Pretend for a bit that you are an NFL player about to enter the stadium for a championship game. You have spent years getting to this moment, starting possibly at age 8 or 9, playing in a Pop Warner or other children’s league. Then, passing through middle school, high school, and college, you continued your athletic journey into the NFL, where, after some years on teams that never reached the Super Bowl, you arrived, ready to win the championship. What goes through your mind? All the years of grueling physical exercise? All the sacrifices in time? All the pregame hours of study?


Whatever goes through your mind as you enter the stadium prepared for action, one thing is certain. The experience makes you aware of the moment's tie to your past and your future. If there is a condition called the “Eternal Present,” walking into that stadium defines it.


We live our lives like the waves on an oscilloscope, the crests and troughs revealing that we are truly alive. Flatlining is paramount to death. And at those crests, we find an intense elation at being in the present. Entering that championship game is a crest on life’s wave.


We could argue that those oscillations between crests and troughs have to be the nature of our lives. Without the fluctuations, we flatline on a high or a low. And experience tells us that perpetuation of either condition without some change isn’t the way of the world. So, we can’t live every day in an Eternal High. The experience would drain us emotionally. And yet, there’s something positive to be said for trying to achieve a life on a continuous crest.


Distractions of all kinds keep us from such continuous intensity. But, since we are pretending, why not imagine a life in which we enter every day as we might enter the stadium for a championship game, all our past efforts leading to one significant moment?

In the second decade of the twenty-first century (the time of this writing), political leaders everywhere faced a real problem: How do they stop a pandemic? One of their solutions was isolating populations, a process easier in socialist and socialist-leaning countries than in capitalist countries. Regardless of the politico-economic nature of the country, all leaders who shut down society discovered that they also shut down their economies. For many, however, the solution was the lesser of two evils. As might have been predicted, that lesser evil was unequally applied because its total application would have terminated all commerce, leading to mass starvation. So, for example, grocery stores remained open, even after the panic emptied their shelves before the normal supply chains were reconnected. And the uneven application of the rule of isolation and closure allowed a company like Target to remain open, whereas a store that sold only clothing, like Macy’s, had to temporarily close. Then came the restrictions and mandates: Vaccines and masks. But, if you have been alive during the past two years, you know this. And you also know that the uneven application of restrictions and mandates was exacerbated by politicians openly defying their own rules.


Eight hundred years ago the people of Florence began construction of the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, today mostly known as the famous Duomo. The plan called for a magnificent dome, but its proposed height above the ground and its great diameter at its base precluded using any then-known building techniques, though several clever ideas were advanced. One of those ideas was to fill the church and the area beneath the dome with an ever-greater pile of dirt intermixed with gold coins. The idea was that after the bricklayers used the growing pile as a base for scaffolding, the massive volume of dirt would be voluntarily removed by the populace eager to find the gold coins. Think of it as a Mark-Twain solution as written into the famous fence-painting episode in Tom Sawyer. As Twain once wrote, “Work consists of whatever the body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”


And that is the reason for protests over mandates around the world and the failure of politicians to convince their people to cooperate. They imposed obligations. And they imposed those obligations on the basis of Either/Or thinking.


As of this writing (in January 2022), 356,081,089 people have been infected by variants of COVID-19. Of those 5,625,000 have died. Those figures equate to a death rate of 1.5%, though the initial variants did most of the killing; Omicron is apparently less fatal and infects and sickens more like the annual flu. And hospital watchers acknowledge that people are currently being hospitalized with COVID more than for COVID. That is not meant to downplay the effect on those who do suffer seriously and even terminally from COVID, but it is meant to downplay the necessity for extreme political decisions. How, for example, does one account for all those who had and survived the disease? In some places, well, actually in many places, the same restrictions and obligations imposed at the outset of the pandemic have continued unabated. The entire world population, it appears, is required to “paint the fence.” Other solutions to living with COVID be damned—at least damned by the politicians.


The dome of that famous Florentine cathedral presented a problem that required a new approach to dome construction. Enter Filippo  Brunelleschi. The creative architect devised a new type of construction and a method for building the dome. His design of an inner and outer dome supported on ribs made the construction possible, because it relied on scaffolding attached to the rising dome, rather than on piles of dirt or scaffolding built on the ground, this latter choice impossible because the timbers could not hold their own weight. Today, when the world’s population looks for a Brunelleschi, they see instead politicians on the floors of unfinished political cathedrals, looking up and scratching their heads, most, if not all of them, seeking no solution but the imposition of obligations.

