Did Schrödinger’s Cat Lick Lasers?

Full disclosure.  I’m a compulsive note taker.  Not just in class (though my class notes are so good that at the end of the semester I have them bound into a book to use as a reference volume), but I scribble little notes into a notebook at the oddest times.  Faculty meetings, funerals, weddings, dinner, and even in the middle of the night when I wake up from a strange dream.  (I’m at that age where I attend more funerals than weddings and should probably stop buying green bananas.). Many of those notes end up as blog posts sometime later.

I usually carry a Moleskin notebook and if I have a few minutes to spare—and I don’t have a book to read—I can happily sit, writing down nonsense, random thoughts, or something interesting that I just heard.  Occasionally, I discover that some of my notes (particularly those I write down in the middle of the night) are a little less than coherent.  I have a note from a couple of years ago, that I jotted down with several stars around it to indicate that it was important.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to remember just what was so important about the words “Laser Licker”.  Did I invent something in the middle of the night?  What did it do?  If it means something to you, go ahead and patent it—I hope it makes you rich.

Every year or so, I take the assorted writings from the current notebook and list them here.  I apologize.

Since at least the time when Andrew Carnegie was building libraries across the country, it was assumed that the reason for rampant stupidity was the lack of information.  Well, now that we all carry small portable devices that can access the accumulated knowledge of the entire world, what do we blame now?  Lite beer?

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a pet cat named “Dixie”.

On his daily walk to school, the young Vincent van Gogh passed a grave where a tombstone bore his own name.  The grave was that of his own brother, who had died before the artist was born, and his parents gave their next child the same name.

Julia Child’s first successful recipe was for shark repellent.

Panama hats are made in Ecuador.  Camel hair brushes are made from squirrel fur.  The misnomer somehow originated from the brushes’ introduction into Europe back when the brushes were made from the fur of the Siberian Ibex.  If this makes any sense to you, perhaps you can explain why Boston Whalers are sturdy boats that were never made in Boston and never used in whaling? 

Evidently, Schrödinger never realized that everything outside of the box was equally unknowable, at least from the viewpoint of the cat.  If he had realized this, his entire world would have been immediately sucked down a Lovecraftian worm hole.

Fatherhood is the only time in a man’s life when he tells girls to put their clothes on.  

When cell phones first came out, every year they got smaller and more portable.  Now, every year they get bigger than the year before.  Why?

When President John F. Kennedy died, almost every American knew of the assassination within 40 minutes.  It took even less time for the majority of Americans to learn of the Challenger Disaster.  Yet somehow, there are people who believe that space aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico seven decades ago and and the news still hasn’t leaked out.

From 1953 to late 1954, the role of Senate Majority Leader switched back and forth from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party a total of 12 times due to the deaths of  senators.  Eventually, the Republican Party, despite having a majority, told the Democrats to just keep the position, as both parties were fairly non-partisan at the time.   Yes, these are the same names of the two major parties we have today.

If Professor Maleficent was any dumber, she’d have to be watered daily.  She teaches imaginary classes in which she pretends to teach while students pretend to learn.

When President Grant, as a young boy traveling to start his first term at West Point, rode on a train at the astonishing speed of 12 miles per hour, he wrote in his notebook that man had annihilated space and distance and that the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.

Would you care to guess the average age of the members of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the British House of Lords?  Which do you think is the oldest?  Considering that membership in the House of Lords is both inherited and for life, you might guess that the Brits hold the honor of the oldest group of public servants.  Unfortunately, the honor falls to the US Supreme Court at 71 years.  The House of Lords and the Senate jockey for second place regularly, but currently, the average age of our Senators is slightly less at a spry 64 years, while the British Lords average 69.

There are only two types of people early in the morning.  I hate both of them.

Reintarnaton is coming back to life as a hillbilly.  

“Critics are people who watch a battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.”  --Ernest Hemingway

Adam Smith is the father of the study of Economics.  Buried in Edinburgh, if you want to pay your respects, admission to his grave is free.  Karl Marx, the philosopher whose publications supported socialism, is buried in London.  Admission to his gravesite will cost you $6.

Charlie Chaplin frequently gets credit for lampooning Hitler in the 1940 movie, The Great Dictator.  Usually forgotten however is that earlier that same year, the Three Stooges made You Nazty Spy.  The Stooges’ movie was the first Hollywood movie to ridicule Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending on their speed, relative to you.

The Model 1860 Boarding Cutlass remained an official weapon of the US Navy until World War II.  Then, in the early days of the war when space on transport ships was at a premium, some idiot supply clerk shipped thousands of them to Australia.  After the cutlasses had sat in a warehouse for months, some enterprising soul had their hilts ground off and had their blades shortened and resharpened.  The resulting mini-cutlasses were then issued as jungle machetes.

After spying a model in Edison’s Laboratory, J. P. Morgan had Edison build the first electric toy train as a birthday present to the financier’s daughter.

Clementine Churchill, the long suffering wife of Winston Churchill, used to joke about an epitaph she wanted on her gravestone:  “Here lies a woman who was always tired, for she lived in world where too much was required.”  Though she outlived her husband by more than a decade, her gravestone lists only her name and the dates of her birth and death.

During the Napoleonic War, mess cooks aboard English sailing ships were required to whistle while fixing meals to prove to the men they were not eating the crew’s rations.

The US Navy maintains a forest of white oak trees in Indiana exclusively to provide the wood necessary to keep the USS Constitution in working condition.

The Institute of Unfinished Research has discovered that six out of ten American adults.

Both the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran teach us to love one another.  The Indian Kama Sutra is more specific.

People who decry toxic masculinity should remember it is the reason their ancestors weren’t eaten by wolves.

Why exactly should universities be ‘safe places’?  Safe denotes complacency, calm, and rest.  Universities should be exciting places of discovery, where students confront challenging ideas, violently reject long held prejudices and wrestle with cherished opinions.  Walking into a library should elevate your blood pressure as much as an African safari.

That's enough.  My hope is that by revealing a little of the contents of my notebooks periodically, it will lessen their shock value at my commitment hearing.  

YAWB (Yet Another Weird Boat)

Yes, I’m writing yet another post about a strange boat.  But, as usual, you have to go around three sides of the barn to get to the horse at the end of the rope in your hand.  Unless you are Quentin Tarantino, the only way to start a story is at the beginning.

The Douglas DC-3 airplane, introduced in 1935, revolutionized the aviation industry.  This was an almost perfect airplane, that was so rugged and reliable that many of them are still in use, despite being more than old enough to qualify for Social Security.  They were ruggedly dependable and reliable, they were easy to fly, and most importantly, they could carry enough passengers and freight to be profitable without being subsidized for carrying the mail.  This just may be the best airplane ever designed, and will certainly be the first plane to still be working despite being a hundred years old.

