Points and lines in mathematical minds don’t take up space. They do, however, have position. A line with a single point can run forever. Two points close off the run to infinity. Without that second, opposing point, a line in “flat” space continues.
 
Points and lines in political minds fill all positions in expanding volumes, and unlike those in mathematical expressions that end at two opposing points, political lines run on and on, and on, and on over an unending series of points. The space of politics, in contrast to that of the physical universe, curves upon itself.
 
And so, in the major political American debate of 2019-2020, the positions taken by both groups of politicians in 1998-1999 have reversed, have come full circle in what appears to be points marked on curved lines. And as circles always do, they run on forever. Even if they don’t take up any real space, they do occupy volumes of lives in a place where points are often made but rarely seen or taken.
 
Lord, save us from the geometry of politics.    

Explaining function isn’t easy. I put a dollar in a vending machine. The vending machine translates or transforms that buck into a candy bar. The vending machine is the function. That’s a common analogy, but other explanations of function are more difficult to envision. Take genes, for example. They “serve a function,” don’t they? All right, regardless of whether or not you can picture a “gene” at this moment, consider the origin of a gene. From what does it originate? From something that serves as a function? That is, given the source of a gene, what is exchanged? Not a buck for candy, but rather, something that had no function becomes the source of a gene that “serves a function” or “has a function” or even “is a function.”
 
That’s the problem identified in the process of de novo gene emergence as identified by Diane Marie Keeling et al. in an eLife paper entitled “Philosophy of Biology: The meanings of ‘function’ in biology and the problematic case of de novo gene emergence.” * Can’t see the relevance of this to your life? Bear with me.
 
Here’s the problem. In genomic studies, is a function defined as “why an entity does what it does” or as “what an entity does”? Some say one; others, the other. In the matter of de novo gene origination, consider what the authors write:
 
     "The meanings of function are at the heart of what constitutes a de novo gene birth... For a genomic sequence to be labelled as a gene, it must by definition have a function; it must express a product that participates in cellular processes and affects phenotypes in a way that is being maintained by selection. If such a gene has evolved de novo, the locus it came from by definition was not a gene, thus did not have a function, or at least not a function of the same nature as the one the new gene has. The molecular objects of study are thus transitioning between a state without a function and a state with a function."
 
Now forget biology and think political science and the current state of the state. Is there any parallel between what Keeling and company write concerning current arguments about gene emergence and the emergence of that peculiar body politic we could call the American genome? If the government actually has a function, from whence did that function arise? Most of us would say The Constitution. That answer is, of course, correct, but from whence The Constitution?
 
So, let’s take a quick detour to the Constitution. Remember the beginning words? 
 
     "We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union. Establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic.], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
 
That, in short, is the function of the United States government. Now, about that beginning…
 
If it was an emergence de novo in the eighteenth century, was there something in the political arena of past governments from which the new American government arose? Was there a function that “expressed the product” of American government? I suppose, using the analogy of the vending machine, the Founding Fathers put something into the Constitution, and the Constitution transformed their ideas and spit out the product, so to speak. The question of the government’s emergence makes us ask whether it arose from a function of a preceding government or from something that didn’t have a function. That is, what was the “locus” of the new American political genome’s emergence?
 
Of course, one could argue a host of contributing “molecules,” such as the philosophy of Locke and the displeasure with monarchy going back to the Magna Carta. But did those sources have functions? One could also argue that there is no tie, no parallelism, between de novo emergence of genes and a similar emergence of a body politic because the consciousness involved in the latter is not present in the formation of the former. The de novo rise of a gene appears to come from molecules that serve no function. They don’t produce genes the way a vending machine produces a candy bar; otherwise, that’s what those seemingly purposeless molecules would always do. In contrast, governments usually form from the collaboration of a group of conscious individuals determined to produce a political system that “functions” differently from or better than the manner in which the previous government “functioned.”
 
So, now it appears to me, that Americans are on the threshold of emergence of a “new gene” in the body politic, the rise of those who believe in socialism and communism as viable governmental functions. From whence does this thinking arise? Certainly, it has its roots in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. But as the molecules of socialism and communism worked their way through the twentieth century, they proved themselves to be genes of economic distress and pathological murderers. If the principles of Natural Selection applied, such systems should have been weeded out of the human condition. As R. J. Rummel, whom I have quoted elsewhere, points out in Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, ** some 169,198,000 people died in the “democides” by socialist/communist/fascist governments. But unlike the unexplained random synthesis of genes from a locus without a function, the emergence of the genes of socialism and communism appear to have been consciously selected and artificially maintained—at the great cost of human suffering. That is, what in Nature would be eliminated because it was harmful to the organism or the species has been artificially generated in the body politic and then maintained under “conscious selection.”

