Being Wrong: A Normal Part of Life We Fight and Cover Up

 

I just finished the delightful book "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schulz. The book is full of wonderful examples of how we are wrong, why we are wrong and the good side of our errors.  The book begins telling us why we are so delighted to be right and so defensive about being wrong.  We insist we are right about everything from loading the dishwasher to the origins of the universe and twist ourselves in knots to prove just how correct we are.  

My favorite passage in the book connects perception, the history of science and the universe that is the Model behind Dante's Divine Comedy. Schulz shows how thoroughly wrong we can be when all of our senses tell us we are right. 

"Step outside...in someplace truly dark: the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars.  Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of the tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your own position in the spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars is quite stationary--stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you. 

"It is, of course, an illusion: almost everything we see and feel out there on our imaginary Patagonia porch is misleading.  The sky is neither vaulted nor revolving around us, the land is neither flat nor stationary, and, sad to say, we ourselves are not the center of the cosmos. Not only are these things wrong, they are canonically wrong. They are to the intellect what the Titanic is to the ego: a permanent puncture wound, a reminder of the sheer scope at which we can err. What is strange, and not a little disconcerting, is that we can commit such fundamental mistakes by simply stepping outside and looking up."

Schulz surveys the history of being wrong quoting many of the great thinkers of history from Augustine to Groucho Marx, so everyone who has ever been wrong should find something to connect with in this delightful book.
 

I Became a NASCAR Fan in the Stoneham, Massachusetts, Public Library in 1961

 

Michael McDowell, the eighth driver 

To win his first race at the Daytona 500

On Sunday night I stayed up past midnight to watch the final laps of the 2021 Daytona 500. The race had started ten hours earlier and been stopped for a big wreck involving eighteen of the forty cars that started the race.  Then there was a rain delay. But the Daytona Motor Speedway has lights, so they ran after rain the rain stopped.

They ran in a fifteen car single-file line at 190 mph for most of the final 20 laps.  With a lap to go gaps opened as drivers started trying to move up. On the last lap the first two cars tangled. Michael McDowell who was in fourth place shot between the spinning cars and was in front of the field at the moment the caution lights flashed on, ending the race.  

McDowell started racing in NASCAR's top series in 2008, starting 358 races before finishing first at the biggest race on the 36-race calendar. On Valentines Day 2021 he became the eighth driver to win his first race in the Daytona 500. 

After watching nearly all the races for twenty years between 1985 and 2005 and being a fan since I was eight years old, I stopped watching the stock car series because they had eliminated the two things that initially got me hooked: real cars and real danger.  

By the 1970s NASCAR stock cars were purpose-built race cars, but they were the shape of their street-car counterparts.  Fords, Chevys, Dodges and Oldsmobiles looked different. And sometimes a particular body would outperform others. After Dale Earnhardt's death at Daytona in 2001, NASCAR went to the Car of Tomorrow which made every car exactly the same except decals. 

Some of the roulette of risk of racing was lost in 1992 when NASCAR went to radial tires.  I kept watching, but it was clear that radials would bring a different kind of driver to the front.  Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson would be the drivers of a new century.

Real Cars, Real Danger

While a driver scoring his first win after a dozen years of no wins is a compelling story, it's not the story that drew my eight-year-old self to follow a racing series hundreds of miles from my home in a suburb north of Boston, Mass.  The Stoneham Public Library had copies of Motor Trend, Hot Rod and Road and Track magazines. The pictures in these magazines showed real cars racing on paved and dirt ovals.  And unlike stick and ball sports, the drivers risked their lives.  Between 1952 and 2001 twenty-eight drivers lost their lives in practice and racing crashes.  

Later I would follow open-wheel and sports car racing, but the little boy in the library wanted to see Fords, Plymouths, Dodges, Chevys, Buicks, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles with roll bars going more than 150mph.  At that time there was about 30 minutes per year of racing on TV on the ABC Wide World of Sports, so reading the racing coverage was my only option. 

Tiny Lund

The first driver I followed was Tiny Lund.  When I read about his win at Daytona in 1963, it was like McDowell's win this year.  Lund had started 163 races over several years without a win, then won the biggest race of year for his first win.  He died in 1975 at the other NASCAR superspeedway in Talledega, Alabama.  

The Other Drivers Who Won Their First Race in the Daytona 500

There have been 39 different winners in the 62 Daytona 500 races since 1959. The dozen multiple winners are led by seven-time winner Richard Petty, four-time winner Cale Yarborough, four three-time winners and five who took two wins.  

Mario Andretti

Four years after Tiny Lund won his first NASCAR race by winning the Daytona 500, Mario Andretti notched his first win in the "Great American Race."  Andretti had just seven NASCAR starts. In the 60s top drivers in Formula 1, Indy Car and Sports Cars would race NASCAR races with big prize money.  Andretti won in all forms of racing and was a champion in Indy Car and Formula 1.

Pete Hamilton

Dedham, Mass. native Pete Hamilton took his first of three NASCAR wins at the 1970 Daytona 500 in a Petty Enterprises Plymouth Road Runner Superbird.  He won two more races that year at Talledega Superspeedway, the only wins of his brief career.  He left racing in 1974 with a neck injury.  

Derrick Cope

For me, the worst of the first-time Daytona winners was Derrick Cope. He won in 1990 in his 72nd start and won only once more in his NASCAR career. I don't begrudge him the win, but at the time I was on the edge of my seat cheering like crazy for Dale Earnhardt to win his first Daytona 500.  Earnhardt began the final lap in the lead with victory all but certain. He ran over a chunk of bell housing a mile from the finish and Cope sailed past the limping Earnhardt for the win.  

