DEI fantasies (2)

Preferentialism

By William Wetherall

27 December 2025

Discrimination is a biologically enabled capacity essential to survival. Failure to differentiate poisonous from non-poisonous mushrooms, or between friends and foes, can be fatal. Parents have reasons for teaching children to be cautious of strangers. The problem is, when is it safe to say hello to someone you don't know? And dangerous not to say hello?

Preferences are forms of discrimination. I prefer ice cream to gelato. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had been raised in a family that preferred gelato. But I grew up in California liking ice cream. In fact, I can't recall encountering gelato until coming to Japan.

In Japan, as I did in America, I accept ice milk as the cheaper and often more available alternative to real ice cream. But I prefer real ice cream, even if it costs a little bit more. And I have always liked vanilla more than chocolate, which is not to say that I haven't liked chocolate. In fact, I have a weakness for chocolate cakes and candies.

But when it comes to ice cream, chocolate has always been a second choice. And generally I've eaten strawberry only when there has been no other choice. Mixing the three doesn't appeal to me. If someone today were to offer me only Neapolitan, I'd be inclined to simply forego dessert. Ditto with gelato -- which I don't hate, but simply don't prefer, and would eat only to be polite.

Do I discriminate? Yes. Am I biased? Yes. All preferences are about discrimination and bias. Do I advocate racioethnic preferences of any kind? I question the very notion of classifying people according to their putative race or ethnicity -- especially for the purpose of establishing enrollment, employment, and other such quotas.

A shoe store owner is biased if he or she seeks a clerk who is able to climb a ladder to fetch shoes from stock, and stoop to measure a customer's feet or feel the fit of a shoe. When, if ever, would it be appropriate to prefer a minimum height, or a maximum weight or a sex or an age range, or a race, religion, or political affiliation?

What if an employer was willing to hire any male, of whatever putative race, so long as he were clean shaven and had short hair? Or any female who agreed to wear skirts, heels, and makeup? When do preferences -- all of which are by definition discriminatory -- become unacceptably discriminatory?

Equality and equity

Equality of opportunity, and equity in outcome, are not the same. As preferences, they generally contradict each other. To prefer and achieve equity in outcome, one usually has to disregard inequalities in qualifications.

Take for example jobs that require formal educations in computer science. To guarantee that the sexual breakdown of employees at a large tech company in Silicon Valley reflected the sexual composition of the general population, you'd have to hire every female graduate -- regardless of her performance in college -- and the staff would still be predominately male.

Hire every so-called Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Multiracial computer science graduate, and Silicon Valley staffs would still be dominated by so-called White and Asian employees. And Asians would still be hugely "over-represented" compared to Whites in terms of their relative populations based on Race boxes in US censuses.

Does being "created equal" mean that everyone has a right, not only to pursue happiness, but also to be happy -- regardless of where their pursuit leads them? Even were governments able to guarantee every pursuer of happiness an equal start, how are they to guarantee that everyone will catch up with happiness?

Do students admitted to elite universities deserve to expect As rather than Bs or Cs, or heaven forbid Ds or Fs -- simply because they were accustomed to straight As in high school, and scored in the top percentiles of achievement and aptitude tests? Should all sprinters who make the final heat in the 100-meter dash be given a gold medal, never mind the order in which they finish?

Is it contradictory for the government or a company to bill itself as an "Equal Opportunity Employer", then allow extra points for military veterans, and more points for veterans with disabilities? Is this not discrimination against disabled conscientious objectors?

And what about the increasing preference, by all manner of companies, for robots and AI agents over human beings?

Last revised 27 December 2025

Viva analog (3)

California Engineer

By William Wetherall

26 December 2025

The fall of 1962 was a big year for me. I had graduated from Sierra College in June 1961, and was accepted by the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, I would have started my studies as a junior that fall, but was granted an 18-month leave of absence to work for the Department of Navy at San Francisco Naval Shipyards at Hunter's Point, where I had worked the summers of 1959 and 1960.

At the shipyards I was engineering aid. I was assigned to the Electronics Division, where I assisted the civilian "yard bird" engineers who installed and tested fire-control radar and sonar systems for state-of-the-art ship-launched guided missiles and torpedoes, and antiaircraft batteries, on new, refitted, and vintage warships, from submarines to aircraft carriers, and occasionally a minesweeper or transport. Most of our work was on ships tied up along a quay or sitting on blocks in a dry dock, but now and then we'd go out on sea trials along the coast outside the Golden Gate.

