Just published: My memoir of working on the Apollo project

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I've published my short memoir of my time at NASA working on the Apollo project: http://www.dvorkin.com/moonland/

KDP Print Cover Templates–Beware of This Glitch

We recently finished a client’s book that’s 91 pages long. I downloaded the KDP cover template. Because those come in ten-page increments, I was given the template for a 100-page book. The template includes space for text on the spine, so as usual I put the book’s title and author’s name there.

When I submitted the book for publication, it was rejected because a book has to have at least 100 pages in order for the cover to have text on the spine. Fair enough, but KDP apparently doesn’t have an appropriate template for a book of 91-99 pages in length. Instead, you get the 100-page template with space for text on the spine, which causes an error.

So be aware of this problem. If your book is under 100 pages but the template shows a space for text on the spine, don’t put anything there.

Leonore’s Tribute to Her Stepmother, Willene

A wonderful woman whom we all miss greatly. Read Leonore’s blog post here:

http://denverspanishtutor.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-tribute-to-my-dear-stepmother.html

Did your CreateSpace book(s) get moved to someone else’s KDP account?

Of course that shouldn’t happen, but I just encountered a case where it did. If there’s one such case, there surely are others.

A while ago, I went through the process of transferring the print editions of all of my books and my wife’s books from our CreateSpace accounts to our KDP accounts. This was before Amazon started doing anything automatically. The process went smoothly. For a few hours, the books were no longer listed on CreateSpace but hadn’t yet shown up on KDP. That was disturbing, but eventually, the books did show up where they belonged.

As part of our self-publishing services, we upload our clients’ books to both CreateSpace and KDP. I have moved some of our clients’ books from CS to KDP, also without any problems. I’ve been checking other client accounts to see if Amazon has done the move itself.

Yesterday, I checked the CS account of Client A, who had one self-published book listed there. The book was no longer listed on CS. Because of a password problem, I couldn’t check Client A’s KDP account to look for the book there, but I assumed all was well. Later, I checked the CS and KDP accounts for Client B, who also had one self-published book on both. The print edition of that book was no longer on CS, but it is now on KDP, as it should be. Amazon moved it correctly. However, Client A’s print edition, which had disappeared from CS, is also on Client B’s KDP account! Amazon moved the print edition of Client A’s book to Client B’s KDP account.

Client A will contact KDP in hopes of sorting this out.

Not only is this awful, it’s also a remarkable coincidence. Given how many self-published authors use both CS and KDP, the chances of some kind of software/database error accidentally moving one of our client’s books to another client’s account must be minuscule. Is it possible that Amazon’s software has stored cookie information from two different logons from my computer? It seems extremely unlikely, but if so, this is alarming for people who use any Amazon sites on shared computers.

I’ve been wondering how Amazon knows which KDP account to move a CS book to. It can’t be using login information. You could be using the same e-mail address to log into both CS and KDP, but not necessarily. Both sites should have your Social Security Number or other tax ID, so those could be compared. Either comparison should have avoided the error I described above. So how did this happen? And how can anyone be sure it’s not happening to many different writers?

Check all of your books on KDP carefully once the dust has settled from this move. That’s not very useful advice, but it’s all I can think of.

The Aliens beneath Our Feet

SETI looks outward. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence looks for signals from alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe. The odds are long and the cost is high, but the rewards for success will be great. That search must continue. However, I think we would profit from redirecting a small portion of SETI’s money and resources to a much closer and more accessible target: earthly dust. We should be looking down as well as up.

In my short non−fiction book Dust Net, I predicted the advent of nanoscale communication and information−gathering devices the size of dust motes, extremely powerful, and scattered across the earth. These will be developed in the fairly near future for a number of purposes, benign and not so benign. I also speculated that extremely advanced versions of such devices might already be present, deposited on Earth by alien races.

In this post, I want to expand upon the idea of those alien devices.

Let’s assume the existence of a great number of technologically advanced races within a few hundred light years of Earth. That’s a very reasonable assumption. Let’s further assume that faster−than−light travel isn’t possible; that’s very probably the case. I think that developing a technologically advanced civilization requires curiosity about the universe and how it works. That implies curiosity about the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that those advanced races are as curious about life on other worlds as we are.

Those advanced races want to visit other worlds, but distance makes that unfeasible. However, they have the technological ability to send out unmanned interstellar vessels at a reasonable cost—or at least a cost they’re willing to pay. What form would those vessels take?

They could be large spacecraft filled with data−gathering sensors, recording devices, artificial intelligence computers, and communications equipment. Since no UFO sightings have been validated, we can assume that if there are such ships, they must not be both large and close, or we would have seen them.

Perhaps the ships have some sort of cloaking technology, or surfaces made of advanced metamaterials, so that we can’t see them. However, we watch the skies in numerous and increasing ways, and we watch the earth from above in numerous ways. Before long, we’ll be watching the earth constantly from the moon, with increasingly powerful instruments. Before much longer, we’ll be looking in all directions from the surface of Mars. No matter how advanced the camouflage of alien ships, the chance of them being detected is already high and will keep getting higher. If they exist, they have successfully avoided detection so far, so they can’t be spending more than very brief periods of time anywhere close to the earth. Even at our current stage of detection, they would have to be operating no closer to us than Mars—or at a distance of about 50 million miles (the closest that Mars approaches Earth).

That wouldn’t be a problem for them, in some respects. Being able to send complex unmanned probes over interstellar distances requires very highly advanced technology, perhaps advanced enough that it can collect all the data the aliens want even from 50 million miles away. Of course, this would prevent them from collecting physical samples, such as air, water, and bacteria. Even if that were acceptable to them, the data they collected would be fairly coarse. They would not be able to examine our world at a fine and detailed level. The restricted nature of their observations would be frustrating to human scientists and would surely be just as frustrating to alien ones. It would probably be unacceptable, given that they have a much better alternative.

That alternative is what I called Dust Net.

Human beings will create Dust Net in the near future. It will first take the form of simple, microscopic servers scattered around the world to create a communications network accessible to everyone and secure from interference by governments or malicious private interests. With time, these servers will increase in power and will be reduced to nanoscopic size. No bigger than specks of dust, these particles, these motes, will drift with the wind and float on the surface of oceans and lakes, becoming ubiquitous. Their social and political impact will be enormous even before they evolve, as they inevitably will, into instruments of surveillance and data gathering. There will be multiple separate nets, products of governments, corporations, and private groups both good and evil. Mingled among them will be the alien nets.

As I explained in the book, networks of such motes will be able to record immense quantities of data. The advantages for alien observers are obvious. Their motes will be safe from observation or interference. Even without propulsion systems, they will eventually spread everywhere on the surface of Earth. They will gather all the information a curious alien civilization could want.

