Wisconsin’s Southern Belle; Belle Boyd’s Grave

Posted on January 12, 2008 by Steve

Image result for belle boyd grave

WISCONSIN DELLS — They may be taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, but the Southern battle flag will fly again this weekend over a little patch of Dixie in the heart of Wisconsin.

As he has for 48 years, Oliver Reese of the Dells American Legion Post will troop out to Spring Grove Cemetery on Decoration Day, bearing the  flags of the Con­federacy and of Vir­ginia. The flags will wave over the grave of ”La Belle Rebelle,” Confederate spy Belle Boyd. Boyd died in Wisconsin Dells a hundred years ago next month while on a speaking tour.

In life, she was famous for using her womanly wiles to help Stonewall Jackson defeat the Union Army. In death, she has been a symbol both of Southern womanhood and Wis­consin Dells tourism. There have been plots to dig her up, and Mason-Dixon line friend­ships formed in her honor.

Belle’s first great adventure occurred on July 4, 1861, when drunken Union soldiers in­vaded her family’s Shenandoah Valley home and attempted to take down the family’s Confed­erate flag. The 17-year-old Belle pulled a pistol and shot a sol­dier dead.

The following May, when Jackson was advancing on the Union Army at Front Royal, Belle learned that the federal army planned to burn the bridges. So she donned her white sunbonnet and ran across the battlefield to warn Jackson. The bridges were saved and Belle Boyd became notorious

She was scorned in the North, where one newspaper trumpeted one of her six prison stays with the headline, “The Secesh Cleopatra Is Caged At Last.” But she was hailed in the South and across Europe, where the French dubbed her “La Belle Rebelle.”

Boyd is said to have been a great beauty, who used her charmes to wangle information from Union soldiers and to persuade jailers to set her free. But if photos are accurate, her beauty may have been more evident from the neck down.

She sailed to England in May, 1864, to carry the message of the Confederacy to a sympathetic audience, but the U.S. Navy captured her boat. She was put under the charge of Ensign Sam Hardinge who, of course, fell in love and allowed one of her comrades to escape. They married in England that August, and the romance of the Confederate spy and the Union sailor captured international headlines.

After the war, Belle became an actress in England and then back home in the United States. Then she went on a speaking tour, high lighting her exploits as a spy.

Reese said she was a popular speaker at Grand Army of the Republic halls, forerunners of to day’s American Legion posts. Her fiery wartime rhetoric bad been tamed. Belle once told a prison warden “If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its president, then I am a criminal.. . I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours.”

But after the war, she promoted unity, ending her talks with “One God, one people, one flag forever.”

She was in the Dells, then known as Kilbourn, in June 1900 when she died of a heart attack. Her grave was unmarked, until a Southern gentleman known only as “a comrade” donated a grave stone.

But Belle enjoyed a new wave of notoriety in 1952, when the Wisconsin Dells launched a tour boat named the Belle Boyd and invited the Richmond chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to Wisconsin to christen the boat with water from the James River.

Reese said the ladies from Richmond were so impressed with how nicely Wisconsin Dells had taken care of their Belle that they adopted a marker in Virginia dedicated to the 36th Wisconsin Infantry, which suffered heavy losses in a battle near Richmond.

Every Memorial Day, Reese said, those ladies would go out to that marker and fly the flag of Wisconsin to honor our dead. And for the past 48 years, Reese has honored his end of the bargain every Memorial Day.

“What started out as a publicity stunt turned into a pretty nice thing,” Reese said.

However, all that publicity stirred up the Southerners.

“The people in Virginia got the idea of digging her up and moving her home,” Reese recalled. “There’s where this came from.”

“This,” is a concrete cap on the grave, embedded with stones sent from every Confederate state.

“One of the rocks was from a state so far south that it couldn’t withstand the bitter cold Wisconsin winters and it crumbled,” Reese said. “We replaced it with good old Wisconsin sandstone.”

Before the cap was set, the ladies of the Elliot Grays Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy were invited back to sprinkle the grave with dirt from Virginia, so Belle could rest peacefully in the soil of Virginia.

So while many Southern families have “Confederates in the Attic,” We have our own Confederate here in the Wisconsin Dells.

Others with Civil War ties are buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, cluding Frederick Brown, brother of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry fame. Oliver Reese, of the Wisconsin Dells American Legion walks past Brown’s grave.

Posted in Civil War, History | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Why We Lose Wars

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Steve

We have had a sorry record with respect to war since the end of World War II. We have not won a single conflict in which we have engaged, major or minor. This is not a slam on our troops; we have won virtually every battle we have fought, whether it be Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, as well as all the minor conflicts in between. Our army is demonstrably the best there is in the world. We have not won the conflicts, however. Korea is still a flash point. In Vietnam we retreated in an inglorious fashion. We conducted a brilliant campaign in Desert Storm, and then had to go back eight years later to do the job over again. We conducted brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we are still fighting there, five years later.