The engineering students I ran with at Berkeley called each other "red hots". We were proud of the 12-1/2-inch Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig slide rules we carried everywhere, often slung from our belts, though not (contrary to folklore) strapped to our legs. We were loaded for any bear of a problem our profs and TAs could throw at us, so long as we could reduce it to an equation, into which we could assign values to all variables, and crank out an answer. We knew next to nothing, and were taught even less, about the social and political complications of life, like girls and Cold War politics.

Then came the Cuban Crisis. We should not have been shocked. The campus was dotted with bomb shelters and other "Civil Defense" facilities. Like many other engineering students, I had studied radio activity, and had even taken part in field exercises in which we walked a grid in a park with a Geiger counter, measured the level of radiation at each point, plotted the data on a map of the park, and located the hot spots. It was like an Easter egg hunt, but the eggs were vials of radioactive material the instructor had buried in the ground.

Not a few engineering students, myself included, became totally disillusioned by the prospects of working for the "military industrial complex". We knew that roughly 70 percent of all electrical engineers worked in the defense industry. We also knew that most sectors of the glamorous aerospace industry were satellites, if you will, of the defense industry. The technology that would out-orbit Sputnik was the same technology that would put the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the ICBM race.

I stopped going to lectures in the College of Engineering and began auditing courses on subjects ranging literally from archaeology to zoology. I read a lot of fiction, from Ayn Rand to Zane Grey. I read several volumes on information theory and the history of science and technology. I read Walden Pond. My report card for the Spring 1963 semester was full of withdrawal Fs, for failing to sit for my final exams. Early in the summer, while working as a surveyor for the Tahoe National Forest, I received a letter informing me that I had been put on academic probation for a year, during which I would not be allowed to enroll.

Late that summer I was ordered to take my Selective Service physical, the first stage in the process of being drafted into the military. In order to be able to choose an occupational specialty, I enlisted in the US Army and indicated my desire to be a surgical technician. I was in infantry boot camp when Kennedy was assassinated. After finishing training as a medic and truck driver, I drove an ambulance in a Strategic Army Corps medical battalion. I spent one-month participating in a field exercise called Desert Strike.

In the heat of the Mojave in California and Arizona, a couple of active Army divisions and Air Force groups fought over the Colorado River. I was on the side that wore Roman crests on their battle helmets. The object of the umpired maneuvers was to test the ability of US forces to fight a desert war. But the ambulance support was not simulated. In addition to the real blisters, crotch rot, clap, and other military malignancies, soldiers were bitten by scorpions, killed in vehicle accidents, crushed by tanks in night operations, and blistered to death in the unforgiving sun. But Operation Desert Storm would not come until twenty years after another war had been fought, and lost, in the hot steamy jungles of Vietnam, on the other side of the same Eurasian continent.

I cannot remember precisely what went through my mind in late October and early November 1962 as I listened, with other students at Arch Place, the private lodging house where I boarded, to the news on the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev over the buildup of Soviet offensive missiles on Cuba. All I recall is that I wondered what kind of career awaited me, and what sense it made, if any, to devote my life to the design, manufacture, sales, and service of devices that could destroy the entire planet.

I had already launched my writing career, as it were, with letters to the editor of the Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus paper. I had also published a critique of local education in The Union, a hometown paper, which had also run a column I wrote while at Fort Ord called "Life in the Army". But the Cuban Crisis, and readings of books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, compelled me to write longer and deeper about the contradictions of technological advancement and civilization. I read, and wrote, from sanctuaries in various US Army posts, but did not finish my first essay until around the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964. And though I was soon to be caught up in what would became a full-scale war, at the time I had little understanding or interest in what seemed to be just another minor skirmish in a far off corner of the world.

What shall we do with Andromeda?

I finished "What shall we do with Andromeda?" while studying to be a medical laboratory technician at the Sixth US Army Medical Laboratory at Fort Baker just north of the Golden Gate Bridge between the bridge and Sausalito, or directly across San Francisco Bay from Letterman Army Hospital where we also did some training. I was, of course, delighted that California Engineer accepted my manuscript. For it was, to say the least, a very unconventional piece of writing. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared in the magazine. I wonder if the editors were as overwhelmed then, as I am now in hindsight, by its cocky rhetoric. Whatever they thought of it, they touched not a word, not even its odd neologisms, which fortunately never made it into a dictionary. Did the editors even try looking them up? Or did they just feel that the guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and besides it has a nice ring to it?