Almost immediately other aircraft manufacturers raced to produce competing planes—usually with four engines, longer fuselages, and a longer range.  None of the planes proved to be as versatile and capable as the DC-3.  Even today, after 88 years, the only thing that can replace a DC-3 is another DC-3.  One of the newer designs, however, deserves to be mentioned.

Boeing was already developing the B-17 Flying Fortress for the American military when it took the B-17 design, keeping the wings, tail, rudder, undercarriage, and engines but substituting a new, much larger, pressurized and circular cross-section fuselage.  In other words, it was a civilian transport version of the B-17, with a pressurized cabin that would enable the plane to carry more passengers and ascend above turbulent weather, while going faster and farther than the DC-3.  This was, for its time, the perfect plane for airlines.  And a few of them actually bought several of the new Boeing 307 Stratoliners.

In 1940, you could pay TWA $150 for a ticket to fly from New York to Burbank California in only 15 hours.  Amazingly, the plane had to stop only three times (in Chicago, Kansas City, and Albuquerque) for gas.  The overnight flight would even provide a sleeping berth for an additional $120.

Unfortunately, after only ten of these planes were built, the world plunged into World War II and Boeing stopped production of the Stratoliner to concentrate on building bombers for the military.  The few airlines that had already taken delivery of the aircraft turned them over to the military who removed the plush passenger seats and carpet and converted the planes to C-75 transport planes.  After the war, these planes found their way into various militaries around the world. 

Four of them were shot down by either the Pathet Lao or North Viet Nam.

One of the Stratoliners, however, had been sold to Howard Hughes for $315,000 before the war.  In 1938, Hughes had set the world record for a round-the-world flight in a Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra in 91 hours and 14 minutes.  Since the Boeing plane was both faster and had a longer range than the Lockheed, Hughes had planned to break his own record.  Normally, Boeing would not have sold a much sought after plane to a civilian, particularly with a war looming on the horizon, but since Hughes owned the majority of the stock of Trans World Airways and Boeing hoped to sell a lot of planes to TWA, Hughes got the fourth plane off the assembly line.

Hughes took possession of his Stratoliner in July, 1939 and was in the process of having long range tanks installed when Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939.  The new record attempt was canceled and Hughes had the plane stored at Hughes Aircraft in Glendale, California for the duration of the war.  If you are wondering how Hughes managed to keep the government from taking the plane for military use, Hughes kept them at bay by dismantling his airplane.

Following the war, Hughes had the plane extensively remodeled for his own person use, intending to use the plane as sort of a flying Winnebago. At a cost of over $250,000, renovation of the plane (that Hughes named The Flying Penthouse) included removal of the long range tanks and installation of a bedroom, two restrooms, a galley, and a large living room (sporting a large wet bar).  At the same time, Hughes replaced the engines with larger and more powerful models.  

A lot of the life of Howard Hughes is surrounded in mystery and that includes his use of his Stratoliner.  We will probably never know how often he used it, who else flew on it, and where it went, but we do know that, just before 1949, Hughes spent $100,000 to remodel the interior in preparation for selling the plane to Glenn McCarthy, the Texas oil millionaire.

“Diamond Glenn” McCarthy was the king of the wildcatters—a man who made and lost fortunes on a regular basis.  In 1949, he opened the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, that was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world at the time.  If you have ever seen the movie, Giant, McCarthy was the model for Jett Rink.  Just as in the movie, McCarthy used his Boeing 307–now renamed the Shamrock—to fly in Ava Gardner, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Jack Benny, Betty Grable, and other Hollywood stars to his hotel.

Note.  Many years later, I worked at the Shamrock Hotel while I went to college and have written about the hotel several times.  Though it had been decades since McCarthy had owned the hotel, I saw the hoofprints from McCarthy’s horse on the parquet floor of the private elevator that went from the underground parking garage to his penthouse.  The stories of a drunken McCarthy riding his horse up and down the halls of the hotel are true.  

Glenn always had several business plans in the works simultaneously, and he gambled a fortune on each.  Take, for example, his idea to build a massive enclosed baseball and football stadium on land he owned on the south side of Houston.  Other projects included KXYZ radio station in Houston, two banks, a bar, a brand of bourbon called "Wildcatter", the McCarthy Chemical Company, a magazine, 14 "throwaway" newspapers and a movie production company known as Glenn McCarthy Productions.  Glenn’s wells hit oil 38 times, and he won and lost fortunes throughout his life.  In one of those losses, the Shamrock Hotel went to the Hilton Corporation and Howard Hughes repossessed the Stratoliner.

By this point, Hughes was no longer interested in using the plane for personal transportation nor was he interested in selling it.  Though the airframe had less than 500 hours of flying time, it just sat at an airport for years, until Hurricane Cleo severely damaged the plane.  Eventually, the wreck was sold to Kenneth W. London for $69.

It was not feasible to make the plane airworthy again, so London cut the wings and tail off, fastened a hull under the fuselage and converted the plane into a houseboat called the Londonaire.  Powered by two V8 engines that were linked to the original flight controls, steering the unusual but speedy houseboat has been described as: “driving it is like driving a school bus. On ice. Backwards. Downhill. Blindfolded, and occasionally a little drunk.”

The 56-foot-long planeboat was then sold to Dave Drimmer for $7500, who finished the conversion for a measly $200,000.  Sometime during the conversion, Jimmy Buffet saw the former Boeing floating in a Florida harbor and became enchanted with it.  When he described the unique houseboat in his book, he called it the Cosmic Muffin.  While only Buffet knows what the term means, Drimmer renamed the boat and it remains the Cosmic Muffin to this day.  Most of the interior remains as Howard Hughes last saw it, including the wet bar and cockpit.

Drimmer lived on the planeboat for years until the cost of maintaining the craft became too heavy and he donated the vessel to the Florida Air Museum, where it has been restored (as a houseboat not a plane) and is on permanent display.

If you are interested in seeing the last airworthy Boeing 307, it is at the National Air and Space  Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

College Highs

The new semester has started, and if all goes well, I’ll graduate—again—in the spring.  I’m only taking two courses this semester, but my tuition for this semester at Enema U, a state cow college in Southern New Mexico is slightly over two grand.  To that, you can add a lot of other miscellaneous charges, bringing the total bill for my two classes to roughly $2500.

I’m not complaining, since as a retired faculty member, my tuition (but not those miscellaneous fees), is waived.   There were other incentives promised to retirees, such as free golf and a special parking permit, but the university has reneged on those benefits.  The tuition waiver has so far been honored—at least until some jackass in Abattoir Hall reads this.

