Government of Profiteers and Wahhabists

Any more, GOP really stands for Government of Profiteers. Admittedly, politicians who are bought and paid for are a bane that curses Democrats, Republicans and political parties of all colors since time immemorial. But having elected Trump, American Exceptionalism acquires a new meaning.

Today's GOP and Trump are in power because the profiteers have allied themselves with an evangelical religion that we may as well label GOP Wahhabism because it has nothing to do with traditional Christianity. And we are accomplices.

I am not really qualified by education, study, debate and reflection to offer an elegant, scholarly analysis of the problem (which is human nature), but I am not stupid, either. And I need to rant.

The Saudis, a family of bandit Bedouin chiefs from a wretchedly backward region of the Arabian Peninsula, were promoted into power by profiteers. After WW1, the British promoted a Saudi to become King of Arabia in order to protect British oil interests. To maintain their power on the peninsula, the Saudi family partnered with a fundamentalist brand of Sunni religion (Wahhabism) that originated in their native Saudi area.

You know the Wahhabists? These are the folks that veil women and prohibit them from driving or going in public without a male relative. They despise music and Western culture, rigidly control the media, and force their practices on any foreigner visiting their country.

The Trump era and the appeasing Republican leadership brings us the all too historically familiar collusion between profiteers and authoritarian religious leaders, just like the Saudis. Throw in fear-mongering nationalism (xenophobia) and we have apt comparisons with Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia. Both are examples of dictators coddling conservative, organized religions and successfully enlisting their support. Leave aside Nazis and Putin. I prefer the comparison to the Saudis because the Trumps practice nepotism and glorify obscenely gaudy displays of wealth, and the "religion" that supports Trump is so extreme, so judgmental, so authoritarian, and so hypocritical that, like Wahhabism, it really is not a religion at all.

The profiteer part is the entrenched wealthy with an insatiable greed for more wealth and power and an immoral indifference to the suffering of others. Such people we always have and such people always use their money and power to influence government to their own ends. But when they have such extreme control over society as in the Trump era, history books devote separate chapters to the phenomenon.

We have propaganda, the indispensable tool for all political exploitation. GOP Wahhabism, wrapped in the American flag like all demagogue scoundrels, is fanned by Fox Noise. How else to explain the relentless hypocrisy and the crazy, paranoid, fear-based dogmas of a patriotism that vilifies imagined opposition, that sanctifies a gun culture, that harps on a make-believe "war" on Christmas (as if today's retail orgy has anything to do with Jesus) and a make-believe "persecution" of Christians and whites? It is relentless propaganda: fear-mongering, angry, divisive, rabble-rousing, fact-adverse, conspiracy theory driven propaganda.

You know the GOP Wahhabists? These are the folks that despise uppity women, prohibit them from practicing birth control, and blame them when they get raped. They despise Western culture (West Coast hippies and East Coast liberals, Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism"), advocate stripping the "fake news" media of its licenses, and force their religious practices (e.g., Christmas and "Biblical" values) on fellow citizens from other traditions.

Mohammed and Jesus inspired people to open their hearts and minds and respect and serve one another, particularly the needy. The organized religions founded after them are political. Even so, more than enough inspiration remained to nurture mystics, saints, beliefs, practices and communities that have enriched the lives of the devout and the not-so-devout, even non-believers, for centuries.

The fundamentalist ilk that breed within these religions and usurp their names have nothing to do with promoting the material or spiritual development of anyone. These religious demagogues use the labels "Christianity" and "Islam" to obscure their real intent: their own ego, anger and lust for power. The scary part is that most of these self-professed religious leaders have egos that match their charisma. They actually believe themselves.

In the U.S., the politically powerful adopt Ayn Rand as their patron saint. (You know Ayn Rand? She's the one who went on the dole when she couldn't pay her bills.) Permitting the unfettered pursuit of profit is the solution for all social problems. Education, prisons and health care are for-profit businesses. The premise that public utilities — water, sewage, electricity, and communications — require regulation is criticized as inefficient and unnecessary. Anger against the government is fanned by the NRA, home builders associations, real estate developers, manufacturers, and CEO's who despise regulations that protect safety in work places, homes, medicines, and even the water we drink and the air we breathe.