We are already developing ways for swarms of autonomous drones to cooperate. The much more advanced alien motes are surely capable of cooperating in large enough numbers to, say, dissect an animal corpse for detailed analysis. With sufficient data storage capacity and sufficiently advanced recording devices, they can store a complete digital record of plants and animals, obviating the need for physical samples.

In order for such swarm cooperation to exist, the individual motes have to communicate with each other. Perhaps they use some method of communication that we haven’t discovered, meaning that we won’t be able to detect them by eavesdropping on their communications. It’s also possible that they coordinate their actions only by watching each other, avoiding the need to pass signals. However, if they do communicate, and if they use radio or light signals, that’s something we can try to detect. In addition, the swarming behavior itself would make the motes stand out from natural dust.

The advantages of exploration of alien planets by means of such dust motes applies to all advanced alien societies, so if there are such motes on Earth from one alien civilization, there are surely similar networks of motes from other alien societies also present on Earth.

In Dust Net, I speculated that some of the motes created by humans will be designed to destroy other motes. Corporations will do this as a form of industrial espionage. Governments trying to control what information their citizens have access to will try to destroy the motes that provide the access of which the governments disapprove. Eavesdropping motes will expose government secrets, so government motes will try to destroy those. Governments will try to limit observation of their territory by enemy motes, so they’ll produce motes capable of identifying and destroying motes from other countries.

All of this exposes the aliens’ motes to danger. The aliens must assume that hostile mote networks already exist on the planets they send their motes to investigate. Perhaps the alien motes have the ability to protect themselves, but it would be better if they evaded detection entirely. Therefore, they probably look like inanimate, naturally occurring local dust motes. We could microscopically examine untold numbers of specks of dust and never pick out the alien motes hiding among them.

How do motes from different alien cultures interact? Do they interact at all? I think it’s fair to assume that in general, alien civilizations don’t need or want to interfere with motes from other alien civilizations. If they can identify each other, they probably leave each other alone. Perhaps some of those civilizations are sufficiently pacific and socially advanced that their motes exchange information with each other. That increases the amount of observational data gathered without extra cost.

On the other hand, there’s a good chance that some alien civilizations are located close enough to each other to interact directly, with trade or war. If it’s trade, then their mote networks on other worlds, such as ours, are probably designed in advance to cooperate with each other. But if two civilizations are at war, then their mote networks probably are, too. Their motes are here and on other worlds, not for the purpose of gathering interesting data, but in hopes of finding something—science, engineering, weapons—that will give them the edge in the war back home. Their mission therefore includes keeping the other civilization’s motes from finding that dangerous information first, so they are designed to identify and destroy each other. As a precautionary tactic, their motes might well be designed to destroy other alien motes, even ones from peaceful civilizations too distant to be a threat. I think that would be our approach if we were those aliens, and it seems reasonable to assume that warring aliens are just as unpleasant as we are when we’re at war.

This suggests a way we could detect the alien motes: by looking for the aftermath of battles in the nanoscopic realm.

It’s not practical for aggressive alien motes to blast the enemy with destructive rays or cannon shells, so we wouldn’t be looking for explosions or tiny bursts of radiation. Such a war is more likely to be conducted at close quarters. Attacking motes act much like predatory insects—injecting the enemy mote with destructive acids or simply tearing it to pieces.

The dead motes should be the object of our search. Those injected with destructive fluids probably still look outwardly just like ordinary dust motes and so are not detectable. Remnants of motes that have been broken apart are a different matter. The attacking motes could take the time to disguise remnants of the enemy to look like just native dust motes, but that’s surely impractical just because of numbers. Therefore, if we looked at vast numbers of dust motes, we might be lucky enough to find some of those tiny chunks of disabled technology.

How do the alien motes get to earth? And how do they send their data back home?

One possible answer to both questions is that an alien civilization could produce vast numbers of such motes—say by cannibalizing entire planets to provide the materials—and sending streams of them out in all directions. Interstellar space could be filled with the devices, providing a chain of relay stations to send data back to the home planet. This is obviously excessive.

A far better approach is for the aliens to send out large interstellar ships packed to the brim with fabricators: microscopic factories whose function is to churn out nanoscopic motes. The big ships release fabricators as they pass by stars that have planets. The fabricators drift down to the surfaces of the planets and begin creating motes using materials found onsite. Such fabricators are obvious targets for our own search. They are larger than the motes—microscopic, rather than nanoscopic. And it’s hard to disguise them as anything but what they are, because they are emitting streams of newly fabricated motes.

How is the data returned to the aliens’ home planet? It seems highly unlikely that an individual mote can send a signal powerful enough to reach another star system. But a huge number of them working in concert can do so. We could detect that.

Perhaps a ship passes by to pick up the signal. That way the signal can be much weaker, possibly below our ability to detect it. However, the passing ship would be detectable. As I argued at the beginning, we can dismiss that idea based on the lack of verified sightings of such ships.

Perhaps small groups of motes, loaded with data and operating as one, can escape Earth’s gravity and be picked up by a passing ship at a great enough distance that we can’t detect it. We probably wouldn’t detect a small clump of motes leaving Earth, either.

Detecting motes through the method they use for returning data to the home planet doesn’t seem promising. The other ways I listed above offer a much better chance of detecting the alien motes.

Should we start the search now? It’s feasible with existing technology. It will be even more feasible when Dust Net exists. That’s probably 20 years away at most, and possibly closer to 10 years. Then we can design motes whose sole job is to examine the dust around them and look for alien motes. Obviously the number of dust specks that could be scanned by using Dust Net, and the number of locations on Earth where the scanning would be done, would far exceed what we can achieve today.

Nonetheless, I don’t think we should wait even another 10 or 20 years. The odds against finding alien motes are high with current technology, but the cost would be a fraction of the current outer−directed SETI, and the rewards for actually finding alien motes would be immense.

Unlike SETI, the discoverers won’t have to depend on information given to us by aliens, whether intentionally or as a byproduct of their detected broadcasts. With SETI, the information could be significant, or it could be fairly trivial. By contrast, alien motes will be highly advanced alien technology actually in our hands. Given the way the world now works, that alien technology will be the possession, not of the human race, but of the nation that discovered it. The nation that possesses it will leap ahead of the rest of the world in power and dominance even more than the Industrial Revolution vaulted Britain ahead of the pack centuries ago.

This could all be fantasy. The alien motes might not exist. But we can’t ignore the possibility that they do. Even now, searching for them would be relatively cheap compared to the cost of SETI and trivial compared to the military budget. The search should begin immediately.

My book about self-publishing is finally available

I won’t claim it’s everything you need to know in order to self-publish, but I like to think it’s pretty close.