In any event, here it is, every real and imaginary word of the original article, reproduced exactly as they were printed over three decades ago. Some silly spelling errors have been corrected in brackets, but the sprinkling of British spellings have been left to puzzle over. And the "pre-liberation" use of masculine terms to represent all humankind remains a testimony to how "real men" wrote in those more arrogant days.

While reflecting on the pompous rage that drove me to write what I did over fifty years ago, I am aware of how much of that youthful anger, though now much quieter and more moderate, still simmers in the furnace of my brain, and still fires my gravest misgivings about the human condition, but as well my deepest hopes.

Cybernetics and semantics

In the fall of 1965, except for the fact that I was in the Army, I was a very happy trooper. What shall we do with Andromeda?, my first magazine article and the cover story of the March 1965 issue of The California Engineer, had been published, It caused a bit of a stir for a magazine not known for its interest in the social consequences of technology, and the editorial of the October 1965 edition credited my article with inspiring "three more views on the relation of contemporary technology to man and environment" in that issue.

While still serving in the U.S. Army, working at Fort Ord as a laboratory technician at the Ft. Ord U.S. Army Hospital, I proposed an article on "Cybernetics and Semantics" and was encouraged to write it. The editors had decided to make "Communications in the Modern World" the focus of its January 1966 issue, and my article, which was all about communications, would fit right in.

I had already started compiling notes and writing paragraphs on the Smith-Corona portable typewriter I packed around everywhere. I worked in the bay of the barracks I shared with a couple of dozen other hospital personnel. I bummed a number of books from the Ft. Ord Library, where I had once worked part-time reshelving books and attending the checkout desk. And I bought a few older and newer titles at bookstores in Monterey.

Then orders came down for me to report to the 106th General Hospital at Fort Bliss in El Paso. The war in Vietnam was heating up. The 106th, I was told when reporting for duty, was gearing up to be sent somewhere in Asia to support the war. The ambulance company I had formerly been with at Fort Ord before being transferred to Fort Baker for training as a lab tech was already in Vietnam, as were the medical battalion and the evacuation hospital it had been associated with.

The 106th General Hospital was a field hospital and was prepared to set up and operate in tents. At the time we had no idea where we were going -- probably not Vietnam, but a neighboring country to which the wounded who survived their treatment in evacuation and MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) hospitals in Vietnam could be airlifted. While at Fort Bliss, the 106th was a component of the William Beaumont General Hospital, where the 106th's medical personnel worked in order to maintain their technical skills.

However, newly assigned personnel like yours truly would bide their time in the barracks, to do chores around the company area or elsewhere on the base, for the few weeks before the unit received its orders to move out. I used my time to continue writing, but not for long. Lab techs were in short supply, and I got seconded to the lab at the new McAfee Army Hospital at White Sands Missile Range. Though I had less time to write during the day, I had no other duties, and so feverishly wrote in the evenings and on weekends.

I was at Ft. Bliss for about 2 months from mid October to mid December, and all but the first and last weeks of this period I spent at White Sands. As I recall, my California Engineer deadline was the end of November, and I mailed my manuscript out, with a few hand corrections, just in time.

There was no email in those days. All my communication with the CE staff was by what today is called "snail mail". I never personally met any of the staff. I never once spoke to any of the staff on the phone. By the time I returned o Berkeley in 1967, the magazine had stopped publishing. I would like to think it was not because of my articles.

In the fall of 1965, I was also more than a little full of myself. Reading the articles I wrote then, for the California Engineer, but especially "Cybernetics and Semantics", I shake my head in utter awe at the magnitude of my "attitude" -- for that's what it must have been. It's still there, I assure you. But in the intervening decades, I've worked very hard at suppressing it, or hiding it behind a veil of clearer writing that even I can understand.

What amazes me, though, is how Richard Sullivan, the editor of the California Engineer, justified including, much less leading with, my article. Was it to get the worst over with? Or to scare readers away from the rest of the issue?

Sullivan even listed me as "Staff" on the masthead and called me "our Far-East Correspondent" on the "About the Authors" page. This was the first and last time that I would ever have such a title.

One thing I will say about my writing then -- after quitting my engineering studies, and before embarking on my language and literature studies -- is that I really knew how to pile it higher and deeper. When I read today what I wrote then, I have to reread some phrases to parse their seamless practically comma-free streams of pretentious thought.

