A speculative mind

  I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local lev...

  My wife got me started watching reruns of Station 19 , a show about Seattle firefighters, a spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy . Like Grey’s Anatomy , it is a typical Hollywood take on an important job, meaning: cue the soap opera subplots. But it does have some realistic portrayals of the kinds of things that a firefighter might encounter, even if some aspects are exaggerated. Anyway, it got me reminiscing about when I was a firefighter. I was a volunteer firefighter in a small coastal town. My situation was different than that of a professional firefighter working in a large city. In my 10-year career as a fireman, I responded to something more than 500 calls. That might seem like a lot in the abstract, but a firefighter in a big city department might do that many in a few months. In station 19 , much is made of the danger firefighters face and their stress it puts on their loved ones (of course they have to ramp up the drama). Firefighters do face dangers. Some of them are injured ...

                                                                                                                  Artwork by Gerd Altmann One time, my wife and I were out to eat at a nice restaurant. It was busy and we had to wait a bit to be seated. I noticed another couple, also waiting, who had decided to sit at the bar until their turn came. It was a young man and woman, probably both in their twenties talking and laughing. It was obvious that the young woman had been in a terrible fire at some point in her life. Her face was a mask of fire scarring that no amount of plastic surgery would ever put completely right. When you see the effects of such a tragedy, there is a natural feeling of sympathy. And w...

  Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things tha...

  When my father was born the world was a different place. Television did not exist. Radio was just a novelty; there were no broadcast networks or stations. Telephones were a rarity. If you wanted news, you had to read a newspaper. The peak of technology was the Model T Ford. The state of medicine was very different. This was before penicillin, even before sulfa drugs, so if you got an infection, it was bad news. My father’s father had a kidney problem. He went in for an operation which he survived, but later died of what the doctor called “ether pneumonia.” My father said his family never bought that explanation and thought the surgeon or staff made an error that cost him his life. I don’t know if there was anything to that. It is hard to second guess a diagnosis 100 years after the fact, but what little researching I did on the subject has shown that ether pneumonia was not a thing. In any event at age six, my father became the man of the house. At that time, his mother was eig...

  Children of Time by Adrien Tchaikovsky is one of those epic science fiction tales that takes place over a span of thousands of years. But, lest you fear that you have to acquaint yourself with new characters every couple of chapters, no. Not so much. There are two separate races that we follow in the story: the humans and the spiders. The spiders were an experiment gone wrong. The experiment was supposed to introduce creatures from Earth to a newly terraformed planet where an introduced virus would genetically uplift a selection of monkeys, so their accelerated evolution into intelligent creatures could be observed. Unfortunately, an ill-timed war (is war ever well-timed?) killed off most of the human population of the galaxy including the scientists working on the experiment. The monkeys did not survive their descent from orbit, so the virus found other organisms to uplift, namely, spiders. I love that this idea of genetic uplift pays homage to David Brin’s Uplift series. The s...

  I am making my selection for the best rock albums of each decade (in my opinion). You are going to disagree with me; of course you are. All art is subjective, but music is the artform that everybody has the strongest opinions on. Everybody is an expert on their own favorite music. And everyone is right!   Rock and roll was born in the 1950’s, but I am going to skip the 1950’s because I wasn’t there and it is not quite the same thing to listen retroactively to music as it is to be brought up with it. The 60’s and 70’s are going to be hardest to pick because this was the music of my formative years. Do you ever hear music the way you did when you were growing up? 1960’s Abbey Road -- The Beatles . If it is the 60’s, the best album has to be from The Beatles, and there are many to choose from, but I am going to give it to their swan song, an album that showed how far they had come from their beginnings. Honorable Mentions: Surrealistic Pillow -- Jefferson Airplane D...