Eric's Beijing Diary

I’ll tell you what I like most about this video. It faces honestly some of Newton’s peculiarities without trying to explain them away.

No one with any sense of integrity can deny that Newton had an interest in the supernatural. He wrote and thought about God a lot. And not only about God. He was fasinated with alchemy. Scandalous.

It is hard to imagine how anyone could try to pass Newton off as an atheist, but believe it or not, they have tried. Most, however, do not resort to such an egregious abuse of history. They content themselves with imagining that the mystical side of Newton was something he kept separate from his science. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is what Newton says in his General Scholium to the Principia Mathematica:

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent being.

Clearly Newton believed in God. But while atheists cannot honestly claim him as their own, neither can evangelical Christians. Newton did not believe in the trinity. He was not a Mormon, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or Muslim or a Jew. But he was on the same side of the Arian controversy as they are. Newton did not trumpet his religious beliefs. But he did manage to get a special exemption from the king to the requirement that scientists must be members of the clergy.

So what does all this mean? Two conclusions come to mind.

1. Newton’s fascination with the mystical may not be “scandalous.” It may, in fact, help to explain why we was more open to allowing ideas so crazy—at the time—as the idea that two unconnected objects thousands and even millions of miles apart, with nothing but empty space between them, would actually have some sort of attracting force pulling them towards each other. I mean, we take it for granted now, but if you think about it, it is pretty mystical and bizarre.

2. Newton’s belief in God cannot be dismissed as something he assented to because his church required it of him. When did Newton ever allow a religious body to tell him what to believe? Clearly it was not his religion from which sprung his belief in God. It was his science. Newton rejected atheism not because it was unreligious. He rejected it because it was fundamentally unscientific.

Let’s examine this simple statement (the law of gravity) for awhile and analyze it:

Every (heavenly) body is attracted to every other by a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

This universal law affects any two objects in the universe no matter how far apart or close together or small or large they may be. Incredible. That’s not small stuff, folks. Could it be that God allowed Newton to indulge the mystical for awhile to prepare his mind to accept an idea (the law of gravity) which seemed much too mystical for any scientist at the time to accept?

During he last part of this life, Stephen Hawking seemed to be flirting with the idea of belief in God. But he tyranny of his atheistic religion put a stop to it. Finally, he said that because of the law of gravity, the universe could have created itself.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.

What nonsense! Clearly it is Hawking, not Newton who allowed his religion to dictate his beliefs in open spite of his science.

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Priscilla. Priscilla was a delightful child—inquisitive, curious, and active.

As she grew into adulthood, Priscilla developed a problem with sleeplessness. This struggle with sleeplessness began after her mother had put her on a regimen of traditional Chinese medicine. This medicine was not something she took because she was sick. Sometimes Chinese people will take Chinese medicine just because they think it might be good for them. At any rate Priscilla would sometimes go for days without being able to sleep. As this problem became evident, her mother told her to stop taking the Chinese medicine.

Later, after Priscilla moved to the big city to continue her education, she became profoundly depressed. What caused this? Was it a residual effect of the Chinese medicine? Or something else? It is significant that, while she had suffered sleeplessness in her hometown before she came to Kunming, the depression did not develop until she moved to Kunming. Why?

These questions and many more are addressed in my interview with Priscilla. As I do in every interview, I asked Priscilla, “What do you believe?” As I mention in the podcast, years ago I came to the conclusion that there are two questions you must answer if you are going to understand a culture:

• What do the people believe?
• Why do they believe it?

So what does belief have to do with something like depression? This is a difficult question to answer. As far as I know, people of every faith suffer from depression. So on an individual level it is hard to define. But is there anything we can say about the society as a whole relative to depression? For example, in China, young women are often subjected to a great deal of pressure if they are still unmarried at a certain age. In China, it is considered shameful for a woman to be single. But the problem does not only come from the beliefs of the people in a young woman’s world. The problem comes also from the fact that young woman herself often buys into the idea that it is shameful for her to be yet unmarried, and, if she ever gets married and has a daughter, she will often impose that same belief on her daughter and pressure her to get married.

Americans do not tend to think that it is shameful for a young woman to be unmarried. Mind you, it is normal for young women to want to get married. That’s true in America, and it’s true in China. The difference is that the Chinese woman carries the extra burden of having everyone around her asking her over and over why she isn’t married yet. That’s not to say that the American way is better. Americans go to the opposite extreme and trivialize marriage to the point where it’s viewed as sort of an extra “add on.” It’s just to say that Chinese young women and American young women have very different pressures because of the beliefs of the people in their society.

This example doesn’t apply to Priscilla directly—I have never heard her express any concern about this issue (perhaps because she is still in her early twenties). But I think it is a good example of how societal beliefs can affect how a person feels about herself. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to develop an understanding of the beliefs in a society and whether or not any of them really constitute a general view of life in that society. Ask one person what he believes, and you know what one person believes. Ask a thousand people what they believe, and you get a read on their culture that nothing else can give you.

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Labels: Depression, Mental Health

Who are they? Where did they come from? Well, they came to China from Persia, but they were not originally from Persia. The Persians had accepted the the Nestorians for their own political reasons. So the Nestorians who came to China came directly from Persia.

