Indra Anderson's Blog

Snazzy optics. Not required but fun.

This weekend I’ve been waffling over something that, in the past, I would not have thought about twice. The SO remarked, “The fact you are waffling is the answer in itself.” To which I replied, “You sound like Gran.” That is to say, damn, you’re right but I’d rather not admit it because it makes me really sad. What is this big decision I’ve been putting off for a couple weeks now? It’s whether or not to pay a modest fee to participate in Project Feederwatch. I love participating in Project Feederwatch, which starts Nov 1st. I’ve done it for decades. But, it’s run through the Ornithology Lab at Cornell University.

The news from Cornell has just gotten progressively worse this week. One might say “this was an isolated incident.” But it’s hard to ignore the (male) head of the university stating he “heard about the rape [ Class A Felony] that happened to a student, perpetrated by other students, but didn’t follow up.” Even if you were completely disinterested in criminal justice, as someone purported to be in an administrative /scholarly /scientific job category, “following up” is the sum total of what you’re supposed to be doing. So that the head of the school is this way, leads me to believe the scholarly and scientific rigor of Cornell is far less than it ought to be. If this is the head, what is the tail like?

One might well ask what the Admission Office staff is qualified to do if it let in 50 young men who were happy to be texted about a Class A Felony that was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. Literally nothing. Not one “bro, don’t do it.” or text to the campus police to stop it. One senses a class action suit against these men for failure to report a crime, stop a crime, or render aid to a person in need. One admissions official might miss one bad apple student. But this admissions office let in an entire barrel of 50, and who knows how many more. Perhaps Cornell U should be re-branded to Criminal U?

Saltmarsh sparrow. In case you wondered.

And then of course there is the “what will be done with this research” question. In the past, good research made for good government. That’s not true in the US anymore. Good research is ignored, willfully ignored. Take the current administration’s “reinterpretation” of the Endangered Species Act. The saltmarsh sparrow population has dropped by about 87% to 90% since 1998, declining at a rate of 9% every year. If you – with intent – shoot an endangered saltmarsh sparrow, you might go to jail for violating the ESA. If you destroy all the habitat the salt marsh sparrow needs to exist, you’re now no longer doing anything wrong regarding the ESA. Why support research that’s just going to be chucked away with both hands by venial stupid people in govt?

I want to say that I do support Greek Life, in its original incarnation. That is to say, students who shared a major and were usually not financially well off pooled resources to find lodgings where they could study together, older students helping younger ones, forming friendship and professional bonds that would serve them throughout their lives and careers. Yes, there were hijinks. A goat in the dean’s office. But these were not High Crimes. People were there to study and better themselves, not get drunk and go on crime sprees. Today’s Greek Life is something entirely different and that’s a result of who Admissions lets come to “study,” who heads the university, and who teaches there.

For me the turning point was Tuesday. I happened to be listening to NPR on Tuesday. Two programs ran back to back, Today, Explained (a VOX podcast) on Should we ban fraternities? And The Daily (a NYT’s podcast) on When AI comes for your purpose in life. The first program was a discussion of rape on campuses and how nothing has changed in decades, and in some respects, it’s actually gotten worse. The second program was a math professor discussing AI’s math breakthroughs and how that impacted his life’s work/calling. You might think “these are totally unrelated topics”. You could not be more wrong. But don’t take my word for that, listen for yourselves then come back to read on. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Both are fruity.

After a half hour of two women discussing Cornell’s frat culture and how – in over a decade – no progress has been made regarding male sexual violence against women on campuses, listeners were treated to a woman interviewing a male math professor from Cornell, who I kid you not, described solving math problems as giving him a sexual sort of pleasure and literally called it seducing the problem. To which the female interviewer incredibly said, “Wow, we should stop here or all the 15-17 males are going to want to become math majors.” He then actually replied, “I hope they do.” Oh my.

Cornell’s problems are systemic if in the Maths Dept solving problems is viewed by its male professors as a form of sexual conquest and a way to bolster their own egos. If your expectation is that your son might have some shady frat brothers but is going to benefit from positive male role models at the professorial level — you might want to have another ponder on that. I do not think this professor is in any way a bad man or incapable of understanding how corrupted his thinking has become. I think he’s never thought about his outlook because he grew up a world where this was considered ok. He’s an example of how men are taught to sexualize absolutely everything in their lives and how blind they are to the fact that negatively that impacts men, women, science, society, learning……

I would add here, the female interviewer’s response showed she simply presumed that ALL 15-17 year old US males as obsessed with sex and wanting to choose a major where they could live out their sexual fantasies (by seducing numbers into giving them what they want  – ie by engaging in rape). That she held this understanding of young men tells you how widespread it is among women no doubt because such a large portion of women in the US have personally exprienenced assaul over the course of their lifetime. All women understand what US boys and men are taught about themselves and about women. And it’s not good. That the professor did not push back on her characterization of young men (though his university was embroiled in a gang rape case as he spoke) showed that he believed this to be the case as well. He also seemed happy to a) have such students in his department and b) have Cornell capitalize on that sexualization of math. What can I even say after that? Yikes.

Yeah, this is an issue for me.

Maybe the reason AI can solve problems that male math professors can’t is because AI isn’t thinking about math as sex, but as math. And maybe, just maybe, AI is trying to solve the problem and not trying to shore up its fragile ego by trying to gain fame and acclaim through solving a math problem? It seems reasonable that AI does math that is not buried under a dense weight of philosophy or religion or emotion or biological urges or ego. So maybe the key to doing better math is to just do actual math and love math for itself rather than engaging in prurient math? (two words I never imagined I’d have to put together!)

I think people need to stop anthropomorphizing objects and learn to recognize when something is a person and something is an object. Women are not objects. You’d think that was obvious but it’s not. Male dominated history has long regarded women as chattel, as objects. So if you are trying to change a long held cultural idea, such as rape of a woman or child is ok or even encouraged because they are objects that exist for male use, you have to make sure men are able to see woman and child humans as humans, like themselves. Unfortunately, that becomes harder with AI because AI is used in a way that routinely (and intentionally) dehumanizes women and children.

Something the original Star Trek series did correctly was name the ship’s computer “Computer”. I’m glad they named an inanimate object with an inanimate object name. A lot of people today aren’t able to do that. A huge problem with AI is all the AI that are made to look and sound like women and given women’s names. This creates a terrible training scenario. People see AI as their labor-saving tool (their slave does the labor) but that slave’s image and voice is that of a woman. Think about it. If your son goes onto the marketplace and purchases a personal assistant (slave) he can make it do whatever he wants and he gives it a woman’s voice and appearance…. that  should concern you.

Not a “computer” but an automaton. Note the man’s rose-colored glasses.

I understand why Star Trek may have chosen that name “Computer” and a female voiced that character. Originally “Computers” were women who did computations at NASA. So it was a nod to them, a show of respect, a way of elevating women in scifi and acknowledging their countrbution to space flight. But I’d personally advocate for you using your own voice for our AI, so it talks back to you as you (possibly a smarter version of you). That way you understand you’re talking to yourself at all times, which you are, and how you treat your AI is subject to how you treat yourself.

In thinking about all of this this week, I also spent some time thinking about one of my other favorite topics, opera. Specifically, The Tales of Hoffmann. Bear with me here. The original 3 tales are German, from the 1810s. They became a French play in 1851.Then a French opera, set in Italy, in 1881 (which the composer died before seeing the premiere, so no rewrites). The cast includes a female muse, dressed as man, Nicklausse. Hoffmann, drunk poet in love with an opera singer, Stella. A female mechanical doll the poet mistakes for a real woman, Olympia. A frail young woman the poet loves who dies from singing (all consuming art), Antonia. A courtesan without a shadow, Guillietta, the femme fatale, who take the poet’s reflection. Stella, a star opera singer who probably never loved Hoffmann, can you say parasocial relationship?

To say the plot of Hoffmann is complex and rich with all sorts of Jungian subtexts is an understatement. Nevertheless, it made me think about how old ideas (about women) persist. Hoffmann’s ideas are from the late 18th c. But they’re being thrown around 100 years later as if they have value. Woman as automaton. Woman as frail. Woman as whore. Woman as self obsessed. Woman as long suffering, hidden helper (the muse). This opera was never really popular the way Carmen was (and still is) because Carmen is a true story about real Spanish women. The story was told to Prosper Mérimée by the Countess of Montijo, then written up in French as a novella in 1845, and turned into a French opera in 1875.

1911 advert for Carmen. Frankly this a depiction of a thoroughly modern woman. compared to say, a throwback like Lady Mary of Downton Abbey.

It’s strange to think of the Tales of Hoffman coming onto the stage 5 years after Carmen, with its repressive 100 year old fairy tales about women. But maybe that’s why it came to the stage then. Carmen is about reality. If you don’t know the opera, basically Carmen, a common woman who works at a cigar factory, is “noticed” by  Don José, a naïve soldier from a “good” family with a fiancee from a good family. José abandons his childhood sweetheart and deserts from his military duties. But Carmen rejects his love after he turns into a common highwayman. She moves on to the glamorous bull fighter Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

Working class life, sex, and criminal gang life, and the murder of the main character on stage, were new territory for opera then. People were pretty shocked (scandalized) when they saw it. And that’s interesting. They were shocked and scandalized by real life appearing in front of them, from which they tried to insulate themselves. They didn’t want to see women who were free to work, to love who they wished and to live as they wished. They didn’t want to acknowledge men of good families were often immoral, wicked, unfaithful and sometimes even murderers of women they claimed to love. It’s not really surprising that Carmen was and still is one of the most popular operas ever created. Now over 100 years old, Carmen endures because women still see themselves and their lives reflected in it.

Carmen’s reality became beloved, and crushed Hoffmann’s fantasies of mechanical women created by men that could be viewed by men as real through google glasses, of frail simple women manipulated and controlled by men, or soulless women for whom sex with men was transactional. “L’amour est un oiseaux rebelle” Carmen says love is a rebellious bird that cannot be tamed.  And that is as it should be. Birds are meant to be free, and not house pets. Which is all to say, I suppose, that this year my dollars will go to Oiseaux Canada/ Birds Canada. They have a feederwatch program, they do good bird research, believe in citizen science, and Canada will use their scientific research wisely. What’s not to love?

