For two weeks I lived across the road from the beach at Vina del Mar, Chile. The weather was lovely--high 60s (20C) during the day and low 50s (12C) at night. The sound of the surf all day and night.
If I get a chance to return to Chile I would like to spend time at Vina del Mar, but definitely want to go south. I want to explore Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. I want to ride up to the ski resorts in the Andes. What a beautiful country.
And the sunsets.......
George Washington was a brave and passionate young man who by will and desire controlled his internal fires. He made himself the stern man who could lead a new nation during and after the Revolution that brought the nation into being. I am reading a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of George Washington by Ron Chernow. The more I read, the more I admire the man who was the symbol of America before there was a capital, a flag or a national government.
And with each page, the contrast between the man who brought America into being and the dissolute dumpy draft dodger in the White House is more vivid. Washington was a colonel in the Virginia militia during his early twenties. He was celebrated for heroism in England and the colonies for his bravery during the Seven Year’s War: at the same age our current President had draft deferments for invisible bone spurs.
When Washington first took command of the continental army in Cambridge, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Boston where the British held the city. The British using 18th Century biological warfare, sent boatloads of infected Boston residents across the Charles River to Cambridge to spread the disease. Washington, who had taken the crude vaccine himself, ordered his soldiers to be vaccinated. He carefully quarantined the infected Bostonians sent across the Charles River.
Today, the anti-vaxxer in chief appointed a lying vaccine skeptic to be the head of Health and Human Services. In a less-known act, Trump re-instated soldiers who refused the Covid vaccine while on duty. Returning to the ranks soldiers who refused orders will make the US military exactly the kind of “losers” he said happened under the previous President. Washington knew discipline (obeying orders) made the army effective. Whining idiots who refuse a vaccine could refuse to fight. How much worse is combat than a Covid shot?
Martha Washington traveled from Virginia to wherever her husband was during terrible winters such as the one in 1976-77 to be with her husband. Martha was terrified of the vaccine which nearly claimed the life of her son, but George insisted she be vaccinated to be with the army. She took the vaccine, was ill for a month and recovered. I think soldiers should be at least as brave as George Washington’s wife.
Washington had an eye for good leaders. The best men in his army rose rapidly through the ranks. Generals Green and Knox notably rose rapidly to important commands as did young officers who caught Washington’s attention. As against the British army with its deep class distinctions, Washington’s army was a meritocracy, bringing the best to the top. Trump has appointed a Star Wars bar scene of misfits to corrupt and destroy the government. Notable in the inventory of idiots is talk-show-host Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. Will this moron even be sober if Russia attacks Europe?
Can America survive this onslaught of mediocrity? I don’t know. When we survived the Civil War, Americans still admired courage and thought the President should be a leader of great character. Last year America no longer cared about character. A mean mediocrity was their pick to make America great again. Not even 100 days into utopia, the economy is tanking because the 20th century man in the White House is re-instating the tariff wars of the 1920s. How did that turn out?
Stupid is not only infinite, but bipartisan. Even as I despair of the descent from the dignity of Washington to immoral mutant Trump, I know that people who agree with me about Trump will howl about Washington, Jefferson and other of the founders of America who owned slaves. Whatever their flaws, the nation they founded eventually fought its bloodiest war to end slavery.
The critics of Washington and America right now are protesting in favor of Jihad on and around college campuses and major cities. The most pathetic of them are Gays for Gaza. Only Israel in the entire Middle East would allow gay people to live in safety, to live at all. In Gaza or any Jihad land, gay people, whatever their pronouns, would be stoned by a gleeful, hateful mob doing the will of their hateful god. Pro-Hamas is not less vile than Pro-Trump. And both are willing to sacrifice their followers without a second thought.
For the next ten days I will be in Chile before returning to Panama. I got a bike yesterday, so I will have a week of riding the hills above the beach in Valparaiso and along the beachfront. This is my first trip to Chile, the fourth country I have visited in South America. I have also been to Argentina, Brazil and Columbia on this continent.
As with other countries south of the equator, riding in Chile is strange because the sun crosses the sky in the north, rather than the south. Since the late 1980s, I have ridden more than 150,000 miles in the northern hemisphere and a few thousand miles either near the equator or in the southern hemisphere.
