majrodgers

I think that we are in an opportune moment for a blog post.

I’m sheltering in place, I’m self-isolating, I’m social-distancing, I’m hunkering down, all in an attempt to avoid colliding with a passing corona virus 19 beastie, otherwise known as “the Chinese virus “ by that loony lout aka the leader of the free world, who presumably is of the opinion that virus particles along with other microscopic nasties have tiny flags emblazoned on their flanks so that we can all easily tell whence they came. 

Another bit of self-denial that I am somewhat reluctantly practicing is staying away from restaurants and bars, especially those that are so crowded that in order to get to the toilet (aka bathroom) you need to squeeze through hordes of scantily clad young ladies who seem to be intent on dislodging virus particles from their backsides and frontsides by brushing them up against your very own person – without so much as a by your leave…

But soft! What if the damned particle has already invaded my sceptered isle and ere now is fast multiplying within bits unknown of my gilded corpus. Am I doomed?

After all, I have reached a grand old age of four score and three and this dastardly beastie has a cowardly streak, it’s known to have a preference for the defenseless old farts amongst us.

Thus perceive, dear friends, the silver lining with which you are now presented: this very issue of the majr blog might be the final one to escape from my metaphorical pen; lucky you!

So, I blow kisses to you and to the flights of angels that will be sent to sing me to those happiest of happy hunting grounds!

Florida Bulletin

How things change; for the past thirty years the only weather phenomena that I have cared about have been tornadoes in the summer and ice storms in the winter. Now I’m a Florida resident and it’s late August and out there in the Atlantic Ocean, just north of San Juan PR, is a hurricane, whimsically named Dorian, presumably by a fan of Oscar Wilde, and it is inexorably approaching the Florida coast.  They tell us that is now a Category I beast but there’s a whole lot of warm Atlantic water between there and here which could pump it up to a Cat lII beast by the time it slams onto the east coast.

As you can imagine the TV meteorological guys are in their element, surrounded by giant screens displaying trajectories that the eye of the storm might (big might) follow and where it will hit. The best that they can say now is anywhere between Miami and Jacksonville or even up in Georgia which makes their algorithms no better than Old Moore’s Almanac, but they keep trying. And once it arrives five miles out, their solutions and Old Moore’s will be coincident.

This is my first hurricane and it’s something akin to the imminent birth of a first child. You know that it will happen, but you don’t know when. Well-meaning friends and relatives give you advice; the governor has told us to buy in supplies for 7 days. My response has been to have a couple of cases of my favorite tipple delivered. Maybe I will also get in some bottled water and some cans of beans and candles. My worst dread is that the power fails and the ice maker ceases operation—what will my Negroni do then, poor thing!

Bah, Humbug Dorian, your getting old!

A little background.

Infamy (Merriam-Webster)

1 : evil reputation brought about by something grossly criminal, shocking, or brutal

2a : an extreme and publicly known criminal or evil act

b : the state of being infamous

On December 7,1941 Japanese warplanes carried out a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, HI; a little over 2000 people, mainly sailors, were killed. The next day, in a speech to the US Congress, President Roosevelt labelled Dec 7 as a date which will live in infamy. The US declared war with Japan and the other Axis powers

The Bombing of Tokyo, (March 9–10, 1945), fire-bombing raid (codenamed “Operation Meetinghouse”) by the United States on the capital of Japan during the final stages of World War II, often cited as one of the most destructive acts of war in history, more destructive than the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. Although the precise death toll is unknown, conservative estimates suggest that the firestorm caused by incendiary bombs killed at least 80,000 people, and likely more than 100,000, in a single night; some one million people were left homeless. The Japanese later called this the “Night of the Black Snow.” (Wikipedia).

April 12, 1945: Roosevelt dies, and Harry S. Truman becomes president.

Later in 1945, having devastated 67 Japanese cities by conventional and firebombing, President Truman decided to deploy the newly developed atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. Up to 100,000 Japanese, mainly civilians were killed in the blast and many died later from acute radiation sickness. (Wikipedia).

Major General Curtis LeMay has said, “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me.”

What follows is an imaginary conversation between a disembodied voice and the pilot of the Boeing B29 Superfortress christened “Enola Gay”, that was about to lift off from Tinian Field in the Mariana Islands with Little Boy in her belly,

On August 6 1945, Paul was praying as he always did prior to take off; during a pause in his prayer he heard a voice which seemed to come from behind him; he turned round in his seat expecting to see one of the crew there, but there was no one to be seen.

“Hello.” Paul said, “who is there?”