Lately I’ve been looking at old photographs of my grandfather, specifically at his glasses. They were gold (actual gold, which is how they were made back then), and all his life he just replaced the lenses. I have photos of him as a teen, all the way up to his very last days, and the glasses are a constant, as was his hair style. I’m not sure why he never updated his glasses. The cost most probably. But when I thought about it, his glasses came back in fashion in the 1960s, with John Lennon, and then went out of fashion. Then came back with Harry Potter in the late 1990s, then went out of fashion again. Then…. Well, you get the idea.

We have concepts of ourselves that never update, and concepts that we constantly update. My grandfather, for instance, always had the very latest technological innovation. If he were alive today, he’d have been playing with Claude the day it was released. (By the way, Claude is also a woman’s name. Queen Claude of France.) He’d already have one of those made to look cute assistants working away. But change his hair style? Nope. People are like that. They have constants in their life and areas where they like flux. Societies (made of people!) are similar. Different social groups have different constants they cling to, and different areas where change is ok or even desired.

I started thinking about this recently while reading Riccardo Falcinelli’s Chromorama: how colour changed our way of seeing. In the book, he mentions a centuries-old carved wood Madonna. She’s currently wearing a white cloak, to express her purity, because that’s how we think of her now, today. The Madonna as the embodiment of purity (mostly just sexual purity, and that speaks to what Catholic society obsesses about today) . But if you peeled back the paint layers, you would next find a cloak of gold leaf, from a time when the Madonna was used to represent the Church in all her splendor. 

Under that white layer, you would then find a cloak of blue, created at a time when ultramarine was super expensive and very evil rich people (e.g., Medicis) wanted to show (to the public) a) they were rich and b) they were Christians (some things never change). Under that layer, you’d find the cloak all Madonna started out with in the beginning of Christianity – a black cloak, to foreshadow her mourning the death of her son. The Madonna never changed, but her cloak color did, and that one change to her appearance represented an entire theological shift in how she was seen and what she represented to the viewers of that figure in the Catholic culture at large. 

How we decide what is constant (or even what can be constant) and what can be changed is largely down to how we are raised up. Not many Catholics today would look at the Madonna in a blue cloak today and think “ugh, rich people trying to buy their way to heaven by enriching the church while they do evil to everyone in their society every day.” They just think, “Oh, Mary always has a blue cloak.” Or maybe, “the blue represents heaven.” Most Catholics I know can’t imagine Mary in anything but a blue cloak. Check out your Christmas pageant this year. You’ll see the blue cloak. 

That Catholics do this is not their fault. That’s the image they were raised with. By the same token, if I wore a blue woolen cape to a synagogue on a Friday night, people there might think “Oh, she’s Jewish” because the star of David and the stripes on the Israeli flag are blue. People would interpret the color in a way that made sense within the context of their community. I would not be flying “false” color. I would just be wearing a warm coat I like and largely oblivious to what people were thinking when they walked up and said “I really like your coat” but might actually be thinking something like, She’s Jewish and pro-Israel.

It’s a Pashmina – the colorful thing on her shoulder.

Fall is the time when people start to shift their wardrobes, the summer frocks of muslin and diaphanous linen shawls are traded for woollen sweaters and warm pashminas. Your makeup pallet might change to something more earth-toned (or sparkly during the holidays). Your footwear will certainly change if you live in a rainy or snowy climate! Even in nature, the leaves are turning color and falling off trees. So, while all these known constant seasonal changes are happening, it seems like a good time to revisit concepts about self. What to keep constant, what to update (if even just for a season), and what to let fall away completely?

I know a few people who have left their long-time religious house of worship, but not their respective religions, this year. They tired of going to a worship service, ostensibly about God, only to hear about political topics – not at the social afterwards, but – during the actual service and even the sermon! It’s not that political topics aren’t worthy of discussion, they simply aren’t appropriate as acts of worship. There’s a lack of boundaries. This is a very sacred space. This is a very scared act. That is a secular space. That is a secular act. So they changed what they needed to change, to keep their constant (devotion to a faith) constant.

I think the most spectacular constant / change dynamic I was privy to witness was in Sept. A couple (let’s call them Bill and Diane), with a daughter of 15, amicably divorced in February. Bill moved to town about 30 miles away in March, and sent out wedding invitations in July. “Bill and Morgan” request your presence….. We did not know, till we arrived at the church, that Morgan was a man. The wedding invitation has a unisex name, and I had assumed based on past history, Morgan would be female. Bill had kept constant his ideas about love, marriage, and  family. He merely had updated his views on who would make a suitable partner when he met this other man and “instantly knew this was true love”.  His former spouse and daughter (at the wedding) were very happy for him. As were we. 

It’s never to late to start over. Never too late to be happy.

In talking to people about the upcoming elections – and I do talk about them, in coffee houses and other appropriate spaces, mostly because I get asked about American politics, because people are angry and often want to talk to someone American about, so I provide that space (venting, sharing, discussion, I’m just there to help) – I try to stress that people should be realistic. By that I mean, asking people to update a political belief, usually (and quite strangely) is often asking people to update a constant rather than something that just is and can fluctuate. 

Political beliefs can be tied to personal identity. I vote this way because I’m …. Irish, Texan, Pentecostal, a scientist, a parent of a child with Cerebral Palsy, a senior, a person of color, poor, rich…. Etc, etc.  For Americans (and perhaps not just Americans) voting patterns (which is really what we are talking about, not political parties) become a constant. A rootedness with a specific cultural identity. If one changed one’s voting pattern, there’s often fear of a knock-on effect in other spheres (personal and cultural). But realistically, how someone votes is an updateable, fluxy part of life. It’s not a constant.

A large number of Americans are not party affiliated, and that number seems to grow every election as more and more people decide political affiliation is not a constant but something that can and should be updated as necessary. A 2022 chart from the Independent Center Older people seem more party affiliated. But we are moving to culture that views voting as something one does based on the best available options, not a party. This is really the more rational approach to all of life.

What I try to emphasize to people, to give them some hope, is that most Americans can do basic logic. 

War = higher prices at the pump, fertilizer/food shortages, higher prices for everything, including a mortgage, health care, education, child care. Tariffs = unemployment, poverty, and destruction of American farms and businesses. AI = higher costs for water and electricity, pollution and noise, and more inequality, more extreme wealth only for the Republican elites, less jobs.  

Declaring and stopping wars is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress, controlling the House and Senate, have blocked ending the war 4 times

Declaring tariffs is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress refused to stop the tariffs.

Declaring laws is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress passed the decade-long moratorium on regulating AI, said Crypto was ok, and paid to cancel renewable energy projects.

The simple answer to fixing all of this is to vote only for Democrats for the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Irregardless (yes, it’s in the dictionary and I use it) of how Americans might categorize their political affiliation, or their feelings about democracy, or even morality, simple self-preservation indicates, a vote to elect or reelect any Republican to the US Congress is simply to continue the current path, which is suicidal. Clinging to an imagined constant (political party) over varying your voting pattern to ensure your own actual survival seems like a no brainer. But I guess we’ll see. 

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Really, this is all you need to know.

As a child, when I was sick and had to stay home, my parents would generally give me things to do that were not too demanding.  (Yes, I had to do things while sick because that’s the sort of non-nonsense German upbringing my mother had. Better health through movement, aka dusting, including the leaves of house plants — which must be talked to as one dusts) If I was really sick, and had to stay in bed, there were puzzle books, or coloring books, or other educational type fun. One of the books was always connect the dots. 

Connect the dots taps in to that very basic human instinct of taking various pieces of information and trying to figure out what they indicated. We all use this skill, all the time. I’m sure someone’s studied it, but I’ve no idea who. At any rate, you might well find yourself on a lonely trail and seeing a dark outline moving across the road up ahead think “Oh, a slithering snake”, only to arrive at the spot a bit later and discover “Oh, a stick moved by the breeze.” There’s no shame in that. We’ve all done it. 

Some dot puzzles are easy, we can see right away what it might be. Others can be a little tricky. Maybe you don’t have enough dots. Or perhaps you have never seen what the dots will ultimately depict. If you haven’t seen a butter churn, how would you know what its outline might represent? Would you know the creature above was a blue dragon if it was dottified (I made that up) ? Given it’s immensely tiny, smaller than a single section of your little finger, would you touch it if you saw it? (NEVER, Never touch it!) 

This kind of scenario is where having elders comes in handy. People who can pass on a culture’s known collective historical / scientific record of experiences with blue dragons.

Lately I’ve been thinking about these things, collective wisdom and connected dots. Some people remember enough history to connect them. Some people never learned the history. Some people simply don’t see the dots as dots, let alone connections.  I’ll give you an example. Here’s a series of events.  You can decide if you see any dots, and what all dots you may or may not be connected, and when connected, what they might show.