The steadily rising cost of going to college is not just caused by the ever-escalating cost of tuition:  increases can be found in almost every sector of the university.  I’ll start with the obscene cost of textbooks.  For one of my courses, a five-year-old book (in fact, a rather small book that is cheaply bound), the cost is $360.  An alternate option is to rent the book for a semester for only $120.  This is not a rare textbook in an obscure field, but a standard in a subject where there is intense competition.  Seeking an additional reference text, it cost me under $30 to buy a similar book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.  

Why does the required textbook cost so much?  Because the book publisher also offers online quizzes, supplemental educational videos, PowerPoint slides and lecture materials to the professor.  The professor is being offered an entire course in a box, so that very little personal effort on his part is required…And in some cases, the publishing company has a financial arrangement with the university (or in layman’s terms, a kickback).   One of the other benefits for the university is that there will be dramatically less need to hire tenured professors to deliver the course.  The university can hire an adjunct professor to deliver the TV-dinner course, saving money since adjuncts are paid far less, rarely receive benefits, and can be fired at will, long before they retire—at which point they may start writing an irritating blog and take advantage of those tuition-free classes.    

One of the strange side effects of this arrangement is that, because of the higher cost of buying textbooks, the majority of the students are forced to use online E-books or rent the few textbooks that come on paper, returning them at the end of the semester.  My house is overflowing with books on history, anthropology, art history, and Latin American Studies because I acquired a lot of books while I was studying those fields—books that went from being required for a current course to later being useful reference tools.  Since the Economics Department has all but become a subsidiary of the British company, Pearson Group, I will not have a single leftover economics textbook for reference after graduation.  

Despite the widespread use of E-books and proprietary textbooks that the university can rent year after year, the cost of textbooks has risen faster than any other expense associated with university education.  Since the late 1970’s, the average cost of textbooks has risen by more than 1000%—an increase five times higher than the cost of other books.

It is hard to find something at the university that hasn’t become more expensive.  The students pay dearly in the dining halls to be served Purina College Chow.  My free retiree parking permit went up 10% this year, alone.  I may be mistaken, but the parking fee seems to go up every single year while the number of parking spaces available seems to dwindle.  Of course, every single time the subject of parking comes up, some nitwit will claim that when they were at the University of Who Cares, the parking fee was a fresh kidney and a bucket of unicorn blood.  For some reason, this is never comforting to cash-strapped students or a university employee who is forced to kick back the equivalent of a day’s pay just to park at work.

And then there is the high cost of tuition.  Universities do not waste money like drunken sailors because when sailors run out of money, they stop spending.  Universities spend money like the Federal Government:  state universities, in particular, can sell bonds to continually borrow more and more money.  Just about anybody could sit down with a university budget and cut out millions of dollars of wasteful spending (and could do it without any of the students—and most of the faculty—noticing any ill effects from the cuts).  

Here's a quick way to save millions:  eliminate all of the upper-level administrative positions created in the last thirty years.  If the university didn’t need an Executive Vice-President of Student Articulation and its accompanying staff in 1993, it could probably get along without one now.  (That’s a “real” position at Enema U and I have never been able to find out what responsibilities come with the job).

There are a lot of other, simple things that would lower the cost of university education.  Post-tenure review would remove some of the non-productive dead weight in some departments.  Or requiring every administrator to teach at least one class a semester, which would allow the university to offer more classes without additional payroll expense and simultaneously remind the administration of the real purpose of the university.  And while universities do need new buildings periodically, every new university president immediately develops an Edifice Complex, knowing that the best way to be hired away by a bigger and more prestigious university is to build a new stadium or athletic facility.  Since I have been at Enema U, I’ve lost track of how many times the coaching staff has moved into new offices.  

Which, of course, brings up the subject of the monstrously high cost of collegiate sports.  Did you know that the highest paid state employee in 43 states is a coach?  Did you know that, while the average state employee’s salary is $63,000 a year, the average college football coach brings down $3.4 million annually?  It is also sometimes a little hard to discover just how much that coach actually receives, since their pay is frequently hidden among multiple accounts such as shoe contracts, summer camps, Foundation subsides, Alumni Association speaking fees and multiple other accounting tricks.  There are nuclear secrets that aren’t as carefully hidden as the salaries of university coaching staff.  Isn’t it strange that they don’t have to pull the same bookkeeping stunts for a really good math professor?  Why don’t we ever hear about recruiting scandals in the English Department?

If you want to cut the cost of a college education, you have to address the incredible amount of money spent on collegiate athletics.  At some state universities, this can amount up to 20% of the university’s total budget.  That’s an incredible amount of money to spend on something that has nothing to do with the core mission of education and, more often than not, lends itself to corruption, scandals, and lawsuits.  

As a nation, we need to stop the conversation about who should pay for college and instead focus on why we have allowed these costs to rise to the level where government assistance is being seriously considered.  Nor should we expect that the solution will come from within the university system itself:  it has to be an initiative led by the state legislatures.  

Expecting the universities to solve their own budget problems is like expecting the drug cartels to develop a better version of Narcan.

Goodbye Flip

While I was growing up, we lived in a small Texas town so remote that we had cable radio…Well, almost.  We certainly didn’t have a local newspaper, so I grew up reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—the paper from the mighty metropolis to the east of us and a good newspaper that I still occasionally read.  But as good as the paper is (and was), the paper I first loved was the Weekly Reader.

If you’re reading this, you probably know all about the Weekly Reader, since it started weekly publication in 1928, providing age-appropriate news and public interest stories for school children across America.  I can’t remember exactly but I think it cost about a dollar a year, which cost was probably partially subsidized by the school.  Since my family didn’t have a television yet and about the only thing that I remember hearing on the radio back then was the farm report or Porter Wagoner, the Weekly Reader was a major source of news for me.  

For a poor, dumb ol’ country boy, the stories in the Weekly Reader were real eye openers—particularly the frequent stories about science, NASA, and exploration.  I can still remember some of those news stories practically verbatim, such as the article about Sealab and the aquanauts exploring the ocean floor.  Another one of those stories was about an amazing “ship” that was designed to partially sink on purpose.  Called the Flip Ship, the aft 300 feet of the vessel would flood with water and sink, flipping the forward 55 feet upward and aft 90°, creating a research laboratory.

Technically, Flip wasn’t actually a ship at all, since the vessel had no propulsion and it had to be towed to its destination, so it was a FLoating Instrument Platform, but probably no one referred to the vessel as such except for the U.S. Navy, who owned the platform.  The Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a part of the University of California system, used the unique platform as a research laboratory, for over 1000 experiments, because the deep vertical ballast made the portion of the platform above the water extremely stable and almost immune to wave action.  When the experiments were finished, compressed air would be pumped into the vessel, expelling the seawater, and returning it back to its horizontal floating position, ready to be towed to the next research location.  

