Author: photog

What If?

photog Current Events , ,

I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.  There is a “hunger strike” going on at Princeton.  One of the goofy kids there was a scrawny girl who said she has been on the hunger strike for almost one hundred and five hours.  She hasn’t had any solid food in all that time.  So, I guess she’s living on Gatorade and orange juice.  And I thought, “Well, she’s gonna lose some of those extra pounds she’s been trying to lose for the beach season.  That’s a plus.  And then they started telling us of all the innocent people in Gaza; women and children that were starving and being killed by bullets and bombs.

And that’s true.  While the IDF and Hamas shoot it out, the human shields that Hamas has emplaced will be killed.  Now that’s a horrible thing.  But when Hamas went on a rampage back in October, they were killing men, women and children.  And they weren’t trying to shoot IDF soldiers hiding behind these people.  They searched them out in civilian towns and murdered them face to face.  They killed parents in front of their children.  The murdered infants and then cut their heads off.  They raped women and then killed them for good measure.  Then they took some of these victims back to Gaza to add to their stock of human shields.

So, if the Israelis want to prevent the next massacre how do they do that without capturing or killing Hamas?  And if Hamas, as a policy, hides in the mass of Gazans how do you fight them without killing those they hide behind?  When we burned down Dresden and Hiroshima, did we separate out the women and children?  No.  Shouldn’t the Hamas fighters confront the IDF face to face, man to man?  Are they cowards?  And shouldn’t the “innocent” Palestinians sneak away from Hamas and leave them to their fate?

Most of these questions have no good answers.  War is horrific even when it is only soldiers involved.  What can you say about women and children dying in war?  There are no words.  But what do you do with an enemy that murders your women and children as a policy.  That makes the need to destroy this enemy an existential imperative that overrides most of the moral sanctions against extreme actions.

I wish there were a magic strategy that could be used against Hamas without harming a single Palestinian civilian.  If there were one, I’ll bet the IDF would be using it right now.  But there isn’t.

You know, I wonder what answer I’d get if I asked one of the “starving” hunger strikers a hypothetical.  Now, under the strain of extreme starvation maybe she couldn’t muster the clarity of thought to answer me but I’d ask, “What if you lived in a neighborhood and you had a family living next door that really hated your family?  They were poor and dysfunctional and hated you because you were rich and happy.  And let’s say that several times the police were forced to come and arrest members of this family for attacking one of your siblings.  And let’s say that one day the worst members of this family went crazy and broke into your house and killed your parents and raped your sister and cut your baby brother’s head off and kidnapped you little sister and took her back with them to their house.  And you called the police and told them what had happened and they went to the house where the killers were but they came back later and said that they couldn’t do anything because there were small children in the other house including your sister so it was too dangerous to attack them.  So, they were just going to issue a warning to the killers not to do it again.”

How would that be?  Would that make everything all right?

09MAY2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

Awake, ye West Winds, through the lonely dale,

And Fancy, to thy fairy bower betake;

Even now, with balmy freshness breathes the gale,

Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;

Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,

And Evening comes with locks bodropp’d with dew;

On Desmond’s mouldering turrets slowly shake

The trembling rye-grass and the harehell blue,

And ever and anon fair Mulla’s plaints renew.

William Julius Mickle

The Story Isn’t Over Yet

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family ,

Every day I hear about all the latest nonsense out of Washington, New York and Hollywood and think, “How will we ever fix all this stuff?”  And I read the price on the gas pump and listen to Camera Girl’s lament over the cost of chicken or vegetables or pumpernickel bagels and I think, “How the hell are we supposed to keep up with this inflation?”

Then I think, “But the story’s not over yet.”  I remember when I was just twenty-three in 1980 and Camera Girl and I were living in our first apartment.  We were poor as church mice and Jimmy Carter had managed to get mortgages up to 18% and inflation was at 13% and even the incredibly cheap company that I was working for in my first job gave us a once in a lifetime bonus just to keep us all from starving to death.  And back then plenty of people were saying that the good days for America were over and we had to accept that prosperity was over.  And I thought, “How are going to do this?”

But people rejected that defeatism and when Reagan took over things got better; eventually, a lot better.  And slowly over time we got a few breaks and we managed to live happily ever after (we hope!)  And so, there were kids and grandkids and maybe I’m starting to hear the first signs that another generation will be in the offing.  And what else is there to hope for anyway?

