“Like Beads on a String”

Kurt Vonnegut

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Living With the Mau Mau

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Mau Mau Terrorists in Kenya

Things change. I remember during the 1950s reading horror stories of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. There were ghastly tales of what the Kikuyu were doing to British settlers. Around the same time, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was taking place. I still remember reading—was it in The Reader’s Digest?—of the Communist Secret Police (the dread AVO) taking captured Budapest prisoners and grinding their living bodies into hamburger meat. For themselves? To feed to their pets?

Not too much time passed before Jomo “Burning Spear” Kenyatta, one of the leaders of the Mau Mau, was named President of an independent Kenya in 1964. Then, after the Hungarian Revolution was ground into goulash by the Russian Tanks of Nikita Khruschchev, Hungarian President János Kádar developed a reputation as being one of the most enlightened Communist satellite leaders—without in any way sacrificing his Marxist/Leninist credentials.

We are perhaps facing a similar situation with the changes wrought by the Arab Spring. Groups that had been associated with terrorism may perhaps turn out to be our Middle East allies of tomorrow:

Amid chaos and uncertainty, the Islamists alone offer a familiar, authentic vision for the future. They might fail or falter, but who will pick up the mantle? Liberal forces have a weak lineage, slim popular support, and hardly any organizational weight. Remnants of the old regime are familiar with the ways of power yet they seem drained and exhausted. If instability spreads, if economic distress deepens, they could benefit from a wave of nostalgia. But they face long odds, bereft of an argument other than that things used to be bad, but now are worse.

These are the observations of Hussein Agha and Robert Malley writing in the November 8, 2012, issue of The New York Review of Books in their excellent article “This Is Not a Revolution.”

 

Watering the Forests of the Northeast

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Forest in Maine

To return for a moment to my recent vacation, one thing I forgot to tell you was that I had forgotten to pack one of my diabetes medications, namely the Metformin HCL. One result was that, even taking insulin, my glucose reading was running rather high (in the 300s). Apparently, when that happens, I have to urinate frequently, about every thirty to forty-five minutes.

While Martine was driving toward the end of our vacation, I felt as if I had to stop by every other tree in the forests of New Brunswick and Maine to water it. That got particularly difficult when there was a chain-link fence separating me from the trees, making it difficult to disguise my actions from other motorists.

That last day from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Manchester, New Hampshire, was definitely the worst. Not only did I have to have Martine stop the car ten to twenty times, but there was a driving rainstorm once we passed Augusta.

Somehow I survived. As soon as we returned to Los Angeles, I started on the Metformin at once. Within a few days, the readings had declined to an acceptable level; and I no longer had to evaluate the cover possibilities of nearby trees.

I can tell you, I left a part of myself in the Northeast,

Exit David Petraeus

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David Petraeus

I am curiously torn about David Petraeus, who just resigned his post as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after admitting to an affair with another woman. This is not standard operating procedure in American political life. Usually, it is preceded by a sleazy denial, which nobody believes. And then there is an onslaught from the media, who troll for salacious details damaging to everyone involved, their families and friends.

No, either the General is a compulsive truth-teller or he is afraid of being blackmailed. Let me see, are there any compulsive truth-tellers in the military or political arenas? I suspect not. It’s too radical an idea for now.

As I said at the outset, I am of two minds about Petraeus. On one hand, he was appointed by George W. Bush, which immediately made me suspect him at the outset. At the same time, he is probably the most effective U.S. military leader since World War II. He reminds me of another general, some sixteen hundred years ago, who administered a decisive defeat to Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in A.D. 451. Flavius Aetius (396-454) was called “The Last of the Romans” for his victory.

Could Petraeus have won in Iraq and Afghanistan? I doubt it, because the enemy is hydra-headed. There are so many warlords and involved parties that, when one was beheaded, others would spring up. Remember when we killed the head of Al Qaida in Iraq? That didn’t accomplish anything in the long run. He was simply replaced. There are plenty more cockroaches-in-waiting to assume the job.

Edward Gibbon called Aetius “the man universally celebrated as the terror of Barbarians and the support of the Republic.”

In general, our times keep reminding me of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Today’s Los Angeles Times predicted that the Chinese economy would overtake us within four years. Oh horrors! (Not that it matters: By then China will be a polluted, smoking ruin from ignoring certain simple responsibilities of governance.) What with global climate change and the staggering world economy, there is an end-times feel to the decade. Not that we won’t somehow prevail in the end by dumb luck or changing our behavior.

Men like David Petraeus are rare in our society. Too bad.

A Classification of Animals

Mythical Animal

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”

On Suffering

Thomas Merton

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.—Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

The Biggest Losers

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Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands Corporation

Millions of dollars were all but thrown away by many of America’s most wealthy right-wingers. Heading up the list is Sheldon Adelson of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Out of $53 million he injected into the 2012 election, his only winner was a minor Michigan ballot initiative. If his political investments were race horses, they were mostly glue factory material.

Remember Karl Rove, whom George W. Bush nicknamed “Turd Blossom”? He came a cropper with his American Crossroads Super PAC, which spent $103 million in attack ads with a paltry 1% success rate. And here we thought the man was invincible, instead of being just another reputation on the rocks.

