Unworthy

During my adult life, I’ve watched most State of the Union Speeches. But I will not be watching tomorrow night’s.

My reason is simple. I don’t believe the man slated to give it is worthy to do so. I believe he will lie about the state of our Union. I trust he will paint a relentlessly deceptive and rosy picture. I think he will focus on himself and his aggrandizement, as he often does. I fear he will spend far too much time damning and profaning his political enemies, and far too little discussing the very real and rapidly advancing problems that threaten our Union.

First among those problems is the state of our economy and its likely future. Once trained as a doctoral-level scientist and engineer, I know something about tangible equipment. So I’ve bought nothing important that was made in our country for the past seven years.

My split-duct home heating system was made in Japan. My leased EV and my clothes washer and electric dryer were made in South Korea. My iPhone, laptop and desktop computers were made in China or South Korea. In my judgment, after diligent research, nothing similar made in America was worth buying. (GM did produce my 2018 Chevy Volt, a fine serial hybrid, and in the US, but before it decided mostly to abandon EVs.)

Never mind. Seventy percent of our national economy now involves services. Plumbers, construction workers and auto mechanics will always be with us—although EVs require far less service than ICE cars which, outside our country, are rapidly becoming obsolete.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of service workers—especially those who earn more than auto mechanics, plumbers, and construction and hospitality workers—have jobs vulnerable to replacement or “downsizing” by AI. They include managers, insurance agents, accountants, investment advisers, HR workers, lawyers, computer programmers, promotion/advertising people and even some non-hands-on members of the medical establishment (especially workers in medical insurance).

So there are two near-term possibilities. First, our present vast overinvestment in AI and its computer infrastructure will do to our upper middle class what outsourcing to China and other low-wage countries has done to manufacturing workers. The devastation and impoverishment of our upper middle class will be upon us.

Second, if the AI boom fails to have this expected effect, we will have a massive, energy-wasting overinvestment in worthless computers and software that will outdo the Dot-Com Bubble and the Crash of 2008 put together. In either case, the future of Americans now in or graduating from college will be dimmer than ever since we first began mandatory public education in Lincoln’s day.

Our chief executive will say nothing about any of this, let alone in his SOTU speech. He won’t because: (1) he wants to paint a rosy picture; (2) he has no idea how cause and effect work in the real world; and (3) the sycophants whom he has pulled around him work mainly in high finance. They’ll benefit from personal connections among the oligarchy, as they do now. So their lives won’t be affected, at least not as immediately and directly as most of our upper middle class.

No one in the present administration has any idea what is about to happen, let alone if positive feedback in planetary heating takes off and causes migration to explode.

I think there is only one person in the entire current administration who might be competent to conceive of these problems and possible solutions, let alone to put them into effect. That person is Marco Rubio. But the enigmatic, ruthlessly opportunistic and likely incompetent J.D. Vance will automatically become president in the event of the current president’s death or removal after impeachment or under Amendment 25. The more experienced and more competent Rubio will be at his mercy.

So as you nod off Tuesday listening to the inevitable self-praise, rosy-tinted lies, and insults to political enemies and helpless minorities, know this. We don’t have three years to turn this country around, let alone its over-investment in AI. If we continue on our present course, those old enough to remember them, or to remember stories that their parents told about them, will look back on the Great Depression and subsequent horrible war with fondness. What they and their families can look forward to will be much worse.

So my hope for the coming SOTU is simple but probably vain. As our increasingly senile and demented president gets up to speak, I hope every Democrat rises and silently leaves the room. I hope that enough Republicans also do so to put a realistic fear of impeachment and removal (or removal under Amendment 25) in the mind of every official who remains.

Barring that, we are looking at something like the Fall of Rome, but at our characteristic “Warp Speed.” It took three “mad” emperors, over a period of some 140 years, to seal Rome’s fate. Ours might easily be sealed in three, with the inevitable sequelae to follow. Ancient Rome did not have a much larger, more prosperous, more advanced, more disciplined and much more populous China to contend with, let alone a modern Europe, India and East Asia, all striving mightily to take its place.

