Remember that “no taxation without representation” cry from revolutionary war days? It’s baaaack. At least, it’s back in Alabama. So, why should I, a Pennsylvanian care?
 
Here’s the gist of Alabama Senate Bill 107. “Under existing law, the planning jurisdiction of a municipality, including the approval of subdivisions, extends for five miles from the corporate limits” (ll. 22-25 p. 1). * Senate Bill 107 would reduce or eliminate that reach.
 
Here’s the effect of the law. If someone lives in a suburb of a city or even a town of 6,000, and wants to put a pink flamingo statue in the yard, but the city has an ordinance against pink flamingo statues, then the city authorities, the policing authority of the city, can impose a fine on the home owner if the house lies within that five-mile radius of the larger municipality. Apparently, the current law which SB 107 replaces would extend police jurisdiction and with it the right to collect taxes to support the police. “This bill [107] would also provide for audit by the Department of Examiners of Public Accounts of any expenditure by a municipality of funds derived from taxes and fees levied within its police jurisdiction” (ll. 1-3 p. 2).
 
Now, you might be a city dweller in another state whose reaction is, “Holy cow! Who cares. It’s Alabama, and I live in the middle of New York City (or some other city). Doesn’t affect me. Besides, look at all those outsiders coming into our town, expecting police protection while they tour the Met or Broadway. Who pays for those police? Yep, I, a New Yorker, do. And what about all those outlying people who share our municipal sewage and water systems. ‘Tax ‘em,’ I say.” 
 
Ah! Modern civilization. The Founding Fathers are probably scratching their skulls. “What have we created?” they ask. “All this, all this big country, started out because we didn’t want to pay taxes to an absentee colonial landlord, one whose reach extended not just five miles beyond England, but thousands of miles.” 
 
Ah! Modern dilemmas. A complex society gets more complex by the day, it seems. And one of the reasons is the conflict arising from neighboring jurisdictions. But isn’t that the way of the world. Isn’t there always the conflict of jurisdictions? If not taxing jurisdictions, then social ones, or even personal ones. Is a continuing problem in human affairs the conflict of people with overlapping spaces, literal and figurative? 
 
Do we all need the oversight of some “Department of Examiners of Public Accounts” to keep us under control, to stave off social chaos? Can’t we do it on our own? Can’t we keep order without outside policing over which we have no control, that is, policing to which we must submit or things as we know them will fall apart? 
 
The territorial imperatives that drive so many of us to protect also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. Conflict from such expansion seems, to me, to be inevitable. It’s a problem that occupied the minds of the Founding Fathers as they wrestled with Federal vs State control. That problem has never been completely resolved, with the larger entity incessantly seeking more power and reach and the smaller entities doing what they can to protect their autonomy. It’s the stuff of tribal warfare run wild. So, yes, as a Pennsylvanian, I’m interested in an Alabama law because it encapsulates one problem that persists in American society, if not in all societies.
 
Beaches. Now, there are the places that exemplify the conflict. Some beaches are designated “private” whereas others are called “public.” The homeowners who pay high taxes for their beachfront properties want exclusive use of their beaches right down to the neap tide low water line. In Rhode Island, the mean high tide line is a boundary above which visitors can’t trespass onto the beachfront property owners’ land. ** Fines accompany such intrusions. The push to eliminate those fines, which are essentially taxes imposed on outsiders has been met with angry homeowners’ complaints. “We pay the taxes. Why should others use our land?”
 
And one can see the dilemma. What if visitors—outsiders—pollute the beach or destroy dunes? The homeowners lose both the quality of their beach lives or the safety provided by dunes. The local authority provides policing. Why should locals pay for policing those who use their beachfronts? Homeowners see the elimination of the fines as a mechanism for stealing their property, property by the way, that a single hurricane can obliterate by washing it into the sea. But that’s not the only problem: In a litigious society, beachfront homeowners could be held liable for strangers who suffer an accident on their beaches. 
 
The dilemma of those who enforce laws within prescribed boundaries is that physical boundaries vary because of natural processes, and imposed boundaries are arbitrary and result from agreements or battles of one kind or another, hot fights or cold diplomacy. Mean high tide line is an example of a shifting natural boundary. If it were up to the homeowners in Rhode Island, their properties would extend into the littoral zone, giving them control of the surf. If it were up to the beach visitors, the public area would extend from surf to dune, and no one would pay a fine for simply walking on the beach or fishing in the surf at high tide.
 
I wrote above that territorial imperatives that drive so many of us also drive us to increase our territories or prohibit others from using what we believe we own exclusively. That applies to thought and knowledge, also. I remember an esteemed colleague returning from a meeting of science department heads shaking his own head and saying he encountered an unusual form of the territorial imperative. In devising a new curriculum in the earth sciences, he had included a bibliography germane to the courses. In that list of books were ecology and biology books. A colleague in the Biology Department objected, arguing that those were biology books and not matter for earth scientists to consider. This, mind you, was in a university. Knowledge, it seems, is owned. It’s an intellectual territory to some, and no “outsider” has the right to it. 
 
I can’t leave without an anecdote. During my years as a professor, I took students on many extended field trips. On one of those, I set the students to the task of seeing whether or not there was a correlation between beach particle size and the slope of a beach. The students used theodolites to determine slope and collected beach materials for later size analysis. As we traveled along the East Coast from beach to beach, we came across one in New Jersey that was designated private, the entrance to which was guarded by college-age people sitting at a desk to collect fees or to restrict entrance. Of like age to my students, the “guards” were amenable to our brief excursion onto the beach for a college assignment. While on the beach with their tripods, theodolites, stadia rods, clip boards, and collecting baggies, one group of the students was approached by a lady who said, “Now, I’m on the beach committee, and I need to know what you are doing.” A quick-witted student looked at her and said, “Why, ma’am, we’re measuring for the bridge.” She went away puzzled, probably headed to call the other committee members to ask about the bridge. No doubt she didn’t consider that it would have been a bridge to Africa.
 
But I can understand her side of the issue and the side of the Rhode Island beachfront homeowners. The society is set up on jurisdictions, and the jurisdictions are set up on boundaries. It’s the nature of societies from tribal units through cities, to states, and federal governments to guard what they have and extend when they can. That the principle of jurisdiction applied to a set of biology reference books just indicates how deep the need to control and extend territories is in the human psyche.
 
Is the lesson here a Buddhist expression? “Do not look for a sanctuary in anyone except yourself (or, your Self).”  
 
*https://legiscan.com/AL/text/SB107/id/2266139  Accessed February 25, 2021.
 
**Nunes, Alex. 24 Feb 2021. Private property owners ‘utterly outraged’ by bill to decriminalize shoreline trespassing.  Online at https://thepublicsradio.org/article/private-property-owners-utterly-outraged-by-bill-to-decriminalize-shoreline-trespassing- Accessed February 25 2021.

Do you prefer struggle over calm?
 
Does the recent discovery that our area of the galaxy is a bath of binary stars indicate anything about us? About me or you? Yes, we’re in a tub filled with twins, maybe an Olympic-size pool. A recent count of binary stars within 3,000 light-years sums to 1.3 million star-pairs. * Many of those are stars of equal size, and a surprising number, to me, at least, of those gravitationally bound twins are as close as Pluto is to our Sun. I wouldn’t want to be the astrophysicist who tries to solve the three-body problem for a planet between two stars, a problem for which there is no finite mathematical final solution. Three gravitationally bound moving bodies? I’d rather calculate the final decimal in Pi or the square root of 2. On a human level it’s a bit similar to a judge figuring out what a divorcing couple is supposed to do with the children, some of who are stepchildren. “Yes,” the lawyer for one spouse says, “your Honor, Mr. So-n-So wants their common children one full week each month of aphelion and every weekend during perihelion except when he is away on business, and he wants the stepchildren at the very least during the equinoxes and solstices and during neap tides.” 
 
For comparison imagine Uranus, which sits midway between the Sun and Pluto’s average distance (at 19.2 astronomical units vs. Pluto’s 39.5 AU).** Now think of two gravity wells, that is, two Suns, Sun and Pluto-Sun at equal distance from Uranus. Disney would be hard-pressed to design a ride or waterpark with the physics of a similar paired pull, maybe a pull in large swimming pool with two fully-opened drains down which the water swirls and pulls little kids. “Margaret, I lost Junior down one of the drains at the waterpark.” 
 
Well, that’s Uranus in such a binary system. Of course, one might think that the chance of going down either drain is equal, given equal stars, but then, our hypothetical Uranus could possibly be more closely tied gravitationally to one over the other star and tend to swim close to or get pulled into one drain preferentially over another, especially if there are other drains, that is other planets exerting a gravitational pull nearby. Additionally, I should note that in the local plethora of binary systems, not all stars are twins, some couple white dwarfs with main sequence stars like our Sun, and that might mean one gravitational drain is larger and more powerful than the other.
 