Sterling Marlin

In 1994 Sterling Marlin won after 279 starts in the Daytona 500. He won nine more races in a long career. Both Neil Bonnet and Rodney Orr died in crashes during that ill-fated speed week.   

As an aside, in 1998, Dale Earnhardt finally won the Daytona 500. He had won more than 30 races on the speedway but not the 500.  I was both yelling and crying to finally see him win the 500. Which made the next first time win the saddest of all. 

Michael Waltrip

In 2001 Michael Waltrip, brother of three-time champion Darrell Waltrip, broke NASCAR's longest streak without a win when he won the Daytona 500.  It was his 463rd NASCAR start. I had followed him for years hoping to see him win. Waltrip drove for Dale Earnhardt's team as did Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was Rookie of the Year in NASCAR's top series in 2000. 

At the beginning of the final lap, Waltrip was in front followed by Dale Jr. and then Earnhardt Sr.  A mile into the lap Waltrip and Junior pulled away. Earnhardt Sr. and Kenny Schaeder collided in Turn 3. Michael Waltrip celebrated in victory lane while his brother Darrell, one of the race announcers, teared up in the booth seeing his little brother finally win.

Then someone whispered to Michael Waltrip the Earnhardt Sr. was in grave condition and getting flown to a hospital. The celebration ended and soon we all learned Dale Earnhardt Sr. had died. Michael Waltrip won the Daytona 500 again in 2003. Dale Jr. would win the Daytona 500 in 2004 and 2014 before retiring in 2017. 

Trevor Bayne

In 2011 rookie Trevor Bayne won the Daytona 500 in his second NASCAR start. He is the youngest winner of 500, just 20 years old.  By 2018 he was out of racing. He never won another race after the 2011 Daytona 500.

Which brings us back to 2021 Daytona 500 winner Michael McDowell. I am also back as a NASCAR fan.  This year, the top series will have seven road course races and a dirt event at Bristol.  Seven road courses and a dirt race along with four superspeedway events will put enough variety in the schedule that the dull mile and a half ovals will not determine the who gets into the playoffs.  

Even when I stopped watching the series, this hangs in library/extra bedroom in my house.

 

One Professor, Two Books, Two Americas

Space and Time in Special Relativity  by N.David Mermin

Two very good books on Special Relativity were written by the same professor at the beginning of his career and at the end of his career.  Together they show how much America has changed between 1968 when the first book was written and 2004 when the second was published.  

In the late 1960s during the zenith of science in American culture, N. David Mermin, a young professor of physics at Cornell University wrote SpaceTime and Special Relativity. I love this book. 

Mermin wrote the book after hosting a summer seminar for high school physics teachers. He taught the group special relativity with the goal of giving them the information they needed to teach special relativity in their high schools. Mermin’s book was published the year before the moon landing. 

He believed that special relativity could be taught and understood at the high school level because the only math required is algebra and trigonometry. In 2005, as he neared retirement, Mermin published a new edition of the book titled It’s About Time. 

It's About Time

The new edition reflected almost 40 years of teaching a course in science for non-science majors. In the preface, he also wistfully admitted his dream of high school kids learning special relativity had evaporated. The new edition is a better book with better examples, but I prefer the first one. 

Mermin has an interlude between chapters 10 and 12, a "Relativisitic Tragicomedy" in which he makes fun of Absolutists. He attacks his anti-science enemies with the same confidence and brio he brings to the subject of the book. For me the book helped me to see the real flaw in the Young Earth Creationist arguments and at the same time gave me a picture of God in the universe that Einstein gets beautifully right and the Creationists get horribly wrong. 

Before the new book was published, I wrote Mermin a letter telling him what I saw in his book. He wrote a long letter back telling me he was happy to hear what I found in the book and saying if he writes a new edition, it would not have a Chorus. It doesn’t.

Thinking about these books together reminded me how different Life, the Universe, and Everything looked when America was the world center of science and innovation.

Paragon Becomes Moral Relativist

The moral absolutes of peace and prosperity can melt like snow in the Sahara when faced with a threat--real or perceived. A man devoted to love and the Kingdom of Heaven fifty years ago now believes the election of Democrats will be the end of Christian America.  

When I got to my first active-duty base in October of 1972, I got a roommate.  Since my first service was the Air Force, I only had one roommate, not eight or a dozen.  My roommate was another 19-year-old named Don.  

He was unlike anyone I had known growing up in a northern suburb of Boston.  I never knew a teenager who was seriously religious.  I grew up nominally Jewish, but did not have a Jewish mother, so most Jews didn't think I was Jewish.  

Don was in Church Sunday morning and evening, Wednesday evening and maybe more than that if he could.  He took the Bible literally and seriously and wanted to tell everyone about Jesus.  He was also a great roommate. He was clean, neat, did not play loud music and was gone a lot--at Church.  

If Don had been a soldier, he could have been "Bible" in "Fury." Don was that sincere about his faith.  I lost touch with Don when I left the Air Force in 1974.  In 2019 he saw a post I made on and Air Force veteran Facebook page and called me.  We talked a couple of times, but we did not continue speaking.  He was a clearly a Trump supporter so we stopped talking before we had a dispute over politics.

