Is innovation really the answer to what ails us right now?

Ten years ago it was "the new, new thing". Now innovation is the trump card. There is lots of talk about it in any case. It's almost as if we are afraid that if we don't innovate the earth might stop still. There is even a wealthy entrepreneur who believes and puts his money behind the idea that a person might spend his or her time more effectively by skipping college and going straight to the task of doing the ever newer thing.

I am not saying innovation is bad. What I am saying is that when there is too much innovation, i.e. one innovation following the other as if there were no tomorrow, we forget that putting layer upon layer of innovation doesn't allow an important innovation to mature.

Some of the most vital stuff might get buried under things that seem flashy and "so much fun" right now as in the current social media frenzy.

People hanker after the great discoveries starting in the renaissance and passing into the 19th and 20th centuries, and what mankind altering discoveries they really were!

Time went slower then, however. And there always was time in between to administer and solidify in between discoveries so that something new could be built onto that for the greater good.

What we have now though is the innovation for innovation's sake, for the sake of the fad. It's for the sake of making money and not for the improvement of mankind and humanity. Is it really the best use of time to do facebook rather than to meet a flesh-and-blood person for tea? Is it really important to tweet when it would be so much more interesting to go back to making something simple as baking bread from scratch with your own starter and with only flour, water, salt and oil? For me that experience was truly novel. And yet, I did not innovate.

Meanwhile, as the children go to their games, they forget to play outdoors and explore what kids have explored since time immemorial. They don't know one bird from the other. They get obese from sitting, and they have forgotten what an apple tastes like that has just fallen off the tree. The old stuff needs tending. Just as "where roses are tended no thistles can bloom" holds true, innovation, too, needs time to settle and find its real place.

Where are we to help those who need us?

It's one thing to "occupy." I feel the plight of those who do. It's cold out there, and who are those people who sleep there wrapped in newspapers on St Nicholas' Day? This is the day for children (at least in Germany) to put a shoe in front of the door or under the bed and receive a gift when they are good and a piece of coal when they are bad.

When I was a small child after the Second World War in 1947, it was very cold and we didn't have coals to warm us. No one would dream of giving us coals no matter how naughty we had been. Coal would have been a good gift. We received apples and nuts from the trees in our yard. We also shared them with friends.

What about today? What should we put into a child's shoes on St. Nick's Day? We should leave kindness. We should leave love and forgiveness. We should bake fruitcakes as in the Truman Capote story. We should think of all the grieving children and all the grieving wives. They are all grieving about different things. Some even grieve about America. There was once such promise. Where has it gone? There is talk that the fast train might not be built.

It is now time to think about finding maybe just one person who needs our compassion for just a little while. Give them a call. See if they are still alive. Wonder whether you will miss that person when he is no longer with us!

This country is all about innovation

It's all about innovation. The new thing is better than the old. If it can be made easier, it's better and it's the American way. So, in order not have to learn a language, we get a computer to do it for us, never mind the slight inaccuracies that happen in the process. And since it is so easy to do translations via translation programs, we don't need the thinking human translator any longer, or so it seems. Translation thus has become a modified product. But that's so exciting because it's in the name of innovation.

It might be a stretch to compare the process and then the product of translation to the replacement of certain body parts. When the old hip or knee is worn out, we have a more functional one implanted via an intermediary that transforms (translates) our failing body parts into something even "better"? It's all in the spirit of doing it the easy way. Hip replacements, knee replacements, a new heart, a new liver, all those things are so "easily (routinely)" translated, i.e. replaced, that it's hardly worth bothering preserving the old-fashioned way, meaning to take care not to use them up by doing foolish things. And it costs quite a bit. But never mind the cost, if it's a life we are prolonging and preserving the easy way. It has to be better because it's in the name of innovation.

Instead of eating natural food, we buy GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) foods at the store because innovation also means "better" design. Foods have to look perfect. Something that looks perfect must be better because that's what innovation is. Innovation is particularly valuable when it can make loads more money via a patent. The tomatoes have to look prettier. The apples have to be ripe all at the same time so that farmer can harvest them and get them to the market in one fell swoop. We don't buy the famous "little green apples" anymore. They are too ugly and they would spoil too fast. But never mind, we prefer the pretty ones. They have lost all their nutrients before we can find out what they tasted like when they first came off the tree. Sorry, I forgot the pretty apples don't taste as good as the old-fashioned ones used to. But we don't know any better anymore. We have forgotten what a real apple tasted like that came from a tree that hadn't been interfered with by human hands.