But were they really heretics? It's a problem of definitions, I think. Goldschmidt and Davidson, in their book Concise History of the Middle East state the following:

In Antioch grew up a school of theologians called the Nestorians. They saw Christ as two distinct persons, divine and human, closely and inseparably joined.

This is technically true, (since they did use the word “person” rather than “nature”), but a bit too loosely stated. It needs to be emphasized that the belief that Jesus was both fully God and fully man is not heresy. It is orthodoxy. But in fact, the Nestorians believed that the human and divine were “loosely joined.” Britannica Encyclopedia has a slightly more nuanced description of the problem, I think:

Whereas orthodox Christology holds that Christ has two natures, divine and human, ineffably united in one person, or hypostasis, Nestorianism so stresses their independence as to suggest that they are in effect two persons, or hypostases, loosely joined by a moral union. Nestorianism envisages the divine Word as having associated with itself at the Incarnation a complete, independently existing man. From the orthodox point of view, Nestorianism therefore denies the reality of the Incarnation and represents Christ as a God-inspired man rather than as God-made-man.

So what do you think? Were they heretics? Well, the Biblical definition of heresy is very simply stated:

1John 4:2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 1John 4:3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

By this definition, I don’t know whether the Nestorians would really be classified as heretics, or merely regarded as having an unclear understanding of the incarnation. The bottom line, it seems, is that the first chapter of the Gospel of John says,

John 1:14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

So the question is very simple: Do you believe that Jesus is God in flesh? If they said “yes,” they would not be heretics. But if they said “no” they would be regarded as teaching false doctrine.

But more germane to their relationship to China is the extent to which they influenced the religious landscape in this country and culture. The problem is that they completely disappeared after about 150 years. Their presence in China is historically documented, being attested to by an ancient stone document inscribed in 781 AD. Many years ago, I visited the museum in Xi’an where this stone stele is housed, and took a picture of it with my pocket camera. It clearly establishes their presence, but gives not a clue as to what happened to them. They just disappeared from the scene, perhaps dissolving through intermarriage or something. So there is no discernable influence of the Nestorians on modern Christianity in China. But the question of their influence on the Tang Dynasty itself is something that cannot be so easily dismissed. It would be hard to determine, since they vanished, but it really should be studied.

When I first posted this piece, I had finished it at the previous paragraph. But I realized that I had neglected to mention the Theotokos, and I just couldn’t let that omission stand. We need to talk about it.

Theotokos is often rendered in English as “Mother of God,” but that is not an exact translation, and there is some controversy over it. Got Questions has a very good article on this subject, so I will quote from it here:

We should distinguish the term Theotokos from mother of God, because there is a subtle yet important difference. The term mother of God could be taken wrongly as implying that Mary was the source or originator of God, similar to how Juno was the mother of Vulcan in Roman mythology. Of course, Christianity teaches that God is eternal and that Jesus Christ has a pre-existent, divine nature. The idea that Mary is the mother of God in the sense that she was the source of God or somehow predated God or is herself part of the Godhead is patently unbiblical.

The term Theotokos, on the other hand, is more specific and less open to being misconstrued. Theotokos simply implies that Mary carried God in her womb and gave birth to Him. Mary was the human agent through whom the eternal Son of God took on a human body and a human nature and entered the world. The term Theotokos was a succinct expression of the biblical teaching of the Incarnation, and that is how the Council of Ephesus used the word. Mary is the “God-bearer” in that within her body the divine person of God the Son took on human nature in addition to His pre-existing divine nature. Since Jesus is fully God and fully man, it is correct to say that Mary “bore” God.

I think the thing to remember about Theotokos is that, while Mary had no part in creating deity, the baby that was inside her was in fact God at the time he was inside her and did not become God afterwards. That’s the important point about Theotokos. The Nestorians do not accept Theotokos, because they believe that the baby inside Mary was entirely human—that the divine nature was not in the womb. Protestants accuse Catholics of going too far on this point and implying that Mary herself was divine. The Nestorians went to the opposite extreme and denied that the baby while still in the womb had any divinity at all. The orthodox Biblical position is that Mary was not divine, and was, in fact, a sinner in need of a savior (as she herself says in Luke 1:47). That Jesus was fully human and fully divine, and that this was true from the beginning of his humanity, which would include the time in the womb, since we believe that little babies in the womb are human beings and not mere tissue. The best way to understand this is to read the first chapter of Luke, because this chapter talks about both Jesus and John the Baptist while they were in their mothers wombs at the same time and in the same place.

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Labels: Christianity, Nestorians, Tang Dynasty

Go to Google and type in the word COVID followed by the name of a city. Be sure to spell the name of the city correctly. When it comes up, scroll down until you see the graph and then go to the top left corner of the graph and change it to “All time.” The default is one year, but COVID is not quite three years old, so there’s no reason not to view the total span of its existence.

In the screenshots below, it’s a little confusing to read the dates at the bottom because what I have here are static images, so they don’t show the year (2020, 2021, or 2022), but if you go to Google and do it yourself, the live online version of each graph will have a slider that allows you to go back and forth, and that will show the year.

