From My Diary of the War in Ukraine

by Madeleine Kando

It is a cold and grey day in late February 2022. We are visiting our friends in Northern New Hampshire. They live on a 300 acre piece of land, their house at the end of a mile long drive way, invisible to the world. There is a lot of snow up here. Snow, pine trees and rolling hills. It’s beautiful.

We have known the Kaufmans for half a century, which tells you how old we all are. But that is what reinforces friendship – we stuck it out this long and will remain friends until all of us turn to dust.

It is a peaceful place, not a single human sound is heard, just the occasional howling of a passing band of coyotes, the long distance shriek of a lone hawk and the loud chatter of the countless blue jays invading the porch, which Janice covers with black sunflower seeds to attract these noisy but beautiful birds. We toast, eat and watch a movie, then go to bed early.

February 24th, 2022

It is a sunny morning. Marty makes his famous breakfast omelet. He looks pale and gaunt. He tells us that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that a war has started in Europe. It seems unreal, impossible to comprehend in this pristine environment. Why? How? The day is spent following the hourly news as the snow begins to accumulate outside.

Marty is a third generation Jewish immigrant. He has deep emotional ties to that part of the world, since his family had to flee Ukraine at a time when Jews were mercilessly persecuted.

We watch the news on CNN. A mother with two small children is interviewed. She is huddled together with hundreds of Ukrainians in a subway station turned into a bomb shelter. She is crying, asking questions: ‘why? Why is this happening?’ She doesn’t understand. Nor do we, up here in the snowy, peaceful Great North Woods of New Hampshire.

February 25, 2022

The snow is accumulating fast. It gets harder to walk down from the pool house, where we are staying. There are snow shoes next to the door, which we tie on to our snow boots. Walking in snow shoes is not easy for novices like us, but we eventually survive the 100 yard distance to the main house, where a warm cup of coffee awaits us.

The conversation revolves around what should be done, could be done, is not done and what will come next. What else is Putin going to invade? There is talk of excluding Russia from the Swift international payments system, instating a no-fly zone, sending more military aid to Ukraine..

I realize how little I know about Ukraine. I learn that Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. Marty has a large globe gathering dust in his living room. We lug it onto the dining room table and squint our eyes as we try to decipher the tiny letters. Which countries that are now independent were part of the USSR? There are 15 of them. That, together with the satellite countries that are now part of the EU, Russia lost a third of its landmass in one swell swoop, when the USSR collapsed. No wonder Putin called it “The greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”

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My Bedtime Betty Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

My lifelong search for a good night’s sleep led me to a dispensary in the town next to mine. Cannabis products are legal in my state and the industry is booming. This particular store was BIG. It sold many types of weed, there was a section just for paraphernalia and it even had a fireplace with a cozy seating arrangement.

The young salesman gave me a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys’ and I took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleepaid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.

I was lying in bed, rigid as a board, waiting for the magic bullet to hit me. Nothing happened. I mentally cursed Bedtime Betty, telling her that she shouldn’t impersonate the sleep fairy, since she didn’t deliver on her promise. I was lying there, teeth clenched, eyelids squeezed shut, neck muscles spasming, blaming my own naivete and the young salesman who had convinced me of the power of Betty over insomnia.

I tried to get back to my ordinary, outdated and inefficient technique of knitting a sweater in my head. That’s what I do to try to fall asleep. A kind of knitting meditation. It didn’t work, of course. I was a frustrated knitter, a frustrated Bedtime Betty consumer and a very frustrated insomniac.

Suddenly, without any warning, my head started to fill with all sorts of strange and wonderful images. I was floating in a sky filled with foam, like the blanket of clouds that an airplane dives into when approaching an overcast city.

Whenever I focused on one cloud, another one was begging for my attention. I was a butterfly, fluttering from one wonderful thought cloud to another. This was a strange experience. I am usually more like a moth with OCD. I circle a thought, like a moth circles a light bulb, around and around, until they burn themselves to death.

It felt wonderful to be a butterfly for a change. Some were good clouds, others were not. There were clouds that contained toxic material about dying, others that contained instructions on how to knit better mental sweaters, others yet that revealed the ‘multiverse’ theory to me on a quantum level. In plain English: I was STONED! Read more...

Pragmatic Idealism

by Madeleine Kando

If I had to choose one word in the English language to describe my oldest daughter’s personality, I would describe her as ‘pragmatic’. My husband likes to describe her as ‘Dutch’, as if she was a piece of cheese. She is after all, half Dutch, half Hungarian. Dutch on her father’s side, Hungarian on her mother’s side. 

But calling her ‘Dutch’ does not do justice to her OR Dutch cheese. There are hundreds of types of Dutch cheeses and many flavors of pragmatism. Calling someone ‘pragmatic’ is just as vague as describing someone’s personality as 'Dutch', but for lack of a better word I will stick to that description.



