Personal Computer

by William H. Benson

June 20, 2013

     Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak grew up in the sixties, in California’s counter culture. The musician Bono explained their influence. “The people who invented the twenty-first century were sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast, like Steve Jobs, because they saw differently. The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking.”

     In his twenties, Steve Jobs did wear sandals, or he went bare-footed, and he grew a slight beard that, people said, made him look like Ho Chi Minh. He also subscribed to the Whole Earth Catalog. But what set him apart from the other hippies living in San Francisco was his fascination with electronic gadgetry and his friendship with Steve Wozniak, a very determined computer geek. 

     In his biography on Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson tells of a magic moment that Steve Wozniak experienced. Days he worked at his job, but nights he designed and soldered together a personal computer. At that time personal computers were defined as keyboard, screen, and a terminal that connected to a colossal computer elsewhere. At the Homebrew Computer Club’s first meeting on March 5, 1975, Wozniak saw the details for a microprocessor, and in a flash he had an insight: “keyboard, screen, and computer, all in one integrated personal package.”

     On Sunday, June 29, 1975, Steve Wozniak was ready to test his computer. “I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen. It was the first time in history that anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.” He told his best friend Steve Jobs, and the result was a partnership and the dawn of the personal computer age.

     There are those who would denigrate the personal computer and the internet. The economist Tyler Cowan, at George Mason University, wrote in his June 2011 short work The Great Stagnation that economic growth has slowed in the United States because of “falling rates of innovation,” and that we are “in an innovation rut.” Nothing in the last 50 years or so approaches the significance of electricity or the internal-combustion engine, inventions from the nineteenth century.

     The internet, Cowan says, “has yet to boost our standard of living significantly. It has, however, boosted our capacity for distraction, procrastination, and extended inquiries into trivia. The personal computer and its cousin, the smartphone, have brought about some big changes. But compared with what my grandmother witnessed, the basic [outlines] of life have remained broadly the same.”

     If Cowan is correct, that personal computers have failed to advance the greater cause of humanity, what innovation would? I think that another energy source is needed. Much of our modern world is built upon Rudolf Diesel and Gottlieb Daimler’s oil-powered internal combustion engines that generate James Watts’s steam-powered invention that turns a turbine that passes loops of copper wire over magnets in Michael Faraday’s electric generating invention. The world would welcome another fuel source from, say, the air or ocean water, a renewable and abundant resource, other than fossil fuel.

     Also, people would appreciate another form of personal transportation, other than the bicycle, motorcycle, vehicle, train, or aircraft. Despite Dean Kamen’s hype, the Segway Personal Transporter never caught on as Kamen expected. It balances itself, stands upright, and carries a single person at a speed greater than walking. Of more promise is the personal rapid transport system in Masdar City, in the United Arab Emerites, that carries people in driverless cars that follows an electronic track.

     Other people have innovative ideas. They say we need inexpensive battery-powered cars, or at the least hybrid cars. We need greater access to solar power, on our smartphones and laptops, similar to those on our calculators. We need to record in digital form all the world’s books. We need a kitchen device to flash freeze meat and vegetables, like a reverse microwave.

     What is not needed is another silly invention, such as the Popinator, a gun that shoots popcorn into a person’s mouth. Of those, Cowan says that “under the hood of our hallowed free market is a bazaar of nutty, half-cocked ideas that do not advance the greater cause of humanity one tiny bit.”

     Is Tyler Cowan right or wrong? Are we in an innovative rut? Perhaps, perhaps not. What his argument does though is ask people to consider extraordinary possibilities. To the question, “What else is there left to invent?,” some would say very little, but those who are equipped with broader vision would say that worlds of innovation are waiting for somebody to discover and market them.

     America and the world awaits the next generation of people like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

Opposite sides of planet but people suffer for same reason

by William H. Benson

December 31, 2014

The two Communist holdouts from the Cold War dominate the news again: Cuba on one page, and North Korea on the other.

