Life on Venus I read with only passing interest that scientists have discovered phosphine gas in the clouds surrounding the planet of Venus. This is considered by many to be a thrilling piece of evidence that there may be life somewhere other than on Earth since phosphine is most often made by microbes and microbes have been long suspected to inhabit the clouds around Venus. The view is that the temperatures on Venus are too…
The Anschluss The hills are alive with The Sound of Music. They are also alive with the sound of jackboots. The German word Anschluss means union and it is generally referred to Anschluss Oesterreichische of the unification of the Germanic language countries of Germany and Austria that occurred, not by referendum, but by force when the Wehrmacht marched into Austria unopposed in March of 1938. We all know from the portrayals of Christopher Plummer and…
The Disinformation Age In preparing my lecture for my upcoming course I have an early slide called Modern Economy. It depicts the ages of mankind from Hunter/Gatherer to Agrarian to the Industrial Age to the Information Era to what has been called the Connection Economy (which is euphemism for social media). I am watching the documentary called The Social Dilemma and it describes a state of development in social engineering through online social media manipulation…
The Bridge Over Troubled Water The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy…
Red Sky in Morning – EXTRA This morning, for the second day in a row, we have awoken before 6am. I am in the habit of looking first at my CPAP machine to see how long I have slept. I do this before I look at the clock to check the time. This morning it said 7 hours and 12 minutes, which is good, but then the clock said 5:41am, which seems suboptimal. I would…
Power Play I am watching Rachel Maddow interview Michael Cohen, who is now on house arrest and out of the federal penitentiary where he has been spending his time. While I think highly of Rachel, I find this interview beneath her. As an avid anti-Trump person, I suppose I should like anything that Michael Cohen says in his book or on cable news that is harmful to Trump. And no one is more scorned by…
Democracy as We Knew It When I was born in 1954, the United States with its $390B in GDP, represented 7.23% of global GDP. In 1954 we were the beacon of democratic light. We had just saved the free world from the horrors of Fascism that had spread from Germany to Italy and Spain and was blooming in its own Asian version in Japan. We can’t even talk about Latin America in those days since…
The Longest Days Last night I stumbled on a Netflix series about the people around Adolf Hitler and how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party grew to prominence and control in Germany. The bottom line is that it was a slow and steady process that took fifteen years to take serious root and then lasted for twelve years. It started in 1918 as a direct result of the ignominious defeat of Germany in WWI and…
Character Debate I am always reminded of the role played by Michael Douglas in The American President when he finally decides he has had enough of the high road and ignoring his opponent’s nasty jibes (his opponent, Senator Rumson played by Richard Dreyfus). He calls a press briefing and finally says, “being President of this country is entirely about character.” And he goes on to say, “We have serious problems to solve, and we need…
Pause and Reflect It’s Saturday morning and I am finally back in the hot tub after what seems like a month of toing and froing. What a hard life, right? Not so much hard, but life is certainly more challenging than normal for everyone and that means that pausing and reflecting is an even better thing now than normal. What exactly is so challenging? Let’s start with a family review. To begin with, as Mark…