of no more Married People’s Circle, together with all the lawns and dwellings appurtenant thereto.  But now we proclaim our dominion over:

  (1) the woods behind our present demesne, stretching all the way down to the Lake.

  (2)  We extend our sway to the lowly kuffar of Chunky Chipmunk Lane in toto, not excluding backyard hottubs, tacky lawn-ornaments, and what-have-you.  Its denizens are now our serfs.

  (3) The adjacent cul-de-sacs  we do not directly claim, but graciously leave them sub-enfeoffed to their present tenants, against payment of a suitable jizya.

  (4) The surrounding town, together with all the highways and interstates leading thereto, are hereby proclaimed lord's waste, and may continue to serve at our pleasure, as thoroughfares and pasture lands.

Riemannistan expands  its global reach

[Update]

The bozo who heads up Boko (al-Haraam `alay-hi), recently posted a video

   Boko Haram Declares A New Caliphate In NorthEastern Nigeria

which was reported as being his declaration of yet another Caliphate -- obviously inspired by our example.  However, as the Long War Journal correctly pointed out, Bozo here uses neither the terms ‘Caliph/Caliphate’ (khalîfah/khilâfah) nor ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (amîr al-mu’minîn).

It’s pretty funny.   In it, he brandishes a sort of wand or sceptre or phallic symbol, waving it to emphasize his vocal bursts;  and then, unexpectedly, stops talking for a bit while he …inserts it into his mouth, and cleans his teeth with the thing!  
 (It was traditional, among the Beduin, to clean the teeth with a toothpick;  but this thing’s humongous, and it’s weird to see him interrupt his own speech  to attend to his toiletries.)

~ For a glimpse of Dr Justice  in his pre-Caliphal days, click here. ~

[Update 10 March 2015]  In a late-breaking development,  Tony’s Pizza has just sworn allegiance to the People’s Caliphate of Riemannistan.   In return,   we shall be ordering-out from Tony’s only, to the complete exclusion of Pietro’s Italian Pies, which has pledged fealty to the infidels of Chunky Chipmunk Lane (may the heavens smite their hatchbacks).

.

“Why is there Something rather than Nothing, Grandpa?”

            That there is Something rather than Nothing, is possibly Necessary, if only in a philosophically rather trivial or anyhow tricky sense: If there were nothing, we wouldn’t be here to observe the nada (this is the Weak Anthropic Principle). But that there is This Something, rather than Some Other Something,  is quite possibly contingent (though the Strong Anthropic Principle would deny that).

            Take for instance the puzzling asymmetry of matter & anti-matter. It would be nice to have a principled explanation of this -- certainly we have heard special-pleading unprincipled ones --  but maybe there isn’t any.  Maybe God just got a little careless with the safety scissors that day, when he was cutting the cosmic cardboard.  He’d meant to slice it straight down the middle but --- oh well… And on to other projects. 

            (Physicists dignify this phenomenon with a poignant designator: “broken symmetry”.  Sounds so sad.  In layman’s terms, that means:  a coin-flip.)

            The concrete, particular cosmos in which we temporarily find ourselves, need no more directly or insightfully reflect the creative, ontological ultimate ground thereof, than the particular grit and consistency of the wafer, gives a hint of the Real Presence.  C.S. Lewis [and others before him? Aquinas?  References please!] compares our worm’s-eye view here below  to looking at a woven carpet from the wrong side.  There is some correlation (in all the wretched hernia-like loops and stitches) with the true pattern, but not much, and you’ll never figure out which bits give a hint and which are noise.  The force of the metaphor only grows, when you consider that reality’s carpet is not flat, but fills all of Hilbert space (at the very least; we are ignoring gravity), and with patterns not specifically tailored to the cerebral convolutions or lack thereof, of this species or that:  the human, the simian, the humble woodchuck.

            Indeed, we ourselves (for all our pathetic stupidity)  may perchance be one of the more Necessary things about it.  With so much Mind on the loose in the multiverse, it may be but natural that some of it would, so to speak, condense out here and there, into rational creatures.  We are like droplets on God’s windowpane.

            There is a popular industry of spewing out books for the general reader, focusing on black holes, or big bang, or the ill-named Theory of Everything, and deducing – well, not actually deducing anything, but sort of gasping in front of the black backdrop, then putting in a plug for God.  As though He cared more for black holes than for blackheads.  We may call this “physics porn”.

            Lately, the situation in physics has got even worse, with the dreadful possibility (and it is a possibility) of a ‘multiverse’ in any of several senses.   There has been some loose talk about “the Landscape”, as though that  were a neat discovery rather than the reduction of the reductionist program to near nullity -- and recent loose talk from Stephen Hawking to the effect that the new Phlabby Physics, as we shall call it (anything can happen anywhere, the basic constants set randomly differently in each separate universe) shows that “science makes God unnecessary”.   The danger is rather that Landscape physics will make physics unnecessary, or pointless.   As physicist Burton Richter said recently, the  Landscape approach means that physicists have “given up.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.” 

-- This just in, a useful corrective:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/01/06/world/europe/news-us-pope-bigbang.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

On this Landscape question, Hawking notwithstanding, I’ll go with the Pope.

What is particularly irksome is that these New Nihilists are attempting to dress up what is essentially an impasse in physics (see our post below, “Truth Decay”), into some new advance, that solves the old problems of Being and God.   Let us satirize the situation with a parable:

            It was observed that a certain bird, known as the Woodpecker, pecks wood.  No-one knew why this was so.  Perhaps it needs to keep its bill from getting too long, the way pet rodents will gnaw and gnaw for dental hygiene.  Perhaps it likes the sound this makes, and is attempting to stake out territory or attract a mate.  Or maybe it just hates trees.

            Scientists took two different routes to a solution.

            (1) The Naturalist, by patient observation over many years, discovered that tiny creatures live hidden beneath the bark.  By pecking, the bird can reach these and eat them.

            (2)  The Landscape Biologist, with a grand wave of the hand, explains that while, locally, Woodpeckers peck, in the next forest over, he imagines they do not, but rather roller-skate; and in the next, they play the ukele.  Problem solved.   Oh and plus -- bonus result -- there is no Creator, because who would create anything so stupid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Addendum:

Re broken symmetry:

Such, in effect, is Hume's fantasy, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

[continued here]

[Update]  A rather mournful meditation on the multiverse (by Alan Lightman)  here.

[Update 7 April 2012]  For the views on the subject, by physicist Lawrence Krauss, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/too-much-of-nothing-updated.html

[Update April 2014]  Jim Holt has written a whole book upon the subject.  We examine it here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/minimalism-vs-nihilism.html