Sopranos.... The end!

So the Sopranos didn't end with Tony getting whacked... it ends with him chewing onion rings with Meadow and AJ and Carm just being lucky. He's one in a million... Phil is whacked, Melfi is now free of his torments, but he's a much better boss thanks to her help. The Melfi Tony relationship is the walkaway lesson.

The cat keeps looking at Christopher's photo. There's a dude in the bathroom - is he packing?. Carlos is singing, Tony will probably do time soon...

It's over, everything Tony ever touched turned to crap, for the 2nd or 3rd generation. The Godfather glory is stripped, shitty people ruin lives. That's the lesson. Not so difficult if you just think about it for a minute. Good ending. Thanks HBO

Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Ch. 1. Baseball

I was 9-years-old. Another night was swirling past. It was 2 or 3 in the morning on a school night and I was thinking about baseball again. Over and over the green grass the p'ting of the bat, the reaction the jump racing after the fly ball accellerating so I just might be able to dive and snag that fly before it hits earth... then the color drains out of the scene. The imaginary me pulls up, no longer cares and the ball drops. It doesn't really even matter if I pick it up. The runner might as well take a right at first base and go back home and play with his other friends. The pitcher might as well roll the ball home, there are so many other things we could be doing. The whole game is completely ridiculous and utterly pointless, and I've been wasting my time thinking about playing it, watching grown men play it on the scratchy black and white television or listening under the crack in my door to radio broadcasts..
Who really cares if you dive and snag that fly. Who cares if you dig in just hard enough on your last step to lunge the extra inch and make a snow-cone catch that you roll up with your wrist to keep the ball from slipping out?

I remember crying and rerunning the scene in my head over and over. Each time the joy of chasing after a pop up just at the edge of my range seemed more impossible to locate. It really is an absurd game, and caring as much as I did about it was, it seemed to me for the first time that night insane.

I had spent every cent of my allowance for the past three years on baseball cards. At times even resorting to theft to collect more of the Topps images with the player's stats on the back. I had 5,000 cards by the time of this existential crisis.

We had serious inflation in those days, in 1974 at the beginning of the season I paid 10 cents plus a penny tax for a pack of 8 cards. Later that season Dougherty drugs upped the price to 15 cents plus 2 cents tax. I remember packs going up to 10 cards and going up to 20 cents plus 2 cents tax. Whatever the price and however I had to scrounge, all my sense in those years was given over to baseball.

And what did I have to show for it? I'd alphabetized them, sorted them by team and home run totals and wins (for pitchers), by years of service, by all-star status. And I would build huge houses out of them that I would bomb with other cards.

I would pull out the card of the player at bat when WTIC's Boston Red Sox broadcast and put him at home plate on my mother's diamond-shaped living room Oriental rug... "Rico Carty steps up to the plate," Ned Martin would say. "He's been struggling this season to find his stroke," Jim Woods. Would pitch in.
"There's a long fly deep left field..."

But what conceivable difference could possibly be made whether this fly ball off Bill Lee on April 13, 1976 would find the screen over the monster.

That night, I recognized for the first time, that there was no point. It didn't matter any more than whether I put on my left shoe first or the right.

After sobbing some, I steeled my emotions. It was a very similar sensation to the realization I had come to at age 6 when I realized that Gramps Beale (my great grandpa) was just the first person I know who died and that everyone else including me was destined to follow. I desparately wanted to talk to my Mommy, who was sleeping in the next room. I crept out of bed stood at my parent's closed door and planned to tell her about how sad I was with the revelation that baseball was completely pointless and that I didn't care whether I hit caught or threw a ball ever again...

I had woken my parents 2-3 times in the past few years when I was sick. I remember a particularly disturbing digestive condition that required an enema... This felt just as bad, but still I felt funny and couldn't wrench the courage to knock on my parent's door. I sat down on the landing. Relaxed a bit and thought about what I felt I had to say to my mommy (who incidentally thought baseball was ridiculous). I was tired, worked up, but with my guard down the image of a fly ball again popped into my head. Adrenaline surged as I accellerated, it didn't matter, but it was the only way to play the game. I surged forward in my mind the gray tones flamed green, I leapt I caught the ball. It was fun and right and the only way to play the game to try and to care. Not just for me in that moment, but for the batter who wanted a legitimate hit, not a gimme... And for the pitcher and for all the other players on my team and all the other teams in the league. The game, the season, the records and the history only work if everybody is allowing their marrow to govern their actions. Anything less is oblivion.

