Transcript of HAMAS Terrorist Bragging About Murder--To His Parents

From the podcast Making Sense by Sam Harris:

There’s a piece of audio from October 7th that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone. Here's a partial transcript of what he said: 

“Hi dad — Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” 

And his dad says “May God protect you.” 

“Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, dad. Open the phone, dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran] Put mom on.” 

And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” 

“I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” 

And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” 

 “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” 

And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” 

“Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” 

And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” 

And the brother says, “You killed ten?” 

“Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference] Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” 

And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” 

And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” 

And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp… 

“Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” 

And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

 

How to Tell If You're a Left Anti-Semite: A Checklist by Ben Wittes of Lawfare

The last few weeks have been rough. Your Jewish friends have been extra needy. It’s not enough that you support their right to own land and enter the professions, that you don’t keep them out of clubs and universities, that you accept their citizenship, and that you don’t describe them as “rootless cosmopolitans” or “international banking conspirators.” 

Now it feels like you’re walking on eggshells around them every time you comment on the news. They have you suddenly wondering: Am I actually an anti-Semite? It’s a painful question. You want to be a good person. You believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion—including of Jews. 

And we all know that antisemitism is not a thing that good people do. And it’s not inclusive. And yet you keep saying things that create what seems to be a stricken look on the faces of Jews of your acquaintance. But then when you ask them whether it was okay to say that thing you just said, they all sound reassuring. But you’re not sure. Is that because it was innocuous? Or is it because they are just being polite and are secretly judging you? It can be hard to tell. 

So as a public service, I thought I would create an “Am I a Left Anti-Semite?” checklist. The checklist consists of ten probing yes-or-no questions, each with an assigned point value of associated with the anti-Semitism of the left. Go through the checklist, add up your score, and see where you rank on the scale of 0 to Pogrom. I have added explanatory notes as needed to each question. By the way, this is an official publication of the entire Jewish community, for which I speak. 

Question #1: Have you ever referred to Hamas fighters as “our martyrs”? If so, give yourself ten points. If not, have you ever referred to Palestinians killed in the Israeli fight against Hamas as “our martyrs” in a context in which a reasonable person might understand you as referring to Hamas fighters as martyrs? If so, give yourself two points. 

Question #2: Have you ever expressed the sentiment that Palestine must be free “from the river to the sea” or any similar slogan that calls for the destruction of any Jewish sovereign presence in Israel proper and that might reasonably be construed as a call to remove or kill Jews from that region? If so, give yourself ten points. Deduct two points if you cannot identify the river in the slogan. Deduct another three if you can’t identify the sea in question. If either or both of these two conditions are met, you might be less of an anti-Semite than an ignorant idiot who has no idea what you’re saying. 

Question #3: Do you find yourself radically more engaged by the plight of Palestinians displaced, injured, or killed in Gaza in response to a massacre of Israeli civilians than by the millions of Syrians displaced, wounded or killed in the murderous war by the Syrian government against its own people; by the millions of Ukrainians who have been killed or made refugees by Russia; or by the brutality of the Taliban? If so, give yourself ten points. 

Question #4: Do you have an urge to shout at or harass Orthodox Jews or others who are visibly Jewish—or to protest at Jewish or kosher institutions—because of your objections to Israeli policy? Give yourself ten points if you have this urge. Give yourself 50 points if you have ever acted on it. 

Question #5: More generally, do you believe the rise in antisemitic incidents, on college campuses and elsewhere, around the country is understandable under the circumstances? Give yourself five to fifteen points depending on how understandable you think it is. 

Question #6: When 1,400 Israeli civilians were massacred, did you have a strong urge to add a “but” to any statement of condemnation you may have issued on social media or elsewhere? Give yourself three points if you had the instinct. Give yourself five points if you, in fact, qualified whatever public statement you made. 

Question #7: Have you ever secretly wondered whether there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian? If so, give yourself ten points; that’s some dark shit. Give yourself an extra ten points if you’ve had this thought about Israelis but never had a similar thought about the nationals of any other country. 

