What actually happened to Otto Richter and his wife? They were reported to have been seen in Cuba several years later. Good thing too, since Belgium later fell to Nazi Germany, its Jewish inhabitants paying the price. 

According to the stock photograph repository Alamy, the picture was taken on 12 June 1936 and credited to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and featured a man named Otto Richter and his wife protesting at Ellis Island. A 24 December 1937 report in Seattle’s The Jewish Transcript provides a full accounting of Richter’s remarkable story, which ended with his deportation to Belgium (as opposed to Nazi Germany) after significant pressure from U.S. based-advocacy groups:

In November, 1933, a young German seaman jumped ship In the harbor of Seattle. He was in the truest sense of the word a political refugee, seeking the right of asylum from a regime of tyranny and dictatorship. This young man’s name was Otto Richter; born in Bremen, Germany, he was a worker and an active anti-Nazi. On the night of the burning of the Reichstag, storm troopers apprehended him and, though he had not the slightest connection with that event, beat and tortured him. The next four and a half months he spent hiding from Hitler’s secret police. [He] managed to enlist as a seaman and sail on German boat which was to call at ports in the United States. During the voyage his identity became known and officers of the ship, after abusing him, threatened to turn him over to the police on their return to Nazi Germany. These were the circumstances underlying Richter’s attempted escape from Nazi tyranny to American freedom.

What has happened since? In July, 1934, during the San Francisco general strike, a vigilante raid was made on the Workers Center, and there Otto Richter was found engaged in what the Department of Labor evidently regarded as the heinous offense of helping to feed striking marine workers. He was seized and ordered deported to Nazi Germany on the technical charge that he had remained in the United States illegally. Since that time a long legal battle has been fought by the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born to save him from deportation. And only the tremendous counterpressure of mass sentiment has secured for Otto Richter the dubious privilege of being deported to a country of his choice -— Belgium -— instead of to Hitler’s sadistocracy.

It seems clear that the incoming Trump Administration has already figured out how to make the country “great again”. Key to its strategy is the sale or “gift” of public assets to private interests, mainly “friends” of Trump and his pals.

Certainly whatever token amount can be worked out for this fire sale of the heritage of our country will temporarily boost revenues, but in the long term (too late, of course) we will learn the consequences of the election of 2016.

The other part of this festival of greed will be what are called “usage charges” for literally everything essential to life and sustenance,  essentially the conversion of freely traveled highways to toll roads, escalating fees for privately owned frequency spectrum and both surface and subsurface water.

Actually we will see a replay of the scandals of the Harding Administration of the 1920s, such as the Teapot Dome bribery case involving the only Cabinet Officer (so far!) convicted of a crime in office, a character well known in New Mexico (and reviled by history!), Albert B. Fall.

Complicit in the Harding greed-fest was Republican lock on Congress, lasting from 1919 to 1930, during which the slide toward Depression and war was launched—another similarity to today.

Sadly, responsibility for this election result belongs with all the eligible voters who, by their indifference, failed to exercise their responsibilities by voting in the 2016 election (final total, 53.1% voted, 46.9 % stayed home). I hope they’re happy.

“Today, we can’t afford to become adults”

Thoughts on change, questioning, and childlike wonder from MIT’s Joichi Ito

In recent weeks, I’ve been sharing some of the fuller versions of interviews conducted while I was researching and writing A More Beautiful Question. Here are some quotes from my talk with Joichi Ito (@Joi), one of the world’s most respected technologists and the current director of that hothouse of innovation known as the MIT Media Lab.

Ito on why questioning is becoming more important than ever

“There are two important differences in the world now. First, it’s a time of exponential change, so things are different every day. The old model of learning—that you do a lot of it when you’re young and then become an adult who doesn’t learn as much—that just doesn’t work as a productive way of living now. You have to learn new things all the time. And you learn by being curious and by questioning

“The other important difference: in addition to increasing change, you’ve got increasing speed and complexity. In a world that’s complex and fast, things aren’t as predictable as they were before. You must be much more resilient—to change, to failure, to the unexpected. Now you must maintain some of that childlike wonder and that ability to keep questioning and learning through doing.”

On questioning and learning

“If the learner is doing the questioning, it’s very different from when an examiner (or teacher) is doing the questioning. When you have the examiner doing the questioning, you’re in what I would call education mode. I think education is something other people do to you, whereas learning is what you do to yourself. You don’t learn unless you question—but we often don’t teach our kids to question; we teach them to answer our questions, forcing them to learn facts and skills. But since we may not know what facts or skills that kid’s going to need in the future, what you really want is to empower them to be able to find their own answers when they need them.