The word pragmatic comes from the Latin word ‘pragmaticus’ (being skilled in law or business) and the Greek root ‘pragma’, which means a thing done, a fact. I personally like the following definition of a pragmatist: ‘One who acts in response to particular situations rather than upon abstract ideals; one who is willing to ignore their ideals to accomplish goals.’


Well, in that sense, we are all pragmatists by default? The question is not whether you are willing to ignore your ideals in the face of reality, but how far you are willing to go.



It is often said that the American character is quintessentially pragmatic. American inventors like Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell epitomize Pragmatism and the Yankee spirit of tinkering. Pragmatism says: ‘Try something and see if it works’. America itself was an experiment. Pragmatism judges whether something is good by its consequences. Pragmatism says that there are no absolute truths. Nothing is sacred. Ideas are basically there to give actions their purpose. Not the other way around.



For example, is it pragmatic to steal a car so you won’t have to walk to work? Well, according to one of the founders of pragmatism, William James, pragmatism is what works for the majority of people. If everyone started to steal cars, it wouldn't be good for the people whose cars got stolen (or for the car thieves who go to jail), so in the long run, stealing a car to go to work is not pragmatic.



If pragmatism is so American, it is in danger of suffering a slow death. How come we have so many 'principled' politicians in government? The current grid-lock is a direct result of falsely-interpreted idealism on both sides of the isle. From the Republicans' obsession with anti-abortion to the unwillingness to compromise on the Democratic side. It's all very non-American, if you ask me.



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Accent Discrimination

By Madeleine Kando

I speak English as if it were my native language. My native language is Hungarian, but I was too young when I left, so I no longer speak it. It is buried beneath other languages that I had to learn on the way to adulthood. I am a language mutt, you might say. Were it not for my accent, which I am told is French, I could impersonate the most diehard native English speaker. 

The only language that I speak without an accent is French, because I learnt it before my speech apparatus settled itself in the comfortable language groove that native speakers always dig for themselves. But before I could learn my multiplication tables, my French had to be tucked away in the bottom of my backpack, when we moved from Paris to Amsterdam. I learnt Dutch quickly and perfectly, without anyone noticing that I was an imposter. Or so I thought.

The problem is, that you cannot hear your own voice the way other people hear it, unless you use a recording device. The fact that I couldn’t hear my own accent protected me from the harsh reality that when people heard me speak, they saw a French duck, but I thought of myself as a Dutch swan.

Kachru's Three Circles of English

English is the Lingua Franca of the world. Non-native speakers use English to communicate with each other, which allows an Eskimo to speak to a Pigmy, to a Dutchman or a Russian without having to learn all these languages. He only has to learn English and presto, he is able to attend a Pigmy conference on how to grow taller, a Dutch workshop on how to build dykes, or read a manual on how to install a samovar in his igloo.

Of the one and a half billion people in the world who speak English, only 380 million are native speakers. Not only are they in the minority, but most of them are ‘mono-lingual’. They only speak one language. Who can blame them? Why bother learn another language if everybody else speaks your language?

Accent Discrimination

English is the undisputed global ruler, but there is English and then there is English. Speaking English without an accent (called neutral English), immediately puts you in a privileged position on the chessboard of life. You could have five post-graduate degrees and an IQ of 180, but none of that matters when you are a person in the possession of an accent. There are jobs and even entire careers that I would not waste my time applying for, knowing that I have a foreign accent. Can you imagine the President of the United States delivering the State of the Union with a French accent? People would roll on the floor laughing.

Accent racism is a result of our basic desire to classify others, to group them in a certain hierarchy and to differentiate friend from foe.* It is a global phenomenon, but it is ironic that ‘neutral English’ should be the norm when two third of English speakers have an accent. It’s like asking the entire male population to wear a crew-cut because a minority of American men are subjected to this atrociously disfiguring custom when they enlist in the army.

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Low Vaccination Rates = High Death Rates

Tom Kando 

On January 19, the Sacramento Bee reproduced an article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram by Cynthia Allen, titled “As Covid rises across the US, pandemic life is better in Texas.” This is just another example of the stubborn ignorance of millions of people who continue to resist mandatory precautions against Covid, including vaccines and masks. This author presents, again, the worn-out and wrong-headed argument that people are better off opening the economy (as is the case in Texas) rather than mandating vaccines, masks, and other life-saving measures (as happens more in the Northeastern states). These people prioritize avoiding minor discomfort above saving lives. 