This week, with Trump out of office and the impeachment trial underway, I thought I would ask Don what he was thinking about the state of the country.  

I called and left a message.  His phone flipped to voice mail and the greeting was "For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten ... " ending by identifying the words read as John 3:16 and asking me to leave a message.  

The next day he called.  I first told him the impression he made on me 49 years ago.  All the rest of us in the barracks lived to get high and get laid, but he had a higher purpose.  In 1972 he was against sex outside marriage, smoking, drinking, gambling, drugs, greed, lying, and all the other Thou Shalt Nots of the Bible.  

So I asked him how he and other Christians could support a perpetual fountain of sin like Trump.  His first reason was abortion, we would return to that every few minutes.  The other was Israel.  He acknowledged Trump lies, but said all politicians lie and believes Trump is no different.  

After we exhausted all of the various reasons why it was the right thing for Christians to attack Bill Clinton based on character while excusing Trump, he got to the central issue of his support for an unrepentant and bragging sinner.  Don believes the country went wrong in the 50s when prayer started to be removed from school.  He said America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles and that America stopped honoring God and chaos followed: sex, drugs, rock and roll, abortion, and defeat in the Vietnam War.

I asked how he felt about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  America was an apartheid state until Jim Crow laws were dismantled. He thought a white man was always at a disadvantage now because of quotas.  And he was very angry about political correctness--that if he says the wrong thing even in jest and someone is offended he could lose his job or worse. 

When we talked about January 6 and Trump's attempt to steal the election and take power as a dictator, Don said he would not support that. If the coup had succeeded support would not be an issue, I said. Free and fair elections would have ended in 2018. He said the election of Democrats this year would mean there would never be another free election, that Democrats would rig the elections going forward. 

For me, January 6 very nearly ended American democracy. For him, democracy did end on that day.  At one point, I asked him if he could tell someone about Jesus with a MAGA hat on.  Forty-nine years ago, Don could and did tell people about Jesus in chow hall, in the latrine, at bus stops, and anywhere else he could.  

Nixon was President when we were roommates. Watergate unfolded during that time. I can't remember caring about it. I don't remember ever talking about politics with Don. At that time Pentacostals like him were more likely to be apolitical than concerned with politics.  

But nearly fifty years later, a country with legal abortion, legal gay marriage, and what he perceives as cancel culture is not his country. Trump, as I have heard in many focus group reports, is the choice of people who believe fake history conjured by the likes of Michael Barton  whose books have been debunked by historians. He and others like him have created the myths that fill the minds of Believers when they hear MAGA.  America was great in the 50s. America was great in the Antebellum south. America was great when Andrew Jackson broke treaties with Native Americans.  

So Don voted for Trump in 2016 to save America from Hillary Clinton. He voted for Trump in 2020 to save America from Radical Agenda of Joe Biden.  And after listening to the blizzard of lies from Trump, he believes it is the Democrats who will be stealing all the elections from this day forward.  

Somehow Don's moral certainty of 1972 has slid full-throated support of a man was willing to overthrow the government and cheering when it almost happened. 

Trading the Kingdom of Heaven for the Tyranny of Trump seems to me a very bad deal, and sadly, one made by millions.

Field Guide to Flying Death: Dumb Bombs, Russia and Syria

US Army Air Corps B-17 Flying Fortress dropping "dumb" bombs 

on Germany in World War II

 During World War II and for decades after, "dumb" or unguided bombs were the only way to put explosives on target from the air.  Beginning in the Gulf War, America and other nations started using "smart" or guided bombs.  

In 1999 when American B-2s bombed Belgrade, Pentagon spokespersons said they could not only hit a specific building, but put a bomb in a specific doorway of a building. 

Beginning in September 2015, Russian strategic bombers flew from Ossetia near the Republic of Georgia in Southern Russia and bombed targets in Syria.  They claimed to be fighting ISIS, but hit civilian targets, causing thousands of casualties. The Russian bombers dropped "dumb" bombs.  Various news outlets at the time speculated that the Russians used dumb bombs because these bombs are much cheaper than guided weapons. Up to 100 times cheaper.  The Miami Herald wrote this.

From top: Tu-95, Tu-160 and Tu-22 Strategic Bombers

In his book The Road to Unfreedom Timothy Snyder said Russia began bombing Syria three weeks after Germany announced it would take in a half million refugees. 

"Russian aircraft dropped non-precision ("dumb") bombs from high altitudes. ... Russia was not targeting ISIS bases. Human rights organizations reported the Russian bombing of mosques, clinics, hospitals, refugee camps, water treatment plants and cities in general." (pages 198-199)

Dumb bombs made the refugee crisis worse. Putin's goal, according to Snyder, was to destabilize Europe. By making the refugee crisis worse in Europe, the Russian bombing campaign played to the xenophobia of the fastest-rising candidate in the American Presidential election. That candidate would eventually take the side of Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies.

The dumb bombs were dropped by a man with a smart plan.  

Field Guide to Domestic Terrorists: Boogaloo Boys

The Boogaloo Boys--terrorists in floral prints.

For my second terrorist group, I picked the Boogaloo Boys.  They are the newest terrorist group with a large following in America.  They are gun-loving fools who think they can tear down America and still have 5G phone service, toilet paper and dinners with mom.  

Their newness shows just how successful the last four years have been in promoting anarchy.  Every right-wing terrorist group has flourished under trump. they are his people.  

