Our feature image: A blood moon rises over Marseille, southern France, Friday, July 27, 2018. Curiosity and awe have greeted a complete lunar eclipse, the longest one of this century. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

The Charity Corner has found a home on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights Action site. Prometheus and Pandora hope that you will visit there, take the actions and make the donations.

RANTS AND RAVES

This month there is so much to rant and rave about, both at home and worldwide, that Prometheus and Pandora have no idea where to start. Let us start with the closest and the possibly worst.

RANT ON A FASCIST LAW

The Knesset overnight, 17-18/7, passed into law the contentious nation-state bill that for the first time enshrines Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people, ” in its quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. The law also declares that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, sets the Hebrew calendar as the official calendar of the state, and recognizes Independence Day, days of remembrance and Jewish holidays. One clause of the bill downgrades the Arabic language from official to “special” standing, but also cryptically stipulates that “this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before this law came into effect.” Read the full text of the law here.
This law is another lethal blow against democracy in Israel. In an unusual public critique of proposed legislation, President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter Tuesday morning to Knesset members urging them to amend the controversial bill aimed at enshrining Israel’s Jewish character in law, saying that the measure “could harm the Jewish people, Jews throughout the world and the State of Israel.”
Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man puts it well in +972, ” You can look at the Jewish Nation-State law from two perspectives. There is the message it was intended to send to Jews: a positive affirmation of Israel as the Jewish nation-state; as the Jewish homeland; as the state of the Jews; a reassuring and nationalist message that says ‘this country is yours and yours alone.”

The other message, the inverse, meant for Palestinians, is: “this is not your land; this country does not belong to you, irrespective of whether you are an Israeli citizen living in the home of your great-grandparents or a refugee yearning to return to the land of your grandparents; your culture, language, and history are at best tolerated — this is not their home, this is not your homeland.”

The Jewish Nation-State Law states, implicitly and explicitly, that Israel belongs not to all of its citizens, over 20 percent of whom are not Jewish. Instead, it declares that Israel belongs to the Jewish people, some half of whom are not Israeli citizens.

It tells all of us that we are well on the way to becoming an apartheid fascist state. As stated by Adalah attorney Fady Khoury in an interview with +972,
“Apartheid in South Africa was a process. It was a system that took years to develop and was built on the work of academics and theologians who had to create justifications for white supremacy. It was a system of hierarchy, in which there is one group with all the power and another without any power.”

There appears to be little that liberal Israeli citizens can do to halt this process. It would seem that liberal Zionism has been crushed by the combination of the right wing in Israel and the policy of the Trump administration, as pointed out by Michelle Goldberg in the NYTimes several months ago. In general the difficulty that liberal Zionists, such as Prometheus and Pandora, have in reconciling their humanist beliefs with support for Israel is nothing new. Four years ago Anthony Lerman writing in the NYTimes outlined the dilemma of liberal Zionists–“They’re convinced that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, but they fail to explain how to reconcile God’s supreme authority with the sovereign power of the people. Meanwhile, the self-appointed arbiters of what’s Jewish in the Jewish state — the extreme religious Zionists and the strictly Orthodox, aided and abetted by Jewish racists in the Knesset like Ayelet Shaked, a Jewish Home Party member and Minister of Justice, who recently called for the mothers of Palestinian “snakes” to be killed — are trashing democracy more and more each day. “

 

RANT ON UNWORTHY FRIENDS

Here in Israel we have been “honored” by visits of people who are the dregs of world politics.

Viktor Orban the Prime Minister of Hungary, who is known as one of the world’s greatest enemies of democracy, was here for a few days visiting his dear buddy, Netanyahu. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, ties with Orban have warmed, prompting criticism from the local Jewish community over the Hungarian prime minister’s attacks on Jewish billionaire George Soros, which critics say toy with anti-Semitic stereotypes. They also object to his past praise for a former Nazi ally. He has praised Horthy who ruled occupied Hungary during the war and under whose aegis over half a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

While Orban has vilified George Soros,the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire, who has been promoting democracy in Hungary and Eastern Europe in general ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel has lobbied the United States to “open doors” to Orban’s government. The US government  has traditionally  kept Orban at arm’s length in view of  Hungary’s  ultra-nationalist stance and the prime minister’s embracing of what he has termed an “illiberal democracy.”

Orban was received with open arms, visited Yad Vashem according to protocol, met the President, the works. All that Pandora and Prometheus, as well as their friends, can do is to blush with shame. Daniel Barenboim the great musician puts it best.  

There were some signs of   protest.

In the meantime, Israel and Myanmar have signed an agreement to coordinate what is written about each country in the school textbooks of the other. In a somewhat controversial move, the agreement allows the parties to “through their competent authorities, endeavor to mutually verify school textbooks, particularly concerning the passages referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce corrections to these textbooks.” A joint committee will be established to implement the agreement and will meet every three years. Noa Landau in Haaretz gives the details. We wonder what our children will learn about the genocide of the Rohingya. We are told that Israel has ceased selling weaponry to Myanmar, but the cozy relationship continues. We should all be ashamed including President Rivlin.

CRIME AGAINST CHILDREN

The Trump separation of children from their parents is beyond words. Let Mike Luckovich put it best.

GOODIES FROM SCIENCE

WATER FOUND ON MARS

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The Holy Grail of planetary science, liquid water on Mars, has been found.  The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on the Mars Express spacecraft collected radar measurements over the SPLD (South Pole Layered Deposit) .The research team led by R. Orosei of Istituto di Radioastronomia, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Bologna, Italy identified a distinct 20-km-wide bright reflector on multiple profiles collected over 3 years. They rule out a number of possible explanations for this bright reflector, leaving the existence of liquid water, either as a distinct water layer or as saturated sediments, as the only explanation. The finding is described in detail in news media such as BBC while the scientific paper has come out in Science.

BLOOD MARKER FOR MELANOMA

Melanoma is an aggressive form of skin cancer and early detection is of the greatest importance. A blood test marker has long been sought by researchers and it now appears to have been found. An Australian team has published in the journal Oncotarget a description of research that has found a marker in the blood that can serve as an indicator of early stage melanoma. Pandora and Prometheus are very excited about this breakthrough and hope the test finds its way into clinical use very soon.

BOOK REVIEWS

This week we look at the NYRB reviews of two books on English religious music. Prometheus and Pandora hope you find them interesting.
God’s Own Music
Ian Bostridge
February 22, 2018 Issue
O Sing unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music
by Andrew Gant
University of Chicago Press, 454 pp., $35.00
Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece
by Jonathan Keates
Basic Books, 165 pp., $25.00

Ian Bostridge gives us a very personal review of these two books. The history book by Gant provides a detailed synopsis and melds the history of English music with developments in English history. Bostridge himself was a choir boy at a church in London that had seen better days in its past, but nonetheless had a charismatic organist and choir master who inspired the boys to reach heights of song. In particular they performed and loved the great hymns of the the English Reformation and its immediate aftermath—Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, the exotically named Orlando Gibbons, John Blow, Henry Purcell—and the music that was created in an attempt to recreate that beauty of holiness: the Victorian and Edwardian anthem tradition of Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Herbert Howells, and many others.

Thomas Webster: A Village Choir, 1847

 

The oratorio The Messiah by Handel is indeed worthy of a study on its own. In writing it Handel deviated from his usual style of stories of Old Testament heroes and it is devoted to the prediction of the coming of Christ. Handel was disappointed that people saw it as entertainment rather than a call to Godliness. It is customary for the audience to stand during the Hallelujah Chorus, although the source of the custom is not clear. When the piece was performed in Tel Aviv a few years ago, a few people, including your humble servant, stood, most did not.

A QUESTION ABOUT MUSIC

Classical music is one of the few domains in which women continue to  play a very minor and subservient role. Last week’s Donne – Women in Music report expressed this in stark statistics. Across Europe, 97.6% of classical and contemporary classical music performed in the last three seasons was written by men, leaving a paltry 2.3% written by women. Why is this so? In a BBC documentary that aired this summer, the question is addressed by Danielle de Niese who writes about it in the Guardian.

SILLY TIME

WHAT IF?

Lake Tea

What if we were to dump all the tea in the world into the Great Lakes? How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be?

Alex Burman

The answer should be of great interest to the tea drinkers among us.

We are planning a trip abroad and have consulted the Id folks on travel:

WUMO

Here is the link.

Anyone who has traveled with children will have empathy.

Our featured image above shows a montage of the small moons of Saturn including  : Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus, Janus, and Mimas, to scale. A true family picture of our friends.

The eight innermost moons of Saturn, in color images collected by Cassini between June 7, 2005, and July 5, 2010. Pan and Daphnis (top left small moons) orbit within the Encke and Keeler gaps in the rings; Atlas (below Pan and Daphnis) orbits at the outer edge of the main rings. To their right are Prometheus and Pandora; Prometheus orbits just inside and Pandora just outside the F ring. Below them are Epimetheus (left) and Janus (right), which trade positions every four years, averaging out to the same distance from Saturn. Mimas orbits considerably farther away, but its gravitational effects influence the positions of gaps and waves within the rings. At full resolution, the montage has a scale of 500 meters per pixel.

The Charity Corner has found a home on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights Action site. Prometheus and Pandora hope that you will visit there, take the actions and make the donations.

IN MEMORIAM

PHILIP ROTH March 19, 1933-May 22, 2018

The great American-Jewish novelist died this month at the age of 85. His work has been described as ‘savagely funny and bitingly honest’ which Pandora and Prometheus consider a good description. The Guardian asked 14 acclaimed writers including William Boyd, David Baddiel, Linda Grant and Joyce Carol Oates to pick their favorite work and the responses are worth reading. As Jennifer Gilmore wrote in Forward–“Roth’s death, like all deaths, is the end of many things. Of towering white male novelists. Of that first wave of Jewish American immigrants who helped build literature as I know it. Of America as my Jewish grandparents knew it.”
He angered many people, such as rabbis who resented his way of presenting Jewish characters, women who disliked his misogynist way of presenting women in his novels and literary critics such as Irving Howe, whom Roth lampooned mercilessly. Howe declared ironically that Roth “now stands close to the center of our culture (if that is anything for him to be pleased about), and he is accorded serious attention both by a number of literary critics and those rabbis and Jewish communal leaders who can hardly wait to repay the animus he has lavished upon them.”
In addition to the obituaries in the NYTimes and elsewhere, many writers have written  how Roth influenced their careers. Andrew Martin writing in Vice tries to explicate Roth’s attitude towards women. He refers to Vivian Gornick who wrote a vividly argued and much quoted essay about the way that Roth’s narrators, beginning with the title character of his infamous, spectacularly successful novel Portnoy’s Complaint, transfer their rage at the powers that be on to the women they’re sleeping with, creating an “impassioned association of woman-hating with being Jewish-in-America” that outpaced even Bellow’s. These comments are certainly worth reading.