I can generally still figure out what it was I was trying to say. And I can generally sort the wheat from the chaff. From my vantage point half a century later, there was mostly chaff.

Someday, when I have time, I may try to rewrite the essay in clearer and simpler terms that an editor today might agree is good prose. The sentences will be half as long and say twice as much. And I wouldn't have to look up my own words in a dictionary and discover that they're not there.

Alternatively, I could compile a glossary of neologisms and outright Wetherallisms to aide reading, and markup each word in the glossary to display a pop-up annotation on mouseover.

https://www.yoshabunko.com/wetherall/prose/Wetherall_1965_Andromeda.html

https://www.yoshabunko.com/wetherall/prose/Wetherall_1966_Cybernetics_and_Semantics.html

Wetherall_1966-01_Cybernetics_and_Semantics_CE_09_yb.jpg
Wetherall_1966-01_Cybernetics_and_Semantics_CE_21_yb.jpg

California Engineer

"The California Journal of Technology first appeared in February, 1903 as a medium of communication for students in engineering. It was the first college magazine in the west to specialize in the area of science and technology. The magazine was discontinued in February, 1914, but was revived by the Student Engineers Council as the California Engineer in January, 1923. By the mid-1960s, the magazine was sponsored by the Associated Students and maintained a circulation of about 1,500 copies per month." (www.lib.berkeley.edu/)

Last revised 26 December 2025

Viva analog (2)

Early writings

By William Wetherall

16 December 2025

While calling myself a journalist, I have been a reporter in pursuit of news on only one occasion. From the start of my life as a writer, I have been mainly an opinionist when not a publicist, and a feature writer. Most of my articles have focused on current, especially social issues, but I also take on history, language, and literature.

My first two ventures into the world of print media -- for which I received nothing but the thrill of seeing my by-line in the paper -- were published by The Union, a Civil War era broadsheet, hence the title, published in Grass Valley, California, where I graduated from high school in 1959.

Grass Valley is a small town, but is the largest municipality in Nevada County, in the Sierras northeast of Sacramento. The Union had been a town rag in the early gold-mining years, but then became a county paper. I was acquainted with the editor, who owned the building leased by the shoe store where I had worked part time, across from the paper's office and printing plant on Mill street.

Nevada-County Education and Culture

My first published article -- A Treatise on Nevada-County Education and Culture -- appeared in the 16 April 1963 edition of The Union. I was 21, an electrical engineering major in my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley, with a B+ GPA, and enjoyed my studies. But in the fall of 1962, with the publication of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring in September and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October and November, I lost my political innocence and decided to drop out of engineering.

I became disillusioned by the prospects of working in the aerospace industry, a synonym for weapons development. I stopped going to classes and audited a few courses on the humanities side of campus. I have never turn my back on science and math, but their applications by global corporations and technocratic nationalistic governments continue to sadden me.

No longer saddled by engineering homework -- problem sets that kept hard-science students out of trouble -- I decided to write something for The Union about my recent education in Nevada County schools. Though awakened to the realities of nationalism and industrial pollution, I was still unaware of how much my education had culturally and socially pickled my brain in the brine of Saturday Evening Post America.

My diatribe filled over one full broadsheet page of the older kind with small print and crowded columns. Reading it now is painful, illuminating, and entertaining. How did such rubbish get as far as the linotype operator? It would have broken all of today's spelling, grammar, and style checkers, and driven an entire bay of human fact checkers and PC-minded editors to the brink. Yet my father, on his death bed half a century later, could still remember a line he treasured about how doctors save the broken backs of ditch diggers, who save the backs of doctors from being broken.

Life in the Army

After sitting out all my final exams in the Spring 1963 semester at Cal, the College of Engineering put me on academic probation for a year. That summer, while working on a surveying crew for the Tahoe National Forest, the local draft board -- aware that I was no longer attending college -- ordered me to take a physical, which I easily passed.

While in college I had worked summers on ship-to-air guided missile systems at San Francisco Naval Shipyard. So thinking that I'd be assigned to a missile unit if drafted for 2 years, I enlisted for 3 years in order to choose my military specialty. 

After basic combat training at Ft. Ord near Monterey in California, I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio in Texas for my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) training as a medical corpsman. I was then assigned to a Ft. Ord ambulance company, which was part of a medical battalion that supported a 24-hour-readiness Strategic Army Corps (STRAC) evacuation hospital, but also supported basic training maneuvers. 