So what can we conclude from this? Clearly from the graph of Beijing below, the recent spikes have been astronomical compared to before. If you pan across the graph from January 2020 until now, you will see a few blips. At the time that they happened, they appeared as huge spikes, because the scale of the graph was much smaller. If one hundred new cases a day is considered an astronomical number (which it used to be in China), then some of those blips would go almost to the top of the graph. So when you look at a graph like this, it is always important to take note of the scale. Simply put: What is the highest number?

Guangzhou (below) looks similar to Beijing, but if you look at the numbers on the left side, it’s clearly much worse, because the top number is about twice that of Beijing. But although the cases are much more numerous, the pattern is the same. Nothing that happened before begins to compare to how bad it is now.

There are probably a few reasons for these spikes, but I think the main reason is that the latest versions of COVID are much less deadly than before, but they spread much faster. This phenomenon is challenging China’s zero covid policy. But there is something else that is providing a much greater challenge, and that is the current unrest. There have been major demonstrations in several cities. This is unprecedented. But why are people so upset? What has changed?

There are lockdowns, but there have always been lockdowns. In America, they say “lockdowns don’t work.” It’s more accurate to say “American lockdowns don’t work.” You see, for lockdowns to work they have to be total. But you can’t do that in America. American lockdowns are a joke. I remember when CNN had a special feature for Chris Cuomo when he came out of COVID seclusion.. It was a farse. There were videos all over the Internet of him being out on the street during the time that he was supposedly quarantined. That doesn't happen in China.

There are levels of lockdown in China, but they are all pretty Kafkaesque compared to America. Some friends of mine were locked down for about ten days or so because someone in their compound tested positive for COVID. The police put a divice on their door so that if they tried to open it, the police would be notified. But my friends took it in stride.

A friend of mine was just released a couple days ago from a five-day quarantine at her home. In her case, she could leave her apartment, but the door to the building was locked. She could not go outside. I have another friend in Xi’an who was quarantined for some time. In his case, he could leave his apartment, and even leave his building, but not his gated community. By God’s mercy, it has not happened to me. I wouldn’t like it. I guess nobody likes it. But Chinese people have been amazingly accepting of these measures. Look at this graph from Shanghai:

What does this graph say to you? I can tell you what it says to Chinese government officials. They look at this and say, “See, lockdowns work.” Are they right? Well, no doubt they are, you have to admit that. But again, how long can people be expected to tolerate endless lockdowns? As I said, in China, if you’re locked down, you really are locked down. It’s not a suggestion. But most people see that as a needful part of containing COVID and tend to accept it. I do think it adds to the stress that has created the current explosion of anger, but it’s not the main thing.

So what is the main thing? Masks? For the most part, people accept them, I think. In America masks have become a huge point of contention, but not really in China. In America, Republicans see masks as an assault on their freedom. Mask haters in America get really crazy about masks, They see them as sinister and evil. But Democrats are no better. Democrats preach masks, but don't actually wear them. Message to Democrats: If you put your mask on for the cameras and then take it off as soon as the news camera is off, does it not occur to you that a Republican with a cell phone might be there ready to document your hypocrisy? The simple fact is that Americans, both Democrats and Republicans do not like masks and do not wear them.

But in China they are more or less accepted. You see a lot of people wearing them under their chins, but they are there in case they are called for. Here’s the thing: If you show up at the subway station and see a big sign that says, “Everyone who has COVID please wear a mask so that you do not infect other people,” how many people with COVID do you think will be wearing a mask? Obviously none. They’re not stupid. But if the sign tells you that you will not be allowed to board the subway if you are not wearing a mask, then what percentage of those who have COVID will be wearing a mask? Obviously all of them. You see, masks don’t protect you from anything. But they do protect others from you. At least a little bit. Subways are a veritable incubator for viruses like COVID. No surprise that COVID spread like a wildfire in New York during the early days of COVID. So in your normal activity, you will not want to wear a mask. But if you get on the subway, you will wear a mask even though you are not sick, because that is the price you givc in exchange for assurance that everyone else is wearing a mask to protect you.

So if not lockdowns or masks, then what is the issue? But I shouldn’t really imply that lockdowns and masks are not part of the issue. They certainly add to the frustration—especially the lockdowns. I guess you could say that the lockdowns helped to fray the nerves of the people, but they didn’t result in an explosion of anger, because they had a certain legitimacy. The laobaixing accept them as needful, even though they are really getting tired of them.

But the thing that has really incurred the ire of the people is the COVID testing. Testing itself is not new. It has been around since the beginning of COVID. But recently, the government has started to require them for more and more things. Before, you needed a COVID test to get on an airplane. But now you can’t even get on a bus or subway without one. I can’t pinpoint exactly when this change happened, but it must have been sometime in August, because I have to go to the Entry Exit office every month to get a 30 day extension. I went to that office in August with no trouble. But when I tried to go there in September, I was refused entry because I did not have at least a 48 hour test. I was surprised. Nobody had told me anything about this. I had never had a COVID test in my life. Now, I don’t have much to complain about, because I don’t have to go to that office but once a month. So it’s a mild annoyance for me. But what if you work in a government office? You wouldn’t have to get one every day, because most places will accept a 48 hour test. But you would have to get one every two days. There are testing sites set up on the sidewalk around the cities, but the lines can be kinda long, and it’s just more than the masses were willing to put up with.