What was the ultimate function of the political gene that such selection produced? Service to the State.
 
A rational person might argue that 170 million deaths in government-sponsored democides should convince anyone that socialist and communist political genes are inimical to economy and health, particularly to the economy and health of individuals. But then, there are seemingly rational people arguing for socialism and communism, in particular, many millennials according to polls. Now being young is a problem we all face or faced. Certainly, we can’t have lived what others lived one, two, or fifty generations earlier. But we can read, and we can research. And those who come from an older generation can teach what happened in the twentieth century to 170 million people.
 
Can’t happen again? I would like to think so, but then I saw a video recently in which a supporter of one of the presidential candidates who labels himself a “democratic socialist” praising Stalin’s gulags and calling for “reeducation” of those who disagree with the “cause.” Granted, the supporter was a “low level” field worker for the campaign, but one would think his comments were not made in a vacuum. In addition, the worker said that if his candidate doesn’t get the party’s nomination, then Milwaukee would burn. So, where are we today not long after those 170 million deaths by government? Where will we be if we allow the socialism gene to persist in our political DNA? Remember the function of people under socialism and communism: Service to the State. 
 
Will we be the function or the product, the input, the device, or the output? Think of the promises made: Freedom from student loans, freedom from health care costs, and freedom to cross borders without legal application. Are those the coins put into the vending machine? And is a lifetime of servitude to the state the candy bar?
 
 
 
*Keeling, Diane Marie, et al. 1 Nov 2019. eLife2019;8:e47014 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.47014
https://elifesciences.org/articles/47014   Accessed January 25, 2020.
 
**Rummel, R. J., 1994. Death by Government. New York. Routledge. p. 1. You can read some excerpts at https://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-Genocide-Murder-Since/dp/1560009276/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=death+by+government&qid=1580070452&sr=8-1

Even the flabbiest of us admires those with taught bodies. Nothing like the middle-ager at the beach contracting some muscles to look a little thinner, a little more in shape. Anyway, those with flabby forms do have some muscle beneath the layers of fat; they, too, can flex. But who would have thought that such contraction, such flexing, might be one of life’s secrets, one of the reasons that we are multicellular? It never crossed my mind. Cherish the muscle! Revel in muscular contractions!
 
And then I read “Multicellularity: How contraction has shaped evolution,” an eLife paper by Mukund Thattai of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.* In a short review of research Thattai links actomyosin (aka actinomyosin) with the transition from single-cell critters to multi-cell ones like you and me. One study of a choanoflagellate by Nicole King, Thibaut Brunet, Ben Larsen, and Tess Linden demonstrated the cup-like colony of cells point their flagella toward the inside of the “cup” in bright light, but in darkness, they point their flagella outward.** They suggest, and Thattai accepts that suggestion, that the collective contraction is “reminiscent of the contractions that generate curvature in developing animal tissues.”
 
Makes me think of coral polyps, and anemones, and the guy I see in the mirror, all multicellular and all with an “inside.” Folding. What am I some kind of mushy origami? Seems so, just not one made of paper. And collectively, aren’t we a bit like contractile cells making actomyosin rings?  
 
Think of whole groups of multicellular organisms like, for example, cliques, clubs, and countries, all at times, folded in upon themselves, all cuplike, especially in the darkness of exclusion, bias, and fear. All members universally contracting. Circle the wagons! And it’s always been so since the multicellular evolved into the social and then the political, contracting into a single voice of unity. The society and the party exist inside the “cup,” the multicellular contraction orienting every unit inward.  
 
Oh! To think that half a billion years or so of evolution in multicellularity has brought us to a closure of minds, to an inward-folding state in which even the flabbiest of minds puts on a flexing show like that middle-aged guy on the beach, thinking that the rest of the world will take him for an exuberant youth with an openness to fresh thinking. But the rest of the world sees the contractions for what they are, a vain attempt to conceal the flab, the fat of years without exercising openness.
 
Actomyosin. It worked its magic in turning the isolated cells of the deep past into the conjoined cells of the present curvature of humans, multicellular organisms with consciousness that evolved from that process and turned inward to isolate our contracting minds in the origami of bias and mutual approbation. In some ways, we aren’t much different from those ancient choanoflagellates.
 
*Thattai, Mukund. 14 Nov 2019. Insight: Cell Biology, Evolutionary Biology. https://elifesciences.org/articles/52805   Accessed January 21, 2020.
 
**Brunet, T. et al., Light-regulated collective contractility in a multicellular choanoflagellate. Science 366: 326-334. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay2346

One difficult assignment for composition students is writing directions for tying a shoestring. Difficult? Such a common task? Difficult? How so?
 