With time on my hands, and fresh memories of basic training, I banged out Life in the Army -- my first newspaper column -- which The Union ran in 16 long installments from 29 October to 26 November 1964. 

Robert Ingram, the editor and owner of The Union, read the galleys but touched very little. One time, though, something I had written required surgery, and pinched for time, he had the galleys hand delivered to my father to rewrite and tone down. My father had no trouble cutting and recasting the problematic graphs. I learned many red-lining skills from my father, a lawyer who knew how to write.

I saved nothing from the column, not even the clippings. Yet I now have copies of everything -- the galleys and correspondence with Ingram, and a full set of clippings -- in Japan. Ingram's widow found my file in her husbands office and mailed it to my father, thinking I might like to have it. And Bob Lobecker -- one of my closest friends from high school and college, a local boy who unlike me finished his electrical engineering studies at Cal and then earned his living as an EE -- had clipped the entire column in real time, and decades later he sent it to me.

Rejection letter

In the summer of 1964, while in the ambulance company at Ft. Ord, writing the first installments of the "Life in the Army" column, there was a meningitis outbreak at the training facility, which resulted in the entire base being quarantined. I followed the reportage in the press, and certain that I could contribute to the outside world's understanding of the causes of the outbreak, I submitted an unsolicited article to the San Francisco Examiner -- or perhaps the Chronicle, I frankly forget -- and received a personal and encouraging rejection letter from an editor.

It was not a pre-printed rejection slip, mind you, but a hand-written, thanks-but-no-thanks note -- encouraging me and giving me some advice. The editor said my writing reflected the zeal of a journalist and story teller. The problem was, I was too alarmist about things that were well understood in the real world, where most readers would not be shocked by my reports of the conditions of life in Ft. Ord's barracks.

In other words, if I wanted to be a writer, I would have to be less naive. This was probably the best advice I have ever received. It did not dampen my idealism and romanticism, but it did help me become a better doubter, skeptic, and even cynic.

While at Berkeley, I submitted a number of poems and vignettes to various magazines, and had gotten several rejection slips of the form-letter kind, sent in the self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) I always enclosed with a submission. I kept them in a file, tokens of my clamoring for admission to writing circles.

I added the rejection letter to the file, proud of it as evidence that I might have discovered an alternative to a career in engineering. A few years later, when visiting my parents -- in a funky erase-the-past, clean-the-slate mood -- I threw out a box of youthful memorabilia, including the file of rejection slips -- and even photos of my high school classmates, though I hesitated tossing the yearbooks, all but one of which have survived and are now in Japan.

It would be several years, after settling in Japan, before most articles I submitted to newspapers on spec were accepted -- usually as I wrote them, and with my titles.

Last revised 16 December 2025

Hibernation

"If summer comes, can spring be far behind?"

By William Wetherall

14 December 2025

Having just finished my 2-week turn to police the neighborhood garbage collection station, I passed the duty roster to the next in line -- one of my 7 fence neighbors.

Either I have a huge lot, or my neighbor's lots are tiny, you might think. In fact, my property includes a very long approach from the street to my home, which sits on a fairly long and narrow back lot. And my neighbor built his new home far from the street alongside mine.

My neighbor keeps a couple of turtles in an enclosure with a pond between his home and mine. The enclosure is covered with a net to keep cats and crows at bay. The turtles can swim in the pond, rest on the bottom, or crawl out to bask in the sun or cool off in the shade on rocks or grass.

I asked my neighbor how they were faring in the cold.

They're hibernating, he said.

Already.

Yeah.

No movement.

No.

No need to feed them.

No.

I wish I could hibernate, I said.

He laughed, then we started talking about the maple tree immediately beside us midway along the approach to his home. It had been in the garden in front of his parents home, which had been on the same lot but near the street. After his mother died a couple of years  ago, his father having died several years before that, he built the new home and tore down the old old to sell its half of the lot -- but not before transplanting the maple to the font of his new home.

It is the deepest, richest purple I have every seen. And it had just started to drop its leaves, a week before the winter solstice.

Winter skys are my favorite as they are the clearest and darkest. In the foothills of the Sierras, where I grew up in my teens, the bottom of the night of my neighborhood -- on a terrace in a clearing on the top of a ridge, fenced by ponderosa pines and incense cedars -- the bottom of the nights were whitest under the Milky Way in winter. There wasn't a star or nebula on the naked-eye magnitude chart that I couldn't see.