I crept back into bed and woke up loving baseball more than ever. Thirty years later I would much less precipitously, but just as thoroughly come to the same conclusion about fiction. Pointless, yes, but there are more than enough dividends to justify the willing suspension of disbelief. That will be the subject of my next blog.

Diverted

So I stayed up all night worrying about being an immature idiot and whether my flight to Rochester, New York for "spring break" would be cancelled. By 4 am there was a serious blizzard blowing and 6 inches of powder in upstate NY and a front bearing down on Boston, but my wife cheerily assured me that we still had a window before the Nor'easter shut down all travel.

So I pulled myself together, packed my golf clubs and my son's into a hard cover tube that looks like a bazooka tube to teh TSA and always gets searched. Even though we would at best be lucky to smack whitey at a range the idea of a week's vacation without the prospect of sport makes me wither.

Spring break 2007 would involve packing up the remnants of my parent's estate in a snowstorm. Dad killed himself 11 months ago, unable to recouperate from the blow struck when my mom died in 2003 from the sporadic form of mad cow disease.

I was hardened, hung-over and fairly heavily stressed out when we pulled into Logan. The rain from the Nor'easter was starting to fall sideways I figured we'd be lucky to fly any time in the next two days. They called our section and I stood there talking to a guy in a Red Sox hat about how we were heading into the teeth of the storm - six inches fallen already and 1-2 feet forecast. He told me he thought we would be flying around it. But I pointed out that we had to land in it nonetheless. Then my wife Emily handed me my ticket... to San Juan Puerto Rico and said, Surprise!

It was awesome. My son Clint didn't figure it out until we were landing and the pilot mentioned that it was 87 degrees and that we were landing in San Juan Puerto Rico... What continent are we on? He asked bewildered by the possibilities.

My daughter was wondering about why we were flying over the ocean, but is still more surprised that her mother could fool her for so long...

So here I am in the mountains at Nelson's Country House a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Carribean National Forest with about 700 screeching frogs yelling in my ear. 2000 miles from estate planning and putting my family heirlooms in PODS containers. I'm told there are more pleasant surprises to come, there always are with Emily... It's good to be alive.

Guest Blog: The Gulf of Tonkin and the Persian Gulf: The Case Against a War with Iran

The Gulf of Tonkin and the Persian Gulf: The Case Against a War with Iran



For those who know history, the capture of fifteen British sailors elicits an unhappy feeling of déjà vu. In the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. naval forces were supporting South Vietnamese commandos engaged in sabotage operations in North Vietnam. Although Operation 34 A may have been a justifiable response to Vietcong infiltration of South Vietnam, the fact that U.S. naval forces were engaged in military conflict at the time of the first attack on the destroyer Maddox was withheld from the general public. Apparently, there was no second attack on the Maddox and the Turner Joy, and it may well be the case that in the first episode the Maddox was attacked in a case of mistaken identity by still relatively harmless patrol boats. In the second attack, it is clear that what Clausewitz called the fog of war played a key role, as nervous sonar technicians misinterpreted data under stress.

The point of the matter is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was generated by dangerous interaction between U.S. naval forces pressuring an adversary, and then used to rationalize the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese civil war, an escalation that President Johnson already desired. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized the ultimate deaths of millions of Vietnamese and fifty thousand Americans would have been unlikely to have passed the Congress if either Operation 34 A or contemporary doubts as to the reality of the second attack had been public or congressional knowledge.

The analogy with the capture of the British sailors is obvious. It is widely rumored that the United States has been attempting to pressure the Iranians through destabilization activities of U.S. intelligence services. The Bush administration has called for regime change in Iran on more than one occasion. The Bush administration has placed an enormous naval and air strike force in the region capable of a devastating attack on Iran. This has created a very tense situation between the U.S. and Iran, especially on the Shat al Arab waterway where the British were captured, the waterway being a source of contention between Iran and Iraq that in significant measure lead to the Iran-Iraq War.

An episode like the capture of the British sailors was almost a certainty given the tense security environment. While we may not like the Iranian regime, we would be unwise to allow such an episode to be the first step to rationalizing an attack on Iran that is a Bush administration policy in search of a justification for the following reasons.