Actually, as anyone who has ever struggled to put together a Christmas toy or piece of Ikea furniture knows, writing any set of directions can be challenging. Those who must follow such directions have no coach to guide them through the process. The reader doesn’t have access to the writer. The directions, like some poorly written novel, stand on their own, their implications left to the inferences of the reader. Try the shoestring assignment. Write directions for tying a shoestring that would walk a novice through the practice. No verbal help allowed. No visuals. Remember the details: It is one string, not two—one of first mistakes the composition student makes—and the knot is the product of multistage and additive processes.   
 
How could this be a difficult assignment? We tie shoestrings without thinking, as we say. It’s muscle memory. Yes, it is, but that muscle memory came at the end of many failures, and still there’s that occasional episode of tying a shoestring only to have to re-tie because, somehow, the imperfectly tied shoestring un-knots itself as one walks through Ikea.
 
It’s an example, I suggest, of Moravec’s paradox, the bane of AI researchers, probably best summarized by Steven Pinker. Pinker wrote that in developing AI, software engineers encounter a fundamental truth, that “the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.”* Say what?
 
Obviously, a computer can do math, really complex math. It can translate whatever language it learns—though in this, idiom and innuendo befuddle the machine. It can run models. It can do much that we do in our frontal cortexes, but very little of what we do deep in the brain, that which we have inherited through millions of years of evolution, that is, all that is necessary for survival. Obviously, our ancient hominin ancestors could survive with smaller frontal cortexes and without the Calculus. That might mean that the Calculus, the burden of math students, wasn’t really necessary for survival outside the historical confines of modern civilization. It is, however, essential for a highly technical civilization and a species that prizes the workings of the frontal cortex: The physics of sending a spacecraft to Mars was not on the minds of our ancient ancestors and neither was the calculation necessary to compensate for Relativity’s effects on satellite-related navigation systems. AI can do the hard stuff, and it can do it more quickly than its inventors. But the easy stuff? Not so much.
 
Take reading the expressions of a friend or foe as an example.  
 
Reading through a formula is a skill AI can learn and can excel at; reading the facial expression of a person is a skill that a baby can do, but a computer finds difficult in a good liar. In Moravec’s paradox, those skills that took the longest to develop are “second nature” to us, whereas those skills that humans have developed recently, say in the last 100,000 years, are difficult for us, but easy for the computer. Math is new, isn’t it? Only as old as civilization, probably coincident with trade and architecture. Logic, too, is a relatively recent development on this planet. Both math and logic can be programmed. However, reading subtle flirtation (or subtle rejection) at a bar is an old skill, one older than the oldest bar, by the way. Flirtation is, I’m going out on a limb to say, older than beer.
 
But it isn’t older than beer yeast. That’s the organism that contains Cytochrome-C. Cytochrome-C? Hey, humans, too, have a form of Cytochrome-C, albeit one with a slightly different set of molecules. Cytochrome-C is one of those molecular complexes that reveals our tie to ancient life, and that’s the point of Moravec’s paradox. Humans have been a long time in the making, and along the way have incorporated skills and abilities deeply buried in the brain, so deeply buried as to lie beneath the frontal cortex, and so old as to be “second nature.” Those skills can’t be easily learned even though they are easily practiced. You comprehend innuendo. You comprehend subtle flirtation. Easy for you. Hard for a computer.
 
I think of dogs in this. Wolves, more so. Or bears. Given a threat, they expose their teeth. One can assume that other mammals, especially other wolves and bears, understand the facial expression of exposed teeth is a sign of danger, of animal “anger” (for want of a better word). And dogs still bare their teeth in a sign of ferocity. But—and here’s the deep brain part—they don’t interpret their owners’ smiles with fully bared teeth as a threat. They know smile from threat even while they retain their wolf heritage of showing teeth during a threat. Teach both interpretations to AI if you can. Easy for us; hard for AI. To repeat Pinker: “the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.”
 
Moravec calls abstract thinking a veneer on the older brain. Sure, abstraction is a complex process often involving, as it does in algebra or the Calculus, symbols, but AI does it, and does it with apparent ease. But in perception of nuances AI struggles, whereas we don’t. Dogs don’t either.
 
An AI walks into a bar and sits next to a woman. “So, do you come here often?” the AI asks. She looks at the AI, and says, “Do you come here often?” The AI says, “This is my first visit, but I hope to make it a pattern.” She says, “This is my last time here.”  
 
* Pinker, Steven (September 4, 2007) [1994], The Language Instinct, Perennial Modern Classics, Harper, ISBN 978-0-06-133646-1

You look around. Almost everything is in a blur. Life moves fast. “Why just yesterday, I was a child. Life’s shorter than a blink.”
 