From the Anti-Defmation League:  The boogaloo movement is a developing anti-government extremist movement that arose in 2019 and features a loose anti-government and anti-police ideology. The participation of boogaloo adherents in 2020’s anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests has focused significant attention on the movement, as have the criminal and violent acts committed by some of its adherents.

Before there was a boogaloo movement, there was the concept of “the boogaloo” itself: a slang phrase used as a shorthand reference for a future civil war that became popular in various fringe circles in late 2018. By 2019, people ranging from gun rights activists to libertarians and anarchocapitalists freely used the term “boogaloo,” urging people to be “boogaloo ready” or even to “bring on the boogaloo.”  The term itself didn’t specify a type of civil conflict, allowing different types of extremists to insert their own particular fantasies as the concept spread on numerous discussion forums and social media sites.

The term itself derives from a longstanding joke referencing the 1984 film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, in which the first part of the film’s title is replaced by something else to suggest some sort of sequel.  When George W. Bush followed in his father’s footsteps to the U.S. presidency, for example, some people jokingly referred to it as “Bush 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

More ADL info here.

Key Points:

• The boogaloo movement is an anti-government extremist movement that formed in 2019. In 2020, boogalooers increasingly engaged in real world activities as well as online activities, showing up at protests and rallies around gun rights, pandemic restrictions and police-related killings.
• The term “boogaloo” is a slang reference to a future civil war, a concept boogalooers anticipate and even embrace.
• The ideology of the boogaloo movement is still developing but is primarily anti-government, anti-authority and anti-police in nature.
• Most boogalooers are not white supremacists, though one can find white supremacists within the movement.
• The boogalooers’ anti-police beliefs prompted them to participate widely in the Black Lives Matters protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020.
• Boogalooers rely on memes and in-jokes, as well as gear and apparel, to create a sense of community and share their ideology.
• Boogalooers have been arrested for crimes up to and including murder and terrorist plots.

The Atlantic magazine recently wrote about the Civil War dreams of the Boogaloo Boys.

Last time I wrote about the 3 Percenters

Books of 2020 -- The Complete List

 

My favorite book of 2020

The following are the books I read in 2020.  They are grouped in categories.  There are links to the comments of those I already wrote about. 

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen -- My favorite book of 2020. Essay here.

Fiction

I wrote a separate post about books of fiction here. I added more about Decameron and The Great Divorce. The rest of the list is below.

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio -- This year was my second reading of Decameron, but my first reading during a pandemic! It was more vivid this time, reading about a group of young men and women escaping the plague at its epicenter to feast and tell stories.  The plague was so bad in Florence it was referred to as the Florentine Plague at the height of the Black Death in Europe. Seven of ten Florentines died in the middle of the 14th Century.  

The book itself was more intriguing this time. I have read and re-read the 100 Cantos of the Divine Comedy but until this year was in thrall to Dante and not so interested in Boccaccio. But this year as I read the Decameron I thought how the 100-story form could be re-created in our own time of plague.  The New York Times magazine devoted an issue to Decameron stories from many writers.  One Hundred stories while under various forms of quarantine seems like a wonderful idea.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis:  The book has nothing to do with marriage ending happily. This short book begins at a bus stop in Hell where many residents catch a bus for a day trip to the edge of Heaven. The journey follows Dante's Divine Comedy both in the route from Hell to Heaven and in the book's focus on the people the Pilgrim (narrator) meets along the way.

One huge difference is the geography of Hell. Dante climbs down from the surface of the Earth through the center of our planet and up to the other side and Mount Purgatory. Dante's trip is vertical.

The journey in Lewis' book is flat. Hell is a flat, ever-expanding disk in which people build houses, fight and move further and further apart. The smoky wraiths from Hell seem to be rising on the bus tour, but are actually expanding to allow them to tour the edge of Heaven.

The book ends by underlining the underlying point of the Divine Comedy: Free Will. Lewis makes a good attempt at talking about how we can perceive predestination and free will and how both can be true though the lens of Time.

Both books are brilliant. The Great Divorce is something of a tribute. Lewis loved the Divine Comedy. 

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Head of Professor Dowell by Alexander Belyaev

Memoir from an Antroof Case by Mark Helprin

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, #1 and 

A Clash of Kings, #2 by George R.R. Martin

21: Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey 

Blue at the Mizzen 

The Commodore

The Hundred Days

The Nutmeg of Consolation

The Thirteen-Gun Salute

The Truelove

The Wine Dark Sea

The Yellow Admiral by Patrick O'Brian 

Il Etait une Fois by Francoise Savigny--every year I re-read this French children's book just to practice reading French aloud without hesitating. 

History, Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Memoir

Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne -- one of several books interesting books in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.  The book is a 100-page history of bookshelves from the Ancient world to what to call a "shelf" of ebooks. I have read several.  Another I read this year is Silence by John Biguenet. It is a history of who has the privilege of silence and the place of silence in our world and past worlds: from First-Class Lounges in airports to monastic life.

My favorite so far in the series is Free Will by Mark Balaguer -- I re-read the book this year with my ESL Book Group. I love the way the book presents the issues around Free Will.  

I am currently reading Paradox and Irony and Sarcasm. The series includes more than 30 books on Food, Artificial Intelligence, fMRI, Recycling, and Science Fiction to name a few. Check them out here.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and On Tyranny by Timothy -- I re-read both this year while waiting for the coup d'etat that ultimately failed because the former President is a coward.  Here is what I wrote about these books four years ago.