Deporting the “Worst of the Worst”

President Trump has said that he wants to deport “the worst of the worst” of undocumented migrants. That’s a goal with which many voters would agree, including me. That’s especially so if you define “worst of the worst” as criminals guilty of serious felonies such as murder, manslaughter, assault, burglary, robbery, financial crimes (fraud, larceny) involving more than $5,000, or gang conspiracies to commit any of the foregoing.

But that’s far from what Trump’s DHS, ICE and CBP are now doing, isn’t it? They’ve been mostly detaining, abusing and deporting people, including children, on suspicion of having brown skin, speaking Spanish (or any non-English language), protesting or resisting unlawful government action, living in an immigrant community (or so-called “sanctuary city”), or having undocumented co-workers, family or friends.

Does that sound like a fair, just and American way—let alone a constitutional way—of getting rid of the worst of the worst? Bear in mind that our Fourth through Seventh Amendments are not limited to citizens or lawful residents but apply to every person suspected of a crime. They require protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and self-incrimination. They also provide the right to be indicted by a grand jury, to have legal counsel, and to be tried by a jury.

So, at very least, what Trump has been doing is unconstitutional, as well as cruel, brutal and stupid.

How would a hypothetically smart, law-abiding president get rid of the “worst of the worst” quickly, constitutionally, and even humanely? Arresting, detaining and deporting people because they live or work in areas where undocumented people congregate is nothing close to “the American way.” But it’s easy to imagine a way that’s not only lawful, but much, much more efficient and effective.

How about detaining and maybe deporting people who have already been arrested (by normal state or federal authorities, not ICE or CBP) on suspicion of having committed a serious crime? Wouldn’t that put the focus on what they did, rather than (unconstitutionally and irrationally) on who they are?

Suppose Congress passed a law as follows. Every person, in any state or D.C., arrested on suspicion of having committed a serious crime (as defined), would be detained, without bail, until having proved his or her citizenship or lawful immigration status. If necessary for reasons of state law or state budgets, the detainee could be transferred to a federal detention facility pending such proof. (This procedure would probably pass constitutional muster, as immigration control is a federal, not state, responsibility.)

Out of fairness to lawful residents without quick access to proof of citizenship (passport or birth certificate) or other evidence of lawful residence, this mandatory detention could be limited to a period of fifteen days. Local government, or DHS, ICE or CBP, could be required to send personnel to retrieve proper documentation from the suspect’s home, place of work or government archives while the suspect were detained.

If proof of citizenship or lawful residence were found, the detainee could be transferred to the proper state or federal prison or perhaps released on bail, and the trial placed on the normal docket. If not, the trial would be on an accelerated calendar, required to be held in, say, sixty or ninety days. After conviction, the detainee could be deported forthwith or (in a more lenient version of this process) after losing an expedited appeal.

A procedure like this could get rid of the “worst of the worst” in an expedited and efficient manner, but in compliance with our Constitution’s protections of all criminal suspects. It would probably “work” constitutionally under the Supremacy Clause, which gives federal laws like those involving immigration precedence over conflicting state and local laws. All our broken Congress would have to do to make this happen is to act.

Such a procedure would have several advantages over what is currently going on. First, it would put the emphasis on catching and deporting serious criminals. Second, it would encourage state and local officials to cooperate with DHS, ICE and CPB because the rules would be just and the feds would share the chores and the expense of temporary detention pending deportation. Third, it would not unlawfully and unfairly distinguish between “blue” and “red” states in applying immigration rules that, according to our Constitution and common sense, ought to be applied evenly nationwide.

There! That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If you really want to get rid of the “worst of the worst” there are much cleverer, more efficient and more effective ways to do it than what’s happening now. Don’t the sheer cruelty, brutality, disorder and unfairness—let alone frequent mayhem—of what we’re doing now tell a lot about our current national leaders and our supine Congress?

Managing Our Own Implicit Bias

Memes matter. They matter especially now, when they often substitute for thinking.

There are bad memes and good memes. Prime examples involved President Barack Obama.

The worst and most recent showed Obama and his wife Michelle, depicted with the bodies of monkeys or apes, bowing down (along with other Democrats) to a lion with the face of Donald Trump, as if in a clip from the Disney cartoon “The Lion King.”

One of the best, in my view, also involved Obama, but as President. It was a real photo, showing him bowing low to the Emperor of Japan in a formal greeting.