And then you say, “I don’t mind the activity, constant as it is, but I would like, on occasion, to stop, even if just for a moment or two. Catch my breath, so to speak. Find my peaceful quiet place where I can just sit still.”
 
Two stories; I’ll connect them in a bit. First one: Jaguar Land Rover developed a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking, a “morphable” seat that uses “a series of micro-adjustable actuators” to move the pelvic area, “making occupants feel like they’re walking.”* Ah! Modern technology; We can sit still and walk simultaneously! Second one: Lihong Wang of Caltech has developed a camera that can take ten trillion pictures per second.** And now he has developed a newer version of the camera that can take one trillion pictures of transparent objects like glass. It’s an ingenious system Wang calls “lossless encoding compressed ultrafast technology.” And here’s how it works: His system takes a single shot, capturing all the motion that occurs during the time that shot takes to complete. If that means what I think it means (and you can see a demonstration of it online), then Wang has enabled us to capture in an instant what we know takes time. Think of it as the reverse of the Jaguar Land Rover morphable seat. Motion that appears to the camera to be one unit, kind of like being in motion and being still simultaneously.
 
Which technology fits your lifestyle and needs? Would you like to capture all that motion that’s passed since you were a child in a single photo that still shows the motion? Would you like to know that in all those moments when nothing seemed to occur, such as in sitting in traffic, waiting in the doctor’s office or DMV line, or standing in the queue at Disney World’s Splash Mountain, that in those moments, you could impose motion?
 
Or, given the choice, how would you choose between not moving while moving or moving while not moving?
 
Of course, you and I know that even in stillness, we are restless creatures of contradiction. We could argue that we are victims of both physiology and culture, that flowing blood and neurotransmitters plus economic and social pressures don’t allow us a moment of complete stillness. I can’t do more than guess your thoughts on stillness and motion, but I know that for curiosity’s sake, I want to take a Selfie with Wang’s camera while I sit on a morphable Jaguar seat during a traffic jam.  
 
*Aamir, Humza. 16 Jan 2020. Jaguar develops a shape-shifting car seat that simulates walking. Techspot.com https://www.techspot.com/news/83577-jaguar-develops-shape-shifting-car-seat-simulates-walking.html     Accessed January 20, 2020. 

**California Institute of Technology. 20 Jan 2020. Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-ultrafast-camera-trillion-transparent-phenomena.html    Accessed January 20, 2020.

“Cottage for Rent,” “Rent to Own,” “Cottage for Sale”: I’m waiting for the signs to go up. Each will have a qualifier: “Newly remodeled five-bedroom home.”
 
Yeah, newly remodeled at a cost of $3.5 million. You read that correctly. Millions. Have you seen that place? Cottage? I suppose cottage is a relative term because a house with four bedrooms plus a nursery is smaller than a palace or castle.
 
What’s that you say? Oh! I thought Harry and Meghan were abandoning the place. Not for sale? They’re going to rent it as their “home base”? Well, at least, having been thrown out of the royal retinue, they won’t be homeless; they’ll always have a place to come back to. Whew! Another homeless problem solved.
 
The downside of Frogmore? It’s just two football fields from the public long walk. And you know what the public is like. Tempted to tread on royal property just to see the famous couple—or any resident—in their native setting, the public will live their inner anthropologist as they are driven to paparazzi-like selfie-obsessed action. “We just want to see how the natives live,” they’ll tell the guards.
 
So, the news force is out in force over a prince and his princess rejecting the shelter of the royal household. “We want to make it on our own,” they say. Not that they are building from the ground up. I mean, come on, I just saw a news clip of their socializing with the head of Disney, with the Prince pushing the voice-over skills of his bride. Nothing like bypassing HR and the typical application and interview process on the way to moviedom fame and lucrative gigs. Will the Prince apply for a job with the local ambulance service as a life-flight helicopter pilot? He’s qualified, you know.
 
I’m sure the couple will be able to pull off this separation thing successfully. They seem to be a bright duo, and they can always turn to the speakers’ circuit to talk about life in the royal family, its tribulations, and its rewards—for $50,000 per talk. And then the book deal and TV show based on the book will provide some income. I have no doubt about their survival. And I’m not envious. I wish them well, but I’m wondering whether or not I can rent Frogmore Cottage for a nominal fee, kind of like staying in a B&B, when the couple is cavorting around western Canada and Hollywood. It would be my small way of helping a young couple survive by defraying some of the rent on the cottage. In fact, maybe they should open up the cottage as a B&B during tourist seasons. Think of the cottage as a time-share.
 
