Switzerland and Thought

 Noticed the other day in Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937:

I spent the evening with Pellegrini, the painter, Dürr, the writer, and Oeri, the editor of the Basler Nachrichten. Dürr advanced, clearly and fascinatingly, the theory that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Jacob Burkhardt, Gottfried Keller, Jeremias Gotthelf, Nietzche, Gobineau, and all the rest of the great intellectuals active in Switzerland around the middle of the nineteenth century (Gobineau was a legation counsellor at Berne) were pushed into aversion to democracy and conversion to an aristocratic philosophy of life by the spectacle presented by the victory of Swiss democracy.  1831 saw the beginning in Switzerland of a cultural levelling process which lasted until about 1875 and produced to a varying degree detestation, fear, hate, and contempt among all these men. The lower middle class, which mistook its semi-education for culture, came to power and pushed the old, highly cultivated patrician families aside. Switzerland thus forestalled developments all over Europe. at the same time there arose in the cantons petty tyrants who pursued a harsh, ruthless rule on the lower-middle-class's behalf. Since then Switzerland has become conservative.

I was very interested by this exposure of where the roots of Nietzche's 'Superman' concept and his hostile attitude toward democracy lie, and secondly, to learn that they did not derive from purely idealistic notions but were the upshot of political experience and factional sympathies aroused by his Swiss environment.

(Entry of Thursday, 21 July 1927)

 Dürr is not further identified, that I can see. Ian Buruma provides many illuminating notes, but not on Dürr.

At the Strand

 Last weekend, we were in New York, and I had a quick look at The Strand. I'd have had a longer look, had I been clearer on the geography of Manhattan--I thought that 5th Avenue was west of Broadway at 12th Street, which is not so. In the few minutes I had, I saw nothing that I really needed.

On my way out of the store, I heard an exclamation from a young woman who had just found a book she wanted on the $3 outside carts. She was even more delighted when she discovered that the book was signed by the author. Her friend took a couple of pictures showing her holding it up. I wish that I could remember book or author: I think that the book had to do with circumstances of women, perhaps of young women, perhaps of young women of color. I'm glad it found its way to the hands of someone who so much appreciated it.

Apologies to My ISP

Yesterday at work, I was surprised to see my browser balk at the certificate for a Yahoo.com URL. This led me to take a closer look: as earlier with my webmail, the certificate was issued by OpenDNS, the certifying authority was Cisco Umbrella. I checked with the network guys, and indeed Cisco Umbrella is doing some special handling with URLs not from a set of trusted domains.

I had not seen this particular bit of handling in quite a while. The way that it works apparently is that the firewall emulates a browser with the incoming data, accepting and unencrypting it. If the data is not judged malicious, the firewall passes it back along to the PC's browser. But in order to do so it must provide its own certificates, hence OpenDNS, certified by Cisco Umbrella.

I don't know that this is better than a simple block. Google Chrome gives explicit warnings about expired or bad certificates, and can be configured to refuse a connection to servers with bad certificates. At work, it is so configured.

I was wrong, therefore, to blame my ISP for my PC's refusal to connect to webmail this weekend.

Drive Through

 Our internet provider now has a certificate that my computer will accept, and I have been able to get back to the webmail pages. I found several days' worth of email, nearly all from the listserv.

One item in particular caught my eye: the church at the end of the street offered "the drive-thru imposition of ashes for Ash Wednesday". The email explained that this was an innovation from the pandemic, i.e. Lent 2021, which I suppose made sense then. The church is a Mosaic Church, an offshoot of the Southern Baptist Church according to Wikipedia. I had not known that the Baptists had ever gone in for the imposition of ashes.

There are few enough physical needs that can't be served in drive-through fashion in the United State: alcoholic beverages, bank transactions, coffee, groceries, and fast food are among them. This was the first I heard of a religious ministry served that way.

Certificates

Our internet-service provider (ISP) gives us an email account, which we use mostly for the neighborhood listserv. Yesterday, it became inaccessible, for the web server has an invalid certificate. Chrome says

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

and curl says

curl: (60) schannel: SEC_E_UNTRUSTED_ROOT (0x80090325) - The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.

Yesterday I explained this to a support staffer at the ISP. This was not something she could diagnose or fix, and I did not suppose that it would be. Still, I wanted it brought to the attention of those who could correct the certificates. The certificates are not fixed, though I'm sure she did her best to report the error. The last one in the chain expires today, but I have no confidence that the one that replaces it will be better. It could be a week or so before I can log in to the webmail page without telling a browser to ignore errors.

 Bad certificates happen, and I've let one or two linger a day or two past expiration date. Still, it amazes me than an ISP would let this happen.

Roger Schank, RIP

 The New York Times this week carried an obituary of Roger Schank, who taught and wrote on artificial intelligence for many years. I never read his more technical work, unless an excerpt or two, but he wrote books for the general reader also. Of those, I read and enjoyed The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind and Tell Me a Story. The first, as I recall, got a favorable review from the critic Hugh Kenner.

Crows

 Yesterday I saw a crow perched on the edge of our birdbath. He was facing away from the water, looking southeast, perhaps at one of the neighborhood cats. I was surprised at how big he was.

In the early 1990s, crows were very common in the Washington area. I saw many in Wheaton, where we then lived. A stand of trees near Rockville Pike and Randolph Road, a few miles away, was said to house 500,000 of them. The number looked implausible on paper, but if you happened to be in that area about sunset, and see the dense stream of crows approaching it, you could believe it. Then about 2000 West Nile virus arrived, and devastated the crows. It was at least ten years before I started to see them again.

At some point in the late 1800s, John Hay wrote the poem "Crows at Washington", which includes the lines

 The dim, deep air, the level ray
Of dying sunlight on their plumes,
 Give them a beauty not their own;
Their hoarse notes fail and faint away;
 A rustling murmur floating down
Blends sweetly with the thickening glooms;
They touch with grace the fading day,
 Slow flying over Washington.
 

As far as I know, John Hay and John Quincy Adams were the only men ever to publish their poems and serve as U.S. Secretary of State. Of Adams's verses I have seen little, and that satirical. I was not impressed by what I have seen of Hay's Pike County Ballads, which achieved some fame. Yet the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online site quotes a story saying that George Eliot found one of them deeply moving.