​And even when a “Brunelleschi” comes along with possible alternatives, such as using therapeutics that have by those on the front lines of care been demonstrated to work with some positive results, the politicians cannot break from their one-size-fits-all approach. They also seem to reject the facts that those already infected have immunity, that those vaccinated still get the disease, that most masking did nothing to spread the disease, that a six-foot distance is an arbitrary guidance with no scientific support, and that even the vaccinated can spread the disease. Seems to me that the current political leaders will never get the fence painted or the dome built.

Picture a race between the fastest female and the fastest male. Unless he slips or falls, the guy wins the race. Maybe that’s the reason that so many prefer to watch men’s sports over women’s sports. It’s a matter of seeing not the fastest man or the fastest woman; it’s a matter of seeing the fastest human being.


Not so for the authors of a study on the UK’s male football (soccer) fans. That they prefer to watch men’s football over women’s football is an indication of misogyny. To make their point, the authors define various kinds of masculinities:
    
    Progressive masculinities
    Overtly misogynistic masculinities
    Covertly misogynistic masculinities


Stacey Poper, John Williams, and Jamie Cleland, the three who ran the study, declare that the progressive and overtly misogynistic masculinities are polar opposites, both, however, overlapping on their Venn diagram the third type of masculinity. The title of their paper is “Men’s Football Fandom and the Performance of Progressive and Misogynistic Masculinities in a ‘New Age’ of UK Women’s Sport.” In their paper they write of hegemonic masculinity, inclusive masculinity, and the coverage in male-dominated sports media.


Venus and Serena Williams, aside, the authors suggest that greater media coverage of women’s sports, such as football, poses a threat to the long-standing “male preserve.” They also tie the attitudes of UK’s male fandom to hegemonic masculinity.


But is their categorization of football fandom a story worth telling? Does it teach us anything new about humanity? To do their study, Poper, Williams, and Cleland asked through 150 online message boards for survey volunteers. They got 1950 men to respond, eliciting from them their views on women’s football. You can probably guess where this is going.


The researchers include statements by the participants in the paper, such as one by a persons in the 26-35 age category in which the guy says he has no problem with women playing football and that he even wishes the UK’s women football team well, but that he has no personal interest in watching women play football anymore than he has an interest in watching Notts County’s men’s team play, essentially because he believes the “minor league” men’s team doesn’t play the game at the level of the professionals. In other words, he wants to see the “best human players.” For that statement he is placed in the “covertly misogynistic masculinity” category. You can imagine the responses of the “progressive masculinities” and “overtly misogynistic masculinities.”


Yep. Stereotypical. But then, what do we expect in an age when one must of necessity fit into some sociological category? What’s wrong with a guy who just prefers men’s soccer over women’s soccer. Does it entail that in the workplace he will be misogynistic or abusive? Does it mean that his attitude toward the level of athletic endeavor and performance will drive him to quash the advancement of a female in other venues?


Do we categorize one another because we seek confirmation of our beliefs, often beliefs made popular by social movements? We see the effects of anti-misogyny not in the equal treatment of women and men, not in the fulfillment of positive aspirations of talented women athletes like the Williams sisters, but rather in the condemnation of personal opinion. What’s wrong with some people liking women’s sports and other people not liking them?


All categorizations reduce humans to extreme positions, even when they include a set of overlapping categories in some Venn diagram. Each of us knows enough to realize we are walking oxymorons, containing as we do contradictory thoughts and beliefs. Our personal interactions have shown that each of us is more than “just this” or “just that.” Ambivalence is the human condition because we cannot escape the inevitable variations that we encounter in people and interactions.


Yet, we continue to categorize, and our categories justify our judging others and their motivations. There are, I assume, men among UK’s football fandom who know that some women can outperform many men in an athletic endeavor. Again, the Williams sisters would provide stiff competition for many male tennis players. I think of that famous 1973 tennis match in Houston’s Astrodome between Billie Jean King, then 29 and at the top of her game, and the aging 50-something Bobby Riggs in which King took home the winner-take-all $100,000. It was dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” But Riggs, as I noted, was in his fifties and well past his prime of the 1940s and 1950s. The match drew a crowd of both men and women to the Astrodome and a very large television audience. It was entertainment.