GOP Wahhabists actually believe it is morally wrong for society (when a society organizes, we call it "government") to help the poor and the sick. The destitute have no one to blame but themselves.

We reward executives in private and public sectors, whether publicly traded corporations, financial market brokers, hospital administrators, or university deans and coaches, with compensation ridiculously disproportionate to the average worker who actually produces something useful.

Watch. The GOP will privatize National Parks and make them profit centers, including slapping corporate trade names on them like bowl games and sports stadiums. (My favorite is the Arizona Cardinals' "University of Phoenix Stadium." The University of Phoenix, a for-profit university, of course, has no sports program whatsoever.) Or, as Trump is now doing, the GOP will simply sell off ("privatize" is the euphamism) public property.

Science and our own self-interest take a back seat to GOP Wahhabism. We teach little science in schools in favor of promoting "Intelligent Design". We deny the human contribution to climate change, or even to environmental degradation. We believe in "alternative" facts for the purpose of protecting the vested profits of tobacco, oil, and coal.

The entire GOP notion that government is bad is demented. Instead of using business tools to make government efficient, we make government so weak it becomes a business tool.

How can this happen? It is the human ego, the profiteers and corrupt Pharisees of our times, the same hypocritical bane that Mohammed and Jesus railed against. "Ego" reads a little antiseptic. Think "greed," "fear," "anger," "hatred," and "narcissism." Ego is every selfish, ignorant, self-destructing human weakness and ignorance that all we share in varying degrees.

What drives Rupert Murdoch to shamelessly pursue profit from fake news? 32% of the electorate is enough of a tail to wag the election dog. That is the percentage of the electorate that still thinks Trump is doing a good job. That minority is enough to determine and intimidate the outcome of Republican primary elections. In the long run (hopefully), it should not be enough to sustain control over the nation's government. The pundits say even now the percentage is shrinking. But what does Murdoch care? A 32% market share is more than enough to ensure top ratings and mega-profits for Fox Noise. Murdoch, described by those who know him as willing to sell his own mother for profit, has his roots in the tabloid business. If people get news and form opinions based upon Fox Noise, it is the equivalent of reading the National Enquirer or the Daily Mirror. As one columnist recently wrote, how can a 15-minute sermon once a week compete with hours and hours of glossy Fox Noise television distortions and lies.

I have not touched upon racism. This is the argument that Trump is a backlash to eight years of a black man in the White House, and the idiotic notion that African Americans have it easy.

We enable all this. We are accomplices. That is the tragedy.

We vote carelessly and ignorantly. That is what fundamentalists and the GOP promote: ignorance. Mohammed and Jesus taught people to think for themselves. Religious leaders and GOP Wahhabists teach people to not think for fear of divine punishment. Wahhabist leaders do your thinking for you. With enough propaganda, people do not think they react. It is called mob psychology.

In this country, we promote ignorance. We have underpaid school teachers who use their own money to buy supplies for their students. We have broken teachers unions because — well, educated people tend to vote Democrat. We have people who believe a two thousand plus year old book is authoritative on matters of science. Heck, not even the Catholic church teaches that. We believe that a president is patriotic even though he fawns upon the dictator who meddled in our elections. We have not learned from religion, history or even from the experiences of other countries. The political troubles that confront us are no different from what other societies have struggled with for millennia: human nature. The modern world faces the same challenges, only compounded by technology and social isolation.

News and information today are a for-profit business that is primarily entertainment and advertising. What few professional news organizations remain are labeled as "fake news" by Fox Noise, the tabloid that is the epitome of fake news propaganda. "Jail Hillary", but the Russian-Trump investigation is a witch hunt. We have an internet with algorithms that give us information from Google, Facebook and their ilk that is paid advertising: a feedback loop that reflects back our own greed and prejudices.

A vote is so valuable that the GOP is legislating obstacles to prevent or dilute voting by those who are indisposed towards them. The GOP promotes paranoia over voting fraud when there is no evidence of it — other than by Putin. In a concerted effort over decades, the GOP has successfully gerrymandered legislative districts to ensure that a minority of voters elect a majority of our Representatives. Now the GOP is changing the rules so that religions (read, the already mobilized GOP Wahhabists) may use tax-exempt money to actively participate in politics. That is how important votes are.