Two drains. Two gravitational wells. Ever feel you’re the Uranus (pun intended) caught between two flushing systems, between two drains? I don’t need you to answer. You have had such an experience, sucked into the whirlpool of one or the other parent, one or another relative or friend, one or another social group, or even one or another belief. And the belief doesn’t have to be religious. 
 
When Kareem El-Badry and colleagues published their 3-D atlas of nearby binaries, they revealed that what I call “two-gravitational drain systems” are rather common within a radius of 3,000 light-years. Should it surprise us that we as humans are a microcosm of that local Cosmic structure? Two drains are common, and no doubt, here on little planet Earth, there are probably many three-drain systems that affect our behavior, perspectives, and attitudes. Even those of us who believe we are solitary entities like unbound or un-twinned stars, still have local drains that affect us, that influence our behavior. For planet Earth, those other planets play a role and act as gravitational drains. Even that little moon of ours affects the planet, so drains don’t have to be large. We get sucked into the smallest, the pettiest of conflicts and ideas.
 
Aren’t all of us born into a two-drain gravitational system of some kind, psychological, philosophical, or social? In every life there are drains that draw each toward positive and negative effects, drains that affect behavior: Good vs. bad habits, freedom from addiction vs. addiction, inner peace vs. inner rage. From binary solar systems to binary behaviors, that seems to be the nature of our universe and the nature of us. We spend much of our orbital energy going down or avoiding a drain of some kind. But what alternative universe would you want? Would you want a single Sun with a single planet in a perfectly stable orbit, a planet that unvaryingly swirls at the same distance from its nearby gravitational drain in perfect equilibrium? 
 
Having multiple drains pulling on us means that life is a constant struggle. Should we attempt to achieve a permanent balance? Not so fast. Many, if not all of us, would probably suffer the ennui of such equilibrium. Swimming against the pull of one drain’s whirlpool only to find ourselves only momentarily balanced between drains simply puts us temporarily in dead water. Come on. Admit it. You like the struggle even when you complain about it. You know you were born into it just the way planets are born into the whirlpools of their suns. How long would you be pleased with dead water with no intellectual or emotional whirlpool? Sure, you might float a little, and the stability would be restful at first, very peaceful, even, but you would eventually ask yourself what you are doing, and you would not be satisfied. Could you be happy with unending equilibrium, calm water, or a teetertotter that neither teeters nor totters. 
 
I’m glad astronomers discovered the multitude of binary systems. I’ve seen other such analogs of my life in nature or analogs of nature in my life that reveals how I am part of a complex Cosmos that demands struggle of its entities. Why should I think that the rules that apply to everything that surrounds me don’t apply to me? Go ahead, Universe; go ahead life: Unplug the drains and let me thrash about for control; let me choose the drain.
 
Think I’ll go for a swim in the pool of life. Don’t worry. I’ll watch out for the drains. I suggest you do the same.  
 
Notes
 
*El-Badry, Kareem, et al. A million binaries from Gaia eDR3: sample selection and validation of Gaia parallax uncertainties. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society  (2021) DOI: 101093/mnras/stab323.  https://phys.org/news/2021-02-binary-stars-solar-neighborhood.html
Summary at University of California, Phys.org, 22 Feb 2021.   Website accessed on February 21, 2021.
**One astronomical unit is 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.

Here’s the conversation of the day between Don and Chuck. You’ve heard it before.
 
Don: “Chuck, ever get the feeling that you live Bill Murray’s life in the 1993 film Groundhog Day? I certainly do every time I hear about climate change. In the film, Murray wakes each morning to the same day which he runs through with some variations because he knows the past and the future. You know how we can rewind a video, nowadays instantly going to the very minute and second we want to see again? Well, I feel I am Murray in a way. I know the video will rewind, but I don’t have any control; I see the repeated end and the repeated beginning. And I can’t make any significant changes in either. That’s our world film on climate change. I fear this film will run for a couple of centuries. Heck, we’ve been at this repeatedly since the nineteenth century when Fourier and Tyndall identified carbon’s potential effect on the atmosphere.”
 
Chuck: “You mean people have been discussing greenhouse gases for two centuries? Wow! I didn’t realize. You’d think we would have a handle on this by now. I remember that the Clinton Administration started spending money on climate with Al Gore in the lead, and then the Bush Administration played down its significance before the Obama Administration pumped up the spending before the Trump Administration dampened it right before the Biden Administration said ‘Let’s get out there and spend, baby, spend.’ If I get your meaning, I can see how we are living in an eternal Groundhog Day climate film.”
 
Don: “I guess that spending part is what bothers me. I did some of those government-funded studies on greenhouse gases and green technologies back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I even wrote a policy for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania only to find, Groundhog-Day-style, that the following administration junked it because it was the product of the previous administration. Then in the 2000s, I was approached again to redo what I had already done for the state. I’m Bill Murray! So, if I add up all the money spent to fund me, the graduate students and professional consultants I hired, and the sundries of the studies, I’d say the repeated research was an unnecessary expense in light of its being sanctioned and abandoned and sanctioned again.
 
“I’m not an economist, but I have observed a few economic principles in action, some supply-demand stuff and inflation and the like. Take home-viewed movies, for example. VHS players initially cost a bundle in the late 1970s and early 1980s, maybe as much as $2,000 per unit. By the mid-1980s, the price was in the neighborhood of $400, then less, and less, and less. Of course, the machines and their tapes are antiques nowadays, valuable, I suppose only to a nostalgic collector or to someone who still wants to wait to rewind one of those tapes collecting dust in a closet. As antiques they probably cost more now than they did originally. Home-viewing, of course, has jumped to different technologies and, with them, to different cost structuring as multiple providers compete. Anyway, after I read an article on the current administration’s estimated price of carbon, I began thinking about the cost of a VHS player way back then and of the analog of rewinding and fast-forwarding.”
 
Chuck: “So, when you talk about the price of carbon, you’re not talking about carbon as in diamonds or graphite in pencils. You mean ‘climate-change-carbon,’ that stuff we emit because we like living the way we live with relatively cheap energy for heating, cooling, electrifying, and traveling.”
 
Don: “Precisely, that kind of carbon, the stuff emitted by coal-fired power plants, oil-burning engines, natural gas furnaces and fireplace logs for heating homes, and the planes, yes, the planes, both public and private crossing overhead and spewing carbon into the atmosphere. So, I guess in 2021 we’re now once again going to revisit climate change, aka global warming, in the United States. We’re going to save the planet in a never ending replay.”
 
Chuck: “Well, that’s noble, isn’t it? That’s a cause worth the effort, isn’t it? You don’t want to have all those Jupiter Red-Spot size hurricanes hitting the vacation homes and old people in a Floridian retirement community. Or do you? Don’t you know the billions of dollars in damage they cause? And what about sea level. Yeah. There’s a problem for low-lying states like Florida. In fact, all the coastal plain states will lose property. And goodbye Bourbon Street, or at least, goodbye to much of the delta, or as Paul Simon calls it, to a “national guitar” that starts in Memphis and runs down to the Gulf.”
 
Don: “I understand. I’ve heard this before. Bad things are predicted if we don’t stop global warming. But I just wanted to mention the cost, the cost of carbon emitted by our civilization. There’s a recent study that is serving as the new guideline for the current administration’s efforts to curb climate change. According to an estimate by Raphael Calel and others, carbon emissions will cost between $10 trillion and $50 trillion over the next two centuries. * Now you can couple that bit of research with what will become the newly revised ‘social cost of carbon.’ Anyway, there’s also a group of distinguished people who have offered a ‘roadmap’ to the administration that includes raising the recently reduced estimated economic cost of carbon dioxide from $1-7 per ton to $50 per ton. Fifty bucks per ton! Now I know these guys are smart economists, probably far smarter than the average Donald, but why $50? Well, say the authors, ‘Climate science and economics have advanced since 2010…Devastating storms and wildfires are now more common, and costs are mounting…and new econometric techniques help to quantify dollar impacts.’ ** As usual, I look for analogs, so I have to ask, whether or not there is an analog between the costs of VHS players and climate costs. Those players started out high, then went low, and are now back up with antique players. Carbon was given a value; it was dropped; and now it’s back up to that $50 per ton. But is there an inverse rule here? That is, unlike VHS players whose cost came down as the number of VHS players went up, with an increase in all those little carbon dioxide molecules the cost has just risen. However, before you interrupt, let me say I see the limp in the analogy.”
 
