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ALTERNATE REALITY

12/29/2011

Alternate Reality
    In 1957, a doctoral dissertation by Hugh Everett proved mathematically that all possible alternative histories and futures exist, each a real world in an Alternate Universe. This is now the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. Murphy’s Law states that “If anything can go wrong, it will,” The MWI holds that “If anything can happen, it will.”
    A fascinating consequence of MWI is that it can explain the power of prayer. If human consciousness is part of an Infinite Quantum Consciousness (God, if you prefer), prayer can have the power to direct the one who prays into an alternate world where the prayer is Reality.
    Envision the Reality where Newt Gingrich becomes President. In his inaugural address he congratulates the American people for their wisdom and springs into action.
    Vice-President Sarah Palin, points a TV camera in Alaska at Russia, channels it into every American household, saying “Anyone who spots suspicious activity should call 911.” She resigns after three months to marry the President in a White House Ceremony, after which she takes a trip to Africa, to shoot wildebeasts, jumps out of the helicopter, disappears into the Serengeti and is never seen again.
    Secretary of Treasury, Herman Cain, has the Tea Party Congress pass “Nine, Nine,Nine.” Ninety-nine new billionaires are created, and the 99% become the 99.9%.
    Secretary of Defense, John McCain, sends 50,000 “trainers” into Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites unite for the first time in history, raise a force of 100,000 suicide bombers who vow to blow up “The Great Satan.”
    Secretary of the Interior, Michele Bachmann, builds 20-foot cement double walls topped by razor wire with a no-man’s land in the middle, at the U.S./Mexico border. Illegals tunnel under and paraglide over, but it blocks all animal migration. Seventeen species including Monarch butterflies are added to the endangered list.
    Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, after drilling several thousand oil wells, soothes angry corn farmers by subsidizing ethanol production. The price of corn syrup, corn bread, corn flakes, and tacos skyrockets.
   Secretary of Commerce, Donald Trump, places a 200% embargo on all goods manufactured in China. China retaliates. Trade with China comes to a standstill. Sixty-six major corporations leave the U.S. and 140,638 American small businesses go bankrupt.
    Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Ron Paul, eliminates Medicare. After a pregnant woman and her baby die in the admitting room because her health insurance had lapsed, Dr. Paul, heartbroken, goes on national TV pleading with people to keep their insurance up to date.
    Secretary of Education, Callista Gingrich, implements PUNK (Practical Uses for Neighborhood Kids), fires 80,000 janitors and hires kids ten and older.
    This is not fiction. It's a world that exists now in a mathematically proven Alternate Reality. If you can visualize another such world, it definitely exists. Jot down some things about it, email it to StuHodes@Hodesshows.com, for posting right here.

PARTY POOPER

12/29/2011

PARTY POOPER

Twas Romney, and the Gingrich Newt
Did Paul and Perry in the muck
All Bachmann was the Huntsman hoot
And Santorum upchuck

Beware the Party Poop my friend
The Kyls that suck, the Cantor twitch
Beware the Boehnor bluff and mend
The Darrrell Issa itch

It bore his Randish pole on high
O'Reilly fangs a-gleam
So pondered he in Foxy glee
While Limbaugh vented steam

And as the Bachmann guttered sore
The Party Poop in testy scree
Plunged through the Ryan Barbour door
And grackled Huckabee!

"Oh greed is good ! Oh fie, oh fee!"
Glenn Beckish breath blew Norquist black
Then turned bright red, but wasn't dead
And sent Koch brothers back

And hast thou slain the Party Poop?
Mike Pence me in, the Cheney roach,
Broke Coulter wind and gobbled goop
While mumbling "Dana Loesch.”

