The Trinity test at Los Alamos, showing the traditional mushroom cloud
It’s now Friday October 6th, 2023. Kia ora!
Yesterday we were due to meet up with our daughter and her friends, but arrangements were a tad haphazard. Instead, the cleaning lady turned up – I had not looked at the schedule, and again, Access had tried to change my weekly schedule from Friday to Thursday. I repeat, Thursdays are no good for me. I go to singing or to Tai Chi on a Thursday morning. I don’t do much, but this is really important to me, as I’ve explained to Access more than once.
In the event we had kebabs with them for tea at their Airbnb. They were staying nearby in Paparangi. The house looked quite attractive on Google Maps, but it was down a really narrow cul de sac, and not that easy to get to. Furthermore, access was difficult, with an overgrown sloping path and some steps with no handrail. Surely this is not legal? The house was quite nice inside, and I guess getting somewhere that sleeps 7 is quite a challenge to find. Still, they may have been more comfortable staying in a motel! Inside there was a sunny conservatory and deck, and a modern kitchen. We took some paper towels and picnic plates and some lemon iced tea. One of our sons called in to see his sister while we were there. They were to go to the WOW show that evening, and leave to return to Hawkes Bay early this morning. Our daughter always had big smiles for JD and myself and her brother. Evidently she enjoyed the WOW show, although it was quite intense.
Today someone came from Access to do some cleaning, and accordingly, I changed the towels, tidied up, and put some washing on.
So, in the US, Trump’s “My Kevin” has been ousted as Leader of the House of Representatives; and Trump is growing increasingly unhinged as his business is threatened in the New York civil fraud trial. Whose Kevin is he now? Trump did not support His Kevin in this crisis. This fraud seems to be the trial Trump finds most threatening, since it strikes at the core of his professed personal wealth. Forbes have taken him off their Rich List; and he’s now quoting from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Wise people are talking about the Weimar Republic (you know, the one that was failing when Hitler was elected to power); and about the famous film Cabaret starring Liza Minelli; there’s also talk about the Fall of the Roman Republic, or perhaps the Roman Empire. Having watched the film Path to War with Michael Gambon as Lyndon B. Johnson, I can see how so many Americans have distrust in the institutions of their government. Still and all, I want to be able to renew my passport! You need some institutions of government to achieve that. It seems many Americans do not have passports. In an island country like New Zealand, literally at the bottom of the world, you need a passport. Also, it’s a recognised form of id.
Apparently Trump’s been given 7 days to submit a list of firms that will lose business licences.
The general election in New Zealand is coming up soon, Our Easy Vote cards arrived in the mail yesterday, but, sadly, they’re not perforated. Meanwhile, it’s pretty sure to be close, with popularity among the major parties not changing much over the past few weeks. Prime Minister Hipkins is out of Covid isolation now, and says he’s feeling fine; there’s still a lot of changes to public transport with many trains replaced by buses on account of staff shortages and other mishaps.
Trump has withdrawn his case against Michael Cohen, on the point of being required to testify under oath. Trump’s fraud trial continues, and Jeff McOnie (I think) has confirmed that Eric Trump was fine with him greatly augmenting the values of various Trump properties. The trial is to be delayed for a few days; but Trump has been asked to nominate businesses to be ruled out of order.
But the most stunning Trump news is that he told Australian billionaire Pratt about US nuclear powered and armed submarine capabilities. Pratt bought his way into Trump’s club at Mar a Lago, chatted to Trump, and subsequently told several people about his discussions, including three Australian Prime Ministers – Scott Morrison, Paul Keating, and Malcolm Turnbull, I think. Whether these highly confidential details were true or not is beside the point; there is no classified document involved here, but Pratt has been interviewed by prosecutor Jack Smith, who evidently wishes to establish that Trump was very careless about classified information. He had a very short attention span, but he paid enormous attention to details of how the nuclear football worked, it is said. Furthermore, he called for the shooting of his former Head of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, expecting that someone would take him up on it. To date, no Republicans have denounced this shocking call.
By the way, the Aussies reneged on a submarine deal with France. Just saying.
It’s now Sunday October 8th.
Last night we went to a 5 pm screening of Oppenheimer at the Penthouse Cinema in Brooklyn. The film is unusually long, at three hours, but there were several people there, including a very restless person behind me who continually jabbed at my seat.
The film is very good; Cillian Murphy does a fine turn as Dr Oppenheimer; Matt Damon is fine as General Groves; and the rest of the cast are uniformly excellent. I found the film a bit theatrical, with frequent interruptions of loud and colourful eruptions. The music, if you can call it that, was awful. The story is told in terms of the questioning of Oppenheimer by the FBI and the senate after the Manhattan project’s success, about his supposed communist origins. I found this upsetting, given that it parallels the American legal system as demonstrated in the current Trump trials, but then we learn of Trump’s supreme carelessness about classified information! Anyone else would be in prison!
Still, it was good to see the Manhattan project in action under Groves and Oppenheimer, in New Mexico; it was interesting too to see his misgivings develop as the outcomes were taken completely out of his hands, as in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the development of the arms race, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), and the Cold War. It was pointed out that when the Manhattan Project started, the Americans were in a race to establish an atomic bomb before Germany did, since it was known that Germany was eradicating Jewish people, and Hitler’s hatred of Jewish people had been know for a long time. After the bomb had been tested, Germany had surrendered and was no longer at war; the main enemy, it was thought, was Japan. It later became former US and UK allies, the Soviets.