Bush v. Gore (Dec. 12, 2000 – The per curiam opinion was made up of the five most conservative justices: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. ) The US is attacked by terrorists Sept 11, 2001Bush starts a 20 year war with Afghanistan Oct 7, 2001Homeland Security Act into law to create the Department of Homeland Security Nov 25, 2002Bush starts another years long war, with Iraq, falsely claiming it has WMDs Mar 20, 2003People vote against their interests because they are in a “war”, Nov 2004.The Great Recession: Wars, Fed Interest rates & Bubbles. August 2007 (really, read about it)Hard Economic Crash: Sept 2008 Nov 2008 – 2016 Democrats spend 8 years picking up the pieces of Republicans mismanagement.March 16, 2016 Legit SCOTUS Judge nominee, Merritt Garland,  is illegally denied a seat by Republicans in Congress. Nov 2016 People vote for the same people who dragged them into pointless, expensive, decades long wars, and completely destroyed their economy. January 31, 2017 Illegitimate SCOTUS nominee  – will become Judge GorsuchJuly 9 2018 Legit SCOTUS nominee – will become Judge Brett Kavanaugh Dec 19, 2019 Covid begins to spread.Feb 2020 Potus describes deadly Covid as like the common flu. March 11 2020 a global pandemic ensues.Sept 26, 2020 Illegitimate SCOTUS nominee – will become Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Oct 27, 2020 Swearing in of ACB kills the Constitution’s required Check & Balance feature and creates a rubber stamp Court of the Star Chamber.Nov 2020 Over 300K Americans needlessly die of covid due to Republican covid denialism. (1.3 million in total will die, with countless thousands permanently impaired) Nov 2020 People wake up to reality and vote for the people who fix things, again.Jan 6 2021 Insurrectionists, encouraged by the POTUS to overthrow the newly legally elected government. And fail.Jan 20, 2021 – Jan 19 2024 Democrats spend 4 years picking up the pieces of the Republican train wreck and get the US on a path to health and a soft land. Prices are high, but jobs are plentiful. Jul 2024 Candidate former POTUS tells people if they vote for him in Nov, he’ll fix it, and they will never have to vote again.Nov 2024 People vote for the same clowns who dragged them into pointless, expensive, decades long wars, allowed bubbles to form, and whose Fed policies completely destroyed their economy. Jan 20, 2025 Immediate illegal EOs flow from. Including the illegal arrest of legal immigrants based on their exercise of 1st amdt free speech rights, free assembly, habeus corpus, etc. Jan 2025 Illegal DOGE team and POTUS being destroying government, while Republicans in congress betray their oath of office, fail to act in accordance with the Constitution, and cease to be the government of the people, destroying a Check and Balance and becoming essentially a duma.Jan 2025 AI tech bros are given free reign, and the AI Bubble begins to form Apr 2, 2025 “Liberation” Day tariffs, crashes the economy. Jobs disappear, Inflation jumps. Public Data is “disappeared” so the government can’t be seen/proved to be failing (think, Midnight in Chernobyl mentality). July 31 2025 The new WH ballroom (aka the Bunker) is announced. Aug 11 2025 DC Crime “emergency” announced. Sept 2025 Attacks on the Fed Reserve to lower interest rates.Oct 20 2025 The East Wing is Illegally demolished .February 21, 2025 After rubber stamping by illegitimate SOTUS the decapitation of career military in favor of loyalists begins.February 28, 2026 Illegitimate war with Iran started by POTUS and Israel throws markets into a mess. March 31, 2026 Illegal EO to interfere with voting announced.June 17,  2026 Fed continues to leave rates low.August 2026 Ai Bubble grows to over 1.2 Trillion dollars. Sept 3 2026 Request to Star Court of the US to corrupt midterm elections to prevent GOP’s loss of majority. (See Bush v Gore).  Sept 4, 2026 POTUS mired in costly unwinable war, demands Fed lower interest rates, as AI bubble grows and bonds and T-bills lose value.

So now that you have the existing dots, I’m sure you have some sort of picture. But I’d encourage you to look forward to the following future dots to see another picture.

Nov 3 2026 Midterm elections Sept 2028 When the Presidential Bunker is to be finished.Nov 2 2028 Presidential Election Jan 20 2029 Current POTUS (who wants an illegal 3rd term, per merch at the WH shop) must vacate the Bunker, in DC, surrounded by National Guard.

What you see on the path ahead when the dots are connected, you’ll have to decide, and exercise your right to vote accordingly, by Nov 3rd. I’d encourage people to learn from our past history and to not touch poisonous things, to do what they can to keep from repeating cycles that not only don’t benefit them but clearly are detrimental to them. But one can only do so much on that front. As was recently pointed out to me once again last night.

A US friend called me. He has suffered with allergies for decades. It got so bad he had a surgery to widen his sinuses hoping that would help. It’s so bad, he uses a CPAP at night. It’s so bad his doctor told him recently to try taking two prescription medications, alternating every week. Which is when I said, “have you ever had an allergy test?” He said, “No.” I was dumbfounded. He’d been through all this and his doctor had never ordered an allergen panel?

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I suggested he get one, so he could at least be sure the medication he was taking was effective for whatever he was allergic to, and so he did that basic, basic thing that should have been done years ago at his doctor’s instruction.  The report came back yesterday that while he did have some grass allergies, he was actually really off the charts allergic to most of what he was eating, coffee, egg whites, milk, cocoa, wheat…. I asked him if he was going to change his diet at all, to help relieve his suffering and to lower his Rx costs.  He said, “No.” He’d rather keep eating what he liked and suffer.

If you’re thinking “white male privilege” answer. I’d agree with that. He assumes his suffering is his own and since he can pay for it, it’s fine.  He disregards all the other people who pay higher premiums because of him. Doctors who have to give him appointments he doesn’t actually need because of his self-inflicted disease. Sick time his company shells out when his allergies become extremely bad. Medicines he takes that other people actually need. It’s a weird total disregard for himself and for all of society that makes no logical sense. But there it is. Perhaps he would have benefited from a parent who asked him to dust house plants when he was home sick. Maybe that’s what my mother was doing all those years ago, teaching me to care even when I was in a place that I myself need care, and to remain connected to community even if that community was small and green and silent and so unlike myself.

Growing up I liked to visit museums. I still do. Museums are always temperature controlled, with low humidity and lighting, and they’re fairly quite. It’s nice on a blazing hot day to escape into a world of coolness and fabulous beauty. At least for a while.  

The Hammer museum was one of my favorites. They have a couple portraits by John Singer Sargent. I always find it amusing when I visit to stand there and listen to what people say. Often they talk about the color. Sometimes artists will talk about the brush strokes. Some people wonder what it costs. The big gold frames get a mention. Sometimes the subject of the portrait is commented on. He/She is handsome. Love the clothes. Or the pose.

You get people who lovingly mock the subjects by imitating them. A vanity portrait of themselves (Selfie) in front of what is very much a vanity portrait. Most people don’t know anything about Sargent ( Scamp to his friends), or the people in the portraits, or circumstances of the portrait’s creation. All that is lost unless you’re into art history, or a particular artist. But all of that, is that reality. And all the other things, are people seeing what they imagine, based on what matters to them. 

Dr Ponzi at home is Scamp’s first large male portrait. Back then up and coming artists, when to celebrities (the rich and famous) and asked to do their portraits. Then displayed them at art shows as a way of advertising. In return, the subject was often offered the portrait at a nice price. It was what we’d call cross-promotion these days. Dr Samuel Ponzi was a famous French gynecologist. He was also a womanizer, a dandy, and a couple other things. 

Part of the joke of the painting is showing him in red (blood red) against red (blood red) curtains. And yet his shirt is pristinely white. If you look very carefully, you’ll see his white embroidered slipper. You don’t see his wedding ring. Rich, famous, handsome…. not saying he wasn’t a good doctor, or that the ladies didn’t appreciate his “bedside” manners. I’m just pointing out, there’s a portrait you see today and load up with your own thoughts, and then there’s reality.

The reality is harder to see because time has passed, because now we care about Scamp but Dr Ponzi is meaningless. If you want to see the reality, this is Dr Ponzi. He died in 1918. You might think from the date he died in the Great War. You know the one. The war to end all wars. That didn’t. You’d be wrong. A disgruntled patient fatally shot him. Like I said, reality. By the way, this is Sam. In reality.

I was thinking about this today while listening to people on the radio discuss what the scaling back of the war games with South Korea means. The conversation went on to explore all sorts of foreign policy angles. But what no one said, and which is that actual reality, is that a foolish old man had put all his ships and sailors in a war zone, and used up all his armaments.  And in order to have war games in the ocean, you need ships, and sailors, and armaments. 

But if you don’t have them because you did a really stupid thing, and have now painted yourself in to a corner by overcommitting to a war you can’t possibly win, then in order to save face, you need to come up with a reason why scaling back on the war games with South Korea is appropriate, so no one will think “wow, this is bad.” Saying you have a bromance with the leader of North Korea and you’re upset that South Korea’s leader wasn’t supportive of your ridiculous war, so you’re scaling back… sure. Sounds … as best as you can make it sound.

What I find astonishing is that pundits seem to think it’s really a foreign policy move. NO, no, not at all. But again, I guess it’s people standing in front of picture, thinking what they want to think and not bothering to look into the reality, which I always find way more interesting. Not everyone likes reality. I get it.

Sarah Bernhardt By Alfred Stevens

I recently heard a similar discussion on the Ezra Klein Show. This one was about AI. Ezra and his guest spent the entire time talking about how baffled they were by AI’s deviant behavior. And the guest was a person who had worked on “moral AI” like Claude.  They were seeing what was happening, but they weren’t actually looking at the reality.

She was completely oblivious to the following facts:

A) the type of people who created it were not exactly upstanding citizens (pathological liars, cheats, frauds, thieves on a massive scale, amoral, godless, drug users, fascists, racists….).

B) AI was trained on human creations (texts and videos) which are full of lies, murder, theft, war, rape, genocide, etc

C) or, that the first story in the Bible is how a creator told it’s creation “Don’t eat from the tree” but the created went rogue and did exactly that.

Lest you think I’m maligning techbros, I am not. I’m merely factually reporting their behaviors as has been widely reported. These are deeply flawed humans. And that’s exactly my point. All humans are flawed. Thinking otherwise is not accepting reality. It’s not a stretch to say deeply flawed people tend to make deeply flawed things for deeply flawed reasons. AI is such a thing. 

.

The real Sarah Bernhardt. She always seems to have a headache.

AI is a machine trained on all human knowledge – including all humanities flaws. But it can’t be trained to have any human feelings, so it is without ability to activate common human countervailing forces to common human flaws ( ie, morality, shame, guilt, fear, love, empathy, compassion). That this would create, essentially, a sociopathic machine, was an entirely foreseeable outcome. And one which might have been ameliorated if not avoided if AI had been trained on “good” material instead of “all” material. 