Much, much worse than ignorance is indifference. We do not bother to vote, or we throw them away on the Ralph Naders and the Jill Steins of the world. People complain about how bad things are and that there is no real difference between the two parties. Guess what. People who do not vote are the problem. You are enabling the very system that turns you off.

Such a small thing, to vote, yet so powerful.

It Takes a Village . . .

. . . of Hardware and Software to make a home movie.

Scenes from a movie about Thomas Edison (Edison, the Man, 1940) come to mind. Spencer Tracy, playing the role, keeps trying different materials to serve as the filament for his electric light bulb. After numerous failed attempts, he hits upon carbon and the commercially viable electric light bulb is patented.

Home video editing is like that, only without the commercial viability or the patent.

Depending upon the medium — a computer file resident on a hard drive, a Blu-ray disk, or a regular or high definition DVD disk  — it takes experimenting with different combinations of hardware, software, and techniques to produce a viable product.

I think video editing is a wonderful expression of creativity. But then, it is my hobby. I would not want to discourage anyone from the hobby. Editing home videos is a form of storing and sharing memories and, hey, who isn't into a bit of self-indulgence? But in my experience, it is also a frustrating process of trial and error. I suppose that also is a form of creativity. Like Edison and his filaments, I was forced to think up different trials of computers, programs, and settings to hit upon a satisfactory result.

I began editing video in the late 20th Century using multiple video-tape recorders and a switch box. It's a process called linear editing and it is not only frustrating, it's not very rewarding because with each copy, the picture quality gets worse. With the advent of affordable, consumer non-linear editing, I took the plunge. I am on my fourth system and, as it turns out, in order to share videos taken in Europe this September, I need each of the previous three.

A Simple Video File that Plays on Television

For our own use, I store video files on an external hard drive that hooks up to a new Roku box via a USB cable. My tiny four terabyte drive is only half full and replaces some fifty DVD boxes. But I did have to buy the new Roku box, and it took several tries with different file formats on my iMac before I discovered the one that the Roku could read. It's got to be in H264. The lesson here is that if you are using a Mac, you live in a small world.

Then the problem was jerky playback. What looked perfectly fine on the Mac was intolerably jerky on anything else. I won't go through the details, in large part because there were so many frustrations that I have shoved the memories into oblivion. All I remember is what worked.

First, edit the raw clips in Final Cut X in their native format. In my case, I am using a high definition, 1920x1080 pixel video camera that shoots 60 frames per second. I am rounding up. Owing to accidents of cathode ray televisions, it's actually 59.94 fps, which is double the standard NTSC 29.97 fps. Web search "frames per second" and your head will spin looking for rhyme or reason. There are more settings than you can imagine in a nightmare. At any rate, FC-X and its extra-price "Compressor" software which is supposedly "professional" and gives the user even more control over output (it doesn't) is incapable of producing a movie file that does not jerk on my television.

Second, copy the edited file into MyDVD (a hybrid Roxio-Apple program) and have it rendered into a high definition DVD. Why MyDVD? Because Toast Titanium, the much touted standard for playing, copying and authoring CD, DVD and now Blu-rays on Macs, particularly important because Steve Jobs and Apple refused to support Blu-ray (it had to do with patent royalties), does not work. Another lesson: do not use Toast Titanium for anything other than copying.

Third, strip the actual movie file from the DVD image (an "ISO" folder), now in television-legible 29.97 fps, and import it back into FC-X.

Fourth, render the imported DVD file from the ISO folder because without the DVD envelope, no Roku box or pretty much anything else will read it. By stroke of good fortune, FC-X does. It takes several agonizing minutes to import, then more time to export (the term used now is "share") the .mov file (in H264, naturally).

Oh, I forgot something. While Toast would not work at all, MyDVD has the curious habit of shifting the sound track almost two seconds ahead of the video. Like, you hear the words from my mouth one second, then my mouth moves the next. Unacceptable. The fix? Start each edit with two seconds of test frames and loud noise, then two seconds of blank video and audio. When the file is imported back into FC-X for the final rendering, detach the audio and, using the test frames, noise, and blank, shift the audio track into place.

The end product is high definition video on my television. It's quite satisfying to watch.