Ally by Michael B. Oren -- This memoir by the Israeli Ambassador to the US during the first term of President Obama made me wish Romney had won in 2012.  It would have made Trump impossible. I wrote about the book here.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu or Master Sun -- My first reading of this classic book of advice to warriors.  It was fun. The second book we read for the World Conquest Book Club.

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen -- Written in 1899, this book describes so much about the actual problems of living in a culture obsessed with money and power and with how to show off how successful and powerful we are.  

Why Arendt Matters by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl -- I have read most of Hannah Arendt's major works, but had not read a book about her. This year I read an overview of her works before participating in the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.  We finished The Promise of Politics in January 2021 and this week start on my favorite of Arendt's works The Human Condition.

The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols --  I loved the book. We read it for the ESL Book Discussion Group. The title explains premise of the book, but it is entertaining and sad.  Here is part of my reaction to it:  I am delighted reading The Death of Expertise. Chapter 3 is about the changes in higher education in the last half century and how these changes led to many people getting degrees that merely indicate sustained breathing with inflated grades. Chapter 4 is a detailed examination of how the internet makes us stupid. Tom Nichols says that accumulating random facts you don't understand on the internet and thinking you have done research is like saying you can swim when you simply get wet. In the same chapter, Nichols talks about the actress Gwyneth Paltrow recommending her legions of fans get their vaginas steamed instead of seeing a gynecologist. A gynecologist replied in a long, delightful rant that is in Chapter 4. It's worth the price of the book.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli -- When I re-read The Prince this summer for the first meeting of the World Conquest Book Club, it was my 11th reading since 1980. I read a new translation and loved the discussion. I wrote about my 10th reading here. 

White Fragility by Robin Diangelo -- My responses were "Amen!" and "Guilty!" 

The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard Henri-Levy -- I have read several of Levy's books. In the faith section at the top is my favorite. This one is short and a timely of how crazy the world gets when the richest people are in danger.  

Fascism and Democracy by George Orwell -- An Orwell essay published with a few other essays as a book. I picked it up in Paris. It was a good reminder of how bad things can get by a brilliant pessimist.

(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump by Jonathan Weisman -- Trump unleashed a host of flying monkeys with his candidacy and election. Weisman lived through how bad it could get for a journalist. 

Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell -- We had a delightful discussion about the premise of the book and the critics of the book.  ESL Book Discussion Group.  

Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom by Ariel Burger -- I read this book for the Writers in Residences series at F&M College.  It was interesting to see Wiesel through the eyes of one of his students.

Tell Me Another One by Judith Newman -- This book was just fun. I wrote about it here.

Science

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. this year was my third reading of this wonderful book. 

Sex At Dawn by Allyson Johns and Jonathan Davis -- Two species are closest to humans on a genetic and evolutionary basis:  Bonobos and Chimpanzees.  Bonobos are cooperative and have many ways of organizing their communities, but tend to matriarchies.  Chimps are hierarchical, patriarchal and murderous.  Linking this book to Sapiens, our species had a chance to be follow either and before agriculture we did.  After wheat tamed us, not so much.  

Universal Constants in Physics by Gilles Cohen-Tannougji -- This short book is about G, c, h, and k.  It could be Sesame Street. But it is about the four constants in physics that are the limits of what we can comprehend on the grandest and smallest of scales.  

G, the gravitational constant, allowed Newton to give physics a rational basis for describing the universe.  

c, the speed of light, is the absolute number--the speed limit of the universe--that allowed Einstein to define Special Relativity.  General Relativity considered G and c simultaneously.

k, Boltzman's constant, is the fundamental unit relating energy to temperature. It is the basis of thermodynamics and it predicts the existence of a quantum of information.

h, Planck's constant, marks the lower limit of what we can know at the atomic level. With k, h defines the limits of certainty.  

I read this book every few years to remind me how beautiful science is. 

Books on Faith

Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will we pass the Trump test? by Michael Brown--The Worst book of 2020.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan  Jacobs--a lovely meditation on what we can learn by reading authors no longer living.  Jacobs ranges over three millennia of those departed.  I loved the book.  

Beyond the Binaries by Thomas L. Horrocks. This book advocates people talking together about abortion and not being absolutists in either direction. Horrocks is an Evangelical who seems to think Jesus meant all that stuff about caring for widows and orphans and detesting power and money.  The book was an interesting tilt at one of America's biggest political windmills.  I admire Horrocks.  In the theocracy that most Evangelicals wish for, Franklin Graham would burn Horrocks as a heretic on the DC Mall.

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. -- When I began my Jewish journey after Charlottesville, Levy was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. Gentiles, less so. Every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  Levy showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.  I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, but this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.  Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Overall, the book left me wondering about my identity as a Jew. The book helped me to decide that I could reconnect with the Jewish part of me in a positive and growing way, a process that began last spring and is still going on as the New Year begins. 

The Question of God by Armond Nicholi, Jr. -- A book about a course at Harvard comparing the lives and beliefs of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Lewis comes off looking a lot better than Freud. Since I knew nothing of Freud, I learned a lot from that part of the book. I have read a dozen biographies of Lewis and all of his books, so that part of the book was familiar, but good.

Field Guide to Domestic Terrorists: 3 Percenters

3 Percenter Logo: A symbol of domestic terrorism.

Several years ago, I wrote a series of posts with the collective title FGFD: A Field Guide to Flying Death. I wrote a half-dozen posts in the series. I have plans to write a half-dozen more.  One post was on ICBMs, InterContinental Ballistic Missiles, the kind would destroy cities and countries. If terrorists ever get weapons like these, the world is in deep and imminent danger. 