First, given the duplicity of the Administration in launching the attack on Iraq, there would need to be very precise GPS coordinates of the British ship's position provided by an independent source before anyone ought to believe the story being put forward. Second, any attack on Iran would severely stress the U.S. armed forces, because the United States would be required to secure the oil fields of Southern Iran in order to prevent Iranian retaliation with their oil weapon. Third, an attack on Iran would increase Muslim hostility to the United States in general, and especially among Shia in Iraq who are vital to achieving any reasonable outcome there. Fourth, any U.S. attack on Iran more generally would unite Shia and Sunni against the United States, a grievous development to long term U.S. security interests. Fifth, an attack on Iran would push China and Russia closer together, as the U.S. would appear as an increasingly dangerous menace to world order. Finally, because of all the above effects of an attack on Iran, Israel's long term security would be endangered. Israel cannot in the long term live with Muslim hostility that is provoked by the United States on an increasing basis and must find some accommodation in order to survive. Many Israelis fear Iran, and not without reason, but a Muslim world increasingly united in hatred of the U.S. cannot be in Israel's interest.

The impact of the Gulf of Tonkin incident was to destroy a generation of South and North Vietnamese, and kill fifty eight thousand American soldiers. The press must do its duty and see that the current drift of events with Iran does not generate an outcome orders of magnitude worse.

Guest Blogger Donnie is an adjunct professor of
Instructor of Political Science, Economics, Finance and Law
He can be reached here:
Drich@mc3.edu

Blog Mysteriously Deleted

The Five Paragraph Essay

The ability to organize one's thoughts and communicate ideas clearly is the backbone of good writing. This is why Bolsheviks and neo-Manicheans reincarnated in the role of officials in state education authorities, are entitled to insist upon the notion that the five-paragraph essay is the foundation of good writing.

The five-paragraph essay is a formal format of written argument just as a sentence is a vine upon which ripe fruits of thought may hang. It is a common requisite in assignments in middle school, high school, university and sometimes elementary school where doofus children roam in search of clues as to how to express themselves.

The format is obvious enough to satisfy the typical monad. Writing a keen five paragraph essay involves some transitions and variations expressed upon a theme's merits. Mind you, don't let them ramble or burst in ways that might seem unseemly.

Yet finally, in preparation for my recapitulation of the topic sentences: heretofore; I recall a moment in my youth, in which my dearly departed mother, expressed her concern over the welfare of her father's anti-troglodendtensendentitiousnist legacy. She worried that a boy raised in a town where co-ed four-square was considered racey would be incapable of scrying the experience of a minor above the tree-line where men - waking at dawn - choke on the first breath of coal dust, swallow back a hiccup of the hooch they drank from the belly-button of their second cousin the night before, and move on down the mine without any further reflection.

Nonetheless, I successfully am able to conclude, by assuring the reader that the four paragraphs prior to this one are among the smartest, well-connected, convincing arguements scripted since the 6th century Nipponese scholar Matsuyama:
Haiku, writ by you
says I care for structured thought
more than I let on.

A theory of nothing

When I was a teenager, a strange Scottish family moved into a big white house across town. Attracted by the strange cuisine and the good humor in that household, I spent many fine days tracking mud around and breaking furniture in that big colonial manse that turned out to have also been the childhood home of Edward Williams Morley.

As it turns out, here in Blogopotamia, breaking ashtrays, couches and chairs in the childhood home of a somewhat famous physicist is all the credentialling you need to publish articles about the history and nature of physics. So here it goes:

Morley, in the mid-19th century, grew up and got the hell out of West Hartford like every other sensible person raised in the fine public schools of that municipality. After some schooling in New Jersey he soon found himself in Cleveland with a fellow named Albert Michaelson conducting one of the most famous failed experiments in history. In a nutshell, the two scientists used one of the world's first interferometers to measure the speed of light as it smacked into the front and backside of our home-planet.

In very basic terms, the thinking of the day said that if light travels in waves there must be stuff that it's making waves in. Without this so called aether, light from the sun would be like a surfer in Kansas: posing gnarl-like, pumped up, yet with no curls to ride.