The inspiration for such a novel vessel came from an unusual source:  A scientist was conducting experiments on sonar improvements while aboard a US Navy submarine, but found that while the sub was surfaced, the natural wave action of the ocean rocked the ship, interfering with his experiments.  One day, while the sub was in port, his eye was caught by an ordinary mop floating next to the pier.  He observed that the mop floated with the mop head below the surface and with just the top foot of the handle sticking straight up out of the water.  More important, he noticed that the mop stayed stationary as the waves hit, neither rising nor sinking as the waves passed, and he reasoned that a vertically oriented, partially submerged ship might behave the same way and be similarly unaffected by wave action.  In 1962, the Flip Ship, technically the RP FLIP, was launched in Portland, Oregon.

With a crew of five, whose jobs were mainly to care for the generators, compressors, and water purification system, the vessel would be towed into position, then the forward ballast tanks would be flooded with 600 tons of seawater to rotate it.  The process that took thirty minutes, with the last two minutes said to be the most exciting for the eleven scientists on board.  Once in place, the extremely stable platform could remain in position for up to a month.  

As you have probably guessed, the interior of the Flip was a special design with some fixtures meant to be rotated, while others had to be duplicated on either the wall/floor or the wall/ceiling.  All of the counters and kitchen appliances in the galley were mounted on gimbals.  The main living area was located in the "cradle" end of the vessel, and included a galley, a mess hall, a lounge, and a recreation room. The crew's quarters were in the "handle" end, with some as much as 150 feet underwater, and they included individual cabins, a shower room, and a laundry room.  Overall, those working on Flip said it was an enjoyable duty, but after days of living in horizontal rooms, it took several days for the crew to become accustomed to living in the ‘new’ vertical rooms.

Flip, unfortunately, has become a casualty of COVID.  After fifty years of scientific service, the research platform was to be partially dismantled and added to a museum collection, but after it sat idle during the Pandemic, the Scripps officials decided it would cost too much to prepare the vessel for display and sent the platform to a breaker for dismantling.  As I write this, Skip is being towed to her final destination.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the latest news about Skip from the Weekly Reader, though I would be happy to have a subscription.  (For my grandchildren, of course.). The Weekly Reader—like so  many other newspapers and magazines—was killed off by the internet and ceased publication in 2012.

Bogus Armies

A fake army is a force that does not exist—a military force that actually is not capable of delivering a strike against any opponent.  It exists only because of an act of deception or because of a misinterpretation of military intelligence.  There have been more of them throughout history than most people realize.

Though fake armies usually rely on deception, deception alone does not create a fake army.  There have been countless confrontations in which one side or the other used dummy soldiers to create the illusion of a larger force than was actually on the field.  This tactic has been a common practice in warfare for millennia and was used extensively by the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Mongols.  In many battles of the American Civil War, both sides enlisted the aid of “Quaker Guns”, bogus artillery that consisted of black painted logs set up either to intimidate the opposing side or to create a target at which the enemy would waste artillery fire.  

It was during World War II that fake armies really came of age.  During the North Africa Campaign, the British, in “Operation Bertram”, camouflaged real vehicles, created fake units out of baling wire and calico, constructed artillery out of bundles of palm fronds, and generated so much fake radio chatter that Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was convinced that the attack at El Alamein would be farther to the south than the actual offensive was.

Similarly, the Germans kept a careful eye on the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) that was commanded by General Patton since they knew that this army would lead the advance for the D-Day invasion in 1944.  In reality, FUSAG’s tanks were Goodyear inflatables, the massive collection of troop tents were empty and the radio traffic was a deception invented by radio operators on one side of the tent to operators on the other side of the tent.  FUSAG worked so well that on the actual day of the invasion, Rommel was on vacation, certain that the invasion could not happen because Patton’s army was still in camp.

At least one of these deceptions had tragic results, however.  Through carefully conducted Japanese deceptions, the Allies in early 1945 were convinced that the Japanese Army in Manchuko was at least a million men stronger than reality.  One of the reasons that Allied strategy relied on atomic warfare in lieu of an invasion of the Japan was was the belief that Japan could swiftly move its forces back across the Sea of Japan to defend the homeland.  

These armies were fake, though at the time, they had very real military uses.  There have been other military forces that actually existed, but were nevertheless totally fake and were a military threat to absolutely no one.

Take, for example, the strategic bombing force so large that it was one of the top ten aviation forces in the world, all under the control of movie director Mike Nichols.  In 1969, Nichols wanted to bring to the screen Joseph Heller’s best-selling novel, Catch-22, that was based on Heller’s own experiences as a bombardier on North American B-25 Mitchells of the 488th Bombardment Squadron (Medium) in the Mediterranean.

This is a great book and I’m not saying that just because my high school confiscated my copy of the book due to its frequent use of profanity.  (I stole the book back from the principal’s office, and finished reading it during my three day suspension.). 

For Nichols to make the movie in those days (long before CGI), he had to actually acquire the aging airplanes.  At the time, the “go-to” aviation source in Hollywood was Tallman Aviation, the company started by stunt pilots Frank Tallman and Paul Mantz.  Mantz had been killed while flying the Tallman P-1 for the movie Flight of the Phoenix.  Tallman Aviation continued under Frank Tallman.

Luckily for Nichols, who produced the movie with a budget of only a $18 million dollars, Tallman already owned four B-25 bombers and was able to acquire fourteen additional aircraft.  Most of these could no longer fly, but Tallman was looking for planes with good hydraulics and wiring, intending to install serviceable engines in all of the planes.   

Since they were no longer airworthy when purchased, the planes were purchased at bargain prices (one costing only $1,500).  All of the planes were brought to flying condition, with working bomb bay doors, and repainted to resemble World War II aircraft.

In addition, Tallman spent a million dollars building a replica airfield including a barracks, a control tower, and a 6,000-foot runway.  To fly the aircraft, Tallman trained 32 pilots and had them licensed for the twin engine B-25 aircraft.  By this time, Nichols controlled one of the largest strategic air forces in the world.

The planes flew for a total of 1,500 hours with no accidents in order to create the 12 minutes of film needed in the movie.  One of the planes was intentionally crashed for the movie, and the remains were buried next to the runway.  Fifteen of the aircraft remain today, eight are still flying (including the Berlin Express above), and the remainder are in museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Nichols Air Force consisted of only 18 bombers, a handful of trucks, and a small fleet of jeeps.  Pepsi, on the other hand, once controlled an entire naval force, including a modern cruiser, a frigate, a destroyer, and 17 submarines.  

Yes, I’m talking about Pepsi Cola.  No:  I’m not talking about boats at an amusement park.

We have to start with President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon.  In 1959, Eisenhower convinced that the Soviets to allow a American Exhibition of Products in Moscow.  Among the array of American products were huge cars from Detroit, American-made televisions, and Pepsi.  A Pepsi executive named Kendall had convinced his company to be part of the exhibition.