I have rarely seen even a dim suggestion of the Milky Way where I live in Japan, on the fringes of the suburban sprawl around Tokyo. But I can see more in mid winter than at any other time of year -- enough to enable me to imagine the rest.

My only complaint about winter is not the cold outside but in my home. It's old, uninsulated, and drafty. I warm the kitchen by opening the refrigerator door. Wouldn't life be nicer to fall asleep at the end of autumn, and wake up at the start of spring?

Come to think of it, though, that would be boring and lifeless.

I'd miss the barrenness of winter trees that makes their blooming in spring worth surviving to witness. And I'd miss the stirring of the rain frogs coming out of their winterless slumber in another fence neighbor's garden.

And without its winter metaphor, Shelley's poem would lose its elegant pathos.

Last revised 15 December 2025

Viva analog (1)

An analoger with digits

By William Wetherall

13 December 2025

I was born and raised in the analog-age, and remain attached to books and other printed matter. I also insist on honoring the standards of creativity and originality instilled in me by all my mentors, who insisted I think for myself, and kill Buddha if I meet him on the road.

Yet if ever I wrote an analog story in the pre-digital age, I can't recall it. Every story I've written in my life, I've written digitally. Baby pictures confirm I was born with ten fingers, and this story is proof that I still have them. For I wrote it using my fingers. I didn't dictate it. It is not the product of a thought reader, much less inspired or in any way faked by AI.

My digits first learned to manipulate crayons, pencils and pens, then manual and electric typewriters. Now they pound away on a wireless keyboard that transmits my brain and spleen dumps to a word processor, as a train of bits and bytes transmitted by electromagnetic currents to other devices, via the Internet.

Eventually my digitized stories generate pixilated graphs on a monitor, or text on paper if directed to a printer -- conveying my thoughts and feelings to anyone who can read the language in which I choose to write -- aided only by an occasional consultation of a dictionary or thesaurus, now online, as my frayed paper copies collect dust.

I've fingered a friend's tablet, and thumbed my daughter's (and more recently my own) smartphone. And I have no doubt that -- if stuck with such devices in a dark elevator, just me and my type of woman -- I could hack out the same sort of stories I've written since the early 1960s in California. And they'd be no better or worse because of technology -- or because of the how technology has changed some of the ways I write, or how human editors shepherd my stories into public media. But let me return to the question of quality later.

One, Two, Three . . . Infinity

This is the title of one my favorite books -- subtitled "Facts and Speculations of Science" -- a best seller published in 1947 by the Soviet-turned-American cosmologist George Gamow (1904-1968). I read the original edition in the late 1950s, and the 1961 revised edition in the early 1960s, at the peak of the race for space and the cold war between Gamow's fatherland and his new homeland.

At the time, I read mainly books about space and western gunslinger fiction. I wasn't supposed to be a writer. My hobbies, grades, and aptitude tests said I was strong in math and science, and weak in English and everything else that required literacy.

Long before the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in October 1957, shattering America's confidence in the superiority of its rocket technology, I saw my future in electronics. But the Sputnik Shock greatly improved the education and employment opportunities for space-age dreamers like me.

My aspirations, when graduating from high school in 1959, were to study electronics and become an astronautical engineer. I had built an oscilloscope, read a thick handbook on orbital mechanics, and gazed at Saturn's rings through my own telescope near my home in the Sierras, where the skies were owned by the Milky Way, and beyond it Andromeda and the bottomless night -- to paraphrase Kawabata's beautiful metaphor that Seidensticker, when translating Yukiguni as Snow Country, declined to put into English.

So in the fall of 1962, when enrolling in the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, to begin my junior year, I was ready to explore the cosmos. My mind could not have been further from history, literature, or social issues, or anything Japanese except transistors and optics. I was fresh off a public school assembly line -- ignorant, romantic, and full of myself.

But I could type, and I had grievances. A dangerous combination.

First drafted January 2022
First posted 13 December 2025
Last revised 13 December 2025

Cultural advice

Heads I win, tails you lose

By William Wetherall

3 December 2025

I needed information on Marie Duret, a 19th century English actress, who settled in America but also "played the empire" in South Africa and Australia. Among the websites that featured what little is known or conjectured about her life was Australian Dictionary of Biography -- An initiative of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University.