I don’t mean to rehash this unnecessary debate, or remind you that previous generations had no problem with other vaccines (measles, polio, etc.) Or with mandatory seat belt laws, etc., etc. I don’t know whether there are more ignorant people now than in the past, or more here than overseas. But I’ll remind you that the US has 4.2% of the world’s population, but, shamefully, 21% of the world’s Covid cases and 15.8% of the world’s Covid deaths. And there is no evidence that this is because we test more than everyone else. 

I just want to give you some straightforward prima facie evidence that people like this Fort Worth woman are so very wrong. 
Using Johns Hopkins data, I ranked all 50 states for two variables: (1) The Covid death rates per million population and (2) the rates of vaccination per 100 population. The lists below show the results: Read more...

Stupidity: Our Worst Enemy

by Madeleine Kando

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”

wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943. He was a German pastor known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he was imprisoned and later hanged. In prison, he wrote ‘Prisoners of War’, later published as ‘letters and papers from prison’, in which he tried to understand how Germany had entered such dark times.

Thinking about the nature of evil, he came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. It was stupidity.
“You can fight evil” he said. “It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread.”

“But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out three important facts about stupidity:

First, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. ‘There are men of great intellect who are fools and men of low intellect who are anything but fools’. If you know that something is evil, but choose to ignore it because others ignore it, you are not only stupid but you are also immoral.

Second, stupidity is acquired rather than congenital. ‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And third, it is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals who are inclined to sociability. It is a sociological problem rather than psychological.

    

If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day. But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.

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Whose New Year Is It, Anyway?

by Madeleine Kando

Since my mother died, two days shy of her 104th birthday, I have thought a lot about the passing of time. 
But why do I think of time as ‘passing’? Is it like a train passing by as I stand on a platform? That’s not possible since I am on the train.

And why does the train only go in one direction? According to experts, the reason for the arrow of time is the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). There was only one way my mother existed and putting her back together again would violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s why she no longer exists as my mother.

Nobody really knows what time is, but it doesn’t prevent us from experiencing it. According to Aristotle, this is interlinked with our capacity to perceive change. If I were sitting in a dark room for a week without outside references, how would I know a week had passed? 

But what constitutes ‘change’?

Environmentalist Bill McKibben points out that our inability to respond to climate change is because we perceive change on a ‘human’ level, but cannot perceive change in the sphere of nature. We are ‘fatally confused’ about the nature of time. (Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises, by Michelle Bastian). Our notion of time is specific to our species, for better of for worse.

If you were a mayfly, you wouldn’t be celebrating New Year’s Eve. You wouldn’t even celebrate New Day’s Eve because mayflies in their adult form, don’t live more than one day. They spend two years as larvae immersed in water, but then their one-day clock starts ticking. They swarm to find a mate, fly around a bit, lay their eggs on the surface of ponds and then die, all in a 24 hour span of time. They don’t even have time to eat, which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth. Does that mean mayflies appreciate their time more than we do? After all, we live about 30,000 times longer!

A fruit fly could potentially celebrate New Week’s Eve, since they live for two weeks. They still have to spend their precious time laying eggs, eat as much rotten fruit as possible and hope they don’t get squashed before their number is up.

A housefly lives a generous two months, which is four times longer than a fruit fly and sixty times longer than a mayfly. It’s like a one year old mayfly meeting a senior citizen housefly.

Mammals are guaranteed a much longer life span than insects. And the bigger a mammal you are, the longer you live. Field mice live about a year or two. They could potentially celebrate New Year’s Eve and make a resolution to eat less cheese, but what’s the point of losing weight when you don’t live to see the benefits?

Elephants live up to 60 years, bowhead whales live 200 years and the Greenland shark can live up 400 years. They should celebrate New Century’s Eve, but remembering a resolution you made a hundred years ago might not be so easy.

One of the longest living beings on earth is the ‘Ming clam’. It can live up to 500 years. Can you imagine having 500 years to live? When a Ming clam is a mere 8 years old, we already spent most of our useful life, at age 48. At the height of the Ming clam’s puberty, we are all long dead and buried. And to vaunt its superiority, the lucky devil keeps on living for another 485 years! 

Who cares about time, when you have so much of it? You can cruise along, violate the minimum speed limit, with not a care in the world. Did you forget about your best friend’s birthday? No harm done, there will be so many more. A Ming clam lives 200,000 times longer than a mayfly. But do they appreciate all that extra time, or do they take it for granted? Unfortunately, the last surviving Ming clam was killed by scientists trying to work out how old he was.

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Santa’s Dark History

by Madeleine Kando

Like most children, I believed in Santa while I was growing up. It wasn’t easy believing in someone who changed his name and his appearance every time my family moved from country to country.