That one of the surveyed UK football fans declares his disinterest in watching women’s football doesn’t necessarily mean that fan is abusive toward women, quashes their aspirations, or considers women inferior human beings. Misogynist is a category imposed by the researchers on the men they surveyed.


We all need to consider how we impose categories. Which of us wants to be pigeonholed as “just this” or “just that”?


*Published  20 Jan 2022 online as an one EPUB by Sage Journals under the topic of Sociology. Found at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385211063359  Accessed January 20, 2022.

Years ago on a prop plane flight over the West Coast, I could see the analog altimeter through the opened curtains of the cockpit. Yes, it was a time before we needed un-breachable steel doors to protect pilots from terrorists. On this short flight, the pilots never closed the drapes behind them, and because the plane was so small, I sat with the same view the pilots had.


Anyway, as we approached our destination, I could see the altimeter spin backwards like a dial on the time machine in the eponymous 2002 film. We hadn’t flown much higher than 17,000 feet on the way from Medford to Portland, so I could also generally gauge the descent by my approximate knowledge of the elevations of Cascade volcanoes outside my window.  During the descent the rapidly spinning hands on the altimeter revealed in numbers how rapidly we approached the ground. As we neared the airport, I grew curious about the accuracy of the instrument. I wondered how the pilots compensated for variations in air pressure. Surely, that parameter has to come into play. My own pocket altimeter works on the principle that ties altitude to pressure. I had used that instrument to demonstrate the relationship between the air and topography to college students during single-day drives from the Outer Banks to Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina. But I always assumed that my own calibrations might produce a small error, even when I used a United States Geological Survey benchmark at some  starting site. What if, I wondered, the pilots’ altimeter is off by ten feet? Were we in for a hard landing or a touchdown at the end of the runway?


In fact, the altimeter in my view did not read “O” when we touched down. It had gone below that elevation right before touchdown. I reasoned—falsely—the worst. “We’re going to land short of the runway.” But, no, as my writing this reveals years later, the pilots landed smoothly.


Obviously, in addition to doors that prevent a passenger from seeing the altimeter, pilots now have access to both analog and digital readouts for altitude. GPS has made a difference and reliable radio altimeters are the instrument of choice. Airlines use the latter for pinpoint accuracy. However, the reliability of even those instruments is potentially affected by other radio signals, particularly, it seems, by those associated with 5G’s C-Band which, in the United States, is stronger in rural areas. Thus, some airlines have halted flights into certain airports. The UAE’s airline, for example, flies Boeing 777s, planes with altimeters that might be affected by 5G. The airline has as of this writing temporarily halted flights to certain US airports.


The altimeter problem got me to thinking about the altitude of emotions and how we use the common expression of “letting someone down easily.” It’s a Lifetime movie problem, I guess. It’s a sitcom problem, also, as the characters of Seinfeld indicate during frequent breakups with the line “It’s not you; it’s me.” And of course, there’s the “crash and burn” image of a breakup gone bad, the kind of sudden dissolution of a relationship that teenagers might, and probably often, experience. In the extreme, such “crashes” result in Fatal Attraction obsessions.


Then, of course, there are those circumstances other than love relationships where the altimeter isn’t accurate. They all center on unfulfilled expectations, such the failure of a child of promise, the would-be novelist, the team eliminated in the first playoff game, and an indefinite number of other such scenarios of “being in the clouds” and then landing harshly or even crashing.


Knowing altitude is essential to pilots and passengers, but flying isn’t the only time we need to know the distance to a soft and safe landing. Each of us needs to have a reliable altimeter, especially during flights of hubris. 

Did you see either the original or the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still? One of my favorites, maybe because of Gort, the massive invulnerable robot that protects Michael Rennie in the 1951 version or Keanu Reeves in the 2008 version, both playing Klaatu, and both associated with the line “Klaatu barada nikto” spoken after each is wounded, one at the end of the film and the other at the beginning; yes, Gort, capable of saving or destroying. Yes, the original especially is, in my estimation, a "classic."