“It is I, he whom you call Lord when you pray,” replied a disembodied voice

“It is you, Lord?” Paul said in an incredulous tone,” but I was just praying to you.”

“Yes, Paul, I heard you and I decided that the two of us should have a conversation, so here I am beside you.”

“But it is my co-pilot who is beside me”

“Not an old man with a grey beard and wearing a white cloak, eh? Yes, I know what you are thinking, but I really am next to you; Joe is having a sort of siesta; but let’s not get bogged down in details, focus on the big picture, please Paul.”

“Er-rr, big picture?”

The big picture, Paul, is that you have been ordered by no less a person than Harry S Truman  to fly this silver bird to Hiroshima and there to release the newly built bomb, Little Boy, now resting in its bay, and explode it over the city. Am I correct?”

“Yes Lord, that is the situation.”

“What have you been told about the expected result of exploding this new weapon on Hiroshima?”

“I was briefed by a group of scientists who told me that they expected up to one hundred thousand persons to be killed outright, perhaps as many as perished in the fire-bombing of Tokyo last March; a similar number to be maimed and an unknown, but very large number to die of radiation sickness within a couple of years.”

“How many of these persons affected would be active military combatants?”

“No numbers are known, but it was expected to be a small percentage of the total.”

“So, a major fraction of those killed or maimed would be civilians, people going about their everyday business? Nothing short of an unspeakable horror.”

“Yes, Lord, so it would seem.”

“That is what it seems to me, and you are the person that is bent on perpetrating this horror, savagery many people would say. Do you feel to be a savage, Paul?”

“But Lord, I am only flying the airplane, obeying my orders.”

“Ah yes, your orders; from the President himself, so he is the savage and you are only an agent?”

“This is not how I see it, Lord, the President is trying to end the war as quickly as possible, to avoid unnecessary loss of life by American forces.”

“Well, Paul, he could end the war tomorrow by declaring a cease fire and a pullback of your buddies to American shores, thereby saving many, many lives, American and Japanese.”

“But would the Japanese also cease fire? If not, they would win the war.”

“So, this is all about winning and not about saving the lives of American boys?  Why would the Japanese not cease firing?”

“Lord, the Japanese are a sub-human race who decapitate American prisoners of war, how could they be trusted to honor a cease fire?”

“Paul, here is where you are entering dangerous philosophical territory, the Japanese people are my children, as are the American and all other peoples. In my eyes, all my children are equal and deserving of equal treatment. Your calling some of my children sub-human makes me shudder; admittedly in every racial group there are some members that behave anti-socially, shall we say. But to label the whole group as sub-humans is wrong and grossly unfair. They could point to the German people and call them sub-human for their horrific treatment of Jews, who were in turn labelled sub-human by the Germans who used that appellation as a reason for exterminating them. And now, look at you and your President, you are about to embark on a mission that will exterminate many, many thousands of innocent Japanese; will history put the same label on you?”

“Dear Lord, I think of myself as a good Christian, I pray and go to church regularly, and yet, here you are asking me if I am a sub-human savage.”

“Paul, praying and participating in churches activities are certainly necessary conditions for a good Christian life, but they are insufficient; you also need to demonstrate that you love and respect your fellows among God’s children.”

“But Lord, America is at war with Japan and I am a military pilot, I have been ordered to fly this mission and if I refuse now I shall surely be thrown into military prison and perhaps tried as a deserter or even a traitor for which I could be executed.”

“Yes Paul, I am sure that you are aware of the thousands of my children, your siblings, that throughout history have been hanged, stoned, shot, burned, disemboweled, and so on for standing up for their Christian beliefs; indeed the first of them was my own son who was crucified. Can you imagine, Paul, what pains he suffered whilst hanging there for hours from the nails through his hands and his feet? The story of Christianity is a continuous trail of torture and death of believers. The men and women who endured these grievous deaths were truly saintly in my eyes, if not in the eyes of the church’s leaders of the day. Paul, I ask you to unbuckle your harness and dismount from the plane and tell your supervisor that your Christian beliefs will not allow you to send a multitude of Japanese people to their deaths.”

Paul was silent for a couple of minutes, seemingly weighing his responsibilities. Finally, he said,

“No, Lord, I will not do as you ask. I regret to say that your voice is not enough, and even if you appeared to me in the flesh, as it were, it would still take a giant leap of faith for me to believe that you were God and not the devil pretending to be God in an effort to interfere in the plans of my President to end the war quickly. I understand your point about the Japanese and the German people, the enemies of America, are all God’s children, but their behavior over the past few years cannot be overlooked. My President has decided that this mission must be carried out and I have been selected to pilot Enola Gay. What you ask, whoever you are, is too much; my orders are clear, and I must follow them.”