First, President Barak Obama wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba after five and a half decades of Communist rule. Then, the FBI has traced “one of the most punishing cyber-attacks on a major American corporation in recent memory” back to the Guardians of Peace, all because of a new movie that mocks Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator.

Both Cuba and North Korea are Stalinist-styled governments: Brutal, repressive, and tyrannical. Since 1959, a single family has controlled Cuba: The Castro family, or Fidel and his brother Raul.

Since 1946, a single family has controlled North Korea: the Kim family – Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un; or father, son, and grandson.

Those fortunate Cubans who fled their country decades ago and found refuge in Miami have adapted to American life, and some have even prospered and become wealthy. Conditions though in Cuba are appalling. The automobiles are of 1950’s vintage, the economy is stagnant, critics are silenced, and no one in Cuba today claims much wealth, except the Castro brothers and their friends.

The two countries lost legiti-macy decades ago.

South Korea is a rich economic powerhouse, but North Korea has no allies, not even Russia or China, produces nothing the world needs, suffers under the heaviest trade sanctions on Earth, but terrifies the world with its nuclear tests. The Korean people north of the DMZ suffered through a devastating self-induced famine in the 1990’s that, it is rumored, resulted in cannibalism.

The government responded with a program it called, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.”

Both governments in Cuba and North Korea terrorize their people. In 1959, after Fidel Castro seized control of the island, he executed hundreds who had opposed him, saying, “We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers, and they deserve it.”

Kim Jong-un is 31 years old – too young to own a nuclear arsenal – and, since 2011, he has ruled hard over the North Koreans. By executing dozens, if not hundreds, he has purged the country of his suspected enemies. On Dec. 12, 2013, the state media warned the people that the army “will never pardon all those who disobey the order of the Supreme Commander.”

The United States government instituted trade embargoes upon Cuba and North Korea more than five decades ago, and they failed to weaken the Castro or the Kim families’ grip on power.

Instead, the sanctions impoverished and starved the people. “Isolation has not worked,” said Obama, referring to Cuba. “It’s time for a new approach.”

Before Obama would re-establish relations with Cuba, he insisted that Cuba release Alan Gross, a contractor imprisoned in Cuba for five years.

Gross was arrested when working to expand Internet access for Havana’s Jewish community, an act that Cuban officials considered “undermining the state.” Cuban officials released Gross in exchange for the release of three Cuban spies imprisoned in America.

Both countries have refused to provide their citizens with the latest technology. Cuba’s citizens want to own cellphones, but the phones they buy cannot access the World Wide Web.

A Korean-American named Suki Kim published this month her memoir of her days teaching English at a North Korean university.

She entitled her book, “Without You, There is No Us,” and in it she describes the students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, who “do have access to an internal network, or intranet, but it’s not connected to the Internet, and they use their computers mostly as dictionaries.”

The sight of these whiz kids, Suki Kim writes, “staring blankly at screens was so pathetic that I was seized by a pang of anger, mixed with sadness, and soon left the room.”

Kim Jong-un’s government did display some technical skill when the Guardians of Peace routed their cyber-attacks “through China and then through servers in Singapore, Thailand, and Bolivia.”

An interesting fact. Kim Jong-il, who died on Dec. 17, 2011 at the age of 70, owned a huge collection of Hollywood movies, estimated between 20,000-30,000. He especially loved watching Sean Connery’s James Bond movies, and Kim Jong-il was such a great fan of Elvis Presley, that the dictator arranged his hair in a bouffant style, wore Elvis-like dark shades, and dressed in jump suits, reminiscent of Elvis’s Las Vegas performances.

Now, his son, Kim Jong-un, feels offended because

Hollywood would dare to ridicule him in a low-brow farcical movie that few people with any sense of discernment would care to watch. So offended is he that he steals from the production company and then makes threats if they release “The Interview.” Someone should remind him that he is not the dictator of the United States.