Those screen plays were adaptations of “Farewell to the Master,” a short story by Harry Bates. The earlier version made nuclear war the focus; the later version, environmental damage—who would have guessed? Anyway, if you haven’t seen the film—spoiler alert—an alien arrives on the planet with a message of doom: You humans better change your ways, or we’ll destroy you. In the first version, Gort stops every machine on the planet as a warning, thus the title.


Although I prefer to write over watching, I have on rare occasions seen a few minutes of various late night comedy shows. And what I noticed in those brief encounters is something I’ve been hearing other say. Mirth is dead, or, if it isn’t dead, is very much standing still.


As I walked from my office to lab or lecture hall during my career, I passed the lab of a colleague from which laughter spilled into the corridor. He kept his students in stitches while he taught. Good for him and good for them, I always thought. Toward the end of his career, I noticed little or no laughter emanating from his lab. When I asked him about it, he said his students seemed to lack a sense of humor. Shortly after that conversation, he retired, citing  that lack of humor was one of the causes. “Time to do other things,” he had said. And I had to agree, as I did not long after that. Over the course of my career I found a decreasing openness to mirth among my students.


Now there could have been many reasons for my observations, none of them scientific. Maybe my colleague's humor and mine were just out-of-date. After all, comedy does often rely on relevance to the lives of the audience. If I listen to a broadcast of a Bob Hope show performed before a military audience during and shortly after World War II and the Korean War, I hear soldiers in the audience responding to jokes that largely go “over my head,” mostly because Hope tailored his jokes to the audience before him. And maybe my colleague and I were just telling jokes that had no relevance to our young audiences. That is definitely a possibility.


But there are some kinds of humor, such as statements about the topic at hand or about objects or stereotypes that transcend generations. And there are puns that derive from language common to young and old alike that, though considered a “lower form” of humor, should strike some funny bone in the brain that speaks the same language. And to my colleague’s and my disappointment, even those seem less effective. Yet, neither of us was unaware of pop culture and that which occupied the nonacademic brains of those young academicians.


And that brings me to my statement that mirth is either dead or standing still. By that I mean I and others have observed that unless humor is directed by the late night talk show host toward only political opponents, there’s little to laugh about. And certainly, there’s no joking about the politicians who belong to the favored class, which, at this time, seems to be the Left. That was particularly true, I believe, during the Obama-Biden administration, and it appears to be true now. So, when former college athlete Gerry Ford tripped on the steps to the plane, it became the make-moment for Chevy Chase’s career, but when Joe Biden fell not once, but twice one the steps to the plane…well, it was a windy day.


I don’t know how you feel about comedy that derives its material from the same source and that fears to borrow from other sources. Personally, I would like to see humor from both sides of the political spectrum and from all sides of the social spectrum. Those who can’t make fun of themselves will ultimately fall into hopeless hubris, the greatest of all human follies.


One of the key components of good humor is unexpectedness. Another is a point of view that turns ordinary perspectives upside down. From what I can tell, there is nothing unexpected in the monologues of the late night talk show hosts. If you expect a joke about a Republican, you will get it. Seems that nothing any Democrat does or says—no matter how absurd, contradictory, or hypocritical—has any humor in it. Unexpectedness is gone, and with it the kind of humor it underlies. At the same time, the snarky hubris that draws on only one source of humor has turned to boring repetition. Might as well read a phone book.


I think Gort has come to the planet, has seen that humans can’t be saved because they will continue to do what they do, and has decided to make the mirth stand still.

The “wisdom of Solomon” hasn’t been the standard in most American elections. It might not have been a standard during any election anywhere. Immediate political and social concerns, international pressures, and economic matters probably motivate many voters who want “their” solutions embodied in the elected official. But wisdom? Is there such an animal, or is it a unicorn appearing in a flight of fantasy?


If we limit our definition of wisdom to “understanding” and “acting on some utilitarian ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number,” then wisdom can still have an inimical effect on individuals, especially on those concerned with personal freedom.


Is there a truism, an axiom, by which we can judge a leader’s wisdom?


If there is an underlying Truth about wisdom, it might be that relationship between facts and understanding encapsulated in one of the surviving “fragments” of Heraclitus. The Ephesian wrote, “One can’t have facts without understanding nor have understanding without facts.” Well, that’s the gist of it if not the exact words from the papyrus scroll.