When the exhibit opened, Vice President Nixon skillfully steered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over to the Pepsi exhibit to sample the wares.  While the Russians are fond of sweet drinks, Khrushchev was not overly impressed with the soft drink.  But the photo of the premier drinking Pepsi created the stereotype of Pepsi being part of the decadent goodies that were being denied to the Russian people.

While Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, Kendall had better luck, becoming the President of Pepsi—in part due to his product placement coup in Russia.  Kendall threw Nixon a bone, making it clear that whichever prominent law firm made Richard Nixon a partner, would be assured of becoming the house law firm for Pepsi.  The New York law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, & Todd eagerly accepted the deal.

Nixon, who became rich from the deal, spent some of his new-found wealth to orchestrate a political comeback and he traveled the world as a Pepsi spokesman.  When Nixon won the presidency in 1968, he was in a position to return the favor to Kendall.  Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, began working on a deal for a select few American corporations to enter the Soviet market.

In 1972, Pepsi announced that a deal had been reached with the Soviet Union in which $500 million worth of Pepsi would be exchanged for $500 million worth of Stolichnaya Vodka, which the company could sell in the West.  In a small codicil of the agreement, Coca-Cola was banned from the Soviet Union.

Pepsi became very popular in Russia, while for a spell, everybody in the US seemed to be drinking Stoli.  Russians clamored for more American products and it wasn’t long before the people of Moscow were standing in long lines at Pizza Hut, which was a division of PepsiCo.

By 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was having a hard time supplying enough vodka to pay for all the soda and pizzas being consumed by the Russian people.  Surely, there was something else Pepsi would accept in trade?

Look around your house for any products you own that were made in Russia.  Except for vodka and perhaps caviar, you are not likely to find anything.  No one I know owns a Russian-made computer or a pair of shoes produced in a peasant sweatshop.  I do own a box of matches that someone brought me from Russia, that are very pretty in a rugged sort of way, but they are impossible to light.  What else does Russia make?

Russia is basically a large gas station with a military and with the collapse of the evil empire, Russia could no longer afford to maintain a huge and aging navy, so Russian officials worked out a deal to trade old naval vessels to Pepsi.  These vessels weren’t to be used, as they were rusting hulks, badly maintained, and since Coca Cola did not have any ships that Pepsi could attack on the high seas….The ships were to be sold for scrap metal.

At the time, the deal was big news.  Pepsi had a navy, albeit a somewhat fake navy.  At least for a little while.  Turning warships into soda and pizza was a better deal than beating a sword into a plowshare.  

The ships weren’t really worth having, the cost of moving them was very high and they were so full of asbestos that it is doubtful that Pepsi broke even on the deal.  What did not make the popular news was that Pepsi received a total of 85 ships and that the other 67 ships were valuable commercial vessels that included two oil tankers and an ice breaker, all of which were sold at a sizable profit.  The ships for soda trade stopped after Russia began to sell oil in Western market and could afford to pay cash for its imports.

If you are wondering, in 2021, Pepsi had its most profitable year in Russia ever.  The next year, Pepsi stopped doing business in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine.

Airmail

There are certain obvious, every day, common things and knowledge that most of us have never noticed that either never existed or that have completely vanished.  There are no 1975 quarters, for instance—the US mint never produced any because they were ramping up production of the bicentennial quarter.  Do you even know the location of the closest payphone to your house?  Contrary to popular belief, the names of Columbus’ three ships were not the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And did you know that you can’t send letters by airmail anymore?  

Okay, technically, you can still send mail that will travel by air.  The United States Postal Service claims that Express Mail and Priority Mail travel by air, but they no longer use the term ‘airmail’ and the old service for private letters is no longer being offered.  

Up until 1977, you could buy special airmail stamps to use on correspondence and you would be assured that the letter would be delivered as soon as possible because these letters would be sorted first and travel to the destination by airplane.  For this faster service, the post office charged much more per ounce of weight, meaning that the letters were printed on the lightest and thinnest possible stationary, with specially marked envelopes to aid in the sorting.

Getting an airmail letter meant someone cared, it meant that they wanted their message to get to you as fast as possible, and it meant there was something adventurous about the special journey the letter took.  I miss all of that.

When Ben Franklin established America’s postal system, there was only one class of mail and the cost to send a simple letter anywhere in the former colonies was two cents.  The British had a sliding scale for postage that depended on how far the letter was to be sent, but Franklin cut those rates as an act of unifying the colonies into a nation.  The cost was low, but the service was slow:  it might take two weeks for a letter to travel from New York to South Carolina.

As the country grew, the cost of transporting letters across the constantly increasing distances was partially offset by the steady improvements of transportation infrastructure such as roads, canals, and  eventually trains.  With the acquisition of California, however, the postal service had to dramatically raise rates again.  Most letters traveled to the West Coast by ship around Cape Horn, a passage that took up to three months and cost half a dollar per letter.  If you were in a hurry, you could pay a full dollar for a letter that would be shipped to Panama, then travel cross the Isthmus of Panama by mule, then would be loaded onto a different boat to be shipped to San Francisco, arriving in the incredible time of only three weeks.  

And then, we got airmail.  Not really, but it was the airmail of its day.  For a brief period, lasting only 18 months, your mail could travel by a private mail service called the Pony Express that would carry the lightest possible letter from Saint Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco in only ten days.  

Perhaps no one has ever described the Pony Express better than Mark Twain, who witnessed one of the riders in 1861 while traveling to Nevada by stagecoach:

“Both rider and horse went ‘flying light.’  The rider's dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a "roundabout," and a skull cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider.  He carried no arms—he carried only what was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.  He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry —his bag had business letters in it, mostly.  His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too.  He wore a little wafer of a racing saddle, and no visible blanket.  He wore light shoes, or none at all.  The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized.  The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty.  There were about eighty pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn as tiring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.” (Roughing It, Chapter 8.)

The trans-continental telegraph service put an almost immediate stop to the express riders.  Two days after the telegraph service was operational, the Pony Express shut down for good.  For only a dollar, your telegraph message of ten words was sent across the continent instantly.  When the railroad linked the two coasts together, once again the postal service would deliver a letter anywhere in the country for only a few pennies, though it might still take more than a week for a letter to cross the continent.

Now we bring in airmail.

In June 1910, just seven years after the Wright Brother’s first flight, Congressman Shepherd Morris of Texas introduced a bill charging the Postmaster General to investigate the possibility of using airplanes to ship the mail.  The bill promptly died in committee as New York papers ridiculed the ridiculous idea.

Love letters will be carried in a rose-pink aeroplane, steered by Cupid’s wings and operated by perfumed gasoline. … [and] postmen will wear wired coat tails and on their feet will be wings.