Back in January, a pregnant woman in labor was denied admission to a hospital because her COVID test had expired. She was forced to wait outside. She began bleeding heavily, so she was finally admitted, but the baby died. But recently the kinds of things that require a COVID test have increased, and well, you know, it just reached a breaking point. I heard that what triggered it was a fire in an apartment building in Ürümqi. I guess some of the doors had been welded shut or something to keep people from leaving, since there was a lockdown. Anyway, ten people were not able to get out, and perished in the flames. So that was the trigger. But the demonstrators are not attacking lockdown. They are tearing down testing stations.

So what will China do? There have to be changes. But China is in between a rock and a hard place. If they declare the pandemic to be endemic, cases will almost surely skyrocket, because there is little or no herd immunity in China (thanks to the Zero COVID policy).I am conflicted about this, because there is no question that I have benefited hugely from China’s policy. But I feel a bit guilty too, because my safety has been at the expense of people who have had to go through a huge amount of hassle that I have not had to deal with. Sometime ago, Singapore officially declared that COVID was now classified as “endemic” rather than “pandemic.” That’s a pretty big change. But can China do that? Is COVID over just because we say it’s over? Look at this graph for New York City:

So you look at this and you say, “ OK, it spiked, but now it’s down to nothing again, so COVID is basically over. Nothing?? Over?? New York’s “nothing” is much higher than any of China’s spikes. But the contrast is much easier to illustrate if we look at death rates rather than new cases. Here’s China. This time, I changed the default setting (you can't see it in this screenshot) from “New Cases” to “Deaths,” hence the grey color:

You see, there’s just no question that China’s draconian COVID restrictions have saved many lives. Hundreds of lives. Thousands of lives. Tens of thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands of lives. Millions of lives. Millions?? Well, look at this:

China has five times as many people as the United States. But are China's numbers accurate? I don't know. But I think it's pretty clear that but for China's dreaded COVID policies, lots and lots of Chinese people would be dead. There will be changes, because the demonstrations are very concerning to the leadership. People are really, really angry. But I don't know that China is quite ready to give up Zero Covid just yet. That might be awhile.

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Labels: COVID, Protests

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grant connect, resource to AM56000248 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to AM56000255 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211222 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to AM36211320 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to AM37211423 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211119 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211325 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to AM35211119 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM35211215 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM36211508 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211105 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211106 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211107 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211108 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211109 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211110 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211111 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211112 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211113 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211114 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211115 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211116 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211117 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211118 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211120 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211121 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211122 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211123 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211124 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211125 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211126 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211127 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211128 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211201 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211202 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211203 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211204 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211205 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211206 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211207 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211208 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211209 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211210 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211211 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211212 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211213 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211215 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211216 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211217 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211218 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211219 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211220 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211221 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211223 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211224 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211225 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211226 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211227 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211228 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211301 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211302 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211303 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211304 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211305 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211306 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211307 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211308 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211309 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211310 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211311 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211312 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211313 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211314 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211315 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211316 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211317 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211318 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211319 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211320 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211321 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211322 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211323 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211324 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211326 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211327 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM37211328 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM56000212 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM56000217 identified by password;
grant connect, resource to PM56000232 identified by password;

create view PM31415926.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM36211124.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211101.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211102.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211103.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211104.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211401.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211402.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211404.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211405.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211406.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211407.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211408.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211409.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211410.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211411.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211412.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211413.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211414.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211415.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211416.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211417.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211418.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211419.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211420.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211421.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211422.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211425.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211426.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211427.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211501.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211502.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211503.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211504.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211505.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211506.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211507.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211508.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211509.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211510.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211511.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211512.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211513.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211514.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211515.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211516.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211517.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211518.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211519.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211520.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211521.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211522.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211523.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211524.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211525.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211526.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211527.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211530.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM56000248.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM56000255.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211222.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM36211320.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM37211423.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211119.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211325.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view AM35211119.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM35211215.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM36211508.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211105.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211106.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211107.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211108.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211109.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211110.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211111.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211112.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211113.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211114.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211115.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211116.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211117.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211118.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211120.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211121.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211122.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211123.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211124.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211125.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211126.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211127.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211128.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211201.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211202.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211203.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211204.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211205.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211206.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211207.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211208.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211209.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211210.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211211.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211212.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211213.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211215.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211216.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211217.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211218.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211219.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211220.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211221.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211223.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211224.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211225.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211226.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211227.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211228.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211301.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211302.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211303.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211304.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211305.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211306.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211307.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211308.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211309.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211310.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211311.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211312.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211313.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211314.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211315.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211316.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211317.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211318.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211319.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211320.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211321.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211322.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211323.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211324.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211326.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211327.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM37211328.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM56000212.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM56000217.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;
create view PM56000232.mygrades as select * from fall2009.studentrecords where student_id = USER;

SQL> @C:\chapter5\loadscores

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211416.sql"
SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211417.sql"
SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211418.sql"

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211420.sql"

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211422.sql"

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211426.sql"

0 rows updated.