I was born in Hungary, where Santa goes by the name of Mikulas or Szent Miklós. He is really a Bishop, not a jolly old dude who lives on the North Pole. He shows up on December 6th, giving children barely enough time to mend their ways and be worthy of presents.
Thankfully we moved to France before I was introduced to Mikulás’ assistant ‘Krampusz’, a horned, hairy creature with fangs and a tongue a mile long. Krampus’ job is to scare the bejesus out of children. If you are lucky, you just get a raw potato in your sock, but the really bad children get stuffed in Krampus’ backpack and taken to his ‘lair’, somewhere deep in the forest, to be eaten alive.

In France, Santa is called 'Père Noël'. He had swapped his Bishop’s miter for a floppy looking hat with a pompon. Père Noël wasn't very generous in those post-war days, especially when he came down a poor refugee family's chimney. I started to connect the dots between the lack of heat in our apartment and Père Noel’s reluctance to leave us presents. Should I have a heart to heart with him, as he was climbing down our chimney? I decided that my French wasn’t good enough. It wouldn’t have added weight to my argument and he might not have left me any present at all!


When my family moved to Holland, I was introduced to the Dutch version of Santa. Over there, Santa plays second fiddle to a far less benevolent character named Sinterklaas. He must be a relative of the Mikulas of my native Hungary; same figure with a big pointy miter and a staff, riding a big white horse.

Every 5th of December, he arrives from Spain on a steam boat, accompanied by his 'helpers'. These helpers called ‘Zwarte Piet’ (black Peter), are a more benevolent version of  the Hungarian Krampus. Theirs befalls the thankless task of selecting good and bad children. Good children get candy of course, bad children get coal or a branch in their socks. But if you have been particularly bad, you get stuffed in a canvas bag and shipped back to Spain. No wonder the Dutch are so stoic. Early on they are taught to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Needless to say I was especially good around December 5th. I couldn't care less about the presents, I just wanted to avoid the fate of those very bad children at all cost.

Had we decided to move to Iceland instead of Holland, a fate far worse than death might have awaited us, the Kando children. Iceland is the home of Gryla, a giantess. She leaves her cave, hunts for bad children, and carries them home in her giant sack and devours them. If you are lucky enough to escape her, a huge and vicious cat known as Jólakötturinn, comes down the snowy mountain slopes at Christmas time and finishes the job.

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Back to Vigilantism?

Tom Kando 

 The other day, my wife and I walked by one of the movie theaters at the Galleria shopping mall, the Caremark theaters. We were stunned when we saw a sign posted at the entrance, stating in big black letters: “Do not bring in your own food, drink or fire arm.” 

That’s it, I thought. This country is going back to the days of Tombstone and the O. K. Corral. The Wild West is coming back. It’ll soon be Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday against the Clanton brothers. Except that it won’t be clear who is Wyatt Earp and who is Billy Clanton. 

Lead by states such as Texas, more and more states are now “open-carry.” This means that we all have the right to run around while visibly packing pistols. Vigilantism is on the rise. it is increasingly accepted and even encouraged. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted after murdering two men, as was George Zimmerman in 2012 after executing Trayvon Martin. As in many other cases, self-defense was the winning argument. 

The self-defense chimera is what drives this country’s insane proliferation of fire arms. Americans are becoming universally armed. Vigilantism is on the rise. “Stand-your-ground” laws are increasingly used to justify murder under the guise of self-defense. 

In fact, death is more likely to happen when both the aggressor and the victim are armed than when the victim is unarmed. You are more likely to be shot to death if you own a firearm than if you don’t. Some protection!  Read more...

Should we Get Rid of Term Limits?

by Tom Kando

When you look at the history of various countries around the world, you see success stories,  failures, and cases in-between. You also see, within the history of individual countries, periods of peace, progress and  prosperity, alternating with  dismal conflict, regression and misery. For example, less than a century ago, Germany went through a terrible phase, becoming a monstrous country, whereas today it is doing better than most; countries, economically, morally and in terms of its quality of life.

Probably what matters the most in determining whether a country does well or not is the quality of its LEADERSHIP, right? For example, President Franklin Roosevelt  took us out of the Great Depression and won World War Two. President James Buchanan got us into the Civil War.

And combined with that, there  is also the longevity of leadership: Good leadership is precious. So isn’t it possible that countries that hold onto their good leaders for longer periods of time will thrive more than countries that switch leaders frequently?  Other things being equal, longevity of leadership offers the advantage of stability.

We obviously want good  leadership, but in addition we might  re-think our infatuation with things like term-limits. Isn’t there  something to be said for experience, expertise, learning and getting better on the job?  Why must we get rid of a president after  four years or at the most eight years? Wouldn’t it be nice if  President Kennedy had lasted longer, or President Obama?  The only leaders in this country who stay in power for the rest of their lives are the Supreme Court Judges. Maybe it should be the other way around - longer presidential terms and shorter Supreme Court terms.

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