Our Trip to the Solar Eclipse

by Madeleine Kando

We left Boston early Sunday morning, the day before the 2024 Solar Eclipse. We have friends who live close to the Canadian border, who invited us to watch it from their house. The path of the eclipse crosses their property, as it travels from Mexico to Maine, so we did not hesitate to accept their invitation.

After countless visits to ‘Bear Rock’, the place where our friends live, we have developed a routine. The small town of Plymouth, New Hampshire has become our pit stop on this five-hour journey. We stop for coffee and muffins before we enter the White Mountains. In the hazy distance, we see the mighty snow-covered Mount Washington, branded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world. It is not particularly tall at 6,000 feet, but has some of the most extreme weather, with the highest surface wind speed ever observed by man – 231 miles per hour.

We drive through Franconia Notch, a major mountain pass, which was home to the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock formation in the shape of a face. But in 2003 the Old Man first lost his nose and then completely collapsed. Still, the notch is impressive with or without it.

Our friends are a breed apart. Almost half a century ago, they bought a piece of land for a smitten in this forgotten nook of New Hampshire. They are city transplants, and living in an area where everyone has known each other since they were born, they will always be the couple from ‘somewhere else’. They live a solitary life, with their two horses on 300 acres. But they love it.

As we drive up to their house, we see Marc on the porch looking up at the sky, testing his eclipse glasses. He fiddles with the glasses, looks up, and fiddles some more. He doesn’t see us. I call him, but he is hard of hearing and doesn’t hear me. Finally, he comes over in his slippers through the snow. We hug and go inside where we find Helen in front of the stove, preparing one of her delicious meals. Read more...

About Mozart

By Tom Kando

A good friend of mine recently asked me to provide her with a few comments about Mozart, and the social significance of his music. Here is my reply: Hi Gail,

Mozart! 

Many people think that he was the greatest composer ever. Everyone agrees that he was one of the three greatest (the other two being Bach and Beethoven). Mozart died at thirty-five, and even so managed to compose over eight hundred works. The Requiem (to which you were just listening) was his last composition, one of the few works with a magnificent but somewhat somber character. 

He was a child prodigy, and his compositions matured as he got older. His operas, piano and violin concertos, his quartets, his symphonies got better and more imposing as he matured. Mozart was also a virtuoso on the piano, the violin and other instruments. His father was also a composer. He began Mozart’s musical education when Amadeus was still an infant. Unfortunately, their relationship was difficult. However, most of Mozart’s music is enormously happy . One of his few tragedies is his opera Don Giovanni, which contains a moral condemnation of promiscuity (Don Giovanni goes to Hell). 

Have you seen the movie Amadeus? (1984). A must. One of the greatest movies ever made. However, don’t accept it literally. It takes many liberties with the facts of Mozart’s life. Even so, the movie is correct in describing Mozart dying in obscurity and only gaining justified recognition posthumously. Such is the fate of many geniuses in all the arts. Think of Van Gogh, Kafka and so many others! The problem with geniuses is that they are often far ahead of everyone else, much too brilliant to be recognized in their own time.

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An Air Travel Nightmare

By Madeleine Kando

Flying is like signing away your rights as a human being. Not only is your life put on hold, but you never know which side of providence your fate will fall.

On my most recent flight to Spain, I thought lady luck had smiled on us, but after we were all seated in the full, upright, and locked position, our carry-ons stowed away, we were told that there was a slight problem with one of the landing lights, which would only take 20 minutes to fix. I could see Lady Luck start packing her bags and by the time we were told that unfortunately, they needed to wait for a replacement part to be flown in, she had stepped out of the plane altogether.

We were 'deplaned' and asked to wait at the gate, where we were offered complimentary refreshments, a euphemism for the familiar constipation-causing mini pretzels and soft drinks. What would that incoming plane do without the part we would be stealing from it, I wondered? Probably wait for another plane to come in, have those passengers wait 2 hours, and so on, ad infinitum.

As I was observing my co-passengers, some struggling with fretting, hungry babies, others snoring away or talking on their cell phones, I couldn't help but admire the collective patience and goodwill that filled this cold and sterile space. No cursing or yelling, no angry kicking, just a group of docile, well-behaved human beings.