FELICIA LANGER December 9, 1930 – June 21, 2018

The lawyer who was the first to bring the Occupation and its violations of human rights and international law to the courtroom died in Germany on June 21.

Felicia Langer was an Israeli attorney and human rights activist known for her defense of Palestinian political prisoners in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She became a hated figure in Israel and was regarded as a traitor by many people. In 1990 she gave up the struggle since she realized that the courts and the system were using her as a fig leaf to portray the regime in a favorable light. She is eulogized by Gideon Levi in Haaretz and the +972 blog by the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard.

May she rest in peace. Many lawyers are following the path that she laid out for them with phenomenal courage and integrity.

MICHAEL S.J. BELTON September 29, 1934-June 4, 2018

Our esteemed colleague, Mike Belton died this month at the age 84. He was the President of Belton Space Exploration Initiatives, LLC, and an Emeritus Astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). Born in Bognor Regis, England, he received his Bachelor’s degree at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Kitt Peak National Observatory (the precursor to NOAO) in 1964 and carried out research on nearly all objects that fell under “planetary science.” A detailed obituary has been put out by the American Astronomical Society.

We remember him from the heady days of planetary exploration with Voyager, Galileo and other spacecraft. Rest in Peace Mike.

CONGRATULATIONS TO NETTA BARZILAI

This Israel singer just won the Eurovision with her song “Toy” Cheers!

This is the performance that won.

Here are the lyrics.

https://genius.com/Netta-barzilai-toy-lyrics

Netta says it is a #MeToo song of empowerment. Pandora and Prometheus, to say nothing of their imaginary playmates, YandA, find it mostly opaque, but that is a matter of age.

A TRUE CLOAK AND DAGGER STORY

One of the Israeli intelligence agency’s most daring missions is being turned into a movie, ‘Red Sea Diving Resort.’ One of the operatives looks back on a breathtaking operation that saved thousands of Ethiopian Jews’ lives in the 1980’s. Here is the pitch…

The story is told in the blog of Allison Kaplan Sommer who writes in Haaretz. She interviewed one of the participants in the phony beach resort in Sudan through which thousands of Ethiopian Jews were smuggled to Israel. The story is fascinating and worthy of your time. Here is the route:

 

RANT ON RAQQA

The city of Raqqa in Syria was subjected to a major set of attacks by the US-led coalition. The attack was supposed to drive Da’ash out of its self-declared capital. The attack killed hundreds of civilians who had no way of escaping the city. Someone must be held accountable for this massive atrocity. Please open the link, read the devastating account and sign the letter to the US Secretary of Defense demanding an accounting for the killings.
In the end, Da’ash was granted safe passage out of the town so the civilian deaths served no real military purpose.

RANT ON KIDNAPPING CHILDREN TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT

Words fail:

PROFILE OF A WRITER

Our attention is called this month to William Trevor, whose mournful, sometimes darkly funny short stories and novels about the small struggles of unremarkable people placed him in the company of masters like V. S. Pritchett, W. Somerset Maugham and Chekhov. He died in 2016 in Somerset, England at age 88. With the republication of his final collection of short stories, “Last Stories” a renewed interest is seen in his oeuvre. The collection is reviewed this month in the Washington Post by Heller McAlpin. When he died a wave of obituaries came out including a beautiful evaluation by the great Irish writer Ann Enright. She extols him as” a tender and compassionate chronicler of small town life.”

Trevor, although born in Ireland, lived most of his adult life in England He described himself “I don’t really feel those divisions any more than really I feel, in literary terms, the division between Ireland and England. I feel that writers of fiction do belong in a no man’s land some place and I certainly feel I do.”

From that no-man’s land he gave us a treasure of wonderful writing. Prometheus and Pandora are grateful for the revival of his work and memory.

SOMETHING FROM SCIENCE

The question of the origin of language in homo sapiens has long proved difficult of linguists and anthropologists. A recent hypothesis  relates the development of language to the ability of our ancestors to make stone tools. Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?”

He and his colleagues have proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper, Kolodny  argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools–hijacked the capacity for language from themselves. The hypothesis is described in detail in the Atlantic by Ben James. Kolodny and Edelman published their scientific results and ideas in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Naturally there is considerable resistance to this idea, in particular from the doyen of linguistics Noam Chomsky, Robert Berwick and other well-known linguists. In a famous 2014 paper in PLOS Biology they conclude that the evolution of language was unrelated to tool making and happened quickly. “The language faculty is an extremely recent acquisition in our lineage,” these authors wrote, “and it was acquired not in the context of slow, gradual modification of preexisting systems under natural selection but in a single, rapid, emergent event.”
The question is a thorny one since language in its development and evolution left no fossil record. The controversy will continue and we shall try to follow it. Stay tuned.

MAYBE SOME GOOD NEWS ON THE CLIMATE FRONT

Bill Mckibben writing it in the Guardian informs us that the fossil fuel  industry is on the ropes. He quotes research “In the past several years, oil industry financial statements have revealed significant signs of strain: Profits have dropped, cash flow is down, balance sheets are deteriorating and capital spending is falling. The stock market has recognized the sector’s overall weakness, punishing oil and gas shares over the past five years even as the market as a whole has soared.” The Pope has also taken a stand against the fossil fuel industry. Cheers.

WuMo even find a lighter side: Lest they sue us, we just give you the  link. https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/wumo/s-2092525

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Ronald Welch – The Gauntlet

This is a book aimed at young boys who like history and derring do. Prometheus and Pandora recently gave a copy to a young grandson in the hope that the adventures will motivate him to overcome the barrier and to read English. We append a review by Lady Fanciful.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

CHEERS FOR THE WORLD CUP

Gideon Levy writing in Haaretz extols the world of sports and the world wide festival of the World Cup of soccer. He has a point although there is some argument over Senegal’s ejection over yellow cards, possibly a result of referee racial bias. We also deplore the sexual harassment of female journalists.

SILLY TIME

WhatIf is interesting indeed–a five year old kid can think of things.

Earth-Moon Fire Pole

My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman’s pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?

Ramon Schönborn, Germany

The answer is interesting.

ON MORALITY

AI TELLS THE TRUTH

Zack cuts close to the bone here:

 

 

Fish beaks? Zack needs some basic biology lessons…

 

This month we (the Jews among us)  are preparing for the Pesach holiday which commemorates the liberation of the ancient Hebrews from bondage in Egypt during Pharaonic times. The featured image above shows us the Seder plate with the items used during the Seder.

Pesach is observed by avoiding leaven, and highlighted by the Seder meal that includeד four cups of wine, eating matzah and bitter herbs, and retelling the story of the Exodus.

“Matzah is one of those wonderful transcendent ritual items in Judaism, a symbol embodying a duality to teach a moral lesson. At the beginning of the seder, we break one of the sheets of matzah and call it the bread (lekhem) of affliction (oni). It is the meager sustenance of slaves, the meanest fare of the poor, the quickly produced food of those who make a hurried, under-cover-of-dark getaway. Yet later, it represents freedom, the bread we ate when we were liberated from Egyptian bondage.”–quote from Leslie K. Rossץ

We are told that God inflicted ten plagues upon the Egyptian people, culminating in the killing of the first born, which broke Pharaoh’s spirit and caused him to drive the Israelites from his land.

Later, Pharaoh regretted his decision, chased them into the Red Sea where God caused our people to  cross on dry land and then brought the waters back to drown the Egyptians.  The Talmud tells us that when the angels joined in the hymn of rejoicing (Exodus XV,1-22), God reprimanded them saying “beings I created are drowning in the sea and you sing?” The angels pointed out that humans were singing and He responded that humans are capable of mixed feelings of joy and sadness whereas angels have only pure feelings. We mark the mourning for the drowned Egyptians by shortening our hymn of praise on the seventh day of the holiday.

In Hebrew the festival is known as Pesach (which means “to pass over”), because God passed over the Jewish homes when killing the Egyptian firstborn on the very first Passover eve. This year the holiday runs from March 31 to April 7. It is constrained by the Torah to always fall on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. We have discussed the equinox in previous blogs, now we just show a picture of what it means.

 

Prometheus and Pandora together with their imaginary friends YandA wish all their Jewish readers a very Happy Pesach.  They also wish their Christian friends a Happy Easter, which  takes place from Good Friday on March 30 until Easter Monday on April 2.

The Charity Corner has found a home on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights Action site. Prometheus and Pandora hope that you will visit there, take the actions and make the donations.

IN MEMORIAM Steven Hawking 1942-2018

Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died on March 14 at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

He was crippled by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) but was able to overcome the difficulties of such a life. He was diagnosed at age 21 and lived with the disease for 55 years. He made great contributions to cosmology and the understanding of black holes and their role in the universe. Hawking’s popular book A Brief History of Time was a long time best seller.

For scientists, we recommend the biography by a former collaborator Roger Penrose, himself an outstanding scientist. More accessible obituaries can be found in the NYTimes and in the Guardian. His ashes will be interred in Westminster Abbey near the graves of  Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

RANTING ABOUT THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

It is both saddening and maddening to see democracy being wiped out in so many countries. Prometheus and Pandora find it frustrating that in far too many instances it is done with the compliance of the people or their total ignorance of the implications of what is happening around them. This is nothing new–over 2000 years ago the Roman philosopher Cicero is supposed to have reacted to Julius Caesar’s destruction of the republic “Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.”  (The attribution is historically doubtful but he might have said it and it is indeed true.)

Back to our time–Donald Trump poses a dangerous threat to American democracy — but many people do not know how extraordinary this  threat is, in concert with troubling trends in the USA and the world. In just his first year in office, Trump has undermined election results,  cozied up to dictators, threatened to jail his political opponents, maliciously lied to manipulate the media and the masses, and attacked judges and even his own Justice Department for refusing to stop investigations into his actions. and that is just scratching the surface. In their award-winning and New York Times best-selling book, “How Democracies Die”, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide illuminating and alarming context for the current predicament of people who care about democracy. In this riveting new book, Levitsky and Ziblatt conduct an insightful investigation into how other democracies have failed and broken down and what the average person can do to fight back. The Washington Post summed up the book perfectly:

“Cool and persuasive… ‘How Democracies Die’ comes at exactly the right moment.”

True manipulation a la Lukovich

OUR BOOK REVIEWS

NEVER LET ME GO

By Kazuo Ishiguro. 288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

We have just read this 2005 novel by the Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. It is heavily dystopian. As Sarah Kerr says in her review in the NYTimes “There is no way around revealing the premise of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel. It is brutal, especially for a writer celebrated as a poet of the unspoken. But it takes a while for us to get a handle on it. Since it’s the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don’t quite know what’s going on.”
It is a strange read, but worth the effort. In general, Ishiguro is stingy of early detail (vid. Remains of the Day) and we have to live with that as we read. Kazuo Ishiguro fascinates M. John Harrison, who reviews in the Guardian, with his  subtle take on mortality and hopelessness, in Never Let Me Go. Revealing more would be spoiling–in fact, Pandora and Prometheus think that the reviewers reveal too much and it is best to go along with Kathy the narrator, who knows what is going on, but mostly tells us of  her innocent childhood and adolescence.