Questions #8: Was any part of you secretly relieved by the speed and ferocity of the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre, as it allowed you to stop talking about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and instead talk about Israeli policies and actions you could condemn? If so, give yourself five points. Give yourself an extra five if you never seriously contemplated what realistic alternative options Israel might have to protect its people than the course it is taking. Give yourself an extra five still if the first statement you made or protest you attended took place in response to Israeli action, rather than the Hamas action. 

Question #9: When you heard about the riot that broke out in an airport in Dagestan the other day, in which rioters looked to attack passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv, did you instinctively want more “context” or to understand the rioters’ point of view? If so, give yourself five points. 

Question #10: Do you interpret the Biden administration’s support for Israel principally as evidence of Jewish political power in the United States? Give yourself five points for a soft yes, ten points for a more emphatic yes. 

Scorecard 

0-to-10 points: Not an anti-semite. I absolve you of sin. 

11-to-30 points: You have been infected with left antisemitism, but it’s nothing a little reading on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the left won’t cure. 

31-to-50 points: You’re dabbling in some serious antisemitic ideation. You clearly don’t mind violence against Jews very much. 

51-to-75 points: You’ve got a serious problem. 

76-and above: You’re a member of the Raging Bigot Club.

Here is the original post.

Breakout Sessions at the Hannah Arendt Conference 2023: Friendship & Politics

In addition to the general sessions at the 2023 Hannah Arendt Conference, I enjoyed the breakout sessions. I wrote about some of the general sessions at the conference here.

Jana Mader

The first was a session titled: Is Reading a Poem an Act of Friendship? led by Ann Lauterbach and Jana Mader.

Ann Lauterbach

The session began with Ann Lauterbach talking about her work, particularly her eleventh collection of poetry Door published this year.  She also read from her work. 

Jana Mader, Director of Academic Programs at the Hannah Arendt Center, guided the discussion on poetry as an act of friendship. I chose this breakout session because of the group I formed on Camp Adder in Iraq 2009 to read Inferno and Aeneid.  

Mader is also the host of the new podcast "Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz. 

After the breakout session, I talked with Stephanie Frampton, a literature professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Her research area is Ancient literature so she was delighted to talk about soldiers reading Virgil and Dante. 

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

I went to a second breakout session titled: Friendships and Federations of Care: Forms, Alliances, and Multiverses led by Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, an award-winning designer of experiences, creative director and director.  During a discussion about spaces we learn and teach in someone asked about unusual places in which we have taught classes.  

I was the only one in the room who had taught a class inside a tank turret.  

My classroom in 1976 an M60A1 Patton tank on 

the south gunnery range, Fort Carson, Colorado.

Fetterman Backs Ukraine 100%! Ukraine Action Summit, Washington DC

 

Members of the Pennsylvania delegation of the Ukraine Action Summit 

on the steps of the Senate with Senator John Fetterman (middle, last row)

On Monday and Tuesday, I was in Washington DC at the Ukraine Action Summit: more than 500 people and dozens of organizations in the US Capitol to support Ukraine.  I was a member of the Pennsylvania delegation, more than twenty people from around the commonwealth advocating for Ukraine. 

Senator John Fetterman talking to our delegation.

Senator John Fetterman was our last visit on Tuesday. He was the most full-throated in his support of Ukraine among all of the lawmakers we spoke with during the visit. He said he will support Ukraine in every way he can as long as he is in office.  It was a very positive end to two days of meetings.

Our delegation at Congressman Scott Perry's office

On the first day, I was part of the group that visited the office Congressman Scott Perry. We met with a member of his staff. Perry was not in the office.  In 2009-10 Perry was my battalion commander in Iraq, where we deployed for a year. Perry is a Blackhawk pilot. I worked in his headquarters and flew on his aircraft.  Perry is the head of the Freedom Caucus. We completely disagree on politics, including on aid for Ukraine, but he was a good commander. I wrote about him in 2010. 

