Olivia Newton-John

A beautiful face is a wonderful thing for anyone to have.  An amazing voice would be great, as well.  What about a glowing smile?

ONJ had all three!  I would say---at the risk of making a lot of women mad---that Olivia Newton-John had one of the most dazzling smiles I have ever seen.  Many women, including my lovely wife, have wonderful smiles.  Olivia's smile was more: it was blinding.  You would imagine she was deliriously happy, and was about to break into laughter!  And maybe she was!

She died of cancer, and she probably was diagnosed many years ago.  She was a simple person; perhaps that was---and I'm going to be killed for saying this---clear in her expression.  She could look on the bright side of life easily.

I will miss her.

Men and Women Are Equal?

When I was growing up, the equality of women was not something that was taken for granted, either by men or by women.

Make no mistake; there were plenty of enlightened men who believed in something close to this principle of equality.  Our cultural history—like most countries—was dominated by men, who were ruthless about protecting their advantages.  But over the years and centuries, the rights accorded to women were accumulated, and on one fine day in the early sixties, a Sri Lankan woman became the first elected female head of state.  (Even then, she was elected from within a political party, therefore she was not elected by the popular vote.)  Furthermore, traditionally in many Asian countries, women were the heads of households.

In the family in which I grew up, our mother was the head of the household, for many practical reasons: she earned the larger paycheck; she managed the home; she had the larger influence over the education of the children; and she had a degree of influence over my father’s occupation indirectly: he was a pastor, and he volunteered her for various responsibilities in the ‘parish’, such as the so-called women's fellowship, the Sunday-School, the flowers for church, the choir, and so on.  So my mother held not one job, but about 5.

The equality of women and men as far as talent was concerned was never in any doubt, in our family circle, and as I was growing up, in our country at large.  So it was with efficiency and capability.  Women did continue to be suppressed, ultimately, for political reasons.  Men believed that women did not have the judgement that some office required.  Some men were prejudiced against women.  Some men resented women for reasons that never emerged.  This is true of almost every society: men simply could not bring themselves to declare that women were equal to men politically; the most they could concede was that women deserved the vote.

What do I personally think?

The question of equality between the sexes is vague.  As long as women have the unique responsibility for bearing children, this fact establishes an asymmetry in the comparison of the two sexes.  All rights and privileges of government and society should be equal to the two sexes.  But the phrase ‘The sexes are equal’ simply does not make sense.

Of course, I speak as a mathematician.  It does not make sense to say that a Ford is equal to a Toyota.  In what sense? is the question that springs to the lips.  Are men and women equal in the athletic field?  In the boxing ring?  In the Olympic games?  In family planning?  In insurance premiums?  In bathrooms?  I believe that equality is not true in all these areas.  As long as women and men are more comfortable with many activities taking place in segregation, there cannot be unqualified ‘equality’.  (I’m using the word unqualified in the sense of unrestricted.)

I wish this was a forum where you readers can respond to these posts.  You can, but hardly anyone does!  Well, I'm aware of this inequality between us, so the lack of any counterarguments to my opinion will not make me assume that I have won the debate.

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I'm a Foodie!

These days I spend a lot of time reading.  It so happens that I was reading a passage about a meal, and now I'm hungry for pasta!  It's only 8 in the morning, and I'm craving Fettuccine Alfredo.  (Actually, from a nutritional point of view, it's better to eat something heavy and cheesy earlier in the day, so that the food circulates all over your body as you walk around.  Instead, if you eat late and go to bed--or stay seated--the food just diffuses to the tissue near your belly, so you're likely to grow your belly.)

I once made Alfredo from scratch from a recipe in a Time/Life book, and it was the most heavenly thing we ever ate.  Butter, cream, black pepper, fresh grated Parmesan.  Italian cooking is (supposedly) all about the fresh ingredients.  In contrast, French cooking is about the sauces, though that's probably an oversimplification.