So, there’s an interdependence between facts and understanding. In the current Age of Misinformation, one of the components is woefully lacking in those who “lead.” Take, for example, the mask mandates. The world went through at least a year of a pandemic before anyone attempted an experiment on the efficacy of masks; yet, many leaders proclaimed that masks stopped the spread of the disease. Recently, the CDC announced that cloth masks do not stop the spread of COVID-19 and that the only partially effective coverings are approved surgical masks. But the US President, who has worn a mask during a Zoom meeting and who recently took off his mask for a brief appearance before the Press, insists with other government officials, that masks “save lives.” Take, also, the numbers of people who have died specifically because of the disease. The US Vice President recently said the number was 200,000,000. Have you driven through the empty cities? The US population, if that “fact” were correct, would be only a third of what it was two years ago. Take the claim that the vaccines stop the spread of the disease, also. What’s one to do with Pfizer’s recent acknowledgement that the vaccines don’t, in fact, stop the spread? And what is one to do with the fact of infections among the vaccinated? Or take the effect of the Omicron variant that wended its way through the American population in late 2021 and early 2022. University administrators in at least one Ivy League school required vaccines and boosters for all students entering the 2022 spring semester because of Omicron, even though there is no factual evidence that they prevent the spread of the disease. And what of the fact that males between 18-24 are more likely to suffer some serious consequences from the vaccine, such as myocarditis, than they are to suffer from Omicron? Finally, take a Supreme Court Justice who said that COVID-19 has hospitalized 100,000 children, many of them on ventilators. From what treasure-trove of facts did she pull that bit of information, which a brief search through CDC records would negate?


No, we don’t live in an Age of the Wise. Wisdom isn’t the forte of those in charge, and maybe that’s a product of their not coupling facts to their understanding.. If the President, Vice President, Supreme Court Justice, multiple governors, and college administrators had just paid attention during their introductory philosophy classes in college, they might have stumbled upon that fragment of Heraclitus.


But could those who lack wisdom have understood what the philosopher wrote? Keep in mind that in the fragment, understanding and facts are dual prerequisites.

How is it possible that a group of highly educated researchers never heard anyone say, “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop”?


Did Pfattheicher, Lazarevic, Westgate, and Schindler of Aarhus University not have grandmothers? Those four published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled “On the Relation of Boredom and Sadistic Aggression.” * Surely, someone along the paths of their development said something about idleness.


The researchers claim to have shed some light on why people troll people online and perform physically sadistic acts that I will allow you to list from your experiential catalog of human behaviors. They do acknowledge that there are some people who have high dispositional sadism, that is, that some people are pathologically sadistic. Such people appear to be continuously motivated to hurt others. But for the rest of humanity? Well, that's where boredom plays its role.


Who hasn’t seen train cars with graffiti? Who hasn’t seen a few scenes from a teen movie with “mean” girls? Who hasn’t heard of MS-13 atrocities? Or those atrocities of World War II's Nazis in Europe and Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, Sadam Hussein’s sons in Iraq, or ISIS’s terrorists throughout their brief Caliphate? Given boredom and power over others, people live in the Devil’s workshop. I know that because my grandmother told me, and my mother, and my teachers, and my experiences, all telling me that boredom leads in many instances to bad behavior, including cruelty.


With Stanislav Andreski, ** a critic of social science, I keep wondering why social scientists and social psychologists just keep pointing out the obvious. Are they bored?


*Pfattheicher, S., et al. 2021. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(3), 573-600. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000335.   Accessed January 15, 2022.


**Andreski, Stanislav. (1972) Social Science as Sorcery. London: Andre Deutsch.

More bad news about this place we call home.


Some 40 years ago, I told students studying historical geology and paleontology that we were most likely a cause of the sixth mass extinction event. “Yep. Look around. This is what a mass extinction event looks like unless it’s caused by a giant comet or asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere to strike the surface. Yep. Species have always come into and gone out of existence, but every so often a bunch die out in a relatively short period. This is one of those periods.”