Sure, Joe Biden has decided to follow the Barack Obama playbook and destroy America.  I think they may have overplayed their hand.  They have done such a truly awful job of running the country that even their supposedly bought and paid for constituencies are screaming over the results.  It seems to me that it’s only a matter of time before most everyone is going to demand someone competent put a stop to the destruction and drastically change course.

And until that time, I think it’s my job to lend whatever and however much support I can to those currently paying the bills for those who can’t yet.  And that most definitely includes moral support.  We’re all liable to shout about the doom and gloom that we see all around us.  Well, sure.  That’s what I do every day.  But remember that the young have to keep going after we’re gone, so make sure that the things you say are actionable in a positive way.  Saying it’s all over or things will never be as good as they were is just defeatism.  We don’t know that.  Lots of people have smartened up in the last ten years and a lot of the old traps that we fell in before won’t work anymore.  The days of the neo-cons sounding the charge for us to sign up for the next forever war are over for most of us.

There are signs here and there that leaders are beginning to provide some hope for Americans in several areas of the country.  If any of them are at all smart they’ll begin to coordinate their actions and try to build up a movement.  That’s what we should see beginning to happen and in very small ways I think I can see some of that happening.

So, I’m not asking for unbridled exuberance over the immediate future.  We are sunk in a morass of debt and hog tied by administrative policy that strips us of our constitutional rights but I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless.  The story isn’t over yet.  Be part of the solution.  Try to keep that in mind.

Oppenheimer (2023) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science , , , ,

I finally got around to watching this movie.  This won’t be a full review because I don’t think I can be completely fair to the movie.  Christopher Nolan has been a big-time director for a good long while.  His Batman trilogy earned gazillions of dollars and was actually very good.  Now this movie is a very different animal.  I don’t think it is supposed to be entertainment in the same way.  It’s a biopic and a historical recreation of a very important event, the Manhattan Project; the invention of the atomic bomb.

As the story of the Manhattan Project, it is fascinating and compelling.  The biopic is a combination of experiences.  Oppenheimer himself is very odd duck.  From his own admission he was not a great physicist like Fermi, Einstein or Bohr.  He was a dilettante who found himself surrounded by the generation that invented quantum mechanics and became their interpreter and project manager in shepherding all the pieces needed to allow the US military to get the a-bomb in 1945.

And we hear his history as a retrospective because the movie is really the story of how Oppenheimer; this critical individual in the ushering in of the nuclear era, loses his US government security clearance due to his former association with communists and other less reputable individuals in his circle of friends.  We are also led through the less than honorable path of his love life.  And we see how his concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons seem somewhat inconsistent depending upon where his role in producing the bomb stands.  While ensconced in the project he seems not at all conflicted.  But once he and his colleagues have handed over the bombs to the Army and the spotlight is no longer on him, his qualms grow exponentially.  As a viewer of the story, this seems clear.

The movie is populated with famous names and faces, some of them very hard to recognize.  Robert Downey Jr. is Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s implacable foe who hounds him out of the government circle of influence.  Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife.  Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.  Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist.  Kenneth Branagh is the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.  Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and weirdest of all Gary Oldman is Harry S. Truman.

And there’s all kinds of good acting.  I especially enjoyed the “physicists seemingly engrossed in the endless details of making a weapon out of their incomprehensible mathematical equations.  There is a critical scene where Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb stops the project when his calculations seem to indicate that there is a very high probability that setting off a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and end all life on the planet.  That is a pivotal scene where eventually even Einstein is consulted.

And the climactic Trinity test scene in the desert is very effective.

But it’s a three-hour movie and that means we see quite a bit of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I have to admit I didn’t find him the most sympathetic character to follow for that three-hours.  It’s a good movie.  But I ended it wishing it had been more about Matt Damon’s character and that’s an odd feeling for me.

07MAY2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

The moon, full-orbed, forsakes her watery cave,

And lifts her lovely head above the wave;

The snowy splendours of her modest ray

Stream o’er the glistening waves, and quivering play;

Around her, glittering on the heaven’s arched brow,

Unnumbered stars, enclosed in azure, glow,

Thick as the dew-drops of the April dawn,

Or May-flowers crowding o’er the daisy lawn;

The canvas whitens in the silvery beam,

And with a mild pale-red the pendants gleam;

The masts’ tall shadows tremble o’er the deep;

The peaceful winds a holy silence keep;

The watchman’s carol, echoed from the prows,

Alone, at times, awakes the still repose.

William Julius Mickle