Author Archives: Grace

Why Do I Love Sabine Hossenfelder?

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I’m taking a break from the depressing state of the world to offer up some fun science videos for your entertainment. I don’t have an actual YouTube account, even though I spend a lot of time on YouTube. My guess is that if I sign up for an account, YouTube will double down on its attempts to track everything I watch, so no account for me. That means that my time on YouTube is much more random than it needs to be.

The great thing about random offerings is that I find surprises in their suggestions that might not show up if I were directing YT to send me in the direction of “my personal silo.” One of the best surprises recently was videos by Sabine Hossenfelder. She has degrees in physics, but now spends a lot of her time as a “science communicator.” That wasn’t an option when I was wondering what to do with my life many decades ago, but I think I would have enjoyed being a science communicator. 

In any event, Sabine has a YT channel with programs on a wide array of topics. A recent one was a about climate change in which she wondered why her videos about climate change get the most thumbs down votes of all the work she does. Watch it and see what you think. 

Oh, and by the way, I just learned today that we can minimize the tracking that YouTube does on us by viewing everything through “Duck Player” from DuckDuckGo. Clever, no? Yes, DDG started out as a search engine that minimized tracking, but now it’s its own browser and video player. Give it a try.

For more free science, try Knowable Magazine. Lots of articles on a wide variety of topics, and did I say it’s free? Yes, they’d love your donations, but they’re not required. 

In any event, it’s all a pleasant relief from fretting about Congress, about the 2024 elections, about Ukraine, about Israel. And about all the other troubles in the world that get very little press. 

MLK, BLM, Glenn Loury, Donald Trump

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Flawed human beings can do good. 

This morning, I read a moving article by Angel Eduardo on the FAIR website. It made the case that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a saint, but he was the right man at the right time to bring our attention to injustices that we needed to address. King was a powerful orator who made masterful use of non-violent tactics to bring attention to Jim Crow laws in the south and Jim Crow sentiments in the north. Yet he wouldn’t pass muster today with people who expect leaders of both the past and present to have no earthly flaws. 

BLM employs powerful rhetoric and surely has a winning slogan, “Black Lives Matter.” Yet it clamors for justice for individuals who have somehow gotten the message that only “the system” is wrong, that their own actions cannot be scrutinized, that no one needs to obey a cop, that admitting mistakes will fail the cause. Rosa Parks was primed for her role in the fight against racism. A less sympathetic woman was passed over. Yes, the system was unfair to both, but we benefitted from the decision to use Rosa Parks to advance the cause. When individuals can readily be discredited, advancing the cause is more difficult. Knowing this, MLK hid his flaws. And he made sure to focus on people who were undeserving of the ill treatment they received.

Glenn Loury: Flawed. Intelligent. Honest about his struggles. And barely getting the attention he deserves. I look forward to the release of his memoir this spring, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Glenn posts on Substack, and every other week, he and John McWhorter do a podcast on race issues in which they speak heresy and challenge each other to clarify and justify their thinking. Thomas Sowell might be more famous, but Loury is absolutely the real deal in terms of a flawed person who has overcome many struggles (drugs and infidelity in addition to poverty) accomplished a great deal, and is now sharing his insights and wisdom. Admitting his flaws elevates Loury’s message that individual responsibility is still a vital element in individual achievement.

And then there’s Donald Trump. One thing I learned when I began reaching out to Trump voters is that his supporters are able to overlook his flaws because they like his message. Or they like some of his policies. Or they like the way he stands up to elites. This lesson is why I think it’s vital that we not vilify his supporters if we feel that Trump is dangerous or is too flawed to be President. If someone tells me that MLK was a womanizer, I’m not going to let that fact drown out his important message. 

No. I do not think Trump is of the same stature as Martin Luther King, Jr. No, I do not equate Trump and King in any way. I’m not even sure that Trump has a message for America. To me, he’s all about Trump, and he’s latched onto victim status in a way that true victims can only watch with amazement.