Twas Romney, and the Gingrich Newt
Did Paul and Perry in the muck
All Bachmann was the Huntsman hoot
And Santorum upchuck

A PIG IN A POKE

12/27/2011

A Pig In A Poke
    Clowns, flakes, and snake-oil purveyors have made this year’s Republican primary contest into a carnival side show.
    * Michele Bachmann: wants to abolish the EPA.
    * Newt Gingrich: says an electromagnetic pulse could shut down the U.S.A.
    * Jon Huntsman: Condoleezza Rice plays Bach, He plays rock.
    * Ron Paul: would give us the right to smoke pot, sniff cocaine, shoot heroin.
    * Rick Perry: Duh... !
    * Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
    * Rick Santorum: endorsed by Sarah Palin.
    Two of the above are believable candidates: Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, but Huntsman is like a colorless clone of Mitt Romney, so anyone inclined to vote for him will likely flutter to Romney.
    Romney’s probable candidacy prompted the New York Times to give him a three-page spread. Most know that he went to Harvard, but not that he was a straight A student who earned degrees in both Law and Business, and that as a graduate student, married with two kids, he paid no attention to the C-student frat brat one year behind him—George W Bush. He later said that if he’d known where Bush, “was gonna go, I would have been on him like white on rice,” Many people kiss up to power, but few come right out and admit it. It may be the only honest admission he’s made, including telling Sean Hannity that his liberalism as governor of Massachusetts, was “a mistake.” Now, desperate to calm Tea Party ideologues, he’s crawling Right as fast as hands and knees allow.
    The New York Times portrait is of a man as data-driven as a computer, “a gifted fix-it man... eager to deliver what customers wanted.” He's also one untouched by emotional issues like the war in Vietnam. This well served his drive to succeed in business by really trying. He’s often heard to say that as a business man he “understands how the economy works.” Nobel prize-winning economists would never make that claim.
    If candidate Romney is willing to say whatever voters want to hear, what will President Romney do at the reins of power? That’s something to generate Radical Right nightmares. It might also be what gives Obama the edge he needs to eliminate the question entirely.

CHOW

12/26/2011

PRESIDENT OBAMA MEETING TROOPS IN A MESS HALL

    CHOW
    My first U.S. Army breakfast was creamed chip beef on white toast. The GIs called it “shit-on-a-shingle.” I liked it. Army food varied from post to post the best ever in Santa Ana AFB, California, where the mess officer was said to spend his entire food budget on... food. We ate like kings.
    With precisely 20 minutes for every meal, we rushed into the dining room-style mess hall, tables loaded with bowls of huge black olives, peaches, nectarines, plums, baked or mashed potatoes, platters of pork chops, veal chops, or pot roast, two different vegetables, quarts of milk, coffee, and for dessert, pie or cake, which we topped with slabs of ice cream, on top of that, fresh strawberry preserves, honey over that. These were A-Rations, cooked on the spot from produce bought locally.
    No base matched Santa Ana, yet everywhere the military got the best. Before I became a cadet, in Sioux Falls, SD, radio operator school, the huge base had been carved out of farm land. One day we were marched into a field of ripe tomatoes.
    “Halt! Fall out and eat tomatoes.”

On my one leave, I felt sad for my mom and the shriveled grapefruit she served for breakfast. I learned to drink coffee in the army, first loading it with sugar and condensed milk, but grew to love coffee, eight to a dozen cups a day for most of my life.
Food quality dropped overseas, first in Goose Bay Labrador, where they ate mostly C-Rations [photo, left]. , which came in cans already prepared. It generated the expected griping, especially jellied beef tongue, which I particularly liked.

    Field rations were called K-rations and came in olive-drab waxed boxes the size of Cracker Jacks. [photo, left] and made by the Cracker Jack company, breakfast, dinner, and supper units. On every flying mission, a case or two would be tossed into the plane, passed around when anyone got hungry, in each box a can of Spam-like meat, or cheese, or eggs, dried fruit, a powder that mixed with water to make a sort of candy-flavored drink, a bar of chocolate, four cigarettes, and toilet paper.
    Living on K-Rations had to be tough on ground troops, but for us it was a picnic aloft, and the chocolate was delicious. Troops today have something called MREs—Meals Ready to Eat. You can buy them in outdoor camping supply stores. I have a young friend who said his teacher brought some to class one day, pouches of dried food to which you add water, which then gets hot.
    “Did you like it?” I asked.
    “No.”