Riding in the northern hemisphere, especially in cold weather, conditions me to feel the sun in the south. As I ride due west, for example, my left side is slightly warmer and the glare of the low winter sun is in my left eye. Tens of thousands of miles and decades of riding burned this into my mind as "normal."
My first ride in the southern hemisphere almost 30 years ago was due west from Perth, Australia, to the Indian Ocean. It was mid July, winter, and barely above freezing. On that 20-km ride, I stopped twice. My body told me I had to be going the wrong way because my right side was warmed by the sun. Instinct led me to think I was somehow going the wrong way. I was not.
For the next week in Chile, I will have the same instinctual feeling of going the wrong way. When I ride south and have the sun behind me, I will have to tell myself nothing is wrong.
In the meantime, the view along the coast is spectacular.
As an aside on travel, I have been to all six continents, and ridden in five. I have yet to ride in Africa. Chile is the 62nd country I have visited. I have lived in five countries including the US.
Also, South American and Oceana are the two continents where I have ridden in all the countries I have visited. Four countries in South America. And in Oceana, I have only visited one country, Australia, and ridden in it.
I have only been in five countries in North America and ridden in just three:the US, Canada and Panama. I have not ridden in Mexico or Haiti.
Which means I have ridden in 43 of the 55 countries I have visited in Europe and Asia.
I have ridden a bike in more countries that I have done any other activity I keep track of. For example, I have been in an airplane in 43 countries, driven in 30, ridden in a train in 25, used a laundromat in 21 and swam in 14. My biggest decade for travel is the current one. I have visited 35 countries since January 2020.
I'm not sure when I will ride in another country. I have no definite plans to visit a new country in the near future. I have ridden in 35 of the 41 United States, so I have more states to visit sometime in future.
This week, Jews across America get more divided each day over the arrest of Mahmoud Kahlil. Why did ICE arrest Kahlil? They could have deported a dozen, a hundred, or more students on visas and had very little blowback. On a student visa, supporting terrorists is automatic deportation.
But Kahlil has a green card so his free-speech rights are ambiguous. He is not a student but is living in student housing. His wife is eight months pregnant so he is more sympathetic than that other supporters of Hamas terror.
Why him?
Because he will give Trump a controversy to point to every time something does not go his way. Kahlil will likely get deported. The conservative high court is not going to give him the benefit of the doubt if it gets that far.
For Trump, the support for Kahlil is just another deep-state defense of terrorism.
For some Jews Kahlil is a terrorist who should be deported, for others, he has rights and Jews should protect the rights of everyone because we will be next.
Whatever the fate of Kahlil, the divisions among American Jews will be deeper.
If I could recommend just one book of all those I read with the ERT, in fact any single book I read on science, it would be Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts. I liked this book from the introduction, but the more I read it, the more I was drawn into the parallel lives of Carl Linnaeus and the Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon.
These men both lived and worked through much of the 18th Century. Both devoted their lives to classifying every living thing, plus rocks and minerals and even the universe beyond the earth in the case of Buffon. Both men wrote a single work in many volumes with many revisions for their entire lives, describing every sort of life they could find.
During their lifetimes, both were well known. Both suffered tragic and painful deaths. But that's where Roberts tale really took hold of me. He tells the story of how the ideas and reputations of the two men rose and fell after their deaths. This story shows how much science is influenced by culture and politics and the whims of people with an agenda having nothing to do with the work of the scientist.
Linnaeus died in 1778 in Sweden, a country that would remain relatively stable in the centuries ahead. Buffon, a rich French aristocrat, died in 1788 on the eve of the French Revolution. Among the excesses of the French Revolution was erasing anything aristocratic, along with murdering aristocrats. One of the revolutionary committees decided Linnaeus was a man of the people and Buffon should be erased.
The revolutionaries promoted Linnaeus. Buffon and his multi-volume work went into eclipse. Right now on Amazon there are 50 books on Linnaeus plus children's books. Since Linnaeus was a creationist who believed all the species were created by God in the week described in Genesis Linnaeus has a Christian home-school following.