A High Definition Silver Platter

Shari wants to send copies to her Mum. Of course, I am flattered with any audience. Shari's Mum doesn't have a new Roku box with a USB port, but she does have a Blu-ray player. I am scared because I know the frustrations of authoring and burning silver platters are even greater than just producing a viable video file. Plus, it takes several hours for the computer to render and burn a disk, so the frustration of each trial and error is magnified.

Apple, courtesy of Steve Jobs, does not support Blu-ray. Which is why I have MyDVD and Toast. Both have facilities for authoring Blu-ray and high definition DVD (called "AVCHD" DVD) discs. Like a gullible fool, I fiddled around setting up menus and chapter markers for scenes on each program. The time was wasted. Toast would hum along for several hours then, when its little ticker-tape reader stated it was 99% done, it froze and delivered the always assuring dialogue box that reads something like "unknown error 3640137. Toast must shut down." MyDVD would hum along for several hours and produce a wonderful disc — with the audio track almost two seconds off-kilter. Unacceptable.

I thought of using my Windows laptop. There are two "big" video editing programs for consumers: Final Cut on Macs and Premiere on Windows. I also have Premiere. I had purchased it before my iMac and FC-X, only to be frustrated trying to use Premiere. So I switched back to Macs. Now came the time for Premiere and Windows glory. I copied the end product files from my iMac onto a thumb drive and loaded them onto my laptop and into Premiere. I even figured out menus and chapter markers for scenes. First I produced high definition DVD's, the AVCHD variety. Lo and behold, success!

Blank DVD's are much cheaper than blank Blu-rays. Trouble is, a DVD is good for 4.7 gigabytes compared to 23 gigabytes for a Blu-ray. My product took six DVD's, about twenty-five minutes of video each. I progressed to Blu-ray. I burned two separate Blu-rays and got perfect results, except for the photo of Shari I used for one of the menus. No worries. I had finally figured out how to produce a Blu-ray.

A Regular Definition Silver Platter

Shari wants to send copies to her Aunt. Of course, I am flattered with any audience. Shari's Aunt has only a regular television and a regular DVD player. That adds another complexity: reducing wide screen, high definition, 16:9 aspect video to the old standard resolution, 4:3 aspect video.

I tried the iMac. FC-X hummed along for several hours and produced a disk with chopped off menus and images. It's what low resolution TV broadcasters do to wide screen movies: mutilate them. MyDVD hummed along for several hours and produced a good looking disk with the audio track almost two seconds off kilter. Unacceptable. Toast hummed along for several hours and choked. It delivered an assuring dialogue box stating that the last instruction failed because it had to open too many files. Say what? It had successfully processed, interpreted, de-shrunk, sampled, re-shrunk and multiplexed some three hours of video, that's over 22 billion pixels plus audio, and it got hung up opening thirty files? Premiere hummed along for several hours then choked. It just froze. After aborting a couple of times, I thought to myself, "Maybe it needs a lot of time."  I left it on overnight. It was at 23% when I went to bed. It was at 23% when I woke up.

Shari suggested taking my files to a commercial place to have it authored and burned onto DVD. My ego took that as a personal affront. She intended only to help, but I would not give in.

After some hours, I thought to myself, "What about the old Mac?" I bought the Mac G-5 in 2006 because the custom built PC that I had bought specifically for video editing a couple of years earlier was incapable of burning a DVD without skips. Its connection between computer and burner was too slow. The G-5, like its Windows-based predecessor, is a desktop. Does anyone remember desktop computers? They are the ones so big and so heavy that you had to put them on the floor. They came with cathode ray monitors.

The G-5 version of Final Cut had never failed me editing. Its version of MyDVD worked seamlessly because, back a decade ago, Apple actually supported and integrated the then current video technology.

I experimented. I converted one of my end-product files to the DV format. Thank goodness, Final Cut on the G-5 read the files. I loaded all the files on the G-5 and Final Cut. The old ways came back, like riding a bicycle. I quickly loaded a timeline with about half the files, inserted chapter markers, rendered it, imported it into MyDVD, then designed menus. The G-5 hummed along for three hours and produced a DVD that worked perfectly.

Thomas Edison would be proud.

Walking on Castle Hill

Map of Buda Castle Hill area, a "you are here" map
for tourists posted in various places.