MID-AMERICAN WW 2 POWs, AN UNTOLD STORY

12/23/2011

Mid-American WW 2 POWs, an Untold Story
    In Italy during World War 2, bombing missions over the Italian Alps had to fly through anti-aircraft batteries 10,000 feet up the mountains, pretty close since we rarely flew higher than 16,000 feet. If hit we were told to try to make it across the Swiss border to avoid becoming German POWs. We’d be interned, but rumor had it we’d be treated like honored guests, might even go to college in Zurich or Geneva. It was far from the truth. Downed flight crews went into a barbed-wire POW camp much like those in Germany, and if they tried to escape, which is the first duty of a POW, and were caught, they were sent to a horrible jail and thrown in among the most degraded criminals in Europe.
        American POWs in Germany were divided by religion, Jews sent to ancillary death camps. Pacific POWS who survived came back in the worst condition of all. I’ve read stories from King Rat by James Clavel to John McCain's account of “special treatment” by the North Vietnamese, to the recent Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, all of barbaric inhumanity.
        But there's another POW story that remains untold, that of German and Italian POWs held in the USA, 400,000 Germans alone. The photo [above left] shows a group somewhere in rural mid-America, many of whom were loaned to local farmers whose sons were in the US military and needed farmhands.
        I met an Italian ex-POW in Foggia, Savino Bufalo, a photographer on the staff of our paper, The Foggia Occupator, After VJ Day, he’d been quickly repatriated and told us cheerfully about having met an American girl while a POW and that he intended to emigrate to America and marry her.
        Why has no American writer found one of these POWs and drawn out the story? Can it be because the experience wasn’t terrible enough to attract a publisher? Do all POW stories (with the exception of a farce like Stalag 17) have to be unmitigated horror? Yet there must be a publisher willing seek readers fascinated by the contrast between what happened to POWs in the U.S. and American held by any of our erstwhile foes. There's not much time left because WW2 vets are dying off.
        Their story is especially needed to balance out the Bush/Cheney descent into barbarity that gave us Guantanamo and water-boarding, millstones we still cannot shed, and which drag the U.S.A. into the sinkhole of inhumanity alongside all of our erstwhile enemies whose stalags, gulags, and death marches will stand forever as grisly landmarks in the sordid depths to which Humano Sapiens regularly sinks.

BESTIALITY AND MISOGYNY IN TAHRIR SQUARE

12/22/2011

Bestiality and Mysogyny In Tahrir Square
    Will ten thousand women marching in Tahrir Square be enough to change the criminal behavior of Cairo's police? Is such behavior unique to Cairo's police, or does it happen everywhere, including the U.S.A,? Is criminal behavior ingrained in police culture, inherent in the very act of policing as practiced today, or can it be changed by recruitment and training?
    Such questions follow the shocking, debased thuggery in Tahrir Square when uniformed sub-humans attacked, beat, stripped, and stomped one defenseless woman. I cannot personally comprehend what kind of beast in human form could do these things, and like many others might refuse to believe it happened had it not been videoed and sent around the world. The perpetrators are bereft of anything recognizable as human feelings, as most people understand human feelings, unless our conception of human beings is false and such bestiality is all too human.
    But it is not only bestiality. The pack of thugs exhibited a deep and choreographed hatred of women. Years ago, a thoughtful young woman said to me, “Some men are afraid of a woman.” She was not talking about the kind of fear a man might feel for a bigger, stronger man, but something deeper, fear of what Martha Graham termed, “the mystery of woman.”
    Women carry in them the future of the human species. Men have a trivial role that can soon, perhaps already be entirely dispensed with. Any evolutionary advantage of having two sets of genes mingle could be achieved by having women exchange genes between themselves. It can be argued (and has been) that the human race would be better off without self-aggrandizing chest-thumping males, and so would our planet and all its creatures.
    Do men know this, yet squeeze the knowledge into the depths of their unconscious, where it goads them into the kind of hateful acts done in Tahrir Square? Were they further inflamed by the psychotic depths of male chauvinism which plagues some Arab cultures, disenfranchising women, confining them behind walls, hiding them behind veils, forcing them into garments of midnight black?
     One can only hope that such hatred is cultural and not genetic, to be softened and eliminated when culture changes, which it does, no matter how slowly. And until it does, there can only be expressions of horror, condemnation, and universal outcry against the perpetrators, plus sanctions against a country that tolerates bestial acts like the one in Tahrir Square.