0 rows updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211522.sql"

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM37211524.sql"

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM56000248.sql"
SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\AM56000255.sql"
SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\PM31415926.sql"

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\PM37211211.sql"
SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\PM37211212.sql"

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\PM37211227.sql"

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SP2-0310: unable to open file "C:\chapter5\PM37211312.sql"

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

1 row updated.

SQL> spool off

This film posted above addresses the movie 2000 Mules. The 2020 election seems never to be able to escape controversy. Why are people still arguing about it after two years? I hate to even think about publishing yet one more confusing diatribe on the sad events leading up to the disaster on January 6th, 2020.

But recently John posted a video (above) in the Politics group regarding that movie. It’s not a shortened version of the movie; it’s a commentary on the movie. Basically this guy (he does not introduce himself) is saying that the movie is not convincing, because they don’t show more than one video of the same person. I am not sure how important that is, but I have to admit that it is a fair point. Nevertheless, I also had a problem with his approach, because he used that weakness as an excuse to blow off everything else in the movie.

But one thing he did in the video above that really fascinated me was to show that many media outlets who dismissed 2000 Mules had actually copied and pasted the Associated Press “fact check” written by Ali Swenson. That peaked my attention, because Ali Swenson’s bogus fact check is the one I featured in the podcast I made on 2000 Mules back in May (posted below). The main point I was trying make then was that she clearly had not seen the movie when she wrote that fact check. So now it appears that many, if not most, of the mainstream media reports on 2000 Mules were written by people who did not actually take time to watch the movie; they just copied from the Associated Press article written by Ali Swenson, who also had not seen the movie when she wrote her “fact check.” For this research, I give this guy credit. 2000 Mules should be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the movie most criticized by people who did not bother to watch it.

But astonishingly, this guy seems completely unaware that Ali Swenson’s own review is fundamentally dishonest, because she clearly had not seen the video herself when she wrote the fact check. This is not obvious when you first read the fact check. I was actually impressed by her fact check when I read it before I saw the movie. But as I explained in the podcast episode below, she wrote things in that article that she would not have written if she had seen the movie. He goes even further. He did an exhaustive research of everything (almost) that Ali Swenson had put online for the past ten years. He did this to show her credibility—all without ever noticing that she wrote a fact check about a movie she clearly had not bothered to watch. This leads me to wonder if he is really objective. He is disturbingly blind to the faults of someone he seems to have an emotional need to believe in.

But in spite of my respect for his research, there is something else about his review (I mean the video above) that troubles me. He focuses on what he sees as the great weakness of the 2000 Mules movie, but he totally blows off everything else, and this is not really fair to the movie or to its creators.

So here's a scene from the movie: We see a lady walking up to a box for depositing ballot envelopes. She puts a few ballot envelopes in the ballot depository, then she turns around, pulls off her rubber gloves, and throws them in the garbage can. Which of the following best explains this behavior?

1. She is wearing rubber gloves to protect her hands from the cold winter air.
2. She is wearing rubber gloves because she is afraid of getting COVID.
3. She is wearing rubber gloves because she does not want her fingerprints to be on the envelopes, so she keeps them on until she has placed the ballot envelopes in the box, then she throws the rubber gloves in the garbage, because she no longer needs them to shield her identity.

Come on, you guys. Let’s have a moment of integrity. We all know what the obvious answer is. So does 2000 Mules prove that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election? No, of course not. Once the ballots are separated from the envelope, there is no way to tell where they came from, or who filled them out. So you couldn’t prove anything, and in fact, you couldn’t even prove that a single ballot was filled out inappropriately. But the fact that this kind of corruption is so difficult to trace is exactly why it is not legal to deliver ballots for other people. The only way to deal with certain kinds of corruption is to set up a situation such that it could not happen.

But if this movie (2000 Mules) does not prove that Trump won, does it at least show evidence of malfeasance? It certainly does. It’s not perfect, and the observation made in the video above is well taken. But his failure to address critical information presented in the film is also concerning. It suggests that perhaps he is not totally objective.

So why do people avoid this movie so much? Because they are clearly threatened by the possibility of having their chosen beliefs knocked down. My advice: watch the movie. Watch it critically, and then share your thoughts. But share your thoughts after you have seen the movie. All comments are welcome. If you comment on the video above, I will assume that you watched it. But if you comment on 2000 Mules, I may take the liberty to ask you if you actually watched it, because so many people haven’t, even including people like Ali Swenson, who wrote a fact check about a movie she had not actually seen.

Where will this end up? Will there ever be healing from this national hate fest that pits people against each other in American society? I’ll tell you the answer: Democrats think Republicans are the problem. Republicans think Democrats are the problem. Healing will not come until both Democrats and Republicans realize that they have forgotten God. 2000 Mules is a good example of this problem. The Movie accuses people of corruption. They don’t name the people, but we led to assume that they are opponents of Trump. Democrats, in other words. But I don’t know how many of you remember that, just before he left office, Donald Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza. Do you remember what the crime was? You guessed it. Election fraud. Granted, it wasn’t voter fraud. But it was fraud nonetheless—a crime to which he pled guilty in a court of law. There is a lot of corruption in the Democratic party. But the Republicans are not better if they measure themselves by the Democrats. A little bit better than really bad is still bad:

But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding. (2nd Corinthians 10:12)

The only hope for America is for everyone to allow themselves to be held up against God’s standards.