That’s normal and expected in Japanese society, especially in a diplomatic visit. But Obama was much taller than the Emperor, so he bowed especially low, as protocol required. The result was oddly humorous, as reflected in the strange smile on Emperor Akihito’s face.

The American right—especially the racists among us—made a big deal of it. They ridiculed Obama for allegedly debasing himself before a nation we had beaten in war, most of a century before, at great cost.

But I saw it differently. I’ve visited Japan several times, and not just as a tourist. I admire its culture. I’ve observed not just the formal politesse, which we “practical” Americans rarely show. I also saw, on numerous occasions, how ordinary Japanese people seem to look out for everyone else, even complete strangers and foreigners like me.

So when I saw that photo of Obama bowing, it moved me deeply. I saw an American president showing proper respect for a nation we had beaten in our most horrible war but that is now our most important ally. Today’s Japan has a lot to teach us, especially about Asia, where our whole species’ most important epoch is just beginning.

A devout believer in science, I also saw something in that bowing photo even more profound. I saw a son of Africa, where science says our species evolved, politely greeting the (nominal) ruler of Japan, from which the distant ancestors of our Native Americans may have come across the “land bridge” to populate America toward the end of the last Ice Age. So that bowing meme not only made me glad; it brought a deep feeling of species-wide “rightness” and closure.

The contrast between those two memes reflects our greatest challenge as a species. We evolved from apes on the African savanna, where an alpha male ruled every clan of thirty or so members ruled absolutely. Now that we live in nations of over a billion people (India and China), the alpha-male-ruler model is wearing thin. Even Xi Jinping, undoubtedly the most intelligent authoritarian leader today, is not up to the task, which no one person can possibly perform. Far too much knowledge of ourselves, our physiology and psychology, our diseases, our sciences, our appliances and our weapons lies trapped in the brains of specialists.

On the African savanna, it was no big deal for an angry and incompetent alpha male to rule a thirty-member clan absolutely. The worst that could happen was that the clan got defeated and banished, died out, or got absorbed by another clan. Our evolving species survived.

Today is different. A clash between great nations could cause the self-extinction of our species, whether by nuclear war, runaway global warming, or failure to stem a global pandemic while fighting a war. (Imagine a disease as deadly as ebola, but airborne, spread around the globe in days by airplanes.)

So, in my view, Job One for our species is expunging our innate clannishness, which today appears most powerfully and persistently in the form of racism.

How do we do that?

How can we all make progress together when vast regions of the globe fear, distrust or despise each other for little more than hereditary clannishness? How can we Americans make progress when our society—once driven by a fierce belief in equality—sets race against race, religion against religion, and those whose ancestors came here earlier against those who’ve come recently?

A lot of the problem boils down to what scientists call “implicit” bias. That’s a subconscious tendency to “demote” other groups in our estimation, without recognizing that we’re doing so and consequently never admitting it, even to ourselves.

We all have unconscious bias, whether we admit it or not. Even I do, although I was brought up by parents and in a culture that taught and celebrated the core teaching of our Declaration of Independence, that “all . . . are created equal[.]”

As scientific studies have shown, implicit and unconscious bias is nearly universal. Once trained as a scientist myself (later as a lawyer), I discovered a simple test for implicit bias that anyone can try.

It’s an easy thought experiment. I call it “painting ‘em white.” Not literally, of course. But in my mind.

I imagine that the object of possible unconscious racism, often a Black person, is instead a white person, with white skin, “white” speech, “white” clothes, and a name like John or Mary Smith. Then I consider how I would react if that hypothetical white person spoke (except for accent) and acted exactly like the Black person whose conduct or behavior is in question.

At first, I thought there was no need for such a test in my case because I had no implicit bias. But then I thought hard about the Reverend Al Sharpton.

I first applied this test years ago, when Sharpton was in his sociopolitical prime. He seemed to appear at every news conference of a Black victim of racial injustice. He was articulate, if not eloquent. He was generally unsparing in his criticism of the police, local and national leaders, the “system” and anyone else he viewed as responsible for injustice.

But he also seemed to have little or no sense of humor, or of the absurd. From a distance, he seemed a perpetually disgruntled and often angry man, albeit with good reason.