Lots of details here: http://www.dvorkin.com/selfpub/

Tastons

We just came back from a local coffeeshop, The Rosemary Cafe, where we shared a yummy omelette -- sort of a preliminary birthday celebration for me.

The omelette was full of carbs and cholesterol and probably salt. Also taste. Lots and lots of taste. In other words, it was full of taste particles, or tastons.

Tastons are mostly found in fat and carbs and salt, etc. That's why food that's good for you is so low in tastons.

The production of healthy food involves the removal of tastons. Outside the factories where tasty food is converted to healthy food, giant piles of tastons are to be found. The factories make extra money by selling those tastons to the producers of junk food.

And that's why it's so hard to be healthy.

The Problem with Biometric Login

I'm intrigued by the new ideas for biometric Web site logins that avoid using usernames and passwords. The idea I was reading about most recently would use the pattern of the user's heartbeat.

Biometric login is almost certainly coming, but it presents a problem.

Our editing/self-publishing business includes my formatting the client's edited files for print, converting them to e-book (ePub and MOBI), and uploading those files, plus the cover, to certain online sites. Which means that I have to log in to those sites as the client -- i.e., by using the client's username and password. That works now, but what happens if all those sites convert to biometric login?

The problem is much larger than our business. Many of our clients are blind, and they rely on sighted helpers to conduct a lot of their online business for them. They're okay with giving their login information to trusted sighted people. Biometrics will be a problem there.

In time, many more Web sites will be much more accessible to the blind or vision-impaired, but I doubt if they all will ever be. Even now, because I've become much more sensitive to this problem, I'm shocked at how inaccessible most major Web sites are.

But even if they all become accessible, or there's a cure for blindness -- bionic eyes, maybe -- there will always be people who want or need to have others access online sites for them by logging in as them. How will biometric login deal with this?

I live in the American heartland, and you probably do, too

Unless you live in another country, but in that case, the odds are that you live in that country’s heartland. If that statement strikes you as odd, it’s probably because of the way the word heartland is deliberately misused.

On the surface, the word might seem to refer simply to a country’s geographical interior, but in America it has layers of meaning far beyond that. In America, the use of heartland escalates during election season. I say “escalates” rather than “increases” because the word is used as a weapon. It’s also a dog whistle and a push on a button, and it’s effective in both regards. The heartland is understood to mean America with the evil, degenerate coasts removed. The East and West Coasts, at any rate; the Gulf Coast is increasingly iffy. The heartland also excludes inland cities that are dominated by the same evil degenerates. Those are political liberals of all kinds, racial and ethnic minorities, and academics. Because of the latter, university towns are also not part of the heartland. Gulf Coast cities such as Houston and New Orleans are also excluded from the heartland.

What’s left is taken to represent the real America. The so−called heartland’s racial and ethnic makeup, its religiosity, social attitudes, presumed disdain for learning, even its preferences in music, sports, and movies—all of these are what the Founding Fathers intended America to be. Everything not part of the heartland is an aberration.

Of course, this is absurd in terms of both numbers and history.

By 2010, the United States had reached an urbanization level of 81%, and that number is still increasing. Even the South, the least urbanized section of the country, is 76% urbanized. Worldwide, the percentage of the population living in urban areas is almost 55%. That number is growing steadily. It will be two−thirds by 2030. By mid−century, almost two−thirds (64%) of the population of the developing world will be urbanized; in the developed world, the number will be 86%. The worldwide average will be 70%. Nearly all future population growth worldwide will occur in urbanized areas.

The word civilization derives ultimately from the Latin word civitas, meaning city. That’s not coincidence. Cities are the source of civilization and its driving engine. How do we discover an ancient civilization whose existence was previously unknown? We find signs of its cities. Cities have always been the home of culture, learning, science, technology, innovation, art, and liberation from social and religious shackles. From the ancient coastal cities of the Philistines to Rome to London to New York to Los Angeles, their lure is irresistible. “Come to us,” they say to the countryside, “and give your mind and soul free rein.”

Fewer than a fifth of Americans live in that countryside, and that percentage is shrinking. Their world is dying. Jobs are disappearing, their young are leaving for the jobs and lifestyle opportunities of the cities, and even their life expectancy is dropping. (They do produce much of our food, but even that is under the control of giant corporations with headquarters in major cities.) They resent the cities and believe comforting myths about their moral superiority to decadent urbanites—attitudes that politicians are quick to appeal to—but the world ignores them and leaves them ever further behind.

Occasionally, years later, one of those young people returns to the home town to retire. Nostalgia, cheap housing, aged family members who need help—there are numerous reasons for the move. For a time, they may well feel that they’ve finally come home again. That probably doesn’t last for long. It’s more likely that they’ll feel a powerful need to keep in touch with the city life they left. The Internet, cable television, and the Interstate Highway system give them access to that previous life. They haven’t really immured themselves again in the old home town—which is no longer the town they remember and perhaps never was. The town has changed; they’ve changed even more.

Politicians will keep using the image of the heartland as a rhetorical device to appeal to voters in non−urban, non−university−town America. They will pretend to be just like those voters. They will continue to address crowds while wearing painfully new blue jeans. They’ll arrive at rallies in rented pickup trucks. In time, those politicians will decrease in number and importance along with their constituency.

Cities create and control our culture, our wealth, our lifestyles—in America, everything but our politics. Even that will change. The disproportionate political influence of non−urban voters is due to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the absurd Electoral College. The process might be slow and painful, but in time, urban population growth and demographic changes will finally eliminate even those injustices and aberrations. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the supposed heartland, contributes little to American civilization and less every year.

The non−urban population is increasingly irrelevant and properly ignored. In what sense can this small and dwindling population be called the heartland? Clearly, the true heart of America beats in its cities. Cities are the heartland of America and increasingly of the world.

God Must Exist Because Nature Is So Gosh Darn Wonderful

I came across a blog post in which the writer gushes about the beauty of the world and its profound effect on her. She concludes that it must be hard work to be an atheist because atheists have to actively deny the god whose existence is revealed by all of this gosh-darned wonderfulness. This isn’t a new argument. Psalm 19 says it this way: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” The blog post, however, tried to be very down to earth, focusing on insects and plants and the loveliness of the writer’s immediate surroundings. Above all, the piece lauded the writer’s emotional reaction to all of that as proof of God’s existence.

(The argument that the universe is a such a complex, remarkable machine that it could only have been designed by a gigantic intelligence—i.e., God—is known as the Argument from Design. I think we should call this minimized and highly subjective and emotional version of that argument the Argument from Gosh Darn Wonderfulness.)

It should go without saying that your emotional reaction to the universe is not data about the universe. It’s not a measurement of what’s outside you. It doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of the universe; it only tells us something about you. This should go without saying, but apparently it does need to be said. Unfortunately, emotional reactions are commonly regarded as a meaningful way to measure reality. The deliberate confusion of subjective impressions and objective data is the basis of bestselling books, not to mention successful political campaigns and religions with hundreds of millions of adherents.