In honor of Women’s Day on March 20, the NYTimes has compiled a set of reviews of books about women and  their struggles. Three, of particular interest to Pandora and Prometheus, are about the invisible women of science,

A LAB OF ONE’S OWN
Science and Suffrage in the First World War
By Patricia Fara
334 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.

BROAD BAND
The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
By Claire L. Evans
278 pp. Portfolio/Penguin. $27.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Sobel, Dava, reviewed in the Guardian by Nicola Davis.

The first two are reviewed in the NYTimes by Dava Sobel. The “Lab” is a title salute to A Room of One’s Own, a 1929 feminist polemic essay by Virginia Woolf. To some  of us it brought up a memory  of A League of Their Own, a 1992 film about the professional all-female baseball league that played during WWII. The league was real, the film about it is fiction, but good. Since Patricia Fara is English, her reference must be to the Woolf essay. Dava Sobol herself, the author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, has published her own history of female astronomers, The Glass Universe, that explores these women’s lives and work, revealing their grit, tenacity and brilliance in classifying the stars. “Even before they won the right to vote, several of them made contributions of such significance that their names gained honored places in the history of astronomy,” writes Sobel.

NEWS FROM SCIENCE

ARCHAEOLOGY UNDER THE JAIL

Excavations under the Megiddo prison, which is now being vacated, have come up with some remarkable findings, described in Haaretz by Ruth Schuster.  The prison will be replaced by an archaeological park featuring one of the earliest-known houses of Christian worship, which was found in the ancient Jewish village of Kefar Othnay (a.k.a. Kfar Otnai), as well as the remains of a vast Roman army base across the Qeni river, Megiddo Regional Council announced this week. The new park will also encompass seven Ottoman-era flour mills built along a stream, the council says.

One of the structures was a pre-church, from before Christians began to build churches. It contains a dedication inscription in Greek:

 

The article is fascinating and provides fresh insights into the role of Christianity in the Roman army in the era before the conversion of Constantine.When the site becomes open to the public, it will be a worthwhile visit.

Elsewhere on our planet, in Chile, DNA analysis of a small mummy has provided insight into evolution. The researchers identified in her DNA a group of mutations in genes related to bone development. Some of these mutations might be responsible for the skeleton’s bizarre form, causing a hereditary disorder never before documented in humans.

SILLY TIME

What If?

If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? Would you freeze or suffocate first? Or something else?

Rebecca B. The answer tells us a bit about our atmosphere.

 

 

Believe Big Pharma?

This is how it works….

In the past I have given sweatshirts with the logo “Eschew Obfuscation” and “Procrastinate Now” to people and they were indeed appreciated, albeit in long obscure words much later. I have stumbled on a good take on procrastination:

Our featured  image evokes the holiday of Purim. Cheers and best wishes to all who are going to celebrate it this week.

The Charity Corner has found a home on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights Action site. Prometheus and Pandora hope that you will visit there, take the actions and make the donations.

IN MEMORIAM Haim Guri

October 9, 1923 Tel Aviv, Mandate Palestine-January 31, 2018 (aged 94) Jerusalem, Israel

Haim Gouri, a leading Israel poet died on January 31. His life represents a history of an entire generation who fought to create the state and lived long enough to experience great disappointment with the community as it stands today.He grew up in a socialist Zionist family. His father served for a long time in the Knesset (Parliament) as a representative of Mapai, the precursor of the Israel Labor Party. Haim Gouri served in the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Hagana underground, which fought in the 1940s to establish the state of Israel. After the war he was sent to Hungary to organize Holocaust survivors to come to Israel and participate in the struggle for independence and the establishment of the state. The experience had a profound effect on him.

A number of his most famous poems became some of Israel’s most beloved songs, particularly those about the War of Independence in 1948 and the founding of Israel. He became well-known to the Israeli public for his journalistic coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961.

He published 12 books of poetry and 10 works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as translations, journalism and documentary films. Obituaries can be found in Haaretz and in the NYTimes.

A RANT ABOUT RACISM

First let us understand what we mean by this term. Racism is the belief that characteristics and abilities can be attributed to people simply on the basis of their race and that some racial groups are superior to others. Racism and discrimination have been used as powerful weapons encouraging fear or hatred of others in times of conflict and war, and even during economic downturns. In a short introductory video the Understanding Race project from the American Anthropological Association says race is a powerful idea and an enduring concept, invented by society. It has also fostered inequality and discrimination for centuries, as well as influencing how we relate to other human beings:

The American Anthropological Association has posted comments on race, racism and their implications on its Web site. They have developed a program for teaching middle school age children about race.

A set of principles: The program conveys three overall messages:

Race is a recent human invention
Race is about culture, not biology
Race and racism are embedded in institutions and everyday life.

That given, let us look at manifestations of racism in the world around us and try to understand how we can oppose racism in all its forms.

It is important to debunk various misconceptions upon which racism rests:

There is no biological foundation to ‘race.’ Physical differences between individuals and groups of individuals are genetically /scientifically so minute they are meaningless. What matters are the social meanings that are attached to perceived physical differences, be these ‘skin color,’ hair color, height, etc., and the political and economic forces that support (reinforce, and enforce) these perceptions. In other words, ‘race’ is a social construction. The idea that somehow white skin color provides a justification for the idea of racial superiority has over time been responsible for the colonial attitudes that caused European powers to conquer enslave and oppress indigenous people throughout the world

In Calgary, Alberta, a body called CARED ((Calgary Anti-Racism Education) maintains a Web site devoted to confronting racism. We strongly recommend that you open the site and learn about anti-racism and how to be an effective participant in the struggle. The philosophy of CARED is defined thus:
“Our Philosophy

“We recognize both the influence and the potential of the formal education system, as well as the many anti-racism initiatives in workplaces and communities, and want to build on that potential. The CARED Collective has engaged in extensive discussion and consideration of the terms “Anti-Racism Education” and “Anti-Racism Training.” While recognizing the very significant impacts of individuals working within the formal ‘education system” we believe that historically the formal education system has often functioned to reinforce rather than dismantle racism. This has been aptly demonstrated in analyses of how specific racialized groups have been misrepresented (or absent altogether) in the curriculum, in teacher education, in positions of authority and decision-making within the system. Studies of racism experienced by racialized ‘students’ and ‘teachers’ in the system have demonstrated that it is characterized by silence, exclusion, subtle behaviors and overt acts of violence and, increasingly, anti-racism has also been demonstrated in critical analyses of whiteness. Moreover, racism in the formal education system is not only about ‘who’ is in the system, who holds positions of authority in the system, or about curriculum content. While these absolutely are crucial factors, they are not the only considerations. It is not only a matter of What is taught, but How.”

While individual racism can seek protection under freedom of speech laws, it ultimately is connected with what sociologists define as systemic racism which manifests itself in two ways:

institutional racism: racial discrimination that derives from individuals carrying out the dictates of others who are prejudiced or of a prejudiced society
structural racism: inequalities rooted in the system-wide operation of a society that excludes substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions.

Manifestations of systemic racism are often easy to identify, for example, in the Jim Crow laws of the US or the treatment of the Bushmen by the government of Botswana. Others are more subtle such as opportunities in education, hiring and advancement practices and access to sports. An example is the sport of ice hockey, which in the US and Canada is predominantly white. There is no explicit policy that excludes people of color and indigenous people from participating in organized hockey, yet there are few players of color/indigenous players. What is it that keeps organized hockey ‘white’?

Playing hockey is expensive (fees and gear), time consuming for families, requires transportation and an accommodating work schedule, and in most of Canada, for example, is conducted in English. While there is no ‘intent’ to exclude non-English speaking, lower-income, shift-working, single-parent families from playing organized hockey, the system is designed by and for middle-class, professional white families. The same is true for soccer in the US.

We also see structural racism in the attitude towards refugees in countless countries. The fact that most of the refugees are black or Muslim or both plays a major role in determining the reception or non-reception of refugees in Western countries such as Norway, Australia, Israel and many others.

It behooves all of us to look carefully at our own attitudes. The CARED program in Canada is a channel through which one can fight racism. The organization Survival International provides an opportunity to help indigenous tribes around the world. Amnesty International works to defend human rights around the world and by the nature of such work encounters racism almost everywhere.

RANT ABOUT ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING

Again we are facing a school shooting in the US, this time a school in Florida with at least 17 dead, 5 of them Jewish. The description is harrowing. A former student, who had been expelled for undisciplined behavior returned to the school with an automatic rifle and shot students all over the building. He is now in custody and will answer for his crime, but none of this will enhance personal security in a country that refuses to control deadly weapons in the hands of its citizens. The US spends untold billions fighting terrorism around the world and rightly so, but as pointed out by Uri Friedman in the Atlantic, it does little to prevent mass shootings at home. The shooting this week in Parkland FL is the eighth such event in 2018 only seven weeks into the year. Prometheus and Pandora have given up on the US political system as an entity to do something about gun proliferation. Joe Biden, the former vice president of the US has started a petition calling out members of Congress who are not willing to take the risk of standing up to the NRA. Please go there and add your name.

ON ACCOUNTABILITY AND SEX CRIMES #METOO IS MAKING CHANGES HAPPEN

The rise of the #MeToo movement has brought about a change in attitudes towards the major issue of abuse of women and girls (and men and boys as well.) We would like to call your attention to an op-ed in the NYTimes by Nicholas Kristof in which he revisits the sad case of Dylan Farrow who was sexually assaulted by her adoptive father, Woody Allen, when she was seven years old.

She is now a woman in her thirties and continues her allegation, now with the support of #MeToo women and others who now are ostracizing Allen.

The counter view points out that there is little evidence of the abuse and cites the findings of an evaluation team from Yale New Haven Hospital, who concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan. On the other hand, the judge in the custody case noted that “Mr. Allen’s behavior toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate.” Bret Stephens writing also in the NYTimes makes the point that whereas the case against Harvey  Weinstein and the like was backed by evidence beyond any reasonable doubt, Dylan Farrow’s case suffers from the lack of such evidence. As Kristof puts it: “Indeed, the certainty of the Dylan Farrow case is that there has been a gross injustice: Either an innocent man’s career is being destroyed, or a victim has been unfairly doubted since she confided in her pediatrician about an assault when she was 7 years old.”

OK enough ranting–we could fill countless blogs with the corruption scandals in Israel, but we will leave that to professional journalists. Here is a link to Haaretz which is full of the nasty business. Now let us move on to more pleasant places.

SHAKESPEARE’S MUSE DISCOVERED

Software used by professors to discover plagiarism by students has been applied to the search for sources of the vocabulary and stories in various plays by Shakespeare. A pair of unusual scholars, Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, claim, in a book about to be published, to have found such a source. The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript entitled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.