 What is wrong? Why can we not seem to finish what we start? Why do we end, but not win our conflicts? They all boil down to the same basic principle. In order to win, one must want to win. One must have the will to win, and the will to do what one must do in order to win. One cannot win, if one does not define the meaning of victory, and maintain that definition to the end. Napoleon had a maxim; “if you set out to take Vienna, then take Vienna”. A corollary to that is that if one sets out to take Vienna, ensure that one does, indeed, want to and need to take Vienna, and that one is willing to pay the cost to do so. Articulating a goal, without understanding the full implications of achieving that goal is as worthless as not attempting that goal in the first place. The United States has lacked that will to win that would make the best use of our military superiority. We are afraid of conflict.

 Conflict is as much a part of our natural world as is the weather. Every endeavor we attempt involves conflict of some sort, whether it be competition in the business world, competition between nations over resources, individual attempts to rise in the world of corporate life or two football teams attempting to achieve victory over each other on the field of sports. Few of us would deny that such conflict exists, but there has risen, at least in the American nation, a general distaste at the very idea of conflict. It is considered to be a fault in human nature that one person should triumph, while another should fail, or that one company or nation should triumph over their competition. Despite the evidence that conflict, indeed, benefits a society, by forcing it to extend itself beyond what it thinks possible, our schools outlaw such competitive games such as  <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/18/no.tag.ap/index.html”>tag</a>, and conflict resolution and ‘peace studies’ abound at Universities, while military history is rarely taught.

 A United Nations body of experts has recently denied that war is essential to man’s nature, as an array of sociologists adds that we have no innate aggression in our genes. Sociologists and political scientists favor international conferences and peacekeepers in lieu of U.S. aircraft carriers and Special Forces. Such faith accordingly argues that military investment is unessential, and so defense spending is reluctantly agreed to only when there are immediate adversaries on the horizon. Those who argue in favor of military preparedness are labeled warmonger, peace is considered to be the natural order of man, war an aberration, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

 To quote the famous military historian Victor Davis Hanson:

 Yet history more often proves otherwise. Note the use of the plural to describe chronic conflict-the Persian Wars (490 b.c.; 480-79 b.c.) or the Punic Wars (264-146 b.c.), Sometimes the noun “years” is necessary nomenclature-Seven Years’ War, Thirty Years’ War, or Hundred Years’ War-to describe chronic fighting. Battles as well are often identified by numerical adjectives-Second Mantinea, First Bull Run, or Third Ypres-suggesting that the same places are the repeated sites of major campaigns. The Germans scattered the French in the Ardennes in spring 1940, before themselves retreating through the same forest in a failed second try in December 1944-a landscape pockmarked by the artillery of World War I. Epaminondas called the great plain of Boeotia the “dancing floor of war”-since the battles of Plataea, Coronea (first and second), Oinophyta, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Chaeronea were all fought within a few miles of each other.

 The myth is that we can do away with conflict, if we can all get together and talk. We, as Americans, have always shied away from conflict, when at all possible, and tried to do as little damage as possible, when we did, aware of the fact that reconstruction is harder the more the toll that war takes on the combatants. We could get away with that, prior to WWII, when we were not one of the major powers in the world. We are, however, the major power in the world, now, and we are the target of everyone else who seeks power. If we are not capable of fighting off our enemies, winning our conflicts with those enemies, they will destroy us.

 One cannot win in war without proving to the other side that you can beat them, and that you have beaten them. You cannot allow them to salvage their pride. You must, in fact, demonstrate, without a doubt, that you have beaten them without any possibility of their coming back to fight another day. If we had done so at the end of World War I, there would not have been a World War II.

 That point is demonstrated in the American Civil War. That war went on far longer than it should have, because there were few, if any, Americans who understood what victory actually meant. Most, at the beginning of the war, thought that a few big battles would end the war, and everyone would go home. Many, in the North, sympathized with the South, and did not want to see it destroyed. They simply wanted the South to surrender, with as little damage to its people and institutions as possible. This was not how the war was going to be won.

 One of those few who truly understood what victory in war actually meant was William Tecumseh Sherman. As a General in Ohio, in 1862, he told the press that it would take an army of 500,000 men to conquer the South. He was called crazy and dismissed from his command. In fact, it took far larger numbers to win this war than even Sherman imagined. Sherman understood that, to win a war, one must use all the strength, heart, soul and mind one has. Sherman undertook a campaign against the civilian population to convince them of the overwhelming force available to the Federal government, and the government’s willingness to use that force against them. He performed one of the epic marches in American history, 1500 miles, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia, to Savannah Georgia and finally up to Richmond Virginia, in the meantime laying waste and devastation to the peoples of the South. When the Southern armies surrendered, so did the people. The war was over, no question about it. He knew what had to be done to win that war better than almost anyone else, and he did what he had to do, despite the toll in human lives.

