The Promise

Perplexities

Her breakfasts were known to be splendid, and prepared with enough pepper to make me cry. At the first fiery bite I said, bathed in tears: Tonight I won’t need a full moon for my asshole to burn. Don’t complain she said. If it burns, it’s because you still have one, thanks be to God.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cosmology

When the Hubble variable was discovered in 1926 it had a value of 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec. During the past halfcentury this variable has gradually declined to 50.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec. The radius of the universe is inversely proportional to the magnitude of this variable. Accordingly the universe is expanding by a factor of 100 per century. Dividing this factor into the above ratio discloses that the expansion began here on earth in 1,015 AD. during the dark ages.

Halton Arp (Extragalactic Astronomy, Science, 17 Dec. 1971, vol. 174, p. 1189)

Republican Economy

Darkness is cheap and Scrooge liked it.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

In the Light of Benazir Buttho’s Assassination

The law in Pakistan makes going to school mandatory. Isn't that so everywhere? Not quite! In Pakistan the state doesn't spend a dime on public schools. Therefore a large proportion of the children, who incidentally come mostly from the poorest and disenfranchised, observe the law by going to Koran schools, so called Madrasahs, where they literally learn nothing but chanting the Koran in a foreign language. Rarely has observing a beneficial law perverted a good intention to such extreme degree. Pakistan is a nuclear power! Can you imagine what this may mean, one day? Don't imagine! It's already happening.

m.s.

A Paradox?

War is the father of all and the king of all; Homer was wrong in saying: "Would that strife might perish from among gods and humans!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away (Heraclit 535-475 BC.). This is true: these days many more patients survive in our ER units because of the emergency techniques developed in the Vietnam war than there had been soldiers killed in Vietnam.

m.s.

Thank you, but no, thanks

I have received your new book (A Discourse on Inequality, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.

Voltaire (1755)

The first Secularist

And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, enter into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father which is in secret.

Matthew, 6:5-6

Ernest Hemingway

He became the most famous writer of the century, but it was for everything except writing.

He killed at least one each of every animal in Africa. He caught at least one each of every big fish in the sea. Hemingway's lethal exploits were written up in the new picture magazines Life and Look, with photographs taken on the site of the massacre. Often Hemingway contributed the pose himself. He didn't actually kill every bull in Spain, but he liked watching. He wrote a book about it. He used simple sentences. He said the simple life of the instincts was better than too much thought.

In 1959 Hemmingway was back in Spain to watch the bulls bite the dust. Or else he was out in the Gulf Stream killing fish. Or else he was in Africa killing animals again. Hemmingway was always killing something. He called it an appetite for life.

Hemingway lived in Key West, in Cuba, and in all the world's best hotels, always talking about the good wine and the good food and the good season. But he no longer wrote good books, although the Nobel Prize followed one of his worst, The Old Man and the Sea.

In Africa, on the hunt for the few remaining animals he had not already killed, Hemingway had a plane crash and woke up to read his own obituaries. His next move was to have another plane crash. When he recovered from that one he went fishing. He could never have enough of killing living things.

Finally he did it to himself, with a shotgun.

Clive James

Our constitutional Dilemma

A: As a historian I have an idea what the originators of the electoral college may have had in mind - look at it in a context of horse drawn carriages and smoke signals as the fastest means of communication. But the election of the President of the United States is the election of the Union's head of state: he is everybody's president not just for the people in Milwaukee, Delaware, and Rhode Island. And if Missouri needs to speak for herself, she has her governor and local senate to do so. The President of the United States is my and every individual's president regardless how such individual may feel for his or her state. The electoral college has one and one purpose only, to elect the President, therefore it is obsolete and self-defeating in a time when the popular majority of all individuals can be known in the same night, even before closing the polls. In fact the elector's legal right to overrule the figures from his constituency is a slap in the face for everything democracy is standing for. The electoral college has the function and capacity to introduce bias in an affair where only the figures should count. So why do we continue to cling so tenaciously to this archaic institution? We don't go to work on horseback anymore!"

B: Different people elect presidents for different reasons, so do different groups of people ...

A: ... are you trying to tell me that the people in Tennessee have a different agenda when voting for a President than the people in California, hence you need the electors to put things right? Well, hard luck buddy, if the interest of the Californians is outweighing yours in sheer numbers, then there must be a reason for it, a reason which figures in the Union's gross annual income. Their interest simply deserves to enjoy the priority as mirrored in the majority figures.

B: Hey! Just imagine the whole world would be one big happy family under one state with popular majority rule, then the two groups with the lowest income, the peasant populations in China and India would be the ones pulling the weight and totaling out every other voter group - is that really what you want?

A: Why, have they no right to be represented?

B: Sure, but do you really think their interests weigh as much as the exponentially more productive interests of some much smaller groups? And this is limiting the argument only to the economic aspect. We even don't go to the cultural ramifications. Popular democracy can get us into the strangest places, my friend ... ."

m.s.

Dairy Maid Economy

In 1995 a British politician described the most recent changes in our economy as turning the under-educated labor-force from needless but decently paid jobs into subsidized redundancies, meaning that this actually would reduce the costs for the taxpayer. But his facial expression and a sudden pause between two phrases was a dead giveaway for what this means in terms of human dignity and motivation. And the reasoning is actually wrong. Those people did not receive their income from taxes, but from redundant branches of an admittedly obsolete industry which indeed meant smaller profits for the money lender, but was still capable of generating enough profit to balance the payroll. So their income contributed to the most important factor of any economy: domestic purchasing power. The only legitimate fuel of any economy, and it didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny. On the dole they contribute nothing, and we pay for it. In other words, they are laid off for the interests of an other minority group, which has the financial muscle to force their fellow human beings into redundancy for no better reason but to increase their own profits. And they dare telling us, Marx is passe?

m.s.

Cold War

It was a new concept and given the most recent developments in our blessed post-cold-war world, a successful concept. That it should lead to one side's "victory" was a flaw in the execution. It left behind a world which is clearly less manageable and less secure with numberless hot little wars flaring up everywhere.

m.s.

Archaeology from the Future

In a distant future - say, two millennia from now - it should be easy to date my skeletal remains. I was born when the world powers were testing hydrogen bombs in the open atmosphere; so every bone from that period contains deposits of strontium, a fallout product of nuclear explosions. Younger people, born in the seventies and later, will be recognizable by their dentures - there have been significant advances in dental care. (My childhood was still marred by black spotted teeth and gaps in the incisors.) An other clue are new materials in hip-replacements.

m.s.