Despite the public ridicule, within months the Postmaster began authorizing demonstration flights of the mail for short ranges by airplane.  More publicity stunts than practical deliveries, there was no doubt that as soon as the technology of flight became practical, the postal service would begin transport by mail.

Regular airmail service started in 1918, with transcontinental service beginning two years later.  Though interrupted by World War II, international airmail began in 1939 and was using jet aircraft only twenty years later.  Unfortunately, regular airmail service ended in 1977, and today, only about 1% of our domestic mail travels by air.

There is, of course, a noticeable trend in the evolution of mail service:  as technology advances, mail service gets faster and the relative cost decreases, but something intangible is lost in the process.  Today, an email reaches me within seconds of being sent, but it lacks the emotional weight of that airmail letter…it lacks the touch of intimacy.

As Emily Dickinson said, “The ways that letters go Are lovely as the ways the light goes – The sun himself is known to lose his way Yet find it, in a letter's ray."

Caesar and the Pirates

Revolutions, like forest fires, are far easier to start than to end.  Countless revolutionary leaders have discovered the difficulty of disbanding an army after the battles have ended.  Thousands of unemployed young men, unable to find work in a civilian workforce in an economy struggling to recover from the disruptions of war, have all too often returned to violence as way of life simply to survive.

After the American Civil War, for example, restless veterans frequently either turned to crime or became mercenaries in the seemingly endless revolutions in Latin America.  Similarly, Boers who had been forced into exile by the British after their defeat during the Boer War in Africa, fought for several armies during the Mexican Revolution.

Perhaps no military leader solved the problem of how to “fire” angry young men with weapons better than Julius Caesar, who carved out new cities in conquered territory as a reward for his loyal veterans.  Not only did the presence of these soldiers help to Romanize the newly acquired territory, but it removed the possibility of these men being used in a military coup against Caesar by moving the veterans far from Rome.

Caesar probably learned this lesson after being captured by pirates.

Following the Marian-Sulla Civil War in 89 BCE, revolutions and violence erupted throughout the Mediterranean area, providing new employment opportunities to men who had been trained to fight, but couldn’t find work after the previous battles had ended.  Many of these young men turned to piracy and were collectively known as the Cilician pirates.  Carthage had been destroyed and Ptolemaic Egypt was collapsing from internal rot (several centuries of sibling marriage by the pharaohs will do that), which led to a power vacuum at sea.  

Based out of what is now Western Turkey, the notorious Cilician pirates did what pirates have always done:  they preyed on commercial shipping and kidnapped the rich for large ransoms.  These sea raiders were renowned for incredible violence but were also known to honor their ransoms and to release their captives unharmed…if they were paid.  Since the pirates were also known to profit from the growing slave trade, captives not ransomed were sold far from their homes.

That the pirates honored ransoms was not to say that they were trustworthy—treating their captives fairly was just a good business practice.  In fact, the pirates were more than capable of acting treacherously, as they did with Spartacus, the former gladiator who led a slave revolt that was almost successful.  Spartacus had contracted with the pirates to transport his army (for a large fee) to Sicily.  After accepting the payment, the pirates reneged on their promise and left Spartacus and his army abandoned on the beach, at the mercy of a Roman Army not known for dispensing mercy.

Julius Caesar was a wealthy twenty-five-year-old attorney who was already well known for prosecuting the supporters of Sulla, when he set sail for Rhodes to study oratory to further his professional career.  As you have already guessed, a band of the Cilician pirates seized Caesar and his entire party, intending to ransom the young Caesar for an incredible sum:  twenty talents of silver (then worth about half a million sesterces).

Comparing the relative value of money in different cultures across a gap of more than two millennia, with widely varied purchasing power, is almost impossible, but this amount was at least the equivalent of $150,000 today and probably more.  As large as that sum was for a young lawyer, Caesar ridiculed the pirates, laughingly insisting that he was worth more than twice that.  At Caesar’s insistence, the pirates raised the ransom amount to 50 talents, or 1,200,000 sesterces.  This was a brilliant tactic by Caesar as it guaranteed that the pirates treated their valuable captive like a king until they were paid.

Caesar took full advantage of his captor’s new respect and sent almost all of his entourage out to raise the large ransom, retaining only two slaves to see to his daily needs.  While he waited, Caesar acted as if he were on vacation, dining well, sleeping late, and truly enjoying himself.  When the pirates entertained themselves with games or sporting contests, Caesar joined in, frequently besting the pirates (particularly after he taught the pirates how to play Roman games).  When Caesar decided to take an afternoon nap, he sent his slaves out to order the pirates to keep quiet so as not to interrupt his sleep.  Caesar also wrote frequently, composing poetry which he read to his captors.  

More than anything else, Caesar ridiculed his captors, making frequent jokes at their expense.  At one point, he even offered to take over the leadership of the gang, promising that under his command, the pirates would each make more money.  He taunted the pirates, frequently telling them that he would one day crucify the lot of them—a taunt that the pirates treated as a joke from their new friend.

After thirty-eight days, Caesar’s associates returned and paid the unusually large ransom.  As promised, the Cilician pirates promptly released Caesar, who made his way to Miletus, the Roman capital of Asia Minor.  There, he raised a small army, hired enough ships to transport it and set out to search for his former captors.  He eventually discovered them on the same small island where they had held him captive.  

Catching the pirates off guard, Caesar and his force quickly captured the pirates and recovered not only the ransom he had paid, but considerable other stolen loot, as well.  Caesar transported the pirates back to Miletus, where he told the Roman governor to execute the pirates.  When the governor refused, saying he didn’t have the proper authority, Caesar ignored the governor and had the pirates crucified, exactly as he had told him he would do.  

Caesar obviously knew that the Roman government wasn’t going to complain that he had usurped proper authority.  And Caesar knew that his actions were going to win him the admiration of the Roman citizens, and that with the admiration of the masses became political power.

Caesar's experience with the Cilician pirates is a reminder of his ruthlessness and his willingness to do whatever it took to achieve his goals.  It also shows that he was not afraid to stand up to even the most dangerous enemies.

Eight years after Caesar was released, the Roman Senate appointed Pompey, the Great, to deal with the Cilician pirates.  Pompey quickly assembled a large fleet and went on to defeat the pirates in a series of decisive battles.  He then established a system of naval patrols to prevent the pirates from resurfacing.  This victory also made Pompey popular with the Roman people, eventually setting up the contest between the two men for control of Rome. 

But that’s a different and much longer story.

Camel Racers—Yee-HAL!

There is an ongoing writers’ strike in Hollywood—the writers are concerned about the impact of AI on their future employment.  They’re right to be concerned:  AI is going to change just about everyone’s job and writers may see their jobs change before other professions do.