This is an amazing discovery for the Shakespeare scholarly community. and will spur more searches for unpublished manuscripts to which Shakespeare might have had access. Stay tuned.

OUR BOOK REVIEWS

Our friends at the New York Review of Books have provided us with reviews of a trio of works about Jacques Offenbach which includes a new biography by Lawrence Senelick, a musicologist reconstruction of Tales of Hoffman and a production at the Met. The three
are reviewed by Adam Kirsch.

CLASSICAL CANCAN
Adam Kirsch
January 18, 2018 Issue

Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture
by Laurence Senelick
Cambridge University Press, 354 pp., $120.00

The Real “Tales of Hoffmann”: Origin, History, and Restoration of an Operatic Masterpiece
by Vincent Giroud and Michael Kaye, with a foreword by Plácido Domingo
Rowman and Littlefield, 563 pp., $130.00; $75.00 (paper)

Les contes d’Hoffmann, an opera by Jacques Offenbach, directed by Bartlett Sher, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, September 26–October 28, 2017

It is noted that Offenbach is known today mainly for Tales of Hoffman, which Senelick describes as untypical of Offenbach’s oeuvre in its intellectual, poetic, and melancholy nature. In his time his works were known to Paris audiences for being comic, knowing, exciting; they lampooned everything respectable, from classical mythology to military glory to the sanctity of marriage; they featured actresses baring their legs and shoulders as they danced the cancan. Pandora and Prometheus regard him as a Gallic version of Gilbert and Sullivan, albeit with the explicit sex and wild abandon censored out in the latter to conform with Victorian English prudery. Can you imagine the Three Little Maids in the Mikado coming on with a CanCan like this?

We have two of his send ups in our DVD collection, La belle Hélène and Orphée aux Enfers, and they are delightful spoofs. The book certainly looks like a good read.

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Reviewed in the NYTimes by Parul Seghal

This collection of essays of Marilynne Robinson deals with the question in the title. When Barak Obama asked her how she got to where she is, how someone born in the boondocks of Idaho becomes the kind of person who declares, as Robinson does, “democracy is my aesthetics and my ethics and more or less my religion”?, the answer is somewhere in her writings, possibly here.

In these essays she comes to grips with that question herself. The book is demanding, but well worth the effort. Help may be found in the long interview with her by Wyatt  Mason, also published in the NYTimes magazine

 

SCIENCE TIDBITS

THE GLOBAL VIROME PROJECT (GVP)

GVP is a ten-year project to pre-empt emerging pandemic threats by identifying the majority of unknown viruses throughout the world that are likely to infect humans.

The Challenge

We live in an era when the threats posed by global pandemics and epidemics are greater than at any other point in human history. Recent outbreaks such as SARS, Ebola and Zika illustrate that we are ill-prepared and extremely vulnerable to emerging viral threats. However, less than 0.1% of all viruses with the potential to pose a threat to global health are estimated to have spilled over from animals to humans. Since the mid-20th century, new and deadly diseases have emerged at an alarming rate and the threats from this vast pool of unknown viruses are accelerating exponentially, driven by our expanding population and global travel.

Pandora and Prometheus are most impressed and hope that the project brings the anticipated benefits to humankind.

SPOOKY SCIENCE

Using a single photon, or particle of light, two people can simultaneously send information to one another, scientists report in a new pair of papers. The feat relies on a quirk of quantum mechanics — superposition, the phenomenon through which particles can effectively occupy two places at once. The theory is given in a paper in Phys. Rev. Letters and a demonstration is shown in paper posted at arXiv.org on February 14.
Imagine that two people, Alice and Bob, are stationed some distance apart. In standard classical physics, Alice and Bob would each require their own photon to send each other messages simultaneously, with each light particle transmitting a single bit, 0 or 1.

If, however,  Alice and Bob possess a photon that is in a superposition — simultaneously located near Alice and near Bob — both of them can manipulate that photon to encode a 0 or 1, and then send it back to the other. How each manipulates the photon determines which of the two receives the photon in the end. If Alice and Bob put in the same bit — both 0s or both 1s — Alice receives the photon. If their bits don’t match, Bob gets it. Since Alice knows whether she sent a 0 or a 1, she immediately knows whether Bob encoded a 0 or 1, and vice versa.

To show that such communication is possible, Walther and colleagues sent single photons through an arrangement of mirrors and other optical devices. The setup put the photon in a superposition, sending it simultaneously to two stations that represented Alice and Bob.

By changing the phase of the light’s electromagnetic wave — shifting where the troughs and peaks of the wave fell — the researchers encoded the photon with a 0 or 1 at each station. Then, at each station, the photon — still in limbo between Alice and Bob — was sent to the opposite station. Along the way, the photon interacted with itself, interfering like water ripples combining to amplify their strength or cancel out. That interference determined whether the final photon was detected at Alice’s station or Bob’s.

Indeed quantum mechanics is weird, but it is certainly fascinating.

NEANDERTHALS NOT ALL THAT DUMB

It has long been believed that the extinction of Neanderthals was caused by the arrival of humans who had a cognitive edge that manifested itself in more cooperative hunting, better weaponry and innovation, a broader diet, or other major advantages. Careful
study of the archaeological record does not support any of the hypotheses based on this assumption. Part of the misunderstanding may have arisen because researchers compared Neanderthals with their successors, the modern humans who lived in the Upper Palaeolithic, rather than the humans who lived at the same time. That is like saying people in the 19th century were less intelligent than those in the 21st because they didn’t have laptops and space travel.

SILLY TIME

What If

What if I tried to re-enter the atmosphere in my car? (a 2000 VW Jetta TDI). Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing?

—Casey Berg

The answer is interesting.

 

BIG PHARMA HAS CONVINCING ADS

WELCOME TO NEW WORLD POLITICS

 

AND THE MODERN SCHOOL…

Our featured image shows Pandora trying to undo, based on a etching by F.S. Church

The Charity Corner has found a home on the Miriam Shlesinger Human Rights Action site. Prometheus and Pandora hope that you will visit there, take the actions and make the donations.

ANNIVERSARIES OF 2018

With each new year,  history offers a fresh list of memorable occasions ideally suited to be remembered. In a previous issue, we marked the centennial of the birth of the great American musician Leonard Bernstein. For a list of the top 10 scientific anniversaries, see Science News.

A CENTENNIAL OF A SCIENTIST

Let us continue with the centennial of the birth of the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. He was an American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era.  He revised and essentially recreated the field of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.  Feynman took a leading role in the Manhattan Project during the war, after which he continued his brilliant career, mostly at CalTech.  He is celebrated, inter alia, for the introduction of the famous Feynman diagrams that gave a concrete expression to esoteric calculations and a quantum mechanical theory for superfluidity.  The link above connects to a detailed biography in the Britannica.

 A DOUBLE CENTENNIAL OF A SCIENTIST

James Prescott Joule (200th birthday)

James Joule was born into a family of brewers on December 24, 1818. The brewery provided a laboratory where he developed exceptional experimental skills. Despite no formal scientific training and no academic job, he still became one of England’s leading scientists. His experimental skill led him to establish precisely  the amount of work needed to produce a quantity of heat and the relationship between heat and electricity.

The results of his experiments were fully described in his famous 1845 paper “On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat” and they established that heat and mechanical work are both forms of energy. His efforts became the cornerstone of the theory of conservation of energy (the First Law of Thermodynamics).   Read more here.

A CENTENNIAL FOR DEMOCRACY

Women’s right to vote

A major anniversary in the history of democracy in Great Britain and Ireland is set to take place in February: the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote. The introduction of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 meant that women, who were over the age of 30, property owners and graduates from British universities, were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections for the first time. The same Act gave the vote to all men over the age of 21. The law was later extended ten years later, in June 1928, to include all women over the age of 21.

 

IN MEMORIAM

Aharon Appelfeld (February 16, 1932-January 4, 2018)

Israeli writer and Israel Prize laureate Aharon Appelfeld died on Thursday January 4 at age 85.  He was a prolific author whose works were translated into a number of languages and who had a wide following in the English-speaking world. The last of his 45 books, “Timahon” (“Astonishment”), was published in Hebrew in 2017. His most recent book in English, “The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping: A Novel,” was published a year ago.

Philip Gourevitch, writing in the New Yorker  calls him one of the subtlest, most unorthodox, and most exactingly perceptive novelists to make the memory of the Holocaust his abiding project. He was born in Romania, and was eight when the war became his life. His mother was killed. He was deported with his father to Trans-Dniester, in Ukraine. He escaped alone from a concentration camp there. He sustained himself for three years as a vagabond farm-laborer. He wound up for a while as a kitchen boy in the Soviet Army. He fetched up next in a refugee camp, then on a kibbutz in Palestine, then fighting in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. At that point he was just sixteen, and felt totally inhabited by overwhelming memories, yet at the same time unable to summon anything like a complete or precise account of any part of his lost boyhood or his odyssey through hell. So he began, over the ensuing decade, to write stories. “I remember something, but not too much,” he told Gourevich. “Therefore I’m writing fiction, because I understood immediately that my memory is weak and I must fill it with imagination.”

His biography is well known, boyhood spent surviving in Nazi-held Europe, coming alone to Israel at age 12 and his subsequent education and entrance into writing in the late 1950’s. Gili Izikovich writing in Haaretz gives a fascinating and revealing interview with him.

Full obituaries can be found in Haaretz and in the NYTimes.

 

John Watts Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018)

John Young, NASA’s longest-serving astronaut, who walked on the moon and flew on the first Gemini and space shuttle missions, has died. The first person to fly six times into space — seven, if you count his launch off  the moon in 1972 —and the first astronaut to command four different types of spacecraft. Young died on Friday (Jan. 5) following complications from pneumonia. He was 87.

Mr. Young joined NASA in the early years of manned spaceflight and was still flying, at age 53, in the era of space shuttles. He was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. He was also chief of NASA’s astronaut office for 13 years and a leading executive at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Mr. Young  retired in 2004. A detailed obituary can be found in the NYTimes     and in SpaceCollect.

THE RANTS

There is much to rant about as the new year gets underway.  Pandora and Prometheus will throw a few at you and hope that your blood pressure reacts  as it should.

A MAJOR RANT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL

Climate change aka global warming is real and is happening. The various deniers can spew out all the pernicious nonsense they want, e.g. “Chinese hoax” according to the idiot in the White House, who was placed there by a nation of idiots.  The pernicious nature of the denial has been working for a long time and now, whether we accept it or not, climate change is here and affecting us every day. For example, let us look at a recent article in the Los Angeles Times entitled Wildfires, sea level rise, coral bleaching: Climate change is already here.  If we consider wildfires we find that over the last 30 years, the American West has seen a dramatic increase in their incidence.

Scientists recently determined that human-caused warming has greatly increased the area of land that has burned since the 1980s. That amounts to 16,000 additional square miles (0ver 44,000 square kilometers), or the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined . The cost is huge.