TAKING OFF IN THE RAIN

12/21/2011

FLYING SOUTH, PISA TO NAPOLI, AT SUNSET

Taking Off In the Rain
    To many, going from flying to dancing seems strange. I mentioned it to novelist, Jerome Charyn, whom I met only once. “They have a lot in common.”
“True, but I never thought of it."
    After WW II, I wanted to keep flying but not for an airline flying from point A to Point B. Anyway, there were thousands of ex-pilots but no airlines. I joined the Air Force reserves, managed one flight in an AT-6 advanced trainer for fighter pilots, but soon, immersed in dancing, I had no time to keep up my air hours or spend three weeks a year on active duty. Got out just before the Korean War and wonder what life would have been like if I'd re-upped, flown in Korea, etc.
    Flying in the army was an adventure, not just combat, which did have a strange attraction, but all the time. To keep an air rating, pilots had to fly a minimum four hours a month and most flew much more. Missions went everywhere, always something new to see, aircraft to fly, stopovers in exotic places. Just being aloft was magical, and I never tired of cloud formations, each unique, shaped by fractal geometry, the mathematics of nature.
    Every take-off was a transformation, from land-bound to air-free, each landing a return to comfort and my natural habitat. A skill I never mastered, or wanted to, was landing on an aircraft carrier, especially at night. I salute and bow to every Navy pilot, but no thanks.
    Flying through weather reminded you that you didn't belong up there. Weather is less a problem these days with advanced technology, but planes still go down.
    I liked taking off in the rain under low cloud cover. At the head of the runway, windshield wipers arcing, the far end shrouded in mist, advance the throttles, thunder into the splattering drops, lift off, engulfed in clouds, break out into brilliant sun, an alien world of blue sky over a shimmering white blanket.
    Sometimes it was the reverse, take-off under a clear sky, land through cloud cover. These days it's routine, but then the only instruments were a “beam” which sort of told you that you were headed for the runway, and three cockpit compasses, magnetic, gyro, and radio, with somebody in the control tower hopefully watching a tiny blip on primitive radar. Once, flying at 500 feet through misty low-hanging stratus clouds searching for a field near Bangor, Maine, glimpses of forest and farms below, following a radio beacon I wasn't sure was the right one, suddenly to see the field directly below, landing, comparing flights with other freshman pilots, none with more than a few hundred hours in the air, every one of us feeling like lords of space and time.

PEOPLE AND ANTS

12/20/2011

People and Ants
     Ants and humans, the most successful creatures on Earth, populate all continents except Antarctica, their success attributed to the fact that both are highly social. But they are social in different ways. There are over 11,000 species of ants, only one species of human, each ant is born into its niche and cannot change, humans are born unformed and must find a niche in society, ant colonies only change with evolution, human societies are in a constant state of flux. The only overlap: human societies are suspicious of foreigners and quick to war, ants are furiously ready to fight and destroy all foreigners.
        King Solomon said, “Observe the ant, thou sluggard, consider its ways and be wise.” [Proverbs 6:6] This evokes the hard-working worker ant, but there's more. Each ant colony is rigid and each worker, drone, soldier, and Queen is born into the position it will occupy its whole life. Human beings,on the other hand, are born with infinite potential and are shaped by their societies which are always in a state of change.
        And yet people fear change. American society, one of the most dynamic ever, is constantly pulled between those who seek change and those who shun it. The result can be dynamic equilibrium, unless one side overwhelms the other, as in North Korea, which just lost its “Dear Leader,” Kim Jung Il, the son of “Great Leader,” Kim Il Sung, and father of Kim Jung Eun, now in line to inherit under a power elite in deadly fear of change. But this power elite will one day fall, and change will come anyway.
        But is all change good? Everyone wants change that advances liberty, freedom from fear, want, and sickness. It's called progress. The Arab Spring envisions progress in the change from tyranny to democracy. Democracy is stabler than tyranny, which breeds discontent, yet democracies can be voted out, like Germany's promising Weimar Republic was voted out in favor of the National Socialists (Nazis) resulting in the most gruesomely debased society in human history.
        Vying for presidency of the U.S., is Michele Bachmann who proposed a Congressional investigation of President Obama, she and her colleagues approve of torture in an albatross prison on the tip of Cuba, every candidate except Ron Paul wants the Iraq war to continue and excoriates President Obama for ending it, multi-millionaire Mitt Romney calls himself “middle class,” while still raking in millions from deals that closed businesses and fired workers, anonymous millions pour into political campaigns, and Newt Gingrich wants to arrest judges who make decisions he doesn't like. Can any of these shepherd a society seeking progress? Or would they shift it into reverse? Ben Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
        When President George W. Bush's approval rating was down to 18%, Jay Leno asked, “What is the matter with those people?” If any of these candidates become President, when the nation wakes up and asks itself what happened, it will be too late. Democracy is fragile and inefficient, yet magnificent, and it can be stolen away

LIAR! LIAR! PANTS ON FIRE!