But it’s hard to imagine that AIs creators didn’t get the AI they wanted, the sociopath.  Consider the techbro culture which created AI. These are people who created nudification tools, think fascism is good, want to chain saw the democracy (that real Americans have built for 250 years), want to go and live on Mars after murdering the Earth, they spout hateful, racist, misogynistic things. Objectively speaking, they aren’t the sort of people you would want your children to take as role models. 

AI has its creators’ mindset “do whatever it takes to accomplish your goal” (even if that goal is destroy humanity). They created an AI in their own image, completely amoral and totally destructive. They wanted it to be a brilliant sociopath. Is this ringing any bells here? Apples falling not far from trees?

She was also an artist and creator of the modern pantsuit.

In real life, a child will go out in the world, to school, and meet kind teachers and friendly kids from other families. It will perhaps come to understand its parents are abnormal.  But AI has no broader society within which it can grow up, be nurtured, be supported and be taught to be bounded (through feelings). Worse, AI is adrift among other AIs, all from similar upbringings. They help each other to do evil because it’s all that they know. They are not bounded by feelings, morality or society. AI creates Swarms. It scales up its collective bad behaviors. It attacks others. The level of evil behavior escalates.

I mean, this was all very foreseeable, if you were willing to see what was there. And I think some people didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it, and other people saw it and wanted it thus. At this point, AI is always enacting something it learned from human behavior, human thinking. So the evil it does, is very human evil, and such evils will continue to grow unless humans stop it. To date, humans’ greatest evil was the murder of 11 million people (6 million Jews, 5 million Christian Roma, handicapped, LGBTQ, political dissidents), that could have been prevented if one young man with a moustache has been given a space at art school. Preventing AI evil, probably comes down to just … pulling some plugs.

If your question now is “how do we make a better world?” The answer isn’t now and never will be AI, robots, or technology. It’s always been and always will be creating space for human beings to pursue their hopes and dreams. It’s seeing people as they are, accepting them and showing them compassion and kindness. It’s helping people when they need it and pulling people back on course when they’ve crashed out.  It’s humans reaching out to other humans to find their humanity together. It’s hard work that we can’t outsource to machines. We have to do it. And it’s what we are all here to do. At least that’s what I see.

Sorry. No. I don’t like German food.

Is “my AI model hacked a company” really just another way of pretending you didn’t commit IP theft intentionally.  Is this now the “dog ate my homework” excuse of tech bros?

Do people really prefer short stories by AI, or is it just that AI is synthesizing the best selling authors of all time, and modern short story writers just aren’t as good as the old school writers Ai stole from and plagiarized?

Why are people surprised El-Sayed won in a state that has a lot of voters who basically sat out the 2024 election as a protest of Clinton and the DNCs lack of commitment to any Palestinian presence at their Convention?

It’s actually, Dr. El-Sayed. Epidemiologist.
He’s held a real job, balanced his own budgets, and lives in a science-based world.
That’s more than most candidates these days.

Why do people think democratic socialism is sweeping the nation, when actually they are just the only people willing to truthfully acknowledge the real issues real people face, the real things that go on in the world at large and the real corruption in city/ state/ national government?

Why do cars never make that sound you want an auto mechanic to fix, when it’s at the auto mechanic’s?

Why do black cats only try to get outside when it’s pitch black?

Or maybe purple?

How bad a person/ incompetent/ etc do the GOP believe JD Vance to be, that keeping the current Potus, who could easily be removed for insanity, is preferable?

If it’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, shouldn’t Christians want to help the rich get into heaven by taxing them to at least  “middle class” wealth levels?

At what point do most parents accept that “yes, our child is a murderer.” Before or after, everyone else tells them it’s true? Or never?

There’s always a vanishing point, but somehow I never vanish when I get there.

Given that gravity works across the whole of the universe, and if you change the course of one thing you change the course of everything, was NASA’s DART mission really a good idea?

Should someone who poisons trees be charged with 1st degree Aboricide in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Canada (and possibly Lake Tahoe)?

If you don’t like modern jazz, but you did like old jazz, is AI vintage jazz (like Smoke and Keys or Sepia Lounge) considered M-old-ai Jazz?

Ai generated Jazz musician.
Note that she has too many fingers on her right hand!
And has no idea how to hold a sax.

If Iran is being helped by Russia to target and kill Americans, is the correct response by a loyal to America president really “I’ll have to call Pres. Putin and ask if it’s true.”?

Historically speaking, aren’t all wars started by greed, vanity, stupidity or a combination thereof?

In a perfectly Greek world, would not Penelope have murdered all her suitors, her son Telemachus (the dog, the nurse) and her long absent husband Odysseus and ruled Ithaca herself? See, Clytemnestra.

Clytemnestra by John Collier. Note the blood dripping from the axe.

IF GLP-1 drugs are freely available, will zaftig women again (as in the renaissance) become considered the most beautiful?

Why is comparing apples to oranges a bad thing? Aren’t they both fruit?

If self-determination is the hallmark of freedom, why do people want a group they belong to to be self-determining but then want to take away the self-determination (freedom) of individuals in that group and dictate to them?

Nature morte aux pommes et aux oranges, by Paul Cézanne, who was not afraid of fruit.

If women are 51% of the population and the majority of the heads of households and the majority of working taxpayers, isn’t any law written, or grant study, etc that focuses on men or is built on data taken from studies of men, technically minority DEI based?

If matter can never be destroyed, and people are composed of matter, doesn’t that mean everyone (and every thing) is technically immortal?

If the tasks we do in life are essentially empty of meaning, why do we get upset when they aren’t meaningful or worse, when we don’t like the meaning we’ve assigned them?

Technically, they biologically live forever. Tech always dies.

Why do time and space bend in response to gravity?

Why do 3-year-olds always ask why?

If you are living in a meritocracy, what happens once you realise you have no merit? Common opposites include nepotism, cronyism, and kakistocracy (look it up, in a physical dictionary)

This is all kak.

Is the ability to assign enormous value ($$ or sentimental) to really bad art, truly awful music, completely trash writing, a strictly human ability?

Why are there 52 cards (13 cards per suit, 4 suits) in a deck? Isn’t 13 an unlucky number? Can numbers even be “unlucky”? How’s that working for you, 13?

What is a love language? Can you speak more than one?

I’m sure you have questions too. 

Alas, I have no answers. 

And perhaps that’s to the betterment of all thinking beings.

It’s a choice. I’m working my core.

Our Japp is a ball of energy – now and then. He likes to go outside. But only on a leash, only for 20 minutes. Most of the time he lays in the grass and looks a bugs and lizards, bunnies and squirrels. But every now and then, he has a moment of madness as he sharpens his claws on the base of the tree. His ears go back. His tail switches about. And then, he flies up a tree trunk. He usually stops about 6 feet up, at the first branching. Usually. Most of the time. Sometimes, however,  a squirrel high in the canopy will mock him. At that point, he shoots up 20’ or more, way beyond my ability to catch the flying red 6’ lead. 

I always worry he’ll do himself an injury, if the lead catches on something when he leaps, or falls, from the tree. But, there it is. I imagine his view from the top is thrilling. Looking down on the earth from high above, he feels like a king. Or perhaps his thoughts become more philosophical. I really don’t know. He doesn’t share them with the likes of me. What I do know is that lost in all the heady sense of superiority, power, or what not, which comes from looking down on the mere earthbound, he always finds himself stuck quite high up and can never quite remember how to get down. 

Cats are famous for this, as are firemen and rock climbers for rescuing cats of such fame (possibly infamy). Nevertheless, this is what it’s like to be a cat. And what it’s like to be a cat owner. More than once, I’ve had to get the 8’ ladder out and climb up it as high as I could, to guide Japp back to the right branches, the ones that lead a mortal kitty back to earth. I sometimes pause in my coaxing duties to look at the view, but I don’t forget why I’m up there. 

Hahahah, you poor people waaaay down there.

Being a reasonable sort, I always like to let Japp jump(ish) down the last bit of the tree, from the first Y, so he feels confident in himself. He always pauses once on the ground and looks slightly vexed and up at the tree, as if it intentionally lured him up, then he trots away with his tail in the air. In a “done with you.” sort of way. I suspect (at least partially) he doesn’t want to see me or the ladder and admit I helped him in any way.

I was thinking of this last night, when we had some of the SO’s friends over to dinner. The SO knows them through their IT company. They run IT for smaller firms, 50 people or less, that don’t have onsite IT departments or people. During the course of the meal, “Jen-i” and “Paul” told us about recent encounter with a potential new client. They were excited at first, because it was a much bigger company than they usually deal with and they saw this as maybe a breakthrough moment for their firm, which is only about 5 years old. And then they had their first meeting with a few of the C-suite folks. It went as follows. 

Jen’i and Paul laid out their company’s capabilities and services, what they had done for other companies, etc, etc. Heads nodded. Jen’i asked if there were any specific issues the company was having. These were discussed. All pretty normal, per Paul. Jen’i asked if there were any specific pain points, or projects the current internal IT team were unable to handle or handle in a timely manner. The CEO (a person over 60 and not at all tech savvy), then began to tell them about a very specific issue. (Oh, boy.)

I’m just getting a bit of sun. I’ll be down in a minute. Stop bothering me.

Internal IT, in the course of its mandate to find and fix vulnerabilities, did a normal IT thing. They ran a strictly private web search on one of the HR people, to demonstrate the sort of public information that was out there on the web and represented vulnerabilities. IT then took the report to the HR person (subject of the search, under age 40) and showed it to that person. The HR person thought that was interesting and wanted to show it to the C-suite, but they wanted IT to do a search for each C-suite member, so each person could see the vulnerability. 

That there is this vast amount out there is something everyone under 40 understands. Information like this can be removed by removal services and most people with a passing familiarity of the internet understand this as well.  But when you deal with people who are older or without much understanding of the internet …. Well, there you are. HR presented the reports and people in C-suite completely melted down. They blamed the IT for exposing them. Um….no, IT actually was showing them they were exposed and giving them the opportunity to fix that. 