 

The same article provides a chilling (or sweating) account of sea level rise, ocean acidification, coral bleaching–part of what we have been inflicting upon ourselves for decades with our political heads in the sand. What is even more frightening is the continuation of denial caused by a combination of economic interests focused on short term profit and a natural inclination of people to chose to avoid unpleasant reality. This is analogous to the European Jews in the writing of Aharon Applefeld (obituary in this blog) who fled from one place to another in Europe but never understood until it was too late that the game was over. We, Prometheus and Pandora recommend strongly that all take a look at the Web site Skeptical Science which deals with climate change denial and confronts the mythical arguments of the deniers with solid scientific fact.

For Example: Warmest year on record in the oceans

More than 90% of the heat trapped by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations ends up going into the Earth’s oceans. While surface temperatures fluctuate a bit from year to year due to natural variability, ocean heat content increases much more smoothly and is, in many ways, a more reliable indicator of the warming of the Earth, albeit one with a shorter historical record.

2017 set a clear record for the highest ocean heat content since records began in 1958, according to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(IAP-CAS), which maintains an up-to-date ocean heat content database.

The figures below shows ocean heat content for each year in the region of the ocean between the surface and 2,000 meters in depth (comprising the bulk of the world’s oceans), as well as a map of 2017 anomalies.

The upper figure shows changes in ocean heat content since 1958, while the lower map shows ocean heat content in 2017 relative to the average ocean heat content between 1981 and 2010, with red areas showing warmer ocean heat content than over the past few decades and blue areas showing cooler.

A RANT ABOUT ABUSE OF WOMEN AND GIRLS

Since the original disclosure of the sexual abuse of women in the film industry, more women have come out and the hashtag #MeToo is expanding. Ronan Farrow in a series of articles in the New Yorker provides us with a detailed chronicle and description of what is involved in a woman coming forward to accuse powerful men, in particular Harvey Weinstein and the likes of him who can crush women who dare to accuse. In addition, the perpetrators are surrounded by high-powered lawyers and colleagues who over the decades chose to look aside, while the women were offered bribes for silence.
Pandora points out that all this anguish is real but these women are educated professionals who could go elsewhere and rebuild their lives. Women who fall victim to the use of rape as a weapon of warfare have no such avenue of protest and demand for redress. The UN Security Council has declared rape a war crime. In the resolution, passed 19 June, the Security Council noted that “women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”
The resolution demanded the “immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians.”

Rape has been a dishonorable camp follower of war for as long as armies have marched into battle. In the 20th century, perceptions of rape in war have moved from something that is inevitable when men are deprived of female companionship for prolonged periods to an actual tactic in conflict. The lasting psychological harm that rape inflicts on its victims has also been recognized: Rape is always torture, says Manfred Nowak,
Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Christian Caryl gives a fierce indictment of the use of rape as a means of destroying a community. Human Rights Watch
has come out with a harrowing report on sexual abuse of Rohingya women by the Burmese military. This is by no means an isolated case. Thousands of women have fallen victim to rape in South Sudan’s civil war. The reign of ISIS in Syria and Iraq has resulted in the wholesale sexual abuse of young women from the ancient religious community of the Yezidis. Women were also raped during the recent ethnic unrest in Burundi.

It is indeed worthy that the Weinsteins of the world be called to account and that Dr. Larry Nassar, the predatory physician of the US Olympic gymnastics team, has been sentenced to a long jail term. . It is equally important that the world community makes the rapists in combat zones accountable for their crimes as well.

A RANT ABOUT DEPORTATION OF REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

In a previous blog Prometheus and Pandora pointed an accusing finger at Norway which deports asylum seekers to Afghanistan despite the civil war raging there. Now they join the outcry much closer to home, the cruel deportation of thousands of African asylum seekers from Israel to “third countries.” The government had claimed that Rwanda and Uganda had agreed to take the refugees, which is apparently false. An editorial in Haaretz called on the government to stop lying and to adopt a reasonable policy towards these unfortunate asylum seekers who are fleeing war and genocide. The foul way the government has acted despite court orders is a shame to all of us. Instead of keeping the 37,000 asylum-seekers in Israel who were deported, allowing them to work and live with dignity, and dispersing them throughout the country so as not to burden long-time residents of south Tel Aviv, Israel — a state of refugees — insists on betraying the dictates of justice and undermining its own moral right to exist.
A movement of protest against these policies is rising. Hundreds of professionals including flight crews, school principals and psychologists have called on Israel to
halt deportations of asylum seekers or announced they would not cooperate with expulsions. For example, a letter by educators reads in part-  “We teach tens of thousands of students about our past as refugees, persecuted people and asylum seekers during the darkest periods of human history, out of a personal and professional commitment to ensure ‘never again” the principals wrote. “We believe that asylum seekers, like all people, are entitled to have their natural rights protected, by virtue of their being human beings, by
virtue of conventions that Israel has signed, and by virtue of the Declaration of Independence and Israel’s Jewish and human values.”
As Noa Yachot writes in 972-“Even as it invokes the Holocaust at every turn, Israel is feeding the people who most need its protection to a brutal human smuggling industry. In doing so, it becomes an active player in the worst migration crisis since the Jewish people’s near-extinction.”

Israeli progressives must continue the protest and hope that progressive Jews in the US will join in support. Already the plan for deporting tens of thousands of asylum seekers, most of them from Eritrea or Ethiopia, seems to have gone agley as happens to the best laid plans of mice and men. Of course, the pressure must be maintained. The only thing that will deter the likes of Netanyahu and Der’i is bad PR, especially abroad.

A FEW RANTS IN THE WAKE OF THE PENCE VISIT

When the US VP addressed the Knesset, the Arab members were evicted. It is a shame to admit that members of the left wing opposition sat quietly while this was happening. Prometheus and Pandora, both loyal supporters of Meretz (as well as their imaginary playmates, YandA) were appalled. They even sent Ms Tamar Zandberg, a Knesset member from Meretz, who is running for the leadership of the party, a tweet of protest that was neither acknowledged nor answered. Haaretz took them to task severely in an editorial with full justification.

Mr. Pence’s speech was a combination of bullshit, humbug and platitudes, but the audience, Israelis whose knowledge of Christian evangelical ideology is essentially zero, failed to understand the main point.  Amit Gevaryahu writing in Haaretz points out most correctly that as an evangelical Pence was making it clear that Israel is only a pawn in the process of bringing about the second coming of Christ. Gevaryahu sums up the essence of Pence’s speech-“…Regardless, per Pence, the tribulations and successes of the Jews are valuable only as pre-figurations and theological models for Christians. But the Jewish state is also necessary for his eschatology. Evangelicals like Pence see the urgent need to literally encourage Jews to return to Zion and to sovereignty as a critical step towards Christ’s second coming.”

The U.S. Vice President stood before the assembled delegates of the Jewish state and told them, right after talking about the Holocaust, that Abraham was not their father but that Abraham was his father.
…”And this too is the level to which Israel’s Knesset has stooped. Its overwhelming right-wing and religious majority obsequiously traded the historical Jewish claim to Abraham, the Torah, and redemption according to the Jewish narrative, for the lentil stew of American “recognition” of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the city where, Pence and others hope, Christian dreams may still come true.”

TIDBITS FROM SCIENCE

 New Egyptian dinosaur reveals ancient link between Africa and Europe

Mansourasaurus shahinae helps fill in gaps of African dinosaurs of Late Cretaceous

A new dinosaur fossil discovered in the Egyptian Sahara is contributing to our knowledge of dinosaur evolution.  As reported in Science Daily “When it comes to the final days of the dinosaurs, Africa is something of a blank page. Fossils found in Africa from the Late Cretaceous, the time period from 100 to 66 million years ago, are few and far between. That means that the course of dinosaur evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery. But in the Egyptian Sahara Desert, scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that helps fill in those gaps. “

 

SUCCESSFUL CLONING OF PRIMATES

A group of scientists led by Zhen Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has succeeded in cloning twin macaque monkeys. The work required years of experimentation by means of a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT. This method was used twenty years ago to create Dolly, the first cloned sheep. Adapting the method to primates was by no means a trivial task. The effort finally delivered two twin monkeys, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. The scientific paper was published in Cell.

RANT ON POLISH REWRITING OF HISTORY

The Polish parliament has approved a controversial law forbidding any mention of participation of the “Polish nation” in crimes committed during the Holocaust. The law also forbids use of the term “Polish death camp” to describe the death camps where Jews and others were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Anyone who violates the new law, including non-Polish citizens, will be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.
This law has drawn criticism from around the world and especially from Israel and Jews. PM Netanyahu for once got it right “The law is baseless. I strongly oppose it. History cannot be changed and it is forbidden to deny the Holocaust. I ordered the Israeli embassy in Poland to meet with the Polish Prime Minister and express my firm stand against the law,” Netanyahu said.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, also condemned  the proposed law.  Yad Vashem noted, however, that Poland is right in its objection to the term “Polish death camps,” explaining that “there is no doubt that the term is a distortion of history. The death camps were set up in Nazi-occupied Poland with the intention of murdering Jews as part of the final solution. “

Indeed there were Poles who helped Jews and hid them, but  in truth  more than 200,000 Jews were killed, directly or indirectly, by Poles in World War II, says historian Jan Grabowski, who studied the brutal persecution of the victims. His conclusion: There were no bystanders in the Holocaust.

We  must,however, note that according to Yad Vashem the citizens of Poland have the world’s highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews from extermination during the Holocaust in World War II. There are 6,706 Polish men and women recognized as Righteous to this day, over a quarter of the total number of 26,513^[ awards.

Nonetheless, Prometheus and Pandora strongly condemn this attempt to obscure the role played by Poland, a nation with a long history of antisemitism. They agree with Ofer Aderet who calls in Haaretz to leave the judgement of Poland’s role in WWII  to future historians.

BOOK REVIEW

The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart
Image of The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart
Author(s):
Mitchell Cohen
Release Date:
September 4, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Princeton University Press

This book has all the appearances of a fascinating read. To quote the review in the New York Review of Books by Larry Wolff (for subscribers only alas)  the above book has boldly placed Machiavelli and early modern political theory at the center of the early history of opera, reflecting creatively on the ways in which the reverberations of the great Florentine realist reached even into the musical realm. For just as The Prince
was presented as a precious gift precisely because it described and prescribed the conduct of princes, so the operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries placed princes on the stage and let them sing their political circumstances. The book gets a full open review by Lew Whittington in the New York Journal of Books. A less favorable review is given by Mark Berry in Times of Higher Education.