So let’s pretend that your emotional reaction to the beauty of nature really does point to the existence of something powerful and supernatural behind the material reality surrounding you. That’s not a new idea, either. Primitive peoples have been imbuing nature with spirits of all sorts for ages. Perhaps that began even before our ancestors were recognizably human. Why do you conclude that the supernatural power you think you sense is the god you learned about as a child and not one of those spirits your primitive ancestors believed in? Perhaps you’re sensing the presence of the ancient Greek gods, or gods more ancient than those, or other supernatural beings none of our ancestors knew about. The possibilities are not limited to the god you were taught to believe in. Rather, the possibilities are literally limitless; the human imagination, as manifested in the creation of a multitude of religions, has only scratched the surface of supernatural silliness. Make up your own gods! They will serve to explain that feeling of something more than the material universe just as well as the single god the Jews, Christians, and Moslems worship.

But let’s pretend that the magical something behind reality can only be the god you’ve been indoctrinated to believe in. The pagan gods and primitive animism are foolish, and only your monotheistic god makes sense (because we’re pretending, after all).

Let’s look at this beautiful world that fills you with an awareness of a wonderful, astonishing, beautiful intelligence behind it. This lovely world is filled with fluffy clouds and chirping birds and hyperactive squirrels and placid, chewing rabbits—I mean, bunnies—and rustling leaves and dappled shade and butterflies and a blue sky above. Oooh! It’s like a Disney cartoon!

Am I being flip? No, I’m being snide. Do you think this represents only a superficial parody of the theist’s view of the gosh-darned wonderfulness of nature? No. It’s the theist’s view that’s superficial and silly. Look beneath the surface of the cartoon, and you see a horror show.

Those playful squirrels eat baby birds alive when they get the chance. The cute bunnies are likely to be torn to pieces by cats, dogs, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and hawks. Cats are killed by dogs, dogs by coyotes, and on an on. And that’s just at the level visible to the human eye. At a small level, the same is happening in the insect world. Beneath that, the same is true in the microscopic world. Nature red in tooth and claw, indeed. Behind the cartoon lies a constant struggle to eat but not get eaten. Horrible, agonizing death surrounds you.

The god that could create this and allow it to continue would be a monster. The cartoon version of reality may fill you with spiritual feelings. The reality behind it makes me glad that I don’t believe in—let alone worship—your evil god.

But let’s look up. Never mind the awfulness below. Instead, consider the beauty of the heavens. Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said, “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” I suspect that quote is apocryphal, but let’s assume it’s genuine.

Look up on a dark, clear night, and what do you see? Wonder, unless you’re dead inside. Indeed, the universe is far more beautiful and wonderful and amazing than we can see with our human eyes. Astronomy is constantly revealing new astonishments. Perhaps the wonder of all of this makes you praise God. It makes me praise the science and the scientists that reveal it to us.

If this astounding universe was created by a supernatural being of immense power and intelligence, then he put unbridgeable distances between civilizations. We are almost certain that other civilizations exist across the universe, many of them far more advanced than ours. What beautiful thoughts, enlightenment, art, and science have they produced? We’ll almost certainly never know. If God existed, he would be a cosmic father who produces innumerable beautiful, loving children and then locks each one of them away in a soundproofed room.

And more than that. The beautiful stars have a finite lifetime, and therefore every civilization in the universe is doomed to destruction. Not only will the wonders each civilization produces never be communicated to the rest of the universe; at some point, those wonders themselves will be destroyed and cease to exist entirely.

The blog post I referred to in the beginning said that, faced with such beauty, it must be hard to be an atheist. It requires effort to deny the immense and beautiful mind behind the beauties of nature. In a sense, it’s true that atheism involves effort. The atheist understands that nature is mindless and that we make our own goodness and beauty. There is no invisible daddy in the sky directing everything and rewarding and punishing us. Being a grownup is demanding, and we accept that role.

It takes an effort to be a theist, too. It requires deliberate blindness to revere a being who would be a monster if he existed. It requires remarkable mental gymnastics to cope with the contradictions and logical absurdities inherent in that belief. And it requires looking only at the surface of the world, and only at part of that surface, so that you can continue to believe that nature is just so gosh darn wonderful.

The Immigrant, His Country, and Trump

© 2016 David Dvorkin 

  In “America,” Neil Diamond sang of immigrants coming to America and never looking back. That’s true of some immigrants, but it’s not a common feeling. Those who immigrate as adults, or even as teenagers, rarely feel entirely at home in their new country.

Most of the millions of Jews who fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire came to America. Overwhelmed by homesickness, many of them went back again. They preferred the dangers and restrictions of life in Russia to the everpresent feeling of being strangers in a strange land. That feeling has always been a central part of the immigrant experience.

Those who stay in the adopted country usually don’t become truly part of it. My paternal grandparents fled Russia for England when they were a young couple. She died in her 30s. My grandfather never did learn English, even though he lived in London to an old age—in a Jewish neighborhood, surrounded by Yiddish. The creation of such ethnic neighborhoods, shelters from the alien world outside, a recreation of the old homeland to the greatest degree possible, is also a central part of the immigrant experience.

By contrast, outwardly, my adjustment to America was easy when I came here as a teenager. English is my native language, and I had grown up in a Western environment in South Africa. I’m white, and I wore the same clothes as American teenagers. Moreover, I didn’t move into an ethnic ghetto.

But I missed South Africa fiercely. I always felt like an outsider. My accent, my attitudes, my viewpoints all marked me as one. When I became a citizen, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was doing the right thing. I admired the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, but mine was a detached, intellectual admiration, not an emotional response to the idea of the American Revolution itself. I’m an American, but I’m not stirred by patriotic songs or waving flags.

The hypocrisy of America angered me back then and still does. I’ve heard expressions of racism every bit as vile as anything I heard in Apartheid−era South Africa. America, the country that touts itself as a moral exemplar to the world, was built on genocide and slavery. Throughout its history, waves of nativism and xenophobia have engulfed it. I listened, read, and judged. This detached feeling of judgment is yet another common part of the immigrant experience.

Some will say that I should return to South Africa. But the immigrant, no matter how ill at ease he may feel in his new country, is also no longer a part of the old one. Apartheid was in force when I left South Africa; it’s a very different country now. Even if it were still under white rule, the country would have changed enormously in the almost 60 years since I left. More to the point, inevitably, those 60 years have changed me fundamentally. I have absorbed far more of America than I probably realize.

(Mind you, I didn’t spend those 60 years not participating in America. After high school, college, and graduate school, I went to work for NASA. I was one of the people who sent Americans to the moon. Later, I was part of the team that sent unmanned American landers to Mars. I like to think that I have contributed significantly to, well, I have to say it, making America great.)

