Flying to the USA Today--With an Unusual Travel Accessory (for me)

Today the nine-month sojourn in Panama ends with two flights back to the USA.  Because the trip was really a temporary move, I had a very unusual travel accessory for me--a suitcase! With all the travel I have had in the last decade, the last time I can remember having a suitcase was a 2017 trip to Europe. I brought a bicycle on that trip--so I definitely had luggage. 

I also shipped the bike I bought here last August back to the USA.  So really two pieces of luggage.  I was going to leave the bike here but it is an aluminum-frame Giant road bike that would be a good travel bike for the future.  There is a possibility we could live in Chile for a month or two in 2026 or 2027. If so, I will take the bike there and leave it when the trip is over.  

 The bike survived here so it should be good for travel anywhere else.  And if Chile doesn't happen, it could go somewhere else.

USA late Today!!!

The Nazi Apprentice: Eichmann Sent Thousands of Jews to Palestine Before He Sent Millions to Death Camps

Adolf Eichmann on Trial in Jerusalem

In 1932, Adolf Eichmann was an unemployed Austrian who went to Germany to join the Nazi Party. He needed a job. 

He eventually found work in the Nazi effort to make Germany Judenrein, free of Jews. From the time Hitler took power in 1933 until he started World War II, the Nazis deported Jews from the Reich, mass murder was still in the future of the Nazi program. 

Eichmann had a gift for logistics, for organizing.  The Nazi effort to deport Jews in the 1930s was slow because those who wanted to get out had to get authorizations from many agencies.  Eichmann brought all of the organizations necessary into one large building and processed Jews for deportation in days instead of months.  

In that process, Eichmann took the property of the Jews: emptied their bank accounts and left them with just enough to get to their destination.  Thousands of those Eichmann processed got to British Palestine, some got to Spain and to other countries the Nazis never conquered.  Although they lost all of their possessions, the Jews Eichmann deported got away from the Holocaust. 

When the war began, deportation stopped.  For more than two years, Eichmann and his fellow Nazis who were deporting Jews waited for a decision about the fate of the Jews and their next mission. During this period millions of Jews were murdered singly and en masse by shooting, but the killings were mostly done where the Jews lived. No need for transportation.

In January 1942, the Nazis decided to kill all Jews within their territories.  The skills Eichmann had sharpened in organizing the deporting of Jews outside the Reich were used to transport Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps.   

Eichmann refined his methods until in 1944 in Budapest, with the cooperation of Jewish leaders, he deported nearly half a million Jews to their death in just three months.  

Eichmann was not a supervillain. He was a skilled organizer of transport and paperwork with years of experience.  When the Nazi policy was deportation, Eichmann got Jews out of Germany.  When the policy was mass murder, Eichmann filled train cars with victims. He was an amoral functionary who obeyed orders to the point of transporting three million Jews to Death Camps.  

When the war ended with Nazi defeat, Eichmann hid in Austria until the Rat Line organized by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal got Eichmann to Argentina. The pro-Nazi Pope Pius XII was still in power as Nazis slid to South America. In Argentina, Eichmann bragged about his crimes. He was kidnapped by Israeli agents and put on trial on Jerusalem. 

Eichmann was executed for his crimes in Israel. 

I have read and reread Hannah Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial. She had many critics ofher work during her lifetime and still does fifty years later.  then as now, most ofher critics have not actually read her book.

I can recommend all of Hannah Arendt's books, which I did  in brief summaries here. Her book The Origins of Totalitarianism is the most important of her books in understanding the horror of the Holocaust. 

 

Potholes in Panama City, Panama

In 10 days I will end my nine-month stay in Panama City, Panama. I loved many things about my stay here and met many great people.  But riding here was always tense and difficult. 

Today I rode about 20 miles and created a new facebook group to share pictures of Potholes in Panama City.  Sometimes my bike is in the picture. Sometimes just the pothole.  

I ride here because I ride everywhere, but between narrow roads and deep potholes and no shoulders, I will be glad to be home in Pennsylvania.  

https://www.facebook.com/groups/3523199161309187 

Some of my other posts about riding in Panama:

Buying a bike.

First flat in a pothole.

First riding post.

Riding in western Panama.

Trump Fan Suddenly Worried About Liberty: Rod Dreher Realizes Trump Could Threaten White Christians Too!!

Rod Dreher

 I wrote this essay/review after reading The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher in 2017. This tireless exponent of Christian Nationalism is suddenly worried about liberty in America. Or maybe his bank account. It was the worst book I read that year.