“Yes Paul, you are just following orders. That defense has been used by everyone charged with heinous crimes over the centuries. You and your colleagues will assuredly hold the dubious honor of killing more people in a few milliseconds than anyone before you. The bomber pilots of World War II are in a league of their own, witness for example the destructions of London, Coventry, Dresden, Berlin and just recently Tokyo, but many pilots shared in those savage horrors, you are heading to become the supreme champion of all time. You, more or less alone, armed with a single weapon, are on your way to Hiroshima where you will cause the deaths of untold thousands of unsuspecting members of my family. Your President and generals and the military are of the opinion that to have a weapon that can exterminate thousands of my children in a few milliseconds and leave thousands more with a debilitating illness that will eventually lead to a lingering and painful death, is something to be proud of; medals will be given, promotions will be handed out, parades will be organized, children will be given flags to wave. But as the bodies pile up, I shall weep; for me it will be a huge step backwards in the advancement of civilization.”

“I can only repeat what I said earlier, Lord, I am a soldier, fighting in a war.”

“You know what I mean when I say Ten Commandments, Paul?”

“Yes, it is an ancient moral code passed from God to Moses that Christians adhere to.”

“And many non-Christians also. What is the sixth Commandment?”

“Thou shallt not kill; I know where you are going, but Lord, we are at war with the Japanese nation and without killing, war would be virtually meaningless.”

“So, you are willfully disobeying my sixth commandment?”

“Not really because during wartime the sixth is suspended, in a way.”

“Where did you learn this interesting information?”

“From the chaplain, Lord. He explained that killing an enemy soldier in a war is allowed by our church.”

“I see; and not only enemy soldiers but civilians, too, it would appear. I must have a word with the boss of the chaplains and explain that Commandments are not suspended during a war and that anyone who kills is guilty of sinning, and chaplains and the like do not have the right to state or imply that killing is absolved from sin in wartime.”

“The Japanese are also sinning then? What about Pearl Harbor, Lord? The Japanese killed more than 2000 Americans in that attack”

“Yes, some of them are sinning, but the attack at Pearl Harbor was an attack on a prime military target, battleships at anchor and airplanes on the ground at Hickam and Wheeler Fields. Those over 2000 persons killed that you refer to were military personnel, mainly drowning sailors, less than 100 were civilians. The Japanese were aiming to cripple the Pacific Fleet, not kill people going to school or to work or shopping as the US army air force did at Tokyo, or as you intend to be doing later today. Roosevelt called it a day that will live in infamy largely to divert attention from his having been caught with his pants down. The great US military juggernaut was sleeping off their Saturday night parties when the Japanese struck. Carrying out surprise attacks is surely part of military tactics, is it not? Don’t bother to respond, Paul, and I am done now. Since you are determined to go ahead with this evil deed, I will leave you and try my luck elsewhere.”

And so it came to pass that on August 6 and 9, 1945, an American president, a man of little significant accomplishment, heralded in the age of nuclear weapons with the murder of some 200,000 Japanese citizens in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an infamy relegating that of Pearl Harbor to the minor leagues. Pandora’s box was opened, and it was seen to contain limitless potential for the pursuit of killing.

I’ve decided to restart writing blog posts (Oh no! they cry) but first I wish to acknowledge those among my friends, friendly acquaintances and the rest who responded to my earlier note announcing that I am yet alive and kicking! Some very agreeable sentiments arrived in my Inbox. One of them that I found especially pleasant was from Malcolm Kenney with whom I enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration during the later decades of the last century. Malcolm, with tongue firmly planted in cheek (I hope) suggested that the gradation of correspondents that I had used was sadly insufficient and in future my salutation list should be extended to include “bosom buddies, close friends, not-so-close friends, distant friends, dropped friends, former friends, long-lost friends, aspirational friends, business friends, chemist friends” and so on. Indeed, I thank Malcolm kindly for this suggestion which I shall ignore forthwith, although I must confess that “bosom buddies” summons more than a little titillation.

For those of you who do not know Malcolm, he has had a long and distinguished career in designing, synthesizing and characterizing metal-centered tetrapyrrolic compounds based on the phthalocyanine configuration and, as I was interested in the photophysical properties of such materials, we became natural collaborators. Fortunately, this collaboration was facilitated since Malcolm was based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a paltry 100 miles from Bowling Green and I fondly recall meeting him frequently for working lunches at the “Highwayman” restaurant in Milan, Ohio, roughly midway between our two laboratories.