Comments

Labels: Election 2020

I remember lying in bed wondering if there was any place in this city where I could buy a Panasonic washing machine. I had just rented an apartment that had a separate laundry room.

In answer to my desire, a friend of mine told me that a local international school was having a sale. KIA (Kunming International Academy) has quite a turnover of teachers—probably more now because of COVID, so the school was selling off their household furniture. The apartment I had just rented was pretty cheap because it had no furniture in it, which is not common in China. So I welcomed the news. We went out there, and I found very good bed, a desk, two bedside cabinets, an excellent refrigerator, and, last but not least, a Panasonic washing machine! God is good.

The thing was not new, of course, but it was in mint condition. I did have to buy hose and clamp, but otherwise, it was ready to start using. But I had no idea which buttons to push and why. So I took a picture of the console and sent it to a church friend who is getting her Ph.D in Australia. She sent it back appropriately marked. Pretty easy, actually. You can just ignore all that other stuff. It does it automatically.

Vagabond that I am, I had not had a washing machine in my house for thirty-five years. In America, I always used laundromats. When I came to Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics as a database instructor in the Software College in 2004, I lived in the foreign teachers’ dormitory. There was a floor lady on the fourteenth floor where the foreign teachers lived, who was there during the day, and there were two washing machines in her office. So that was almost as good as having my own machine.

When I left Beihang University after six years and moved out to the village in the western hills where I lived until I moved to Kunming, I rented a little hovel that had no room for a washing machine. That place was pretty tiny. Fortunately, a friend of mine told me about a laundromat at the Geosciences university that I could use for a price. So I carried my laundry into town in a basket every month (more or less) and washed it in one or two or three of their machines.

One of my neighbors in the village tried to show me how to wash my clothes by hand. I did not learn quickly. I noticed that she would sometimes rub two parts of a garment together. Why? Washing machines don’t do that. If you are wondering how to wash your clothes by hand, I’ll tell you what to do: Sneak up to a washing machine when it is in operation and open the lid just enough to see what is going on in their without tripping the automatic shutoff. Whatever you see, do that and you’re good. You don’t need to do all that other stuff. Anyway, I did not wash my own clothes very often, but once in awhile I might wash a garment of two.

I had lived in that little village for ten years when I moved across the country to Kunming in May of 2020. I lived in a small Chinese hotel for five months until I got my own place. So I washed my clothes by hand in the sink most of the time, although they did have a cheap washing machine there that I could use. After I found an apartment, I continued to wash my clothes by hand, because my place had two big sinks, but no separate laundry room. But when I moved to the place where I am living now, I decided it was time for me to have a washing machine, and I guess God agreed, because I got one almost immediately.

This washing machine is not large by American standards, but it’s way good enough for me. But it’s amazing how quickly you get spoiled when you have your own washing machine. As I said, I lived in that little village in the westren hills of Beijing for ten years. Since I had to put my dirty clothes in my laundry basket ad take it into town on the bus, I was always having these arguments with myself about whether or not a particular garment was really dirty enough to warrent being washed. Now I throw stuff in the washing machine all the time that isn’t really that filthy.

I should say a thing about dryers in China. There aren’t any. I have never seen a dryer in China. But you cannot enter a house or apartment anywhere in China without finding a clothes line in the back room. When I say “room,” I use the word loosely. It’s usually a porch or balcony. In Beijing such a balcony will be closed in. But in the south of China you will see both. The line I had in my little hovel in rural Beijing just had a bar across the room near the ceiling. My apartment now has a cable system that allows me to crank one side at a time down to hang clothes or remove clothes and then crank it back up to the ceiling. Maybe a big American family would prefer a dryer, but for me, the Chinese system is so much less trouble.

But if you can wash clothes by hand, is a washing machine necessary? For Chinese people, not really. Most Chinese people can get on quite well without a washing machine. In fact, people in the countryside of China who have grown up washing clothes by hand don’t trust washing machines. If you read the book Mao’s Last Dancer, he talks about how his parents came to visit him and they were happy as a lark washing their clothes with a garden hose. If you have ever been to the countryside of China, that won’t surprise you at all. To someone from the countryside of China, running water is like having a washing machine. But doesn’t everyone have running water? Nope. Back in 2004 I went to a little village in Shanxi Province where the people lived in Yaodong (earth caves) dug out of the side of the mountain. They had a little well I their yard, so they had water. But it wasn’t running water.

Here is a washer woman from Langmusi, a little village up on the Tibetan Plateau I used to go to in the summertime:

You can see from this picture that country people in China will do anything to find running water. Once they have that, the rest is easy.

So what is the advantage of washing clothes by hand?

Chinese people’s answer: You can’t trust washing machines. They won’t get your clothes clean.