In the mid 19th Century, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species it was clear that the work of Buffon had anticipated evolution. When genes were found to be the inner mechanism of life and reproduction, Buffon's work again seemed prophetic. In the 21st Century with millions of species and many more more types of life that are neither plant nor animal, the Linnaean system is being supplanted. Linnaeus thought God created 40,000 species. His system is overloaded with a thousand times more.
Why this book above every other book on evolution? Because Every Living Thing shows the reader the obsession, the rivalry, the passion, the determination of scientific discovery and then shows how history and politics can promote or ignore a lifetime of work. Real science is always changing, always affected by the culture in which it works.
Right now uncertainty will hinder science in America, maybe leading it to flourish elsewhere. Germany was the center of the scientific world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then the Nazis took over and German science never recovered.
Chance and circumstance affect us all and science no less.
Freedom by Sebastian Junger is first and foremost a Quest or Journey Away, an adventure leaving home. Junger and his friends walk the railroad tracks that connect Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fast-moving narrative takes the reader northwest up the Juniata River valley beginning where it joins the Susquehanna River, then at the headwaters of the Juniata turns southwest along the freight and passenger line that passes through Altoona's Horseshoe Curve on the way to Steel City.
As the group strides alongside the tracks, we learn about the mechanics of long-distance walking, including why the spacing of the ties makes it so difficult to walk on the wooden crossties that support the steel rails.
Before the path along the river was railroad right of way, it was a trail used by settlers moving west and the tribes who lived on the land before them. Junger tells us some of history of the tribes and how they fought and allied with settlers. We also learn the history of tribes and individuals far from Pennsylvania. There is a long section on the Apache on the US-Mexican border.
One of these narrative asides describes how George Washington is reputed to have started the French and Indian War. In 1754 Washington led an attack on a French detachment at what became known as Fort Necessity. Washington won the skirmish. The French surrendered, but the Mingo tribesmen led by the warrior known as the Half King slaughtered and scalped some of the French. What became the Seven Years War arguably began with that battle and its bloody aftermath.
The narrative is interspersed with meditations on what it means to be free in modern America and back through the history.
On the history of freedom versus the modern democratic world:
“For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all--rationing water during a drought, for example--are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”
On leaders who exploit their freedom:
“But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”
Wealth erodes freedom:
“Wealth is supposed to liberate us from the dangers of dependency, but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right. The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more—not less—we depend on society for our safety and comfort.”
On the freedom of the journey at the center of Freedom:
“We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.”
On freedom and power:
“The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.”
He hated liberals ever since and when Trump said he hated liberals, Tom found his man. The central appeal of Trump is hate and resentment. Recently I was reminded that those who are bullied will attach themselves to a bully as their protector.
I went to school with Denny from first grade to high school graduation. He was short, not athletic, and had an ethnic eastern European name. He was easy to tease and never had many friends. When he graduated high school he left Stoneham and had a successful career. He retired to the very red state of Idaho.
Since the election he has made a blizzard of Facebook posts, praising everything Trump does and says.
The experience of being bullied can either lead to loathing bullies or identifying with the bully. In this case, the marginal kid who got bullied anglicized both his first and last names, moved across the country and became an avid promoter of everything Trump does. If Trump farts, Denny will gush about the aroma.
He clearly believes he is on the safe side of bullying now, taking the side of the biggest bully ever to occupy the White House.
On Friday, Trump and Vance attacked President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office (their turf) surrounded by their worshipful staff. In this two against one or fifty against one contest, Zelenskyy refused to bow to the bully. He fought off Putin for three years, Trump is a pale orange imitation. Afterwards, Denny attacked Zelenskyy and has attacked Zelenskyy every day since.
From the day Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, the broken boys of America have flocked to Trump. "I am your retribution," Trump said.
Some who were bullied and managed to survive and thrive were repelled by the game show host who can only punch down. Others saw their revenge in an old, angry, broken man like themselves. They bought MAGA hats and cheered for hate.
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Draft dodgers did not get lift from Bill Clinton. He apologized. But Trump bragged about being a draft dodger. He gave the cowards who let another man serve in their place an increase in status.