It is possible that the Citizens United decision which opened the political contribution floodgates did more of a disservice to American millionaires than it did to the electoral process. You may recall from several of my recent posts that I thought all this political advertising would ultimately be regarded as mere noise in the system which voters would just tune out. That is a typical American failing: If something works once, say the Willy Horton ads that sank Michael Dukakis’s campaign for President in 1988, that doesn’t mean that a thousand-fold increase in negative advertising will bear a thousand times as much in the way of results.

No, there are limits. You know that I don’t listen to political advertising at all. I even throw out all the political bulk mail I get without reading it. For me, information is not something I am force-fed, but something I go out and actively seek, carefully judging the accuracy of the source.

So now there are quite a few millionaires out a lot of money. I’m sure they’re on the horn with their accountants right now trying to figure out how to expense their contributions so that they won’t have to pay so much in taxes. I frankly hope they get audited and convicted. The jerks!

Papa Bear Gets It Right

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“Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly

The nickname is from Stephen Colbert, who has occasionally had him on as a guest on his Comedy Central show. In all the media and political verbiage being flung back and forth yesterday, he made probably the most accurate statement of why Obama won last night: “It’s not a traditional America any more…. The White Establishment is now a minority.”

While O’Reilly meant that in the most rueful way possible, it’s what I have been saying for years. The whole Conservative political movement in the United States has been driven by aging Whites, many of whom feel disenfranchised and alienated. They tend to be either rich (a small minority of them), or small businessmen who made it big at one time and are now facing an attrition of their past gains, or poor and wanting to identify with the rich. In any case, they are not young. If they have any children, there’s no guarantee that their children are either numerous or politically in step with their parents.

Even though I am White, I am part of that new America that O’Reilly decries. I am not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP); nor am I Scotch-Irish; nor am I a member of any other demographic cohort that runs with the Right Wing. I am a White Hungarian Renegade Catholic (WHRC) with Black, Latino, and Asian sympathies.

When I used to work with census data at Urban Decision Systems some twenty years ago, I saw the handwriting on the wall for the White political establishment.

The Handwriting on the Wall

Over the next decade or so, most of the Tea Party recidivists will either die out or enter nursing homes. Those who remain will be increasingly irrelevant in the face of a demographic groundswell for those who had, until lately, been lumped together as “minorities.” In Los Angeles, it is the Whites who are in the minority. And, really, it’s not so bad as all that.

It has always been the fate of political establishments to be supplanted. Remember the Irish immigration of the 1830s and 1840s? Then it was the “Yellow Peril” when people feared being replaced by Chinese coolies who were brought in to work on the railroads. Then it was the turn of us Eastern Europeans later in the 19th and early 20th centuries as they arrived to escape political and religious persecution. Then it was the turn of the Mexicans.

Somehow, enough always remains of America to be worthwhile, even if there is a slightly darker shade of skin, an epicanthic fold about the eyes, or broken English. Hell, I didn’t even know the English language existed until I showed up in kindergarten. (That was just before the days of a TV set in every home.)

So yesterday I called it right. I thought Obama would win. And I think we all will win in the long run as a result. Don’t worry about me becoming an embittered Conservative complaining about the relentless tides of change. That’s what life is all about.

 

 

This Is the Day

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This Says It All About U.S. Elections

I was surprised, but at the same time gratified, to see about 150 people in line ahead of me when I showed up at 7:15 am—just a quarter of an hour after the polls opened—to cast my ballot. Needless to say, I voted against Mitt Romney and whatever issues and candidates the Koch Brothers and their nefarious ilk supported.

For me, the 2012 Election is over. I’ll check the Internet a few times this evening to see how things are going, looking anxiously over my shoulder to make sure there is no last-minute groundswell of support for Conservative candidates.

Tomorrow morning, I will know whether we will be relatively safe for the next four years under the mercurial “Bronco Bama” or whether I will have to join the disloyal opposition and bullyrag my Senators and Congressman into doing to the Romnesiac what Boehner and McConnell have been doing to Obama since he took office. And I’ll want to see birth certificates and baptismal certificates for Romney and his wife and dog: We don’t want no polygamite Messicans taking over our fair land.

You can probably guess that, if Romney should win, you will see me doing more blog entries in protest of what I can guess will be some pretty objectionable government policies. And I will certainly foment class warfare against Right Wing billionaires.

Frankly, I would just as soon write about some great literature I’ve read, neat places Martine and I have visited, and maybe some personal reminiscences of my past. If you haven’t voted yet, you can save me from becoming politically radicalized by voting Democratic wherever possible. You don’t want to do that, don’t you?

The above Cartoon is a classic from the New Yorker.

 

A Downside to Superfast Computers

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Chip for a Dwave Quantum Computer

There is one possible downside to having a superfast quantum computer such as the one envisioned by Nobel Prizewinners Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland. Right now, your secure websites are protected by passwords that, for the present level of technology, are good enough to avoid cracking by other PCs.

But what if a strong password such as recommended by Microsoft isn’t good enough for a supercomputer that is thousands of times faster than the fastest PCs? In that case, if the hacker has access to one of these quantum computers, even a strong password may not be enough. Perhaps the next step is what Bank of America is doing right now: namely, asking you a question whose answer has been predetermined by you and requiring a strong password as well. Perhaps some websites may ask you a whole string of questions.

Eventually, keeping tabs on a whole plethora of passwords will become a far more tricky task than it is now. There may be whole strings of passwords which are too complicated to be remembered directly by any human. What to do? You can perhaps put them in an Excel file on your computer which is itself passworded,

In any case, as usual, the more things advance, the more complicated they become.