Potatoes get mutated into purple things for Halloween. Actually the gene probably comes from a purple eggplant (same nightshade family - the genes can easily be exchanged within the same family). Do we know where all these mutations come from? The nightshade family of plants is a very large one, and among them can be found the deadly nightshade, jimsonweed, angels trumpets (all poisonous). So extracting a gene from one of those into our edible vegetables is not that much of a leap of thought. No leap necessary. It's been done. Of course these genes are only implanted into our vegetables to get rid of "pests". Implanting these genes, that's innovation.

Innovation has made it possible for us to buy all the necessary vitamins at the store. We don't have to get Vitamin D from the sun any longer because the sun that has served us for so long is really an evil cancer-causing menace. The sun is cheap. So, it can't possibly be good.

We are really a bunch of losers in our quest for innovation. We are instituting a middleman whenever possible. We are paying for the novelty and do not think about how our bodies were put together in the first place.

What's really going on? All those things that used to come naturally, are now only available through the industry of others. It's expensive and it gives us a false sense of production.

Just consider the pharmaceutical industry. It is fundamentally not productive. It lives and makes big bucks only off of our sicknesses. It lives because we are looking for the easy way out. But when finally push come to shove, we are not the wiser for it.

The mindset of innovation at any price needs to be stopped. That's why I propose that it is sometimes worthwhile to look for the easy way out.

Start getting back to growing your own! Start baking you own bread! Start living a day without innovation! It might be surprising how novel an idea that might be.

Are the media really that powerful?

They say that the media are really powerful tools for social change. Is that really true? In my opinion the media are not powerful in effecting anything. Newspapers, and for that matter other media, do not in effect cause social change because in today's climate they have become organs for corporations, churches, political action committees (PACs). The media bow to the highest bidder. The media are merely the reflection of who can pay more. It is almost impossible to find out who pays what when to the various entities. But most of what we get in the news nowadays is tailored to reflect the highest bidders' viewpoints.

Gone are the days when a newspaper article could cut down to size a pharmaceutical company as happened with Chemie Grünenthal in Germany when the Thalidomide scandal broke. Gone are the days when, led by Harold Evans, a group of Sunday Times journalists wrote a book "Suffer the Children" that gave a needed voice to the tragedy that was perpetrated in the late '50s and early '60s. The book discusses the attitudes of the pharmaceutical companies and their greed that came before conscience.

How could it happen that the media became so thoroughly dependent on the payments by those interest groups? It came with the rising power of the corporation. The culmination was reached with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The corporation has become "a person", and all we are now waiting for is for a corporation to run for President. How would "Monsanto for President" sound? The way to do advertisements and how to effect interest groups was laid out very well in "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, nephew of S. Freud, somewhere around 1929. It was a book that influenced Hitler for one in his quest for power.

Can the media regain their power? Not until they realize that they have to earn their money again honestly without using special interest moneys. I hope that happens. But I am not holding my breath.

Places to vacation

The rest of my stay in Germany was spent by visiting the down-town Munich area again with its many wonderful shops. We did not do any sight-seeing. But then I had to still get to Paris to catch the plane home. I got a reservation for the train. I should have also gotten a hotel reservation, too. But not knowing what hotel to choose, I took my chances and figured there would, no doubt, be a hotel right around the Gare de L'Est railroad station. The Gare du Nord and the Gare de L'Est are really close together in Paris, and there are all kinds of hotels. I wasn't going to be picky.

Wrong! After an uneventful train ride, I arrived in Paris at 22:00 o'clock in the rain. I saw the the "All Seasons" Hotel from the train windows, and that is where I was going to spend the night. I walked over to the hotel. It looked very nice, and it didn't seem too expensive, by what I could see on the price-list. The lobby was very busy.

I waited my turn, and at that I found out that there was no room available. There was no room apparently in all of Paris. Since it was still raining, the concierge offered me to sit down, and hopefully he would be able to find a hotel. So I waited, and I waited, and I waited. Hotel guests returned from their touristy night-life experiences. I watched. The hotel elevator opened and closed. I hoped someone would suddenly decide to leave in the middle of the night. But it was not happening.

I looked through the window, and suddenly a fight broke out between several young men. One of them was punched several times, and when he landed on the soaking wet pavement one of the other men kicked him several times until he was not moving any longer. The concierge ran out into the street after a short phone call, and somehow the fight broke up. I had no idea that this area was as dangerous as that. Watching someone gett beaten up in an area with lots of lighting was a bit shocking. I probably would not have walked from the train station to this place, if I had known.

Finally at about 2:00 AM, the concierge told me he had found a hotel. The man called a taxi for me, and within about fifteen minute I arrived at another All Seasons Hotel. The room was more expensive then the first hotel; but it was more centrally located, and it was quiet. The neighborhood was much better, and it had a view of Mansard designed houses that are so typical for Paris. I slept well.

