Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 15

Imitating the Elite

I was exactly three months old when FDR gave a speech of which I reproduce a segment here. I found the speech easily when I searched Google with the key words “Roosevelt hatred.” Herewith that fragment:
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.     [Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 31, 1936, at Madison Square Garden, link ]
I made that search in the first place because, looking back, I was looking for another president of the United States who had been as genuinely hated by a subset of the U.S. public as President Obama. I knew that FDR had been so hated. Between 1936 and today, only a few things have changed. One is that we did not have any long breadlines during the recent Great Recession. Another is that FDR, no doubt because of those very real breadlines in his time, had full congressional support; hence “Government” was not split into warring sides; therefore he could right the wrongs that had caused the Great Depression. Finally, Obama is black; and in our time poverty affects ethnic minorities more than whites. To update the speech, we need only remove one word and add another. Remove breadlinesand add, right after class antagonism, the word racism.
One cannot know anything with certainty where vast collectives are involved, but it seems clear enough to me that the recent upsurge of cases around aberrant cops killing blacks has its roots in examples being given at very high levels of government, namely barely disguised contempt for a black President by leaders in the U.S. Congress. I know, I know. It’s all about policy differences. But if the highest office is not visibly respected, the ordinary people, especially those who lack the necessary sensitivity—because they did not get it in their childhood—can certainly draw the wrong conclusions. And then the darkest angels of our nature will act in violent ways—when no one is watching.

Don't Ask

April does not want to get going around here. My desktop PC has been home but has also gone back to the doctor again for further therapies. Good thing. I managed to transfer my tax files to the laptop which, just this morning, finally, managed to dispatch “that which belongs to Caesar” back to Caesar via Turbo Tax. So don't ask. Give me some time now to recover...

Easter Morning

An odd dream of black Mormon women controlling the Postal Service from the Moon wakes me this morning. The New York Times is, of course, “itself” and embodies the same incoherencies as my dream.
This madness will retreat, of course, as I anchor myself in concentration. Neither dream associations nor the news deliver the longed for Divine Order. But Divine Order is at work. My surroundings are still. Faint sunlight. The call of a mourning dove. Ignoring Netanyahu, the trees and bushes bud. The noise of a crumbling civilization does not signal anything high no matter the vast technologies and moneys that bring me news of them.
Settle out. Calm. That steady hiss in my ears means silence. No wind. The temperature is over 40. Deep breath. A kind of sleepiness steals over me, but B will wake now any minute and her cup is ready to take up filled with water boiled in our hi-tech Sunbeam device calculated to perform in 1 minute and 28 seconds. Breathe again…. The ragged clouds of madness have, indeed, already blown away. The animal has quieted; it sensed a superior and reassuring presence.
The resurrection of the Lord today: a potent, hopeful symbol even if we see no hint of it anywhere in a paper that today reports on a search for Jesus’ bones.

Calendrical Tomfoolery

I got to wondering why on this blog I’ve not yet done the pedantic sort of earnest thing I’m apt to do, namely to explain how April Fool’s Day originated. Now I have an explanation. It is that, by and large, nobody actually knows how the day originated. Attempts at tying it to New Year’s Day fail. Yes, once April 1st was New Year’s Day in some cultures—which is loosely associated with the Vernal Equinox. But that equinox takes place in March. And if the new year was such an inherently tricky or hoaxy day, why was its redesignation to January 1 (in 1582) not accompanied by the movement of Fool’s Day too? Some would have Chaucer as its originator, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where arrogant Chanticleer, the cock, is tricked by a fox; but that explanation relies for its justification on a presumed misspelling of one word in one sentence of the tale ( link ). No cigar. There was once a Feast of Fools celebrated more or less to coincide with the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1st). But how could the blasphemous Feast of Fools, condemned by the medieval Church, have found a rooting in April. Problems. Problems.
My personal problem is that this day was not marked in any way in my native Hungary. Yes, these days, Hungarians here and there mention it as an occasion of jokes, but it has no standing. When I consulted the Hungarian Wikipédia, as it is called there, asking for an article on Aprilis elsö, I was told that no such article exists, no article mentions it, and Wikipédia invited me to write the first one, if I wished. Brigitte has no memories of April Fool’s Day in Germany, and she lived in the north—nor do I though living in Bavaria where, per the German Wikipedia’s article it was common—indeed whence it emigrated to the United States. The German article is equally as fuzzy as the English-language version is.
My first e-mail this morning, however, informing me that my computer’s repairs will take at least another day—twice delayed already—ended with the following sentence: “I *wish* this were an April Fool joke...”

March Ends

March ends in snow lightly coatingJust the grass where big flakes sag withDisappointment and half-live bladesOf last year’s growth drink unawarelyOf the moisture the flakes bring.Flakes die, blades live, unawakely,Until the sun resplendently Half wakes them to emerging Spring.

Our Sense of Time

I’m reading again a book which was completed in 1899. At least I presume that was the year because the book, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, was first presented in 1900 as the second Gifford Lecture given at Edinburgh. By 1900, I learned today, the Eiffel Tower in Paris had already been in place for a decade. It was opened to the public on March 31, 1889—and since Google is featuring the tower today, now everybody knows. A hundred and twenty-six years ago! Did William James ever go up to see Paris from that height? My own reaction was a slight startle of surprise. That long ago? Somehow what I was reading—and Varieties is one of several books I’m reading in parallel from that time—does not smoothly integrate with this monument of technological self-assertion. At the same time, reading writings from that period had also struck me with the modernity of the views I was absorbing. All times, ultimately, reflect all aspects of a society, not merely its thought or its technology. And this coincidence in time, for me, is one of the proofs of that.
Just to stay with wondrous constructs, the Chartres Cathedral was completed in 1220. Looking for significant figures in that time, I come up with Hildegard of Bingen (who died while it was being built but 31 years before its completion), Francis of Assisi  (who died six years after the cathedral was done), and Roger Bacon (who was a boy of six the year when Chartres was finished). It all sort of fits, you might say.