Our delegation at Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan's office

We met with a staff member in the office of Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan. She is very supportive of aid for Ukraine and behind Ukraine's fight against the Russian invasion. Houlahan's grandfather (then 4 years old) survived The Holocaust because he was hidden from the Nazis by a Ukrainian Catholic Priest in Lviv. Houlahan keeps her grandfather's teddy bear in a display case in her office.

Another delightful meeting was with Mike Kelly, the Congressman from the northeast corner of Pennsylvania. He said he will support all aid for Ukraine and was especially concerned about the children kidnapped from their families in Ukraine into Russia for re-education. 

During the two days, there were wry comments from the representatives and their staffs about the how the House of Representatives was unable to do anything without a speaker.  All of the legislation we hope will pass is frozen without a speaker. Then on Wednesday, the day after our meetings, the Republican party voted in a new speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. 

On the one hand, it is good to have a speaker so something can get done, but on the other hand, the new speaker has an F rating on support for Ukraine and was deeply involved in trying to overthrow the 2020 election. 

The fight for support continues here in America while Ukrainians give their lives every day to defend their homes and nation. 

Friendship & Politics: 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center, Bard College

Two of my favorite subjects in life and in philosophy are Friendship and Politics. 

So I was delighted to attend the 15th Annual Conference at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. This year’s title was: 

Friendship & Politics.

Roger Berkowitz

The opening talk was by Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center. He talked about Arendt's view of friendship as the center of a good life and critical to functioning politics.  

Esther Perel

There were so many good discussions, all in person and available on Zoom.  The one that most filled Olin Hall was on Friday morning.  Psychotherapist, international best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter Esther Perel discussed the Power of Friendship with psychologist and professor Marisa Franco, also a best-selling author and popular TED talk presenter.  Several groups of students filed in just before the Perel and Franco spoke.  

Marisa Franco

Franco talked about her recent book Platonic. She talked about the importance of friendship then Esther Perel asked the audience questions about their relationships and the importance of friendship in their lives.  

Niobe Way

Niobe Way made another high-energy presentation about her work on the crisis of connection in modern life and the crisis of masculinity.  She Professor of Developmental Psychology and the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. 

Earlier this year I attended the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center. 

I went to two of the several breakout sessions.  More about those in the next post. 

In 1997, the Italian novelist Umberto Eco wrote an essay titled "Ur-Fascism" describing the 14 characteristics of fascism. His little book How to Spot a Fascist was published in 2011 in English. The "Ur-Fascism" essay is the first of three in the slim volume. I read it last month as many countries around the world flirt with electing fascist dictators.  

In the essay, Eco is clear that while Nazis are fascists, not all fascists are Nazis.  The Nazi regime had a clear, horrible, ideology. Fascists can have an ideology, but they can also change ideologies as needed. Mussolini did not persecute Jews until his Nazi allies became his overlords.  Then he deported Italian Jews to death camps.

Eco was born in fascist Italy under the rule of Mussolini in 1932 living most of his childhood in a nation at war, then in a defeated nation after the war. He saw fascism in triumph and utter defeat.

Reading Eco's list, it will be very easy to see Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, and Erdogan of Turkey. It is just as easy to see Donald Trump, but only as a wannabe. Trump is a coward. His cowardice saved America in 2021 when any would-be dictator with a pair of balls would have walked to the Capital with his mob and taken over on the spot. 

Trump allowed himself to be led back to his TV and snacks.   If he gets in power again, we may not be so lucky. His rage for revenge may overpower his cowardice. 

The 14 Characteristics of Fascism:

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.” 

2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” 

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” 

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.” 

5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” 

6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” 

7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” 

8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” 

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.” 

10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.” 

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.” 

12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” 

13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” 

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Yom Kippur War, 50th Anniversary, Remembering the Carnage of Armor

A Syrian Tank in the Golan, 1973

On 2pm on October 6, 1973, near the end of the Yom Kippur fast by Jews, Egypt and Syria, backed by auxilliary soldiers from many Arab nations, attacked Israel.  It was a surprise attack with devastating Israeli losses of 2,521 killed and more than 8,000 wounded.  