Chuck interrupting: “I was going to say apples and oranges.”
 
Don: “So, those guys who recently raised carbon’s cost to civilization to $50 per ton probably would argue that they see normalized costs, if I understand correctly. That is, they’re taking the nominal costs, the costs in dollars as measured in a specific economic time frame, and they’re changing the cost according to some standardized scale that adjusts for matters not like inflation, but rather in carbon’s increased effect on the planet. In doing so, they consider what they call ‘natural capital,’ you know, things like soil or water resources that, once lost, cannot be regained.”
 
Chuck: “Normalized costs?”
 
Don: “To understand normalized costs, consider hurricane damage. When devastating Hurricane Camille hit in 1965, it had a nominal cost of $1.4 billion. Standardize that or normalize that, and the number jumps to $26.4 billion. Obviously, that jump is to the value in dollars either averaged since 1965 or determined by today’s value. Makes sense, right? When I was a kid bread cost less. You know the statement about the decreasing value of a dollar based on purchasing power. On a normalization scale, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 cost $116.9 and $62.2 billion in damages, even though their nominal costs were each $125 billion. Making normalizations of costs is easy to do in hindsight. Heck, everything is easier to do in hindsight. I don’t think Japan would have attacked Pearl Harbor if it could have operated by hindsight. ‘Seemed a good idea at the time,’ Isoroku Yamamoto probably said seven months later when the Japanese Navy lost the Battle of Midway. Hindsight. Yeah, Bill Murray had it in Groundhog Day and used it to find the human value of his actions. I wish we had it for climate costs.
 
“I guess I question all this back-and-forth climate spending and valuations of carbon emissions because of one inescapable fact: People can’t really predict well. They can make guesses, even educated guesses, but no one, not even Nostradamus, is a Nostradamus when it comes to details. Fifty bucks per ton as opposed to the discarded $1-7 bucks per ton? That’s the outcome of a prediction whose details cannot be known except in hindsight. I know, I know, Chuck, you’re going to say ‘The models, the models.’ Am I right?”
 
Chuck: “Well, if things continue as they are, then such-n-such will occur. Southern Florida’s population will increase, more buildings will go up in low-lying areas, sea water will gradually replace shallow fresh ground water because of density differences, and costs will go up for everything every time a storm hits. After all, if you build another house, that’s another house that gets storm damage or that goes under the waves like Atlantis. So, yes, I can see why they increased the value of a ton of carbon to $50.”
 
Don: “Given the historical nature of inflation and population growth, I can see that an increase from $1 per ton of carbon to as much as $50 per ton of emitted carbon seems like a reasonable inflated estimate to the folks who are part of the in-the-know loop. As an outsider, I can only guess. But unlike the more accurate hindsight economics of damage caused by Katrina, Harvey, and Camille, the future economics we’re dealing with include unknowns as much as knowns, or maybe even more unknowables than knowables. And the new cost estimates are all founded on unvarying beliefs that the world is getting warmer and that that’s a bad thing caused by humans.
 
“I made a prediction when VHS players first came out and cost as much as $2,000. I told my kids that the price would come down and also that we didn’t need to spend a bunch of time and money sitting still in front of a TV that suddenly cost an extra couple of thou to watch. Well, I was right. The price did come down. And I was wrong at the same time: Even with parental restrictions that made continued room for school work and sports, we did start spending some time watching rented movies. It’s easy to be both right and wrong, especially when it comes to human behavior. It’s folly to conclude that one can accurately predict details on the basis of general trends and vogue assumptions that world temperatures will rise exponentially. Everyone buys into the hockey-stick temperature rise based on one tree-ring study but ignores another tree-ring study that shows a different pattern; everyone is sold on the same assumptions. What if the predictions aren’t as detailed as they pretend to be? This might not seem relevant here, but since she was a teen, my wife has contended that ‘You never know who you are until you are.’ Or, in another version: 'You never know what you are until you are.' With climate forecasts, I’d have to paraphrase her and say, ‘You never know if your model is correct until your prediction comes true.’ Or, rather, ‘You never know if your actions today won’t produce unintended consequences until the unintended consequences bite you in the economic butt.’ Wean ourselves off fossil fuels? Noble idea, right? ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘but let’s try to anticipate the negative consequences, and let’s consider that human behavior and circumstances are often unpredictable. Who knew the toll of the 2020 pandemic in 2019? Everyone knows the toll in 2021. Hindsight. Rewinding the tape.’”
 
Chuck: “I see what you mean, but those guys who push for the upward revision of carbon costs have included what past projections don’t include, the so-called natural capital costs, the costs that come from environmental effects. Dry out the soils and lower the water tables, and you destroy agriculture, and that affects everyone by making food scarcer and more expensive. You can’t be narrow-minded and think only of tax dollars and fossil-fuel jobs.”
 
Don: “True, but putting a specific price tag on carbon convinces people that it’s okay to spend trillions on a green economy now because it might save trillions over the next two hundred years. Might. There’s no guarantee. What if the economic prognosticators operated from faulty assumptions? What if we enter another Little Ice Age like the one from which we just emerged? What if they didn’t take into account the ramifications for people alive right now?
 
“Should I assume that the climate prognosticators practice what they preach? Or does all this climate stuff apply only to those who have no power? On a gut level, the hypocrisy in all this bugs me. I know that’s an emotional issue, but it’s one that has consequences for the so-called little guy who is going to pay a hefty price for carbon. As an example of hypocrisy, take the person that the current administration put in charge of climate change policy on the international stage. As a politician, he actually fought the emplacement of windmills in the waters offshore his luxury digs. The late Ted Kennedy also objected to those same windmills. Everyone wants green energy until it affects his backyard, or should I say, New England waters. The new climate tzar now argues that Earth will reach a ‘tipping point’ just under a decade from now. Once we cross that point, well, there’s no turning back he argues. Venus here we come. Unstoppable greenhouse gas effects will turn the planet into Hell. Deserts all around the world will expand. We’re all gonna be toast, is the general idea.  
 
“Think of that tipping point prediction. It was supposed to occur some years ago; then it moved forward when it didn’t occur; and it moved forward again. Fast-forward the tape, and then rewind it; that’s what we keep doing. But the film is always the same movie. What if we do reach that tipping point only to find out that it means that we prevented another ‘ice age’ from occurring or at least that we staved off the next ice advance by a couple tens to a couple hundred thousand years? Do Canada, northern Europe, and Russia want ice sheets one-mile thick plowing over their cities? What would cost more to Canadians, the complete loss of their country to invading sheets of ice as in the last ice advance or a bit of warming that moves the corn and wheat belts into their farmlands? If I were Canadian, I’d gamble on becoming the world’s bread basket and developing ethanol refineries.
 
“But just consider the current political plan and the question it raises. So, if the United States undoes its reliance on fossil fuels to the detriment of its living citizens in favor of its future citizens and does so on the basis of an economic estimate, will one country change the destiny of the world? Will the USA impose restrictions on itself while other countries continue to serve their economic interests in the short term? And lost in the big shuffle, you, the little guy has to find some way to pay for the increased costs of electricity and gasoline. So, what happens to you? Certainly, nothing will happen to the self-established and wealthy elitists. If their past and current behavior is a predictor of their future, they won’t worry about the cost of carbon because they won’t live by any restriction. But look what happened in California and Texas, the grids dependent on green energy, on windmills, failed the customers.
 
“Considering costs, I find this climate stuff, regardless of what the experts say, to be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s that kind of planet, a planet on which the consequences of doing one thing result in unintended consequences to something else. Let’s say that by spending trillions on green technologies, we go full throttle on allaying our fears that we’ll all roast in the greenhouse. Well, then that could mean using up valuable metal reserves.”
 
Chuck: “Metal reserves? What’s metal have to do with climate?”
 
Don: “Think solar panels. Now think cadmium, gallium, germanium, indium, selenium, tellurium, and most of all silver. Let’s say we want to turn the Sahara into a land of solar panels. Cover the entire sunbaked land, say. Sounds like a good idea. All that available sunshine and all that empty space. We could leave some pathways between rows of panels for caravans of camels. But covering, let’s say, just a fifth of the Sahara with solar panels would put a serious crunch on the supplies of those metals I just mentioned.
 
“And remember I said there would be unintended consequences? When you think of solar panels, what color comes to mind?”
 
Chuck: “Black.”
 