My answer: You get to listen to interesting podcasts that you don’t usually have time for. Stuff you subscribe to because you think it’s good, but that you never get around to listening to. There is another advantage: You really get an idea how much soap is appropriate, because lf you use to much detergent, you have to rinse your clothes lots of times.

I personally think that the biggest advantage Chinese people enjoy because of their ability to wash their clothes by hand is that they can travel lightly. Chinese young people usually carry not that many outfits and wash them at night. Americans carry everything they are going to need for their whole vacation and wash everything when they get home. I am kinda in between. I usually carry enough so that I have enough to wear until I can find a youth hostel that has a washing machine—hopefully once a week or so. So I don’t travel quite as lightly as Chinese people. But less than most Americans. When I travel in the mountains of western China, people are like, “You have such a big backpack!” But when I go to America, people are like, “Where’s your luggage?” I think it's going to be changing, though. More and more we are going to see the younger generation using washing machines and forgetting all about washing clothes by hand.

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The podcast leaves you in Clarksville, Tennessee, after my return from the Democratic convention in July of 1972, This is because, as it turned out, Mary and Dennis were moving back to Oregon the end of August, so I decided to just wait and ride back with them. So my hitchhiking adventure was over for that summer. It wasn’t exactly the end of my hitchhiking; I hitchhiked down the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska with John in the summer of 1979 (another story for another time)

What were the factors that led to the great Jesus revolution of the Seventies?

The Jesus movement was a spiritual revival among the counter-culuture “hippies” who had more or less dropped out of the ordinary course of life in cold war America, particularly during the period of the Vietnam War (1964-1974).

The hippies were the offspring of middle class Americans who had focused their attention on developing financial prosperity, mainly as a reaction to the deprivation of the Depression years. The years following the depression and the second world war were years of prosperity, which resulted in a “baby boom.” People who had spent their childhood in the Depression were very focused on developing the kind of success that would protect them from ever having to return to what they had seen as children.

Americans who had grown during the Depression years were understandably determined not to suffer the deprivation they had seen their parents endure. The problem was that as they focused on developing economic affluence and security, they often neglected the deeper side of life, so their children grew up with a sense of aimlessness that made them weary of the material affluence their parents had worked so hard to give them.

Futility. What’s the meaning of it all? This feeling of futility was greatly exacerbated by the Vietnam War, which the Americans just couldn’t seem to win. Those who have lived through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have no idea—these modern wars are fought with minimal American involvement (roughly 2500 American casualties in Afghanistan and 4500 in Iraq). Almost 60,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam (58220).

Seeing so many people die for a war that the Americans just couldn’t seem to win, created a deep, nationwide despair. In addition to this, the mainstream media billed the war as unwinnable. In February of 1968, the Tet Offensive caught the South and the Americans off guard, and made for depressing news stories. But what many Americans to this day do not know is that the Tet offensive was a disaster for the North. The attacker always has the initial advantage. So what? The fierce response by the South, aided by the Americans devastated the North. But the mainstream media, led by Walter Cronkite, sold it as a defeat to the American public.

I remember the Tet Offensive, but I did not know at the time how badly it had been misrepresented by the media. I first became aware of this problem when I read Nguyen Cao Ky’s book. It’s been years, now, since I read it, but he expresses his astonishment at the Americans for regarding such an extraordinary victory as a defeat. And he wasn’t the only one. Here’s a comment from a Vietnam vet on an article praising Cronkite’s response to the Tet offensive. The article is favorable to Cronkite, but the comments in the comment section below the article are ruthless in their repudiation of his nefarious influence on the American public, and were written by people who knew a lot more about the subject than the guy who wrote the article:

I was there with a rifle in my hand, BUNKY. . We totally destroyed the VC and they never again were a viable force. , We had the NVA in full retreat across the Cambodian boarder and the DMZ. –Mathew Molk

There were lots of problems with Vietnam, so it is not my intent, here, to blame the whole national disillusionment on one journalist. Still, with the media presenting a false story of what was really going on, it was all but impossible for the nation to be unified. And after Nixon resigned, it was all over. The North Vietnamese were afraid of Nixon. But after he left, they started violating agreements they had made when he was still president, and took the weak, half-hearted response from the Americans as encouragement to keep going, with the result that the Americans escaped literally from the roof of the embassy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That was three years later, in 1975. This was 1972, four years after Cronkite’s commentary, and three years before it all came to an end.

So the first factor was futility, with the inability or unwillingness to get out of the quagmire a big cause of that futility.

The second factor, I think, was a sense of ambivalence. Ambivalence about life, and ambivalence about God. In the words of Desiderata, a poem that was popular when I was a senior in high school, “Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.” Whatever you conceive Him to be?? What arrogance! Do you allow people to believe in you whatever they conceive you to be? So this generation with a sense of ambivalence about who they were, and what their powerless country was, and with nothing more to rely on than a DIY God, had a strong inclination to give it up. To throw everything to the wind, and just experience existence for whatever it was worth.

You see, a God you have to create the definition for is really no God at all, and that was the real point. For many, many young people, there really was no God, and this life is really all there is. There’s nothing else.