Along with the luminescent aether theory came the assumption that if you ran really fast into the light waves they would hit you at a higher speed than if you were running along with them. Since the earth is zipping around the sun at about 108,000 kilometers per hour those on the aether binge assumed light would hit the leading face of our orbit some 30,000 meters per second harder than on the trailing fringe.

However the readings then, as now, revealed that light travels at a constant speed. Michaelson's new tool measured it. He said it disproved the aether theory, measured the speed of light and in 1907 he won the Nobel prize. Morley said, he wasn't so sure it proved, or disproved, anything. For his part, he had an elementary school named after him in West Hartford. Morley's experiment also plays a central role in Thomas Pynchon's nutty new novel "Against the Day."

By dismissing the aether, Morley and Michaelson created a vacuum in theoretical physics that soon caused Albert Einstein to come hurtling out of a Swiss patent office where he had apparently failed kindergarten. The young Einstein grabbed his chalk and start building a new paradigm. However along with Einstein came Quantum Theorists Niels Bohr, Erwin Shroedinger, his half-dead cat, and Karl Heisenberg. The Q crowd also wanted in on the new paradigm. Einstein was relatively particular about the universe and went nuclear while the quantum theorists came at him with all their fuzzy talk about probability fields and uncertainty.

Shroedinger, shocked theoretical cat-lovers everywhere, by locking his own darling Fluffy in a sealed chamber along with a vial of hydrocyanic acid. The vial would be smashed based on the state of a particle has a 50/50 probability of decaying and setting off the device. Weird thing was, Schroedinger said, that the cat wasn't dead or alive until you observed it and thereby took it out of it's 50/50 dead or alive probability state.

This apparently hit a sore spot with Einstein, whose own theoretical cat had only recently travelled back in time and killed his own grandfather thus ending his own existence, which in turn prevented him from killing his grandfather, which restored his existence... Anyhow, Einstein was really mad so he went to consult with his close friend God who assured him that he had never played craps or Dungeons and Dragons with Illuvator or any of the personifications of the universe.

"God doesn't play dice with the cosmos," Einstein reported in 1954, which theorists of the day interpretted to mean that particles either are or aren't someplace at any given instant counter to the probablistic formulations that the QT crowd was using to deceive us into building transistors and discover DNA.

To understand Shroedinger's point of view, try to imagine where you might find me during a Red Sox game. About 85% of me is sitting on the couch, 9 percent of me was going back and forth to the refridgerator getting beers and 6% of me is mictorating a heteroscedastic stream. If you had to build my location into a formula, I would be presented as part of a wave orbiting the couch, fridge and toilet.

Einstein dismissed the equations that spread me all over the house and preferred to think of me as being in only one place following sensible laws of physics until the moment when the bullpen by committee blows a six run lead and sends me fuming off to bed. However, the wave equations that had me flowing all over the house explained my behavior during the game better for many purposes than any one snapshot of the couch despite the counterintuitive notion that I was in more than one place at the same time. If my state of being during a Red Sox game is inexorably linked to my visits to the fridge and loo, I am a particle behaving like a wave.

Intelligent Design theorists following their modus operandi interjected themselves into this debate several decades later by completely misunderstood the point and hijacking Einstein's statement about God not playing dice as evidence of his support for their own crackpot theory.

Einstein's rhetorical flourish invoking God on his side of the argument was a pretty cheap trick, but it did reveal his fundamental belief in orderly, discrete materialism where events occur in order according to universal laws. Bohr's reaction "Einstein, don't tell God what to do," was equally petulant.

Each side manages to explain a lot of things that Newton's physics couldn't. Einstein connected mass, speed, time and energy, allowed us to destroy two cities in Japan, and to explain all sorts of interstellar phenomemenae. Shroedinger explained how atoms work well enough that we can now build microprocessors that are networked sufficiently to allow me to publish this ridiculous blog. Intelligent Designers, for their part, 60 years later would use their theory to prove that they had a theory, and that it was theirs.

But the fact is: none of the contestants in this cat-fight have a good explanation for why gravity sucks, which is why we've been stuck in the same f$%@#ing paradigm since before Thomas Kuhn came along and invented the term.

In the meantime, we seem to be surrounded by forms of energy that appear to behave at times, and in certain equations, like particles; and at others like waves, which can be both proven and disproven by watching light waves cancel each other out in a two slit experiment. One particularly bizarre observation is that coupled particles influence the state of their partner subatoms even when they have been separated. (Or so it seems when you blast objects into subatomic bits in particle accellerators.)