This week I learned that in addition to the soldiers from Arab countries who went to Egypt and Syria to fight, Cuba sent 500 tank commanders to the Syrian Army. These tank commanders led crews that fought in The Valley of Tears near Mount Bental in the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria.  

In the battle, 160 Israeli tanks stopped the advance of 1,500 Syrian  tanks. The Syrian tanks had to funnel through a narrow valley. At the end of the battle 153 of the Israeli tanks were damaged or destroyed. Nearly all the Israeli casualties in the battle were tank crewmen. Only seven Israeli tanks survived the fight. 

The Syrians lost more than 600 tanks with many more damaged. Thousands of armor crewmen in these Soviet-built tanks were killed and wounded. Of the Cuban tank commanders, 188 were killed, 250 were wounded. Just 62 went back to Cuba uninjured after the war. 

In June of 1975, I re-enlisted in the Army and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Armor School.  The 1973 Yom Kippur War informed a lot of what we learned about tank tactics and about the short, violent life of tank crews in war. For instance, we were given the breakdown of casualties among Israeli tank crewman in the Yom Kippur War. 

Tank Commander 60%

Gunner 25% 

Loader 10%

Driver 5%

Tank commanders, according to the reports, "suffered fatal head injuries and hideous face and neck wounds." They had their hatch open and heads out to see the fight. Which helps to explain why almost 90% of the Cubans were killed or injured fighting on the losing side of one of the biggest tank battles in history. 

Within three days, the Israel Defense Force rallied and launched counter attacks against the invading armies.  By October 25, the IDF was shelling Damascus and was less than 60 miles from Cairo. 

In 19 days there was a cease fire and the war ended.  From the Sinai desert where the Egyptian Army invaded and retreated, to the Golan Heights where the Syrian columns began their invasion, the border areas of Israel were littered with the wreckage of tanks.   

Ig Nobel Prizes 2023

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Winners The 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on September 14. Video and details of the ceremony are at improbable.com/ig/2023-ceremony 

I wrote about the ceremony and emcee Marc Abrahams in 2018: 

https://armynow.blogspot.com/2018/10/marc-abrahams-turned-strange-science.html

Here are the new winners. Details here:  improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2023 

I recently met a physicist on a train in Germany who had a photo from an Ig Nobel Prize winner on his phone:

https://armynow.blogspot.com/2023/08/ig-nobel-moment-on-german-train.html

CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. 

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. 

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. 

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.  

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. 

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. 

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. 

EDUCATION PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA, UK, HONG KONG, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. 

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward 

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

 

Eurail Pass App--So Much Better and Cheaper than Tickets

When I wrote about airlines, good and bad, my conclusion was: choose the airline with the best app, because data matters.  This year I bought a Eurail pass rather than individual tickets partly based on great reviews of the app.  My experience was better than my best expectations. 

I bought a seven-day pass in one month. It allowed me to pick any seven travel days in a thirty-day period and travel as much as I want on those days.  I could book the tickets in advance or just take the next train as I arrived in the station. I did both. 

The advance ticket was for the last travel day. I took the Eurostar from Brussels to London.  It required a reserved seat which I bought through the app two weeks in advance.  Many trains require buying seat reservations and on the most popular trains the seats can only be reserved on line well in advance.  

But in major stations you can buy a seat any time up to departure in their ticket offices. I had to do this with several tickets.  But in person the reservations are often cheaper than on line.  

When buying tickets from on line apps, the prices rise cheap to pricey to crazy as the departure approaches.  The Eurail app allows last-minute changes with no penalty.  Any train in the network (most trains) are included in the price of the pass.  I have seen Eurostar tickets costing nearly $300.  Mine cost $51--one seventh of the $358 cost of my Eurail pass.  

One of my travel days was from Vienna to Geneva--11 hours on two trains. The prices on Omio range from $227 to $304. With the Eurail pass, it was $51 plus a $12 seat reservation. My trip from Amsterdam on the four-hour express train would be $180. The 6.5-hour slower train $94. I took an unreserved fast train. 