Don: “Yep. Black. Remember your blackbody radiation lessons in physics? Can’t have light-colored solar panels that reflect sunlight that could be converted to electricity. Absorption is key; thus, the color. So, imagine covering the Sahara with black panels, that is, converting a light-colored, highly reflective landscape into a dark, absorbing one. Solar panels have a limited efficiency; they need all the light they can get. That means that blackbody radiation takes over. A surface that, though hot under lots of sunshine, becomes hotter by the absorption and reradiation of solar energy. According to a study by Zhengyao Lu and Benjamin Smith, a solar farm the size of the Sahara would produce four times the current world electricity need, but…and here’s that big BUT: Once the ‘solar farm reaches 20% of the total area of the Sahara, it triggers a feedback loop. Heat emitted by the darker solar panels…creates a steep temperature difference between the land and surrounding oceans.’*** That process, they argue, increases monsoonal rains, increases plant growth in the Sahara which then darkens the landscape even more. A darker surface absorbs more solar energy. Lu and Smith estimate that a 20% coverage of the Sahara would increase the local desert temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius. That heating in turn would cause more warming at the poles, ironically. It would also, with that 20% coverage, raise world average temperature by 0.16 Celsius. Whoa! I thought this green energy stuff was supposed to ‘save the planet’ by cooling it.
 
“All those unpredictable and unintended consequences do what they always do, make, as Robert Burns wrote, the best laid ‘schemes o’ mice and men’ go astray. Peter loses money while Paul gains it. Bad for Peter; good for Paul. The plan to even things out just impoverishes one while enriching the other. Solar panels in the Sahara? Sure, we’ll simultaneously cool the planet by using less carbon-based energy and heat it by the simple physics of blackbody radiation.
 
“But, given the political and economic control of those who believe they can ‘save the planet,’ there isn’t much you and I can do short of running for political office, not something I have the desire to do. So, backed by political people who have in their heads that they know what is best for the planet, we’re headed into one of those ages when people live more for the uncertain predicted future than for the actual present because they are sure they know what is coming. They believe we will incur climate costs of $10 to $50 trillion over the next two centuries, but that they can offset those costs by spending trillions right now and de-establishing the sources of energy that made the modern world possible. And that’s not an exaggeration. There would have been no Industrial Revolution and subsequent Tech Revolution without fossil fuels. Should we also ignore the facts of past climate change, should we ignore that as the ice receded ten millennia ago, it made Canada, northern Europe, and Russia habitable. Keep in mind that those expansive and thick continental ice sheets melted before people began burning fossil fuels. Think, also, that the warmer world that melted the glaciers was accompanied by a sea level rise that led to the inundation of once exposed continental shelves, pushing the shoreline landward toward its current position in places a hundred or meters higher than the glacial low stand. All that happened without human interference.”
 
Chuck: “Well, that’s something to consider, but isn’t the warming faster now? And isn’t it true that once carbon gets into the atmosphere, it can stay a long time? We could be looking at centuries of a warm Earth, maybe even millennia. We might experience more droughts and more dangerous diseases that spread from the current tropics into mid latitudes.”
 
“I’ll skip over the paleoclimate and atmospheric history that says yes. For many humans and animals, bad things might happen. Instead I’ll mention that feedback loops occur all the time in Earth systems. Does a warmer Earth mean increased evaporation off the oceans, more cloud formation, more blocked sunlight, and eventually more cooling? Does a cooler Earth mean decreased evaporation, less cloud cover, more insolation, and new heating? What if the predictions are wrong? What if the projected cost is wrong. I had a general idea that the cost of the first VHS players would drop, but I didn’t know by exactly how much. Just remember that all climate models, no matter how inclusive they are, are subject to some subjectivity, some educated guesses and chosen algorithms, and definitely on what to include and exclude in the models. Wasn’t there a recent study that linked Earth’s magnetic field to climate? Who is going to control the Earth’s magnetic field or any of those Milankovich cycles that involve orbit shape, tilt of the axis, and precession? In the case of those many climate models, haven’t there been legitimate suspicions that some people with agendas have ever so slightly tweaked the data to support their foregone conclusions to convince the public? Don’t the wealthy people who are concerned about climate change continue a luxury lifestyle that includes flying to exotic places to discuss why you and I should not be allowed to fly to exotic places? Don’t many of those many researchers living on public money attend climate conferences around the world and then tell everyone else how to live while they themselves continue to enjoy a lifestyle afforded by a carbon-rich energy system? What’s their newest argument going to be? Will it be that everyone should see the economics, including the loss of ‘natural capital,’ as they call it? Don’t those projected economics favor spending trillions now to save trillions in the future?
 
“Back and forth we go. One administration questions the expenditures and policies centered on climate change, and the next one either fast-forwards the tape or does a rewind. And now, years after we have abandoned the VHS player technology, we can rewind and fast forward at incredible speed. Back and forth; forth and back. With the new technology, we can even skip to the end, bypassing all the near future to see, we think, the distant ending. But, in truth, regardless of the rewinding and fast-forwarding, only rewinding establishes reality because the only reality we can actually know is the one that’s come and gone. Remember what my wife contended from her teenage years onward: ‘You never know what you are until you are.’ We are individually rather complex entities, but we are nowhere in the ballpark of complexity when it comes to an entire Earth and extraterrestrial processes and interactions that influence climate. Those who are so sure that a tipping point is just under a decade away might live to see that no such tipping point is reached. And then what? Having spent trillions of dollars to prevent the tip, will they then say, ‘We were off by a year or two or a decade or so, or maybe even a century or more.’ Will they argue that we should continue to spend trillions of dollars because we all supposedly know that the tipping point is inevitable and that it will occur very soon?
 
“I hope we all live more than those next ten years and survive economically. It will be interesting to rewind the tape a decade from now to see those predictions in hindsight. Will we see ourselves replaying our own version of Groundhog Day, condemned to rewinding, fast-forwarding, and rewinding again?”
 
 
Notes
*Calel, Raphael, et al. Temperature variability implies greater economic damages from climate change. Nature Communications (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18797-8  Accessed February 21, 2021.
 
**NYU. How to calculate the social cost of carbon? Researchers offer roadmap in new analysis. Phys.org. 19 Feb, 2021.  Accessed February 21, 2021.
 
***Lu, Shengyao and Benjamin Smith. 11 Feb 2021. Solar panels in the Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate—here’s why. The Conversation. Online at https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992    Accessed February 21, 2021.

The Dodgers played the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, with victory claimed by the Yankees. The highlight of the Series occurred when Don Larsen threw a perfect game. I was in school, but the teacher let us listen on a scratchy AM radio, so I heard the ending innings of the perfect game in a late afternoon study hall. I remember the game’s being the center of conversation for the rest of the day and into the next. Even though both kids and adults play thousands of baseball games yearly, perfect games are rare events. Although pitchers begin a game with hopes of perfection, perfect games come unexpectedly. Larsen had pitched poorly in his previous Series outing. 
 
I don’t remember whether or not I came down with the flu that year or the next. If I did get sick, I might have contracted the H2N2 flu that killed between 70,000 and 100,000 Americans. That flu might have killed up to four million worldwide, but “experts” believe that the 1956-1958 “Asian flu” deaths to have been in the neighborhood of two million plus. Compare that toll to the current 2.43 million who reportedly died from COVID-19 from late 2019 through early 2021.  
 
In the course of human events, a single game, though memorable for fans of a sport, is insignificant. That I don’t remember the flu but remember that game probably says something about my age, interests, and mental maturity at the time. But no doubt many older fans remember that game, either because their team lost or because it won. Remembering the game and not remembering the flu might indicate something about the nature of the brain when bad events occur. Whatever is not personal is often meaningless. One might even argue that it is only that which is personal that is meaningful. Now, I’m not speaking of meaningful erudition. You might not think a collection of coccolithophores or conodonts has meaning, but a petroleum company’s micropaleontologist finds them meaningful because they can provide a moment of discovery and a doorway to wealth. Do you have a meaningful interest that disinterests others? I like the study of the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, but my interest is largely a detached “academic-like” interest in its meaning for the development of the country; reenactors probably empathize with the lives of those who fought there, making the battle more personal for them. The arrow of time imposes entropy on empathy unless we find a way to personalize the lives of others.    
 
Whether or not someone has contracted COVID-19 has become one of those meaningful personal matters. With incessant negative news, the disease rose to the forefront and plunged into the emotional innards of human brains around the world, much more so than the H2N2 of the late 1950s. Yes, people were connected at that time by newspapers, radio, and evening TV news, but not to the degree provided by the ubiquitous media of the 21st century. And a worldwide emphasis on washing hands and wearing masks coupled with government-imposed cancellations of “normality” has made COVID-19 personal for just about everyone, including those who are now at the age that I was in the 1950s. Kids know there’s a disease out there. Kids related to the hundreds of thousands whom the disease killed are especially aware. But in the spring of 2020, thousands of college-age kids went to beaches and parties during Spring Break, mostly without considering the disease to be personally meaningful—until some of them contracted the disease.  
 