Citizens of Cuba and of North Korea live on opposite sides of the planet, and yet both suffer for the same reason: The people have no rights because their dictators are committed to Marxist philosophy.

(Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.)

Father’s Day and the Vikings

by William H. Benson

June 6, 2013

     Recent news tells of a cell phone app for Iceland’s 325,000 residents. Because nearly all are descendents of about 15,000 Vikings who settled there late in the ninth century, the chances for incest are high. Software engineers designed the app so that a young Icelandic boy or girl can bump his or her cell phone with another’s and know how close or distant the two are related. If too close, the Incest Prevention Alarm sounds off.

     It is a high tech method for preventing an age-old difficulty, that of marrying far enough away from one’s immediate family to avoid birth defects.

     A problem for the Icelandic people is that they do not have a uniform system of last names needed to track relationships. A person’s last name is his or her father’s first name followed by the suffix “son,” if you are a boy, or “dottir,” if you are a girl, a system that has remained fixed for centuries. One source said that Iceland’s phone book lists people’s names in alphabetic order, but by first names. 

     Iceland was not inhabited in 874 A.D. when a Norseman named Naddoddr landed there. Although he did not stay, others followed him, and by 930 A.D., those first settlers claimed all the good land. Iceland’s colonization was part of a wider migration out of Norway that lasted for three centuries: from the eighth through the tenth.    

     Because of a lack of arable farm ground in Norway, as well as the snow, freezing temperatures, and foreboding mountains, many departed their native Norway for other locations. To the west they settled Iceland, Greenland and Vineland; to the east they marched across Russia and down to the Caspian Sea; and to the south they invaded England. They were Vikings.

     Most scholars agree that on June 7, 793 A.D., it was the Vikings who raided the monastery at Lindisfarne, an English island along Northumberland’s coast. This raid “never fails to capture the imagination,” because the Vikings inflicted terrible slaughter and injury upon the Christian English people. The only items saved was Lindisfarne’s Bible, now stored in the British museum, and the coffin that contained St. Cuthbert’s relics. All else was destroyed. The English never forgot that day.

     Another migration out of Norway occurred centuries later. During the hundred years between 1825 and 1925, some 800,000 Norwegians, one-third of the population at that time, migrated to the United States to settle in Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Iowa. One of those was my paternal great-grandfather, Ben Benson. Because his father was named Ben Davidson, he was given the last name of  Benson, but once in America, that last name stayed with the family.

     When growing up, I heard the stories of how Ben had worked on a fishing ship that sailed out of Tromso, Norway, some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. In America, he settled first in northwest Iowa, near Sioux Rapids; then in Niobrara, Nebraska; and finally on a farm in Colorado, in southeast Logan County, where he built a sodhouse, farmed, and raised his three sons.

     An uncle explained Ben Benson’s life best. “He fished for a living the first half of his life, but dreamed of farming. He farmed the second half of his life, but reminisced of his days when he fished.”

     That is the conundrum that perplexes every immigrant. Regrets and second guesses. Was it wise for him to leave Norway? I think so. Even though a life on that dry-land farm meant constant wind, and dried up or hailed-out crops, and vermin crawling out of the kitchen walls, he found a life there.

     National Geographic magazine’s June 2013 edition describes the difficult life that the fishermen tolerate on the Lofoten Islands near Tromso, Norway. The work on the sea is arduous and dangerous, the cost to buy a boat is “typically three-quarters of a million dollars,” and then the large seafood companies buy up the quotas for the millions of cod that arrive to spawn among the islands each year.

     First, the history books tell us of the Viking Age; second, my family’s stories tell me of another age and time when my great-grandfather left Tromso, Norway; and third, that app for the young Icelandic boys and girls tries to circumvent what their geography and history gave to them: a small closely-related population with little migration into the island.

