Group A

January 3, 2022

What China is now doing concerning Taiwan is very disheartening. It insists that Taiwan is part of mainland China and that it will never give up this belief, going to war with the U.S. if necessary to keep Taiwan from “seceding.” It’s as if China has abandoned its tradition of cooperation and replaced it with the struggle for power in competition with the U.S. and Western tradition.

China is confident in its handling of Hong Kong. Hong Kong, with a population of 7.5 million is mainly a financial hub; international interest is focused on making money—Wall Street interests. China has no problem arresting young people who foolishly defend Hong Kong as a “democracy.” 

But Taiwan with its population of almost 24 million people is a different matter. Right now the Chinese in Taiwan seem perfectly content sharing in the prosperity fueled by the United States and doing things as they see fit. For example, when cases of Corona virus occur, they are able to persuade their population to lock down. However, If they are forced by China to break ties with the West and accept a role in the life style and ideology of mainland China, Taiwan will resist.The Chinese of Taipan need to make up their own minds: if their prosperity is lost, as I believe it will be as part of the continued decline of the U.S., they will voluntarily choose to be part of mainland China. China needs to be patient.

Also, the U.S. may lose interest in Taiwan because it has to defend against Russia’s growing influence in Central and South America. That also may encourage the Taiwanese to rejoin the mainland. 

January 1, 2022

Maya Lin, a 21 year old college student, designed the Viet Nam Memorial, and we are now paying the price for her genius. She drew attention to the importance of the individual, replacing emphasis on the ideology of statues—for example of Robert E. Lee or George Washington. 

But now the individual is asserting its “ideology,” demanding recognition and admiration. The LGBT community, for example, demands not just their right to live life as they choose, but they sometimes often go further, insisting on their right to be admired for it. When they are denied that admiration they become angry, which fuels the anger of those denying them the right, creating increased polarization in our society. 

That’s the way the Wheel of Life turns (as Tibetan tankas express it). Hopefully, that Wheel gradually turns into a drift towards goodness in the human genome.

January 1, 2022

Central Park (or Nordstrom) Tower rises 1,550 feet in the air, and is the tallest primarily residential building in the world. It was begun in 2014 and completed last year at a cost of $3 billion. The impact on the environment is almost unimaginable; at one point 19 trucks carrying concrete were lined up to pour their content into the foundations. The manufacture of concrete is one of the greatest contributions to global warming. 

Five hundred years earlier Leonardo Da Vinci and his shop of workers were painting the Mona Lisa. It took them 16 years, layering white paint, which reflects light, over darker colors, which absorbs it, creating a remarkable impression of depth to the entire painting—especially the eyes and lips, which of course interest us the most. It is a triumph of “engineering,” equal to that of  Central Park Tower, but at zero cost to the environment in terms of global warming.

December 20, 2021

It would be a good thing if the Second Amendment to the Constitution was repealed, but the outcome is unpredictable. (It should be noted that the United States is worse than Third World countries; those countries at least make ownership of guns illegal.) It could certainly happen that the U.S. would descend into a civil war, but it would be far worse than the civil war of the 1860s. At that time the population of the U.S. was only a few million; now it is 330 million, and the technology of weaponry is far more developed and lethal than it was in the 1860s. 

The results of this civil war would also have a global effect, since the U.S. still seeks hegemony in the world. China might be able to save us from total Armageddon. China in its long history has been through the struggle between cooperation and competition, and reflected deeply on the subject (as demonstrated in Lin Yutang’s book, “The Wisdom of China and India”).

So the future is unpredictable. But as Murphy’s law says: “Whatever can happen will happen,” and that applies to both the bad and the good. We can hope the good will eventually gain over the bad, and there will be a drift towards the good in the genes of human beings.

November 2021

Alan Paton finds himself “no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of himself and to deny it with another.” It’s tempting for most people to identify with that problem, believing that they too strive towards the highest but are too weak to reach it, and so they torture themselves with guilt. It’s a trap easy to fall into.