“Through questioning, we can also find more than answers—knowing how to ask the right questions can help you to pull support from a network of people or communities as you need it. You pull from the network by querying it, but you need to understand how to frame the questions. So it may be a matter of, how do you formulate the query to Google, or to an online community, to get the support or resources or answers you need. And if you have that skill, you may not need to know anything, other than people; it’s more about understanding the context of the network and how to traverse it.”

Diversity and questioning

“If a group is asking a question or challenging itself to come up with an answer for something, there’s a great body of work that shows diversity is extremely important. Everybody has different frameworks or models to ask the question; and it turns out that having a large number of very smart people that are similar is not nearly as useful as having maybe less smart people but with diversity of background.

“Then the issue becomes, how do you have a constructive conversation when everyone’s frameworks and backgrounds are different? At the Media Lab, we do what I call practice over theory. So, if an artist and a mechanical engineer are working together, it might be difficult for them to write a rigorous academic paper together, but they can build something together… and it either works or doesn’t. Often, academics create theories and test them and if it doesn’t work they start questioning the reality, the data. We’re the opposite; we build a robot and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And if it works but we don’t understand it, we can study it. Being able to “build the robot” is a really essential in this kind of environment where you’re searching and trying to discover things.

“At the Media Lab, we try to discover answers to questions we don’t know to ask yet. And that’s actually a harder kind of questioning because what you’re doing is asking, What is the question? That’s a harder thing but it’s where you get the really disruptive changes and discoveries. Some people would say we’re a pile of answers looking for questions.”

Why companies need to experiment more

“At the Lab, usually the costs of trying to figure out whether or not we should try something is more than just going ahead and letting people try it. For most things, the costs of experimenting, of building and trying things, have gone down. If you look at the people who started Facebook and Google, none of these guys asked permission, they just tried things out—because it didn’t cost them much to do it. And in companies today, I think people really need to think about that. Because in many companies, it’s still very difficult to do things without permission—and the permission-getting process can be slow. It’s important to lower the friction on innovation by allowing people to explore.”

On “neoteny”

“I was introduced to the term by Timothy Leary when he and I were writing a book together, and I kind of fell in love with it. Neoteny is about the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood; curiosity, playfulness, imagination, joy, wonder. This brings us back to the point that today, we can’t afford to become adults—meaning, we can’t afford to fall into that trap of being in repetition mode. Those childlike attributes, somehow you need to keep them. There are some people in our society who are allowed to remain creative, but for the most part, creativity isn’t considered an adult thing—you’re not supposed to fingerpaint. Neoteny is a word that gives you permission to keep that childlike creativity as an adult. To encourage neoteny, I think what’s needed is a culture that encourages playfulness and experimentation. That’s the culture we have here at the Media Lab.” (More on this site about neoteny.)

 On getting better at questioning

“To question, I think you have to have courage and confidence. A lot of times, if you’re sitting there and you think about something in the bathtub, you might say, “Oh, I’m sure somebody’s already thought of it”—and then you stop thinking about it. But the world is changing so fast and so much, every day, that things that weren’t true in the past are true now—so you should assume that what you’re thinking may actually be an original idea and pursue it. Have the energy and the courage and creativity to think through these ideas and try them out. And even if you fail you’ll have learned a lot more than if you just gave up.”

Your opinions (printed March 18, Las Cruces Sun-News)

                                     NEW SPACEPORT BAR LIKE OLD BOOZE SHIPS

A burst of creativity from the crew piloting New Mexico’s ill-starred spaceport resulted in a need to obtain a liquor license, authorization for which was signed into law by Gov. Susana Martinez. (Senate Bill 147) This “need” has a basis in history. In the 1920s, during Prohibition, grand ocean liners such as the Ile-de-France, Windsor Castle and Bremen kept their on-board bars open while docked at New York piers, as the liners stocked and fueled for the return voyage across the Atlantic to Europe.

Through a quirk in the law, well-heeled visitors to shipboard bars were not technically on the soil of the United States, and thus were free to imbibe in unlimited quantities the premium booze (far superior to the mob-produced bootleg gin available on land) before staggering down the gangway to a waiting limo or cab.

So impaired these bar patrons were, that many could have been convinced they had traveled across the ocean and returned during their boozy episode.

In the same way, fogged-up patrons of the spaceport’s bar could be led to believe, with a little creative stage-craft, that they had launched into space and returned as their glasses were speedily refilled one after another. All such patrons, when suitably pickled, (no doubt enhancing the bottom line of the spaceport in the process) would be loaded into a stretch limo for the trek home to make sure none got near the wheel of a car until thoroughly sobered up.

The genius of this plan is that no longer do we have to bother with the empty promises of Sir Richard or his fellow space-venture hype artists or the technical issues of an actual orbital passenger rocket ship to provide a revenue stream for the spaceport.