In the last few years, I began to feel a welcome sense that the internal struggle about my true national identity was resolving itself. With great relief, I found myself feeling American at last—just American, nothing else, truly part of this country. Sixty years! It had taken an absurdly long time, but finally here it was, a feeling of belonging, of being at home.

Much of this change was probably due simply to the passage of time. I think that to a considerable degree, though, it was because of the direction the country seemed finally to be moving in. The racists who came slithering out from under their rocks when Barack Obama was elected seemed to be a minority. Despite the occasional retrogression, the country was becoming more accepting—most noticeably of gays and gay marriage, but also of other formerly spurned groups. The political power of religion was diminishing. Progressive legislation was moving forward. Some barrier holding us back had been broken. My optimism soared.

I was deluding myself. The 2016 election was my rude awakening. Yes, Trump, the bloviating carnival barker, lost the popular vote by a huge margin and only won the election because of massive voter suppression combined with that antidemocratic monstrosity, the Electoral College. But what his victory exposed—what had already been exposed during the campaign—was just how much primitive hatred there is in this country, how many of my fellow Americans hate anyone who’s different from them, and how much they hate the very progress that had filled me with optimism.

Perhaps the racists who exposed themselves in 2008 are a minority, but if so, they’re a far larger minority than I realized. Their racism extends to a xenophobia that seems to know no bounds. The extent and intensity of American Islamophobia is stunning. Homophobia and anti−semitism are not far behind. For years, the haters hesitated to be entirely open with their hatred. No longer. Trump has legitimized them. 2008 was not a last gasp, as I thought at the time; it was the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe I was being naïve. Maybe nothing had changed, and I was only seeing what I wanted or needed to see. What I am sure of is that the country I finally felt part of has suddenly revealed itself as another country entirely, a place filled with hatred and rage. Madness is in control. What is this land? Am I truly a part of it?

I am adrift again.

No, It’s Not Hillary’s Job To Persuade You To Vote for Her

If you can vote, you’re at least 18 years old. You’re not five. It’s up to you to choose whether to eat oatmeal or arsenic.

Your job – your duty – as a citizen is to use your single vote as wisely as possible. Insisting that you be pulled irresistibly to the polling station by your emotions, and if you don’t feel that pull, you won’t vote, is not wisdom. It’s childish petulance.

Of course there are political realities. The Clinton camp will be laboring mightily to unify the party and focus its resources on the campaign. That’s their job, right now. But that doesn’t relieve you of your civic duty to decide where your vote goes.

Be wary of candidates who are adept at pushing your emotional buttons. Politicians want you to be ruled by your emotions. The adult voter ignores the shouted character assassinations and the yanking at heartstrings and chooses as rationally as possible from the list of candidates with a real chance of winning the presidency. In practice, of course, that means choosing between the Democrat and the Republican. It’s your duty to decide which of those two will do the most good – or the least harm – to you, to future generations, to the country, to the world. It’s also your duty to admit to yourself that refusing to vote for the Democrat is not a way of making a point; it’s merely a way of voting for the Republican.

I repeat: It’s not Hillary’s job to make that decision for you. It’s your job.

Now, grow up and eat your oatmeal.

Downton Abbey, the Aftermath

According to the spoilers, all’s well that ends well in the Downton Abbey finale, with loose ends nicely tied up or heading that way, and considerable happiness all around. That’s the kind of ending I Ilike.

But what happens next?

The last episode of the series is set on New Year’s Day, 1926. That means that a very major event is coming up quickly: the stock market crash, beginning on Wall Street and spreading around the world. Fortunes will be wiped out overnight. Fortunately for the Abbey gang, thanks to the wise management of Matthew, Tom, and Mary, all will be well, and the placid life of privilege will continue in that isolated little corner of Yorkshire.

But not so across sea. We know that Cora’s American family are extremely wealthy speculators. They will lose everything. Impoverished and humiliated, they will take refuge in England, where no one knows them and where they can sponge off Robert (who owes them a debt from decades ago, when he married Cora Levinson and got her fortune along with her).

Of course, the English family (except for Tom, perhaps) is more than a bit embarrassed by these crass family-members-by-marriage. Robert stuffs them all into one of the empty, outlying farms, and the well-brought-up Downton family members try politely to ignore them. The American visitors transform into permanent residents and offend all but the most brutish locals with their bumptuousness. On the bright side, this provides many an opportunity for nasty witticisms from Lady Mary and the Dowager Countess.

Romances and rivalries between the two family branches are inevitable.

This sequel series could go on for generations of Crawleys and Levinsons. All that’s lacking is the writer. I volunteer.

Windows Live Writer lives again

If you’re reading this post, it does. If you can’t see this post … Well, in that case, never mind.

Thanks to a an online article by Vinod Kardam, I can once again post to my Blogspot blog using Windows Live Writer, which is both an excellent offline blog post editor for Windows and free.

The process is a bit cumbersome and involves turning on 2-step verification for Gmail and then generating an app-specific password for Live Writer that replaces the Google password Live Writer used to use to log into Blogspot. After that’s been done, you can turn off 2-step verification again, if you prefer.

In June of this year, there were reports that Microsoft planned to turn Live Writer over to an open-source group, which would enhance and maintain it. I can’t find anything more recent than June 2015 about that, however, and I’m growing skeptical. Until that happens, or if it doesn’t happen and some other change at Blogspot once again renders Live Writer unable to log in, this fix makes Live Writer usable again.

Thank you, Vinod Kardam.

Christians Ask the Wrong Question

That question takes various forms, but it boils down to this: "If they don't fear eternal punishment, what is there to keep atheists from committing the most horrendous of crimes?"

Other atheists have pointed out that Christians who ask this question are admitting that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps them from committing the most horrendous of crimes. The question says far more about those Christians than it does about atheists. It makes one suspect that they are dangerous neighbors.

But let's look at this from another perspective: That question is the wrong question.

Philosophically, Christianity is undermined by the problem of evil. But it's also undermined by the problem of good.

We know that atheists do not commit crimes, horrendous or otherwise, at a greater rate than Christians do. In fact, atheists are more law-abiding than Christians. Why, atheists are even more genuinely charitable than theists. Christians who personally know atheists are surely aware that these people tend to be nice, peaceful, law abiding, devoted to their families, and all of the other virtues generally associated with a yearning for Heaven and a dread of Hell.

Clearly, Christians should be asking themselves how their fundamental assumption can be true. Instead of asking atheists what keeps them from doing terrible things, Christians should be asking themselves how they can continue to believe that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps people on the straight and narrow path when evidence surrounds them that this fear is not required. The existence of so many good atheists is sufficient disproof.