Panama is a beautiful place with every kind of hot weather recreation, and more diversity in wildlife than almost any place in the world. Panama is 400 miles long, 50 to 120 miles wide and has mountains more than 11,000 feet high. The north border of the country is 400 miles of Caribbean/Atlantic sea shore, the south side is 400 miles of Pacific shore. To the west is Costa Rice. To the east is Columbia.
Since the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, I have admired the bravery of the Ukrainian people in defense of their nation. Vladimir Putin wants to destroy Ukraine and restore the Tsarist Russia of his disgusting dreams and destroy Ukraine.
For three years now, Ukraine has stood against everything Russia can do--killing hundreds of thousands of Russian troops and wounding even more. For Ukraine, this war is existential. If Russia wins, Ukraine and all of its history and culture disappear as Russia continues to murder, rape and dispossess the people of Ukraine.At this critical moment, America is abandoning Ukraine. Trump is attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the same moment he giving the war criminal Putin anything he wants in regard to Ukraine.
As we approach the Quarter Millennial Anniversary of America next year, we are on course to betray Ukraine, desert Taiwan, take Greenland, attack Panama and threaten our closest allies--and as the frosting on this shit cake, leave NATO.
Forty-nine years ago, my tank flew a Bicentennial American Flag as we trained to face Soviet tanks on the East-West German border. I enlisted during four different wars in the past fifty years. The Cold War was the only war America won. And now Trump has given that victory away by siding with Putin against our allies.
I hoped to celebrate America on July 4, 2026, but it is more likely I will be in DC protesting the betrayal of Ukraine: assuming we still have Constitutional Rights next year. I wouldn't bet one way or the other.
My Dad had several favorite bits of wisdom he lived by. “You can tell who boozes by the company he chooses” was one I first heard when Dad did not approve of my middle school friends. “Volunteer for everything” was the last advice he gave me before I flew to Texas for Basic Training. He was right. But the most useful advice when approaching a complex world was his Every-Other-Asshole Rule.
I remember hearing this for the first time the day I took my driver’s license test. I wanted nothing more in the world than to get my license and drive. I had aced the written test and had years of practice driving warehouse vehicles and an old pickup truck for hauling trash in my summer job. But I was nervous. Just before I took the road test, my Dad said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Just look at every other asshole who has a license and ask yourself, is he smarter than I am?”
I passed.
And for the rest of my life, when faced with something that seemed difficult or frightening, I would look around and see every other asshole who could do what I was about to do. And it worked.
Several years later I was training to be a tank gunner. I had to fire a tank cannon (for the first time) and hit the target down range or redo gunnery training. I was intimidated. I had never fired anything larger than an M16 rifle. But I looked around at the other gunnery trainees who passed the test and even some of the training leaders who were not the brightest bulb on the chandelier and thought, ‘I can do this.’ I did. I was a tank commander less than a year later.
A decade after that, I was the first one out of the plane when a group of eight co-workers at an ad agency went skydiving. We watched a group before us float to the ground. I looked at that group, remembered Dad's advice, and boarded the little single-engine plane last. Last in, first out!
In 2009 in Oklahoma, I went off a rappel tower for the first time. Same drill. Look around, think of Dad, jump backwards and sail to the ground.
In 2012 at age 59, I learned to swim. I had never swum the length of a pool. I went to the YMCA for lessons, not sure I could actually swim. I met my instructor, looked around and thought at least half the human race can swim, I can too.
Thanks Dad.
After months of sea-level riding and walking with some small hills, I hiked and rode up and down some very long, very steep hills near Volcan Baru, a volcano last active about 500 years ago.
From Boquete, I rode past streams and waterfalls toward one of the peaks. Several times I walked on grades that exceeded 20%. I turned around at a point when I could not pedal and could see a half kilometer of very steep road. Total climb was 700 meters.
The descent was slow. The road was narrow and had delivery vans, minibuses and taxis climbing and descending. The road was occasionally smooth, but would suddenly be broken and gravel-strewn.
Here is one grade I rode and walked up:
A new friend here in Panama, a cyclist, Yogi, and round-the-world-sailor named Roger, asked me for a list of books I would recommend. He is an avid reader and looking for new books he has not read.
Roger has read all the greats of 19th Century Russian literature. Today I found out why. Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970. He took a
semester of creative writing with Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigre poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987. Roger won the Russian lit. professor lottery!