     We celebrate the Vikings when we cheer Minnesota’s football team, and for two days each week we pay homage to two of the Norseman’s gods: on Thursday it is Thor, the thunder god, the god of war; and on Friday, it is Freya, the goddess of beauty and love, and Odin’s wife. They all live in Valhalla, the most gorgeous mansion in all of Asgard where the gods feast with slain soldiers.

     Sunday is Father’s Day, the day when we recognize our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great, great-grandfathers, and so on. My last name is fixed, and has not changed for five generations, and by it people know that my paternal great-grandfather was a Norwegian. No need for an app.

The Movie “The Great Gatsby”

by William H. Benson

May 23, 2013

     Last Friday evening I saw “The Great Gatsby.” Playing Jay Gatsby is Leonardo DiCaprio, and he gives his usual rounded and splashy performance. The blonde English actress, Carey Mulligan, plays the comely and innocent-appearing, but not-so-intelligent, Daisy Buchanan, desired by two men, first, her husband, Tom Buchanan, but also her neighbor, Jay Gatsby. It is a tale of unrequited love, of adultery, and its ugly consequences.

     In a sense though, DiCaprio and Mulligan appear mismatched. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 fictional novel, they are close to the same age, nearing 30, but DiCaprio is 38 this year, and looks even older. Carey Mulligan is 27, but her ghost-white English skin makes her look 20. There is an age gap.

     Tobey Maguire plays the thirty-year-old Nick Carraway, the story’s first-person narrator. Tobey will turn 38 next month, and he looks 38.

     Baz Luhrmann, the movie’s director, has created a vision of “Great Gatsby” that is a phantasmagoric dreamscape of music, dance, colors, sights, and sounds that he centers around the most unrestrained party scenes imaginable, scenes that may eclipse anything witnessed in the 1920s. Then, when Nick Carraway types his tale on an early-vintage typewriter, letters appear around him, bounce into place across the screen, and transform themselves into sentences. Also, the camera will zoom across vast distances and then stop at a moment.

     It is enough, or too much, and a far cry from Fitzgerald’s literary novel, and from the chaste and sedate 1974 movie that starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

     One redeeming thing I noticed. Luhrmann laid a recognizable piece of music near his version’s beginning: a few chords of George Gershwin’s 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue,” that appear out of nowhere, distinct and incongruous, like a rose standing in a weed patch.

     The story is simple. Jimmy Gatz fled his parent’s poor farm in North Dakota and survived combat in Europe’s Great War. Later, he changed his name to Jay Gatsby, and earned a fortune through Meyer Wolfsheim, a New York City racketeer who, with Gatsby’s help, defied the country’s prohibition laws.

    Gatsby met Daisy in 1917 during the war and fell in love with her, but because he was penniless at that time, she married the dashing Tom Buchanan, who came from old money. Gatsby builds a mansion at West Egg on Long Island’s north shore, across the bay from East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live.

     In the summer of 1922 Gatsby stares at night across that bay to the green light that fronts Tom and Daisy’s mansion, reaching out for that light, hoping that he can win Daisy’s love. He throws reckless parties for people he does not know, and so Fitzgerald wrote, “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

     Gatsby confides in Nick Carraway, his only friend, who lives in the cottage next door, and Nick tells Jay not to expect too much from Daisy because “You can’t repeat the past.”

     “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

     Jay is obsessed with recapturing those first moments he had with Daisy when they were young, before the war, but now when he pushes her to tell Tom Buchanan that she never loved him, she is bewildered, confused, torn. Her hesitation crushes Jay, and so the tale winds down to its hideous conclusion, as do most tales that include alcohol abuse, criminal activity, and adultery.

     Fitzgerald’s literary skills, his way with words, and Luhrmann’s staging and scenery construction  dazzle the screen, and together they surpass the plot’s wretchedness.

     Nick Carraway finishes the story. “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

     Nick feels sympathy for Jay Gatsby because he was innocent: “he believed in the green light.”