It’s hard to describe my relationship with this ambivalence and futility. I did not believe it, especially the idea about God being basically created by man instead of the other way around. But I felt it very deeply. I just didn’t know the cause of it. How could a generation like the generation of my parents, which was so focused and ambitious, beget a generation so unfocused and ambivalent? But the question is flawed. “Desiderata” was written the year my mother was born. The self-made God idea came from them. “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” In other words, you are the only God you can rely on.

I took a sheet of notebook paper, and drew a line down the middle. Then I drew a horizontal line across from one side to the other. Then I drew a diagonal line, and another and another until I had a asterisk covering my page with the spokes of the wheel coming out from the center. I started writing on the lines, one word on each line. Believe it or not, I didn’t even think to count the words until the other day when I was reminiscing about this. When I was finished, I had written exactly twenty words.

I wrote those words down the side of a piece of paper and submitted it to the literary magazine at South Salem High School. Believe it or not, they published my “poem.” In retrospect, that may not have been such a good idea, because it had my name on it, and someone who did not know me could be justified in concluding that I was expressing my own philosophy. That’s because they didn’t see the original. You see, I had not written it as a poem, I had written it on the spokes of a wheel as a vortex that was sucking in an entire generation. But can one express the futility and ambivalence of the sixties in only twenty words? You decide. Here are the twenty words:

1. life
2. is
3. a
4. mad
5. ball
6. of
7. fire
8. circling
9. the
10. globe
11. and
12. falling
13. into
14. the
15. sun
16. to
17. say
18. hello
19. to
20. oblivion

I did not want to be swallowed up by that vortex, and I saw the Jesus revolution as an antidote to the emptiness of that futility and ambivalence. Many things can be uncertain and indefinite and life still goes on. There is still hope. But there is no hope if God is not definite. We do not define God. God defines us.

So I wanted to leave and never come back, and that brings me back to what I said at the beginning of the podcast. I said that God said yes and God said no. How do I explain that? The best analogy I can think of is Jesus in the temple as a little boy. You see, his parents were very frustrated with Jesus, and their frustration was understandable, but he hadn’t done anything wrong. His behavior was not rebellious. You could say it was childish, but he was a child, after all. It’s not wrong for children to be childish. The whole reason kids need parents is so their parents can cover for their childishness so that they don’t get hurt by it. Mary and Joseph failed to do that. But God had mercy on them, too. He understood that they had quite a child on their hands.

We certainly should discipline children when they rebel against authority. But we should be very careful not to discipline children for being children. But to my point  God favored the desire of Jesus to be about his father’s business. But he also made Jesus go back to Nazareth and grow up to be the son of a carpenter.

So in like manner, God perceived my desire and helped me make that summer more than just a field trip. But God also made me come back. God knew that the work he had for me to do required more education that I had at that time.

From where I sit, fifty years later, I can see now, how sometimes the mundane routines of life are just as important in shaping you into the tool God needs, as the excitement of an Explo 72 experience. Jesus had to wait eighteen years to begin the ministry he had intended to be about when he was twelve years old. The wait was useful. And I can say that the years I spent at the teachers college in Oregon, as well as the University of Regina in Saskatchewan were very useful in shaping me into what God needs me to be at this time my life, not to mention the years I spent at the chalkface, and even the years I spent on the road as a truck driver.

On the last day of Explo 72, there was a rock concert in a wide open space in Dallas. It was actually a piece of land that had been cleared for the construction of a freeway, but the freeway had not been built yet. I would venture to say that the thousands of people who rush back and forth over that freeway today are ignorant of the Godfest that lived in that space for one brief moment in time.

I don’t remember what Billy Graham said. It’s just been so long ago. But I do remember Larry Norman. He was talking and singing at the same time. I don’t remember the names of the songs, but one little snippet of his remarks has stayed with me over the past five decades:

…Don’t trip out, it’s not the biggest thing you’re ever gonna to be part of. Not the biggest thing you’re gonna do.

Jesus gave much the same message to his disciples: “Greater things than these shall ye do…”

When the huddle is over, it’s time to play ball. And the game is more important than the huddle, even though the huddle makes the game more efficient and effective.

So that’s my Explo 72 story. And if any of you have an Explo 72 story, I would like to hear it.

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For several years in the noughties, I wrote reviews for Amazon. It just seemed simpler to publish them on that site. Recently I have started putting new reviews here on my blog. It's just simpler. But the old reviews from Amazon will also be listed here.

Amazon Book Reviews

This is a collection of book reviews I published on the Amazon website years ago. Most of them are still there and available to read.

Buddha's Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam

This book is essential to understanding the endgame in Vietnam. Mind you, this is one person's story told from his perspective. So it should be balanced by other reading. Still, it is immensely useful in building an understanding of the war and how and why it failed.

Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's classic Civil War novel set before, during, and just following the American Civil war, and written in the South during the Jim Crow period of the first half of the twentieth century.

Mao's Last Dancer

Fascinating portrayal of a boy from the countryside of China who was chosen to become a professional dancer. His descriptions of country life, especially in terms of relationship, are very real and quite compelling.