I’ve often wondered about the drive in people to seek information about the lives of others, why, for example, people take tours to see where the “stars” live. I suppose I’m guilty of the same in a way. I’ve visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, the Breakers in Newport, and Viscaya in Miami. Of course, I didn’t go to see the long-gone residents, but rather to see the structure and its included artworks, those tapestries in the Biltmore, for example. And it’s not that I wish I could live in a home as large as those three buildings or Frogmore or Windsor. I surmise that no one can actually “live” in all those rooms and that any resident will eventually settle for the most part in just one or two of those rooms because we are, as you know, creatures of habit. Where, at home, do you spend most of your time?  
 
So, if you learn that the Vanderbilts took their private train from New York City to Newport for a six-week stay at their “cottage” and that they took with them a retinue of twenty servants, will that mean anything for your life? In knowing that, will you live vicariously someone else’s life? Will you envision yourself at Great-Gatsby-like summer parties with the Vanderbilts? Of life with the Kennedys at private pools and on private sailboats?
 
And that brings me to thoughts of what role “vicarious living” plays in any life. Why, for example, do people buy those tabloids for sale next to the conveyor belt at the cashier in grocery stores? What’s to be gained? What do any of us gain by any vicarious living, be it through a TV show, a novel, or a tabloid article? Are we all unhappy at the core? Are we all caught up by an imagined life when we could be forging our own?
 
No, I’m not advocating anyone’s yielding to life in the status quo. As we can see by the Prince and the Princess, the status quo, even for wealthy aristocrats, has its downside. What is it that motivated the Prince and Princess to abandon a lifestyle that all those buyers of tabloids imagine living? Is there in them what lies in all? Is there an innate dissatisfaction with the status quo that says, “We need to remodel,” or “We need a change in scenery,” or even “We need to do something else with our lives because we can’t do the same thing without either becoming bored or vegetative”? Is there within each of us a desire, as Tennyson wrote in “Ulysses,” “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” In that line, the poet wasn’t advocating a vicarious life; he wasn’t saying, “Let’s strive, seek, and find through the lives of others.”*
 
You know that as you stand in the grocery store checkout line, you’re going to see those tabloid headlines. You’ll be tempted to read each one—though you might not pick up the tabloid for fear of judgment by the guy in the suit standing behind you. Sure, you can probably guess the stories on the inside of the magazine, and you can, if you want, do some vicarious living right there by the conveyor belt. But the line will move, the cashier will tally your expenditures, and you will have to pay the bill and cart the grocery bags to the car—unless, of course, your servants do all that for you.
 
And when you return home to your “cottage,” will you do anything that alters what you were?
 
 
*In another line of the poem, Tennyson has Ulysses say: “Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.”

You consider yourself a relatively “good” person, don’t you? What about others? You think they consider themselves similarly, even those who commit what you call “crimes”? What about the pathological, that serial killer who both frightens us by action, but continues what is for him or her a “normal” activity? If you consider yourself to be a “good” person, do you believe the “good” lies within you, innately so, or do you think you acquired “good” from your culture? Does “bad” like “good,” or evil like good, come from within or without? Both?
 
No matter how hard you wish for a break from bad news, you won’t get it. Bad things have always occurred and will occur. You’re on your own if you want respite. Not only are there people “out there” who do bad, but even when you seek respite and no matter where you seek it, there are also people “out there” who are determined to tell you about every conceivable “bad thing or person.”
 
That bad people do bad things is a fact. That they do them ubiquitously is also a fact. And for every bad person there appear to be multiple reporters, all eager to tell you the bad that has occurred, is occurring, or will occur. The 24-hour news cycle is here to stay. and it is fed by a seeming endless number of reporters eager to find something newsworthy, a term, in today’s world, meaning, if not “an act of dire consequences caused by humans or Nature,” then “the best example of public disgrace we can find at the moment—it’s all about the opprobrium, baby; it’s all about the bad we can attribute.” What is newsworthy as “bad,” of course, includes natural disasters and suffering of all kinds, from burned koalas to burned out homeowners. But since the large disasters, like the tsunami of 2004 or the Australian fires of 2020, are relatively infrequent—on the order of about one or so per year— the news people have to fill their day with something. No murders or robberies today? No problem. There has to be some kind of argument at the town council or school board meeting. There has to be some politician or celebrity to denigrate. Is reporting on the “bad” of any kind—from murder of the innocent to death by volcanic eruption—a manifestation of something surfacing from the “inside,” the reporters’ suppressed “bad” springing fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus? In the absence of mega-events does the devil inside reporters emerge in those stories that supposedly reveal the internal evil of others?
 