Malcolm became known to me in one of those strange but beautiful coincidences that make life more than just the interval between birth and death; allow me to recount it to you. I was sitting at my desk in my office at U of Texas, a couple of years prior to relocating to BGSU, and I was paging through an issue of JACS, seeking a paper that had looked to be of interest in a bibliographic listing; this was how we did things before the arrival of the internet. I found the paper, and its first page, as all first pages, was on the right-hand page of the journal. However, my eye was drawn to the previous left-hand page, the last page of the contiguous paper, because there was a uv-vis spectrum of a compound thereon which showed an intense peak near 750 nm, a spectral region in which I had become particularly interested. So completely forgetting the paper that had initiated this quest, I perused the paper with the near IR spectrum; it turned out to be about some electrochemical properties of a silicon-centered naphthalocyanine compound that had been synthesized in the Kenney lab in Cleveland. The electrochemistry work had been performed, wonder of wonders, in the group of Al Bard, an eminent electrochemist, and one of my colleagues at Texas just across campus from my office. I excitedly called Al to see whether he had any of the compound remaining and he went to search through his store cupboard. He called back to report that there were a few green crystals in a vial, that I was welcome to, and I sent Pat Firey over to his lab to get the vial and the few grains she got were enough to make a solution in toluene and to perform some exploratory photophysical measurements. My next task was to call Malcolm to introduce myself and to inform him of what we were up to and to suggest a collaboration to which he generously agreed, and so began two decades of fruitful interactions  and attendant NIH funding, all because of happenstance in the juxtaposition of papers in JACS.

I leave you to ponder this concept but as I depart, I beg to inform you that I already have in mind some subjects for another post.

What is becoming abundantly clear to the inhabitants of planet Earth is that one man taking a knee in stony silence during the playing of the US national anthem at a sporting event, speaks louder than the massed voices of thousands of others lustily singing along to the “Star-Spangled Banner”. One wonders what would have happened had a German boy of immense personal courage done the same during a rendition of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied” at one of Hitler’s rallies. I would bet that he would not have done it a second time and to be referred to as a “son of a bitch” would have been the least of his worries.

Nevertheless, it seems to me, that to so patently remain silent at a time when there is an expectation, nay, almost a demand for standing and singing along with your brothers, is another form of the exercise of freedom of expression and as such is guaranteed by the US Constitution to be free from governmental opprobrium. Thus for the President of the United States to call such activists “sons of bitches” and to demand that they are fired by their employers is nothing less than a deplorable insult to the Constitution. Maybe it is the former TV performer that ought to be fired.

I keep thinking of a “joke” that I came across some time ago, it goes like this:

Two astronomers on a far distant planet were conversing and one said, “Did you see that the planet called Earth on that distant solar system had blown up into smithereens?”

“Yes, I saw that; it proves that intelligent life existed there,” the other said.

But does it really prove that my friends? I sometimes wonder whether our astrophysics community should focus their search for intelligent life to this planet Earth, and not concern themselves with far off galaxies.

Such thoughts are, of course, brought on by reading about the behavior of Messrs. Trump and Un, which seems to me to be very similar to that of a pair of little boys screaming insults and threats at each other across the school yard. My fear is that once they have worn their throats dry they will start lobbing rocks at each other and bring us into the condition expressed by the aforementioned joke. In real life, a parent or a teacher would box their ears and send them crying for their mothers. Unfortunately that parent/teacher is missing from the scene, unless Mr. Putin might take up the role. Maybe he could threaten to reduce the one who cast the first stone to ashes; after all, he would be less concerned about the presence of several thousand US military personnel in Korea, or the proximity of US friends Japan, S. Korea, Guam, etc. to the emergent ash pit; and if it was the US who struck first, he should be able to hit enough Trump Towers and presidential golf courses with his nuke-tipped ICBMs until the Donald cried Uncle.

Maybe this scenario is good reason for us all to relocate to Sochi or St. Petersburg? Neither of the two idiots seems to be concerned by Russia as of now. In fact, turning this around, this could be an opportune moment for Mr. Putin to march into the Baltic republics and other states that he has been enviously eying for some time. I can’t imagine that the US, the only force capable of dissuading him, has the capacity for thinking of two things at the same time!

I have often thought that nations that unceasingly arm themselves are like dinosaurs, animals that had impressive body armor but tiny brains; we all know what happened to the dinosaurs-they exist today only in museums. On that note I shall return to my bunker.