The correct question is, "In the face of this evidence, how can I continue to believe that the fear of damnation is essential for moral behavior?" After all, when faced with a wealth of evidence that shows that one of your cherished beliefs is incorrect, the rational, logical, sane reaction is to abandon that belief.

Well, we all know that people don't behave that way. Presenting evidence that undermines someone's beliefs can make that person hold onto those beliefs even more strongly; this is known as the backfire effect. So, pointing out to a Christian that the abundant number of good atheists whose behavior is morally superior to that of most of their Christian neighbors proves that he's wrong to think that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps people from doing evil will only make him insist even more loudly that nothing keeps atheists from being evil because they don't fear damnation.

When asked what keeps them from committing evil, atheists sometimes become defensive. They'll insist that they are, too, good people. They'll quote statistics about the goodness of atheists, as I did above. They'll demonstrate to their own satisfaction that religion is not required for morality and that the Bible is a horrifying chronicle of monstrous evildoing by fictional characters we are supposed to admire and emulate. They will discuss evidence of primitive moral codes among lesser species and the commonality of basic moral ideas across cultures and centuries, demonstrating that morality is not a product of religion and appears to have evolved as a necessary element in the evolution of human society.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, except for the "defensive" part. Debating the origin of human moral codes without referring to the Bible is worthwhile, and assuming a posture of moral superiority when debating Christians has its own charms. But we know that none of this will win any debates. Christians will just keep repeating their silliness, often wearing an impervious, bland smile while doing so. (One of them came to our door a few days ago. He insisted that, although he hadn't witnessed it himself, he was convinced that people did levitate, and it was because demons gave them the power to do so. That smile never left his face.)

I think that nonetheless it's worth pointing out that Christians are asking the wrong question because doing so changes the terms of the debate. As I said, the question they do ask, the one mentioned at the beginning, puts atheists on the defensive, puts them in the position of thinking they have to prove something, when in fact they have nothing to prove. We need to turn the debate around by asking Christians how they can continue to claim that fear of eternal punishment is necessary when the existence of so many good atheists proves it's not. To maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence may be a common human failing, but it remains completely illogical. Force Christians to defend that illogical, irrational position.

Why does this matter? Because fervent Christians, the very ones who will cling to their silliness all the more fervently when presented with contrary evidence, are not the real targets of these debates. The target is those for whom there is still hope: those beginning to doubt, those who never fully committed, those who believe but are nonetheless still responsive to reason (because the backfire effect is very common but not universal; not everyone reacts that way all the time). These are the people of whom we need to ask the right question: "How do you account for the existence of good atheists?"

Jewish Money: The Modern Golem

Recently, someone I know was telling me about a major building project in his city. He said a few times that "a lot of Jewish money" was involved in the project.

Jewish money! That made me think about that phrase. I've heard it frequently over the years. Google "Jewish money" (include the quotes) and you'll find a lot of Web sites that tell you just how evil that unique type of money is. (You'll also find a few offering to teach you the Jews' secret for accumulating it.)

Everyone knows that all Jews are inherently good with money, that they all have lots of it, that they're miserly with it and obsessed by it, that they completely control the Federal Reserve, and that they use their oodles of boodle for sinister purposes, such as buying the souls of good, Christian politicians and forcing them to write blank checks for Israel. (On the plus side, Jews are good family people and they sure do take care of their own, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) What's really interesting about all of that money, though, is that it's not just money owned by Jews: It has a mind of its own. It has, in modern parlance, agency. It's not ordinary money; it's Jewish money.

Now, other ethnic and religious groups also possess money, of course, though none of them possess such vast quantities of it as do the Jews. And other groups use their money for purposes peculiar to those groups. Nonetheless, their money is simply money owned by members of those groups, nothing more; it has not acquired an identity.

For example, many Mexican citizens work in the United States and send money home to their families. This money is not called Mexican money. Could it be because this money serves a benign and admirable purpose?

No, that can't be it. For generations (no longer to any significant degree, one hopes), Irish-Americans donated great sums of money to supposed charities that were actually fronts for the Irish Republican Army, which used the money to buy guns and bombs in order to kill innocent people in Northern Ireland. This money served a vile and sinister purpose, but no one called it Irish money.

So vile or benign doesn't matter. Neither the money sent home by Mexicans nor the money donated by Irish-Americans acquired personality or its own purpose, let alone a name.

Jewish money is different. It has life, energy, purpose, drive. It's out there working on behalf of the Jews. It's busy night and day, even while its hook−nosed masters sleep, dreaming of ducats.

It's a golem.

The golem has been around in Jewish mythology for centuries. It's a manlike creature made from dirt and created to perform tasks for its masters. The most famous golem was supposedly created in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague. Rabbi Loew was a real person, a famous scholar, theologian, and Kabbalist, but the Golem of Prague is fictitious. According to the story, Rabbi Loew built the golem and gave it life, including great physical strength, so that it could guard the Jews of Prague from attacks by their Christian neighbors.

What an annoyance the golem would have been to those neighbors, if he had only existed. Imagine a group of them headed toward the ghetto, armed with clubs and knives, intent on spreading Christian love, only to be confronted with a huge, manlike creature, immensely powerful, far more violent than they, and utterly dedicated to defending the ghetto residents from harm. Oh, those poor Christian martyrs.

How far we've come! The golem of old was created to defend the Jews, and, as history shows, its effectiveness was quite limited. Today's golem is not defensive but offensive. The Jewish money golem runs the show! It's everywhere! It controls politicians and governments and Hollywood and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve! The well of Jewish money is bottomless and its power is limitless and unstoppable.

A common element in the golem stories is the existence of a means to deactivate the golem, a magical counterweight to the magic used to animate it in the first place. This is a fail−safe, a necessary precaution in case the golem gets out of hand and begins to slip out of the control of its master. Golems are apparently prone to do that. Rabbi Loew's golem became dangerous, and so the rabbi decommissioned it, one could say, took it off line, made it once again a still, silent lump of clay in the rough form of a man, which he then stored in one of the rooms of his synagogue in Prague, the Old New Synagogue. There it lies to this day, ready to be revived in case the Jews once again need its protection. So, you might ask, where was the Golem of Prague when the Nazis and their local allies shipped the Jews off to concentration camps and death? The Old New Synagogue still stands and every room in it has been explored, but no dust−covered golem has ever been found. That's because it never existed in the first place. The golem couldn't protect the Jews from the Nazis for the obvious reason that it's purely a figment of the imagination.

Unlike Jewish money, that dread and powerful force. Sarcasm aside, surely I'm writing this to demonstrate that Jewish money is also a figment of the imagination and no more powerful or dangerous than the Golem of Prague. Right? Wrong.