Did INXS provide the succinct explanation for bad news in “The Devil Inside”? Were Mick and the rest of the Rolling Stones among the most insightful of social and moral philosophers in “Gimme Shelter”? Didn’t the two groups encapsulate all the writings on the philosophy of evil in those two songs? Is the source of bad news, of evil itself, internal or external? Do we, as INXS sings, house evil, i.e., the Devil Inside? Or must we seek shelter from outside evil? If the latter, do we mark our safety from the “bad” by our distance from the nearest “shot” that starts verbal or physical local or regional war? Is evil out there, external to us individually, or does it lie within us as it does in the boys in Lord of the Flies. Is evil a natural state kept in check only by some artificial constructs that make up societies and religions? Can there be no shelter because we, all of us, are only “a shot away” from its inevitable occurrence?  
 
Are respite and shelter possible in a world that is so seemingly full of evil and bad news? Is it possible that we all, in fact, shelter a “devil inside” that makes escaping the “bad,” any “bad,” only temporarily possible? In the absence of reporters, do we find ourselves self-reporting? Is there something legitimate to this “original sin” notion? Are we evil by a nature that is enhanced by nurture? If we take away that nurture, are we inherently devilish? Or, are we victims of evil imposed from outside, living just “a shot away,” as the Rolling Stones sing, from war of any kind?
 
You might ask, “Why does the origin of evil matter? That it plagues us as it has always plagued humans is the point. Evil from the outside or evil from the inside, I don’t see the difference. You can go back to the Book of Job to see how old and unresolved this discussion is. Job was supposedly a ‘good’ person, but the Adversary, aka Satan, the Devil or whatever you want to call him, imposed ‘evil’ from without.” And you might continue, “Anyway, how do we define evil? Isn’t one person’s evil another’s good? Kill a murderous terrorist and people live. Isn’t such killing justified. Isn’t it just a choice between the ‘lesser’ of two evils? Do we include evil or ‘the bad’ as the product of natural events like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis that kill the innocent? Surely, all 230,000 victims of the 2004 Christmastime Indian Ocean tsunami didn’t deserve their watery deaths. For their surviving friends and families, the seafloor perpetrated a great evil. Did IT act on its own, as an agent of an indifferent natural process, or as a proxy for an external Adversary?”
 
Is it possible that natural disasters aren’t a manifestation of evil in any sense? To attribute evil to them is to ascribe some conscious agency. Volcanoes just do what they do. The “evil” they impose on people living nearby isn’t the result of a conscious act except as a consequence of deciding to live near active volcanoes. If no people lived nearby… well, by analogy, if that tree falls in a forest, it does transfer its kinetic energy to the air, but in the absence of humans, no one hears those sound waves. Evil? If there are no villages beneath the volcano’s summit, there's no death by pyroclastic flow--the Pompeians live.
 
Or is ignorance the cause of random misfortune, like not knowing a volcano can erupt or not knowing that an old tree is ready to fall. Would you say that in the case of natural disasters—for individuals or groups—ignorance, and not evil, is in play. Death by volcano is death by ignorance. Is such “evil” planned? And if one says, “It was his (or their) time” or “It was meant to be,” does that ascribe responsibility to the agency we call fate? But bad luck, just being in the wrong spot during a volcano’s long history of activity or beneath that old big tree, eliminates the universal Adversary that reversed Job’s fortunes. Job, like those victims of “perfect storms,” was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in a universe of so many possibilities that eventually someone’s timeline was going to meet in space with forces of downfall and destruction. Remember that fender bender? Had you and that stranger not left your respective homes at the moments you backed out of the driveway, taken the routes you took, stopped at those traffic lights, or yielded to a merging driver, then neither of you could possibly have collided at that distant intersection. Preordained? With a couple of hundred million vehicles on the roads, isn’t that collision just a chance event with a “bad outcome” one that would inevitably occur to two out of hundreds of millions of people traveling in cars? Is the universe merely filled with particles in motion that randomly collide and that for humans indifferently impose the evil of fender benders or horrible accidents?
 
“Gimme shelter from randomness,” is an unrealistic request if all is a matter of randomness whose only control lies in the four fundamental forces of the universe and Newtonian principles. “Gimme shelter from conscious evil,” might also be an unrealistic request, especially if the “devil” lies within. Anyway, merely making the request suggests that there’s an Agent capable of granting the request. Are the Rolling Stones seeking shelter from such an Agent? Is Mick a religious man? From whom does he seek shelter?
 
And even if we define evil only as “the act of a conscious being,” isn’t randomness still in play? How, like the car accident, does the serial killer come across the path of one of the victims? Would you say, “With seven plus billion people in the world, some random chance meeting of killer and victim is inevitable”? But if evil resides inside, then how does it emerge? If suppressing the evil inside requires a conscious effort to be “good” as a culture defines good, then does the “devil inside” escape to the outside because all cultural restraints are incomplete barriers. Some of us just don’t have a moral wall strong enough to keep the devil inside.
 