There’s something in humanity that drives hope in a time of despair and overshadows reality with detached unreality. In that detachment the mind seeks distraction from suffering and hopelessness. Too much empathizing is hard on the psyche. Intellectually, almost everyone knows that some people live without a chance for better times as uncounted millions do. And among those uncounted millions is an unknown number of survivors, people who endure regardless of their dire circumstances. But even in an age of instant worldwide reports, chance ignorance or purposeful dismissal of the circumstances of others prevails. It is difficult to personalize the unseen suffering of those in distant places. We know by experience that even with knowledge of suffering, people exhibit various degrees of empathy. We don’t equitably share care.  
 
As a young teenager in a time when news wasn’t 24/7, I probably had no idea that two million people—or more—were dying from H2N2. Without that knowledge, I had no motivation to empathize. Knowing, however, would not necessarily have made me empathetic to their plight unless I could have personalized it.  Since I can’t remember any family doctor telling me that I had H2N2, I cannot remember the pandemic except as a matter learned after its occurrence and in my adulthood, too late for empathy. 
 
I suppose the same can be said for any generation for whom suffering isn’t personal. Can Berliners or New Yorkers understand the suffering of the destitute in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where murder and rape, starvation, disease, and political and industrial corruption coupled with intrusive foreign interests have been commonplace for decades? If you live outside equatorial Africa, are you aware of those who seem to have no escape from Man’s inhumanity to Man in a country fraught with tribal warfare and murderers and slavers who act without compunction? 
 
But what is one to answer to such a question? The world is big, too big for any one person, even the most travelled among us, to comprehend all at once. And even when anyone does delve into the suffering of others, the effort and the empathy are limited by the ability to withstand the stress of overwhelming despair. We can personalize the suffering of one or a few. But hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Can we empathize without personally suffering? Isn’t that the reason playwrights insert some little comic relief into their tragedies? Too much despair makes one numb, as I assume many in the DRC have become in a vale of hopelessness. Yet, even in that particular vale of tears in what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness, children continue to play and lovers continue to love. And when they are not under personal attack, people in that “darkness” continue to sing and dance to soukous.
 
Maybe I was aware of the H2N2 pandemic back then. I can’t say. If I had been aware, then my memory of Don Larsen’s perfect game makes sense. It was a “comic relief,” a lift from depths. I can think of parallels, of radio shows and life “as usual” going on for millions during the death and destruction of World War II, for example, or for millions during the democides by socialist, fascist, and communist governments during the twentieth century. In a world of uncountable tragedies, comic relief is a mechanism for sanity and a glimmer, as we say, of hope. 
 
But hope for what? The answer, I think is for at least temporary perfection, a moment in some Garden of Eden before the Fall. Sure, all such moments are brief. We rejoice in them, nevertheless, because we know they come in the context of a human constant, the ever-present suffering the world imposes on millions at any one time. Just two weeks after Don Larsen threw that perfect game, the Hungarian Uprising led to a two-month period in which 700 Soviet troops and 2,500 Hungarians died in a civil unrest that precipitated an exodus of 200,000 refugees. Life was turmoil in Hungary while Yankee fans celebrated their victory.  
 
A perfect baseball game is a reminder that perfection, though incredibly rare and never lasting, is possible, and that a world with so many despairing people can occasionally provide one brief glimmer of hope. People still find time to love others and to strive toward some goal. The brain still finds temporary relief as the human spirit continuously seeks that perfect game. 

When you click onto the opening page of this website, you see a little statement about the importance of place. Consider your own relationship to place: To home or homes, hometown or current town, schools or workplaces, social gathering places, and religiously or spiritually significant places. Typically, we do so in the context of daily life, but sometimes we reflect, noting nostalgically our relationship to some places and fearfully our relationship to others. Reflecting on the nature of places past can give any of us a new perspective on places present. With that and before I begin, I ask you to make an audio or video message for future generations to hear. You will understand why in a few minutes.  
 
There’s a hotel in Hobart, Tasmania, called Doctor Syntax Hotel that was built in 1846. It derives its name from a famous nineteenth-century racehorse born in 1811. Winning three dozen races from 1814 through 1823, and euthanized in 1838, “The Good Old Doctor” was as well known in his time as were Secretariat, Native Dancer, and that other educated horse Dr. Fager in their times. The famous horse carried the name of a character in a long, serialized poem by William Combe. He wasn’t an especially big horse, standing about the size of an Arabian at 15 hands, and thus, shorter than a thoroughbred. Nevertheless, he was so successful and popular that he garnered the concern of the racing public when he fell after winning his last race. Fortunately, the concern was unnecessary because he hadn’t suffered any life-threatening injuries. Anyway, back to the Doctor Syntax Hotel where one can see a painting of the horse, and I assume, one can speak the vernacular like a native, use slang, invert subject and verb and direct object, and slur speech while ordering a vegemite sandwich. “One of those vegemite sandwiches and a Boag’s Draught I’ll have.” Doctor Syntax Hotel isn’t about syntax.
 
Without any historical knowledge of the hotel’s name, a visitor might think, “This is a place in which only standard formal English emanates from staff members’ mouths” and where people say “I shall” instead of “I will,” as in “I shall have a vegemite sandwich.” From a distance of 10,020.78 miles on a Great Circle between Pittsburgh and Hobart, I know that thought occurred to me when I saw the establishment’s name. “Wow!” I initially thought, “an establishment made exclusively for English majors and the literati. And Down Under, even closer to the snowy wilderness of Antarctica than the outback. Imagine that.”
 
Now, this is not an advertisement for the hotel. I am not a travel agent, have not been to Hobart, and cannot envision a time when I will book a room there. Nor is this an indictment of twenty-first century languages, dialects, and vernaculars. And it casts nothing against the hotel, Hobart, or Tasmania. No doubt they all have their charms: A 175-year-old quaint hotel with its own restaurant and a new menu introduced during the pandemic with clean, but, as shown in online pictures, rather stark rooms that offer modern amenities located in an Australian state with great scenery and a 40,000-year human history, the last eight millennia of which have been defined by its isolated position and indigenous people. Yeah. Eight thousand years separated from the rest of humanity. You can guess they didn’t have much in common with Europeans.
 
The peoples of Northern Hemisphere countries literally knew nothing about Tasmanians until the Dutch, French, and British began sailing around the world discovering and claiming lands for Thrones and merchant companies, and in the process subjugating and exploiting native populations. It was because of those explorations that the King’s English spread over the island of Tasmania. English syntax had arrived, and with it the tie to everything British, including favorite racehorses. As in most human endeavors, there’s was a downside though not so much for the British. Brits decimated the native populations whose vulnerabilities included inferior technologies and tribal units. Tasmania was the Americas in miniature.  
 
Having been isolated for so many thousands of years, the native Tasmanians fell to disease and cruelty, the last of the native population being shipped off to Flinders and their language dying with a quintet of women named Truganini, Sal, Suke, Betty, and Fanny Cochrane Smith. As in the loss of so many languages, the syntaxes of the various Tasmanian dialects were largely lost to the ravages of the invading British. Tasmania, after its long isolation, was a changed place. Fortunately, Fanny Cochrane Smith made recordings of her native Tasmanian language, preserving some of it for posterity. *  
 
The story of Truganini is an especially sad tale, but it is also one of endurance. She lost her family. Sailors killed her mother; a soldier shot her uncle. Slavers kidnapped her sister. Lumberjacks killed her fiancé and abused her. But she survived, and since her death Truganini has been an off-an-on focus of many people over the last century, including those who wrote plays, songs, articles, and books about her. She is also the namesake of at least two racehorses and one ship, a nineteenth-century steamer called Truganini. The place where she grew up, suffered indignities, married, and birthed has changed dramatically. Today a physical memorial recognizes her and her people, the Nuenonne people of a place now known as Bruny Island  that Truganini called Lunnawannalonna.
 
Although Bruny Island and the rest of Tasmania have undergone notable changes since their discovery by Europeans, apparently one unchanging characteristic of humanity persists in place. Her bronze memorial has been vandalized several times, an indication that any place, regardless of the changes it undergoes, provides a venue for human depravity. How might the place where you currently live have once been the site of similar inhumanities? Fortunately, the local historical society keeps coming up with the funds to restore the memorial and possibly even more fortunately, both Truganini and Mrs. Smith have been memorialized in the place we call the Web, where damage repair, should it be needed, is less costly. That I should have need to mention Web vandalism, only serves to underline the continuing characteristic of human cruelty that altered the places and destroyed the lives of so many indigenous Tasmanians.  
 