On January 6, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by terrorists who murdered a police office and hurt and maimed others.  The former President incited the riot, but various domestic terrorist groups attacked the Capitol at his direction.  

I wanted to know more about the groups that attack their own government inspired by the Liar-in-Chief.

I will begin with Three Percenters.  The Anti-Defamation League, ADL, has called them a terrorist group for a while which means they love Trump and Trump loves them.  

Here are some key points from the ADL:

• Three Percenters are part of the militia movement, which supports the idea of a small number of dedicated “patriots” protecting Americans from government tyranny, just as the patriots of the American Revolution protected early Americans from British tyranny. 
• The Three Percenter concept, created in 2008, is based on an inaccurate historical claim that only three percent of Americans fought in the Revolutionary War against the British. 
• Three Percenters may join or form traditional militia groups but often form non-paramilitary groups or online networks. Many are not associated with any particular groups. 
• The Three Percenter concept both contributed to and benefited from the resurgence of the militia movement that began in 2008. Because many adherents to the militia movement strongly support President Trump, in recent years, Three Percenters have not been as active in opposing the federal government, directing their ire at other perceived foes, including leftists/antifa, Muslims and immigrants. 
• Three Percenters have been active in 2019-2020 in reaction to a range of issues, including attempts to pass state level gun control measures, state-imposed restrictions and lockdowns to prevent spread of the coronavirus, and the protests that have taken place around the country over the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 
• Three Percenters have a track record of criminal activity ranging from weapons violations to terrorist plots and attacks.

Their ideology according to Wikipedia:

The group's website states it is "not a militia" and "not anti-government".^[15][6] Three Percenters believe that ordinary citizens must take a stand against perceived abuses by the U.S. federal government, which they characterize as overstepping its Constitutional limits.^[1] Its stated goals include protecting the right to keep and bear arms, and to "push back against tyranny".^[7] The group opposes federal involvement in what they consider local affairs, and states in its bylaws that county sheriffs are "the supreme law of the land".^[15]

Like other American militia movements, Three Percenters believe in the ability of citizen volunteers with ordinary weapons to successfully resist the United States military. They support this belief by claiming that only around 3% of American colonists fought the British during the American Revolution, a claim which underestimates the number of people who resisted British rule,^[8] and which does not take into account the concentration of British forces in coastal cities, the similarity of weapons used by American and British forces, and French support for the colonists.^[8]

Racist, Right-Wing, Republican Fools with a lot of guns is one way to look at them.  They first organized in opposition to a Black President.  They should be treated as terrorists.  No definition of patriot describes what they do or believe.

The Worst President, Then One of the Greatest Presidents, Then Civil War

 

James Buchanan, worst President, until 2020

James Buchanan was widely regarded as the worst President in American history until January 6, 2020.  Buchanan presided over the slide to Civil War.  The last month of the Buchanan administration saw the rebellious states prepare for war.  On February 8, 1861, the first seven of the traitorous states formed the Confederate States of America.  Buchanan was President until Abraham Lincoln's inauguration on March 4. 

The war did not begin until the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12. For 39 days, President Lincoln, one of the greatest Presidents who ever lived, tried to re-unite the country and then defend the United States.  

In the 157-day period between election day November 6, 1860, and April 12, 1861, many families split, many friendships ended, many comrades took opposite sides in the coming war.  

The terrorist attack on the Capitol on January 6 began with an hour of incitement by Trump based on his endless lies about the election.  After the attack that left five dead, 139 members of Congress and 8 senators voted not to accept the election results: AFTER the Capitol was attacked.  They are still seated in Congress.  They should not be. 

Eight of those traitorous Republicans are Pennsylvania representatives including my former commander in Iraq, Scott Perry. President Joe Biden has been sworn into office, but Perry and the rest of the insurrection caucus stand by Trump's lies.  They have broken their oath to uphold the Constitution.  

Every day since January 6, I have wondered if this is what it felt like to live in 1861 and watch the country fall apart. For the first time in 240 years, the United States of America did not have a peaceful transfer of power. The President told his followers to attack the Capitol, then he refused to attend the inauguration of the new President.  

Buchanan went to Lincoln's inauguration. 

What Will We Do With the Sedition Caucus?

 

Helsinki 2018, selling out America to her enemies

Now that the President who sided with Vladimir Putin against our government is out of office, America will have to deal with the liars and traitors left who still hold office in our government.

Congressman Lloyd Smucker voted against me and everyone else in his district who cast legal votes in the election.  Smucker along with seven other Pennsylvania congressman voted not to certify the election in Pa. AFTER the a mob of white supremacist terrorists invaded the Capital.  

Another member of the Pennsylvania Sedition Caucus is Scott Perry. My commander in Iraq in 2009-10 repeated all of Trump's lies about the election and voted with the murderers who invaded the U.S. Capital.  

They joined more than 100 other seditious Republican members of congress and eight senators--led by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.  

None of the Republicans who voted for Trump's lies and against America should hold office, but they do. Now that the Traitor-in-Chief has returned to his Dacha (Дача) in Florida, I can focus on fighting the sedition caucus here in Pennsylvania.  Before his traitorous vote on January 6, I would not have believed Smucker could be defeated, but he can.  He will always be defined by his vile vote.

The same is true of Scott Perry. He won by several percentage points in 2020, but his unwavering support of Trump's unending lies will be his undoing.  