Gimme shelter from the devil inside others, from random evil, and, if I have one, the devil inside me. 

You are about to hear the cry, almost reminiscent of Chicken Little’s, but one centered on the minimal “solar activity” that appears to panic so many: “The Sun doesn’t have many sunspots nowadays. We’re going to enter another ‘ice age’ like the one that plagued the people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everyone be very afraid. The winter storms are coming, and they will be unprecedented.”
 
That is, “unprecedented” if one doesn’t consider the precedents.*  
 
“No sunspots. Didn’t that happen in the same year that Big Ben, the famous clock, also stopped running? 1976, no clock, no spots I think. And wasn’t the winter of 1976-1977 a really bad one for northeastern USA? That winter and the winter of 1916-1917 comprise arguably the two worst winters of the twentieth century. What if we’re entering a period like the Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age?”**
 
What if we do enter an era that parallels that of the Little Ice Age? Or, a better question: What are YOU going to do about it? Really, what can you do about the Sun or about volcanic activity that blocks incoming solar radiation? Tell me. I’m all ears.
 
The Sun is almost a million miles in diameter and about a million times the volume of Earth. In other words, kids, It’s really big—pay attention over there in the corner: I’m talking to you, Greta. It’s also very far away, so far that when it sends photons our way, they take more than eight minutes to reach us. The Sun we see is the Sun of the past. But that past stretches only those eight minutes. That we have discerned patterns in its activity is remarkable, but we have identified those patterns for only the briefest part of its approximately five-billion-year history. True, the Sun has been steady enough over the past 3.5 billion years for life to form, but we know little of its past fluctuations except by proxy science. Our knowledge of sunspots goes back only as far as Galileo’s telescopic observations.*** Four centuries is just 0.00000009 of the Sun’s lifetime and a time clumped at this end of its existence; it’s not a sampling of a five-billion-year history.****
 
But those in-the-know think they know that the Sun is entering a quiescent period, and that could mean a brief respite from global warming. In fact, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere might help to lessen any effects of a predicted Little Ice Age or even of a potentially coming cold decade. Now I can hear the newscasters exclaiming, “Well, if it hadn’t been for the burning of fossil fuels, we’d all be freezing right now.” And I can hear those who are freezing and paying big heating bills, even those enamored of global warming, say, “Quick, everyone, burn something.” Such is the nature of human nature. In comfort, we all seem to have morals; we’re all altruistic and ethical. We all care about Mother Earth. In discomfort? Not so much. Lump of coal, anyone? Oh! That’s right; it’s not easy to find.*****
 
Strange how humans have such short memories: The moment dictates the logic. And the logic dictates the ethics. The moment dictates the attitude, the philosophy, the politics, and the beliefs. And this seems especially true when the matter is too complex for any one layperson to take in. Told that we’re doomed to suffer irreversible warming in just under a decade from now, we’re currently told that the Sun’s inactivity might cast us into a prolonged winter, crop failures, and the need for burning more fossil fuels just to keep warm. What’s a layperson to think? What’s a climate zealot to do? Shiver in cold and wear a sweater as Jimmy Carter advised, or, shoot, just temporarily give in and burn some stuff?
 
In fact, most of us don’t really “think.” We react to rumor and innuendo. We follow as we are told to follow, not as a mere “Nation of Sheep,” but as individuals incapable of sifting through the data on a complex Solar System and a planet that has undergone excessive warming and cooling. Solar Minimums? They come and go. Occasional droughts, cold spells, and heat waves, also. Coming and going. That’s the way of the world. Could an increase in carbon stave off a new ice age? It might. Then what? When the Sun becomes active again, we’ll have all that carbon in our air, and we’ll swing to higher temperatures, making us wish for the next Solar Minimum or distant super volcanic eruption.
 
Sure, we can stop using fossil fuels, build nuclear reactors with fail-safe protections, use less energy individually, buy a solar panel or two, and turn as green as we can, but the Sun will do what it always does. Sometimes it’s active; other times, inactive. And those occasional big eruptions that spew ash and sulfur into the stratosphere to block incoming radiation will occur as they occur, hopefully not during a Solar Minimum to exacerbate the cold.
 
What are the global warming proselytizers going to do? Simple me: I need advice, and, apparently, I need it soon. A quiescent Sun hovers over us. The number of sunspots has fallen. We look up at an unblemished disk of light. Should I be worried? Someone in-the-know, tell me what to do.
 
*Wagner, James A. Nov. 1977. The Severe Winter of 1976-1977: Precursors and Precedents. Long Range Prediction Group of the National Meteorological Center, National Weather Service, NOAA, Washington, D.C.  http://nwafiles.nwas.org/digest/papers/1977/Vol02No4/1977v002no04-Wagner.pdf
Accessed January 16, 2020.
 