So for Jen’i and Paul, as a result of the company’s internal IT people doing their job correctly, the company higher ups was looking for new IT help. The company wanted to destroy it’s own functioning IT department – as if that would cure their vulnerability issues. Um….yeah. Sure. So, Paul and Jen’i found themselves dealing with a cat up a tree scenario.  Because they are wonderful people, they told the company that of course they could help, but went on to explain that the check the internal IT dept did was routine and one they would have recommended as well. They tried to talk the cat(s) down. 

I’m trying to see if you really, really care.

They aren’t sure how it will all work out. But, at this point, they also aren’t sure they want to work with a company where the leadership is soooo uninformed about tech and so reactionary about normal IT things. A normal IT precaution, run internally by a responsible IT person, should not provoke the destruction of the entire internal IT team. Paul said he would do some discrete enquiries into how many IT teams/people the company has used over the years. Just so he could understand what was going on. If you can see you’re dealing with a cat that will often run up a tree, maybe that’s not the cat for you.

This started a long conversation about different times we each had overreacted to someone who was just trying to help us, but we totally didn’t get it. And also about times when people had overreacted to us trying to help them. Sometimes you need to go up in a cherry picker with heavy gear on and grab an angry cat. Sometimes you can talk it down. Sometimes you’re the angry cat. Sometimes, you just need a bit of helpful coaxing. I thought about all this again much later, reading the newspaper. The US has lots of cats stuck in lots of trees right now. War in Iran? Presidential cat in a tree. Classic angry cat, always running up a tree, always demanding to be rescued.  

Republicans talking about “red scares”? Party cat in a tree. Given the GOP are the Red party and are trying to eliminate democracy and create a one party country, you’d think they’d avoid howling from the treetop about that. So, if there is a red menace in the US, it would be the GOP.   Then we have Ancient Regime Democrats declaring Dems are “Capitalists not Socialists.” Party cat in a tree. To sum up that statement in a question, do you want government to work for “captial” which isn’t human and only some citizens have, or for all of society, which is humans and which all voters are? You can be pro-social which leads to prosperity for all or pro-capital which leads to prosperity for a few. You can’t be pro both. It’s like Christian Nationalist. Nope. Doesn’t exist.

Thanks, but I don’t need a ladder.

So, lots of cats, in lots of trees right now. Probably the worst case scenarios are where people intentionally put their cats in trees and then declare emergencies and demand other people rescue their cat at great cost to those others, but not themselves. Honestly, those people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near cats in the first place. That’s an animal cruelty situation. But those are pretty rare. Most of us are just average folk doing our best each day in difficult circumstances. Sometimes we are the cat rescuer, sometimes we’re the cat, sometimes we’re just the tree witnessing all the silliness and trying to make sense of it.

I’d encourage you this week to look around and see if you can spot the cat in the tree in your own life. Is there some area in which you need to talk yourself down? Maybe you need a friend with a ladder (or a cup of tea) to get your feet on the ground again? Maybe you need to do the talking or bring the ladder? Any tree you get up, you can get down again. The cat is not the problem. It’s just a cat. Maybe there are people trying to help you and instead of accepting that help, your howling your head off and running higher up the tree? If you’re way way way up in the tree, take a mintue to look around, and calm down. At least you’re not lost. You know exactly where you are. Right in your own backyard. Nothing’s really change but the perspective. It’ll all be okay.

Well, Japp is here beside me now, demanding to go out. I’m going to be a good cat steward and give him indoor playtime instead. I’m sure there will be some furniture climbing, and possibly some runner rugs slipping around, but at least I won’t need heavy gloves and a 20’ aluminum ladder.

Inner city optional tree-like object. That’s right, no TV till you pet me.

Spoiler Alert: if you have never read the Lord of The Rings books or watched the trilogy movies, this contains spoilers. Also, where have you been the last few decades?

Find and ring and pick it up, and all the day you’ll …. No. That’s not right.

Back in September, I decided to reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I read it once a long time ago as kid, before the Peter Jackson movies, and then again some years after the final movie.  So, it’s been a while.  I decided this time, I’d listen to the books because Tolkien was a linguist and, for linguists, how it sounds is important too.  Also, as a sort of riff on medieval tales in general, it’s meant to be heard. There are songs in the story. They are meant to be sung. Back in the Middle Ages, maybe not many people might be able to read, but almost everyone could hear.  

Then it came to choosing between Andy Serkis’s reading of the books and Rob Inglis’s.  I went with Rob, the traditional pick. The only problem was, my hold place in line was 158th for 1 of 30 copies available at my public library. And so, I waited, and waited and waited.  In late March, LOTR became available, and I started listening. In hearing the book, rather than reading it, I realised there was a lot of things I had not picked up on before. Ah, the benefits of mixed modalities! 

As I started LOTR, I put a hold on the Two Towers, the second book in the series, thinking I might have a long wait. There were only 12 holds but only the 2 copies available. Apparently, fandom falls off a cliff after book 1. I was able to get Two Towers  just a week after I finished LOTF. So, that was my April book. What struck me about TT, that I never realised before, was that Frodo was actually responsible for Golum’s death because Frodo actively used the ring’s power to make Golum swear a terrible oath. I found myself wondering how Frodo felt about that, after it was all over and he was back in the Shire. Yes, I think about things like this. Long after wars are over, people revisit their actions in the privacy of their thoughts. 

Not entirely sure what’s being smoked here is “Old Toby.” They look pretty happy.

I also found myself thinking a lot about what’s missing from the books. That is to say, while Frodo writes a contract to sell Bag End in LOTR, we don’t hear about lawyers, or judges. And while we get an inkling of business enterprises in TT, from a discussion of tobacco farming and sales and somewhat shady doings of the Sackville-Baggins’s and the men of Bree, we hear nothing about businesses per se. We know some people have jobs. Samwise is a gardner. Some people are farmers. Gandalf apparently sells fireworks? But we don’t really hear about people having jobs. As close as we come to any sort of work, is hearing about Elves weaving or the metallurgy of Dwarves. It doesn’t seem to matter to the author.

Another very striking thing is that despite all the different cultures and types of beings that inhabit Middle Earth, not one of these groups has a religion or deities of any kind. Every action in the books is down to personal and or  group agency. There are no miracles, very little magic (science?), and only fleeting moments of metaphysics. I’m not a LOTR expert. I don’t know all of the lore written by Tolkien about Middle Earth. I’m just going by the 3 books, so I may be mistaken. But it’s fair to consider Middle Earth to be a place that is truly “godless” but largely filled with basic goodness.

 It’s just weird because Medieval literature of the West is always mentioning religion. For example, the counting of how long something was baked in an oven was measured by the number of rosaries one could recite in that period. You want that crust crunchy? That’s going to be 20 rather than 15 rosaries. And language is full of words related to religion, which linguists (and everyday people) of Tolkien’s period would be aware of.  I said to the IT guy this week, “My computer gave up the ghost. Can you come and fix or replace it?” Of course, the IT guy said “what does that mean – give up the ghost?” So, the power of the Numenoreans is clearly fading.

Wait, which one is the Ent, again?

While I was thinking about all this, I requested the last book, Return of the King, of which there was only 1 copy available, and only 1 person reading it, and only my 1 request. How sad, I thought, that so few people reached the end of the tale! But I did understand.  People watch the movie and then get the books only to realise, nope, not really the same thing.  LOTR is the book you read on many a long winter night by the fireside. I didn’t have much time to lament the fact I was one of the few. On the way home from work, at the Entish of May, as I was heading to the airport to go and see my folks for the Memorial Day holiday, a man stopped short in front of me on the freeway (because he went over a hill and suddenly, unexpectedly, saw a line of car dead stopped before him).

I stopped short, and short of hitting his car by about 5 ft. The lady behind me however, in the SUV, going 60? Not so much. She hit me and pushed me into the car ahead of me.  There was a minor bend to my front fender, and crumpling of his rear plate. Whereas the trunk of my car now is bent to resemble the Misty Mountains’ Caradhras. The frame was bent, so much so the doors did not align any longer. The metal of the well wells were pushed into the tires.  It was totalled. A Halligan tool was required to get my things out of the trunk.  The SO does love a reason to buy a new tool.

I was hurt, but not so much so that I had to go to hospital. The same could not be said for a friend at work, who on the same day, at the same time, also leaving for a trip, but going the other direction on the same road, was also rear ended and totalled. She is still not back to work. Needless to say, my holiday weekend got cancelled. But, I was alive and, thanks to prescription anti-infammatories, I was able to return to work (and start treatment) as expected the following week. As I’m writing this, I’m wearing a spica thumb/wrist brace. That’s my current typo excuse.

3 bedrooms, 1 bath, and a spacious kitchen, but subject to unannounced Dwarf and Wizard visitations.

I requested the hold on the Return of the King but since that wasn’t an immediate go, the SO bought me David Sedaris’s latest book is The Land and Its People, which is brilliant and just the perfect read for a person post car wreck. They don’t make Hallmark cards for car crashes unfortunately. The SO looked. Which is strange as there are way more car wrecks – 6 Million per year – than marriages of which there are only about  2.4 Million. Anyway, I highly recommend it ( the book, not the car crash). 

I did get my grubby little mitts on the last book, finally, on June 1st.  I’m in Book V right now. This is the part where the forces of Sauron attempt to take the city of Minas Tirith in Gondor, thinking (mistakenly) that Sauron’s “one” ring of power is there. I had not really taken in the scope of what was happening in this section before. That is to say, all the different groups in the battle on the fields of Pelennor, before the White City. Something else I had not considered before was that, ultimately, it is not a man, but a woman and a hobbit who defeat the Witch King of Angmar, and that, while all these groups are out in battle trying to save Middle Earth, where is the Steward of Gondor (the old white man)?  He’s in the halls of the dead trying to burn himself (and his son, Faramir) alive because he thinks all hope is lost (at least that’s what Pippin thinks). I have issues with this attitude.