We were finally allowed to board again and I was hoping that my connecting flight from Dublin to Malaga would also have some part missing so that it would not leave without me.

After a few hours, I take out my phone to write notes. I do that, so I won’t forget the details of an event, which I later want to incorporate into one of my silly stories. I keep my phone on the window side, away from my neighbor, and start typing. ‘Here I am packed like a sardine, afraid to ask the heavy-set Irish woman next to me to stand up, so I can go to the bathroom’.

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Project 2025: A Blueprint for Authoritarianism

By Madeleine Kando

During Biden’s State of the Union address, the President referenced a speech given by President Franklin Roosevelt almost a century ago. Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that his were no ordinary times. ‘Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world’.

Biden continued: ‘Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. Freedom and democracy are under attack again, both at home and overseas’.

These words are no longer alarmist rhetoric. While France becomes the first country to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution, the United States is barreling its way in the opposite direction. The Far Right is now ready ‘to battle anti-American “woke” forces’ and enshrine white Christian patriarchal values in our government. 

Project 2025 *

In case of a Republican victory in the 2024, the far right is planning to implement an authoritarian takeover of the America Government. They call it ‘Project 2025’. Published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Project 2025 is a clear threat to our democracy, and we must treat it as such.

It wants the President to have direct control of all the departments in the Executive branch, so it can gut them at will (including the DOJ and the FBI) and reform others, such as the Department of Education, by funneling tax money into religious charter schools, instead of public schools. It calls the DOE a “one-stop shop for the 'woke' education cartel” and plans to close it down altogether and return all responsibility for education to the states.

An illegal instrument called "Schedule F" would allow the President to fire and replace thousands of civil servants who are now shielded from political manipulation. The entire Executive branch will become politicized.

The lengthy document covers all departments in great detail. It wants to give a President (Trump is their favorite candidate) complete control over Education, Health Care, Defense, the Press and even Finances.

It is frighteningly candid in its goals for the future of the country.

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What Comes After the American Century?

By Thomas Kando 

There is today a widespread sense that America is in decline. On the right, there is MAGA and the Trumpites. On the left, many young people and not-so-young people feel that America is doing everything wrong. Overseas our adversaries, like Putin, wishfully predict America’s downfall. And many people in countries friendly to us also talk about our (allegedly growing) weaknesses. Whether you care about America or not, pessimism about our country is widespread. 

What is one to make of all this? 

To me, it is not clear that America is in decline. I have heard this refrain my whole life. Over the decades, there have been many predictions of the imminent end of what has been called the American century. Each crisis has produced predictions of precipitous American decline. During the Vietnam war many people were convinced that the US was declining. In the sixties Nikita Khrushchev said “we shall bury you,” and many western intellectuals believed him. After 9/11 some European pundits said that America’s pre-eminent position in the world was coming to an end. 

When we hear the term “American century.” the implication is often that this is coming to an end. 

For the past eighty years, those of us of a certain age - including the baby boomers - have lived lives of stability, world peace, prosperity, progress and democracy. By and large anyway, and granted, mostly so in the western world. 

This can be attributed to the Pax Americana during that period of time. Thanks to American help, the American economy and American military might, the devastated world (including our former enemies) was rebuilt and kept free and prosperous. 

I’ll skip the debate as to whether the Pax Americana was self-serving for the US or altruistic. 

America’s dominance was enormous right after the end of World War Two, when its economy was half that of the world. This huge advantage was bound to decline, as the rest of the world rebuilt itself. Eventually the US settled at one fourth of the world’s economy, and this has pretty much remained so for many years. 

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2024 Global Elections and Voting

By Madeleine Kando

The year 2024 will be the year of elections: four billion people will cast a vote in over 60 countries, which is about half of the world’s population. 900 million in India, 200 million in Indonesia, 160 million in the US and so on.

But the election that the entire world is most anxious about is the US Presidential election. If we elect a leader that encourages Russia to attack those NATO nations that fall short on defence-spending and admires dictators, many countries will think twice about their allegiance to America.

Many foreigners think that if a Democrat wins the White House, the whole country must have voted for that candidate. Vice-versa, if a Republican wins the Presidency, it means that the whole country is Republican. That is because the two-party system is a foreign concept for countries that do not have our voting system.