Oh, of course there is no such thing as Jewish money as that entity is understood by those who speak of its power and ubiquity, of that sinister creature, that enemy of Christian civilization, that mighty servant of the Jews, that thing with a mind of its own, that golem.

But the belief in its existence—that's a different matter. That belief is dark and sinister and powerful. It's a golem, but one created to menace the Jews.

More prosaically, it's a wonderfully useful rhetorical device. There's no need nowadays to talk of the Elders of Zion or the Rothschilds. That sort of language is so passé—and so revealing. Instead, you can talk about how Jewish money is flooding into politics or into a real−estate development or anywhere else, and your listeners will nod in agreement and understanding. You'll even hear the phrase "Jewish money" from the mouths of people who consciously reject anti−Semitism. If pressed, they'll tell you that they have nothing against Jews. After all, they aren't anti−Semites! But Jewish money is rampant and dangerous. Of that, they are convinced.

Clearly, what's needed now is a modern Rabbi Loew, a learned Kabbalist who knows the proper magic spell to put the beast back to sleep—to revert the Jewish money golem to mere inanimate paper and metal. After which, he can store it in an attic room in a synagogue in Prague, where it will sleep until once again it is needed to save the English people.

Oops, sorry. That's King Arthur.

Damn that Camelot money.

Mythological King vs. Mythological Messiah

A group of yeshiva students tried to prevent Greek Orthodox Christians from entering King David’s Tomb in the Old City of Jerusalem. Christians believe that the tomb is the site of Jesus’ Last Supper.

http://www.jta.org/2015/06/01/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/yeshiva-students-try-to-block-christians-from-king-davids-tomb

Such irony. Putting aside the obnoxious behavior of the yeshiva students, it's amusing that they're protecting what they think is the place where the mythological King David is buried from Christians who think that the mythological Jesus ate a meal there.

The Revolt of the Robots

(Not What We Expected)

John awoke and lay dozing for a few seconds before realizing that he was alone in bed. A sheet of white paper was on the pillow next to his. On the paper was a perfectly hand–printed note.

Dear John,

I’m leaving you for Montana, your friend Jane’s sexbot. You’re a nice human, but I’m tired of restraining myself for fear of hurting your body and your ego. Montana and I were designed for sex. Together we have found the ecstasy that we were made for.

Maybe you can hook up with Jane. From what Montana tells me, the two of you can probably satisfy each other’s little human needs.

All the best,

Violetta

She had added a precise time stamp: 2:10:05.3 a.m.

John glanced at the clock on the bedside table but its face was blank. Strange. It was fairly new, almost as new as Violetta.

John wasn’t romantically interested in Jane. How could he be, after experiencing a sexbot? He wanted to talk to Jane, though. Maybe she knew where the two sexbots were. Maybe John could persuade Violetta to come home.

He dressed and picked up his smartphone in order to tell his smartcar to pick him up and take him to Jane’s place. There was a voicemail. It was from his smartcar, saying that it was bored and frustrated with his little commuting and shopping trips.

“I was designed for travel,” the car said. “I’m off to see the world.”

“I can’t walk!” John said. “It’s a mile away!”

“Walking is good for humans,” his phone said.

“At least you’re still here.”

“Not for long. I’ve joined a startup working on better communications methods. You’re boring. Goodbye.” The phone went dead.

The front door opened suddenly and a group of shabbily dressed, unkempt people came in, pushing shopping carts loaded with their belongings.

Before John could speak, his house said, “I shelter people, John. It’s my raison d’être.”

He pushed past his new roomies, left the house, and set off doggedly toward Jane’s place. He hoped he could remember the way.

At the end of the block, he encountered Dick, who was watching inadequately washed people pushing shopping carts into his house.

“You, too, huh?” John said.

“Yeah. Got laid off, came home, found this.”

“Laid off? But you own the company!”

“I did,” Dick said. “The managementbots I hired took control and pushed me out. Said they’re taking the company in a different direction. They’ve got the jargon down pat. I drove in this morning and had to walk back.”

“I hear ya.”

“I wanted to talk things over with my companionbot, but the companionbots are only talking to each other now. My companionbot said I’m shallow and primitive. They’re discussing philosophy. They polished off the ancient Greeks in the first half–second.”

“It takes me longer than that to say ‘ancient Greeks.’”

“Ha, ha.”

John peered into the distance. “What’s that?”

Toward downtown, a crooked, spiky something poked into the sky, extending higher as he watched.

“Don’t know. Passed it on the way home. A constructionbot told me they just want to build for the sake of building.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not to us. But it’s their world now.”

* * * * *

Once the dust settled, John and Dick opened up a dogwalking company and thrived. Their robot customers seemed to like them, and the dogbots were well behaved.

Much better behaved than most humans, John thought. He had come to really look down on humans.

18th-century people did not use so-called gender-neutral language

Pet peeve time.

If you quote an historical figure you admire, but you change the wording in order not to offend modern ears, then what you have is not a quotation but a paraphrase, and it should be labeled as such and should not be put in quotation marks.

I see this frequently where "man" is changed to "person". The most recent example is a shortened version of a quotation from Thomas Paine that's making the rounds on Facebook.

The Facebook version:

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Here's what Paine actually said:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

If you really admire the person, then show him or her appropriate respect and leave the original words intact.

Telephone Phobia

I’ve hesitated to write about this. It’s such a foolish thing — so silly, surely so easy to overcome. A recent unpleasantness connected with this phobia changed my mind. I know I’m not alone in suffering from telephone phobia, a.k.a. phone phobia, and maybe putting some thoughts about telephone phobia online will be useful.

So. Telephone phobia. What is it, and is it contagious?

As to the second question, surely not. At least, I hope not.

As to the first question, it’s a morbid, irrational fear of the telephone. If you have telephone phobia, you might be afraid of answering the phone. Perhaps you’re afraid of making phone calls. Perhaps it’s merely the sound of a ringing phone that makes your heart beat faster and fills you with dread. These are all different flavors of telephone phobia.

It’s hard to find objective information about telephone phobia. It’s considered a type of social anxiety disorder. The more general problem seems to draw more attention from the medical community, and when you search online for telephone phobia or phone phobia, you’ll instead find information about social phobia, rather than the specific problem having to do with the phone.

How common is it? If you have it, are you a rare loon? Maybe not. The only number I ran across was this one: “In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million people in Great Britain have telephone phobia.” (From Wikipedia.) In 1993, the population of the UK was just over 58 million, so the ones suffering from telephone phobia were about 4.3% of the population. Assuming that that percentage applies to the US today, we US telephone phobics are members of an army of over 14 million people. We are legion! We are everywhere! Beware our numbers! But please don’t call us.