Despite Trump, Smucker and Perry, America is still a democracy.  One down, two to go in 2022.

  

Are We in 1861 America or in 1991 Yugoslavia?

 

Insurgent mob declares war on America at the direction of 

the President on January 6, 2021.

When the MAGA mob stormed the Capitol, were we watching the first battle of second American Civil War? Or were we watching an inevitable slide into tyranny?

In 1861, the second worst President in American history, James Buchanan, sent America into Civil War. But that war had a clear definition and boundaries, which meant the war could be fought and won and had an ending.  

In Yugoslavia the war is contained, for now. In Iraq or Yemen or Syria or Lybia the war is either intermittent or permanent, but essentially never ending.  One of the problem is borders.

In America, the borders of slave states formed the rebel nation.  Slaves were in these states. Slaves were not in the other states. (There were border states, but the rebel government had defined area.) So war could be fought and won or lost.  We utterly fucked up the peace, but the war itself and the rebel government ended.  

You could say the war ended in Yugoslavia, but the multi-ethnic society held together by Marshall Tito is gone and won't return. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Normal life has returned, but in ethnic enclaves with real borders.  

America is a complicated mess.  There are red states and blue states, but a half dozen states are more or less evenly split.  What side are they on?  And what about Austin, Texas, a hip enclave in amid millions of red state rednecks? Or Madison, Wisconsin? Or Denver and Boulder in Colorado? 

My own state of Pennsylvania can still be described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.  I live in the city of Lancaster, a small, largely Democratic city in the middle of a county that is 80% Republican. Is Pennsylvania red or blue? It has a split congressional delegation--nine congress members from each party, one senator from each party. 

If America falls apart, the split can't happen along defined physical borders.  We are mixed thoroughly. We have to find a way to live with each other or face an ugly future.   

The Most Fun Book of 2020: "Tell Me Another One"

Judith Newman

At the end of 2019, before the pandemic, I was in the middle of a crowd of more than a thousand people in a big hall in Brooklyn. We came to hear Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg speak.  Halfway through the event, I met Judith Newman, author and New York Times columnist.  We talked about why we thought Mayor Pete was the best candidate for President, then talked about raising kids.

Newman has written several books. Her most well-known is To Siri with Love about raising her autistic son Gus.  Goodreads lists 22 editions of Siri including editions in Dutch, French and Spanish.  

But my favorite of her books is her first.  In 1994 she published Tell Me Another One: A Woman's Guide to Men's Classic Lines.  Before the first of my four daughters was born, I had a goal for all of their lives.  I wanted to convince each of my girls that women cannot change men.  To me, the saddest and most pervasive American myth for girls that kissing a frog would create a prince.  Or that loving a woman would lead a man to change.  

More specifically, I never wanted one of my daughters to say of a furtive, sneaky, loser with his uncombed hair in his eyes, "No one understands him but me."  The truth is, everyone understands that worthless little shit except the foolish girl who is smitten with him.  

All of my life I have known unhappy women who married that guy. They never changed him.  Decades of unhappiness followed.  

In the middle of Tell Me Another One is a brief taxonomy of guys by type. "I'm the Kinda Guy Who...." (How he describes himself)

• The Loner
• The Legend in His Own Mind
• The Rebel
• The Bum
• SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys)
• The Woefully Misunderstood

The last section has lovely quotes that describe the guy I warned my girls away from:

"Oh, I'm eternally right. But what good does it do me?" --Robert Sherwood, The Petrified Forest

"If I loved you less, I'd be happier now." --Man whose martyr complex is annoyingly larger than yours.

"This long disease, my life." --Alexander Pope, prologue to The Imitations of Horace 

This is a book of lines. The classic trio is on page 39:

• "You'd do it if you really love me." --Men, from the day they turn 14.
• "Nothing's going to happen that you really don't want to happen." --The same men after they turn 30.
• "Of course, I'll still respect you." --All men, all ages.

On page 35 is civilian version the go-to line of soldiers in every army ever:

"Who knows but the world may end to-night?" --Robert Browning, "The Last Ride Together"

Military version:  "I leave tomorrow. I might not be coming back." --Said any soldier or sailor in any army or navy who thought it would get him laid.  

--------

My daughters are in relationships with good men who are the opposite of the "misunderstood" guy I worried about.  I could take credit, but it turns out an important part of their education in what men are really like came from playing teams sports at a small school. For away games in middle and high school, they sometimes rode the same bus as the boys teams.  One or two seasons and all of their illusions about boys and men were gone.  

Book Report 2020: Best and Worst

My favorite book of 2020

This year I am breaking my book list into pieces. This piece is Best and Worst books of 2020.  Each book was recommended by a friend, even the bad book.

First, my favorite book: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen.  The author is a refugee. He and his family escaped Vietnam after the war was lost by America and by our ally South Vietnam.  

The thesis of the book: 

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.  

In America we call this war the Vietnam War.  In Vietnam, it is the American War.  In the wake of the victory of the North in 1975, the South was oppressed and the memory of its part in the war erased from the official records.

The stark differences in the views of the war between the two combatant countries are evident at the Vietnam War Memorial where every American soldier who died in the war is etched in the long black wall.  More than three million Vietnamese died in the war, a fact that is not part of any remembrance of the decade-long conflict. Many of the dead were our allies.  Nguyen also points out that the American wounded are not part of the memorial. 