Syntax, if you recall your English lessons, is word arrangement. Each language has an idiomatic one though related languages share syntax, such as where verbs normally go in relationship to subjects and objects. English, a Germanic language, uses a slightly different syntax from its German parent which places past participles at the end of sentences. “The English had established penal colonies on Tasmania” becomes “Die Engländer hatten Strafkolonien auf Tasmanien errichtet” auf Deutsch. That past participle errichtet finds itself at the end of the German sentence separated from its auxiliary verb hatten. In all languages, native speakers acquire a sense of word order. Example? Easy. How about that last group of words? Acquire word sense in native all a languages order of speakers. Bad syntax equals meaninglessness.
 
Now think of taking a trip for an overnighter in The Doctor Syntax Hotel. If you speak any English, you’ll probably have no difficulty communicating with staff or other guests. Not so for Truganini or Fanny Cochrane Smith if they were still alive. Their land would be a foreign one. But then, almost everywhere anyone lives is a land foreign to a displaced or extinct indigenous people—even your current residence. Old neighborhoods give way to new ones just as forests and farms give way to new developments; houses once occupied by original owners are now the domains of another generation. Ethnic neighborhoods gradually succumb to time and mixing and to population thinning as an ensuing generation leaves for the grass on the other side of the fence and to population expansion as others move into the area.
 
There’s a high probability that you are not the first occupant of the land on which you reside. There’s also a high probability that previous residents would have difficulty understanding some, if not all, of your expressions, especially those associated with technology, like smart phone, 5G, social media, trolling, EV, or even emoji. You are in the process of changing not only place, but also language. Your text messages might even alter syntax as so many texts alter punctuation, spelling, and grammar. And globalization, begun long ago by those intrepid and often inhumane explorers, has introduced into your language new words and phrases and slight, but gradually effective tweaks to your grammar and syntax. That’s nothing new, of course. One need only look at the many Latin words and roots that filtered into English to see how the culture of one people can influence, or even replace, the culture of another. Remember that the Romans, and after them the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes occupied Celtic Britain, subjecting the locals to the same kinds of treatment the Brits were later to perpetrate on the indigenous Tasmanians.  
 
Not to worry about change to your place or language. You’ve made a video that records what you sound like and how you talk. You are a present-day Fanny Cochrane Smith, and you’re leaving a memorial like the bronze head of Truganini.  In making your video, you are leaving something behind for posterity to puzzle over as they sit and chat in The Doctor Syntax Hotel, many of them using a language you might find quite unfamiliar, possibly even unintelligible. Make that video. Your grandchildren three generations removed from now might be curious about you and the place where you once lived.
 
*If you are curious about how Franny Cochrane Smith talked and sang, see https://aso.gov.au/titles/music/fanny-cochrane-smith-songs/clip1/  Accessed February 15, 2021.

Not all, but many comedians for centuries have deigned to offend. In doing so, they put hubris in perspective and on notice. No doubt the kinds of ethnic and personal remarks of comedians like the late Don Rickles have always struck a dissonant chord in some audience members, but in general, anyone going to see Rickles at the height of his career knew that offending was the nature of his comedy. Rickles belonged to a generation that produced Lenny Bruce and that fostered comedians of the next generation like George Carlin. Irreverent? Yes. Offensive to some? Yes. Funny? Definitely—but, as they say, only you’re into that kind of humor.
 
As many would acknowledge, being made the object of someone else’s humor is uncomfortable at the least and, at the worst, well, here is a long list: objectionable, abusive, reprehensible, and repugnant. If we look at any of those adjectives, we can find in them a hint of wounded pride or perspective. We can also find a hint of wounded identity and exposed insecurity. Who wants to have either identity denigrated or personal security breached? In defense of our perceived personhood, we tend to take offense. And then we cast aspersions, sometimes casting them hard as in the current milieu of “cancel culture.”
 
But comedians on stage aren’t the only people who have to avoid hard-cast aspersions that hurt more than thrown tomatos. Now, people throughout society have to duck after they comment. Where did this originate?
 
I suppose a historian of free speech could point out that every age has had cancel culture and that not only comedians of the time, but also any outspoken person could be subject to cancelling, sometimes permanently, as in killed very dead. When the powers-that-be have no sense of humor and a heightened sense of identity and importance, any comment can put the commenter in jeopardy.
 
So, to ask when all this politically correct, don’t-offend-me milieu began leads to a simple answer: It’s always been there, at least as long as people have made fun of other people. I don’t know whether Neanderthals, Denisovans, or any of our hominin relatives had a sense of humor, but I assume that humans have long had one, especially since the time when languages became codified or standardized.
 
Now a word from our esteemed Teller of Anecdotes: For years I passed by the lab of a colleague who was known for his lectures interspersed with humor. Laughter cascaded into the hall outside that room, and in walking by, I would smile, knowing that students were enjoying their learning. And then, over the years, I began to notice less laughter and more silence. When my colleague announced to me his intention to retire in his early sixties, he said that “students aren’t the same. No one can say anything and no one gets humor, no one gets a joke. Teaching just isn’t fun anymore; it’s time for me to move on.”
 
Yep. Lack of humor. Two reasons: 1) Humor always has a context, a knowledge of history, culture and psychology and 2) Humor requires an audience with an open mind, if not totally open then at least cracked like a boiled egg’s shell. When students don’t know history, culture, or psychology, they have little reference for a joke. That’s not unusual for any of us. If you listen for example to an old radio broadcast of comedians like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, or their contemporaries, you’ll hear some jokes that make little sense because their contexts were the current events and people in a time unfamiliar to the twenty-first century listeners. Yet in their live radio shows, one can hear genuine laughter from the audiences who got the jokes.
 
But cultural context aside, consider that second parameter for humor, an open mind. Minds are sealed by the hubris and self-identity not only of individuals but also of the favored class, a class that gets its societal power from a self-assumed elitism. And since the young of every generation grow up under the influence of elders in charge of social acceptance, they fall into an intellectual line, making them likely to condemn what their elders condemn. When someone like Lenny Bruce comes along, the powers-that-be impose restrictions.
 
In an interview with ESPN’s Colin Cowherd, Jerry Seinfeld expressed what my now retired colleague expressed, that college students have a sense of humor tempered by or even eliminated by political correctness. Seinfeld said, “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’” Seinfeld continued by saying, “They [the college students] just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice’…they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”*
 
Colleges. Universities. Now they’re at the forefront of humorless cancel culture. And cancel culture means that no free exchange of ideas can exist without persecution. The folly is the lack of folly. A free sense of humor is dead. There’s no room for George Carlin or Don Rickles unless the comedian makes fun of individuals in a class of persecuted or estranged outsiders. No one in a protected group can be subjected to humorous denigration because “there is no such thing.” All satire has to be approved satire.
 
But as I said, there’s nothing new in this. Voltaire, were he alive today, would agree. Free-ranging humor is dead because satire must be approved; humor, controlled. The hall outside that retired colleague’s lab is probably always silent. That stream of laughter has been completely dammed. And with the demise of humor we have entered a new age of mind control and protected hubris. Boring for the openminded, but no doubt satisfying for those within the sensitive protected group.
 
And as in every past age of protected hubris, the end of the age comes with a fall. The dam that creates the reservoir of unheard humor eventually breaks under a natural pressure. “Pride,” as we can read in the Book of Proverbs, “goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Just who are the proud and haughty who have constructed the dams blocking the humor of our times? I can’t name  or make fun of them, of course, without risking cancellation.  

Notes: 
*Falcone, Dana rose. 8 June 2015. “Jerry Seinfeld: College students don’t know what they hell they’re talking about.” Entertainment. Online at https://ew.com/article/2015/06/08/jerry-seinfeld-politically-correct-college-campuses/   Accessed February 12, 2021.
Why did I write this? This morning I saw a story about a professor who lost his job because he asked a question. One of his students, and then a host of people who were not his students, cried foul to the university (St. John's). In their acquiescence to the pressure from those who would cancel a university professor for simply posing a question, regardless of its nature, the school fired him without considering the context of the question and the intellectual conversation it was designed to stimulate. Instead, it chose to walk down the path of those who without evidence called the professor a racist. When universities shut down the free exchange of ideas, the world loses any chance of escape from the cycle of freedom and censorship as one generation's free thinkers succumb to the whims of its censors who, in turn, succumb to erasure by a future generation. Cancellers beware lest you find yourselves disdained by your progeny. 

He seemed relaxed, contemplative even, when out of the blue he said, “I wasn’t even aware of the Kecksburg incident when it happened. Didn’t bother much with the local papers at the time; didn’t pay much attention to news beyond stories about the increasing flames of the Vietnam War. Aliens from other planets were no more than an occasional movie interest, Flash Gordon kind of stuff, the The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, others all obviously fictional. I never considered them to be real, but if I had to choose aliens I wish would visit, it would have been Michael Rennie’s character Klaatu.”
 