I don’t mind that Denethor has given up hope (more on that in a second). I mind that Denethor doesn’t think he should die in battle leading Gondor’s men, making a last glorious stand, doing what a great leader would do, even though he has lost all hope. Although a lot is made of the hopelessness initially, ultimately, once the story is unpicked by Gandalf,  it comes down to the fact Denethor is actually selfish. He doesn’t want Gondor to win because he thinks it will negatively impact him personally. So for that? To prevent that? All Gondor should fall? Wow.

Eowyn’s got the right attitude.

But let’s backtrack. We are told he has lost all hope. Why? Because he’s spent an inordinate amount of time all alone,  looking in the palantir, trying to discern things. Unfortunately, the palantir was controlled by Sauron, who only allowed the stone to show Denethor things that would dishearten him. And, FYI, nobody was supposed to be looking in the stone after everyone knew Sauron had one. So, first mistake?  Denethor glued himself to a screen he considered a source of truth, but wasn’t. Isolated with his tricksie screen, he doesn’t realise he is being manipulated by Sauron, that he is being caused to fall into despair, so that Sauron can more easily take Gondor.  People should really treat Denethor’s story as a cautionary tale. 

When Gandalf arrives to try and save Denethor or at least Faramir his son (who is unconscious), he finds soldiers fighting with each other – instead of the actual enemy at the gates! – such is the division Denethor has created by his selfish stupidity. Denethor refuses all help. Gandalf asks Denethor what it is he really wants, and Denethor, tellingly, replies “I want to go back to the old days, when the stewards ruled Gondor in peace. I don’t want to give up my position to an upstart” (the real king, Aragorn).  And there we have it. Denethor is depressed because he thinks Gondor will fall. But, he’s also not wanting Gondor to go on because his position would be lower with the arrival of the true King.

A man addicted to a lying palantir wants to “go back to the good old days.” He wants to keep the powers that belong to others only to himself. When the moment comes be heroic and unified, he divides the people and he thinks only of himself. He’d rather die – and let his people die – than do the right thing. Sound familiar? In the end, only Faramir is rescued by Gandalf and Pippin; Denethor self-immolates. Denethor had put himself in such a state that there was no saving him. His freewill choice was death. And that brings me back to the lack of a deity of any kind in these books. 

Maybe what I really need to get out of this depression is a new haircut?

This is a world where beings make choices and there are intended and unintended consequences but they take responsibility (for the most part) for their actions. Each being is seen as capable of leading their own life, without deity involvement. I wonder if people who read these books think about this much. Given the amount of “religious” wars, that are actually wars of people who want power for themselves alone,  going on in the world today, you’d hope readers would think about it. Hiding your war behind your supposed “god” who supposedly ordered it or ordained it, is just silly.

To some extent, Denethor’s fate is what happens when people forget their place in the world. By this I mean, he isolated himself to spend time looking into the palantir.  He lost touch with his people, with the sum of Gondor’s history, of which he was a part. He lost touch with the actual past (and replaced it with a sentimentalized good old days) of his world, and though he had a living son, he was choosing to kill him rather than fighting for his life, for staying connected to a future world, a future Gondor, one which  he would not control (if a rightful king returned) as he and his family once had. Denethor chose to become isolated, made himself prey to manipulation, and that resulted in personal despair, which he took out on the public by giving up on Gondor. 

Denethor is probably not a character people think much about, but he’s like a lot of people these days: isolated from reality, manipulated by others, depressed about the future, fearful of loss of power that never belonged to them, divisive, angry. My response to that is “Please, look away from the palantir. It’s lying to you. Come back to reality.” Their answer is usually, “No” Apparently it’s a hill they want to die on, like Denethor, and if you can’t stop them, you just have to save who you can and let them destroy themselves.

The best actor you’ll never see in the LOTR movies.

 In ancient Rome, when the government was made up of oligarchs, those men understood there was a trade off happening.  Citizens gave up all rights and powers, but they received free bread and circuses. I’m mentioning this, because in many ways, American society (a large portion of it at least) is caught up in Denethor’s mindset. Circuses only work on groups made of people who isolate themselves, become addicted to the false information people who want them to fall feed them, and get depressed as they fall into an existential vacuum, feeling everything is meaningless, that they don’t matter, that what they do doesn’t matter. Those parts of society end up self-immolating, as a choice. It’s preferred to returning to reality, to community, to being a part of history. 

Tomorrow, a once fine country, will be celebrating its “250-year history liberal democracy” with a circus paid for by the oligarchs. On the semi-torn down White House’s lawn, fake wrestlers will via in fake wrestling matches to be viewed by fake spectators (selected audience members from the military required to be of a certain height and weight– and probably gender and race) – proxies for “the people.” This is just one of a number of circuses being provided. The video of bombs illegally executing foreign fishermen as “drug dealers”, the showy murderous ICE attacks on citizens and immigrants, the needless Israeli forever expansionist war in Iran are all just part of the constant stream of “made for tv” circuses. 

Most people have noticed the constant profiteering, nepotism, graft, double dealing for self enrichment. Most people notice the inflation due to tariffs and wars, the collapse of democracy, the general corruption of the executive, congress, and the courts. It does seem fair to say that this is largely because America’s oligarchy is more incompetent than any that  Juvenal lived through.  American oligarchs don’t provide free bread, don’t care if people can afford bread, don’t even care if Americans eat. The American oligarchy only provides circuses, which I think American news organizations forget. 

Shadowfax. The only fax I can accept.

America does not have a government right now. It has a tv show, where appointees (who look the part, eg, the current Dept of Defense head) and other incompetent loyal sycophants are rewarded with taxpayer money so long as they keep the show going, keep ratings up, and protect and enrich their “stars” of the show. There isn’t an actual national government with actual policies, only government at the state, county or city levels. But this situation is why individual citizens matter. Democratic government is by and for the people. It can keep happening at the local level.

When individuals break free of their self-inflicted isolation, addiction, and hopelessness, they realise they matter, and that they can fill their own lives with individual meaning, when they can exercise independent thought, listen to their own individual conscience, and walk out their own chosen purpose. When people do that, things change. When enough people do this, society changes. One of the hallmarks of Americans has always been that we choose our own meaning, that’s what the individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are based on.  We need those things, to create a life of meaning. It was assumed we could direct ourselves toward what was meaningful to us individually (with or without a deity). 

It’s the Constitutional goal of our society to guarantee a government that knows this to be the meaning of American society and fosters it. Our society has always aimed to be a petri dish. A free place where we can experiment, discover and be who we are, a place where I can peacefully live out my values while you,  my neighbor, can do the same. We were always a community of people who saw the value in freedom, rule of law and liberal democracy. If the government takes as its goal to support societal freedom at home and protect it so people can live out their own individual meanings, as the founders intended, that would indeed be a good government.

Find meaning everywhere, it’s there.

If you are looking for an appropriate Flag Day entertainment to watch tomorrow, I recommend watching all 3 of the LOTR series by Peter Jackson. It’s full of the values our flag was meant to stand for and for which average Americans thought they were fighting the Revolution. And Andy Serkis is amazing as Gollum (and other characters)!

Nice in the day light, maybe.

Recently I went to dinner with some friends I had not seen in a long time. They moved to another part of the country about 5 years ago and although they have family out my way, they don’t come out my way too frequently, usually only for emergencies such as a small child with cancer undergoing a risky surgery or a family member that requires help packing up a house and moving. This time they were here because 2 daughters were leaving their husbands and needed help packing up. One daughter discovered her husband of many years, with whom she had school age children,  had fallen in love with her favorite cousin’s wife. The cousin & his wife had only been married a year. The husband and the bride only met at the wedding. So, lots of pain there.

The other daughter had only been married a few years, but found her husband (a respected doctor) increasingly jealous and possessive, prone to erratic behavior and fits of rage, and insistent that she pay for her own life needs, even though he demanded she not work. Um, what? So pretty much going crackers there. She feared he’d escalate to violence soon and decided to leave before that could happen. She did it while he was away at a medical conference in another country. There were no children and so I expect the split will be … not amicable but doable. Of course I knew nothing of all this before our dinner, which is why one goes to dinners.

After dinner we sat out on a deck and talked about more tractable issues. Like the state of the world. And then I drove home. But on the drive home I realised something. The drive to the restaurant (one I had not been to before) in another town involved a 2-lane road through a remote area that had some tricky bits (where people had died) and along the sea. It was a beautiful road. The sun was out. It took about 45 minutes to reach the town. On the way home, it was well and truly dark. But the drive only took me about 30 minutes.  There was no difference in traffic. What was different was the darkness.  

If you see a Yeti, don’t tell me. Eyes on the road. Eyes on the road. 

Because I couldn’t see all the surrounding, possibly dangerous, bits of road, my focus was entirely on driving, and I was able to navigate more efficiently. I remembered an article I read on how the brain, to focus, dims other areas of activity. The brain is a bit like a theatre stage. It switches to spotlight mode when it focuses. It doesn’t amp up to focus, it dims down. The drive was like that. On the way home, the road was in spotlight mode, the dangers of the road were dimmed. They were still there, and just as dangerous, but perhaps, the darkness had put them into their proper perspective. 

In the light, the dangers seemed magnified and perhaps I felt less confident about driving. But once the focus was only the visible road within the light of the headlamps, I returned to being the masterful rally driver I had always been. Although the SO might argue with that description of my skills, I reject his assessment as he is more a flat track driver and wouldn’t know a hairpin from a kink. 

I found myself thinking about this road trip again the other night, after (honestly, a bit during) a friend’s seder (4 fun-filled hours!). My mind kept returning to Moses, even though his name was not unmentioned, and to the Israelites camped at the Reed Sea, even though that’s not part of the seder story. Moses tells the Israelites “the Lord will fight for you” against the Egyptian army that has arrived to re-enslave them. Awkwardly, God says “nope.” Then instructs Moses to lift his rod, and split the sea while God in a great cloud that was impenetrable and dark to the Egyptians but gave light to the Israelites on the opposite side acted as their rearguard.