So much of the book was new for me. Although the Vietnam War defined much of my life, the book made clear that I knew little about the war and its devastating effects on both countries.  Most of the senior officers and NCOs I served with on active duty between 1972 and 1979 were Vietnam War veterans. Their experience should have been the basis for fighting the wars in the Middle East in this century, but the lessons learned were quickly forgotten.

A decade ago, when I served in the Iraq War, it was clear that the failures of the Vietnam War would become the failures of the current wars. The big failures of the Iraq War are well known, but Nguyen reminded me of a lesson learned in the Vietnam War that had to be re-learned in Iraq with the loss of many lives and many limbs: armor for trucks. 

Another lesson of the Vietnam War forgotten in this century is the first line of Chapter 6--On Asymmetry: 

Killing is the weapon of the strong. Dying is the weapon of the weak.  

The book is beautifully written and painfully true. 

Next, three books that gave me a different view of Socrates and Plato. Forty years ago as an undergraduate I read Plato's Republic. What I could remember centered on the Allegory of the Cave and the Philosopher King.   I knew even then that every Utopia was really an authoritarian world--perfection can't allow the mess that is freedom.  

What I did not understand until this year was that Plato at the end of his life had a view of the ideal government that was nearly opposite of his mentor Socrates.  Plato spent his life presenting Socrates to the world. But after Socrates took his own life before Athens put him to death, Plato ceased believing in democracy and imagined a world led by a Philosopher King that is the opposite of the Socratic, democratic ideal.  

The anti-democratic, authoritarian tendency of Plato in late life is at the center of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.  

Popper's book and Republic were the third and fourth books we discussed in the World Conquest Book Club.  

Which brings up the delightful irony that I learned more about Plato by using the very Socratic method of discussing ideas among friends.  

And less than a month after discussing these books, I joined the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.  The book they were discussing and will finish this month is Arendt's The Promise of Politics. The first essay is "Socrates." Arendt says Socrates used dialogue to bring each person to clarity and harmony:  It is better [for me] to be in disagreement with the whole world than' being one, to be in disagreement with myself.

Through dialogue, Socrates brought those he spoke with to see what they really believed so they could be in agreement within themselves.  In this context Socrates said one reason not to be murderer is that you must live the rest of your life with a murderer.  

Through reading these books and discussing them, I have become more aware I feel moments of real clarity in dialogue, clarity that I cannot find in thinking about a subject or idea by myself. 

At the same time I was learning more about Socrates and dialogue, I read a book by a man whose inner dialogue must be chaotic.  The book attempts to justify Evangelical Christians voting for Trump.  I can imagine the author's inner dialogue would have less harmony than a half-dozen metal trash cans rolling downhill. 

The worst book I read in 2020, I read at the request of a friend named Dmitri who lives part of each year in a monastery in Germany. My best friend, Cliff, has lived there since 1979, the year we both left active duty in the Army Cold War Germany.  I spent the day with Dmitri and Cliff visiting the Cold War border in 2017. He has a very interesting story. Dmitri sincerely believes Trump is good for the Church, for Israel and for America.  So he asked if I would read book Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will the Church Pass the Trump Test? by Michael L. Brown.  I did.

Brown is a celebrity Christian with who publishes books and articles and is all over social media and does lives interviews and Q&As.  After I read the book, I wrote this on Goodreads: 

In Evangelicals at the Crossroads, Michael L. Brown reminds me of the guy who sat on his own hands and rocked from side to side: he was on the one hand then on the other hand.
Toward the end of the first chapter, Brown quotes Peter Wehner at length. Wehner is an unwavering public Christian who I have heard calmly say that a man with Trump's actions could not possibly represent the Gospel. On the next page he quotes Robert Jeffress who holds rallies for Trump in his Church with patriotic music and flags followed by fireworks displays. Brown quotes these two men as having an equally valid point of view.
Which to me felt like when CNN put an immunologist and Jenny McCarthy, an anti-vaxx celebrity, next to each other as if medical school and nude modeling gave each an equal voice on vaccination.
I looked at Brown's long list of books and it screamed "propaganda."
I deeply distrust his method of presenting opinions without context because his thesis is that there are good people on both sides of the debate. I find that sort of populist equivalency false and repellent.

In the middle of reading the book, I wrote this:

I am reading a book by a white Evangelical Christian justifying his support of the "chaos candidate." I am reading it with two friends who are Christians who live in German and are trying to understand the trumpian Church in America.

The author quotes Christian leaders who celebrate him as a "Chaos Candidate." These trumpians see the white Evangelical Church as embattled by dark forces of secularism who want to take away their freedom.

Imagine those who say they worship the Creator of the Universe celebrating chaos! Chapter 6 has extensive quotes of those celebrating the chaos candidate.

It reads like a librarian celebrating book burning.

The book is a strong confirmation in Church language that the trumpians in the Church, like all trumpians, love their orange idol because he hates who they hate.

Another chilling bit of clarity in the book is that in his reptilian instinct for power, trump has found a huge loyal group who really, deeply celebrates his authoritarian goals. The religious people who support him want rights reversed for everyone who is not them.

MAGA re-elected will reverse gay rights, abortion rights, women's rights, voting rights, the rights of the disabled, worker's rights and when the steamroller gets some momentum going, Trump will reverse civil rights.

========

Since the election Brown is less enthusiastic about Trump, while not quite admitting Trump lost. Brown's livelihood is based on stirring up fear among his followers, and he will keep doing that long after Trump is gone.