— Dan Townsend, Las Cruces

(printed in the Las Cruces Sun-News, December 31, 2015)

Good riddance 2015, hopes for better 2016

If I could, I’d give 2015 a swift kick in the pants as it made way for 2016. Consider what went on during the year now ending: a mother who gave her six-month-old child a bottle, then suited up and joined her husband on a killing spree at a holiday party; a group of thugs in the Middle East who “inspire” others, (not themselves, oddly enough), to blow themselves up in various parts of the world expecting to get to paradise before anyone else; “low information voters” who become low information candidates for president of the U.S. — along with assorted sneerers and overstuffed billionaires. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

How about the “smart money” guys of 2015 who pride themselves on sending young people out on international soccer and (U.S.) football fields to beat their brains out to generate bribes, payoffs and lucrative TV contracts for their handlers. Or the characters who buy up drug companies to enrich themselves on the pain and suffering of others — not to mention congressmen enjoying the best medical care in the world seeking to deny health care to the working poor.

How about the makers and marketers of the guns spewing ammunition out of car windows; within classrooms, clinics, hospitals and churches; into playmates from other playmates; and, at close range, into the bodies of tortured souls afflicted with suicidal impulses.

Finally, 2015 saw another bump in the profits of predatory loan stores now on street corners around poor neighborhoods and military bases — so much for military preparedness.

Hope springs eternal, goes the expression. Will 2016 give hope a chance?

Dan Townsend,

Las Cruces

April 25, 2010

Suppose that an airline pilot, doing his pre-flight checks at Denver’s International Airport, got a printout of weather data which reflected not metropolitan Denver 2010, but  the  same area as it was in 1800.  The occasional native American cooking fire would have been the only contribution of man to the area temperature in 1800. Metropolitan Denver, like all 21^st century urban areas, contributes by means of the well-known “heat island” effect, several degrees (as much as 22 degrees F.), depending on the season/time of day, etc., to its area temperature.  This is in addition to global climate change and other factors.

Factoring the spurious data he was supplied into the “density altitude” calculation critical to successful take-off, the unfortunate pilot and his passengers risked  winding up being mixed with fiery wreckage just across the freeway marking the end of the runway—another tragedy based on faulty data.

Another example: the trainee helmsman on duty as the Exxon Valdez wallowed  fully loaded  through Prince William Sound Alaska one night in 1989,  failed to realize that the fully loaded vessel handled very sluggishly to its controls compared to its handling, empty, on the trip to Alaska.  Pushed by cost-cutting management to shave time from the voyage by charting a course near Bligh Reef, the unfamiliar feel to the controls drew the vessel onto the reef, and on to front pages around the world.

In 1964, my wife and I visited the beaches along New Jersey’s Atlantic Shore. Wondering why so few were present on a beautiful summer afternoon, we soon discovered tar balls and oily goo along the water’s edge. The locals told us that an upwelling of the sea  had brought up oil from the bottom placed there as Nazi submarines, organized into “Wolf Packs” sank hundreds of merchant ships, many of them oil tankers, during the early years of WWII, many within sight of shore (wreckage and bodies were a regular sight along our Atlantic beaches at that time. The massive effort to stop this carnage was a well-kept secret during the war). The  waters of Gulf of Mexico are presently unwilling recipients of enough oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blowout, underway as this piece is written,  to fill each of the sunken tankers of the WWII era in a few minutes. Leadership of the communities  which came to depend on revenue from the undersea oil resource are already in denial, for the usual political reasons.

Natural systems are a lot like the fully loaded Exxon Valdez.  As a helmsman on various ships on several occasions, I am well aware of the need to anticipate the reaction of a vessel to its controls as currents, winds and cargo loading mix with steering commands to produce the vessel’s actual course. Reductions  in, for example, CO2 contributions by man, will not be fully felt in terms of global warming, for decades. Does this mean that we should deny that Bligh Reef, or its climatic equivalent, exist?

Obviously waiting until the Exxon Valdez is within a few feet of the reef to correct its course would be disastrous, as history shows. When do Global Climate Change skeptics plan to take corrective action, should the extremely complex variables at play in man-caused climate change finally produce a definitive result with which all could agree?

The good part is that I am unaware of any global climate change skeptics piloting commercial aircraft or ocean-going ships. We can all be thankful on that score.

Dan Townsend

(Re: the above article: I was a resident of Alaska for 35 years, during the “Pipeline era” and the Exxon Valdez tragedy and its aftermath. At different times I was a helmsman on three ocean-going vessels: the MV Stevonia {Ellerman Wilson Lines, UK}; and  the fully rigged sailing vessels “Western Union” and “Wolf” home port, Key West Florida. I was also, among other duties, a “cockpit observer” for the Federal Aviation Administration.)