She asked, “Why bring this up in 2021? I once read that the Kecksburg thing was in the mid-1960s.”
 
“The Harvard guy,” he said.
 
“Who?”
 
“You know. There’s a Harvard professor who claims Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft that whizzed through our Solar System.”
 
“Ou?”
 
“Oumuamua. Ooo mu ah mu ah. Some kind of Hawaiian name, I think. Pictures of it were all over the news and Internet a while back. Looks cigar-shaped. Got a lot of attention at the time and, what with his label as a ‘Harvard professor’; the guy in the news has revitalized the interest in UFOs. Supposedly, Oumuamua didn’t originate in the Solar System. Been wandering through the galaxy, I guess. Anyway, the statement by the Harvard guy got lots of press, what with the desire to know if UFOs are ETs without a good navigation system or roadside service.
 
“I remember,” he continued, “when I first heard that people took UFOs seriously. It was about a year after the Kecksburg incident. Sure, I had seen space movies as a kid, but they were exciting fictions. In 1966 I was in my early twenties, and I met a guy in the teachers’ lounge where I first taught; if I remember correctly, he was a substitute teacher. He had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings from around the country. Yeah. Scrapbook. That was before the digital age, before even 8-tracks, tape players, and the Walkman. Anyway, he was eager to convince me that aliens had landed or at least had passed by, skimming the atmosphere, hovering at times, and in Kecksburg and Roswell, crash landing. I wasn’t very receptive. Call me the Doubting Thomas of UFOs type, even back then in my younger days. Since that time there have been bunches of books, TV shows, and films that derive the rudiment of their plots from that 1965 incident in Kecksburg. Just a couple of years ago in 2019 there was another film about it.”
 
“So?”
 
“I suppose it’s in the nature of us to want there to be ‘something more,’ ‘something outside’ what we are, especially during a frightful pandemic. Maybe the isolation of lockdowns makes us ponder the ultimate isolation of being alone in the Cosmos. Idleness from lockdowns breeds speculations about almost everything. More removal from the daily grind breeds more dependence on other ‘realities,’ the realities of the mind. When we can’t physically escape, we flee through imagination. Cabin fever stimulates the right side of the brain, especially so when we’re bombarded with so much unavoidable and entertaining science fiction. And the videos. Oh! The videos. South Floridians reported seeing a UFO on February 9, this year. Turns out it was a Navy test missile. There’s an eagerness among many to see a UFO or to jump to UFO as the default explanation for all apparently inexplicable things in the sky.”
 
“Sure,” she said, “I would guess that UFOs are mostly explainable, but not always immediately, and there’s that occasional one no one explains. What if the Harvard guy is right? He’s from Harvard, you know. Had to have some credentials to get that job. Probably has a long list of pubs. By the way, what’s his name?”
 
“Loeb, Professor Loeb. I’m sure he has a long list of pubs. But I question whether or not his pubs recently included bars as well as publications. Okay, that’s not fair. I take it back, but he’s not going to get direct evidence on Oumuamua; the thing whizzed past us. We’re too late to land on it the way we landed on other asteroids. We don’t have anything to catch it, so no one is launching a vehicle to land on it. So, what does he have for his evidence beside its trajectory, its shape, speed, and its bright albedo? Could its velocity be the product of gravitational boosts from the planets? And, also, he thinks it was in interstellar space until the Solar System ran into it. That doesn’t sound like a vehicle under the control of intelligence. What was the plan? ‘Hey, Yerzlk, let’s get into this thing and wait in interstellar space for a Solar System to come by.’ Do these aliens live for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands? Sure, there are lots of extrasolar planets, but in a galaxy with so much empty space, hitting one, or having one hit you has to be a long shot even in a rotating mass of stars.”  
 
He paused and then continued his argument by saying, “And if it were a powered vessel from outside our Solar System, why would intelligent life come all that way and not stop for a close inspection of a big blue marble? Was Oumuamua the invention of some life-forms that have no concept of life elsewhere but that just decided to wander the galaxy? Are Oumuamua’s pilots creatures that have the technology to travel through the Milky Way but who have no idea that a world in a habitable zone like ours, a world that has not only liquid water but also green colors on continents, houses life-forms? Didn’t they put windows in Oumuamua? I know that if I were passing by, I’d take a look. You know how many times I pulled over on the berm just to look at rocks I had not seen before, maybe a view from an overlook, or a quaint town with a coffee shop or diner?”
 
“But you’re assuming that the life-forms think like you. Maybe they’re on vacation with a destination in mind and no time to stop to see the Grand Canyon or Dollywood along the way. Maybe Ou-what’s-its-name is driven by parents who in turn are driven to ‘don’t-make-me-come-back-there’ anger by fighting siblings in the back. What if they have reservations on Alpha Centauri Bb? Heck, even at the speed of 49 kilometers per second, they’re going to be pushing to make those reservations four light years down the interstate or interspace highway. There’s just no time for stops. Or what if in passing through the Solar System, they saw nothing of interest in what we are or do?”
 
He thought of what she said and replied, “If you spend centuries traveling, wouldn’t there be need for a rest stop? Eventually, you run out of snacks. But to address your first point. Sure, I want to think that in the main aliens think like me. I want to think that given the principle of equivalence in physics, that the universe has only so many options on how it works, and that addressing how things work is pretty much universal like the physics, the chemistry, and the biology. How many conclusions can intelligence draw concerning what life is and where it is? How many definitions of life could there be? And how do we define intelligence if not by its curious nature? Experience might make the base of the knowledge pyramid, but everything from the foundation up is constructed by curiosity.”
 
“Good point,” she said, “but still only a point and made in tiny point of space that might differ if ever so slightly from some other point in space, like the one from which Oumuamua came. Maybe the rules of the Cosmos are uniform, but those rules allow for lots of variability. Geez, I just read that some astronomers think there might be whole sections of the galaxy with antimatter suns and stuff. There’s an online paper published by NASA about X-ray binaries and clouds of antimatter near the center of the galaxy. Imagine that a group of life-forms originated there. ** People who live exclusively in Quito, Ecuador, on top a mountain don’t know much about living at sea level in Miami, Florida. I’ll bet where they live shapes their sense of the world; and I can’t see untraveled residents of Appalachia who live in valleys enveloped by tall mountains knowing much about the lives of people who live on the streets in New York City enveloped by tall buildings. If there’s a noticeable difference among people here on Earth, wouldn’t there be an even greater difference between Earthlings and Otherlings?”
 
“What you just said…Hmmm, it makes me think of the ocean dandelion. I’ll circle back to that. But first, so the guy with his UFO scrapbook in the teachers’ lounge had closely followed the UFO stories for more than a couple of years. He was probably ready to accept that there are different kinds of intelligent life-forms. I know he wasn’t old, but he had to be at least in his late twenties or early thirties, well beyond the age of reason. He certainly was convinced that the aliens were not only out there but also in here, or at least, over us. He no doubt could be counted among numerous likeminded people stretching around the civilized world. People like those who flock to Roswell. People who read through the same news. Obviously, I wasn’t one of them, still am not one of them. I don’t have a membership in that club.”
 
“And the ocean dandelion? What’s that all about? You wander more than Oumuamua.”
 
“Well, consider the nature of it, the ocean dandelion. It’s a siphonophore. It’s an organism made of different organisms, not like us with our trillions of cells and bacteria operating as an individual human, but different. Apparently, the ocean dandelion’s individuals share a single source of nutrients from some central organ that acts like a stomach for all. They are individuals, but if they get separated from that central ‘stomach,’ they die, falling like petals from a dead flower. It’s a strange creature on the ocean floor and little understood except that it is a collection of members whose viability rests on the attachment to that single ‘stomach,’ with a community of individuals who each play a specific role like the cells of sponges that perform individual duties in support of the whole body.
 
“So,” he puffed up to present a conclusion to his analogy, “UFOlogists seem to be individuals dependent upon the same ‘news stomach.’ And I just don’t seem to have the connecting esophagus or intestine they have. When all those years ago some guy talked about Kecksburg, I had no idea, even though the initial reports on the incident were written by a reporter for my hometown newspaper. Obviously, he hadn’t written that report on the sports page. It certainly wasn’t included in the writeup about Roberto Clemente’s latest hits. Kecksburg? Where’s that? I knew I had heard the name Kecksburg but had never to my knowledge driven through the community which, I’ve since learned, was just a dozen miles from my hometown. And in my self-imposed news blackout in 1965, I hadn’t heard the story of the supposed crash.
 