Obviously the Americans did not understand this in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the American armies scored a brilliant victory over the Taliban government, destroying its power and establishing a Democratic government in its place…and then they let the Taliban slip across the border into Pakistan, where we could not attack them. From this safe haven, the Taliban was allowed to rebuild their strength, and come back as strong as before. We are still fighting the Taliban, five years later. In Baghdad, we, again, conducted a brilliant campaign…and, again, gave the enemy time to rebuild.

In both cases, we were too timid to do what needed to be done. We were too afraid of the consequences of using our strength. Unlike Sherman, who was ruthless, and cared less for the possible future consequences of what he knew needed to be done militarily than he did winning, we did not follow the Taliban into Pakistan, to utterly destroy them. We did NOT clamp down on Iraq, after our conquest, and root out the enemy. In both cases, political considerations took precedence over military…and we are still fighting. We should have followed the Taliban wherever they went, and dealt with the consequences as they happened.

 Half-way measures yield half-way victories, and a half-way victory is no victory at all. Ultimately, such timidity costs far more lives than if we had done what we knew needed to be done, ruthlessly, and without care for the feelings of the vanquished, at the time, but were too timid, too ‘civilized’ to do the job well. I do not believe we are ‘too civilized’ to defend ourselves against our foreign enemies. Sadly, I cannot prove that, to date.

 I would like to hear from veterans who read this article. The anger of veterans should be white hot as my own. Perhaps we can develop a veterans organization to ensure that we do not accede to the current calls for a pull-out from our responsibilities in the Mideast.

 © 2006 Steve Haas, All Rights Reserved

Posted in War | Leave a comment

The World Turned Upside Down

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Steve

When the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia, surrendered to American General Washington, on October 19, 1781, the British band was playing a British song, first published in 1643,  called “The World Turned Upside Down.” The first verse of this song demonstrates the way the British felt, at this time, that nothing in the world made sense: 

If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down

 That is the way I often feel, reading the news. Lately, it seems to get worse. In fact, I can date the time I began feeling this way to November of 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress. The news has been asplash with oddities since then.

 One does not have to go too far back to become overwhelmed in the sense that Washington has entered the land of Kafka. The House of Representatives has decided to take a hand in foreign policy, initiating a disaster, when the Speaker of the House visited Syria, and declared that Israel would be happy to negotiate a peace treaty with Syria, surprising, most of all, Israel, who never entertained that notion. Last week, the House passed a resolution condemning one of our most important allies and partners in the War, Turkey, chiding them for an event which occurred almost 100 years ago, as if we had any interest in that event at all.

 In another sterling contribution to our foreign policy, one of our leading Presidential candidates, Barak Obama, suggested that nuclear weapons would be used against another one of our principle allies in the region, Pakistan…and the leading Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, cannot decide if she made a mistake or not in voting for the resolution to bring down our biggest threat in the Middle East, at the time, Saddam Hussein.

 The reason for this disarray, of course is two-fold; the Democrats are in control of the Congress and the Democrats have no principles, besides the need to pander to constituencies in order to stay in power. Thus, they wind up posting comments and passing resolutions that mean little, except to catch the headlines and notice of one group or another.

 What is most disappointing is the fact that they have so much support in the country. A good part of this support arises, of course, from disappointment in the policies of the Republicans in Congress who, over the past eight years, have spent our money like Democrats, without goal or principle.

 And that is the crux. Principle. Congressional and Presidential approval ratings are at an all time low, indicating the American public’s disappointment with the activities of the legislature and the Executive, and the reason is because both are acting like pandering robber barons, Congress spending the public’s money to line their own pockets and garner votes, and the President promoting policies that benefit business rather than the nation.

 Now, I am not so terribly naïve. Congresspeople get re-elected by serving the needs of their constituents, and there is no advantage to them to be frugal when spending money keeps them in a job. Also, there are many who go to Washington to make money…and while I do not it, a certain amount of corruption is part of the job.

 However, there is a trade-off that is expected, that they not throw this kind of corruption in our faces, and that is what they are doing. The Democrats are pandering to their constituents at the expense of the rest of the nation, the Republicans are feathering their nest, and the President is promoting his pro-business agenda at the expense of the rest of the nation. If they wren’t so blatant about it, no one would shed a tear, but they are showing disrespect for the nation by their blatant actions.

 The American people are, for the most part, a principled people. As Winston Churchill said, they will do the right thing, after trying everything else. We got where we are because of the high standards we set for ourselves; I grew up in an era where people got dressed for dinner, for travel, and virtually anytime we went out in public, and it mattered that we did not embarrass each other publicly

 We are obviously not the same people as that. We show up to the finest restaurants, unless specifically told not to, in jeans and even shorts. We are used to poor government service, we are used to living in a high-energy world where the niceties of inter-personal interaction easily go by the boards…and we often have the attention span of gnats. We are far too expectant of others, especially the government, to solve our problems, and I worry that we have lost the knack of solving problems ourselves.

 However, we are still good people; there is no nation in the world that has the level of volunteerism that we have…and there is no disaster in any country for which we do not offer as much help and aid as we can. As is proper in a Democracy, we expect our leaders to lead us, and set an example of how a just life should be lead. I can firmly hope that, if such leaders ever presented themselves, we would rally behind them.

 The people have to take responsibility, also, and that is what I feel is lacking. I can hope that a pendulum will shift, and we will begin demanding better behavior from our leaders…because without the principles upon which this nation was founded, principles of self-sufficiency, helping your neighbor and strong character, we cannot last.

Posted in War | Leave a comment

The Shroud of Turin

Posted on October 2, 2007 by Steve

The Shroud of Turin is a 14 foot piece of cloth, stored at the current Cathedral in Turin, Italy, which has a faint image on the front and the back of a man who appears to have been crucified. The claim is that this is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. As a scientist, and a non-Christian, with no ‘cross to bear’ on this subject, I have been fascinated by the amount of evidence presented by scientific researchers indicating that the Shroud is, indeed, genuine, and not a forgery by a medieval artist, as has been claimed by its detractors.

 Here, I would like to present the evidence supporting the proposition that the Shroud is genuine. I do this because I find the subject interesting, and hope to share it, but also because there is a conclusion to be drawn from the evidence that gives new insight into the story of Jesus’ life and death…and a possible explanation of why the Church seems so anxious not to have the Shroud proven to be genuine..

 First, a very brief history of the Shroud. The historical record dates from 1349, when Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight, writes to Pope Clement VI reporting his intention to build a church at Lirey, France. It is said he builds St. Mary of Lirey church to honor the Holy Trinity who answered his prayers for a miraculous escape while a prisoner of the English. He is also already in possession of the Shroud, which some believe he acquired in Constantinople.

 Before this, we have a long history of mentions of a cloth similar to this. In 544 AD, a burial cloth was discovered ‘above the gate’ in the city’s walls. In 944, this cloth was forcibly transferred to Byzantium (Constantinople). There are numerous records describing this cloth.

 Thus, we have a connection between the Shroud Cloth and the Edessa cloth, but no real proof that the two are one and the same, though the coincidence is compelling.

Continue reading →

Posted in History | Tagged | Leave a comment

Let’s Not Bomb Iran

Posted on September 5, 2007 by Steve

The war in Iraq seems to be winding down. One way or another, we shall probably be withdrawing troops from Iraq beginning next year. One can put any political spin on this one wishes; it is certainly likely that the Democrats will say it is their pressure that has forced the administration to begin withdrawing troops. The more probably spin on this drawdown will be that given by General Petraeus, next week; the surge of 20,000 troops to Iraq, under his leadership, has so degraded the ability of al Qaida to fight that the extra troops will not be so needed next year. Evidence of this was given last week, when the President of the United States, the President of Iraq, the top leadership of the armies of the United States and Iraq, plus their entourages, all met in an airbase in Anbar province, last week. Even a few months ago, Anbar province was considered too unsafe for even American troops to enter. Now, due to the efforts of the surge, Anbar province is considered safe for a high level political meeting.

 The next effort of the War on Terror will be Iran. Iran has been the chief source of and supply for terror throughout the world. It has been the principle bankroll for the insurgent forces in Iraq, and has been responsible for American deaths. It is currently building nuclear weapons, and delivery systems, which it makes no attempt to hide the fact that it plans to use these weapons against the United States and its allies. Despite all efforts with regards to diplomacy, Iran is continuing in its activities. There are few who have any better way to stop them besides military action.

 Recently several ideas have been floated about what kind of military actions are being considered by the administration against Iran. The current idea revolves around an extensive three day bombing campaign against specific targets within Iran. Once they are destroyed, it will be assumed that Iran will no longer be a major problem to the United States and its allies. Perhaps popular opinion within Iran will even work to overthrow the present regime of Mullahs, and install a popular government…which we will, of course, be happy to help.

 Pardon me if I demonstrate some distrust of the administration’s capabilities with respect to an endeavor such as that outlined above. To me, it sounds suspiciously like the lead-in to the war in Iraq, and we all know how easy THAT was. Yes, the citizens greeted us with a certain amount of enthusiasm…but it wasn’t the citizens who were to be the problem. It was all the other groups who wanted a part of the power vacuum created by the fall of the government…and we were not at all prepared to control them. They got, as a matter of fact, quite out of control, and we are just now putting them back in their place.

 First of all, with regards to the bombing campaign, in the history of the world, there has never been a record of a bombing campaign that has stopped a war. Bombs are very good at starting wars…but so is everything else. Wars are easy to start. Finishing a war invariably involves ground troops. That is an axiom of war that is so basic, yet one which almost every military leader never seems to grasp.

 Napoleon tried a massive artillery barrage to win at Waterloo. Robert E. Lee commenced the third day at Gettysburg with the largest artillery bombardment in U.S. history, three hours of firing by 164 guns at the Union position. World War I saw artillery bombardments to soften up the enemy that lasted a week, at times. World War II introduced air assaults, firebombings of major cities, and even atomic weapons. Except for the last example, none of them ever achieved surrender, or even victory…and even atomic weapons failed to halt the will of the Japanese people to fight. Only the intervention of the living God, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito halted the slaughter. The army and the people were willing to continue on until the end. And we have the recent attempt by Israel to bomb Hizbollah from Lebanon, and effort that was a total failure.

 Bombing has its purposes, but anyone who suggests we can stop Iran from its course by bombing it is being foolish. It will not happen, and if this is the mindset of the administration, it has me very worried. Unless they know something I do not know (which is highly possible), every precept of military history gives indication that bombing Iran will only start the war with Iran…and once one starts a war, one rarely, if ever, knows how and when that war will stop. Wars have a way of spinning out of control, and ending in the least acceptable way for all parties involved.

 I am not arguing against attacking Iran. I can see no reason to stop a worse holocaust than to destroy the Iranian mullahs hold on their people at this point, before they are ready to use their weapons.

 What I am arguing is that I am TIRED of people thinking they can fight wars on the cheap. Invariably, that costs more lives than if we took the war seriously, and fought it as it should be fought.

 If we attack Iran, we have to plan to go in there with overwhelming force. I do not know what kind of force that means, but we need to have enough troops to occupy the entire country of Iran…not just its capital, but enough to have a presence in every little piss-poor hovel in the country. We have to have enough troops to clamp down immediately on any untoward behavior before it becomes a major mess. We have to clamp a curfew on the entire country, and only gradually lift it as order is restored to each region. We have to ensure that a government is installed, and is ready to function, with its own army and police force, within as brief a time as possible.

 That is the bare minimum we need…and if we are not willing to put this kind of effort into the job, we shouldn’t do it…if Iran still has to be taken out, then we should be prepared to level the entire country…because half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results, and far too many young American boys and girls have died in efforts by politicians who are too afraid, or too ignorant, to tell the American public that wars are expensive, and are not to be undertaken lightly.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Newsflash: Time May Not Exist

Posted on August 16, 2007 by Steve

Not to mention the question of which way it goes…

by Tim Folger

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.

By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”

Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”

Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Spinning the War in Iraq

Posted on August 1, 2007 by Steve

When I read the article in this week’s New York Times, where Brookings Institution scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack argue that “[w]e are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.” I was elated; when the New York Times has to acknowledge that we might have a chance to win in Iraq, then we are well on the way to doing so. Even so, though…my second thought was that the Left will, somehow, spin this to be a negative, also.

 Sure enough, in today’s Slate magazine, Phillip Carter, an Iraq veteran (it says), posted an article titled “Irrelevant Exuberance: Why the good news from Iraq doesn’t matter.” In this article, he states: 

“But in emphasizing this aspect of current operations, they downplay the more critical questions relating to political progress and the ability of Iraq’s national government to actually govern. Security is not an end in itself. It is just one component, albeit an important one, of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. Unless it is paired with a successful political strategy that consolidates military gains and translates increased security into support from the Iraqi people, these security improvements will, over time, be irrelevant.

 One has to be continually flabbergasted by the inability of the Left to welcome success. We all know people like this; whatever you suggest, they will tell you that it can’t be done. No matter how you argue that it can, and bring examples of how it is being done, they will tell you that you are fooling yourself, and you don’t understand the world shattering implications of your effort. You might as well not try, because you can never succeed.

 Here we see a perfect example. For five years, we have been drummed with doom and gloom about how we cannot defeat our enemies. Before our efforts in Afghanistan, we were reminded of failed British, Russian, and Indian efforts to defeat the tribesmen in Afghanistan, and we would face thousands of body bags before we were done. When 12 Special Forces men organized the Afghan tribesmen to beat the Taliban for us, the Left never admitted they were wrong; they saved it for Iraq, where we were, again, warned of thousands of body bags, and years of effort to defeat the Iraqi army, which was dug in and had weapons of mass destruction. When we took Baghdad, with hardly a fight, we were then told the Shi’a and Sunni would never get along, and we can’t get this country organized into one government. When 70% of the Iraqi people risked their lives to come out and vote for a Constitution, when we formed a stable government, and an Iraqi army, we were told that the Iraqis can never learn to fight for themselves. When we finally got Congress to agree to submit to a surge, we are told by another Slate contributor, Fred Kaplan, that the surge cannot work.

 Now that we have an article by knowledgeable sources, Liberals who had previously been as adamant that the our efforts in Iraq cannot work, writing that it is, indeed, working, that the Iraqi army is, indeed, fighting for itself, and is close to becoming a potent force that does not need the United States, we are told that it doesn’t matter…because we lack a ‘comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.’

 What utter nonsense. My first answer to this doom and gloom message is that we are Americans; we have proven, time and time again, that we can do the impossible, and have never failed at a goal which we have set for ourselves. We built the Panama Canal, when the world said it couldn’t be done. We built the Hoover Dam. We sent men to the moon. If we need a ‘comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy,’ we shall get a ‘comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.’

 In fact, though, they totally misinterpret what we are trying to do in Iraq. It cannot be our goal to solve all of Iraq’s problems. In fact, it would be absolutely wrong to solve all of Iraq’s problems. The Iraqis, themselves, must come to their own solutions, precisely why we so quickly worked to form an Iraqi government to do so. It is not a perfect government; no Democracy is. It too the United States ten years, and two different Constitutions, before we could be at all satisfied that our government was working, and we have had numerous Amendments to our Constitution to make up for perceived difficulties.

 Our purpose in Iraq is to give the Iraqis the tools to solve their own problems; to build an Iraqi army that is capable of defending itself, and taking the fighting to the enemy. To ensure that the government is working and stable, and is able to solve its problems…and to fix the infrastructure of the country to the point where the Iraqi people can be self-sufficient.

 That is it. We are not looking for an Iraq which is a perfect model of a safe-secure country. Considering the Middle East, where it is, that would be foolish. There will be fighting all over the Middle East for years, and hopefully we can fight along with the Iraqis to make the region better off for themselves.

 The Left cannot see this, though. For the Left, any success is an intrusion on their vision of a world where everyone is more capable than they are, where conspiracies are alive all around them, and, as every Democratic Presidential candidate, and many Senators, such as Senator Charles Schumer admitted, where the Left is simply too stupid not to be duped. Those in power are, at the same time, too stupid to govern, but smart enough to beat them, confuse and delude the Left into doing what the party in power wants them to.

 We are winning in Iraq. General Petraeus will give a report highlighting our current level of success, and telling us that, with just a little more time, we can be successful. It is the Left’s greatest nightmare; not only because it will make them look as if they do not know what they are talking about, and have fought every effort to pursue what is going to be a successful war…but moreso because it demonstrates, to themselves, that they are incapable. They were wrong, they are wrong, and their world view is such that they will be wrong in the future.

 One would almost feel sorry for them.

Posted in iraq, War | Leave a comment

Plato’s Cave

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Steve

Plato’s Cave is from a story in book seven of Plato’s Republic. The postulate is, in short, that for people living in a cave all their lives, information from outside must seem like a fantasy. All they know is life in the cave, and a visitor from outside the cave trying to explain modern life to them would seem like a story teller, talking about a world that can’t really exist.

 Most of us lead lives like those in the cave. We associate with people who agree with our world view, our colleagues generally agree with us, we read the newspapers which agree with us, and we are constantly reinforced by those opinions such that anyone suggesting an opposing point of view seems like an outside, spinning a fantasy. We get annoyed that someone is attempting to foist such a bizarre story on us, and look for reasons why that person would try to lie to us.

 Most of us who have argued, one way or another, have positions which we have argued for years, and we are past the point where we question the assumptions upon which those arguments are based. Many of us also associate with friends and associates who agree with that position, and are thus reinforced as to the correctness of our point of view. We take comfort in the assurances we receive from our own group of people. Those who disagree with us, as in Plato’s Cave, we view as insane, deluded, or pursuing an agenda above and beyond the particular issues involved.

 A thinking person is constantly checking his or her assumptions. This especially true with regards to world events; the assumptions we have made based on circumstances that existed in 2006 might not relate at all to events and circumstances that exist in 2007.

 This brings us to the debate on Iraq. It seems to matter to no one that we are winning in Iraq. Everything written by people who are actually involved in our effort in Iraq supports that position. I have given evidence and signs here. There can be no doubt that the Iraq military situation, now, differs radically from the military situation that existed a year ago. There is optimism in Iraq. The American soldiers feel it, those tribes who used to support al Qaida feel it, and are now cooperating with the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people are feeling a new sense of nationhood, as evidenced by the euphoria shown by everyone in Iraq at the win of the Iraqi football team in the Asian Cup. Iraqis, for a brief instance, saw themselves as Iraqis, instead of members of one faction or another, and that is a wonderful sign. The American public sees it; new polls indicate that the American public is more optimistic about our ability to prosecute the war this month than they were three months ago, as we score victory after victory against the enemy. Indirectly, we can see the American press feeling the same optimism; one rarely sees news of Iraq in the press, an indication that there are no bombs going off, and no bad news to report.

 We still see the constant drumbeat of defeat, though, from the Democratic Party, the American Left, and from the press. Slate magazine had an column by Fred Kaplan just last week describing how we couldn’t possibly win in Iraq, an article written by someone who obviously has little insight or understading of just what the current plan is all about

One can make the assumption from this that we are dealing with a group of people in a cave, here. The details of the situation in Iraq make no difference, they are content with the approval of their friends and associates, and think that anyone who has a different opinion is insane, or has an agenda. Whether or not they have spent any time examining the evidence, they know the answer, and do not feel the necessity of changing their opinion; to do so might indicate they are wrong, and that would be terrible.

 This is not to suggest, of course, that supporters of the war do not live in their own caves. There are many people who support the war who work on unfounded assumptions based on a knee-jerk support of American policies. The facts, though, support the point of view of war supporters…and that makes for a big difference.

 Worse is the press; they are caught up with the anti-war myth they have developed. Their credibility is not terribly good, anyway; readership in all newspapers is declining precipitously, as is advertising revenue, as people lose faith in the fairness and credibility of a medium which has been caught the internet being unfair and incredible time after time again. For the press to admit they have been wrong all the time with respect to Iraq would be an incredible blow to whatever credibility survives in the American heart for once great institutions such as the New York and Los Angeles Times, not to mention lesser publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

 The bottom line is that the war has changed since the appointment of General Petraeus, and the beginning of the surge, on July 1. We are, finally, taking control over Iraq, and the Iraqis are responding. Objectively, one can look at what is happening on the ground and feel much more hope than the despair that has gripped both nations for the past two years.

 I challenge those who are opposed to the war to look at the information available, and make an objective decision as to the possibility of winning or losing the war. Look at Bill Roggio’s site, or Michael Yon’s site, or read the recent column by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, A War We Just Might Win. Tell us all why this information is wrong, why they must make the assumption, even with the information presented, that the war is lost. Give us the facts, not the unalloyed opinion, and we might listen. That cannot, of course, happen, because there are no such facts, but I would like to hear the attempt.

Posted in Jottings | Leave a comment

To Vote or Not To Vote; Saving Western Civilization On A Shoestring

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Steve

I have talked to many Conservatives who feel betrayed by the current administration. Many people, I included, voted for the President with hesitation…and now feel betrayed by a President who they feel betrayed many of the principles on which he ran. The answer that many people come up with is to only vote for a candidate who meets their principles…whether or not he or she is running on a major party ticket. They suggest that voting for a ‘lesser of two evils’ is a betrayal of principle. One’s vote is precious, and should be reserved for a candidate for which one wishes to actually win…not a candidate who needs to be elected because his or her opponent is so much worse.

There is much to be said for this…but that point of view is missing a larger point. Voting one’s conscience, instead of voting for a purpose, does not take into account the place the United States holds in the world. It is not only our nation which is at risk when an incompetent such as John Kerry is elected President…it is civilization itself, and the debt we owe to past centuries of individuals who have sacrificed and struggled to build what we have today.

I wrote here that Western culture is the salvation of the world; if the United States, the inheritor of the mantle that the leadership of Western Civilization represents, falls, so does civilization in the world itself. I wrote here that the United States serves as a de-facto world government; we ARE the world, to quote an infamous song.  The United States is the only place that most of the world can look to for the type of security and services that a government is supposed to provide. We also provide a hope, by example, and by actual deeds, for millions of people that their own lives can be improved. We have a debt and a responsibility when we vote, not only to us, but to those who got us where we are, and to those who will follow us. We are not voting simply to make us feel good, we are fighting a war against barbarism. We are fighting to uphold and defend a legacy that goes back thousands of years, and we are fighting for a potential  future where everyone in the world has the opportunity to achieve their full potential…and for the opportunity to harness the full potential of everyone in the world to the benefit of humanity. That is what Capitalism and Democracy are about. 

Voting is thus not simply a personal choice. Throwing away one’s vote by voting for a candidate who has no possibility of winning an election opens up the potential that we could lose. We are fighting anti-Democratic mindsets, both domestically and internationally that would impose tyranny on the world. Leftism is tyrannical; they do not believe that people can govern themselves, they believe that people have to be told what to do for their own good. They are the enemy of civilization.  Religious fanatics are intolerant, and have no intention of allowing people to make free choices. We simply do not have the luxury of throwing away something as precious as a vote. We are at WAR, here…and we have no lock on winning this war. We could very well lose.

I am not advocating, here, blind allegiance to Democratic or Republican choices. We should, in fact, we are obligated, to work for the candidate of our choice. If we believe someone has a point of view that is a valuable addition to the American scene, it is very important that we put this point of view in front of the public. With enough exposure, perhaps that person can get to the point of nomination.

We are a two-party system, and it is very unlikely that a third party candidate will be elected for high political office. It is a tragedy of our American political scene that it is so hard for dark horse candidates to get elected for the Presidency…but that is our reality. Once that nomination is made, that is the choice available to us…and we have to choose one or the other party’s candidate.

Thus, sometimes the best we can do is vote for the least objectionable candidate…because the alternative is to lose a battle. If we lose enough battles, we lose the struggle for survivale…and our children will be the ones to suffer…and we will have betrayed those who came before.

SO…don’t vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate…vote for the one who is best able to keep us alive and whole, here. It might even be a Democrat; simply because the Republicans are in the right, here, does not mean that they will stay that way. Vote for civilization, and the future. Keep that in mind.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Women and Culture

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Steve

The American West, in the period of approximately 1865-1890, was called the ‘Wild West’ for very good reason. There was little that could be called ‘law’ or ‘justice,’ and that justice was very often vigilante justice, which is as good as no justice at all. Men, especially young men, were drawn to this atmosphere like a moth to a flame. Fortunes were to be made, there was the excitement of ‘six-gun justice,’ and there were few restrictions on the activities of these young men.

 Women were drawn to this atmosphere, also, many for the same reasons, but an important distinction must be made, here. The culture of the time made a distinction between a ‘woman of leisure,’ as a ‘decent,’ married woman was called, and a woman who worked for a living. The latter category included, of course, whores, which were prominent in the West, as well as laundresses, cooks, women who ran boarding houses for the men, and any other woman who worked for a living. A miner in, say, Deadwood, South Dakota, could (and did) write home and say that he was doing pretty well, but missed the fact that there were no women in the town. Of course, from our perspective, he was wrong. The town was full of women…but there were few, if any, women that were considered ‘decent,’ and a working woman deserved little or no respect in those climates.

 Women, as opposed to the other kind of female person, were honored in a way we would never understand. Isabella Bird wrote a book titled “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains” where she describes wandering in the Rocky Mountains for several years, often spending the winter snowed in with miners, without every being molested, or even threatened, in any way. She was a woman, something men rarely saw at the time, and she was treated with respect. Narcissus Preston Whitman describes crossing the Rocky Mountains around this period, the first White Woman to do so, and her diary has no mention of feeling awkward or threatened.  That is not to say that women were never molested; there were desperadoes in the West who were quite capable of anything…but the general populace revered and respected women, and, more often than not, defended their honor.

 The Colt .45 is a gun that gained the reputation of a peacemaker; its nickname is ‘the gun that tamed the West. In many ways, that is true, but the real change occured around the 1890’s, when more and more ‘decent’ women began entering the towns that had been built around mining and cattle interests, and demanding that sidewalks be built, schools established, main streets be paved, and the rule of law be enforced…not, as was in most cases, simply laws against carrying and/or shooting firearms, but a real code of law that made life, for them, seem safe and clean. The Colt might have tamed the West, but women made it a good place to live and bring up children.

 And that is the central  point to consider. The role of women has been quite constant throughout the centuries, despite local variations. Women are the glue which hold society together; where the women are, that is where the society is. Men can form armies, migrate, mine, hunt, and do whatever they want, but they do not have a society until women show up. Women, and the children for whom the raising has always been a woman’s role, are society.

 In our present day and age, women, in Western society, have achieved a level of independence unheard of before. Never, in recorded history, have women had the freedom to have a career, run for office, and participate in virtually all facets of life that exists in Western culture. For women living in Europe and the North America, it is probably the best time and place for women to be living that ever existed.

 Does that mean that the role of women has changed? That women are, no longer, the cement which holds society together? Are we getting close to the dream of our 1960’s feminist generation, of making men and women co-equal, if not devaluing the role of men to the point where they become unnecessary, as suggested by Maureen Dowd?

Have we changed, from the point where working women were shoved into the background, ignored, abused and forgotten?

 I don’t think so. The role of women in society has not changed for the vast majority of women. Mothers are not considered to be ‘working,’ by a great part of society, and their contributions to society are greatly undervalued. There are millions, if not tens of millions, of prostitutes living in this country whose existence is rarely acknowledged, who are denied adequate health care, for lack of insurance, have a short life expectancy and whose death is rarely acknowledged as significant by even a causal mention…and women without a husband, who have spent their lives bringing up children, are often thrown upon charity for lack of resources when their children leave the home, and refuse to take responsibility for them.

 The basic role of women to every society is still there. Women are the child rearers, the most basic function of any society. Men simply are not going to take over that job from them. Men don’t ‘do’ babies. The fact that many women feel free to combine career and family responsibilities does not change the basic equation that women are primarily responsible for bringing up our children. Wishing it were different does not change this.

 Women have to make a choice of career in their lives. Are they going to be mothers, or are they going to pursue a career? If the latter, they cannot be mothers, also; you cannot plow two fields at the same time.

 If women decide to be mothers, we, as a society, have a responsibility to support them in this position, and we have not been doing this. Motherhood is the most important job in our society. Women who choose this career should be guaranteed adequate health care, retirement benefits, pension, etc, etc, all the trimmings that a woman working in a corporation enjoy. They deserve to have outlets for their creativity , and, above all, when their child-bearing and child-rearing years are over, they deserve, in grateful thankfulness for their efforts, a slot and role in society to fill their useful lives until they are too old to work.

 Hillary Clinton wrote a book with the title “it takes a village to raise a child,” and I cannot argue with that. We have, in many ways, shattered the communities which used to ensure that our children were supported. If women are ‘the glue’ which holds society together, we have begun diluting and weakening that glue. We need a national dialogue about who we are, where we are going, and what is important in our lives.

 

Posted in Culture, feminism, Women | Tagged | Leave a comment