When I was in Grenoble, I could not book a seat reservation for Paris. Grenoble did not have a ticket office. So I took an unreserved train to Lyon, then got a seat reservation to Paris for $20. 

When I left Paris for Caen in Normandy, I could not book the seat reservations on line. I went to Gare Montparnasse and made the reservations in Person using the SNCF on line system in the station. The seat reservations were $2 each way. 

The seven days of rail travel:

August 26: Amsterdam to Frankfurt

August 29: Darmstadt to Vienna

August 31: Vienna to Geneva

(September 1, bought a $20 local train ticket from Geneva to Grenoble to avoid using a travel day.)

September 3: Grenoble to Paris (through Lyon)

September 8: Paris to Caen

September 9: Caen to Brussels (through Paris)

September 13: Brussels to London

Rode Alpine Climbs Near Grenoble

In 2014, a 197.5km stage of the Tour de France ended with 

the climb from Grenoble to Chamrousse  

This weekend, I achieved one of my bicycle travel goals. It happened at the last minute, without a plan, in a series of delightful discoveries. 

That goal was to ride Tour de France climbs in the Alps or the Pyrenees before I am too old to finish a seven-to-twenty-mile climb and then ride back down. 

The view from Acrobastille, Grenoble

On Friday evening, I rode up a short, steep climb to a Acrobastille park just north of Grenoble. The steepest grade was 22%, the average grade, according to Strava was 15.6%. The road was three meters wide, less in some places, with tight switchbacks every few hundred meters. 

Cars were speeding up and down the hill toward restaurant at the park at the top of the road. A few of the hairpins were so tight that larger cars stopped and backed up a little in an effort not to hit the barriers at the edge of the road. Here is the climb on the ClimbFinder website.  

The road was painted with names of riders for most of the mid-hill steepest section. I was moving at barely over walking speed. I imagined Tour de France riders zooming past me at more than 20kmh. At the top I turned around and headed back right away. Sundown was in 15 minutes. I was glad the carbon bike I rented had disc brakes. I used them hard going into the turns on the way down. 

When I got back to the hotel room I started searching for destinations for the next day’s ride. I looked further north. I knew there was a long easy climb to the south on the long road to Alpe d’Huez, but the fabled mountain was too far for me to ride there—150km from Grenoble. (I rode Alpe d'Huez in 2000 and 2005. It was as tough as advertised.)

I decided to ride east to the ski resort at Chamrousse. It would be a five-mile ride through the city of Grenoble then a 20-mile climb: a six-mile climb on a five-percent grade, followed by a flat mile through a resort town then an eleven-mile eight-percent grade to the summit: almost 1800 meters of climb, more than a mile vertical. Chamrousse was a Tour de France climb in 2001 (time trial), 2014, and 2017.  

This sign was on the lower slop. When I saw it, I thought, 

'No chance I am violating that speed limit.'

The first climb was fine, but the second climb went from slow to slower. The long climb was in forest so I could never see more than a few hundred meters ahead. I would ride through a switchback then a kilometer of winding road, then another switchback. I was moving faster than the previous day but only just. I mostly rode 4-5mph with occasional short bursts of speed standing on the pedals going 7-8mph! 

Early on the long climb, 800 meters of altitude to go

Three miles from the top I was out of water and thinking about turning around. But I kept going and made it to the largely deserted resort at the top. I got water and a Coke and a sandwich. I was going to take pictures at the top, but I got on the bike, and it felt so good to be rolling on a flat road near the top. I was speeding along at 10mph! Then I took the downward turn toward the intersection at the top of the climb. I leaned down, shifted to the highest gear, and flew down the winding road into the forest. 

For the next 11 miles, more than 20 minutes, I sped down the eight-percent grade, braking just before the switchbacks then pedaling out. By the time I was in the village at the bottom of the first climb, my arms were aching from leaning into the handlebars while braking. The road was mostly smooth so I could swing wide going into turns and lean deeply without getting bounced by bad pavement. 