In the author’s discussion of the work of Mozart including the Marriage of Figaro, in which the aristocracy is ridiculed by Figaro’s defiance, we see an example of something subversive:

“Se vuol ballare, signor contino,
Il chitarrino le suonerò.”
[If you want to dance, little count,
I’ll play my little guitar.]
Nonetheless, it is clear that while the foundations of the old regime were tottering, Mozart was no real revolutionary. Cohen attributes the Contessa’s nostalgia in

“Dove sono i bei momenti di dolcezza e di piacer?”(“Where have they gone, the beautiful moments of sweetness and pleasure?”).
not only to her once happy marriage, but also to a feeling of loss as the times change.

Kiri Te Kanawa lets us hear it.

Recall this opera had its  premier in 1786, only three years before the fall of the Bastille. The censors allowed it to premier in Prague rather than Vienna. Riccardo Panela the operatic baritone who has played the role of the lecherous Count has written an interesting analysis of how shrewd self censorship by De Ponte and Mozart enabled the opera to reach the stage.

SILLY TIME

What If

Which has a greater gravitational pull on me: the Sun, or spiders? Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much further away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance.

—Marina Fleming

Interesting for us geeks.

A LANGUAGE LESSON OF SORTS AT THE SOUP KITCHEN

WE AGREE

Darwin  would have loved this:

Find a cool WUMO here.

 

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO A FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE

 

It is our great pleasure to congratulate our friend and colleague at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Pinhas Alpert on his selection by the European Geophysical Society to receive the Bjerknes medal for 2018. The 2018 Vilhelm Bjerknes Medal is awarded to Prof. Pinhas Alpert for the creation of novel approaches to investigate synergistic processes in the atmosphere and to monitor air moisture and flash floods employing cellular systems. Also, for his outstanding contribution to the study of cyclones and aerosols. Alpert is the first Israeli awarded with the Bjerknes Medal. The medal is named after the Norwegian scientist Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862-1951) who is considered to be one of the founders of modern meteorology and weather forecasting.

WINTER SOLSTICE TIME

December is the month in which the Sun reaches its maximum southern declination directly over the Tropic of Capricorn. and Northern Hemisphere days become shorter until December 21 when they begin to lengthen. Note the illustration here.

Yes, dear friends in Tasmania and elsewhere, it is high summer for you and your winter solstice will be in June. Let us continue with Northern Hemisphere chauvinism. For Tel Aviv, which is where we are, it falls on December 21:

Winter Solstice Time = 18:27:29 Sunrise = 06:37:35 Sunset = 16:40:32
Day Duration = 10 Hours 02 Mins 57 Secs
Previous Day Duration = 10 Hours 02 Mins 59 Secs
Next Day Duration = 10 Hours 02 Mins 58 Secs

From the earliest times the solstice was marked by people in ceremonies, mostly designed to persuade the gods to return the Sun. Oddly enough it worked every year. There are countless ways in which humans have celebrated the solstices, winter and summer. It is theorized that Stonehenge may have been built as a solstice temple. Because of  the alignment of the stones, experts acknowledge that the design appears to correspond with the use of the solstices and possibly other solar and lunar astronomical events in some fashion.

There are several theories as to why the structure was built, including that the area was used as a temple to worship the Sun; as a royal burial ground; and/or as a type of astronomical observatory. However, because none of these theories has been proven correct as yet, the true reason (or reasons) for Stonehenge’s existence remains a mystery.

An ancient tradition in the Talmud tells us of Adam and the first Winter Solstice

“When Adam saw the day gradually diminishing, he said, “Woe is me! Perhaps because I sinned, the world around me is growing darker and darker, and is about to return to chaos and confusion, and this is the death heaven has decreed for me. He then sat eight days in fast and prayer. But when the winter solstice arrived, and he saw the days getting gradually longer, he said, “Such is the way of the world,” and proceeded to observe eight days of festivity. The following years he observed both the eight days preceding and the eight days following the solstice as days of festivity.”
(Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 8a) Note that Eve is nowhere in the story

We Jews have our festival of light, Hannuka,

our Christian friends celebrate the birth of their Savior

and some of our African-American friends enjoy Kwanzaa.

Our friends at The Nib offer us an unfortunately appropriate card for this year:

 

RANT AND RAVE

Alas there is always too much to rant and rave about and we certainly cannot cover everything. This month we are ranting and raving about the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers around the world. World Human Rights Day falls on 10 December each year – the day the United Nations General Assembly adopted, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year, Human Rights Day kicks off a year-long campaign to mark the upcoming 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that proclaimed the inalienable rights to which everyone is inherently entitled as a human being — regardless of race, color, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. It is the most translated document in the world, available in more than 500 languages.

Drafted by representatives of diverse legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration sets out universal values and a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations. It establishes the equal dignity and worth of every person. Thanks to the Declaration, and States’ commitments to its principles, the dignity of millions has been uplifted and
the foundation for a more just world has been laid. While its promise is yet to be fully realized, the very fact that it has stood the test of time is testament to the enduring universality of its perennial values of equality, justice and human dignity.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights empowers us all. The principles enshrined in the Declaration are as relevant today as they were in 1948. We need to stand up for our own rights and those of others. We can take action in our own daily lives, to uphold the rights that protect us all and thereby promote the kinship of all human beings.

We should all read the Declaration.

Let us look just at article 1– All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood

Now move on to the UN Convention on Refugees which derives from article 14 of the Declaration:
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and
principles of the United Nations.

This led to the establishment of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) whose mission statement reads in part:

The 1951 Refugee Convention is the key legal document that forms the basis of our work. Ratified​ by 145 State parties, it defines the term ‘refugee’ and outlines the rights of the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of States to protect them. The core principle is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. This is now considered a rule of customary international law. UNHCR serves as the ‘guardian’ of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol. According to the legislation, States are expected to cooperate with us in ensuring that the rights of refugees are respected and protected.

With this in mind let us take a look at how these lofty principles are applied today by countries around the world:

AUSTRALIA

Australia is applying a brutal policy towards all asylum seekers who attempt to come to the country by boat. They are not allowed to enter the country under any circumstances. This holds even if they are legally found to be genuine refugees. Instead, these “illegal maritime arrivals,” as the Australian government calls them, are shunted to poorer neighboring countries — Nauru and Papua New Guinea, of which Manus Island is a part — indefinitely until they can be resettled somewhere that isn’t Australia.
Lisa Pryor writing in the NYTimes gives a damning description of the policy and the attitudes behind it. As she writes-“Refugee policy is to Australians what gun policy is to Americans, our unshakable madness. Irrational, cruel and surprising to the outside world, we cling to our ideas despite all evidence. Many Australians are working hard to bring about a change in attitudes and policy, but harshness toward refugees who attempt to reach Australia by boat is an article of faith in our culture that is difficult to budge.”

There are decent people in Australia but they seem to have little influence.

The object is not to save money, but to implement cruelty for its own sake. It shows a dark side of the Australian character, an embedded racism that knows no shame. Pandora and Prometheus note, alas, that this is by no means unique to Australia.

We could fill up several blogs writing about Myanmar (Burma), Syria and other so-called benighted places where human rights are meaningless or even Israel, where refugees and asylum seekers face a rough deal from the grandchildren of those who were hounded across Europe and killed in a systematic genocide in the last century. Instead, let us look at the country that sets an example of democracy, Norway. This is a country that opened its arms and its borders to a flood of refugees and now is implementing the toughest refugee policy in Europe. This may be attributed to one of
Norway’s most controversial government politicians, Sylvi Listhaug, who promised that Norway would impose what she called “the strictest asylum policies in Europe.” We see the results with the propagation of the myth that Afghanistan is “safe” and the systematic rejection of asylum pleas from Iraqis. Bear in mind that Norway is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and has been accused of not bearing its share of the burden.

Eight humanitarian organizations want the government to keep them open and accept at least 2,500 more refugees who’ve already been certified by the UN. Asylum seekers’ advocacy group NOAS, Norwegian Peoples Aid (Norsk Folkehjelp), Amnesty International, Caritas, the refugee aid organization Flyktninghjelpen, CARE, Atlasalliansen and Mellomkirkelig råd have sent a letter to the government asking that funds be set aside so that more UN quota refugees can be brought to Norway from camps in Greece and Italy.

It seems unusual that an Amnesty International campaign should target a democratic country in northern Europe, but that is the case. Amnesty has launched
a campaign designed to stop the deporting of teenagers bereft of families to a dangerous place such as Afghanistan. They note that the Immigration minister Ms Listhaug has said that she would not care to visit Kabul. She should stop sending people, including young persons, to a place that she regards as too dangerous for herself. Amnesty International presents nine convincing reasons why the policy of the Norwegian government is morally wrong and unworthy of a wealthy democracy. We suggest that you join the protest. The featured image above shows a demonstration of high school students on behalf of their classmate Taibeh Abbasi who is in danger of being sent to Afghanistan.

While some countries, such as The Netherlands, have done better than Norway, the fact is that nearly 10,000 people have been returned to Afghanistan by
European governments. The security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate and the returnees face killing, abuse, rape and the usual
violations of human rights typical of a country in the throes of a civil war. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that 2016 was the deadliest year on record for civilians in Afghanistan, with 11,418 people killed or injured. The UN body stated:
“In 2016, conflict-related insecurity and violence inflicted severe harm on civilians, especially women and children. The intensification of armed clashes between Pro-Government Forces and Anti-Government Elements over territorial gains and losses resulted in record levels of civilian harm, including the highest number of child casualties and levels of internal displacement documented since 2009.”

David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. He served as Foreign Secretary of the UK from 2007 to 2010.
 (October 2016) has published a thoughtful and useful  article in the New York Review of Books, in which he provides a detailed description of the present dire situation and lays down a practical plan for dealing with it.

So what can we do? ask Prometheus and Pandora. The answer is to rant, to point fingers and to join protests against the inhuman and immoral behavior of the so-called civilized nations of our planet. Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay “We Refugees”: “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings. The kind that are put in concentration camps by their
foes and in internment camps by their friends.”

Please rant with us say Prometheus, Pandora and their imaginary friends YandA.

A SMALL RANT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change aka global warming is real and is happening. The various deniers can spew out all the pernicious nonsense they want, e.g. “Chinese hoax” according to the idiot in the White House, who was placed there by a nation of idiots. Just look at this NASA Web site and groan in despair. You should read and think about polar bears. You may also view this video of a polar bear dying of starvation because of our irresponsible actions.

 

Ethan Kuperberg has updated Christmas carols to fit the age of global warming.

You can even listen to them.

We cannot leave this section without referring to the political situation that is responsible for it. Ultimately it comes down to leadership that relies on a base of ignorant people, who feel rejected and out of place in modern society. Chemi Shalev writing in Haaretz describes the parallel degeneracy of Trump and Netanyahu who are leading the US and Israel down a path of destruction. to quote Shalev--“In both countries, values and ideology have been replaced by a kind of tribal loyalty that can sanitize any sin and cleanse any crime. The deteriorating discourse in politics and the masses’ blind worship of its leaders increasingly repel politicians who are burdened with integrity and a conscience, leaving only extremists, thugs, grovelers and apparatchiks to run the party and the country, along with shameless opportunists who find it expedient not to fight the rot that is spreading all around them. “

It might be noticed that this has happened many times in the  past. Richard Hofstadter, the late Harvard philosophy professor, noted the right-wing psychosis over 50 years ago. His article on the paranoid style of American politics is worth reading today and is relevant to the situation in Israel, the US, Hungary and several other countries. The rejection of the nuttiness and corruption by the people of France, the Netherlands and even Alabama offers some hope for the future.