The fact is that most people want pleasure and happiness that is continuous, perfect, and permanent (as Spinoza would say), but of course that is impossible to attain. Their attempts and failures are obvious to themselves and everyone, so they feel shame and guilt. When they hear Alan Paton’s words, they think they are suffering from the same problem he suffers from. They are not.

Rather, their problem is how to control and moderate their desire for happiness in such a way that it does not lose its essence, its sweetness. It’s not easy to do that, but as the current Dalai Lama says, it is your duty to be happy.

Paton is like all other missionaries, protestant and Catholic alike, passionate to convert the “heathen” to their own beliefs. They passionately defend the rights and dignity of those they seek to convert, but never (or rarely) marry one. It’s a deep sort of hypocrisy they torture themselves with; they “cannot live like that.”

When two neurons whose action potentials travel one way come in contact traveling in opposite directions, they create a brief electromagnetic radiation that travels to adjoining neuron clusters or ganglia. That is telepathy in the brains of two people. It occurs only when they are looking at each other. When it happens, however, they are the same person.

It’s a common expression: “I know what you’re thinking.” I think, in fact, there is a neural basis for that idea. A neural event is a fragment of a sensation—it transmits as an electro-magnetic radiation. Enough of these coming together will convey a thought. That is why we believe when looking at someone we think we know what they are thinking.

This is how it works:

1. A water droplet is turned into mist

    Mechanism: Brownian movement, i.e. random movement among particles

2. Neural connection

    Mechanism: Electromagnetic radiation

3. SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence)

    Mechanism: Electromagnetic radiation

(The problem with 2 and 3 is that it is like looking for the proverbial  needle in a hay stack, but greatly magnified.Nevertheless, there is enough in this outline, I think, to establish proof of concept.)

The government of China is structured in such a way that the will of the people is expressed; the government of the United States is not. In China, a country of 1.5 billion people, the people’s will is expressed through discussion and argument in earlier childhood on up to membership in the Communist Party, and from there discussion by the three thousand or so members of the National People’s Congress, and then finally through unanimous decision (which Lenin required of all decisions in Russia}. That is “The Will of the People.”

A few minutes ago I was looking at the branches of a tree outside my window and thought of the line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 73: “bare ruined choirs.” The metaphor has always struck me as remarkable, but I never tried to think out why. The branches are just now beginning to bud and in two months they will be filled with leaves. But in the winter they are bare. So they are indeed choirs, but bare and ruined in winter, but in summer they are lush, a full choir of birds.

China is better structured for decision making than the U.S. There is no question about that. With 5-year plans it has time to change or adjust its decisions, abandon them and start all over with new ones. The U.S. has no such time because every two years politicians must decide on the decisions made two years before. More fundamentally still, the federal government cannot tell the 50 states what they should do.

China has borrowed liberally from the U.S.—its capitalism and movies especially; and from the West in general it has borrowed its music literature, poetry, and other aspects of culture.

Just recently it was revealed by the New York Times that Chinese-born Elaine Chao and her husband Mitch McConnell, long-time leader of the Senate are using her family connections and interests in China to make millions of dollars for them both. This is corruption on the largest scale; but here it is just news, even amusing news. In China, both Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell would likely be serving long prison sentences.

But the problem is how China would and should handle culture from the U.S.—the movies in particular. Take “Manchurian Candidate” for example. It is a powerful story of how North Korea captured American soldiers in the Korean War and brainwashed them. Would the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allow it to be shown in China? That is a question they face with a lot of other excellent Hollywood productions that challenge authority—“The China Syndrome” and “Fried Green Tomatoes” for example. Or would they follow India and only allow such movies as “Bollywood” produces, leading to mere propaganda films that the Mao era in China produced in its last years.

China—or rather, the Chinese system of government—is too smart for that. But it faces a serious problem.