Of course, others had noted the possibility that the modern human age was an Age of Extinction. Some even acted to prevent extinctions, thus the list of endangered animals and the reintroduction of wolves and bison into Yellowstone. To use an old and rarely heard expression from the textile industry, we humans don’t cotton to other species sharing our planet. Oh, we say we do want them around. It’s nice to see little bunnies and deer frolicking in the forest or lions lying in the zoo, but we have our needs; we have our priorities. And when it come to choosing between those needs and priorities and bunnies and deer, well, suffice it to say, “Run Bambi, run.” (“But not onto the highway”)


In January, 2022, Robert H. Cowie, Philippe Bouchet, and Benoit Fontaine published “The Sixth mass Extinction: Fact, fiction, or speculation?” * In their research they studied invertebrates, you know, critters like snails and slugs. And what they found speaks, as they say, volumes about the current state of extinction. Cowie and company estimate that over the last 500 years between 150,000 and 260,000 such mollusks have died out. Sure, there are the those well known critters like the Dodo and the Elephant Bird, the Wooly Mammoth, the zebra-like Quagga, the African Black Rhino, and the once superabundant Passenger Pigeon that kicked the bucket, but biodiversity includes all life-forms, including the lowly snails and slugs. The researchers place the blame on you, well, not just you, but all the critters like you because, they say, “humans are the only species able to manipulate the Earth on a grand scale, and they have allowed the current crisis to happen.”


And in a related article published within days of Cowie et al.’s research, Evan C. Fricke, Alejandro Ordonez, Haldre S. Rogers, and Jens-Christian Svenning noted a decline in long-distance seed dispersal as the result of “defaunation.” ** Because about half of plant species depend on animals for seed dispersal, the loss of animals affects where plants can grow. As some places cool and others warm, plants adapted to specific climate parameters survive only by growing elsewhere. Otherwise, like the animals they depended upon, they, too, go extinct.


Seems there’s bad news all around. If you aren’t worried about a persistent virus, you now have to concern yourself with decreased biodiversity. Should we all move to Mars where we haven’t as yet destroyed any life-forms? We could start over, mend our ways, not kill off whatever “passenger pigeons” we find there the way we killed some 3 to 5 billion such birds in North America in just a few hundred years.


Well, scratch that idea. Remember the announcement President Clinton made when the the meteorite AlH84001 was thought to have a trace of fossilized Martian life? Apparently, it doesn’t according to Andrew Steele. *** The organic molecules found in some Martian meteorites and the very tiny “fossil” found in the Allan Hills meteorite that made the news in a press conference, appear now to be the product of abiotic synthesis. It’s not life that was there and became extinct. It’s organic chemistry in a marriage between water and minerals. If there ever was life on Mars that became extinct, we still have to find evidence for it. So, when humans get to the Red Planet, they won’t have another ecology to destroy.


​Is that the good news?

*Biological Reviews; open access, online: https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12816  Accessed January 13, 2022.


**The effects of defamation on plants’ capacity to track climate change. Science, Vol. 375, No 6577., 13 Jan 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abk3510. Online at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk3510.  Accessed January 13, 2022.


***Phys.Org. Carnegie Institution for Science. Online at https://phys.org/news/2022-01-martian-meteorite-materials-biological-geochemical.html. Accessed January 13, 2022.

I made the mistake this morning of turning on the TV. Regardless of the network, I saw transparently vitriolic people. Because electronic media now have eyes on more of the world than humans had for centuries, and because so much of what we view is through those media, all of us are subjected to caustic perspectives we might not otherwise have.


The word vitriol derives from the Latin word for glass, virtrum. To get to English, it traveled through medieval times to become by 1769 a word meaning “bitter or caustic feelings.” That, in turn, derives from the corrosive properties of sulfuric acid that for a few centuries was known as oil of vitriol. It seems that the glass through which we view the world is clearly acidic at this time.
All feelings are visible. Few in the mainstream and social media hide any of their caustic thoughts in what appears to be a conscious effort to shape the way people view the world.


But should I be surprised. Should I blame the ostensible increase in vitriol on mainstream or social media for an increase in vitriol and a distortion of perspective? Maybe every generation is destined to see the world from a vitriolic perspective.


A common malady that affects vision is a change to the vitreous gel or humor that makes up most of the volume of our eyes. With time, the gel can differentially change in thickness or viscosity and can even detach. An ophthalmologist can repair the organ of vision through a vitrectomy followed by the emplacement of a clear silicone oil, saline solution, or invisible gas.