But there's no doubt that I am hopelessly suggestible; if I read about pizza ...

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A Conundrum

First off: is the plural of 'paradox' simply 'paradoxes', or 'paradoci'?  (Or is a paradox better than one dox, and already plural?)

Ok, here's the conundrum, and it's a serious issue.  From a lot of what I've read, in order to avoid unnecessary weight gain, the nutrition gurus advise to only eat when you're hungry.

Now, obviously in modern communal or family living, when one person cooks for a whole group, for the sake of efficiency, the whole group ought to eat together, even if they're not all simultaneously hungry.  So what to do?

There are lots of possible solutions, depending on the micro-culture of the group: is it OK to leave the cooked food on the counter, for each person to eat when they're ready?  Who's going to wash up? And so on.

I had several other conundrums lined up, but now I've forgotten ...

Patience, and Rhetoric

I had vowed (in a manner of speaking) to be patient with the Alt-Right.  It is so easy to be annoyed with their lack of substance, their disregard for the health of the very old, the very young, and the very poor; their tolerance for the deceit of Trump and his running dogs, and their opposition to Biden's programme.  That last is a given; the GOP wants the Democrats out of office, and Mitch McConnell has long ago shown how utter disregard for the needs of the electorate is rarely punished by the voters.

Giving in to the annoyance that we (or I, anyway) feel is easier on me, because after a while, thinking of the conservatives as a herd of imbecile lemmings streaming over some cliff overlooking the sea is a comforting image.  But anyone who has been paying attention to reporting by the media on individuals, formerly Alt-Righters, coming in from the cold, reveals that a host of them have found it difficult to turn a blind eye to the untruthful rhetoric emanating from Trump Central.  Therefore it is imperative that these refugees from the GOP are met with reason, rather than knee-jerk viciousness.

I'm using "rhetoric" in a slightly illegal sense.  The word really means the tone of a speech, the choice of words of a speaker (or a writer) that is deliberately intended to create a certain effect in the audience.  The common usage of the word implies that rhetorical language is, to various degrees, deceitful.  It need not be, but when the term rhetoric is used increasingly in recent times, because of the rhetorical excesses of the speech on the right, the difference between rhetoric and lies becomes blurred.

But the word rhetoric is still useful, because it conveys that the people who use it today knowingly use it to create a certain impression, while knowing that it stretches the truth, or, increasingly today, consists of out-and-out lies.

For instance, when the Alt-Right leaders suggest that the COVID vaccines are unsafe, it is rhetoric, because the CDC was slow to actually certify them, and vaccines are guilty of being unsafe until proven innocent.  When they say that the vaccines are an aspect of government control, even mind control, they are engaging in slander, that is, lying.

However, some of these "second-rank" GOP leaders are so feeble-minded that they believe their own rhetoric, their own lies, that is, and lose sight of the actual facts that they have to deal with.  For instance, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is a presidential hopeful, initially cooperated with Trump to minimize the danger of COVID.  Then he, with Trump, chose to cast doubt about the efficacy of the vaccine, just so that Biden would be ineffectual in controlling the spread of infection.  But it so happened that the infection was controlled partially, in such a way that the efficacy of the vaccines, at least temporarily, was established, and the shortfall of the vaccines from total effectivity could be easily seen to be caused by dangerous behavior by people carrying infections.  By easy implication, Ron DeSantis and his cronies could be considered to actually cause the spread of COVID in conservative states.  And now, it is mostly conservative states in which the infection is rampant.  And the very constituents of Ron DeS. and his conservative fellow-governors, are dying, which reveals the utter contempt these people have, the sorry lack of compassion they have, for the weaker ones within their flock--thinking for a moment of these governors as shepherds.  This is not just callous, it is stupid.  Well, they are all ambitious, all eager to join the line of conservatives seeking the White House.  The members of their states may overlook their callousness, and vote for them for president.  But the country as a whole is more likely to remember their ignorance, their callousness, and their stupidity.  In their eagerness to cast shade on Biden, they have thrown their old and feeble, their low-paid hospital workers, the teachers in their schools, under the bus.  It was so preventable.