Hungary is a little funny for me. That's funny as in strange, not "ha ha."

I grew up speaking Hungarian fluently in a pretty large Hungarian family and community that preserved Hungarian traditions. We ate Hungarian food, listened to Hungarian music, learned Hungarian csárdás and folk dancing, and attended Hungarian mass on Sundays — all within an Australian environment. But I have never lived in Hungary. It's a foreign country in addition to being deeply familiar.

The ambivalence first hit me in 1970 at age seventeen as I bicycled from Vienna and was crossing the Iron Curtain border into Hungary. The Hungarian border guard dressed in Soviet-style uniform with red communist stars spoke my family's language. As I bicycled in Hungary, everyone, all strangers, was speaking my family's language.

I again was in Hungary for a couple of weeks in 1979, so it had been thirty-eight years when Shari and I visited in September. Over those four decades, my Hungarian has slipped into the background of English speaking life in the U.S.A. I speak English with my siblings and use Hungarian, like the Spanish I learned at age thirteen, only in colorful snippets talking to myself or chatting with Nazar, our wonder-dog.

I was a little apprehensive going back to Hungary after such a long time. It turned out that my language, though a bit awkwardly simple and rough, worked just fine. I could even understand proper Hungarian quite well. See, I have never been educated in the Magyar language. Its syntax, vocabulary, and writing are beyond what I learned in my mother's kitchen and at Hungarian summer camps.

Almost every building on Castle Hill has a plaque with
its history. Oddly enough, the plaques were installed by
the Budapest city soviet and are dated,
of all years, 1956. This plaque states that the building
dates from the 15th Century and was remodeled
in its current form around 1800.

A degree of pride at being able to converse in Hungarian was accompanied by a familiarity with being at home in a place where I had never lived. As I wandered through the baroque streets of Buda's Castle Hill district and looked at young people, I would flatter myself that in some ways, my roots were deeper than theirs. Those roots are the stories and experiences of my ancestors, and they get deeply personal with my mother during the siege of Budapest.

In December of 1944, my mother knew the advancing Soviet troops would overwhelm the German (and tragic Hungarian accomplices) defenses and all her Hungarian paper currency would be worthless — whether replaced by Soviet currency or a dearth of anything to buy. So she spent whatever she could buying food, toys, Christmas decorations, and Christmas cookies. Dad was gone, having been ordered to the front lines somewhere in southern Hungary. Mum had to take care of two-year-old son Paul and eight-month-old daughter Irene. My mother, being the wife of an officer, got permission to take refuge in a make-shift bomb shelter in the Castle Hill district of Buda. It was the cellar of the house at no. 3 Dísz tér. That was where she, my two oldest siblings, my uncle Zoltán, and a small crowd sheltered for two months from Soviet artillery during the day and American bombing at night.

No. 3 Dísz tér

The Danube River, all of its bridges blown up by the Germans, and the hills of Buda were fiercely defended by the Germans for over three months. Their headquarters were in the Buda Palace on Castle Hill, about a thousand feet from Dísz tér. Little Irene contracted tuberculosis. Little Paul suffered from a dangerously high fever caused by tonsillitis and bronchitis. The others in that cellar thought the children were delirious when they asked their mother for Christmas cookies. Mum had them hidden and fed them when no one was watching. That food kept her kids and brother-in-law alive; as did fate. One American bomb crashed through roof and floors, lodging itself in an arch several feet above the cellar. The bomb was a dud. Had it exploded, many of those hiding in the cellar of no. 3 Dísz tér would have perished.

Some eight hundred thousand civilian residents hid for over three months as armies inflicted over four hundred thousand casualties on each other. There are many photographs of what Budapest looked like after the siege. It was devastated. Russians described the city as looking worse than Stalingrad after that four-month battle. The city suffered again during the 1956 uprising. On my previous visits in the 1970's, buildings everywhere were pock-marked with bullet-holes.

The ornate-roofed National Archives building by the old Vienna Gate.

It is all very intense stuff.