We found a lovely reaction to the idiotic Trump declaration about Jerusalem from Signe Wilkenson:

RANT ABOUT ABUSE OF WOMEN

Women and their treatment have been on central stage in the past few weeks. Before we present an in depth panel discussion, Pandora would like to call your attention to a Website devoted to the needs of women. It is certainly worthy of your attention and support. During this holiday season, the site is asking us to give a cow to a woman in Rwanda. Put your hand on the mouse and your heart in your wallet–$100 will not render the readers of this blog penniless.

Now on to issues involving women.We would like to share with you a panel discussion from the NYTimes magazine in which

Seven Women Discuss Work, Fairness, Sex and Ambition

The participants are:

Amanda Hess is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times, where she writes about internet culture.

Anita Hill is a professor of social policy, law and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University. In 1991, she testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus.”

Soledad O’Brien anchors and produces the Hearst Television political-magazine program “Matter of Fact With Soledad O’Brien.” She has won three Emmys, among other awards.

Lynn Povich is the author of “The Good Girls Revolt,” the story of the gender-discrimination complaint that she and other women brought against Newsweek in 1970. She was the editor in chief of Working Woman.

Danyel Smith is senior editor of culture at ESPN’s The Undefeated. She was the editor of Billboard and the editor in chief of the music magazine Vibe.

Moderated by Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School.

Hannah Whitaker is New York-based photographer. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and won an Art Directors Club award for her photo essay “Rise and Shine.”

A related piece, from the same source is also worthy of your attention.

The Reckoning Women and Power in the Workplace

Your humble blogger would like to tell you a story from long ago about his late wife, Daphne. She was a soldier in the Israeli army and was waiting for a flight control course after basic training, while I was an air cadet. Unfortunately, she was pretty enough to attract the attention of the base commander, who persuaded the local female officer supervisor, to assign her to his command. He tried to impose his will up to attempted rape. She complained to the woman officer who was there to protect her and received the following response: “What do you think you were drafted for?” We rushed to get married and got her out of his clutches.

Today the Israel army has tough rules, in particular if a command relationship is exploited.  It seems to be working, although in the military the old boys network still exists and “boys will be boys.”

Prometheus and Pandora hope you have found something relevant in their rants and wish all a happy, harassment-free holiday season.

TIDBITS FROM SCIENCE

It is exciting to hear that the moon of Saturn, Enceladus, appears to have plate tectonics, which could bolster the chance that the ocean known to be inside Enceladus might harbor life. For the record, the prediction of the water beneath the surface goes back to Voyager times, vid. ICARUS 56, 426-438 (1983); allow us to boast a bit.

The issue of a mission to Enceladus to search for life is discussed below in the book review by Freeman Dyson.

BOOK REVIEW

The Green Universe: A Vision

Freeman Dyson

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Penguin, 432 pp., $28.00

Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets
by Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix
Pantheon, 320 pp., $27.95

All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life
by Jon Willis
Yale University Press, 214 pp., $30.00

In this review from the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson discusses in depth the question of Big Science, a la NASA versus Little Science as exemplified by Little Space, aiming to carry out space operations in the Dicke style, using hardware and software mass-produced for other purposes by companies in a competitive
market at vastly lower cost. The Dicke style refers to Richard Dicke, a Princeton physics professor, who built a laser reflector to be put on the moon as a cost of $5000. NASA adopted the design with glee and built the device for $3,000,000, a factor of 600 over Dicke’s cost. Big Space has been very successful with large missions such as Voyager and Cassini, but there are now several start-up companies operating independently of NASA in the Little Space culture, hoping to do space missions that will be bolder, quicker, and cheaper.

Halfway between Big Space and Little Space, there is a group of companies that grew rapidly in recent years, led by SpaceX, a company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. This culture is a compromise, using commercial competition to cut costs while relying on the government for steady funding.

In the review Dyson makes the point that a one shot sample return of the geyser output of Enceladus has little chance of settling the life question and shows the weakness of Big Space culture. After analyzing all three books, Dyson gives us his Noah’s Ark proposal to colonize the universe and it is indeed a fascinating idea. It involves the generation of entire ecologies of living creatures adapted to survive in remote places away from Earth.

SILLY TIME

What If? will start us off with a silly question and an amusing answer.

What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? Would it flow once it’s set up? (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.)

—A group of Google Search SREs

Pandora and Prometheus are chuckling and suggest selling water from Enceledus which in view of the above might be more exotic.

REAL CONNOISSEURS OF WINE

We have often been amused by the comments from professional wine tasters about a hint of this and a smidgen of that etc. We offer this comment with a smile:

LOOK CAREFULLY!!

We have all or most of us made some ghastly error in picking up a tube of something and using where it should not be used–we confess to starting to brush our teeth with anti fungal paste. Let us have some empathy for Barney…

.

Thanksgiving is upon us (was celebrated in Canada on October 9), see our featured image above and we should all, presumably, be thinking of what we should be grateful for  to whomever we wish to designate as the recipient of our gratitude. . Of course you should be careful of your requests (Thanks to Zach for the cartoon):

IN MEMORIAM John Ashbery 1927-2017

John Ashbery, a long-standing contributor to and friend of The New York Review, died on September 3, aged ninety, at his house in Hudson, New York. He was the author of twenty-eight books of poems (not counting Selecteds or Collecteds) as well as one novel, three plays, three volumes of essays and criticism, and three of
translations from French. Over the course of his career he received
just about every major prize, including the triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).

He was considered an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights.

Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music”. Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

Interviewed by the Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery”, it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people”.

At the time of his death he was considered, by general acclaim, the greatest living American poet. A full obituary can be found in the Guardian.

Rest in Peace John Ashbery and we shall remain confused.

RANT FOR THE MONTH

Bloodshed for Naught.

Prometheus, Pandora and their amanuenses, YandA, are outraged at the church massacre in the tiny town of Sutherland Springs, Texas on November 5 . A gunman clad in all black, with a ballistic vest strapped to his chest and a military-style rifle in his hands, opened fire on parishioners at a Sunday service at a small Baptist church in rural Texas, killing at least 26 people and turning this tiny town east of San Antonio into the scene of the country’s newest mass horror.

The gunman was identified as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. Mr. Kelley, who lived in New Braunfels, Tex., died shortly after the attack.

NEW TERROR

Since Prometheus and Pandora wrote the above paragraph, a new rampage of terror has come about. On Tuesday, 14/11 a gunman went on a rampage in California. He conducted a 45-minute attack through Rancho Tehama, a quiet reserve about 120 miles northwest of downtown Sacramento.

The gunman at one point terrorized a local elementary school. Witnesses said he crashed through the school’s gates with his truck and opened fire, spraying walls and classrooms with bullets. Teachers and other adults on campus frantically got the students under desks and locked down the school.

Cheers to the elementary school teachers.

Before the rampage was over, six people were dead, including the gunman and his wife, and at least 10 were wounded. According to police, it appears that the shooter was randomly picking targets.The gunman was killed after two officers engaged him, law enforcement officials said. The gunman had a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns.

The sister of the gunman confirmed his identity as Kevin Janson Neal, 44. Sheridan Orr, of North Carolina, said her brother had a history of mental illness and episodes of rage.“There are certain people that do not need guns, and my brother was clearly one of them,” she said.

Maybe there has been enough of this-a dispute between neighbors escalated to a shooting rampage. America, please wake up! The NRA has blood on its hands indeed, but so has every progressive who did not get around to registering to vote for an anti-gun candidate.

 

In recent years, killing at churches has become more common. Here are a few events:

Sept. 24, 2017 | Antioch, Tenn.

A gunman carrying two pistols opened fire as Sunday services were ending at the Burnette Chapel Church of Christ, killing one person and wounding seven others; he also pistol-whipped a church usher who confronted him. The gunman, identified as Emanuel K. Samson, shot and wounded himself, the police said; he was taken into custody.

June 17, 2015 | Charleston, S.C.

Nine people who had gathered for Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a landmark black church in Charleston, were shot and killed  by a white gunman, identified by the police as Dylann Storm Roof, who was arrested the next day. A 10th person was wounded. The dead included the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a prominent state senator.
What has the President to say: Speaking at a news conference in Japan, the first stop on his tour of Asia, President Trump called the shooting a “mental health problem at the highest level” and not “a guns situation,” adding the gunman was a “very deranged individual.” He also ordered flags flown at half-staff at the White House and all federal buildings through Thursday.

President Trump appeared to offer his condolences for the wrong mass shooting on Tuesday in a late-night Twitter post, which was later deleted.

“May God be with the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The FBI and Law Enforcement has arrived,” Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post at 11:34 p.m., soon after arriving back in the United States from his 12-day trip through Asia.

That attack occurred more than a week ago, on Nov. 5. One might think that there are so many mass killings in the USA that the president can indeed confuse them. Of course, thoughts and prayers are always welcome:

HOME SWEET HOME

ARMS FOR KILLERS

Despite the horrors of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people Israel sold sophisticated weapon systems to the Myanmar military. Israeli weapons are being sold to Myanmar in gross violation of the restrictions on weapons sales to that country. Only last month Israel refused to announce that it would stop selling weapons to Myanmar. The Rohingya minority is now considered the most persecuted people in the world.

Human rights activists petitioned the High Court in Israel, but the response of the government was that the court has no jurisdiction. A verdict was rendered, but is being kept secret. Eitay Mack, the petitioners’ lawyer, noted that the European Union and the United States had imposed a trade embargo on the country formerly known as Burma, and said Israel was the only Western state supplying weapons to the military junta.

Yair Auron writing in Haaretz details past sales of arms by Israel to regimes committing genocide–“I had the privilege of submitting petitions with Mack against the sales of weapons by Israel to the murderous regime in Serbia, which conducted ethnic cleansing campaigns in the early 1990s, and at least one massacre in Srebrenica in Bosnia, and another petition against the weapons deliveries to the Hutu government in Rwanda, which conducted the fastest genocide in human history.

Hundreds of rabbis and religious leaders have pleaded with the Israeli government to stop these sales, but to little avail. The Israeli consul in New York justified
the sales by pointing out crimes committed by Rohingya people as balancing the ledger. Indeed Muslim Rohingya activists did attack a police station and killed several soldiers. This can hardly be called a justification for banishing 300,000 or more civilians unless you have the twisted mind of an Israeli official. There has been one unconfirmed report in a French online magazine that the sales have stopped. We hope this is true, but the main issue is the secrecy of the sales and the lack of decency and principle shown by Israel. Israel was one of the few countries selling weapons to South Africa during apartheid and only stopped selling weapons to Rwanda during the genocide there after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that put an arms embargo on the country.