I have a few books with me in Panama. Two are Blindness, the terrifying dystopian novel by Jose Saramago, and Tribe by the journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger. Both are excellent, so I gave them to Roger.
Now the list.
1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro are my favorites. I have read everything Ishiguro has written, most recently Klara and the Sun and seen his movie Living. His writing is brilliant. These two books are my favorite.
2. Hannah Arendt. Philosopher and historian and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1906, a German Jew, she earned a PhD at Heidelberg in 1929 and fled Germany in 1933 just after the Nazi takeover. She lived in France until WorldWar II began, then escaped to America in 1941. In 1951 She published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her best-known work defining the new tyranny of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. I have read all of her books. I most admire On Revolution a book that shows why nearly all revolutions devolve into tyranny, but America did not. I love The Human Condition for explaining living in our world. I am such a devoted fan, I am in a weekly reading group and go to Hannah Arendt Conferences.
3. George Orwell. I have read and re-read Orwell's novels. A decade ago I read the 1200-page volume of his collected essays, finding endless entertainment. His essay on brewing tea shows the utter snob that still lingered inside the Democratic Socialist writer. There is no better book explaining the rise of Stalin than Animal Farm. A decade ago, I became convinced that 1984 was not prophetic after all, until I read about life in Communist China.
4. Mark Helprin. I have been a devoted fan of Mark Helprin since read his novel Winters Tale in 1983. I have since read every one of his novels, most recently The Ocean and the Stars. His Paris in the Present Tense gave me a new and lovely view of my favorite city. I plan to read Winters Tale for the third time this year.
5. - 12. I love big books in which one author writes the entire history of humanity as in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
Or of recorded human history as in Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris or another view Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Or a history of American from the view of those without power, These Truths by Jill Lepore.
Another delightful view of the past 500 years Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.
I recently read Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montifiore. I plan to read his The World: A Family History of Humanity. But I also want to read his Jerusalem.
An aside on these books is that I believe recent histories are the best. The old histories did not have access to all the new data. That perspective here.
And another aside! If you read books in translation, read the newest translation available. The latest translation will be clearest and will correct the mistakes of predecessors. If you read Scriptures in translation, read a translation by one person. A committee compromises. One person may be wrong, but they won't be tepid.
Back to the list.
13. (for the unluckiest author on this list) The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Son of a German father and French mother from territory between the countries. Enlists in the German Army at 17 in 1941. Spends the entire war in Russia. Returns home. Home is now in France. He serves in the French Foreign Legion to avoid prison. A soldier under any flag can be a good soldier.
14. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli I re-read it for the tenth time last year, every Presidential election year since 1980. I will read it again in 2028. Machiavelli's advice remains brilliant, relevant and chilling 500 years after he wrote it.
15. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin. A 2006 novel that imagines Russia in 2028 as a restored Tsarist empire, complete with Oprichniks, the assassins of Ivan the Terrible. It is a crazy, funny novel, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed it has a dark, prophetic side.
16. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr. shows us the world after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange kills 95% of the population. A Catholic monastery in the ruins of Utah preserves books after the survivors of the nuclear war burn books and scientists. The irony in this book is amazing.
17. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. In a nine-month trip beginning in1830, Tocqueville found the heart of American democracy and wrote a book that became the central description of America for the world--including every political scientist in America. He said in the 1830s that the 20th Century would be defined by the conflict between Russian and America.
18. C.S. Lewis. I have read all of the 39 books he wrote in his lifetime, plus posthumous collections. His novel Till We Have Faces is so good it is one of the books I read aloud to my daughters. The central characters look at the same thing at the same time and see two entirely different things. So much of the book looks at perception and reality in ways I have not read anywhere else. His book The Four Loves gave me a frame for seeing the different ways people express love...and reject love.
19. Vasily Grossman. Since Roger has read about and is very interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, my first recommendation is Life and Fate the novel of the Battle of Stalingrad and it's second volume titled Stalingrad. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who arrived the first day of the battle and reported then entire terrible fight.
I was a fan of T-Mobile even before I was a customer. Until this year I had very reliable service fromT-Mobile. Then I ran afoul of the...