What we appear to need is an analogous operation to increase the clarity of vision and repair  the deformed vitreous in the eye of the media. If we continue to see the world through the glass of the media as they now view the world, we will look through eyes whose vitreous gel provides only a caustic perspective.

COVID-19 taught humans a lesson: In a time of pressing needs, consensus isn’t wisdom.


I think of films like Armageddon, Deep Impact, and Don’t Look Up, which demonstrate our futility in finding solutions for immediate problems or our folly in redirecting our attention to matters irrelevant to the crisis at hand. Of course, in films screenwriters are free to choose whatever kind of ending they wish: Happy, sad, or incomplete. And they can also write in characters with the wisdom of Solomon or the ignorance of a high school sophomore. But in real life where the only script writers are government officials, the pressures of finding solutions to threats like a pandemic have revealed the limits to human wisdom and the weaknesses in our emotional structure.


If I look over the reactions of government officials to the pandemic, I am not inspired to confidence that they could prudently handle an incoming comet. Sorry, screenwriters, there would be very few officials I believe I could trust to take a plan from drawing board to effective reality. And one of the reasons is the self aggrandizement I see in those people who speak for the government. More than ever, policy is a matter of style and not substance.


The vacillating comments by government officials during the pandemic have earned them distrust: No mask; one mask; two masks; six feet; no gatherings; family only gatherings; quarantine two weeks; quarantine ten days; quarantine five days; two shots; a booster shot; maybe a shot every six months; maybe a therapeutic; maybe no therapeutic; travel; don’t travel; wear a mask on a plane; in the near future no mask on a plane; mask when not eating; mask between sips…. There’s something to be said for adapting to fluid conditions, but many of the adaptations are arbitrary at best. And the misinformation compounds the distrust.


King Solomon is famous for the judgment over the disputing “mothers.” Judges, who hold lives on the balance, are ideally Solomons. And the highest court of any country is ideally a place of wisdom. Not so, it seems. And I say that because of a fragment of Heraclitus: “One can’t have wisdom without knowledge or knowledge without wisdom.” Supplant “wisdom” with “facts.”
During the arguments about mask mandates in the case National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, 21A244 before the Supreme Court, Justice Sotomayor said, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, many on ventilators.” In fact, that was not the fact. And the difference between the reality (about 4,000 children with maybe 20%, or 800, on ventilators and many of the hospitalized only incidentally COVID-positive) and Sotomayor’s “fact” is astonishing. Without the “real facts,” this Justice, at the time of this writing, intends to decide.


When I see fawning reporters interview favored personalities, I conclude that the show, the performance of the moment, is more important than the logic or science behind proposed actions. Take the statement by MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. She said, “I am a Fauci groupie, a thrice vaccinated, mask adherent.” Yet in the same TV segment, she spoke of her fears of getting the Omicron variant. She appears to be one of those who, having been told that the comet is approaching, believes the worst scenario is inevitable, and so she lives her life in fear while holding onto her sycophancy. And in New York, the most vaccinated place in the country? Well, at the turn of the year, the COVID cases are peaking, and people are panicking in lines for tests, some standing five-and-a-half-feet from others who, by the way, might have no symptoms. And among those infected with Omicron are the most vocal celebrity adherents of vaccines who are also the loudest judges to condemn the unvaccinated.


COVID has been a real concern, of course, and precautions are prudent. Although the weakest are vulnerable to an Omicron infection, the majority of infected seem to be capable of surviving the variant with OTC therapeutics. That the super-vaccinated and super careful have been infected seems to indicate that a disease goes where whimsy takes it.


Setting aside the political agenda in Don’t Look Up and considering only the ending (spoiler alert), one can see the parallel between government solutions in the movie and government solutions in the current state of affairs. Those who propose solutions are not, as they believe they are, modern day Solomons. And the many “leaders” who have hypocritically disobeyed their own mandates by feasting and partying maskless among groups demonstrate that self aggrandizement is as much a part of the decision-making process as is any set of facts.


So, like many, I have to say that much of what I hear coming from government officials seems to be unscientific and foolish. Much is style and not substance. And much of what they enact or decide has no influence on the whimsy of a virus or the trajectory of a comet.