When you want to say the nation is going to Hell, you first need a villain. Then you need to say how that villain is going to ruin everyone’s lives. The central theme of The Benedict Option is Dreher predicting the end of Christian culture in America through gay rights and the gay agenda. Dreher is sure that Christian hegemony in America is over. The only option is to withdraw from life in corrupt America into intentional communities of those committed to real goodness. 

The first question I have is, ‘Why will the gay agenda ruin our nation after it flourished with a long history of slavery, Jim Crow and betrayal of Native Americans?’ Is a nation really blessed by slavery and genocide and cursed by gay marriage?

America perpetrated the worst slavery in the history of the world on Africans. They were kidnapped and brought here in chains to be slaves until death for generation after generation. America had slavery with no hope of buying oneself out or getting free. The center of that slavery was the New Orleans slave market.

Dreher grew up in Louisiana and returned there to withdraw from life in big cities.  He is in a state and a region with a horrible history of slavery, followed by 100 years of apartheid called Jim Crow. What could be worse than men who would buy and sell human beings, fight a war to keep their slaves, and then oppress their victims openly for a century after losing the war?

Every confederate battle flag represents unrepentant racism, slavery and murder.  And yet, Dreher says, it is gay rights that will kill Christian faith in a way that Pride, Murder, Rape and Greed could not. Dreher says at the end of the book historians will wonder how a 3% minority killed a great nation like ours.

If America can perpetuate slavery longer than every civilized nation, break uncountable treaties, slaughter Native-Americans, allow Jim Crow laws in the south for a century, and then put a racist sexual predator in the White House with the support of 81% of "Christian" America, can the Gay agenda really trump everything else we have done? Dreher has his enemy.

Dreher begins the book saying he was led to the idea of withdrawal from culture by thinking of his son’s future from the moment he was born.  The book has many instances of Dreher and other Christian parents making what he calls sacrifices for their children.  Dreher writes as if parenting were the central Christian ministry.  As a father of six, I would say parenting is one of the central delights and urges and vanities of the Human Condition.  Can any parent really say that spending their time and money toward the success of their children is a sacrifice?  Does working toward the success of my own children make me the equal of Mother Teresa caring for the poorest outcasts in a Calcutta gutter?  No, it doesn’t. My bright, successful, funny children are a delight, they are not a ministry.  And they in no way set me apart from the world.

I heard many idiots in focus groups and on the news say one proof that Trump was obviously a good guy because he is a good father whose children love him.  Saddam Hussein loved Uday and Qusay. The worst Roman emperors were the beloved, spoiled children of previous emperors.  Trump is, by his own words, a racist who is willing to grab other people’s children by the pussy. Parenting does not excuse pandering.

Dreher should know well that nothing ties a person to the world like having children.  No actual Benedictine has kids.  The withdrawal from the world with kids that Dreher posits is not a new monastic movement, but a gated community with spiritual decorations on the iron fence. 

Compared to, say, Coptic Christians in Cairo and other believers facing danger and death, the Benedict Option like a military video game, allowing the out-of-shape, pale player to pretend he is a combat soldier while in the comfort of mom’s basement away from the blood and bullets of battle.

I would have called it the book the Benedict Fiction.

Trust the Science: An Atom of Insight About What "Trusting Science" Means

 

The first thing to say about my lovely graphic is that John Dalton 

proposed his theory of atomism in 1803, not 1903.  

The rest of the dates are good. 

I trust science. But when I say that, I know I will be misunderstood by almost everyone. Science is an open, shared enterprise which is the best current understanding of the world around us shared by those trained in the field.

Which means the best science at any time and place could and has been wrong or incomplete and can be changed, refined and improved by the latest research.  But science, unlike religion and other beliefs, is self correcting.  When a scientific theory is wrong, subsequent discoveries will change it or make it obsolete.  Since the corrections are in the hands of people not deities, the discoveries happen slowly or rapidly. But when the change happens, the previous understanding is discarded.

The story of the discovery that atoms are the basic unit of matter shows how convoluted the path to knowledge can be.  

Atoms were first proposed as the fundamental unit of matter in Ancient Greece by Democritus and others.  But Aristotle did not believe in atoms, so reverence for Aristotle held kept alchemy in place as the central understanding of what is now chemistry for two millennia.

Then in 1803 after meticulous experiments John Dalton proposed that each chemical element was a unique particle, an atom. Molecules were compounds of different atoms in fixed ratios.  This understanding was refined and expanded for a century until science could begin to "see" inside atoms.  