When I clicked the link, my screen filled with a pop-up window -- not a cookie consent notice or product promotion, but a piece of "Cultural Advice" -- with a huge "Hide Message" button at the bottom.

"Cultural Advice"? Did one of the bots that monitor my online activities conclude that I might be planning to visit Australia, and needed some cultural advice? 

Japan is my home -- has been for half a century -- and I have no intentions of visiting Australia again. I spent 2 nights in Sydney on my Tokyo-Hong Kong-Sydney-Fiji-Honolulu-Tokyo honeymoon in 1971, and ate enough lamb for a lifetime. And over the years, an occasional Australian acquaintance in Japan, a journalist or disoriented Japanologist, has updated by impressions of life in the down under Commonwealth of Nations realm.

How a country can recognize the monarch of another country as its head of state, and still call itself a sovereign state, mystifies me. But then I live in a country, and in fact am a national of a country, that hosts and relies on many American military bases -- yet considers itself a sovereign state, and a parliamentary monarchy with an "Emperor" who is not, if that makes sense.

Anyways, I was about to click the "Hide Message" button -- half expecting to then see a "Show Message" button, as though I might want to go back and see what I missed -- when my eye caught the first word, and I was hooked.

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website contains names, images, and voices of deceased persons."

That's not me. What did the bots that monitor my online activities take me for? I'm a native of San Francisco, who migrated to Japan via Grass Valley and Berkeley.

Even if I were an aboriginal Australian or whatever, why would I visit a biographical dictionary to find information on a 19th century actress who had no name, no image, no voice, and was still alive?

Half trigger warning, half land acknowledgement

As I kept reading, I realized the "Cultural Advice" was half trigger warning, half land acknowledgement, half travel alert, and half declaration that no matter how you flip my coin, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. I know this adds up to two, but if you raise two to the zero power, which represents nonsense, you get one. In fact, anything (x) to the zero power (^0) is one. Remembering that may save your life someday.

What I'm being told is that, if I'm not an aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, I don't need to be aware that the website contains names, images, and voices of the dead. Or to be alerted that I might encounter language considered inappropriate today but not when the dead were living.

I'm also being told that, even if I might be upset or offended by some of the material on the website, it was going to be there -- whether I liked it or not -- so live with it.

It's only history.

Last revised 3 December 2025

DEI fantasies (1)

 

Divisiveness, exclusion, and inequality

By William Wetherall

17 November 2025 

What goes around, comes around. Federal and many other Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs have been cancelled, or are being heavily revised and rebranded, to the delight of some and the dismay of others.

DEI programs emerged in the 2000s and 2010s on the foundations of the civil rights movements that spread from the 1950s, and the affirmative action, sensitivity and diversity training, and multicultural education that began in the 1960s and gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1959, I had passively acquired the race-box mentality that has characterized the United States throughout its history. Race boxes in federal censuses have continually evolved since 1790.

From my late teens, I was checking race boxes as a matter of course, like sex and religious preference. In San Francisco, where I partly grew up, race didn't seem to be a big deal. The problems of Little Rock seemed far away. This proved to be a naive impression, as racialism and racism were much closer to home that I imagined.

By the end of the 1960s, however, I was crossing out race boxes wherever I found them, including college and job application forms, and of course on census sheets. And during the 1990s, I began supporting Ward Connerly's racial privacy movement when it began in California. Connerly sought to end race boxes in the belief that race -- whatever that might be -- is a personal matter. The government should not racialize people, and people should not racialize themselves or others in the public square.

So I, for one, have welcomed the demise of DEI as something that was long overdue. Which is not to deny that there are many problems to be solved, which appear to involve race, sex, disabilities, ad infinitum.

Affirmative action and DEI -- both driven by ideologies of race, which heavily depend on race-boxes, and by theories of marginalization and victimization -- are simply the wrong way to address them. In the name of equal opportunity -- which originally meant exactly that -- they fostered divisiveness, exclusion, and inequality. And they distracted attention from the root causes of the difficulties faced by individuals of all putative castes and classes in all countries.

Last revised 15 December 2025

Divided States of America

Territorial imperatives

By William Wetherall

16 November 2025

Once upon a time -- though not that long ago, only 4 generations back in my family, when my great-great grandparents were in their 20s and 30s, and their children were toddlers or in their teens -- the United States of America (USA), then comprised of 34 Union states, became 23 states when ll of its states seceded from the Union and formed a new republic called the Confederate States of America (CSA).