Even with 40mph wind in my ears, I could hear cars coming up and could definitely hear the motorcycles using the mountain for a high-speed thrill ride. Going into a hairpin on the way up a Suzuki FZR flew past me. The ride-white-and-blue-leather-clad rider leaned so far in the turn I heard the hockey puck on his left knee scrape the pavement for a second. He was followed by three other touring motorcycles that went progressively slower through the turn. 

Since I was going 5mph, I could judge their style as the flew past me. I saw no motorcycles on the way down. I saw several bicycle riders making their slow way up the mountain. I also saw a few cars coming up, but only once did we pass by each other in a turn. European drivers hold their lane in hairpins, and I was tight on the inside of the turn. 

At the bottom of the steep hill in the village I rolled slowly through the tourist traffic, then started down the shallower six-mile descent onto the city. The road was smooth and straight with few turns. I rode back to the Natura Velo bike shop and returned the bike. They charged me for one 24-hour day from Friday at 6:30pm to Saturday at 5pm. The guy renting the bikes was friendly and helpful. 

As I walked out of the shop, I ended the Strava trip down the mountain. I walked to a coffee shop and sipped a cappuccino while I looked at what Strava said about my trip. On both rides it is clear I am among the worst riders going uphill and the best descending. 

Of the 2,800 riders who climbed the short, steep hill to Acrobastille, I was in 2,551st place. I was second of two in my age group, 70-74. Going down the hill, I was 772nd of 2,700 riders of all ages and 1st of five riders in my age group by more than a minute. 

On the climb to Chamrousse, I was 4,467th of 4,562 riders going up. On the steep 11-mile descent that begins the road back to Grenoble I was 1,178th of 3,556 riders but #1 of 22 riders in my age group. I was a half-minute ahead of second place. The other guys on the leaderboard live in the area so it was fun to think I could compete with guys who have made many trips up and down the mountain—at least on the descent. 

Both the climb and the descent give me joy in very different ways. The climbs were so difficult I thought about quitting both. On the first I told myself it was getting dark soon and I did not want to descend after sundown. Near the top of the climb to Chamrousse I was moving so slowly that even the 5km to go sign meant I had almost an hour to ride. But I couldn’t (wouldn’t let myself) stop in either case. The 5km sign gave me some inspiration; I went just a little faster.

The last time I rode in the Alps and the Pyrenees was in 2005.  I am not sure I will ride the great climbs of France again, but I am beyond happy that I was able to ride Acrobastille and Chamrousse.

Talking About Language, America, the Cold War, and Sherlock Holmes on a train in Austria and Switzerland

On the train from Vienna to Zurich, I sat at a table with Weiran and Matilda. 

Weiran is a professor of computer science at the University of Shanghai. He was graduate student in Dresden from 2013 to 2017, then a post doc at UC Davis near Sacramento from 2017 to 2021. 

Matilda is a retired teacher from Feldkirch, Austria. She and her husband taught English and other languages. Her husband taught Latin and Greek early in his career, then English and French when demand for classical language teachers disappeared.

When Matilda first sat with us in Salzburg, she and Weiran talked for a while in German. Then Matilda asked me a question in German. I responded with one of my few German phrases, which says I speak little German. They switched to English, and we talked together for the next two hours. Her question was whether we were sitting in a Quiet Car and were they talking too loudly. I said there was no Quiet Car as far as I knew.

Then we talked about Quiet Cars in America and Europe. Matilda thought it would be terrible, disrespectful to talk in a Quiet Car. I asked if they had been to America. Matilda never had. Weiran lived in California but never rode an Amtrak train. I said if they every rode an Amtrak train, the Quiet Car is not always quiet.

We talked more about travel. Matilda has been to the UK (She said England) many times, but never to America. She thought about it but each time she would travel to England instead. Soon after she retired, Trump was elected and that was the end of considering a trip to America. Matilda rolled her eyes and looked disgusted at the mention of Trump. Last year she spent a month at a monastery near Trondheim, Norway. She likes peaceful settings. From 5,000 miles away America looks like a world of noise and guns.