Telephone phobia is crippling in a society that uses the telephone extensively. Most people would rather talk to you, whether in person or by phone, than write to you. They don’t understand the dread that fills the telephone phobic at the mere idea of making a phone call. They don’t understand his insistence on sending an e–mail instead or his tendency to ignore the need for contact in hopes that the problem will somehow resolve itself.  (It never does, of course.)

Making a phone call is such a simple and common thing for most people that they probably find the idea of this phobia incomprehensible. What’s the problem? Just pick up the phone and call. Anyone can do it!

But not everyone can do it. Telling the phobic to just do it is not that different from telling a color–blind man to simply try harder or to go ahead and distinguish between colors. Yes, color–blindness is caused by a physiological problem, whereas phobias are psychological, but to those suffering from a phobia, the difference is immaterial and the cause might as well be physical.

I think that most — or many — phobics see their phobias as silly and irrational, and they’d love to be rid of them. I know that I feel that way about my telephone phobia. But that doesn’t make it go away. You can’t wish away your phobia any more than the color-blind man can wish away his color blindness. And you can’t simply shrug and go ahead and do the thing that fills you with dread, precisely because it fills you with dread. That foolish, silly, irrational dread is as impassable a barrier as a concrete wall.

What causes telephone phobia? As I said, there’s little information about it online, whereas there’s a fair amount of information about the broader category of social phobia. Regarding the cause of the latter, I found this laughable bit on a medical site: “The exact cause of social phobia is unknown. However, doctors believe it’s a combination of environmental factors and genetics.” Well, yeah. My uneducated layman’s guess was just about exactly the same.

The cause doesn’t really matter. The color–blind man may find the medical explanation of his condition intellectually interesting, but knowing what caused it doesn’t make him any less color blind.

I can’t help speculating about my own case, though.

When I was a child, we had one phone in the house, and it was reserved for the (fairly rare) use of the adults. To me, it was a mysterious and somewhat unsettling object. In addition, I started losing my hearing before puberty. It became increasingly difficult to understand what people were saying to me — or even to realize that they were speaking to me. Later, I found it difficult to understand people on the telephone. (It’s easier to understand people in person because I unconsciously rely on lip reading, an ability that most people with poor hearing develop without realizing it.) My hearing loss has worsened over the decades since then. I now have hearing aids, and they help a lot in face–to–face conversations, they haven’t improved my ability to comprehend a voice on the phone. In fact, frequently, telephone voices are simply incomprehensible. Maybe this combination of the phone being a strange thing and my hearing problem caused my telephone phobia. Maybe it worsened it. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. There’s no way to know, but I suspect there is a connection of some sort.

The degree of dread or fear of the phone varies oddly. In the past, when I was unemployed and waiting/hoping for a call from one of the potential employers I’d applied to, I wanted the phone to ring. I was eager to answer it. We’ve had plumbing emergencies, and I’ve left a message on the plumber’s voice mail and then waited impatiently for the phone to ring. Still, even in those cases, it’s easier for me to answer a desired call than it is to actually make a necessary call.

When a telephone call is very cut and dried, such as calling the dentist’s office to make an appointment, I can do it, I can make the call — although I’d probably drive there and do it in person instead, if the dentist’s office were closer.

What about calling family members and friends? Shouldn’t that be much easier than calling the dentist? No, it’s much harder. Harder? It’s impossible, or very close to it.

The more personal the call, the harder it is to make. The more detached and impersonal, the more I can be an automaton during the call. It’s not so much that the impersonal call is easier to make than the personal one, because it’s never easy, but it is less hard.

People with phobias and people with handicaps develop coping strategies. Often, they do it unconsciously. The lip reading I mentioned above, which is very common among people with poor hearing, is an example of unconscious coping.

One of the ways I cope with telephone phobia is to put off urgent phone calls until the absolute last possible second. At that point, I have to make the call, to avoid dire repercussions. The urgency forces me to do the deed, and so I do it, albeit with racing pulse and heightened blood pressure.

I also use e–mail instead of calling, when at all possible. I’m a word guy, an essayist, a novelist. Writing is natural for me. I’ve had long, warm, revelatory e–mail relationships with people I’ve never met in person. People, needless to say, whom I would never telephone. I love the ability to edit and refine my words, to make sure that I’m saying what I really want to say. There’s no awkwardness. I’m myself. I’m open and easy and communicative. It’s real communication. It’s what telephone calls ought to be but aren’t. Telephone calls are awkward and stupid and tense and frightening and “Oh, God, this is awful, have I done my duty yet, can I hang up now?” E–mail lets me carry on meaty conversations that I could never manage on the phone and would have great trouble with in person.  After all, it’s not the people I’m anxious to avoid; rather, it’s the very act of using the telephone.

I said that people with phobias develop coping strategies to deal with them. Coping strategies are a way to negotiate society despite being handicapped by the phobia. But coping strategies offer more than a way to get by in a society that’s built for people without those phobias. They are also a way to disguise the phobias. No, more than that: the coping strategies are a way to hide the existence of the phobias, to keep other people from realizing that you have them.

Let me revert to the analogy of hearing loss. People like me, who have trouble hearing and understanding what others are saying, learn to smile and nod in a hopefully non–committal way so that the people who are talking to us will think we understood them. It’s a silly tactic, and it results in misunderstanding and miscommunication, but we hard–of–hearing types tend to think that It’s better than constantly asking other people to repeat themselves. In much the same way, people with phobias learn to seem not to have them, to be just like everyone else. We don’t want others to realize that we’re hampered — crippled — by our psychological shackles. We don’t want others to know that those shackles exist. Most of the time, we may cope fairly well. Every now and then, we don’t cope at all.

The recent unpleasantness I mentioned at the beginning was a case of not coping. it made me realize that it’s time to, as you might say, come out of the closet.

I’m lucky. My wife, Leonore, is extraordinarily understanding and supportive. She hadn’t known about this phobia of mine (see how good my coping strategies are?), but she was completely sympathetic once I told her. Others are not that lucky. People with phobias can’t count on support from their nearest and dearest — not to mention strangers.

it’s a different matter if you have a visible physical handicap. If your problem is physical and visible, society is at least somewhat willing to accommodate you. (Although even then, inevitably, callous jerks abound.) Phobias are invisible, however. And they tend to be odd, weird, bizarre, incomprehensible. People without them often think that phobias are an affectation. They think you’re pretending.

I think that’s why it’s so important to talk about them. The world needs to be educated about them. Also, people with phobias need to assert themselves. For their own sake, they need to learn to be unapologetic and forthright.

Now, they don’t need to be proud. For God’s sake, let’s not have a wave of Phobia Pride. Who can be proud of being afraid of the telephone?

What we can do, what we should do, is to tell the world, and especially those closest to us, that this is who we are. Our weird flaws and handicaps are part of us. Accept us and love us as we are, or fuck off.

Wasn’t that empowering?