Last year / Later this year
In the next chapter, different thread, US Government officials are doing the lying. Somebody, I guess it was Lord Acton 160 years ago said, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Still true. It's fiction, but don't let that fool you. Novelists become superstar by writing believable characters.
Thinking about that, I decided that my BS
Detector needed another paragraph: Anybody who grew up outside the
USA is a liar and cannot be trusted. The same goes for Americans, unless
they are mature Christians who have internalized the Golden Rule. Government
officials -- especially police officers -- are all liars. Liars will sometimes
tell the truth, but you never know when. They can swear and promise, but
still be lying, and you never can know. Assume the worst.
A couple or three novels ago, Child decided to make his long-term hero Jack Reacher into a math whiz. The problem is that Lee Child himself is not a math whiz, and as noted with a different author some 13 years ago (see "Reality"), you cannot "bamboozle" math with somebody who understands math. It's best if you write what you know about. I majored in math at Berkeley, and some of Reacher's math is just plain wrong:
A question of force, obviously,which is the product of mass times velocity squared, and that squared part puts a premium on speed, not weight. Bulking up by twenty pounds at the gym is good, because it throws an extra twenty pounds into the mix, but moving your foot twenty percent faster is better [so far, so good]. It does you four hundred percent of a favor [wrong]. Because it gets squared.Child's Reacher squared the wrong number. Adding twenty percent means multiplying the whole by 1.2, so it's the 1.2 that gets squared, which is only 44% better. Even if he had missed the +1 add, any math whiz surely would know that a percent is a fraction of 100, with an implied decimal point to the left, so 20% should be read as "0.20" which when squared is 0.400. Either way it's twice as good as a 20% increase in mass, but an order of magnitude (like ten times) less than Reacher's 400%. Most people (like Child himself) are innumerate (don't think mathematically), so they won't catch mistakes like this -- and certainly his editors and readers are innumerate and didn't -- so Lee Child remains a best-selling author. This wasn't his first math error, just the most eggregious (so far). Whatever. It's still a better read than most of the books in the library.
I live in a "fly-over" state, from which all the people greedy enough to learn dishonest lifestyles have left for better pickings elsewhere.. It's also a "Blue State" (shows blue on the TV election night maps) which tends to oppress the poor and attract the lazy, but King SCOTUS explicitly gave this city permission to push back on the lazy people, so it's not as bad as it is in Portland. Most of the people in this county are still running on the fumes in the tank after King SCOTUS took the Statement of Moral Absolutes off schoolroom walls some 40 years ago, thereby giving kids implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (just don't get caught), so I still don't need bars on the windows. Yet.
But the world I read about in these faux-Clancy novels is far more degenerate than what I see here in fly-over land. The really Bad Guys in these stories are in Russia and China, and the author has no clue why that might be the case. His President has better values than the fictional Obama clone he replaced, but author Greeney has no clue why, so his administration is trying to do some of the same things that make the Bad Guys into bad guys. Neither Greeney nor his Prez has any clue why, nor why it matters.
Nobody argues against Moral Absolutes any more, not after the first Trump election. Going on some thirty years, half the country hates the current sitting President, and the other half hated his predecessor. All they could do is hope for better luck in the next election. Until Trump won. Then there was outrage. Except outrage makes no sense apart from Moral Absolutes.
Everybody believes in Moral Absolutes, but mostly they only want other people to obey them, not themselves. Moral Absolutes make life livable. You go into a store to buy a $2 product or service, and pay with a $5 bill, and you expect to get $3 in change. 2+3=5 is a moral absolute, binding on all people everywhere and in all time without exception. Truth and Justice are moral absolutes. There is no Justice in Russia in the current faux-Clancy novel. It makes the place unlivable. Businesses cannot survive if their investment is at risk from corrupt judges. Without the expectation of reasonable profit, there is no way that businesses can and are willing to produce the goods and services that make the USA the richest country in the whole world. Moral Absolutes, taught in the Bible -- and nowhere else, not even in most churches -- did that for us, because the Protestants in northern Europe taught people to read and obey the Bible. It made life better for everybody. That's going away now. The faux-Clancy novels are a grim picture of what life will be like here in the USA (including here in fly-over states) before the end off this century. The USA will no longer be a super-power. I read the last chapter in the Book, and we are not in it.
Not my problem, I have no grandchildren. Besides, I can't do anything
about it, I'm a zero. No, worse than that, I'm a negative. Whatever I tell
people to do, they do the opposite. When I started going to this church,
the senior pastor put all the Bible references in his sermon notes handout.
None of the other (Associate) pastors did, when it was their turn to preach.
So I thanked him for the Bible references. That was the last I ever saw
of Bible references in the sermon notes. I'm a negative. It is what it
is.
After some consideraation, I think I know why that is. We (Europeans and their descendants in other countries like the USA) have a 500-year history of thousands of printers printing books and newspapers and designing new fonts that are more readable. And if I (as a human reader) can tell the difference between this letter and that, then I can write code to tell the computer to make the same discrimination. I suspect that most modern OCR engines use neural nets, which do not have that advantage. By comparison, a thousand years ago text fonts were designed to be easier to write, because the total time to hand-write a page often exceeded the total time of all readers reading it.
Here's where the Moral Absolutes come in: The Christian value system -- as taught in the Bible, but not often taught from the pulpits in churches -- is based on the Golden Rule (GR). About the time of the invention of the printing press (and perhaps for some of the same reasons) Martin Luther and John Wycliffe translated the Bible into their respective language of the people, and the Protestants taught their congregation to read and obey it. So thoughtful (Protestant) Christians tried to live the GR, which basically meant they wanted to make life better for everybody, including the readers of the printed books and newspapers. Which led to more readable fonts. And everybody benefits from their efforts, including the Catholics with no reason to do it themselves.
By contrast, Hebrew has been a dead language for some 2600 years (until the recreation of the nation of Israel in 1948), and the language was preserved almost entirely in hand-written Bibles. The number of readers was hundreds (or perhaps thousands after the Protestants made Bible reading more popular, so translators needed to know Hebrew), which did not justify making the fonts more readable -- until it became a spoken language again in 1948. In Israel today the Hebrew font faces are evolving to be much more readable, in part because Jewish rabbis teach their adherents the GR. Islam has no such moral teaching, so there is little incentive to better the life of other people in Muslim cultures, and their printed text reflects that lack of virtue, both hard to read and hard to print. Not My Problem.
The USA, having removed the statement of Moral Absolutes from schoolroom walls some 40 years ago, thereby giving school kids (and their successors) implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (just don't get caught, but nobody expects to get caught), and some of those kids are now grown up and designing new fonts... Have you ever noticed the new trend in numerals, that they distinguish zero from the letter Oh by a slanted crossbar that makes it hard to distinguish from eight? In the Goode Olde Dayes, the letter Oh was wider than a zero, and no more distinction was ever necessary, because letters and digits were never mixed, so you always knew, but if you didn't, the letter was rounder and wider. Today there is one and only one circumstance where digits and letters are jumbled together, and that is in computer passwords, which nobody ever gets to read anyway, because they are so hard to memorize that we have software tools to type them, and they are never displayed anyway. There are hundreds -- even thousands -- of contexts where the quick determination of an eight from a zero is important, like when you are reading the time off a digital watch or a (stupid) "smart" phone that tells you it's "18:88" in the morning. People no longer care about making life better for their customers, it's "my way or the hiway."
Moral absolutes, given by God to make life better for everybody.
Last year / Later this year
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