In trying to find a good explanation of this weirdness, scientists for the past 30 years have been tying themselves in knots with string theories that, though unproven, have left amateur historians of science in a very strange quantum philosophical state.

As I see it from the sidelines here in Blogopotamia, there is a growing consensus that there is a fabric to the universe. But what that fabric is woven out of - whether, one-to-two dimensional strings (or membranes) that are about 10 exp -35 meters long - or some other substrate is the big question.

Just to be clear: The fabric is everywhere, Not just where there's matter like air, earth or or energy it's the stuff of everything including nothing. In other words: we're about to go on another aether binge.

To hear the string theorists, it all began with the big bang when a one dimensional singularity exploded with energies in the 10 exp 35 range spewing strings all over the universe spinning wildly. When they spin, rotate, or both they take on three dimensional properties that affect other strings over time (the fourth dimension.)

The two dimensional strings manage to occupy three dimensions by swirling around like a jumprope at something close to the speed of light apparently. And with all that wriggling around the strings are influencing other nearby and far off strings. The "influence" is measured, in our experience as strong nuclear forces (the stuff that holds atomic particles like quarks together in patterns that we describe as atoms), weak nuclear forces are like cosmic rays, electomagnetism keeps the electrons in orbit around the nucleus of the atoms and is involved in all molecular bonds. Gravity, as we know, sucks things that have mass together toward each other.

Gravity is about 40 orders of magnitude less powerful than the energy (generally described as gluons by particle freaks) that hold nuclei together and about 38 orders of magnitude less powerful than a photon. Particle freaks also anticipate that we will someday discover gravitons as the basic unit of gravity although wave freaks suspect we will not. In either case if we discover the graviton it will be entirely on a theoretical basis because just can't look at anything that's 38 orders of magnitude smaller than a photon. It would be like trying to "see" Dick Cheney using a machine that bounces the sun off things at a million miles per hour.

Even trillions of Dick Cheneys would be imperceptible to such a measuring device. Although I suppose a quadrillion Dick Cheneys might cause a small wobble in the path of the sun it would be hard to understand much about the vice president's nature with such a device.

Which brings us back to those wicked small strings that may or may not compose the fabric of the universe. The thing that's really strange about them is that the theorists who imagine them only do so because they fit a mathematical solution to that harmonoizes space time and the equations behind the 4 fundamental forces of physics. The really, really strange thing about string theory is that the solution also implies the existence of 6 additional extremely small dimensions.

I'm not convinced that anybody has been able to wrap their brain around what those microdimensions are like, or if they have it is impossible to explain in our language or that some mysterious force ascends from them and obscures the words just as someone begins to reveal their true location. I am also beginning to suspect that the six additional small dimensions

But the cool thing about all the grand unifying theories is that they do seem bring us full circle to where we were during the last paradigm when nothing was something. It's just now we call it spacetime. Whether spacetime contains particles or not depends on whether energy is passing through it. All of the 300 or so elementary particles are made up of nothing behaving in one of 300 different ways. Spin a bunch of strings one way and they are an electron. Spin them another way and they are a positron. Annihilate the two together and you spit out a neutrino moving backwards.

So spacetime is a busy place. And when a region spacetime is full of lots of particles with the characteristic we describe as mass it appears to warp toward other mass bearing particles.

As Einstein predicted light is also bent when it travels around massive regions of spacetime like Mercury where it was first observed. If you are struggling with the idea of a universal medium with no substance realize that photons have no mass and yet can be pulled into black holes because gravity appears to be a distortion of the fabric.

A photon is a packet of energy released when an electron moves from one orbit to another in its travel around an atom like when you run electrons through a tungsten wire in a lightbulb or neon gas in a sign.

Other packets of energy like the 50 trillion "neutrinos" that pass through us every day seem capable of passing through spacetime without causing a stir. Seems likely that these are just ripples in the spacetime continuum and that though we live in the spacetime continuum we are also made up of spacetime so the ripples go through us as if we were nothing. Perhaps because we are nothing twisted by inertia of a tremendous explosion and at rest as we are. If Einstein were around, I'd ask him to ask his friend God if that were true.