Here, I am just addressing the fact that people who support Trump are able to overlook his character flaws, so we might do better to address issues rather than character flaws when discussing Trump. There are some, you know: No plan for health care; no follow-through on infrastructure; no understanding of America’s role in global trade and global affairs; appointment of cronies to important agencies; insistence on gutting government rather than right-sizing it. 

And lest you think you’re right about everything, here’s a nifty (short) commercial that challenges that idea. From the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: FIRE commercial

The Blizzards of My Childhood

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We are spending today at home, mostly inside the house which, at this moment, is comfortably warm and cozy. The “warm and cozy” could change at any moment as we are under a high wind warning in an area which has a reputation for wind events that knock out the power at least once each winter. 

The terrain outside our windows is white. We had a bit of snow night before last. Not deep, but there’s a layer of ice under it which makes it a bit treacherous for walking. My first experiences of that little layer of ice were humbling. I grew up in Wyoming and prided myself on my ability to get around in the snow, both on foot and by car. But I soon discovered that there’s a reason Northwest drivers are chicken when it comes to driving in the snow: what looks beautiful covers that layer of ice which changes everything. Caution is, in fact, advisable here.

Blizzards are uncommon here, but they were an annual event when I was young. They were exciting (for us kids, not necessarily our parents). No school, for one. For my sister and me, it also meant that we were home with mom while dad was working. He was a railroad engineer and seemed always to be trying to get his passengers from one station to another following behind the snowplow. (My sister and I would not exist were it not for a blizzard in the ‘30s. Dad met mom in the hospital where she was his favorite nurse treating his frostbite from a blizzard misadventure.)

If we couldn’t go out to play, we invented adventures inside the house. We rearranged the furniture, draping blankets over chairs and tables to create tunnels to crawl through. We got out every single board and floor game in the house and played them all. (Tiddly Winks was my personal favorite.) We got to dine on cocoa and toast, still a go-to meal at times of despair. And we fought. Angels we were not. We cannot today figure out how mom survived it all.

Once the winds died down, we could bundle up and work our way out of the house. Often, either the front door or the back was blocked by snowdrifts. But the drifts created a unique opportunity for adventure. I remember a year when we could climb a drift all the way to the roof of our house. In ordinary blizzards, the drifts provided instant forts for snowball fights. 

We were blessed in many ways. Power outages were rare for us, even during the worst storms. Dad always survived the storms, even when the train got stuck, though more than once he had to leave the engine and walk to the nearest town to fetch milk for the tiny tots in his care. Mom might even have enjoyed the chaos we created at home. As kids, we were oblivious to the impact of the storms on the world around us. And such breaks from routine, when they end well, are a valuable part of childhood. These anomalies expand our sense of what’s possible and rev up our problem solving abilities. All good – when they end well.

NYT: Screams Without Words: Sexual Violence on October 7

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There are times when I need to write about something that concerns me, but my fingers won’t move. This has been one of those moments. Can I do this? To put yourself into my shoes for moment, read the article linked to above. Can you even finish it? Can you then compose a blog post about it? Or are you frozen as I am.

It’s not just the horrific descriptions of the violence of October 7. It’s the fact that the violence is being denied, that the NYT felt the need to send reporters to fact check the events. It’s the fact that even now there are people who will deny or excuse the actions of Hamas. So it’s not just the horror of that day, it’s the horror of reactions to it that I cannot comprehend.

The Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel and carried out these unthinkable acts are not martyrs or heroes. They are not even animals. Are they even human in any way? Animals kill for food or to protect their young. They do not commit sexual atrocities. In fact the word atrocities can only be applied to humans behaving outside the bounds of any actions necessary for survival. Perhaps it’s the ability to commit atrocities that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. 

People wonder how we’re special. Is it art? Is it language? Is it our problem solving abilities? Yet there are many animals that encroach on our sense of uniqueness in remarkable ways. So perhaps it’s our ability to horrify each other with hideous acts of violence, often, but not only, against women, and then brag about it that really sets us apart. Or our ability to subject people to the sight of family members being raped and tortured and dismembered. Or our ability to deny that these events took place. Or our ability to celebrate the men who commit these hideous acts. 