Then there was the case of Tawana Brawley. This young Black woman claimed she had been attacked and raped by white boys over several days. But the “rape kit” turned out negative, and there was evidence that she had staged the incident to avoid a beating by her father. After hearing all the evidence, the grand jury refused to indict any of the accused perpetrators. Sharpton, who had represented Brawley vigorously, to my knowledge never apologized for adamantly supporting her, although the whole incident had enormously complicated the relationship between the Black community and the police and administration of New York City. This incident increased my skepticism of Sharpton.

But when I applied my “paint em’ white” test, my attitude began to change. I considered the point of view of the many victims of racial injustice whom Sharpton had comforted and helped. Often their angst involved real police violence (including real injury and death) against them, a spouse, a child or another close relative.

I imagined how alone those victims might have felt: ordinary people trying to squeeze justice out of a complex, impersonal, unresponsive, unrepentant and sometimes hostile legal and governmental system. I thought how grateful they must have been for the help of someone with courage, experience, and education to stand by their side.

By putting myself in the place of the victim and/or the victim’s survivors, I could see how comforting and valuable Sharpton might be. I had honestly to conclude that, were I in that position, Sharpton, with his knowledge of the law, know-how drawn from hard experience, and ability to comfort with his religious faith, would appear as both an avenging angel and a comforting soul.

So my “paint ‘em white” test changed my view of the Reverend Al Shapton from grudging acceptance to general admiration, which I still hold, despite his awkward handling of the Brawley fiasco.

That respect only increased in the last year or so, as Sharpton’s personal profile changed from a gigantic beach ball with arms and legs to a skinny old man much like me. Apparently he’s trying to beat the ravages of age just as science urges, with diet and exercise.

Can a Man of the Cloth who’s always been there to protect and comfort people deeply and unjustly aggrieved—and, at the same time, self-evidently applies the hard secrets of medical science in his own life—be all bad? Could he be both an exemplar of support for aggrieved neighbors and the rare “pol” who applies the teachings of science in his own life? (Eat your heart out, RFK, Jr.!)

Science also teaches us a lot indirectly about racism, if we would only we would learn. It tells us that our DNA, in every one of us, is 99.9% identical.

Our “races” are not separate sub-subspecies, let alone separate subspecies or species. They are mostly careless social constructs based on minor, local genetic adaptations, such as dark skin and brown eyes near the Equator, where the Sun shines hot, and light skin and blue eyes up in places like Norway and Sweden where it’s colder and darker.

What matters far more is our culture, education and upbringing, which any sentient, wise person, child or adult, can learn to assess and change. What matters is what we are taught and what we can learn to be.

We all need to learn to change and adapt together, and fast. Nuclear war, planetary heating, the melting of the polar ice caps, or the advent of an airborne pathogen far more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 won’t respect any “barriers” of “race,” religion, clan or place. And their risk is increasing daily.

In our still-new twenty-first century, Rodney King’s plaintive query assumes existential importance: “Why can’t we all just get along?” If we don’t, the danger of species self-extinction or just plain extinction will rise, perhaps decisively. Something like racism could help explain the Fermi Paradox, at least for species of intelligent individuals.

The El Paso Fiasco

“[S]something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?" — Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

According to recent news reports, federal authorities recently shut down the airspace over El Paso for about eight hours, causing havoc and widespread delays in our nationwide air-travel system. The havoc was hardly surprising: on an average day, there are 44 to 45 thousand commercial flights nationwide. And a lot of them are “interlocking” in the sense that passengers and/or crew from one flight may be, or may have been, scheduled on another connecting flight.

What is surprising is that the Homeland Defense side of our government reportedly wanted to make the shutdown last for ten whole days. Fortunately, our civil aviation authorities, and possibly the president himself, prevailed.

This is what happens when you appoint stupid and unqualified people to high positions like Secretary of Defense and Head of the Department of Homeland Security based on their “central casting” good looks and obeisance to a not-so-smart would-be king.

But that’s the easy part of the analysis. The harder question is “what was this all about”? What was so important as to shut down an entire border city’s airspace and risk nationwide chaos, whether for eight hours or ten days?

The answer, I think, is no mean thing: the future of warfare.