Strolling along the streets of today's Budapest, that wretched history seems remote, like the Tatar devastation in 1241 and the two and a half centuries of Ottoman-Habsburg warfare in Hungary. As if by magic, the bridges have been rebuilt, and the baroque-on-medieval buildings and neighborhoods of Castle Hill have been reconstructed, including no. 3 Dísz tér. The fashionable shopping street of Váci utca that my mother knew is thriving, as is the city generally.

I can imagine my grandfather in 1902 stationed in the Castle Hill Palace with the 32nd "Csibész" (Rascal) Regiment, avoiding imprisonment for sedition against the Austrian Habsburgs by feigning insanity. I can see the Magyar pride in Mathias Church and other buildings and monuments embellished or built for the 1896 commemoration of the one thousand anniversary of the founding of the Hungarian nation.

All these feelings and ghosts, national and family, haunted me as I walked and wandered the familiar yet foreign streets of Castle Hill.

Buda in the Morning

It was dreary rain when I woke up early in the morning and looked out our window onto Szentháromság tér (Holy Trinity Square). I took video of a woman, then a young man, crossing the large open square, huddled from the cold wet.

Shari was still asleep, then slowly getting up as I showered and dressed in the clothes we had packed for Iceland. I was eager to get outside and explore. She would wait until the breakfast buffet at seven.

Back in the Middle Ages, someone got the idea that devotion towards the Trinity would ward off the plague. Cities would erect columns honoring God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Buda suffered the plague in 1691-1709, erected such a column, but the plague returned. The city replaced the column with a larger one and never suffered the plague thereafter. That column still stands in the large, elegantly paved open area bounded by our Burg Hotel, the building that housed the Technical University whose students began the 1956 uprising, Mátyás Templom (Mathias Church), and Halászbástya (Fisherman's Bastion).

The neo-Gothic (i.e., 19th Century) Bastion, named after the guild charged with manning this section of the medieval walls, has a gorgeous view over the Danube River to Pest. The church and its colored tiled roof, the bastion, the equestrian statue of Hungary's first king, Saint Stephen, and the views of the bridges over the Danube and the neo-Gothic Parliament building on the Pest side of the river bank are the familiar, often photographed images of the city many regard as among the most beautiful.

That area was where I scurried around with my video camera taking every possible shot of scenes familiar to me since childhood. Every household in the large Hungarian community of Sydney had coffee table books with these images.

The drizzle was grey but light. I shared the open space with occasional pedestrians and commuters and one other couple of tourists taking still photos with an SLR camera of the Bastion area in front of the Hilton.

The only previous time I had been on Castle Hill was in 1979. My father and Uncle Zoltán took me there long enough to show me the Bastion and the house on No. 3 Dísz tér where my mother, two oldest siblings, and Zoltán took refuge in the cellar for two months during the Soviet siege of Budapest in winter of 1944-5.

I remember Uncle Zoltán angrily complaining about the existence of the Hilton Hotel adjacent to the Bastion, a modern structure built over the remaining ruins of the medieval walls of Buda. The then communist government gave Hilton permission to build. The city got some minor accommodation in design to incorporate some of the old wall. Hilton got the iconic views of Budapest.

I doubt if the city would ever again grant permission for such a commercial structure over its history. Taking my video and photos, I made a point to keep the Hilton out of the shots.

I noticed that the church and the upper level of the bastion were closed until nine o'clock. By the Jesuit Stairs that lead down from Castle Hill, there was row of modern windows that opened at nine to sell tickets. I made a note of the ticket prices and decided to return with Shari after our breakfast.

I won't go into the details of the breakfast buffet. It was quite hearty, my favorite being the thin slices of hard Hungarian (of course) sausage. Spiced with lots of sweet paprika (of course), it's not unlike a Spanish chorizo (don't even think of the Mexican).

I'll go straight to Shari and me going outside our Burg Hotel onto Szentháromság tér a little after nine. The weather hadn't changed. It was still light grey, cold, and a hint of drizzle. But my oh my . . . The large square was flooded with bus loads full of tourists equipped with umbrellas, raincoats and selfie-sticks, their tour guides lined up at the windows buying group tickets. It seems that Budapest is a popular tourist destination, even in the cold drizzle somewhat off-season.

I was glad we had chosen the Burg Hotel as the base for our three nights. We had mornings and evenings pretty much to ourselves, free to walk and explore the narrow baroque streets of the Castle Hill district.