There was no mention at all of the British development of nuclear power at Cambridge University, as documented by C.P. Snow in his Strangers and Brothers series of novels, where his brother Martin is a scientist heavily involved in the development of nuclear power in England. The scientists there had similar moral qualms about the monster they had created: they were shocked when a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then on Nagasaki. Their similar moral unease, coupled with radiation sickness, was not mentioned at all. Still, Christopher Nolan has produced a fine and memorable film, like his Dunkirk and 1917 films were memorable, for telling human stories against a background of much larger events, and doing a pretty good job of it. Actually 1917 was directed by Sam Mendes. My bad.
There was a lot of mention of Prometheus (the film was based on the book American Prometheus), the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), and yet the project was named Trinity. The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland spoke about Frankenstein. Evidently Trinity refers to a sonnet by John Donne which begins “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”. Oppenheimer called the test Trinity. Americans do love historical analogies! I guess many of us do, too, although it’s frustrating when they’re used incorrectly. I think of the Trinity as a Christian concept, not a Jewish one, so calling the test Trinity is something to know more about. Evidently Oppenheimer and his mistress liked the sonnet.0
I guess it’s good to be reminded that nuclear power presents a threat as great as that of climate change. Somehow, despite the proliferation of nuclear weapons, amongst several countries, and several near misses, many of us have survived to date, and we hope and pray that our children and grandchildren will survive.
I’m glad we saw the film. Oppenheimer was a linguist – he gave a lecture in Dutch, and was learning Sanskrit! The beginning of the film reminded me of my eldest seriously brainy son, who is a mathematician, a fine linguist, and a fine musician. Seriously brainy people (and I’m not putting him in the same class as Einstein or Oppenheimer) have a degree of autism, perhaps, or unusual behaviour, on the edge of normalcy. He also has a beautiful wife and two beautiful children.
We had agreed to have dinner in town after this. The Salty Pidgin looked pretty busy, so we drove into town and again found a car parking area off Cuba Street, where we had parked the other night.
We had dinner at Loretta, again: JD had a glass of Neudorf Chardonnay (always a treat), and I had a grapefruit mocktail. I was really thirsty after the long movie. We had flatbread and white bean dip, a rather strange main course, (I’d thought the servings were really small after the other night!), and delicious desserts – again: an affogato with Kahlua, and a chocolate brownie with Cointreau ice cream. They were both delicious. We should have shared a pizza for our main course!
As we waited for our food, I commented on the fact that there hadn’t been a nuclear war, yet, although of course there’d been the Chernobyl disaster. JD had been looking at his phone, however, and said that the Palestinians had fired several rockets into Israel. Sadly, this morning, this has become a drastic situation, with Israel declaring war on Palestine. Middle East peace, one of President Jimmy Carter’s hoped for legacies, is not to be, although he’s had huge success with eliminating guinea worm. So there’s another war, and another crisis. Strangely, the famed Israeli intelligence service did not have forewarning of this attack. And where was the Dome? It happened on a Sabbath (Shabbat) day, and many are reminded of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 50 years ago this week , when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Yom Kippur means atonement, by the way.
Afterwards we came home, having left the heat pump on. As JD insists on closing all the doors, it’s not much use leaving the heat pump on!
This morning I listened again to the two The Rest is History podcasts about Oppenheimer. The film sticks pretty closely to the truth, here. Oppenheimer was a seriously intelligent and unusual person, and yet he managed to hold the unwieldy team of brainy people0 together and pull off delivery of the atomic bomb. There was contention: Edward Teller thought it would be best to develop a hydrogen bomb. After this amazing feat, what happened next was taken out of Oppenheimer’s hands, and he was vilified for possible communist party connections in that peculiar American way. By the way, the spy Klaus Fuchs was a member of the team delivering the Manhattan Project, and Oppenheimer had nothing to do with his appointment. Senator McCarthy was gaining influence, President Truman was newly president, and the very shady J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI. What a strange country!
This morning I went to church. The texts were about the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-20 and Matthew 21: 33-46), and a parable about the owner of a vineyard. It strikes me as significant that to deliver the Ten Commandments to Israel, Moses must go up the mountain where God remains unseen in the cloud. No one wants to risk God’s anger. In the New Testament, the vineyard owner sends his only son, and the other guys say let’s kill him, and seize his inheritance. In The New Testament, God is love, and it’s human beings who are angry. So in the Old Testament the one God, El, is unseen, and you must not make an image of him, but in the New Testament, God sends his Son Jesus to earth, in the form of a man, and even when people can see him, they despise him, mock him, and call for Barabbas when given a choice as to who is to be crucified. Yet again, this desperate act of cruelty, led to our salvation, and Christ’s resurrection from the dead. So there is a wonderful progression.
An interesting verse in the Matthew’s Gospel text is about the stone: in chapter 21 verse 44. Going on after speaking about Jesus being the cornerstone, it says: “The one who falls in this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls”. The minister said that the first phrase referred to Isaiah 8, and the second phrase to Daniel 2. Being very interested, I looked these up. The Isaiah verse reads as follows: “And he (God) will be for a sanctuary, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense, to both the houses of Israel…”. The Daniel 2:34 verse reads as follows: “Thou (Nebuchadnezzar) saw till a stone was cut out without hands, and it smote the image upon its feet of iron and clay, and broke them to pieces”. This is when Daniel is brought in to interpret King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Matthew, being a fine Jewish scholar, often demonstrates his extraordinary knowledge of the Old Testament when writing his gospel, and so it is here.
The attack on Israel, by Hamas representing the Palestinians, seems to have been quite intense, with many Israelis being taken hostage. In the walled enclave, walls have been taken down. Does this remind you of anything? I guess one can try to understand the grief and upset on both sides, but surely violence does nothing to solve anything, in this day and age.
Well. That’s enough for now. Slava Ukraini! Ngā mihi nui.
John Donne’s Sonnet:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Classic Barbarian 