Empires rise and fall on the latest weapons and defenses, often in short order. The ancient Greeks invented the catapult, but the Romans used it to breach the walls of besieged cities and expand their empire. The Brits carved their enclaves in Canton and Hong Kong, despite Imperial China’s huge population and its collective might, with the help of more accurate and easier-loading firearms. In World War II, the Nazis’ “Panzer” tanks, with their high mobility, easily bypassed the fixed French fortifications erected at great expense after World War I, and collectively called the “Maginot Line.” Our erstwhile attempt to put missile defenses in Poland and what’s now the Czech Republic may have been similar.

Of course our inept federal authorities couldn’t hide the reason for the shutdown. It was to test some new defenses against drones. Apparently the Mexican drug cartels are using them increasingly, not just to fly drugs themselves, but to surveil our defenses against penetration by drugs, hit men, drug cargoes, and undocumented immigrants.

So what better way to test our defensive (and offensive) measures against drones than in a medium-sized city right on our border, let alone one in which the North Franklin Mountains dominate the city and provide clear lines of sight to and across the border?

That much is crystal clear. But the general importance of drones may not be.

Drones are not just important; they are likely to change the very nature of conflict forever. They are small, mobile, hard to knock down, and cheap. Far more important, their “sacrifice” in combat involves no loss of or injury to human life.

Much more of Ukraine might be Russian today if not for drones. Under Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s capable leadership, Ukraine has developed a vast cottage industry for home-made drones. Ukrainian devices, including field-assembled models, use mostly commercially available components and standard military explosives. Yet they are helping keep the great Russian Bear at bay.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal and gigantic military-industrial complex—far out of proportion to its population, as befits modern history’s most battered nation—have proved no match for Ukraine’s largely hand-made drones. So effective are Ukraine’s drones that it has held Russia back all along the Donbas front for over a year, inflicting terrible casualties on Russia. Russia has responded by throwing convicts, ethnic minorities and now even foreign soldiers into the battle, to die as cannon fodder for Putin the Kleptocrat’s glory. (One wonders whether the recent resort to foreign fighters was intended to suppress a rising mood of rebellion inside Russia.)

Belatedly, our government has reportedly admitted that the El Paso Fiasco related to drone defense. The air-traffic pause was apparently called to avoid any interference in, or danger to aircraft from, test targeting of drones with lasers.

This news came as great relief to me, despite despite the Fiasco and public spectacle. Why? It suggests that our military may finally be doing something right for a change.

Drones are not just the self-evident future of warfare. They are also the future of law enforcement and surveillance. They can be powerful instruments of dominance and tyranny, or they can help keep the forces of darkness at bay.

As long as our species doesn’t self-extinguish, drones will be far more important than nuclear weapons because: (1) drones are infinitely cheaper and less dangerous, and (2) they can be used to take the bad guys out one by one, not just by whole cities. Properly developed, maintained and used, drones could help establish a global regime of individual responsibility—what I once called (referring to the Nuremberg Trials) the “salvation of our species.”

Over 64 years ago, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us to beware the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of our “military-industrial complex.” He was evidently concerned with possibly malign influences on our democracy.

But our military-industrial complex also presents another, more subtle danger. As it gets bigger and bigger, richer and richer, and closer and closer to American industrialists, it may fail to do its most basic job. It may fail to protect us from our enemies. It may be subverted, not by foreigners, but by our own citizens’ quest for profit and “shareholder value.”

Aircraft carriers and the fighter and bombers on them are hugely profitable. So are our “big-system” drones. Here, from Google AI, are procured cost estimates of various US defense items:

Hardware	Price (USD)
USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier	Average: 13 billion Allocated R&D cost: 4.7 billion Total: 17.7 billion
B-1 “Lancer” Bomber	317 million
F-35 fighter jet (average for A Model)	82.5 million
Predator MQ-1 Drone	4 million
Reaper MQ-9 Drone	30 million

The same source reports the price of an Iranian Shahed 136 drone as $20 thousand to $50 thousand and Ukrainian field-made offensive drones at as low as $50 to $100 thousand. These numbers suggest that our enemies and allies can produce at least forty drones for the price of a single one of ours, several hundred for the price of one of our big planes, and 170 thousand for the price of one of our big carriers. And bear in mind that a coordinated set of some fifty drones is probably enough to destroy any of the foregoing.