The Logic of Nuclear Arms

On the eve of a nuclear arms treaty with Iran, the nature of which I cannot guess at, my shopping trip musings turned to the logic of nuclear arms. The general background, I learned later, is that we have nations with nuclear arms, nations without them, and one nation (Israel) which will not say so one way or the other. There is a major treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 1968, to which most nations are signatories except North Korea; North Korea had once been a signatory but then withdrew. Four nations have never signed NPT: India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan. Of those outside the NPT, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have nuclear warms; South Sudan has none; Israel is believed to have them.
Iran is a signatory but believed to be in violation of the NPT.
Now the logic seems to be, here, that some nations are “grandfathered in” and thus no one disputes their ownership. Others fall, through alliances, under the protection of those who do. Iran is something of an exception, being the sole major Sh’ia nation and not a member of a recognized bloc. But it is geographically also close to Israel, a nation with an ambiguous status, but most closely allied with the United States. Therefore Iran is the target of very, very special oversight. But why? Because it threatens Israel? That assumption is at least logical.
Nothing else is in this context. If nuclear arms are so dangerous, why may so many have them. Why is no pressure placed on India to rid itself of such arms? Is that because it is aligned to the West, more or less?
I wonder what would happen if Iran withdrew from the NPT. It would at least make logical sense, in a way, because no one seems intent on attacking India, Pakistan, or even North Korea. So the problem seems to be—Israel. And its ambiguous status. Maybe they are the chosen people. And Truman must have known that when he finally agreed to impose an Israeli state on Palestinian territory—or was Palestine a British Colony then? I better stop before I drown in an overflow of muddy logic.

10: Subscription v. Outright Purchase?

Are computers and all that surrounds them a proper subject for a blog largely focused on matters of culture? You bet. Even those who still actively purchase books and spend real time with them—and talking about them—have come to rely on such things as Amazon, just the mention of which constellates everything from “connectivity” to “operating systems.”
My old machine, running VISTA, will be updated to Windows 7—although a rather questionable Windows 8 exists and Windows 10 is in the offing. From the folks who made the repairs on mine comes the rumor that in the future Microsoft will require you (after Win-10 replaces Win-7) to pay an annual subscription charge. Things like that alarm me.
Back in the 1980s Brigitte’s Minneapolis Branch of Gale Research, the preeminent publisher of reference works, operated a mid-sized IBM system. It was one system but functionally provided the services of three consoles. The quarterly fee for its operating system back then was the chief expense of running that machine; and with the fee one could easily buy four to five PCs. Not surprisingly, a “migration” to PCs actually took place in that office…
I was peripherally involved in that migration and hence have a painful memory of operating systems that needed right regular and sizeable payments just to boot, you might say.
Well, this article ( link ) dated January 10, 2015, on PCGamer, assures me that “Windows 10 will not be sold as a subscription,” quoting Microsoft. Very good. Very good. As with all “outright purchase” systems so also with Windows 10, updates and fixes are continuous and free.
All this began, seemingly, because Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, when first discussing its pricing of Windows 10 in December 2014, had this to say: “We’ve got to monetise it differently. And there are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product and do it in a creative way.”( link ). Furthermore, actual pricing of the product was to be made public in Spring/Summer of 2015. So the public is still quite uncertain—except that Windows 10 on new machines and upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 will be free for purchasers of new machines and owners of 7 and 8. So we shall see.

To be sure, a subscription route, if Microsoft actually ever pursues it, will not do much to secure its dominant market share in operating systems. Others will satisfy such people as me who will refuse going that way. Red Hat or somebody. But it is well to keep one’s eyes open. Microsoft already sells the MSDN Operating System under a subscription ( link ). MSDN, however, is aimed at developers; it gives them access to all Microsoft operating systems to help them test their new products for every Microsoft platform.
Let us by all means stick with “outright ownership” of operating systems. Even then one pays plenty for that ownership. I could provide a long list of operating systems I’ve purchased over the last thirty years, but doing the research for that is a bit tedious…

Mass Killings in 2015

The Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in France begins to appear more and more like a mass killing by a deranged co-pilot. To get some perspective on the sudden deaths of yet another 150 innocents by violent means, I looked for and found Wikipedia’s site titled “Mass Murder in 2015” ( link ). Some 28 cases are listed there, not including the Germanwings crash. Total deaths reported thus far in 2015 have been 944. The largest number is associated with Boko Haram taking place in Nigeria or in neighboring regions of Niger and Cameroon (370 or 39%); Yemen comes next (180, 19%); and Pakistan is third (104, 11%). If we count the Germanwings case, France would displace Pakistan—or Germany would if we assign the deaths to origin of the perpetrator.
Nine hundred and forty-four—and today 1,094 innocents killed. May they all rest in peace….

A Minor First

My trusted HP desktop is presently on the blink. These episodes loom larger than life despite just being minor malfunctions. Subjectively it feels as if a huge crack has appeared in Reality itself. Our habits are our worst addictions.
Computer Days (in the same context as Doctor Days) are relatively rare, but memories of the last time rush in like a tornado. They cost about the same as Doctor Days as well, but in that category we carry no insurance.
Just how rare are they? Well, until I start keeping a log I’ll never know. The other First today is that this post is being written on my HP laptop. The Internet is unaffected. The last time it went down was February 2, 2013.