We note that the European Union has established criteria for arms transfers as follows: (we detail them because of the importance of this issue)

CRITERION ONE

Respect for the international commitments of EU member states, in particular the sanctions decreed by the UN Security Council and those decreed by the Community, agreements on nonproliferation and other subjects, as well as other international obligations

An export license should be refused if approval would be inconsistent with, inter alia:
a) the international obligations of member states and their commitments to enforce
UN, OSCE and EU arms embargoes;
b) the international obligations of member states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons
Convention;
c) their commitments in the frameworks of the Australia Group, the Missile
Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Wassenaar
Arrangement;
d) their commitment not to export any form of anti-personnel landmine.

CRITERION TWO

The respect of human rights in the country of final destination

Having assessed the recipient country’s attitude towards relevant principles established by international human rights instruments, Member States will:
a) not issue an export license if there is a clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression.
b) exercise special caution and vigilance in issuing licenses, on a case-by-case basis
and taking account of the nature of the equipment, to countries where serious
violations of human rights have been established by the competent bodies of the UN,
the Council of Europe or by the EU;
For these purposes, equipment which might be used for internal repression will include, inter alia, equipment where there is evidence of the use of this or similar equipment for internal repression by the proposed end-user, or where there is reason to believe that the equipment will be diverted from its stated end-use or end-user and used for internal repression. In line with operative paragraph 1 of this
Code, the nature of the equipment will be considered carefully, particularly if it is intended for internal security purposes.
Internal repression includes, inter alia, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, summary or arbitrary executions, disappearances, arbitrary detentions and other major violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms as set out in relevant international human rights
instruments, including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

CRITERION THREE

The internal situation in the country of final destination, as a function of the existence of tensions or armed conflicts

Member States will not allow exports which would provoke or prolong armed conflicts or aggravate existing tensions or conflicts in the country of final destination.

CRITERION FOUR

Preservation of regional peace, security and stability

Member States will not issue an export licence if there is a clear risk that the intended recipient would
use the proposed export aggressively against another country or to assert by force a territorial claim.
When considering these risks, EU Member States will take into account inter alia:
a) the existence or likelihood of armed conflict between the recipient and another
country;
b) a claim against the territory of a neighbouring country which the recipient has in the
past tried or threatened to pursue by means of force;
c) whether the equipment would be likely to be used other than for the legitimate
national security and defense of the recipient;
d) the need not to affect adversely regional stability in any significant way.

CRITERION FIVE

The national security of the member states and of territories whose external relations are the responsibility of a Member State, as well as that of friendly and allied countries

Member States will take into account:
a) the potential effect of the proposed export on their defense and security interests
and those of friends, allies and other member states, while recognizing that this factor cannot affect consideration of the criteria on respect of human rights and on regional peace, security and stability;
b) the risk of use of the goods concerned against their forces or those of friends, allies or other member states;
c) the risk of reverse engineering or unintended technology transfer.

CRITERION SIX

The behavior of the buyer country with regard to the international community, as regards in particular to its attitude to terrorism, the nature of its alliances and respect for international law

Member States will take into account inter alia the record of the buyer country with regard to:
a) its support or encouragement of terrorism and international organised crime;
b) its compliance with its international commitments, in particular on the non-use of
force, including under international humanitarian law applicable to international and non-international conflicts;
c) its commitment to non-proliferation and other areas of arms control and
disarmament, in particular the signature, ratification and implementation of relevant arms control and disarmament conventions referred to in sub-para b) of Criterion One.

CRITERION SEVEN

The existence of a risk that the equipment will be diverted within the buyer country or reexported under undesirable conditions

In assessing the impact of the proposed export on the importing country and the risk that exported goods might be diverted to an undesirable end-user, the following will be considered:
a) the legitimate defence and domestic security interests of the recipient country,
including any involvement in UN or other peace-keeping activity;
b) the technical capability of the recipient country to use the equipment;
c) the capability of the recipient country to exert effective export controls;
d) the risk of the arms being re-exported or diverted to terrorist organisations (antiterrorist equipment would need particularly careful consideration in this context).

CRITERION EIGHT

The compatibility of the arms exports with the technical and economic capacity of the recipient country, taking into account the desirability that states should achieve their legitimate needs of security and defense with the least diversion for armaments of human and economic resources

Member States will take into account, in the light of information from relevant sources such as UNDP, World Bank, IMF and OECD reports, whether the proposed export would seriously hamper the sustainable development of the recipient country. They will consider in this context the recipient country’s relative levels of military and social expenditure, taking into account also any EU or bilateral
aid.

All  this causes Prometheus and Pandora to think that in some especially hot corner of  Hell, Hitler is chuckling at his posthumous victory–the state of the Jews is preserving his genocidal legacy.

OK friends, let us get on to something more pleasant.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN CENTENARY
Born: August 25, 1918
Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died: October 14, 1990
New York, New York
American composer, conductor, and pianist

Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, conductor, and pianist. His special gift of bridging the gap between the concert hall and the world of Broadway made him one of the most glamorous musical figures of his day. He took piano lessons as a boy and attended the Garrison and Boston Latin Schools. At Harvard University, he studied with Walter Piston, Edward Burlingame-Hill, and A. Tillman Merritt, among others. Before graduating in 1939, he made an unofficial conducting debut with his own incidental music to “The Birds,” and directed and performed in Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock.” Then at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, he studied piano with Isabella Vengerova, conducting with Fritz Reiner, and orchestration with Randall Thompson.

In 1940, he studied at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s newly created summer institute, Tanglewood, with the orchestra’s conductor, Serge Koussevitzky. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky’s conducting assistant.

Bernstein was appointed to his first permanent conducting post in 1943, as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic. On November 14, 1943, he substituted on a few hours notice for the ailing Bruno Walter at a Carnegie Hall concert, which was broadcast nationally on radio, receiving critical acclaim. Soon orchestras worldwide sought him out as a guest conductor.

The New Yorker gives the centenary festival a royal kickoff.

Illustration by MVM

 

PROFILE OF A WRITER

This month the writer we are featuring is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She grew up in Nigeria and now divides her time between Nigeria and the United States. Her bibliography includes three successful novels,

• Purple Hibiscus (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003; London: Fourth Estate, 2004; Lagos: Farafina, 2004).
• Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2006; Lagos: Farafina, 2006; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
• Americanah (London: Fourth Estate, 2013; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013; Lagos: Farafina, 2013).

She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has won countless awards for her writing, details of which can be found on the Web site maintained by Daria Tunca and hosted by Liege University.

Pandora and Prometheus were captivated by her TED lecture and invite you to watch it at this link.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

You may find the transcript of her talk here.

MARINE ARCHEOLOGY

Divers in the ancient port of Caesarea in Israel came up last spring with a 1,600 year old treasure trove.

Among the artifacts the divers recovered were a bronze lamp depicting the image of the sun god Sol; a figurine of the moon goddess Luna; a lamp in the image of the head of an African slave; fragments of three life-size bronze cast statues; objects fashioned in the shape of animals; a bronze faucet in the form of a wild boar with a swan on its head; and fragments of large jars that carried drinking water along with thousands of Roman coins that were lumped together inside vessels.

The find was made by amateurs, recreational divers and they deserve high praise for reporting their find to the authorities. Jacob Sharvit, director of the Marine Archaeology Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority praised the divers, Ran Feinstein and Ofer Ra’anan.

“The divers demonstrated good citizenship and are deserving of praise,” he said. “They will be awarded a certificate of appreciation and invited to tour the storerooms of the National Treasures.

“By reporting the discovery of the marine assemblage to the Israel Antiquities Authority, they have made it possible for all of us to enjoy these spectacular remains from antiquity.”

BOOK REVIEW

In honor of the 150th birthday of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini (1857-1957) the writer Harvey Sachs has brought out a new biography.

TOSCANINI
Musician of Conscience
By Harvey Sachs
Illustrated. 923 pp. Liveright Publishing. $39.95.

Sachs published a biography of Toscanini in 1978, but it is generally agreed that the new book is in no way redundant. Much has been learned of the great conductor’s
life in the past 40 years. As Sachs puts it in his preface:
“this book is a completely new biography, not a revision or an expanded version of the earlier book. Apart from quotations from other sources, I don’t believe that a single entire sentence from the old book is to be found in this one. I have examined new sources, reexamined old ones, and produced what I hope is a close-to-definitive account of a long life filled with artistic, personal, and political drama….”

Toscanini’s was a ninety-year life that began before the invention of the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb and ended at the dawn of the space age; an eighty-year musical immersion that began before Wagner and Verdi had written their final masterpieces and that ended in the era of Boulez and Stockhausen; a sixty-eight-year career, carried out in twenty European, North and South American, and Middle Eastern countries; and a private existence that was torn between love of family and erotic restlessness.

The book is reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Tim Page and in the NYTimes by Robert Gottlieb.

WEIRD COGNITION

In a recent New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz provides a list of imaginary creatures from angels to zombies and asks you to rate the probability of their existence in the real world. This may sound silly, but many a study of fantasy by cognitive psychologists provides a great deal of insight into the workings of our minds. As Schulz concludes “…we use our ability to think about things that aren’t real all the time, in ways both everyday and momentous. It is what we are doing when we watch movies, write novels, weigh two different job offers, consider whether to have children. As that last example suggests, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this ability is that we can use it to nudge the impossible into the realm of the real. We stare at the sky, watch a seagull bob on a thermal, build wax wings and then fixed wings and then Apollo XI.”

HOW MONA LISA GOT HER SMILE

In a recent issue of The Atlantic, Walter Isaacson discusses the technique and effort of da Vinci to create the enigmatic smile of the world’s most famous painting. As Isaacson puts it:

“His greatest triumph of combining art, science, optics, and illusion was the smile of the Mona Lisa, which he started working on in 1503 and continued laboring over nearly until his death 16 years later. He dissected human faces, delineating the muscles that move the lips, and combined that knowledge with the science of how the retina processes perceptions. The result was a masterpiece that invites and responds to human interactions, making Leonardo a pioneer of virtual reality.”
The article is long and detailed, but well worth your time. Pandora wishes that she could have been painted by an artist of such genius. She and Prometheus would like to share a song about Mona Lisa with you.

 

 

SILLY TIME

WhatIf can become a bit gross at times:

How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva?

—Mary Griffin, 9th grade

Randall of course has an answer and it provides a tour of human history. You can draw your own conclusions of 9th grader Mary and her ideas.

THE VALUE OF SPORT

John Wooden, the famous basketball coach at UCLA in the distant past, said that competition brings out the best in men–here is an example:

THIS STRIP IS DEDICATED TO THE GRANDPARENTS AMONG OUR READERS