I should be excited about a new year, but I am in a state of despair. I don’t know how we fix this. 

Middle East Options

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The joy of being a nobody is that I am free to think and write whatever I want because no one could do anything to me even if they could figure out who I am and where I am. So here are my Middle East Options.

Option 1: Move Israel Somewhere Else

Even though one goal of Hamas is to convert the entire world to Islam, I think they’d take a break from this goal if they could just get the Jews out of  Israel/Palestine. They (and their fellow jihadis) have been banging this drum ever since they first heard that Jews wanted to come to Palestine to create a Jewish state more than a hundred years ago. 

Usually population transfers are from one area to an adjacent area. Everyone grumbles for several decades, but if they realize they are not going “home,” they go on about their lives. Think Greeks and Turks after WW I, think Germans and Poles after WW II, think Indians and Pakistanis after the “decolonization” of the sub-continent. Or, according to Wikipedia, think of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 900s BCE. People have used population transfers for millennia, it seems, to solve one problem or another. 

The movement of Muslims and Hindus post WW II involved 32 million people. Just imagine. So, if you think 7 or 8 million Jews could not be moved out of Palestine, you just need to stretch your imagination a bit more. Of course, there is one problem that India and Pakistan did not have: there is no adjacent territory that wants the Jews or that the Jews want. Yet, it’s something to think about. And in fact, people did think of alternative places for a Jewish homeland – for about five minutes. Aside from Antarctica, there just aren’t many open spaces left on earth. 

Except, perhaps, Nevada. Or the vast plains of North America, or the Gobi Dessert, or the “stans” of Central Asia, or the Amazon. Let’s face it, except for some sites with religious significance, Palestine didn’t have a lot going for it a hundred years ago, and honestly, I don’t know why people are fighting over it today. But people are, so the Jews could consider moving. Again. Perhaps another millennia-long diaspora, just waiting for people to learn to get along?

Option 2: Move the Palestinians Somewhere Else 

This idea has a lot going for it. There are many adjacent countries that could absorb the 7 or 8 million Palestinians living in Israel/Palestine. The primary downside to this plan is that the Palestinians have made themselves unwelcome in countries that have accepted them in the past. Jordan kicked them out. Egypt regards them as troublemakers; things didn’t work out so well in Lebanon; Syria has its own problems. Frankly, I suspect that if the Jews left and Palestinians had all of Palestine to themselves for a decade or two, they’d soon kill each other off. It’s not as if the Arabs/Palestinians are good at “getting along.” Perhaps the Jews, instead of resettling elsewhere, should just go on a very long holiday after which they return to Israel/Palestine to pick up the pieces. 

Option 3: Learn to Live with a Two State Solution

AAAARGH!!! Why can’t this be the answer??? Neither the Jews nor the Palestinians want to be “second-class citizens” in a country ruled by the other. (Never mind that 20% of Israelis are actually Arabs/Palestinians who are not racing to the exits.) Personally, I’m so peeved about the settlements that I wouldn’t care if they ended up in a Palestinian state even if they are technically legal according to someone. Then Palestine would have a minority of Jews in their precious state, and there could either be a population exchange, or everyone could treat their minorities with respect. Ha.

Option 4: The One State Solution. 

Yeah. OK, so either Hamas defeats Israel, or Israel defeats Hamas – and then every other jihadi group. Or maybe the UN rethinks its 1947 solution and gives all of Israel/Palestine to one side or the other. And internal terrorism continues until the end of time if Jews were awarded control. Or there is massive out-migration of Jews to America and any other country that would accept them, and the Palestinians are left to fend for themselves, something they are not especially good at. So they’d come begging to the UN and the US and the EU, and especially the UK for support because, well, just because. Personally, I would expect Israel to treat its Arab/Palestinian residents (citizens?) better than I would expect the Palestinians to treat the Jews, but please, surprise me.

That’s right. There really is no Option 4. War until the end of time? Seriously, that’s not much a solution, is it?