In America, every district elects a single representative. Voters cast a vote for a candidate, one candidate wins, and all the others lose. This makes our elections “winner-take-all” — if a candidate wins 51 percent of the vote, she wins 100 percent of the representation. Any voters who did not back the winning candidate are not represented in government. 

First Past the Post vs Proportional Representation

The First Past the Post system is one of the least democratic systems by global standards. In fact, some political scientists wonder if it qualifies as democratic at all. But clearly some people think this is the best way to organize elections.

With a Proportional Representation system, on the other hand, the percentage of seats reflects the percentage of votes. If a party wins 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats. It is the most widely used system in the world and can be found in almost every country.

The Single Member District system, part of the First Past the Post scenario, guarantees that a large portion of voters will not be represented. The laws are vague on whether the single-member district system is Constitutionally locked in, or whether States have overriding authority on how to select their representatives. 

But the problem with an established voting system is that it is resistant to change. Our two-party system has been in place since Thomas Jefferson and Madison disagreed on whether a central government was necessary and how much power it should have. Ever since then, partisan polarization pulled the parties further apart by a bunch of ideologists, like a piece of chewing gum, to the point of breaking.

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Is Math a Discovery or an Invention?

Thomas Kando 

(Note: the title of this article is similar to an article by Mario Liovo from which I quote extensively, below) 

I have been thinking about the relationship between the universe and mathematics. Humans have measured and given numbers to various objects. The earth’s circumference is 40,000 kilometers. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. When I first learned about the earth’s size in elementary school geography class, I thought “wow! How neat. How come the earth is exactly 40,000 kilometers in size? What a coincidence. Such a simple and memorable whole number.” 

Of course, I was putting the cart before the horse. I did not understand that “kilometer” is not an a priori characteristic of nature. The earth is (approximately) 40,000 kilometers in circumference because humans decided to use as their basic unit of length one forty millionth of the earth’s circumference, however long that is. They called it the meter, of which one thousand added together make a kilometer. 

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's polar circumference is approximately 40,000. (metre) 

But it was later determined that its length was short by about 0.2 millimetres because of miscalculation of the flattening of the Earth, making the prototype about 0.02% shorter than the original proposed definition of the metre. Regardless, this length became the French standard and was adopted by most of the rest of the world. So the polar circumference of the Earth is actually 40,008 kilometres, instead of 40,000. (Earth’s Circumference) 

Then there is the speed of light: Light travels at (nearly) 300,000 kilometers per second (in a vacuum). How convenient! I thought as a youngster. Like earth’s circumference, the speed of light is also a neat, simple and memorable quantity. 

Of course humans must deal with natural phenomena in order to survive, so we have developed measurement systems. These are arbitrary, but hopefully as practical and as scientifically usable as possible. We must measure everything - time, temperature, electricity, weight, distance, speed, you name it. A decimal system seems to be advantageous over alternative systems, as exemplified by temperature: water freezes at zero and boils at 100. Neat and easy. A liter of water weights a kilo, which is a thousand grams. Simple. 

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The Story of a Decal Sticker

By Madeleine Kando

One sunny day, as the winter's snow began to melt, the bird decal on my window pondered why he was stuck there, his wings immobilized for eternity. 




He gazed out onto the yard, the late afternoon shadows growing longer, watching real birds fly by and feed at the bird feeders."Why am I sitting here, collecting dust? Is my sole purpose in life to prevent real birds from crashing into the glass? I long to be free! A strong hailstorm could dislodge me from this glass, and I could fly! Am I not a bird, after all?"

 

He wriggled and wriggled, but nothing happened. His back was firmly attached to the glass. All this wriggling tired him out, so he started to doze off and soon fell into a deep sleep. Decals dream, you know. They might be flat, but they dream of soaring in the blue sky. In his dream, he was looking down at houses with large windows with strange shapes stuck to them. Those shapes evoked something familiar, a past life, another world, stirring feelings of dread, mixed with relief.

A loud crash jolted him awake. Not a foot away, he saw a huge red-tailed hawk. He had seen those monsters before. A shiver went through his flat body.