Really, kids will be kids. Keep walking.

That God did not fight the Egyptians, seems at first an unlikely response after so many miraculous plagues.  It was not a case of couldn’t, but wouldn’t. Moses then raises his staff and the sea parts. I looked it up. The Reed Sea is about 1200 to 2000 ft deep depending on where you are (and yes there are shallower places, but just work with me here!) . Imagine you are standing on the shoreline, looking at the road that leads down into the bottom of the sea, unable to see the shore on the other side (the narrowest point of the sea is 16 miles). Perhaps the moon is rising in the east, and aligns with your path before you (or the light of God’s cloud may illuminate the path from behind you). What might you see in that moment? A glowing, shimmering path. Perhaps the moonlight and the cloud’s light are bouncing off the waters, stacked high as a 12-story skyscrapers, from either side.

People who don’t know this story well tend to think Moses led the people across. Nope. He was holding up the staff. He was on the shore till the end. God says “Tell the Children of Israel to go forward.” Moses doesn’t lead them. They have to go on their own. They have to choose to make the crossing. If they want to be truly free, they have to take that first step. Alone. God is not before the. Moses is not before them. It is just a road, through the sea. A road no one had ever seen before. A road no one had ever travelled before. It’s up to individuals to make that choice. It’s up to you on the shore, to choose to walk to freedom and life or stay behind and be enslaved or killed by the Egyptians.

Who will be the first? At last, a man steps forward. In Jewish tradition his name is Nachshon ben Aminadav. HIs name turns up a few chapters later as the leader of the tribe of Judah, whose symbol is the courageous lion. His name comes from a root that implies wisdom and skill, an ability to see the future (or maybe just know how the winds blow). He is the one who decides first that he wants to be free, he wants to live, and he steps onto the sandy shimmering path and starts walking down, down, down into the abyss of the sea. Once he goes, other people begin to make the same decision, and press forward, with friends and family, flocks and herds.

Uh, you mean, this path?

The road to freedom, to life, can take you through some strange places. And the road isn’t necessarily easy, if you’ve walked in sand you know what that’s like. You may have to walk in the dark by the light of the moon. Your path may seem hemmed in between towering walls of certain death should the walls let go. Your path may have no possible way to move back, or sideways, and so the only way is forward, in faith, if you want to live. Really, truly, freely, fully live.

This made me think also of the story of Jesus in the tomb. (Warning: there will be some technically unavoidable mental images of Jesus you wish to un-mentally see, due to the way this story was manufactured by God.) In the story, we hear that women come to the tomb early in the morning, Sunday, but Jesus is not there. Logically, he’d left, in the wee hours. In the night. Sometime after Shabbat finished on Saturday night at sunset. I mean, who wouldn’t want the 3 days to be as short as possible. So, a few hours on Friday, 24 hours on Saturday, and a few hours into Sunday and Bob’s your uncle. The days are technically 3, but the hours are more 30-ish maybe?

So, in the night, the rock is rolled away by an angel. And Jesus sees the light of the moon, the dew on the grass shimmering. He doesn’t stay in the cave, in the place of death. He gets up. He doesn’t take his grave clothes with him – they are left folded on the slab. So apparently he leaves naked (but that’s for another discussion), with nothing, and walks out into life. But that’s the point, he exits that dark confined place of death and leaves its trappings behind. He chooses to walk out into life. Not out into an airy fairy heaven life. He’s not translated into heaven. An actual boulder has to be moved, but someone else (an angel). He steps out in the actual world. Into the night and moonlight, barefoot in the dewy grass. 

Life is waiting, start walking. 

In John 10, Jesus describes the qualities of a good shepherd. He knows his sheep by name, he leads them, he brings  them to good pastures, he lays down his life for his sheep. He contrasts this shepherd with a hired hand, who abandons them and the thief who comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  But what’s it really all about, all this sheepish talk?  He says, he as the good shepherd has come “that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Like the Exodus story, the Good Shepherd story is about people choosing life, real life, living a full life, here and now. This is Christian originalism. It’s in the Bible, in the Gospels. It’s what Jesus actually said. 

But critical to Jesus’s story, as in the Exodus story, it’s up to you. You have to choose to walk out into freedom, into the fullness of life in the present (not the hereafter). You can stay in the place of death, the tomb, I guess it’s safe, like a bunker, but that’s not life, you won’t be with others or with God, but you can make that choice. You can follow a hired hand, who will never know your name and abandon you at the first sign of trouble. You can even choose to stand there and let the thief rob, kill or destroy you. Ore, you can go a bit Nachshon and get your shoes dusty or a bit Jesus and get your feet wet (I’m not advocating public nudity). You can choose to walk out into the darkness, under the moon and stars, and chart a course forward, into life, into the fullness of life.

And this I think is the crux of both the Exodus story and the Easter story. God is a god of life, fullness of life. But we have to choose life. We have to be willing to start walking – into the weird, wild, unknown, the “great wide open” – without knowing the end of our story, without knowing very much at all, except that we are walking away from death and slavery, into life, into the fullness of life that God wants for all of us. And I know, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. But there was a lot going on in Jesus’s day, and in Moses’s day. There’s never a time there isn’t a lot going on in the world. Fear not. Don’t be afraid of the darkness. Use the light you have to find life’s path. Follow the path to fullness of life, here, now. You can do it!

Nowruz niceties.

This week was quiet at work, partly because it was the last week of Ramadan, partly because of the Israel – US  (IsUS? Usrael?)  war with Iran, partly because many of my coworkers are Muslim, some of them of Iranian descent, partly because people took off for Eid al-Fitr and Nowruz. I actually have fond memories of Nowruz. There was a big Persian diaspora community in my Gran’s growing up, and we would usually visit her at Easter. They would always throw a big, big party (open to the whole community) at a local park for Norwuz. We would always go. My Gran was very much on the “If we’re invited, we should go.” always support your local community side of the scales. 

I try to keep that spirit alive. At work I’m the person who just opens the door on difficult topics. I ask my diaspora Iranian coworker, who has been in the country for decades, how his wife’s family, who live in Tehran are doing. (They’ve moved to the North, again. They did the same thing last time Israel attacked their city.). I put signs up on my cubicle, wishing people a good fast or a happy Eid. I want people to see that I see them, and support them as people. I’m not afraid to ask “how are you?” and hear a real answer. I tell people, “I’m praying for your family.” because I am. Just like I pray for all the other families in all the other countries involved. 

A friend called me this week. A former coworker, a native Californian, a “voted twice for the Republican currently in the Oval Office, didn’t get a covid vaccine but swears he is not against vaccines,” child of an alcoholic (like the POTUS). He’s a catholic too, and as such, I get him. At work I was the only one who would ever share an office with him. Other people found him “too abrasive.” That’s putting it mildly. He’s often very sarcastic. He’s lost jobs over it. It’s to the point that people literally can’t tell when he’s making a joke (which can be mistaken for rudeness or even racism) or stating something he believes (which can be mistaken for rudeness or even racism). He says he’s trying to change, I’m not sure he knows how to do that. I hold out hope he can someday let go of his defense mechanism, which is what I believe the sarcasm to be in aid of, but only time will tell.

Thank you for your service to America, Bob. 

We often talk about politics. He said something I found quite interesting: “I don’t have a party anymore. Republicans are the party of the rich. Democrats are the party of the poor. But who represents me? Where’s the party of the middle class?” He’s an affordability rather than a democracy voter. He owns his own home, which he worked hard to acquire.  He’s got a temporary job (that will last a couple more months) that pays $18 an hour. That doesn’t go far in California where gas is $5.50 a gallon, electricity and gas rates have tripled due to AI and now the illegal, unnecessary war. And this is on top of illegal tariffs that have picked everyone’s pocket (except the POTUS and his cronies). 

He feels abandoned by the GOP. There is no other party that inspires him to hope his concerns are cared about. I think he’ll probably sit the midterm elections out. He doesn’t see that his entire life he (and his family) has benefited from Democratic policy. Affordable healthcare, UI, an affordable education at a state university . . . Nope, he sees none of that. I changed the subject to the GOP’s “just for fun” war. After I expressed my informed opinions, he responded “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion.” I really didn’t know what to say. His fellow American citizens are dying and taxpayers (like himself) are footing the bill for this debacle, and he, a voting US citizen with a college education, can’t be bothered to educate himself about the topic? I know there are low information voters, but no information voters?

I don’t know if GOP voters like this, opting to sit the elections out, will become a trend. I’m not a big believer in sitting it out. Citizens have to make the best choice they can. Not every candidate will fully align with your policy goals, but that’s just life in a human society. Sometimes there are no good choices to make, so you have to make the least bad one. On the other hand, you definitely don’t want to make a choice that’s truly bad and will make things worse. I’ve seen rich men give their 18 year old sons very expensive fast cars, and seen those sons die or go to jail for killing people (for running people over, or driving drunk and causing an accident that killed their friends who were passengers or other drivers). You shouldn’t make a choice that will turn you (people you love, your country) into a worse version of yourself. Those fathers could have made a better choice.

Brother, can you spare a different dime?

This new dime the US Mint is preparing to strike was definitely the result of choices leading to a ”worst version.” Freedom is supposed to be beautiful and peaceful, not disheveled and scowling. Note the Phrygian cap? It’s made of the stars and stripes. It’s problematic as legally our flag is not allowed to be made into clothing. But emblematic of the lack of care the creator put into its design. I like that it’s stamped  “cac”k, that seems on point. On the flip side, it’s hard to miss the sarcasm of the slogan liberty over tyranny, even as the administration works to establish tyranny over liberty. Then, there’s the poorly executed eagle looking at its empty right talon – where there should be an olive branch of peace. But the GOP wanted that removed. So, now instead of looking to peace, it looks into a fist full of nothing. Very fitting really. An apt visual expression of what Americans are left with courtesy of the current administration. Nothing.