** https://www.britannica.com/science/Maunder-minimum
 
***After initially looking through his telescope to observe the setting Sun, Galileo began indirect observations. His blindness occurred decades later, much later in life (in his 70s), so we can’t attribute it to those observations.

****https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity 

*****THE REAL ETHICAL, OR ECO-ETHICAL, TEST: When those who currently advocate the cessation of all fossil fuel use are freezing, will they still insist on not using fossil fuels? The proof, as they say, might lie in the frozen pudding.

“What are we havin’ for supper?”
 
“Oh! I found a limping leg of lamb at the butcher's today. So, limping leg of lamb.”
 
“Limping?! What’s that mean?”
 
“Don’t you ever read the news? Finally, someone has developed a sensor that can detect whether or not a sheep is lame. Big problem you know for shepherds and big-time shepherding, definitely a concern of “experts” from the University of Nottingham and Farm Wizard, an agricultural software developer. Sure, you get your occasional leg of lamb to wolf down, but those people concerned about the sheep industry have to worry about losing $100m/year because of lameness. Anyway, I’m sure that this leg isn’t from a limping lamb. It looks fine.”*
 
“What’s the limping from, jumping over those imaginary fences people use when they try to fall asleep? I’ve often wondered how that started. Sheep don’t seem to be great jumpers. But, then, I’ve never shepherded sheep, and I never made them jump over imaginary fences just so I could count them. Seems cruel, even if imaginary. I mean, why not animals that can jump, like horses? Sheep? It doesn’t even seem realistic. If sheep could jump over fences, wouldn’t they jump the real fences that imprison them as they await being sheared or having a leg amputated so that people can have leg of lamb. ‘Hey, what are you doing with my leg,’ asks the sheared sheep. ‘I don’t mind an occasional trip to the barber, but I can’t make more than four trips to the butcher. How am I supposed to jump those fences for people who can’t sleep? You know that if you take one of my legs, you’ll be contributing to world insomnia?’
 
“Anyway, what’s the cause of all this lameness that costs the industry to much?”
 
“The article says ‘foot rot.’”
 
“Okay, wait a minute. You mean you’ve possibly been feeding me legs that end in rot all these years?”
 
“Well, you don’t eat the hooves. They cut those off.”
 
“But, it was on the leg? What am I? A carrion-eater? A crow?”
 
“Oh! you’re just being silly. If it were a problem, someone from the FDA would have marked the lamb in an inspection.”
 
“Sure, that’s all I need to know. Someone, some highly motivated government official whose only job is to look at a million lamb legs catches the diseased one before you happen to buy it for my dinner. What if the guy has insomnia that results in lack of attention? What if he can’t count sheep because he spends days counting lamb legs? After tonight, no more legs of lamb! ‘Legs of chicken,’ as comedian Brian Regan says in one of his skits, for me.”
 
“You’re missing the larger point. Think of the technology. These scientists have made an ear tag for sheep that contains an accelerometer and a gyroscope to track a sheep’s behavior because sheep apparently don’t want anyone to know that they have a gimpy leg. And the information gets sent to the Cloud so that shepherds can monitor standing, walking, and lying activity in sheep to detect which sheep have a limp.”
 
“See. It’s all about those sheep jumping fences for people who can’t sleep. The Cloud? Isn’t that the stereotypical image, plump sheep jumping fences with puffy clouds in the sky?”
 
“No, no, no. Not some cloud in the sky. THE Cloud, you know, the one that keeps everyone’s phone and computer stuff on that vast network of servers. Give these guys some credit; their purpose was to improve sheep health and industry profits.”
 
“Okay. But what about that lame lamb that changes its behavior just enough to fool the shepherd? What about that human who inspects the butchered legs before they get shipped out to the local grocery store? There’s that occasional human error regardless of the sophisticated algorithms the computer guys put into their system. See, this is what we’re becoming, totally dependent upon some AI or some algorithm to run our lives; and yet, we still depend on some human to decide whether or not something is good for us on the basis of spot inspections. No, start serving legs of chicken, and I’ll pretend they are legs of lamb.”
 
“But don’t you realize that for all of human history, we’ve depended on spot inspections by humans? And some of them might have been sleep-deprived as you say, lessening their ability to concentrate on their jobs? You have to trust somewhere. You should be thankful we have a better system. But, hey, whatever you say, unless you want leftovers, tonight I’m serving leg of lamb.”
 
“With mashed potatoes and gravy?”

 
 
*Anscombe, Charlotte. 15 Jan 2020. Lame sheep adjust their behavior to cope with their condition, study finds. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-lame-sheep-adjust-behavior-cope.html  Accessed January 15, 2020.