So we know that the conservative candidates for the presidency in 2024 are going to be callous, and stupid, and ignorant.  Certainly, they are going to be weak in their science background.  They are going to have to be fast talkers.  And they're not going to persuade too many people.  Their chance may come in 2028, after the Democrats have dragged themselves kicking and screaming into moving the country towards a more equitable society, and a less violent climate.  If they don't, conservative rhetoric hardly matters.

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The Roots of Some Failures in Kabul

[When reading what follows, bear in mind that I do not write from first hand knowledge, or even third-hand knowledge.  Read, for instance, https://www.u4.no/publications/corruption-in-afghanistan-and-the-role-of-development-assistance]

I read a very interesting article that arrived in my mailbox, courtesy of one of the newspapers, which I wanted to disseminate to our readers, but I have inadvertently deleted it.  But let's stumble through the main idea anyway.

The article was written by a political correspondent stationed in Afghanistan, who was so stunned by what she was hearing from rural Afghanis, that she quit her job, and moved to rural Afghanistan, to try and help the people there, especially the women.  She was recounting what she discovered when talking to these people.

The main thing is this: an enormous proportion of the money sent to Afghanistan, for the relief of the worst-off members of the population, was essentially stolen.  Of course, we in the US tend to expect this; we throw up our hands, what can we do when the the country is fighting guerilla gangsters?  As the story continues, we learn that the very people the US had installed as the civilian government in Kabul were the worst sort of racketeers.  Much of the food and supplies that were intended for the people, the troops, the hospitals etc, were actually channeled away---sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes in broad daylight---into the distant compounds of the so-called warlords.  A lot of the actual US dollars that were earmarked for the war effort, found their way into the bank accounts of terrorist leaders hunkered down in Pakistan.

As an aside: the groundwork for systematic, built-in corruption in Afghanistan was laid decades ago by the narcotics trade.

In fact, we have now learned that the so-called US ally, Pakistan, is in fact the location of a lot of insurgent hideouts, and many of these fellows came swarming into Afghanistan the second the US began to pull out.  (Recall that Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan when the Seals got him.)

Let's take a slightly longer view of this problem.
When the US, in the middle of a war, or at any time, wants to support the institutions of a foreign country, it seems to take it as inevitable that the people it deals with are corrupt.  Usually this attitude is justified; the bureaucrats in foreign governments are usually either corrupt, or easily corruptible.  (Trump assumed that the US government was no different, but he was not entirely right about that.)  So the Pentagon budgets (verb)---I suppose---a certain amount of money to spend on corruption.  (This same problem crops up when the US establishes charities to help hardship in foreign lands.  A lot of the money raised in the US for the charities go to, I think, paying out bribes.  I don't know this for certain, and I'd like to be proved wrong.  In any case, a large proportion of the funds go to maintain the American---and even local---administrators and managers of these funds in the style to which they're accustomed.)

To conclude, the conservatives in Congress are often eager to prosecute wars abroad, for various reasons, chiefly to bolster our tendency to put the USA forward as a global policeman.  Even now, the conservatives are furious that the US is in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan.  (The Democrats are not much better; they have been no less enthusiastic about some of these wars.)  The 'nice' thing about these wars is that they help out the arms industry, which is friendly towards conservative congressmen and senators.  However, as the war winds down, the vast numbers of Afghan citizens whom we had to depend on in Kabul: translators, drivers, orderlies, lawyers, what have you, are petitioning to be taken into the USA as refugees.  (Of course they should; for them to remain would be to get killed at the drop of a hat.)  But the Conservatives see this as just immigration in another guise, and can be expected to resist these initiatives.