Unlike Iran and Ukraine, China is hardly restrained by cost. So what I fear most is what might happen to one of our great aircraft carriers going to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan. It might be sunk forthwith by a vast swarm of coordinated or autonomous Chinese drones, without the loss of a single Chinese life. You can imagine the resulting loss of American lives, the domestic political chaos and finger-pointing, and the abject retreat from our international responsibilities that such a catastrophe would produce.

The El Paso Fiasco suggests that, at last, our military leadership is coming to grips with a huge and rapidly increasing threat that it so far has failed to take seriously. Perhaps now our self- and wealth-obsessed “tech bros” may get involved in keeping the US from becoming the latest in a long list of nations and empires that faded from history after failing to stay abreast of advances in weaponry. If so, the Fiasco might be like the tattered flag that “flew through the night” before our Founding.

Que piensa un Viejo Cientifico/Abogado

[PLEASE BRING THIS POST TO THE ATTENTION OF YOUR SPANISH-SPEAKING FRIENDS AND FAMILY, AND TO APPROPRIATE GOTV ORGANIZATIONS.]

Soy un Americano, un judio (pero no mucho religioso). Mis bisabuelos vinieron aquí desde Ucrania para escapar la muerte a manos de los Cosacos rusos. Mis antepasados cuentan historias similares a las que cuentan muchas familias que han venido aquí desde afuera.

Mi padre fue un escritor en Hollywood. Su cenizas están en un cementerio en Puebla, México. ¿Por qué? Tarde en su vida, él aprendió a hablar español, como un radioaficionado, hablando por la radio con Mexicanos lejos. Cuando él encontró dificultades financieras, el decidió emigrar a México para jubilarse, desde visitar a sus amigos de la radio. Murió en Puebla por su segundo infarto, a la edad de 57.

Por eso aprendí una verdad básica. Migración funciona en ambas direcciones. Todo depende de las circunstancias.

El español no es mi primera lengua extranjera. Muchos años he estudiado el ruso, y tuve un beca Fulbright en Moscú en 1993, en medio de la “primavera” rusa. Por eso aprendí otra verdad: la democracia es frágil. Vino Vladimir Putin, y cambió la primavera rusa por invierno. Ahora ha enviado a muchos miles de pobres personas (que no tienen "sangre rusa") para morir en su guerra en Ucrania, solamente para su propia gloria.

Mi profesor de español fue un refugiado de Uruguay. El vino aquí después de trece años como un prisionero político allí, muchos años antes de la “primavera” del buen presidente indígen, Jose Mujica.

Recuento estas historias personales no solo para introducirse, sino para describir los tiempos en que vivimos. El mundo cambia cada día, y nada es cierto. Todo depende de nosotros, cada uno.

Entonces vengamos a las comisas en noviembre que viene. Las noticias dicen que resulta depende, en gran parte, de los votos de los hispanohablantes, especialmente inmigrantes-cuidadanos de México, el Caribe, y Latinoamérica, y sus descendientes. Creo que esto es verdad. Y por eso escribo para Ustedes.

Podría escribir sobre la política, pero puede leer sobre la política en cualquier noticias. Por eso prefiero escribir sobre el hombre. Sabe bien de quien.

¿Qué tipo de hombre es él? ¿Es un hombre joven, inteligente y fuerte? ¿O es un viejo que no puede distinguir Groenlandia de Islandia o México de America Central? ¿Sabe que él llamó a los paises de America Central “los tres Méxicos”?

¿Es un gran líder el que insulta a sus rivales, y el que degrada el más bajo entre nosotros, por ejemplo, llamando a todos los refugiados de la guerra bestial en Somalia “basura”?

¿Permitara a familia de Usted prosperar cuando él corte los fondos para doctores y la salud para reduzcar los impuestos a los ricos por billones de dólares?

¿Le hace orgullo de su país adoptado, los Estado Unidos, cuando él publica un video mostrando nuestro primer presidente negro y su esposa como monos? ¿Si él piensa así sobre un presidente anterior, que piensa de tu y tu familia, especialmente si ellos tienen piel marrón?

El bueno no viene del malo. Nunca. Favor de recordar esto cuando piense por quién votar.