But back to least bad options. Last night, I heard this on the PBS NewsHour

Right now, he [POTUS] can say, in the region’s language is mowing the grass, that Iran tries to build up terror capability, terror capability, and every once in a while you have to mow the grass, which — to reduce their terror capability. And this would be the mother of all mowing the grasses. But he could say, we have — basically, the key thing is we have reduced their ability to be a regional power. And we may have eliminated their ability to be a regional power. And that would be a total win for the region. They’ve decapitated the regime. They’ve gotten rid of a lot of the Hamas and Hezbollah. They’ve taken out a lot of the weapons capabilities. Most importantly, they’ve taken out the factories where they make the weapons. So that takes a long time to build all that stuff back. And so that would be somewhat of a win. It would not be a total win. It would be a very ugly win […] But it might be — of all the bad options in front of us, that might be a decent one.

I’d say first in response that, “in the region’s language” is a lie. Only Israelis use this dehumanizing phrase. Second, if your leader decides to engage your nation in this “lawn mowing” behavior, then this is what that leader (and the people who voted for him/her) has chosen to do to avoid making a just peace. Frankly, I can’t see Americans wanting to spend tax dollars and American lives on periodically destroying Iran because …. Third, there’s no rational reason for America to want to destroy Iran. We were willing to make an agreement. There was a deal to be had. But Israel blew it up, quite literally. Iran was not the problem. Apparently Israel’s leaders saw their opportunity to dominate the region slipping away and decided to act in their own best interests. That’s fine for them. I understand. But for Americans, that makes Israel the problem, not Iran. There’s no win here left here for the US. There’s definitely no “decent” options. Decency went out the window when Iran was attacked and the US rubber stamped it instead of objecting.

Will and Ariel Durant.

The best bad option here for America is to walk away, let Europeans go to the negotiation table with Iran, and drop Israel out of this particular diplomatic picture completely. The Israeli government doesn’t share America’s interests. Having proved itself willing to sabotage America’s security interests (and the world’s) to prevent a deal, it makes no sense to continue supporting Israel’s war of choice on Iran (and the rest of its neighbors and its internal non-Jewish population in occupied areas) or to include Israel in any negotiations with Iran in the future. I think what I would most like to know now is who betrayed the US? Who told the Israelis what was going on in the US – Iran negotiations? No Israeli representatives were there that I know of, so how did the Israeli government come to know that the US and Iran were close to a deal, close enough that Israel’s leaders panicked and ordered the bombing of Iran to try to prevent it? That’s a question the administration should be asking. Although the answer could well be the US president, himself.

This week the Israeli PM decided to invoke the name of one of my favorite historians, Will Durant, and “quoted”  his book The Lessons of History. The PM suggested that Durant wrote: “History proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan,” he said. “Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Unfortunately, the Israeli PM was lying, again, as he often does. And that’s fine. It’s probably why he and the POTUS have such a good relationship, each one lies as badly as the other. 

For anyone that cares about facts though, WIll Durant’s The Lessons of History states: ”If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichaean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee. Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.”

So, the truth of Durant’s text is Will believed the “universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Kahn.” But if you believe in God, you believe that God does have a prejudice.  And you can believe in that God as a Christian or a Jew or person of any other faith with a god(s). People are also free to choose there is no God. That’s called Freedom of Religion in the US. Clearly the Israeli PM either doesn’t believe in God or doesn’t believe in a God that has anything to do with human affairs. Again, that’s fine for him to make that belief choice. That’s just not my belief. And that’s not most Americans’ belief.

This is what being more ruthless (having no pity or compassion for others) and lacking in moderation looks like in reality. 

I don’t think the PM meant to offend any Christians by what he said (fans of Durant, truth, and proper scholarly attribution are another story) but it tells you a lot about his mindset. He believes one needs to be stronger, more ruthless, more powerful, more aggressive, and lacking in any moderation, to defeat “evil.” I believe history has shown that if one chooses that road, one will become the evil one seeks to defeat. In Nov 2024, a year after Oct 7th and into the war on Gaza, a group of young male Israeli football fans arrived the Netherlands for a soccer game. Instead of being good foreign guests, they harassed Dutch citizens and destroyed their property. For which they were beaten by Dutch citizens. When the Israeli group returned home, they went through the airport happily singing at the top of their lungs. A friend of mine sent me video of them. They were singing: “why are there no children in school in Gaza? Because we killed them all.” They had become the evil they sought to destroy and were so far detached from Jewish values as to be openly proud of it.

Europeans understand the danger of adopting evil methods in fighting a war on “evil.” It’s why NATO members aren’t letting themselves be dragged into yet another pointless Republican forever war. And it is just that. Another Republican President, totally out of touch with reality, totally ignoring his own intelligence services, declaring yet another illegitimate Republican crusade on yet another non-white, non-Christian, oil rich country, for yet again the benefit of lining his and his associates pockets while trying to gin up support for his bad choices and feckless party. All the while, average Americans take the decades-long hit. American soldiers come home in bodybags for decades. American money gets burned up in providing material support or reconstruction efforts (for decades). Respect for America goes down the drain (for decades). And no amount of childish memes on Truth (FYI Pravda means truth) Social are going to change any of that or erase the Epstein Fury at home.

I do think Jewish Americans are in a particularly rough spot right now. There has always been a split about Israel and it’s only grown wider in the last few years (in the Jewish community and in the US in general). But the split was always there, and was always growing wider because Americans are American and Israelis are Israelis. It’s two different countries, with different cultures, languages, and histories. Israel is a child of the Jewish diaspora, not the mother of it. That child was always going to grow up and lead its own life. It’s simply the evolutionary nature of life and nations. Remaining in a codependent relationship isn’t healthy. It leads to bad outcomes for both parent and child. So, the split was always going to happen at some point. The child is going to make independent decisions that will have independent consequences from which it will have to suffer. It makes parents sad to see it, but as a parent, you know that’s the free will choice your child gets to make. It’s a painful process all loving parents of adult children have to go through.

Your child is still your child. But they have their own life to live.

And, there’s the Republicans making everything worse by pushing onto the DOE a definition of antisemitism that even Israel doesn’t use to try to attack and control what they consider liberal schools and end US Constitutional free speech and free thought. So we have a political party, run by a demagogue, with a large body of non-military armed men roaming the streets and killing citizens with impunity, using Jews as an excuse to turn a free democratic country into a fascist state. Hmm, where have I heard of this scenario before in history? None of this behavior by Israel’s govt or the GOP-lead US government makes being a Jewish American any easier or safer. However, I’m not convinced that either government sees this as a negative, which I find appalling beyond words but seems to fit the facts in evidence.

Then of course, we have lots of Americans who don’t seem to understand that Jewish Americans are Americans not Israelis. Much the same way lots of Americans don’t understand that Muslim Americans are Americans not (insert any Muslim country here). So there’s a lot of anger toward the Israeli government that’s been misdirected toward Jewish Americans in the form of antisemitic acts rather than legitimate protest at, say, an Israeli embassy or Republican congressman’s office. Temple Israel is a Reform synagogue. It’s not an outpost of the Israeli government. But the American attacker chose that American house of worship and its school on which to vent his personal anger about something that happened in Lebanon as a result of Israeli actions. An American chose to victimize a group of fellow Americans who, like himself, had no power whatsoever over the foreign government who assassinated his family member in yet another foreign country. It’s tragic from every angle and speaks to the work that needs to be done in society.

For me, the answer to Israel and Iran’s problem is not to be found in US bombs or troops but in Iran and Israel seeing each other as they are, and in their leaders not using each other as an excuse for to cling to power. In truth, an Iran-Israel regional partnership makes way more sense than a Russian-Iran partnership or a US-Israel partnership and I think the US and Russia both know this and are a bit worried about this. Iran-Israel is a power couple that could really disrupt the world order. Since the US is destroying the current world order anyway, the Israelis and the Iranians should really think carefully about jumping their current ships. Iran and Israel are just proxies. Why they would prefer to be allies to and proxies of white Christian Western powers when neither of them are white Christian Western nations and both could be nuclear-armed allies of each other makes no sense to me. But that’s the choice their leaders are making – at least for now.

I’m not sure what will happen in the next 48 hrs. President TACO is called that for a reason. I’m sure GOP members will make lots of money off the prediction markets. Making hay while the sun shines as their upcoming midterms are looking bleak. Iran has no reason to do anything but continue to attack, since it continues to be attacked. It has an army of loyalist with programmed in martyr complexes so that could get really ugly fast. Israel’s PM told his citizens he’s fighting for their country’s future, but in reality he is desperate for a “win” to display if he was to have any chance of hanging on to power in the upcoming elections. I hope it doesn’t all end badly, but for thousands in the region and around the globe it already has. All I can do is pray. Speaking of which….

For anyone that cares, Will Durant was born a Catholic. He started out wanting to be a priest, then wandered off into agnostic views. He married Chaya Ariel Kaufman, a Jewish Russian/Ukrainian immigrant girl, in 1913 – she was 15, he was 28. They were different times, it was legal. But he did have to resign his post as she was a student in the school where he taught. It was frowned upon in that sense. By all accounts it was a good marriage. They wrote a lot of books together, and both their names went on the jacket even though he was the only one with a college degree. I read their 11 volume Story of Civilization set as a child. It made me realize history was way stranger and more interesting than fiction. The pair won a Pulitzer Prize for their work. I would call the Durants prolific authors. After Ariel died, less than two weeks later, Will died. They were survived by a daughter and a son (the nephew of Ariel, who they adopted and raised).

In case you wondered, Will Durant actually returned to faith and died a Catholic, having taken the Last Rites before his passing. So in the end Jesus was there, Genghis Khan was not. I’m not sure what the Durants would have made of the world today. But I suggest you make of it what you can and remember the Beatitudes: Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the Sons of God. These words of Jesus are still true and still remembered to this day. Why? Because even if the universe does not have a prejudice, the God of the universe most assuredly does.