I’ve wasted quite a few hours experimenting with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, and if I owned a small newspaper, I’d already be using both services to help provide content.  Both bots can already produce prose that’s as good as what you now find in most national newspapers and it’s far superior to what I see in the local papers.  Simply put, AI works, it already works well, and it is going to get much better extremely quickly.

AI is going to bring a major change in the way we all work, probably making an even bigger change in the ways we work and live than the computer revolution did a few decades ago.  Everyone and every job is going to be changed because of AI, and there is no way of stopping the juggernaut…nor should we want to, as AI is going to make our lives better and more productive, and it will substantially raise the standard of living for all of us.  However, the process of change is going to hurt a lot of us in the short run (some of us a lot more than others) while both employees and employers seek solutions.

We are going to have to change the way we work and we are going to have to accept machines that learn at unimaginable speeds as our assistants and partners.  We are going to have to find ways to accept a greater degree of automation and computerization in our workplaces and our lives.  We will have to find ways to cope as computers and robots become a major part of all segments of our lives.  Artificial intelligence is forcing us to change.

To help in this process, I have an example of change resistant people coping.  Let’s talk camels.

It would surprise most people—even those who live in the Middle East—that camels originated in North America.  About 56 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch, camelids evolved in North America, multiplying and eventually separating into a number of species that spread across the world and eventually arrived in the Middle East, even as the original camelids became extinct in North America (possibly due to overhunting).

Exactly when camels were domesticated is still being debated, but it was probably between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago.  The domestication of camels revolutionized transportation and trade routes in the region, as these animals were well-suited to survive the harsh desert environments and could transport goods and people over long distances. Camels played a crucial role in the development of caravan routes across the Middle East, facilitating trade and cultural exchange.

Over time, camels became integral to the nomadic lifestyle and to the economies of the Middle Eastern regions, providing transportation, milk, meat, and other valuable resources. The ability of camels to adapt to desert conditions, to travel long distances without water, and to endure extreme temperatures made them invaluable to desert dwellers.  Camels are not as fast as horses over short distances, but they can carry as much as 1300 pounds and work in environments that would quickly exhaust horses.

It didn’t take long before owning, breeding, and racing camels became a status symbol, signifying both wealth and prestige.  Camel racing predates the Islamic era and probably began as a way for various tribes to compete and demonstrate their wealth to gain prestige.

Today, as motorized vehicles have almost completely replaced the camel for transportation, the speedy ungulates remain an important status symbol.  The wealthy raise and breed camels primarily for racing.  If you live in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, racing camels occupy the same role in society as a stable of fast racehorses does in Kentucky.  It won’t surprise you to hear that those camels with winning records sell for millions of dollars.

Not only do the camels have to be fast, but they must also look good.  To be presentable in public, the camels are very carefully combed, perfumed, and made to look as pretty as possible.  The owners go to great lengths to have makeup applied to their camels before every race.  The makeup is applied to enhance the camels’ appearance, highlighting their features and adding a touch of elegance.  The designs often include intricate patterns, symbols, and motifs that reflect the cultural traditions and artistic heritage of the region.

It's worth noting that the use of makeup on camels is primarily for aesthetic purposes and does not affect their actual racing performance.  The focus is on showcasing the beauty and heritage of the camels rather than on altering their physical abilities.

Due to the nature of camels, their races are a little different than traditional horse racing.  First, the racetracks are straight and are much longer than those for horses, allowing the camels to build up and maintain speed.  Though most of the racetracks are around 7 kilometers long, the Liwa Golden Camel Race in the United Arab Emirates. is 1,000 kilometers in length.  

In order for the camels to develop their top speed, the jockeys were traditionally small children from India, whom the wealthy camel breeders had purchased from their impoverished parents.  If the child grew too large or too heavy to be competitive…. Well, the career opportunities for foreign ex-camel jockeys who do not speak the local language are not good in any country.  

The European press began publishing horror stories out of the Middle East about abandoned and abused children who were the by-product of traditional camel racing.  Let’s face it, the wealthy of the Middle East are not exactly the poster children for First Adopters who welcome change and innovation—particularly when you are talking about a centuries-old sport.  When change comes in this region, it comes at a pace that makes stalagmites look rash.  It was almost unthinkable that these oil-rich elites would accept change—but they did.

The camels still race, but the children have been replaced with tiny robots weighing about ten pounds, each equipped with a tiny loudspeaker and a mechanical arm wielding a riding crop.  With lighter loads, the camels can run faster, but since the races are for long distances, the owners must race along the side of the track to stay in communication with the robotic jockeys.   A few jockeys are out of work, but whole new industries have sprung up:  Camel makeup, camel cosmetology and makers of tiny racing silks for those little robotic jockeys.

Today, a typical race features fast camels who wear professional makeup and perfume. Each bears a small robot wearing a colorful racing costume indicating its ownership and swinging  a rotating riding crop.  The camel’s owner screams orders to the animal while racing alongside the track in his Mercedes.  This is your “traditional” camel race, nowadays.

If the oil-rich sheiks can accept change and mechanization, so can the rest of us.

Required Reading

Reading is my favorite preoccupation.  Take one look inside our house and this is obvious:  the house is flooded with books in every imaginable subject, as my choice of reading material has moved well past the valley of eclecticism and is now scaling the craggy heights of schizophrenia.  I’ll read just about anything.

I love libraries and have a large collection of library cards to prove it.  Whenever I’m doing research in a library, I have a strict rule:  Whenever you have scoured the stacks until you have located the volume you are looking for—turn around and take a book at random from the opposite shelf and spend at least a few minutes reading it.  You’d be surprised how often this serendipitous research pays off.

There is, however, one kind of book that I absolutely hate to read:  the book that I have to read—particularly one that has been assigned as part of a course curriculum.  Being forced to read any book is a chore that dwarfs the labors of Sisyphus.

Decades ago, I worked for a major Fifth Avenue publishing house and part of my job was to read some of the new books brought on the market.  One of the books that was currently popular was Watership Down, which I dutifully tried to read at least a dozen times.  If you have never read this monstrosity, it is hundreds of pages of cute, lovable rabbits who are hopping around and hopping around and hopping around—until I would fall asleep while on page 15, dreaming of blowing them all to smithereens with a good Remington shotgun.  Anyone who has successfully finished the book should be tested for diabetes.

The quality of the book doesn’t really matter, since any book designated as required reading automatically becomes a horrible book.  A professor once assigned me the task of reading The Education of Henry Adams, since it was his opinion that any student who graduated from college without having read the book was due a full refund of his tuition.  God, I hated that book.  About a dozen years later, I came across my copy of the book and reread it and discovered that in the years the volume had lain idle in my office, the prose had fermented into excellent literary wine, becoming a great book that everyone should read.