When scientists began to see inside atoms, when it became clear that atoms were composed of different particles with different charges, the picture of the inside of the atom evolved rapidly.  A century after Dalton, J.J. Thompson believed the atom had negative particles, electrons, embedded in a positively charged sphere.  

Seven years later Ernst Rutherford created the model of an atom with a positively charged nucleus and electrons orbiting: a tiny solar system.  Neils Bohr refined the model to fix levels or orbitals for the electrons circling the atom.  

In 1926 Erwin Schroedinger applied the new discoveries of quantum mechanics to the atom model which is now seen as a positive nucleus that usually includes neutral particles surrounded by a cloud of electrons. And with many small refinements, that is the current atomic model. 

For those who see science as fixed, this timeline shows that in the past three centuries atoms:

Did not exist (until 1803)

Were indivisible spheres (until 1904)

Were positively charged spheres with electrons inside (until 1911)

Were little solar systems held together by electrical forces (until 1926)

Are a nucleus of many types of particles surrounded by a cloud of electrons (1926 and following)

The leading edge of understanding in any field can always change. If something radical changes in the current understanding of atoms and molecules it will be particle physicists and theoretical chemists who find the new wrinkle in the fabric of the universe. And their colleagues around the world will challenge their insights.

The alternative is the chaos of people sharing ignorance on the internet and turning our understanding of the world into an opinion poll. Or worse, shutting down research by experts. 

The best book I have read on this consensus of science is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch. I'm sure I will re-read it soon as we descend further into ignorance and chaos.

Visiting BioMuseo in Panama

Last weekend, I finally visited the Bimuseo on the Amador Causeway in Panama City.  It presents the amazing biodiversity of the newest part of North America. What is now Panama was a gap between the American continents then plate tectonics and volcanos made a narrow east-west bridge between what is now Columbia and Central America.  

Biodiversity followed the formation of the new land as animals and plants great and small made their way to and through the strip land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  At the narrowest point in the middle of Panama (No surprise, the location of  the Panama Canal.) the country is less than 50 miles wide, spreading to more than 100 miles wide east and west of the canal.  

When a population is separated and isolated from each other and has different sources of food, new species can form.  In Panama this process formed, for example, two hundred species of bats within the borders of a country just four hundred miles long. Plants, insects, reptiles, birds and other creatures all evolved into new species inside the little country that connects the great continents.

On either side of Panama to the north and south marine species that once swam between the two oceans were separated and formed their own ecosystems in the oceans.  In this sense, the Panama Canal doesn't connect the two oceans. The canal rises from each ocean to Gatun Lake in the middle of the country 26 meters above sea level.  The lake is fed by the Chagres River which empties into the Atlantic Ocean on the north side of the canal.  

The water that fills the locks and floats the ships across the country flows down from Lake Gatun into the locks and out to sea. If the canal had been built at sea level through Nicaragua (one of the plans in the late 1800s) it might have been a path between the seas for marine creatures. But in Panama, the canal is a fresh-water path flowing out to the seas from the lake in the middle.

The biodiversity the Biomuseo presents is evident around me every day I live in this lush country. Animals, birds and plants unique to Panama are visible everywhere and, of course, many more are invisible.  

 

Advocating for Ukraine: Telling Our Representatives That Ukraine is the Front Line of Freedom and Democracy

The Pennsylvania Delegation of the Ukraine Action Summit

At the beginning of April, I flew back to America to be part of the Ukraine Action Summit. The song that turned into an earworm was Hail Night of the Woeful Countenance from the musical Man of La Mancha.  In a Republican-controlled Congress, both the House and the Senate, and with a Putin-loving President, I felt I was tilting at windmills.  

I am an American and can tell my elected representatives how I feel about Ukraine. Which I did.  And have been doing since this terrible war started.  

By the way, in case someone reading this hear Kremlin talking points from Tucker Carlson or Putin-loving minions: 

Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russia kidnaps Ukrainian children.

Russia targets homes and schools and civilians.

Russia betrays every agreement it makes.

Russia does not want peace and American negotiators are idiots.

 
I will keep advocating for Ukraine for as long as Ukraine keeps fighting back against the vile invaders of their land.  

As a veteran who enlisted during four different wars between 1972 and 2016,  the Cold War was the only win America had.  And the Trump Republicans have trampled on that victory and taken Putin's side in this fight.  

Nearly 200 years ago in his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville said the leading struggle in the 20th Century would be between Russia and America. He was right, as he was right about so much about America. And yet, that brilliant French writer would never have predicted that an American President would have the spine of a jellyfish and become the willing slave of the Russian President.  But here we are.