Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History

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Scarlet SistersThe Scarlet Sisters, by Myra MacPherson, is subtitled Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age.  It is the story of “two improper Victorians” who were famous in their day for championing women’s rights and infamous for scandals.  Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin “rose from poverty, a trashy family, and a childhood of scam fortune-telling,” (including murderously sham cancer ‘treatments,’) “to become rich, powerful, and infamous.”  MacPherson notes that the sisters as well as their rivals and supporters wrote various lies and inconsistencies which make a biography difficult to assemble.

While I had not heard of the sisters before reading this book, they gained supporters and enemies whose names I recognize: the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and radical socialist Karl Marx.  This is only a sample of their associates; the “Cast of Characters” lists fifty-two people.

Spiritualism was their usual entry into famous social circles, and the rags-to-riches backgrounds of many Gilded Age tycoons offered an accepting attitude towards their origins.  These connections supported them when they opened the first woman-owned brokerage house on Wall Street, where they made and lost a fortune. Continue reading →

Russians, The People Behind the Power

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Russians I found Gregory Feifer’s book depressing. “The vast majority of Russians will continue to endure the grinding bureaucracy… [G]overnment repression, waste, shoddiness and corruption remain prominent.” Between the oligarchs and the vast majority there is a “jarring contrast between extravagance and the heart-wrenching shabbiness of the great unwashed.” Westerners who try to do business through the visible government structure are disappointed because the real power is hidden in traditional cronyism, corruption, and bribery.
Feifer says he is pessimistic that Russia will “Westernize”. He asks: “Have they learned nothing from their painful past?” They don’t seem to; Russia has a “political culture that has shaped the country’s history for centuries.”
Feifer covers tsarist, Soviet, and recent history, including the history of St. Petersburg and Moscow. (Being a Russian peasant has always been a misery.) World War II is still prominent in Russian thinking: while seventy years of Soviet rule killed as many as 20 million people directly through execution and imprisonment, or through state-orchestrated famines; WWII killed 30 million in a few years, including 40% of men aged twenty to forty-nine. Continue reading →

Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

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Future of the MindAuthor Michio Kaku is well known for his books and television popularizing science. He has recently tackled brain research.  His current book, The Future of the Mind, includes popular touches such as references to movies and TV and stories from his own life (wow, he was tough competition in high school science fairs!). The book has been on the New York Times best-seller list, and I thought it was a readable, well-prepared effort; I have watched some of Kaku’s TV shows and in places in the book I can hear his voice in my head as I read.  But somehow this book didn’t completely grab me.  I skimmed through some of the sections, but since the chapters can stand-alone, that worked well for me.

future Michio_Kaku_in_2012

Dr. Kaku

Kaku mentions Phineas Gage, whose accident in 1848 marked “the origins of modern neuroscience.”  When dynamite powder he was tamping down exploded, a metal rod rocketed completely through his head leaving behind massive brain damage, but Gage survived.  Kaku mentions the standard story that Gage’s personality was changed much for the worse by his accident. By coincidence, I found an article in Slate.com that says this standard story may be wrong, that the tale of his changed personality comes from a single, vague report immediately after the accident, and his subsequent life demonstrates he recovered to a remarkable extent.  But whatever the truth abut Gage, Kaku’s point remains: “it would alter the course of science.”  Continue reading →

What Blooms Where You’re Planted?

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I was recently talking with a friend in Silver City, New Mexico who volunteers at the city’s visitors’ center. He relayed a story told him by a visiting tourist: that she had asked the clerk at a local convenience store what there is to do in Silver City and the clerk told her “There’s nothing to do here.”  Imagine the horror and frustration for someone who knows about the Billy the Kid house, the Gila National Forest, Silver City’s old town and gallery scene, every festival and event, and – well- all kinds of things.

It made me wonder why so many of us neglect our own back yards.  I grew up just two hours outside New York City but didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty until I was middle aged.  I appreciate my current home town of Silver City and have gotten involved in a number of events, but I have neighbors who don’t recognize the name of the main street through old town. (No, it’s not “Main Street”.  Come visit and find out. lol)

I guess part of the problem is that your local town is generally where you work, so for fun you go away.  Consider that, no matter where you live, there are likely to be people who come to your town to ‘get away’.

Every town has pluses and minuses, and it can be easy to be disheartened by traffic problems or a boarded-up store and focus on the negative.  Remember that it is still a beautiful world.  I hope you will visit their your own local attractions.  If I may paraphrase a quote I like, see what blooms where you’re planted.

Paradox of Iran

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Ayatollah Begs to DifferThe Ayatollah Begs to Differ
By Hooman Majd

On this blog, we have been making an effort to understand the Islamic world.  Majd says “my hope is that this book, through a combination of stories, history, and personal reflection, will provide the reader a glimpse of Iran and Iranians” and reveal paradoxes of the Iranian character that baffle Americans.  He succeeds.

Majd is the son of an Iranian diplomat raised in the West, and seems well situated to bridge the gap between the two peoples.

Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, and are 90% Shia, not Sunni, Muslim.  Shia believe in the twelfth Imam, who is not dead but hidden, and who will return as the Messiah in a way that reminds me of Christians’ faith in the return of Jesus Christ.  I’m not sure if this similarity will make the two peoples more or less sympathetic to each other, since discussing religion is dangerous outside of trusting relationships.

“Persia” had been “Iran” to Iranians since 226 CE; “Persia” came from the French.  In 1935 a Shah who embraced the Third Reich and fascism decreed that the nation should be called “Iran” which means “land of the Aryans”.  I found it alarming that today Farsi translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf are prominent in book stores, though some Americans may appreciate that Marx and Communist are loathed by the theocracy.

Many Iranians (especially expats) view the word “Persian” as connoting their glorious past and they are annoyed that Westerners are ignorant of Iran’s history.  Iran was the equal of ancient Egypt, Rome, or Athens.  Westerners admire Alexander the Great, while Iranians view him as a barbarian for burning magnificent Iranian libraries.

“The Shia sense of the world [is] a dark and oppressive place” of “estrangement and woe”, “under a perpetual dark cloud” where “death and martyrdom are pillars of Shia Islam.”  The nation’s recent history reinforces this gloomy outlook: Muslims have suffered “five hundred years of Western hegemony,” and “for two or three hundred years Iran had been [under] Western powers – specifically Britain and then the United States when it took over the mantle of empire after World War II.” Continue reading →

David and Goliath

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Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
By Malcolm Gladwell

david and goliathThis book uses David and Goliath as a metaphor, but it’s not the metaphor you might expect.  Gladwell spends some time explaining the story and its setting in the ancient world, with notes on the surprising amount of scholarly research devoted to it. We modern Americans misunderstand the story’s intent and have the original message wrong.

 

David_and_Goliath public domain

Public Domain in the US: copyright expired

We think of David as a hopeless underdog facing an unbeatable foe, saved only by divine intervention.  “No one in ancient times would have doubted David’s tactical advantage once it was known he was an expert in slinging.”  Gladwell writes that soldiers trained to use sling shots were as formidable as archers.  Goliath was a heavily armored infantry warrior and there was no way he could chase down and engage David; he was a sitting duck. (He may have also had acromegaly: speculation on the diseases of historical figures is always intriguing, even if they are seldom provable.)  I found this part of the book surprisingly interesting and fun; much better than the “favorite Bible stories for children” sort of idea I had before. Continue reading →