USA regarded the succession as illegal, thus refused to recognize CSA as a legitimate state. For this reason, the succession -- and CSA's military actions against USA -- were considered a rebellion or insurrection. Hence those who supported and fought for the Confederacy were treated as rebels rather than traitors. Many decades would pass before the federal government conceded to call the war the Civil War, and include Confederate veterans and widows in its Civil War pension and disability scheme.

The Union's aim in prosecuting the War of the Rebellion in 1861 was to preserve its territorial integrity. Accepting the Confederacy as a fait accompli threatened its expansionist dream of becoming a "sea to shining sea" empire. Forcing the rebel states to rejoin the Union was urgent and paramount. Emancipating slaves and abolishing slavery became the objectives of total victory midway through the war. Freeing slaves and ending slavery were predicated on capitulation of the Confederate states and their return to the Union's territorial fold on Union terms.

Union rules

After the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in 1865, the United States of America mandated that a defeated Confederate state, in order to regain its status as a semi-sovereign Union state, had to emancipate its slaves and essentially recant its stance on slavery as a state prerogative. Each Confederate state had to establish a new government with a new constitution approved by the Union -- ratify Amendment 14,  which recognized all persons born and naturalized in the United States as citizens, and guaranteed all citizens equal protection under the law -- and agree to ratify future amendments that were expected to address Reconstruction issues.

Amendment 14 was passed by Congress on 6 June 1866. The first state to be readmitted was Tennessee, on 24 June 1866. Amendment 14 was certified as having been ratified by three-fourths of all states on 9 July 1868. The last state to be readmitted was Georgia. It had been readmitted in July 1868, but was expelled in December for its treatment of black legislators, and was not again readmitted until 15 July 1870.

Racialist ideology

The United States remains, today, a seriously divided nation. Advocates of libertarian, laissez faire capitalism with minimal government controls, who favor the privatization of health insurance, remain at loggerheads with camps pushing for socialized medicine in the form of national health insurance.

The divisions are not about slavery but immigration and how to write and teach history. They are more ideological than racial, in that some ideologies champion the racialization while others seek deracializaton. 

This writer sometimes speaks of California as being between the United States and Japan. At times I speak of Northern California and Southern California as independent states with territorial disputes. Breaking up California is legally more plausible than secession from the Union, but neither is very likely. Today's civil wars are, for the moment at least, being fought mainly in state and federal legislatures and courts.

Cartoon source

Image source -- The Wall Street Journal, Saturday-Sunday, 8-9 November 2025, page C9. Image attributed to Alamy (ID CWAGK8) but captioned by TWSJ.

www.alamy.com metadata attributes the cartoon to the Everett Collection. Alamy's image, which appears to be of a contemporary copy, is captioned 'The True Issue or "Thats Whats the Matter"' [sic]. Alamy describes the background of the cartoon as follows.

Cartoon about the 1864 US presidential election, favoring the Peace campaign of Democrat George McClellan, in the center between a tug-of-war over a map of the United States by Lincoln (left) and Jefferson Davis. McClellan says, The Union must be preserved at all hazards! Lincoln says, No peace without abolition. Davis says, No peace without Separation.

Postscript -- The True Issue

George Brinton McClellan (1826-1885), a West Point graduate, served in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, and was a railroad executive and engineer at the outbreak of the Civil War. Commissioned as a Major General, became the Commanding General of the United States Army from November 1861 to March 1862 under President Lincoln.

During the "True Issue" debates that predicated the 1864 presidential election, as the Democratic Party nominee opposing Lincoln, McClellan argued that the original mission of the Union Army had been to restore the territorial integrity of the Union. He was convinced that reunification should continue to be the paramount political goal of the Union cause -- not abolition and emancipation. He was thus praised or condemned in the press as a so-called "Peace Democrats" -- the minority faction of the Democratic Party that supported the Union but favored reunification through a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.

Peace Democrats varied in their personal views of abolition and emancipation, but agreed that returning to the pre-succession political status quo was better for the Union than to push for a military victory at the risk of an endless war and dissolution. Republicans, who by then favored conquest and capitulation at any cost, for the sake of abolition and emancipation, commonly disparaged Peace Democrats as venomous "Copperheads", and political cartoons caricatured them as such.

Last revised 22 November 2025