These days millions of Americans and others who reside in the US are involved in the preparation of their annual tax returns. In my case for the past couple of years I have used an internet service provided by TurboTax which makes the process simple enough that a person with a PhD in chemistry can sit in front of his computer with the information provided by banks, mortgage companies, etc. and in about 30 minutes the appropriate forms have been filled and submitted to the IRS and to the State of Ohio, after which you can get on with your life again. Coincidentally, on the same day as I did my taxes I read this article by the actor Mark Rylance (https://www.theguardian.com/profile/mark-rylance ) in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/23/my-tax-should-be-for-peace-mark-rylance?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The gist of Rylance’s article is that by paying his taxes he is being forced into a collusion with the British government in their warring activities. Moreover, since war today is a highly technological exercise in which weapons of death roll down city streets or rain from the skies, a large fraction of the maimed and dead are non-combatant citizens that just happen to live there and want the war to go away. No longer are battles fought on fields between phalanxes of the willing; Afghanistan and Iraq are not Agincourt or Culloden.

Rylance supports a political movement in Britain that campaigns for the right to allow individuals to redirect the military portions of their taxes towards peaceful forms of conflict resolution, a modern version of conscientious objection; I wish him and his fellows good luck in their quest.

A very simple internet search showed me that the US taxpayer such as me contributes (willingly or not) about 30% of his tax payment to the Department of Defense and I know full well that no amount of contributed money in that direction will protect me from harm in an attack such as the one at Westminster the other day-a bobby on the beat might do so, but a drone pilot in Tampa never will.

Anybody with half a mind that is reading this will recognize that the real issues are being skirted around here; maybe I’ll have a go at them later, meanwhile enjoy life.

“You going out, Mel?
“Just for a while DJ, I’ll be back soon.”

“What’s that weird hat you’re wearing, it looks like a pink tea cozy.”

“Just something that Karl made for me, all the girls are wearing them.”

“OK sweetie, well be careful out there, they say there’s a parade or something.”

“Don’t worry, poppie, I’ll have a nice Secret Service man to look after me.”

“Is there another dance tonight? I really like dances, everybody looks so nice.”

“We’ll see, now go up for your nap.”

“Yes dear.”

This video came to me from another source; I thought I would pass it on.

Note that Trump Tower is the backdrop.

I came to Sarasota, FL last Thursday after a boring but not uneventful drive from the frozen north. What made it uneventful was that in South Georgia one of my rear tires blew out. I pulled off the highway and stopped on the shoulder and asked myself what do I do now? I was just north of the little town of Cordele, GA and about 300 miles from my final destination and I figured that the little emergency spare (buried under all my belongings in the trunk) would not be adequate for that journey. So I pulled out my trusty cell phone and asked Siri to find tire service folk in the area and in due course he/she/it advised me about a company called A and D tire services in Cordele; even calling them for me. When the gent who answered the phone finally realized that he was dealing with a geriatric incompetent, he established where I was, told me to stay put (not that I had any possibility of leaving), and said he would send his helper to sort me out. After about 20 minutes of my doing nothing this venerable pick-up truck arrived, driven by a young, strong-looking African American who introduced himself as JB and who proceeded to take off the wheel and remove the damaged tire and replace it with a reconditioned one. In the process he used tire levers that dwarfed those that I had used for my bike tires when I was a lad. In the bed of the truck was a gas-powered air compressor which pumped up the replaced tire in no time. He even had a little credit card reader in his cab, and in less than one hour from making the call I was back on the road, and everything with the exception of the compressor and the payment was accomplished by the skill and the muscles and the levers of JB. I felt that I was witnessing a microcosm of the building of the pyramids!

And so later that day I arrived in Sarasota and proceeded to move my stuff into the house that Alex had found for me. Next morning I took a trip to the Comcast office to get cable TV and internet connected since there was none of such in the house. The good news was that this would be done forthwith; the bad news was that the set up would need a tech to visit and so the forthwith would not be until next Wednesday, five days hence. Today is Tuesday and so I have now suffered four of those five interminable internet-free days and I am almost at my wits end! No Netflix, no English Premier League, no PBS News Hour, etc, etc.

How did it come to this? My contemporaries and I and our children grew up and thrived without internet or cable TV or smart phones or computers, so how is it that I become so discombobulated by a few days of i-privation? I suppose it can be put down to the old maxim of “what you never have you never miss!” I imagine that there are some, such as Donald T. who would feel the same way as I do now if Twitter disappeared, but I have never stooped to Twitter so I cannot say. There are those among you who might be thinking “Well, he has his bloody iPhone why does he not use that to access the internet!” And you would be right, but streaming movies and soccer games gobbles Gigas like crazy and the screen is so damn small!

Have you noticed that Bah! Humbug! time is just around the corner?

Enjoy the Solstice.