After breakfast, I decided not to go sightseeing, but instead, to visit the Galeries LaFayette which is very a large department store in the middle of Montmartre. I asked at the desk for instructions of how to get there. This department store is absolutely the grandest department store I have ever visited. The store should clearly be a tourist attraction. I thought it might be called the Cathedral of Merchandise. Stepping in, the first thing you notice is a stained-glass cupola just like one you find in a church.

It's as if you had entered a church with the higher power in it being the large fashion houses of the world. You would see a whole department sell only Armani or Dior items; another section was only Prada. At the Gucci department, security was not immediately visible, but when you stepped too close to a $ 3000.- bag, somebody started following you making sure that nothing got ripped off. I didn't look wealthy enough to buy, and of course they were right. They made me uncomfortable.

I did not buy anything in those departments, even though I could have used a nicer bag than the one I had. In the end my own bag was more functional than anything they had to offer. They had a sale upstairs where I bought some underwear, that actually was expensive, too, even on sale. But you live only once.

For lunch I took the elevator to the restaurant upstairs. All the food was very reasonable and the view was out of this world. You could see all of Paris down below. The old opera building where I had seen Carmen close to fifty years earlier was visible from my window seat. The food was wonderful.

I walked home along Boulevard Haussmann. That, too, is a street to visit. It's for window shopping, and in many ways it is much more a street for people-watching than walking along the Champs Elysees that I had visited on a previous trip. I bought a T-shirt at the Hard Rock Cafe. I couldn't resist going in. But I didn't care for the atmosphere; too noisy.

I watched a bit of TV when I got back only to see more about DSK, meaning Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the fallen IMF chief. Christine Lagarde was going to replace him. It wasn't settled, yet. But that was the main news of the day. Computer-use was free at the hotel. But it was painfully slow, and it timed you out after a few minutes.

To get to the airport the next day, I reserved a spot on a bus that took me there on time. I am glad I found out about that because they are in the business, and I think an airplane would wait for these buses to arrived. Simply taking a taxi would be much too expensive. At around 20.- Euros it was worth it feeling at ease about meeting the airplane without a hitch.

In another 13 hours I would be home.

My sister's fully equipped kitchen

 

Three places to vacation (8)

My sister and her boyfriend own a farmhouse with some acreage in the country in the vicinity of Landau in Lower Bavaria. My sister and I took the train to this out of the way part of paradise.

The two-story white-washed stucco house sits at the edge of the woods down a dirt road on a hillside surrounded by all kinds of fruit trees. There is a huge barn and a ramshackle but charming outbuilding, and from all the eaves petunia baskets are suspended that lend the building its cheerful character. There is a staircase that reaches the second floor from the outside. The railing is fashioned of decorative lattice work.


The living quarters are still in a state of remodeling. Many of the windows already have stained glass installed with sometimes very intricate patterns. A number of the rooms have new fireplaces that look as if they might have sprung right out of a house Harry Potter's friends might occupy.

My bed was a king size air-mattress that lost its air over-night while I was sleeping, and sometimes I had sunk so deep into the collapsing form that I nearly rolled onto the floor. No matter, I had a pump with which to replenish and solidify the structure.




My sister and boyfriend called the main room the "Rittersaal" (knight's hall). It was huge. They had their bed in it and a place to watch movies on a television set. There was no TV because they couldn't get good reception there and the cable would cost an arm and a leg to install.


The kitchen was the place where we spent much time because the cherries were ripe and the huge baskets of fruit had to be dealt with. The candles were lit in the kitchen when I came down for my 70th birthday. Flowers greeted me, and there were several presents including a book by Bill Bryson "Notes From a Big Country" and also the obligatory Salmiak-Pastillen that my sister always remembers to give me as a little inexpensive present because I had once told her that I loved their taste. When I was a child I would put those little pieces on the back of my hand to form a star-shape and lick that black star until it was all gone. The flat pieces taste a bit like licorice.

We spent some wonderful days at the house. It rained a few times. My sister's boyfriend's business is making candles which he sells at Christmas time at various markets in the vicinity of Munich.



I helped with the candles by sticking the wick into the metal forms before the wax is poured in. We took hikes through the wheat fields and watched the dog, an Akito named Goku, race through the woods and return and disappear again. I watched how the bread starter dough is made and how there is really nothing to it other than that it is very time-consuming. It seems--no not just seems--I had another experience of a lifetime.







Leaving the place was as enchanting as getting there. As evening fell the fireflies lit up and saw us drive away with a twinkle and a glimmer.