Y favor de recordar la historia del país de que Usted o sus antepasados vinieron. Prácticamente cada país en el America Central y Sur, excepto Mexico, ha tenido una dictadura bestial en la vida de sus padres, abuelas o bisabuelas. Este ocurrió, por ejemplo, en Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, y Venezuela. (Por mas detalles y datos, vea este resultado de “AI” en inglés.) Favor de preguntar a sus antepasados si la vida era buena bajo esas dictaduras.

He escrito bastante para un ensayo corto. Lo más importante es esto: los Estados Unidos, el lugar al que sus antepasados vinieron para escapar de una dictadura o otras condiciones brutales, está en peligro mortal de convertirse en una dictadura. Si eso viene a pasar, Usted y su familia podrían tener que emigrar a un otro país, precisamente como sus antepasados vinieron aquí. Quizás necesitarán remontar sus pasos toda la vía de vuelta a través del mortal Tapón De Darién.

Favor de pensar mucho antes de tomar una decisión equivocada. Y si se sienta confuso, favor de no votar. Cada voto por el dictador aspirante es un voto por la Caída de Roma y una nueva Edad Oscura, con armas nucleares, aliados confundidos y calentamiento global descontrolado.

Why Learn Korean?

NOTE: IMPORTANT ADDENDUM ADDED AT END, 2/3/26 5:00 am PT

A front-page story in today’s New York Times (paper edition) blew my mind. It reported how many young Americans are flocking to learn Korean.

The main attraction is South Korea’s vibrant youth culture, including K-Pop. But there may be other reasons to learn Korean. It could rewire your brain.

All written languages take one of two forms: alphabetic or pictographic. Alphabetic languages include all “Western” languages, as well as Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian, among others. Nearly all Western languages, including European and Scandinavian languages, use variants of the Roman alphabet. The primary pictographic written languages are Chinese and the Eastern languages that use Chinese characters, at least in part, including Japanese and Korean.

There’s a huge gulf in complexity between the alphabetic languages and the Chinese-derived pictographic languages. In English, for example, the most complex letters—E, M and W—have four strokes. There are only 26 letters in the alphabet. In Chinese, the most complex characters can have up to 24 strokes, and a scholar or educated professional must know about 3,000 of them. So as a rough measure of the complexity of the written language, multiply the number of strokes in the most complex characters by the number of characters, thus:

English: 4 x 26 = 104
Chinese (“hantsu"): 24 x 3,000 = 72,000
“Complexity” ratio: 692
The time needed to learn to read and write reflects this complexity ratio. In the US and UK, children learn the entire alphabet and how to use it to write and pronounce words by age seven. (They may not be able to remember or understand all the words they see, but they can write and read any word in the language.) In China, children do not achieve complete mastery of all the hantsu required to be an educated adult until mid adolescence, at least seven years later. The same is true of children learning hantsu in Japan, which has its own kanji, or slightly simplified versions of the Chinese characters.

Enter hangul. That’s Korea’s unique written alphabet.

With the help of a specially assigned crew of experts, Korea’s King Sejong developed hangul from scratch, over the course of three years during the fifteenth century. Since then, it has slowly and steadily replaced Chinese hantsu in Korea. According to Chat GPT, “By the 1980s, most newspapers, books, and official documents were Hangul-only, with occasional Hanja [the Korean word for Hantsu] in parentheses.”

As Chat CPT confirms, hangul is a unique written language in three respects. First, it didn’t just evolve over centuries or millennia, as did most written languages. It was deliberately created by King Sejong and his committee of experts over a three-year period. Second, it was designed to reflect and exploit the spoken Korean language as it had already developed at that time; it did not co-evolve with spoken Korean.

Finally, as a consequence of the foregoing, Hangul has a unique two-dimensional character. The syllables are each written left to right and then stacked above each other in a two-dimensional array. To the untrained eye, the result can look like Chinese characters, but it’s not. Each two-dimensional block is an alphabetical word with syllables stacked vertically.