Many political wonks are of the opinion that we should have settled on a permanent presence in Kabul (or somewhere in Afghanistan) to keep a lid on "our interests" there, rather than completely cut and run.  This would entail a constant stream of bribes to keep the local Afghanis happy, and would probably end up with a stream of US-origin firearms being trickled out to insurgent groups based in Pakistan, etc.  This would be "foreign aid" of the worst kind.

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A Complete Outsider's View of the War

When it comes to foreign wars, I am a complete outsider.  Of course, I have opinions.  But I know little or nothing of the so-called "calculations" that the generals in the Pentagon make.  At best, these calculations yield probabilities of success.  At worst, they yield highly unreliable, and worse: subjective, estimates of how effectively nation-building will proceed in a theater of war country.  We have been out there, tilling the fields in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran, in the Philippines, with only partial success in Korea.  We have inched in into Syria, and that's not going to work, either.  (This is partly because at least half the USA wants to do a good job of nation-building; the other half wants to establish business opportunities over there.)

Well, the Taliban have been interested in controlling Afghanistan long before the USA stepped in (in the wake of 911).  In fact, the USA enlisted the help of the Taliban in order to oppose the Soviet ambitions in Afghanistan back in the 60's.  (Either the US wanted to oppose anything the Soviets wanted to do, or the Afghanistanis begged the US to come in and help against the Soviets.)

What are the Taliban, anyway?  I honestly don't know.  All I know about the Taliban is that (1) they're religious extremists—signified by their fury at girls and women being educated; (2) they don't like girls and women being educated, which follows on from (1); (3) they hate the USA (which is no wonder, because we have been fighting them for 20 years, and preventing them from getting any sort of political power.   On the other hand, I don't know much more about the gentlemen who have political office in Kabul—those who are opposed to the Taliban.  All we can guess is that (4) they don't like the Taliban, (5) they do like the US, because after all, we set them up in power.

The Taliban is defeating the Afghan forces, and taking over dozens of government centers around the country.  Pretty soon they're going to roll into Kabul, and the whole country will be in their hands.  Girls and women have to stop going to school, and all the (American-style) cultural progress that has been made in Afghanistan will be rolled back, just like Trump rolled back much of what Obama did to make life better for poor Americans.  The Taliban is the 'Trump' of Afghanistan.  As long as we do cultural advancement in the image of the US in Afghanistan, the Taliban will not rest until they change it back.  Let's face it: nation-building in Afghanistan is not something the USA is equipped to do, no matter what GOP military dreamers think.  We may have led the horse to water, but it isn't drinking.

Wherever there has been a repressive Islamist regime in place in a country, if women have acquired rights, it is by their own efforts.  Foreign travel, and the Western experience merely introduces them to how women live in the West; then it is up to Islamic women themselves to push for a measure of liberty.  Afghani women are not going to permanently win any concessions because the US decrees that it should be so.

What are the Taliban going to do to the women?  Kill them all?  That would be horrible, and it is one of the few things that might spur Biden into carpet-bombing the place.  We know how dismal life is for Indian women in (certain parts of) India, but we have not done anything about it—so far.  But there's no saying what these fellows will do.  For 20 years we haven't succeeded in persuading them to think that the American Way is anything they can subscribe to; what are the odds that we can do it another few months?

HOWEVER, there is nothing to say that if other Islamist nations were to attempt to moderate the enthusiasm of the Taliban, it won't be effective.  It is time that these nations stepped up to do something about the situation.  (There is a problem that the wrong denomination of Islam will not succeed at this task; I believe the Afghans are Shia, which means that the only country qualified to address the nation-building of Afghanistan might be Iran.)  Leaving Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban seems to me to be a waste of a perfectly good country, despite that we couldn't make a deal with them to supply us with cocaine.  (I'm being sarcastic; you addicts can go back to sleep.)

The GOP is inclined to blame Biden for either abandoning Afghanistan, or not doing it the right way.  Never mind that Trump wanted to do it the same way.  But they have been inclined to make silly accusations of the Democrats, and Biden, anyway.

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