     A possible theme for Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is that one person cannot force another to love them. Although he or she may try, the results are not the best.

     Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s own life was tragic. He married Zelda, and their romance was legendary, but his true love was for alcohol. In 1940 at the age of 44, he passed away due to a heart attack brought on by chronic alcoholism. Like his fictional hero Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald missed the green light.

Afghanistan

by William H. Benson

May 9, 2013

     “In June 2010, the Afghan War surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest American war in United States history.” Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, a month after Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The war’s goal was to capture those responsible for the terrorist attacks, destroy Osama bin Laden’s terrorist boot camps, and remove from power the Taliban, that Islamic fundamentalist party that controlled the country and that hosted Al-Qaeda. A year later it appeared that the Americans had accomplished those three goals, but today American troops are still dying on Afghan soil.

     The war’s high point occurred two years ago, on May 2, 2011, when U.S. troops invaded a compound in Pakistan at night, found and killed Osama bin Laden. Otherwise, the continual news that another bomb has exploded and killed more Americans has dented America’s resolve to fight to win in this war-torn country. Last week another roadside bomb killed five more American soldiers.

     Hopes are high for a draw-down that will culminate in 2014 when President Obama is expected to reduce American troop strength from the current 74,000 to as little as 10,000. A genuine fear exists that Afghanistan will deteriorate into another civil war, or that the Taliban will regain control. Either way the Afghan people will suffer.

     Two weeks ago, a French envoy to Afghanistan named Bernard Bajolet spoke at his going-away reception in Kabul and outlined the challenges he sees facing the Afghan people. A New York Times reporter said that “His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.”

     Bajolet said, “I think it crucial that the Afghan leadership take more visible and obvious ownership for their army.” He said that the Afghan government needs to “cut corruption, which discourages investment, deal with drugs and become fiscally self-reliant.” The drugs have “caused more casualties than terrorism in Russia, Europe and the Balkans,” and that the Western governments should discontinue spending billions in Afghanistan “if it remains the world’s largest heroin supplier.”

     Such straight talk from a diplomat is welcome and refreshing. The corruption is appalling. In recent days, the news broke that the CIA has been dropping off bags of cash at Amid Karzai’s office. Afghanistan’s top leader hinted that he used American taxpayers’ money “to pay off warlords and power brokers.” Members of Congress expressed their dismay.

     Yet, this is not unusual. The CIA has worked for decades in Afghanistan. Read Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History for an explanation. A Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson ran Operation Cyclone throughout the 1980’s. His CIA operation supplied anti-aircraft weapons, Stingers, to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians after the Soviet Union had invaded their country on December 24, 1979.

     The Russians learned too late that the Afghan is a tenacious foe, and that once the CIA began arming the mujahideen, the war turned against them. The former invincible Russian army withdrew in tatters.

On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromov, stood on the Friendship Bridge at Afghanistan’s border and told a television reporter, “There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me. Our nine year stay ends.” It was nine years, fifty days.

     A wasteland lay behind Gromov. Fifteen thousand Russian soldiers died in what is now called Russia’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union spent billions of rubles, a million Afghan people died, and seven million Afghans streamed into Pakistan and other countries. Other foreigners streamed into Afghanistan to join the mujahideen in their fight. One such foreigner was the Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

     In the power vacuum created when the Russians departed, the mujahideen quarreled and fought among themselves. A vicious civil war broke out in 1994 that made the fight with the Russians look tame. Mullah Mohammed Omer and his Taliban party emerged victorious.

     What will happen once American troops leave Afghanistan and another power vacuum opens up? What will that last American general say? Will another civil war erupt? Will the Taliban regain power?

Questions pile up, but answers elude us.

     The Afghan people deserve better. They deserve peace. The children play in cemeteries because those are the only open fields without land mines. Their land is a battleground where the Western powers play their war games, and the Afghans are shot and killed in the crossfire.

     After eleven years and seven months, it is time that the American troops leave Afghanistan.