The hawk's talons were kneading something on the ground. A pigeon had collided with the glass and lay on the ground, dazed and motionless. The hawk, perched on a branch, had swooped down, pinning the pigeon before it could escape. It was now slowly kneading the life out of him, patiently waiting until the pigeon's body gradually stopped moving. Then, it expanded its enormous wings and flew away with the dead pigeon dangling from its powerful claws.




The decal felt sorry for the pigeon but thought:"What good am I stuck here if I cannot even stop birds from crashing into the window?"

He sadly looked out on the falling snow, fearing that he would never fly, never hop on the bird feeder, or sing to attract a mate.

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Weird Electorates

Tom Kando 

Recent poll numbers: In head-to-head matchups, Trump leads Biden by five points (49 to 44) and Haley leads Biden by thirteen points (52 to 39). 

I don’t get it. The electorate seems to have lost its senses. 

Not that Americans are alone. The wacky rightward political trend is taking place in many countries, We live in an age of reactionary nationalism and populism. This is clearest in Europe and in the US, where the former dominant group - white men, by and large - is panicking at the prospect of sharing power with the growing other groups. 

Coincidentally, several of the countries where the Far Right is on the march are places where I grew up: Hungary, where I was born, has been led by the extreme right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban for nearly two decades. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, the extreme right has also gained force in France, where I spent much of my childhood. And Holland, the country where I spent my next ten years, has also recently elected a far-right majority. In several such countries, (Holland and France, among them), farmers are one of the most vocal and angry constituents of this conservative resurgence. Other examples of the trend include Italy, where prime minister Giorgia Meloni strongly opposes the influx of immigrants, and Britain which, under Brexit, decided eight years ago to withdraw from the European Union. 

And then we have the US. 2024 may well see the return of Donald Trump into the White House. I fail to see how replacing Biden with Trump (or Haley, for that matter) would be good for this country. Let me briefly re-state the obvious: 

We must re-elect Joe Biden. This is a no-brainer. You and I might prefer a younger candidate, for instance Gavin Newsom, but neither he nor any other viable young candidate is running. We are now left with two alternatives. Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. The latter is so abnormal psychologically as to place the country - indeed, the whole world - in danger. He is utterly incompetent in dealing with foreign countries, be they allies or adversaries. He alienates other heads of state by insulting them. He plays golf instead of running the country. Haley is not dangerous and incompetent in the same extreme way as Trump. However, her policies regarding most issues (abortion, immigration, the economy, foreign affairs, etc.) would be contrary to what most Americans need and desire.

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The Importance of Voting Systems

By Madeleine Kando

Depending on where you live in the world, voting systems vary greatly. In some countries, people don’t vote at all. They live in dictatorships. In some other countries, voting is restricted to certain parts of the population (usually men). Universal suffrage is shockingly recent. Before World War II, women couldn’t vote in 155 of the 195 countries in the world. Whether you lived in beautiful France, Switzerland, or sunny Spain, women had no voice. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote only 8 years ago!

Types of Voting Systems

There are two predominant electoral systems in the world: Plurality voting and Proportional Representation.

Plurality Voting (also called “first-past-the-post” or "winner-take-all") awards a seat to the candidate who receives the most votes. It need not be a majority (50%+), so long as the candidate has a larger number of votes than all other candidates. Plurality voting does not represent all (or even most) voters. Since a candidate needs only a plurality of votes, most voters may have voted against the winner. One attempt to improve this non-representation model is a system called Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff.

Proportional Representation makes the percentage of seats reflect the percentage of votes. It is the most widely used system in the world and can be found in almost every country. If a party wins 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats.

The Single Transferable Vote is an important form of proportional representation. It is used in Ireland, Australia, and Malta for national elections. Other countries use it in local elections, and even some communities in the United States (such as Cambridge, MA) use it today. According to the Democracy Index, the STV is the most democratic system in the world.

Democracy

The whole point of a voting system is to allow citizens to decide who will govern them. The word democracy was first used in ancient Athens. It is a combination of two Greek words: demos (a citizen of a city-state) and kratos (meaning ‘power’ or ‘rule’). It means ‘the rule by the people’.

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