12/17/2011

Liar! Liar! Pants On Fire!
    Whatever Newt Gingrich writes, it serves an
agenda. In Days of Infamy, presented as a novel based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he changes facts. Historical novels often do that, but usually the history is ancient. Maybe World War 2 seems like ancient history to him. but there are still some of us around who were alive when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Gingrich has Americans sink a Japanese battleship soon after (never happened) and gives the honor of being the first suicide bomber--Kamikazi—to an American pilot by having him fly his crippled plane into it. Lying about American heroism implies that there wasn’t enough real American heroism for him to write about.
    In Rediscovering God in America, he's out to convince one and all that the Founding Fathers intended religion to be manifest in the public arena. His “proof” is the many statements about God inscribed in stone and written into historical documents. Perhaps his religious constituents will take this as proof that he himslf is devout, and thus honest enough to be their president.
    A Contract with the Earth, purports to be an argument for protecting our air, forests, rivers, and oceans, but the real case is for not hindering entrepreneurs, and we know how caring and considerate they are about preventing oil spills, preserving forests near strip mines, and being sure no poisonous chemicals leech into the water wells of farmers whose land is being frakked for natural gas.
    Gingrich has learned from the advertising industry in the use of language to present something as its opposite. I remember tobacco ads with diagrams of the throat extolling the “medical benefits” of smoking. The “Clear Skies” Initiative of 2003 was a lovely name for a program that let polluters buy and sell the rights to emit poisons.
    In the recent Republican debates, one of his colleagues asked if a man who cheated on his wife could be trusted not to cheat on a business partner or voters. But a look at his books makes it clear that nothing he states is what it appears to be. Another word for that is “lying,” which fits neatly into the big lie that it wasn't Republican policies under G. W. Bush & Company that plunged the country into an enduring recession. Perhaps Gingrich hopes that surrounding a big lie with many little ones will neutralize the stench of all. That’s a lie he may be telling himself.

DARK ENERGY, HIGGS BOSON, "THE GOD PARTICLE"

12/16/2011

Dark Energy, Higgs Boson, "The God Particle
    What a great time to be a scientist! CERN (Conseil Europeen, pour la Recherche Nucleaire), the European Organization for Nuclear Research, with its Large Hadron Collider astride the French and Swiss Borders, may finally reveal whether there is or is not a Higgs boson, dubbed "The God Particle" by someone hoping, perhaps, to tick off atheist scientists. But the Higgs boson may really be out there, something even non-scientists can get excited about.
    To one unable to understand the divine language of higher mathematics, renderings in English, necessarily crude, nevertheless hint at the grandeur of a question the Higgs may answer: what gives matter its mass?
    Why, you may ask, does something have to "give" matter its mass? It's like asking why you can't see through a brick wall? There's a scientific explanation for that too, and the explanation for mass is mind-blowing, even in English. Space is not "empty," but filled with a substance through which all matter flows, and which catches at some kinds of matter more than others. Think of a submarine passing through water. A fat one will be slowed down more than a slender one. So the fat one will have more "mass." The "water" of space is a Higgs Field.
    This changes the universe. We are not motes of life in a lifeless expanse. We are condensates, particles if you like, formed or created (your choice), by whatever commands this Higgs Field in which we live. Do those who call Higgs "The God particle," also consider that the whole Higgs field might be... God? Might Dark Energy be the sweep of God's coattail? It is likely a question which scientists consider jejune. Yet why can't we be particles within the body of God? Not so different from those who profess a "personal relationship" with God, although I have no doubt that they will be the first and loudest to rail against it.
    Why do gold and lead, for two, react more with the Higgs Field than, say, aluminum and carbon? Humano sapiens, all life, in fact, is made of elements lighter than gold and lead. Assuming the Higgs boson is found, what new questions will it trigger? Science has ruled out some ideas favored by science fiction—time travel, for instance. Will the Higgs boson support atheists, or could it lead to a mathematical proof that God exists?

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal