Everything Everywhere All At Once

 Everything Everywhere All At Once

 Watching “Everything Everywhere All At Once” cold, without researching its meaning, can be a confusing mix of images and inferences.  What the hell is this thing about?  Multiverses?  Talking rocks?  An all-knowing bagel? C’mon!

 Seven Oscars for “Everything Everywhere All At Once”

- Best Original Screenplay, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

- Best Motion Picture of the Year, Daniel Kwan (producer), Daniel       Scheinert (producer), Jonathan Wang (producer)-

- Best Achievement in Directing, Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

- Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Michelle Yeoh

- Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, Jamie Lee C  Curtis

- Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, Ke Huy Quan

- Best Achievement in Film Editing, Paul Rogers

 Why?

  Here is one reviewer’s take:

“In "Everything Everywhere All At Once," nihilism drives Alphaverse character Jobu Tupaki to the brink.

There's no simple way to sum up the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once.

 It begins with the premise that a Chinese American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) must enter the multiverse to stop an alternate version of her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), from annihilating their world. Evelyn's husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is along for the ride. (At the Oscars, Yeoh won Best Actress and Quan won Best Supporting Actor. The film also took home Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay Oscars.)

 EEAAO is two hours of chaos punctuated by absurdist humor and nonstop action sequences, followed by a string of emotional revelations about Evelyn, Joy, Waymond, and the human condition. Without much warning, the film becomes a depiction of how someone — Joy — can be brought back from the edge of their existence. Suddenly, the viewer comes face-to-face with a version of their own emotional pain as the movie's fantastical scenes give way to something far more relatable: an unexpected but masterful story about mental health.”

 

Another reviewer says:

“The Deeper Meaning Behind Everything Everywhere All At Once

Though never expressly stated, Everything Everywhere All At Once suggests that what makes life meaningful is the recognition that because there is no inherent meaning, all things and moments are equally meaningful. It turns out that Jobu Tupaki (a variant of Evelyn's daughter Joy) doesn't want to kill Evelyn, but was just seeking another person who can shift through the multiverse, largely out of hope for some different perspective to make sense or find some meaning in it all. Everything Everywhere All At Once is very thoughtful in its treatment of nihilism and depression, and it never gives an explicit answer to the problem of meaninglessness in an infinite universe. Instead, Everything Everywhere All At Once's meaning reveals itself to be a prolonged argument that, perhaps, the only meaning to be found in life is the people in it, and so the solution is to be present every moment possible.”

 

To get a more thorough picture of what Everything Everywhere All At Once is trying to say, a quick look at absurdist and nihilist philosophies is also in order.

 Ray Gruszecki

March 14, 2023

Almost Quantum Theory

 

Almost Quantum Theory

 

“This new version of quantum theory is even stranger than the original

Science Hub Editorial TeamMarch 03, 2023

An idea called almost quantum theory predicts particles could have stronger correlations than we've ever observed. If tests show it to be true, it would be a huge scientific upset.

 “EINSTEIN attacks quantum theory.” That was the headline in The New York Times on 4 May 1935. The world’s most famous scientist and two collaborators had discovered what they saw as a fatal flaw at the heart of our greatest theory of nature. They had found that particles separated by kilometres seemed to be able to interact instantaneously with each other. Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”.

 Even though he had helped lay the foundations of quantum theory, Einstein felt it must be missing something. That spookiness just didn’t feel right – there must be something we weren’t seeing that could explain it. No idea this strange could be true, surely?

 We now know that it is. That is the lesson from most of the past century of physics, as quantum theory, including spooky action at a distance, passed every experimental test thrown at it. At the tiniest scales, reality really is as strange as our best theory of the subatomic world suggests.

 What we haven’t figured out is why quantum theory is so strange. Physicists like me have long been examining its foundations in search of answers. Recently, these efforts have turned up a major surprise: a new hypothesis called “almost quantum theory” that is even more bizarre than the original. What really excites me is that we might be on the cusp of putting it to the test. If it passes, the newspapers will be reporting the scientific upset of the century.

 Quantum theory deals with the subatomic world of particles, and it describes their behaviour with peerless accuracy. It is often spoken of as the most bulletproof scientific theory. But that doesn’t make its ideas any easier to digest. Among its strange facets is that subatomic particles can exist in a cloud of possible states called a superposition before they are measured – the counterintuitive nature of which is most famously captured by Schrödinger’s cat, the thought experiment about a feline that is simultaneously dead and alive. Then, there is the fact that light, say, can behave as both a particle and a wave.

 But it is Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, more properly known as non-locality, that bamboozles us most. Take two particles, prepared using a special procedure known as quantum entanglement, and send them far apart. If you peek at one, you will immediately be able to discern some of the quantum properties of the other. It seems that they influence each other instantaneously over large distances, even though no influence takes place. “Spooky” really is the word.

 The Bell test

To grasp non-locality more fully, it helps to consider an anecdote about odd socks first told by the Irish physicist John Bell, who greatly advanced our understanding of the quantum world. It was inspired by Reinhold Bertlmann, who worked with Bell in the late 1970s. Bell realised his colleague had a habit of wearing a different coloured sock on each foot. This meant that as soon as you saw that one of Bertlmann’s socks was pink, for instance, then you knew the other one wouldn’t be pink.

 Bell thought that sounded suspiciously similar to entanglement. It made him wonder if entanglement was as odd as it seemed. The socks anecdote can be explained easily enough by Bertlmann’s choices as he dressed. Could the correspondence between entangled particles be similarly predetermined – thus explained by everyday, non-quantum physics?

 Bell’s genius was to answer this question with what has come to be known as the Bell test. It involves entangling two particles and sending them far apart, to labs where they can be measured in two different ways. Each lab makes one measurement, not knowing which one the other lab has chosen, and uses that to predict things about the result of the other lab’s measurement. Think of it as the quantum version of looking at the pink sock and predicting that the other sock isn’t pink. They do this lots of times and count up the number of correct predictions. Bell showed that if entanglement can be explained by everyday, non-quantum physics, you would get the right answer in a Bell test no more than 75 per cent of the time. When the test is conducted on quantum entangled particles, however, the right answer emerges 85 per cent of the time.

 Bell’s test, then, was a way to quantify how weird the correlations between quantum particles are – and it showed that they really do exceed anything we can explain using classical physics. This is what we really mean when we talk about “non-locality”.

 Reading about this is what first got me interested in becoming a physicist. The fact you could ask such deep questions about reality and get a clear answer fascinated me. Now, Bell’s test is playing a key role in the development of a set of ideas even stranger than quantum theory.

 These ideas had their genesis 30 years ago, when researchers wondered if there were a single principle at the heart of quantum theory. To see why that matters, compare quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of special relativity. This was built chiefly from the basic principle that nothing can travel faster than light. If quantum theory can be similarly derived from one principle, a kind of essence of quantum, it would not only be highly elegant, it might also show us where the weirdness ultimately springs from.

 In 1994, Sandu Popescu at the University of Bristol, UK, and Daniel Rohrlich at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel were mulling this over. They came up with a potential theory of physics that mathematically formalised just two simple principles. First, no signals can go faster than the speed of light. Second, non-locality applies to reality. It all seemed routine. But they were in for a shock.

 It turned out their idea, known as PR boxes, allowed for much stronger correlations than we observe. A Bell test would produce the right answer 100 per cent of the time. It seems obviously mistaken, but PR boxes started from reasonable assumptions, so why was it wrong? “It was a huge surprise,” says Mirjam Weilenmann at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Austria.

 This result went largely unnoticed for a time. “Their work appeared in a somewhat obscure journal,” says Matty Hoban at Quantinuum, a quantum computing company in Oxford, UK. But a little over a decade ago, some physicists began to investigate further.

 One was Miguel Navascués, also at the Vienna institute. In 2009, he too decided to reformulate the rules of quantum theory, this time starting from the principle that nothing travels faster than light and a new principle called macroscopic locality. The latter says that, as we move from particle-sized objects to the larger, macroscopic world, the rules of classical physics emerge and non-locality vanishes. A Bell test under these assumptions showed the right answers for entangled particles must occur less than 100 per cent of the time. It suggested that PR boxes had gone off the rails because it left out the principle of macroscopic locality. There was now a feeling that this kind of research might inch us closer to finding the essence of quantum theory.

In the same year, a team led by Marcin Pawłowski at the University of Gdansk in Poland tried the reformulation trick again, this time starting from a single principle called information causality. This says that when two people exchange information, one can’t receive more than the other sent. This proved decisive. A Bell test performed under the resulting formulation would produce the right answers 85 per cent of the time, the maximum level of accuracy observed in real experiments.

 Spooky action at a distance

This caused quite a stir. “Information causality was an enormous success, it was amazing,” says Navascués. Some thought that we might finally have hit on the essence of quantum theory. “People said maybe this principle encapsulates all of quantum mechanics,” says Navascués. But he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t think the authors had done enough to show that their framework could describe all the nuances of quantum physics, not least the other strange phenomena beyond non-locality.

 So, Navascués, Hoban and their collaborators came up with yet another proposal in 2015. It misses out some of the information contained in quantum theory proper, which is why it has become known as almost quantum theory. But it seems to come with everything we know to be true about quantum theory baked in. What’s more, when you work through the result you would get from a Bell test under almost quantum theory, it again comes out as about 85 per cent. Navascués and his collaborators had achieved their aim of showing the flaws in information causality because that principle didn’t uniquely reproduce quantum theory.

 It might seem a downer that information causality had been found wanting. But when you think it through, there is an exciting alternative: what if almost quantum theory is actually the true description of reality?

In almost all situations, it makes the same predictions as regular quantum theory. Yet there are some unusual instances where, in a surprising twist, it predicts that there would be correlations between particles that are stronger than plain vanilla quantum theory does. None of these situations has so far been experimentally investigated. So that leaves us in a historic position. We have a potentially viable theory of reality that we can’t rule out, and it suggests that, in some circumstances, quantum theory isn’t weird enough to do justice to reality.

 As if that weren’t thrilling enough, there is another reason to get excited about almost quantum theory. One of the biggest missions of physics is to find a more unified description of reality. At the moment, our theories of gravity and the quantum world are separate beasts, and a promising way of uniting them would be to find a quantum version of general relativity. It turns out that almost quantum theory has a similar mathematical structure to one candidate for a theory of quantum gravity, known as the consistent histories formulation of quantum gravity. The building blocks of this hypothesis, proposed by Nobel prizewinner Murray Gell-Mann, correspond to sequences of particle interactions. The idea isn’t currently popular and this could all be a coincidence. Or it could be telling us something. “I thought it was a really cool connection,” says Hoban.

 Quantum entanglement

It is vital that we find out if almost quantum theory stands up. But it won’t be easy. It predicts that, in certain situations, particles can have stronger correlations than we have ever observed. But, by definition, the systems of particles involved will be harder to control and work with. One way to put it to the test might be to conduct a version of the Bell test with three particles instead of two, says Ana Belén Sainz, also at the University of Gdansk. “I would love to see these experiments,” she says.

The only trouble is, we don’t yet know what kinds of particles would be best for such tests. Familiar ones like electrons or photons aren’t likely to be hiding much. But Navascués says there are systems of quantum particles that we have always struggled to control – particles like kaons, which are composed of quarks bundled together in an unusual way. He thinks these might be hiding post-quantum physics.

 Another place to look for this is inside quantum computers, says Hoban. Within these machines, lots of particles interact in ways we can’t always understand. “I would love it if we start building these quantum computers and, suddenly, they’re not behaving as they should,” says Hoban. This could be a sign of almost quantum theory. Navascués agrees that looking at systems where large numbers of particles are interacting might be fertile ground. He is talking with a group of experimentalists in China to explore how they could design systems like this and test them.

 If almost quantum theory turns out to be true, there will be major implications. The ability to entangle particles underpins quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Quantum computing promises a revolution by providing a totally new way to do calculations. Quantum cryptography offers a reliable way to secure communications and could form the basis of a quantum internet. If almost quantum theory is true and we can harness it, it could supercharge both technologies.

 Even if all this turns out to be smoke and mirrors, the search for new principles of physics is valuable. The more we learn about quantum theory, the better the chance we might find a way to reconcile it with general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. “Quantum theory is already super old compared to other theories, but there are so many new avenues people explore all the time,” says Weilenmann.

Speaking of Einstein, you have to spare a thought for him in all of this. He fervently hoped that spooky action at a distance was a flaw that would end up showing quantum mechanics was wrong. Little did he know that 90 years later we might be about to find an even spookier theory of physics.”

 Ray Gruszecki

March 4, 2023

Conspiracy Theories

 Conspiracy Theories

 Once repudiated “Conspiracy Theories” shown to be true

 Covid was caused by transfer from bats and/or pangolins

Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian misinformation

The Moon landing was staged

 So many such “conspiracy theories” are spawned by our dishonest politicians, media and big tech, and later shown to be true.

 The latest is a recent admission that Covid most likely leaked from the Wuhan lab in China that was experimenting with these viruses.  Since Covid killed nearly seven million people world-wide, and over one million Americans, where and how the pandemic originated is of some importance and should not be covered up and lied about. 

 But that’s what happened.  Lies and repeated lies that the pandemic originated in a wet market and was spread by bats and pangolins.  It is still being lied about by much of the left-wing, who have seized upon the word “weak” somewhere in the DOE study that concluded the lab origin of Covid.

 

Well, I’ve come up with a real wild conspiracy theory that I floated as satire a while back.  I repeat it here as an example of a real conspiracy theory.

 “If I were a communist planner deep in the bowels of the Beijing Politburo’s Dirty Tricks Division, what could I do to bring China economically, materially and militarily equal to, or ahead of the West?  Also, how could I ensure that modern China pays back the West for the humiliating defeats of the opium wars of the 19^th century, the colonization of parts of China by the West, and the addiction of many ancestors in China to opium?

 All under the cloak of absolute secrecy, what if we weaponized a killer virus, ruthlessly controlled it within China, and ensured its release to the outside world?  That would allow China to sprint ahead of most of the rest of the world, particularly using our “Belt and Road Initiative” to acquire infrastructure throughout the world.

 As a further effort, and remembering our addicted ancestors in the 19^th century, suppose we develop a killer drug and export it to the world?  Illegal drug users would take it and die.  We can even make it look like candy for the western kids.  In truth, Fentanyl is now one of the leading causes of deaths in the U.S.

 

Far fetched?  Maybe.  But anything is possible in this crazy world, particularly in secretive, Machiavellian, communist China, whose announced goal is to become the dominant power in this century.

 Is China furthering its goals while doing a little pay back for the 19^th century?”

 Now that is real conspiracy theory.  Let’s hope it never proves true.

 Ray Gruszecki

February 28, 2023

National Review

 

National Review

 This is why I read and support Bill Buckley’s “National Review”.  Not because it’s a right-wing rag.  Because it tells the truth while our mainstream media subscribes to whatever lies and distortions the democrats and the left are pushing.

 This is from Rich Lowry’s solicitation for subscription and financial support of “National Review”, but it highlights several examples where NR told the truth while much of the rest of the media lied.

  

“We live in an era of superstition and lies.

 You might think that at a time when scientific understanding is at its apex, when the level of education is higher than ever before, when technological tools allow for the rapid dissemination of information that we’d be in a golden age of knowledge.

 To the contrary, ideological malice and political cowardice have combined to make contemporary America a cauldron of poisonous and obvious falsehoods.

 We’ve somehow managed to forget what biological sex is, or we pretend to have forgotten.

 We have no idea what Roe v. Wade really was, or what the brute facts of abortion are.

 We make up fictions about guns, both the legal regime around them and the nature of widely available firearms.

 Some of this is conscious deception driven by activists and fanatics; some of it is what might be called “learned ignorance” by people who don’t dare buck a politically correct consensus; and, finally, some of it is old-fashioned ignorance on the part of people who believe what the so-called experts say, or what they read or hear in the legacy media.

 There is an antidote to all of this, of course (and you may be able to guess what I’m about to say), called NATIONAL REVIEW.

 When the great and the good maintained that anyone who thought Covid might have emanated from a Chinese lab was a conspiracy theorist and hater, Jim Geraghty blew through the guardrails and wrote compellingly about why the natural-origins theory didn’t add up. He beat the Energy Department to it.

 When the legacy media wanted to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and (this still holds true) discount the evidence of Biden-family corruption, Andy McCarthy would have none of it and, as usual, knew the case chapter and verse.

 This was a follow-up to his exemplary work on the Russia hoax. The former New York Times journalist Jeff Gerth did a massive rundown of the media failures covering Russia-gate in Columbia Journalism Review a few weeks ago, and I mean no disrespect to Gerth when I say I’m hard-pressed to cite anything that I didn’t already know from reading Andy.

 I mentioned the trans-insanity, abortion, and guns above, and we’ve had you covered on all that as well.

 If you think this work is important, again, please consider ponying up a little bit to help keep it happening.

 Perhaps the worst example of contemporary misinformation is the 1619 Project, which constitutes a libel against our own history.

 A different take on our history is one thing; different schools of thought and new interpretations based on new evidence emerge all the time.

 It’s another thing entirely, though, to set out an ideological goal in advance, and then twist or manufacture the evidence to try to back it up without regard to logic or facts. That’s what the 1619 Project has done, and it hasn’t paid a price for it — rather, it has been celebrated in verse and song, and now has its own Hulu series.

 While, depressingly, the project’s lies about our history and country have been widely accepted in certain quarters of America, we’ve taken the approach that they can’t be allowed to stand.

 We’ve dismantled the Hulu series, which is crude and propagandistic even compared to the original set of essays in the New York Times.

 And we’ve attacked the premises of the project root and branch in pieces that Nikole Hannah-Jones has felt compelled to respond to (while never addressing the substantive points, of course).

 I’m biased, but as far as I’m concerned, Dan McLaughlin’s big, authoritative essay on the history of slavery is worth generous contributions on its own. I’m privileged to have some insight into our editorial process, and I assure you, that piece was not the work of a weekend or even a couple of weeks — rather, months of research, and thought, and care.

 You’re not going to find that at many other places.

 Now, it should be mentioned that at NR we are also willing to call out untruths emanating from our own side. Needless to say, this subjects us to abuse and derision, but we consider it our responsibility regardless.

 The folks who apparently believe it’s a high principle to follow the party line even if it’s outlandish and dumb should consider, if nothing else, the instrumental value of the truth. If Republicans had never gone down the rabbit hole of 2020 conspiracy theories, they’d probably have a comfortable majority in the House right now and a Senate majority — and Joe Biden would be running scared (or at least walking stiffly in the other direction).

 I believe the truth sets you free; even if it doesn’t, it can convince fence-sitting voters that it’s okay to vote for your candidates.

 If you think this independence of thought is refreshing and essential to creating a conservatism that can win, well, I’m going to make myself a bore — please, chip in if you can.

 As a serious magazine of opinion that does not let business considerations affect its editorial line or its commitment to the truth, NR has always depended on the generosity of its readers to keep it afloat — for more than 67 years now.

 I’m honored that you’ve read this missive this far, and can’t express my gratitude if you are able to give something and join the great chain of multigenerational effort that has kept NR battling for truth, justice, and the American way.

 Standing with you, 

Rich Lowry

Editor in Chief

NATIONAL REVIEW

 

Ray Gruszecki

February27, 2023

Our Dishonest News

 Our Dishonest News

 This news item about where old shoes end up really illustrates the lack of veracity in our modern world.  Can we believe anything that we read or watch or hear from Mainstream Media, Big Industry or Big Tech these days?

 Well, the answer is, not indiscriminately!  The source of what we are consuming as news needs to be vetted, and some of the vetting entities are also slanted and dishonest.

 Forgetting my own tendency to be a bit on the libertarian and conservative side of issues, I strive for honesty and accuracy, and have gone out of my way to find it.

 I have found “Media Bias Fact Check” to be an honest and unbiased checker of news sources.  “Factcheck.org” is also honest, but not quite as robust.  “Snopes” and “Politifact” lean as far left as many news sources that they purport to vet.

 One cannot enumerate all of the popular news sources.  That’s what “Media Bias Fact Check” is for.  

 Briefly, the Mainstream Media is left-wing, and pretty much parrots the views of the democrats.  Included in the Mainstream Media are ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP, Time Mag, Atlantic and many other well-worn news sources.

 Expressing a more conservative view are the Murdoch Group’s FOX, WSJ, and NY Post, and the National Review.  Breitbart, OAN and Newsmax are more conservative.  Reuters is a pretty much balanced news service.

 Having said all of that, one needs to distinguish between news and opinion.  We are not getting the news when watching Hannity on Fox or Maddow on MSNBC.  We are getting their strong opinions.

 The difference between the Mainstream and more conservative Media relates many times to what news is covered.  Examples are CNN and Fox coverage, (or lack thereof), of the Southern border crisis and of Hunter’s laptop.  The Mainstream Media obfuscates and distorts the news.  The more conservative media reports it honestly.  The conservative right may have opinions about the news, but they report it honestly and don’t try to hide it.

 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

 Ray Gruszecki

February 25, 2023

Our Dangerous World – Thanks Biden

 

Our Dangerous World – Thanks Biden

 We seem to be on the cusp of an impending conflict with the People’s Republic of China.  They are expanding their military at an alarming rate, their “Belt and Road Initiative” is making huge economic gains in acquiring and dominating the infrastructure of weaker countries, and they make no pretense that their goal is to become the dominant power in the world.  They infringe on U.S. sovereignty by flying their spy balloons over our country, and feign indignation when we shoot one down after it traversed and spied on our nuclear and missile sites. The PRC rattle their sabers with impunity, and are on the verge of supplying material aid to Putin’s war effort in Ukraine.

 The weakness of the West, particularly the U.S., has never been as evident as during this current weak, “woke”, “politically correct” Euro-American environment.  A weak and senile, U.S. president has exacerbated the situation, and has prompted Russia’s Putin to attack Ukraine starting the first European war since WW2.  This also prompted Xi Jinping to greedily eye Taiwan across the Straits, and prompted Kim Jung Un to shoot rockets over Japan.  Many feel that none of this would have happened if we had a strong, resolute leader in the White House.

 Moreover, Putin’s exit from the nuclear START treaty, and his continuing posturing and threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, have the weak-kneed Biden and his sophomoric minions vacillating on types and timing of military aid to Ukraine.  Apparently, Biden is continuing his 50-plus year record of virtually always taking and acting on the wrong side of an issue.

 And much of our younger society, steeped scholastically in socialist, and even Marxist ideology, seems blithely ignorant of our weak foreign posture, instead being concerned with “woke”, LGBTQ+, “trans”, “social justice” and “political correctness” issues, rather than the strength and condition of our country in the world.

 Seeing the weak and vacillating Biden and his sophomoric handlers, Putin took his shot and invaded Ukraine.  Rather than a rapid two-week victory and absorption of Ukraine as “Little Russia”, Putin faced a determined independent Ukraine, with roots stretching back to militant Mongols, Scythians and Cossacks, and led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a charismatic young leader.  The Ukrainians were independent, and did not consider themselves Russian in spite of their similar Cyrillic alphabet and confluence of some of their history and heritage.  Putin also faced determined substantial economic and military aid to Ukraine from Poland, the rest of the EU, and the U.S., although this latter was belated, with a lot of “dragging of feet”, for fear of the threat of the Russian nuclear bear.

 So, here we sit, in an increasingly unsafe world, primarily because the U.S. presidency was virtually handed to an incompetent, senile old hack, by a biased media/big tech cabal, who withheld and distorted news from the electorate just prior to the 2020 election.

 Oh, I hear the shouts of “conspiracy theories” from the dishonest left-wing.  And I hear the same about any efforts to expose the machinations of the Biden crime family, and the “Big Guy”, and how they made their corrupt millions.  Unfortunately, with hardly a republican majority in the house, and with a democrat majority in the senate, Joe the Big Guy, Jimmy the Chin, Hunter and the rest of the boys will most likely skate.

 Also, as an aside, whatever happened to John Durham’s vaunted Special Counsel investigation of Trump-Russia.  It seems to be foundering on its own procedural issues, and seems to be dying its own death, with very few brought to account.

 One cannot help thinking that if we had an honest system, and if the 2020 election was not stacked by a dishonest media and big tech in favor of the incompetent Biden, it would be a much safer world, even under the mercurial Donald Trump as U.S. president.

 Unfortunately, the recent dishonest actors will no doubt skate after some ineffective vocalizations in the house.  Future elections?  I have hope, but we seem to be on an unalterable path to becoming a banana republic.  We need good, honest, charismatic leaders, of which there seems to be a paucity,

 Ray Gruszecki

February 24, 2023

Hulu – “1619 Project”

 Hulu – “1619 Project”

 I just watched Hulu’s six-part presentation of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ controversial “1619 Project”.  I offer my critique.

 Like many others, I object to Ms. Jones’ foundational premise for her series, that American history actually began in 1619 when the first cargo of African slaves landed in Virginia.  This is science fiction and an alternate reality, not factual history, and belies the contributions of so many others to the long history of America.

 I further object to Ms. Jones’ continuing theme that primarily black African slaves contributed to the growth of America and its customs and history, to the exclusion of so many other immigrant groups and native Americans.

 The most egregious distortion of the “1619 Project” is the obvious Marxism-Leninism that permeates it.  Marx’s “class struggles” are replaced by race.  Much of the rest of the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite polemic remains the same.  It is obvious that Ms. Jones writes from the extreme left of the political spectrum.

 I do not criticize Ms. Jones for showing pride in the contributions of black Africans to American society.  We are all proud of our ethnicity and heritage, and can compose stories of how our ancestors contributed to the building of America.  But these are contributions to our American psyche, not efforts to hijack the American story by claiming hegemony for all of our progress, as Ms. Jones does in the “1619 Project”. 

 The unique thing about our black American brothers and sisters is that they were brutally enslaved at a time in history that such atrocities were permitted by history and society.  The descriptions in the “1619 Project” of how enslaved people were treated with animal husbandry like cattle is particularly poignant, as are the eugenics practiced.

 An eye opener for me was the revelation that after the importation of slaves into the U.S. was prohibited by law in 1808 when the slave population was about 1 million, it ballooned to 4 million by 1860 at the start of the Civil War.  Not only were slaves bred by their owners, blacks were defined as matrilineal, so mixed race offspring of white fathers and black mothers were automatically slaves.

 Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones is probably a better writer than a presenter.  Much of the Hulu “1619 Project” is anecdotal with few hard facts to back it up.  She draws on her own individual experiences often as illustrations as part of her story-telling

 Something that Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones seems to have forgotten in her narrative is that nearly 750,000 mostly Caucasian Americans lost their lives in the American Civil War to free the black African slaves.  It seems that she should have fit this important fact into her story of black America.

 The segment on the contribution of Africans to American music is pertinent, but again, omits mention of any other contributing segments of Americana.  Appalachia and American classical music come to mind.

 The call for trillions of dollars of reparations is loosely based on economic abuses of black people that mostly occurred over the last two hundred years.  Claims of continuing economic discrimination seem subjective in a society that is redressing many of these issues.

The insidious nature of the “1619 Project” is that it has become part and parcel of Critical Race Theory, and is being installed as valid course curricula in many of our schools.  Laws passed against these bigoted items?  Just change the names and keep teaching them.

 Ray Gruszecki

February 11, 2023