Note.  I am the “great uncle” to a young man who is just off to college now.  I sent him a copy of the book with a note containing the advice of the professor who had assigned me the book.  I suspect than my “great nephew” will feel somewhat obligated to read the book, almost guaranteeing that he will absolutely hate it, too, and will remember that his grandfather had frequently stated his brother was crazy.

Naturally, when I became the professor—the “sage on the stage”—I only assigned books that I was absolutely certain that my students would love.  Yeah, and Elvis didn’t do no drugs.

Since I was teaching at Enema U, the Harvard on the Rio Grande. Surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert, I assigned my students Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.  This is a fantastic book, one of the most popular books dealing with environmental issues that has been published in the last 50 years.  My students, living in the southwest, would immediately bond with it.

Nope.

My student treated the book like it was bound cancer.  No one liked the book and over half the class mentioned “the horrible desert book” in their end of class evaluations.  From the classroom discussions, it was clear to me that only half the class had actually finished the book and even that low number may be a wild overestimation.  

In a class I taught on the Mexican Revolution, I assigned The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican historian and author.  This is a book so well written, so moving and human that it does for the Mexican Revolution what Hemingway did the Spanish Civil War.  Since major battle of the Mexican Revolution occurred less than 50 miles from the campus of Enema U, and at least a quarter of the class had family in Mexico—the book had to be a success.

Also nope.

The book spans multiple decades with frequent flashbacks and even though I furnished the students with a list of chapters and the dates involved, most of my students seemed to find the events incomprehensible.  Few students understood how the years of fighting had embittered the idealistic young man, changing him into the epitome of what the youth had originally been fighting against.  The only real lesson from the book?  Well, I learned to never use the word “dichotomy” in an exam question since a sizeable percentage of the class wrote essays about the horrifying battlefield torture of what they presumed was a “dick-ectomy”.

Then there was that Civil War class.  Besides the usual textbook, I assigned The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  Surely, this time I had got it right.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize, is required reading at West Point, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, The War College, the Citadel, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, The Basic School for Marine Officers, and is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development.  And most importantly, Joss Whedon says the book was the original inspiration for the TV series Firefly.  

Even more noper.

Unfortunately, the great book was made into the movie, Gettysburg, which would have been a great movie if they hadn’t cast that damn Yankee, Martin Sheen, as Robert E. Lee, complete with a southern accent about as authentic as Velveeta Cheese.  For most of the students, watching the movie was preferable to actually reading the book.  Since Ted Turner was the movie’s director and decided to make a movie more than four hours long, it might have been quicker to read the book.

As with most of the books I assigned, the students complained about the book bitterly in class and noted their frustrations in the end of the semester evaluations.  Almost none of the students reported that they enjoyed reading the book.  

A curious thing happened a few months after the class was over, however.  I got several emails from the parents of my students who had happened to find a pristine copy of Killer Angels laying around the house and had picked it up just to see what it was.  They read the book and enjoyed it enough to take the time to write me a quick note in gratitude.

Of course, they liked the book.  They weren’t required to read it.  So, they did.

An Abnormal Court

This is one of those blogs that will likely cost me subscribers, as readers on both the left and the right will become angry and stop reading me.  I’ll get angry emails from both groups, accusing me of siding with the other camp.  Well, if you didn’t want to hear the “nut” point of view, then you should never have started reading this blog.

Yesterday, President Biden declared that the Supreme Court was “not normal”.  By this, of course, he meant that the decision the court had rendered disagreed with his policy.  This attitude has is perfectly normal, as this country has never had a president who had a good relationship with his Supreme Court.  A few, such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon passionately hated the court.  This is actually not necessarily a bad thing, since the three equal branches of the government are meant to check and balance each other. 

While it is dangerous for a president to publicly criticize one of the pillars holding up our government, in this case Biden might be right.  The present Supreme Court is clearly partisan.  However, while Biden is concerned with only the views of the conservative members of the court, I’m worried about the views of both the conservative and the liberal members of the court.   The voting records of both groups clearly demonstrate that the judges are concerned more with ideology than with legalities.

Our Supreme Court is supposed to decide issues, not by what would be considered a social good, but rather, on what is in alignment with existing law and the Constitution.  Sometimes, this means that the Supreme Court is charged with enforcing laws that are extremely unpopular (or are even harmful to society).  If this happens, it is not the job of our judicial system to change or to overturn the law, but rather, that is the task for the legislative branch to change the “bad” law.

As President Abraham Lincoln said:

“When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws.… But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.”

For the sake of brevity, Lincoln’s words have usually been paraphrased as “The best way ‌to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”  

This means that our Supreme Court Justices are supposed to be upholding the law, not upholding an ideological point of view.  Take two of the recent court opinions: the decision on Affirmative Action in college admissions and that on whether the President has the authority to dismiss or lessen student loan repayments.  I can make a pretty good legal argument for either side of both issues, and if I can do it, so could the lawyers who presented arguments to the court.

Assuming that the decisions handed down were legally justified, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the court’s votes split 7-2 or 5-4, but recently, it seems that the majority of the decisions have come to votes that are repeatedly 6-3–split right along ideological lines.  These judges seem to rarely hear any  convincing arguments outside their own comfort zone.

Even recently, the court wasn’t so clearly, routinely divided.  The late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were widely considered to be outstanding jurists, who in fact, had diametrically opposed political leanings—yet, each occasionally shocked their supporters by voting contrary to their political party.

In the case of United States v. Jones (2012), the Supreme Court examined the issue of warrantless GPS tracking of a suspect's vehicle by law enforcement.  Justice Scalia, known for his strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, joined the majority opinion that ruled in favor of the defendant's privacy rights.  The Court held that the government's failure to obtain a warrant when it attached a GPS device to a vehicle in order to monitor its movements violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

By comparison, there is the case of Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). This case dealt with the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,  which prohibited a specific type of late-term abortion procedure.  Justice Ginsburg dissented from the majority opinion, which upheld the ban, and she argued that it constituted an undue burden on a woman's right to choose and was inconsistent with prior Supreme Court decisions protecting a woman's access to abortion. However, she did join a separate concurring opinion by Justice Kennedy, that clarified the Court's stance on the importance of women's health exceptions in abortion regulations.  She broke with the rest of the liberal judges and wrote a differing minority opinion.

It is important to remember that justices' decisions are not supposed to be  strictly determined by their ideological leanings, and that they should vote differently on different issues based on their interpretation of the Constitution and the specific facts of each case.

I didn’t always agree with either Ginsburg or Scalia, but even when I disagreed with their opinions, I was always impressed with the logic of their decisions.  Even when their arguments didn’t change my mind, I always learned from them.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened lately.