Does that compact, two-dimensional structure have an advantage over the linear (right to left or left to right) alphabetic writing of Europe and the Middle East? That’s my hypothesis. Our eyes and brains did not evolve to see in long, straight lines. When the saber-toothed tiger leapt out of the bush to attack us, we had to see the whole three dimensional picture: not just the tiger, but where it was coming from and how far we were from a tree, cliff or river that might offer safety. Those who couldn’t see the big picture didn’t survive to pass on their genes.

Does anything else suggest that this hypothesized cognitive advantage might be real? Well, consider the following. North Korea is a basket case while it suffers under the most stultifying dictatorship on our planet. Meanwhile, South Korea has one of the world’s most productive and innovating engineering economies. I personally have a Kia electric car (EV6) and an LG laundry (clothes washer and electric dryer), all acquired in the last two years. My Samsung Chromebook is a bit older, but its reliability (along with Google’s solid software) has made me resolve to sell my newer Macbook Air on Craigslist. (I’m typing on the Samsung Chromebook now.)

These Korean-made products are among the best engineered products that I own and that I’ve ever owned. Yet South Korea’s population is less than 52 million, less than one-half of Japan’s and one-sixth of ours.

How did this pipsqueak of a nation rise to become an engineering giant, eclipsing our own country (which now doesn’t make much of note besides airplanes, gas and diesel vehicles and trouble), as well as Japan, the UK and Europe? And how did Korea manage that feat from a standing start of utter devastation after the Korean war, which ended a mere 71 years ago? Could there be something underappreciated in King Sejong’s work?

And how about South Korea’s recent affirmation of democracy? Its erstwhile president, Yoon Suk Yeol, sought to become a despot by declaring martial law. He was promptly impeached and removed as president. He’s now awaiting trial on related criminal charges. No Roberts-conjured legal immunity for him, or for any South Korean chief executive!

So while K-pop may be the immediate driver, there are lots of reasons to respect, honor and emulate South Koreans, their language and tkanjiheir society. Of all our wars since the Big One, the one that liberated South Korea and helped make it what it is today appears to have been the most justified and productive.

In fact, South Korea is looking more and more like a good place to live if you want a thriving economy, good jobs, and a stable democracy. Unlike China, it doesn’t require you to learn 3,000 Hanja just to be able to read and write. And kimchi is just spicy, healthy icing on the cake.

ADDENDUM, ADDED 2/3/26 5:00 am PT:

As compared to written Chinese or Japanese, written Korean is a far, far easier language for foreigners to master.  The reason is simple.  Chinese hantsu and Japanese kanji are pictographic characters.  You need to learn some 1,600 of them, by rote, to be minimally literate, and some 3,000 to be erudite at a professional or scholarly level.  Essentially, you need to learn by rote—including the preferred direction of each stroke—how ancient Chinese depicted things like a man (人), water (水) or a mountain (山) millennia ago.

In contrast, hangul is an alphabetic language as simple as, or simpler than, the Roman alphabet.  It has only 24 characters, 14 for consonants and 10 for vowels.  All are relatively simple mostly-straight-line geometric shapes.

What often confuses foreigners who look at hangul writing casually is that the two-dimensional clumps of hangul characters into words can appear to be like hantsu/kanji/kanja.   But they most definitely are not.  They are much simpler words spelled alphabetically and phonetically.

Remember the not-so-ancient controversy in American grammar schools about whether to teach toddlers to read by “phonics,” i.e., by the sounds of individual letters?  Well, the phonics advocates won.  Science has shown that teaching kids who already have speech to read by “sounding-out” letters is the most efficient and effective way to teach reading and writing.

Funny thing about that.  King Sejong and his crew discovered the same scientific truth three centuries before the US existed, and four centuries before the US “invented” mandatory public primary education.  For hangul is an entirely phonetic alphabet, in which each character represents a specific sound of the Korean language, whether consonant or vowel.  In other words, Koreans discovered and exploited a basic, scientific truth of human language nearly half a millennium before we Americans did.

Think that might make Korean easier to learn than, say, French?  As my late physics research director used to joke, French is just misspelled English.  What he meant was that English and French cannot be considered fully phonic languages because the same letters and combinations of letters represent such different sounds in each.  (Just ask a French- or Spanish-speaking person how to pronounce “enough” or “wrench.”)  In contrast, written Korean was designed from the ground up to be a phonic language and therefore a language that modern science says is easiest to learn.