Weiran lived in California during most of the Trump administration and the first years of COVID and had no problems with either. He worried about the increasingly authoritarian government under President Xi and very much admired our Constitution and how the courts protected America from Trump. He thinks even if Trump gets back in power America will remain a free country.

We also talked a lot about languages: about teaching and learning and grammar and alphabets. Weiran explained the Chinese language and how he moves from one language to another. Matilda said she heard the music of Ancient Greek from her husband who taught the Greek poets singing them to his students.

Weiran told us how he expresses time in a language that does not have formal tenses. It was something like “Yesterday I drive…. tomorrow I drive…. I drive” for past, future, and present. I laughed and said that was how I spoke German 40 years ago. I used the present tense for everything. When I made the joke about speaking a little bit of bad German, I said I had lived in (West) Germany from 1976-79. Matilda said she had recently read a book about the Cold War. She had no idea how many Americans lived in Germany at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s. (A million). In western Austria near Switzerland, the Cold War seemed very remote.

After Matilda left the train, Weiran asked me about tanks. We talked about firing them and why they litter the battlefield in Ukraine, especially Russian tanks. Then as one does, we switched from talking tanks to Sherlock Holmes. We have both read all the Sherlock Holmes stories and started sharing pictures on our phones of our favorite video remakes of the drug-taking detective.

His favorite is the 1984 “Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett. I told him about “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch in which Dr. Watson is an Afghanistan War veteran from the recent war. The original Dr. Watson had served in the second British defeat in Afghanistan in the 1880s. I also mentioned “Elementary” in which Lucy Liu is Dr. Watson.

Weiran and I left the train in Zurich. He was staying the night then flying to Shanghai the next morning. I ran off to catch the train to Geneva. I had ten minutes between trains. Looking at America through the eyes of others is one of my favorite parts of traveling.

 

Ig Nobel Moment on a German Train

Brain activity in dead salmon

On the train from Utrecht to Frankfurt, I sat at a table with Max, a German man in his thirties on the way to Koln. He was wearing a t-shirt from a physics meeting. He runs a lab studying cardiac MRI techniques. He said they study the tiny magnetic fields that surround charge pulses within the heart. 

We talked for a while about his work. Then I asked if he had heard about the Ig Nobel Prizes. I mentioned that a physicist, Andre Geim, is the only person with a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. 

Max was aware of Geim and very aware of an Ig Nobel neuroscience Prize in 2012 won by a team that studied brain activity in dead salmon using fMRI. Max said the paper caused a big reaction in the MRI community because there were real problems with false readings. Here is the Ig Nobel follow up.

After a couple of minutes, Max took out his phone and showed me the fMRI images of brain activity in the now-famous dead salmon. He had the images on his phone. Dead salmon were reported as reacting to human faces. Dead salmon don’t react to human faces as it turns out. Here is the report on the Scicurious blog at Scientific American.

We shared the four-person table with a couple in their 20s who were playing cards with actual cards while the older people at the table were sharing pictures on their iPhones.

Escher Museum, The Hague

While I was in The Hague, capital of The Netherlands, I visited the M.C. Escher museum. His works are illusions within illusions. Here are several.

One of the rooms within the museum is an illusion itself with Escher work displayed inside a larger illusion.

 

Anxious people. A Novel. By Fredrik Backman.

 

I just finished Anxious People: A novel by Fredrik Backman. 

It is hilarious. Really. Actual Laugh Out Loud Hilarious.

Below is the first page and a half. If you like this, you will love the book. Enjoy!!!

A bank robbery. A hostage drama? A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point. Much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. 

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So, it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is, especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human for. Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days.  

You're supposed to have a job, somewhere to live and a family. And you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never managed to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of. The moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control, so we learn to pretend. All the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else, we pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand amortization levels and inflation rates, that we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads. And it always takes us four tries to get the little USB in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round there. In.) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried to keep tropical fish once and they all died, and we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day. Because there will be another one coming along tomorrow.  

Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how because it's so horribly, desperately. Easy to fail at being grown up.  

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight. But which felt like the other way. Like the only way out at the time?