“Siphonophores, I know. I’m all over the map, talking like some Forrest Gump on a town square bench. But in looking back I see an analogy. The hometown news outlets of AM radio and newspapers were like the stomachs of ocean dandelions, whose members were the residents of the area. All the area’s individuals were dependent upon them and connected by them. It was a time when people placed a great deal of trust in the news, well, that is, other people, because I couldn’t have cared less about the news after we all got through the Cuban Missile Crisis a few years before. I paid attention to that; talk about being worried that something from above was about to land! Think atomic bombs. So, sure, during the crisis I was connected to the ‘stomach,’ but had afterward fallen away, a petal that detached itself from the dandelion, but one that remained viable.”
 
“You just ramblin’, or is there another point?”
 
“We haven’t changed much over the last 300 years of newspapers; we feed off the news that ties us together. and we depend on authorities in whom we place our trust. Of course, with all the alternative news sources today, we’re connected by like-mindedness in ever more specialized groups that follow this network or that, this podcast or that. And given our stereotypes that suggest scientists look like Albert Einstein and have knowledge the rest of us don’t have, we’ve been trained to believe that someone associated with astrophysics and astronomy, someone whose work has been published, is worth an ear. We put great emphasis on the thoughts of someone associated with an Ivy League school, too. We think, ‘Wow, if he’s saying it, it must be so. Aren’t all those professors geniuses?’ We’re still uncritical when it comes to getting information from sources we are supposed to respect and from people of like mind. It’s that persistent confirmation bias we can’t shake. But I have to say that Professor Loeb hasn’t gotten the reception by his peers that he has received by the Press. Guess he isn’t toeing the academic line on astrophysics or astrobiology; maybe that’s why some consider him a maverick like Copernicus or Galileo and others consider him a crackpot, a former respected scientist gone off the rails of conformity.  
 
“But basically, that siphonophore attachment to a single stomach is the main point. I’m guessing that that scrapbook guy, if he’s still alive, is still out there scrapbooking articles about UFOs on his IPad, and maybe he’s a card-carrying member of MUFON, the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object Network. I looked them up. They have a conference in Las Vegas in 2021. You can go if you want. And if you can’t make that one, there’s one in Arkansas, the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference or Symposium in April this year. See. These are people who like siphonophores are nourished by a common news stomach, the one that provides every tale or video of strange appearances in the sky. They’re individuals, but attached and codependent. And they’re dead serious, even though they see UFO incident after incident explained away. But in some ways, I can’t fault them at all because any of us can be convinced if we hear something often enough; repeated information makes even doubters doubt their doubt. We’re really subject to self-fulfilling prophecies, or, should I say, self-fulfilling beliefs. That’s why, for example, so many believe that urban legend about 95% of scientists thinking humans have changed the world’s multiple climates, even though no such survey has ever been conducted and the one on which the statement rests was a survey of under 50, maybe under 40, research papers.
 
“Political junkies are the same; they’re also like ocean dandelions. Most belong to groups who follow one kind of news source exclusively. And in every human siphonophore analog, there are those who command respect, whose voices are heard, who make whatever statement they feel like making because they know their opinions will be siphoned off by the attached groups. Gosh! I just realized I painted a bleak picture of mankind. Am I allowed to say that word?”
 
“You certainly have painted a bleak picture of personkind,” she said jokingly. “I don’t want to think that I’m siphoning any opinions the way siphonophores get their sustenance from a central stomach. And I don’t want to think I follow anyone just because of a position in an Ivy League school. Sure, there are connective mental tissues among us, and there are people whose voices are respected. Maybe the Harvard guy is right. Maybe he’s the new Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno.”
 
“But we have no way of knowing, so the comparisons to those guys don’t hold water. It took decades until people accepted Copernican thought and Galileo’s science. Sometimes I think I would rather be an ignorant unattached individual than a knowing part of a collective of self-proclaimed smarties and authorities who get their smarts nourished by the same source. And I can’t leave this without pointing out a picture NASA took of the asteroid 243 Ida. Oumuamua has, according to Loeb, a strange shape; it’s elongated; it’s cigar shaped, and he uses that shape as one of his proofs. Well, sure, it is longer than it is wide, but look at asteroid 243 Ida. It isn’t round, either. Maybe Oumuamua just got pounded by other objects whose many collisions over millions of years whittled it to a cigar shape. With 13.8 billion years of universe history and uncountable billions of collisions in our own galaxy, certainly some odd shapes could occur. If you look at 243 Ida, you can also see an elongate object that seems to have been hit multiple times. Maybe Oumuamua is like a sliver of kyanite, a shiny blade broken from a larger piece.”
 
She concluded, “On the matter of attending one of those UFO conferences, I guess I’ll put you down as a no show. But you can’t be a hypocrite; you have to admit that you also feed off the same sources of knowledge as one group or another. You aren’t really as independent as you think. I’d think that with so few options that everyone has some connection to other people.”
 
“Good guess on my attending a UFO conference; I’m definitely a no show. But also good guess on my own hypocrisy. I’m probably a member of a siphonophore information stomach, also. And I just don’t recognize my dependence on others while I proclaim some individualism and autonomy. So, I guess when I brought up the topic of Kecksburg, all I ended up revealing is that I am like that guy in the teachers’ lounge. Not that I have a scrapbook of UFO sightings, but rather a scrapbook of philosophy and knowledge I share with others of like mind. Excuse me, I better go to see what my like-minded acquaintances and authorities are ingesting for the group stomach.”
 
 
Notes:
*https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/were-not-alone-harvard-astronomer-is-convinced-oumuamua-was-alien-vessel-visiting-earth/ar-BB1dtNt7    Accessed February 9, 2021
 
**NASA online at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/antimatter_binary.html  Accessed February 11, 2021. 

Compare 123 Ida and Oumuamua. The image of 123 Ida is from NASA. 
​243 Ida and Moon Dactyl (By NASA/JPL - NASA planetary photojournalhttp://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA00069http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA00069.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52270 )

​

Is there a god of evil?
 
Should we adopt a humanist, Zoroastrian, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindi, Buddhist, or some other explanation for evil’s obvious presence among us? Who has the explanation?
 
And why should I ask you that question? Is there a trigger, an incident behind the question? Yes, in Pinellas County, Florida, someone hacked into the water supplier’s computer and tried to inject lye into the water at 100 times the recommended proportion. To what end? Certainly, it wasn’t for Good. Undeniably it was for Evil. There’s no relativism here, no situation ethics that can justify poisoning thousands. At least not in the mind of a so-called normal and rational person.  
 
What motivates someone to attempt mass killing? Who poisons indiscriminately? “Nothing new,” you say, “it was a practice long ago when people contaminated wells of their conquered enemies. And remember the reason that all bottles and packages have not only those seals, but also warnings that if the seals are broken, the user should not use the product? That stemmed from the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of 1982.”
 
Thousands of years of contemplating the nature of evil have not produced a satisfactory answer. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, a novel on the reading list in many high schools, suggests that evil, or savagery, is inherent. It’s built into the human framework. Jane Goodall’s discovery of chimps attacking neighboring chimps suggests the inherent evil is inherited. Religions everywhere seek an answer. The Book of Job places evil’s origin in The Adversary, the Satan, making it external to humanity. But seeking an external source has never been an explanation that satisfies. Even in the biblical tale, Job gets only an evasive answer: “Were you there when I created the Leviathan?” What’s the implication? What can Job or any of us infer from that answer? That the presence of evil is beyond our comprehension?
 
Did the Roman god Vulcan unleash pyroclastic flows down the slopes of Vesuvius in 79 AD? Do Zeus and Thor throw lightning at golfers idly standing under a tree during a storm? Is evil imposed from without as retribution for some previous offense, possibly an act that is in its own nature a perpetrated evil? If the answer is affirmative, then the implication is punishment, but no apology, no mea culpa, sets things right. Job lost his wealth and kids. Eurydice stays in Hades. If there had been deaths in Pinellas County as there were in the Tylenol tampering, no one could return the dead to the living. The mark of evil is most often a permanent tattoo, a tombstone at the worst and a psychological scar at the least.
 
But when I ask myself about the motivation for an attempted mass killing of Pinellas County’s residents, I must also ask whether or not I accept the bombing of London, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, or Hiroshima as justifiable mass killings. Was evil not at work? Were the innocent Londoners, sailors, Dresden or Hiroshima residents deserving of indiscriminate or targeted bombing? Isn’t it foolish to ask whether or not they deserved what they received? What had they done on a scale equal to total annihilation? What did Job do? What did the people of Pinellas County do that motivated someone to attempt killing them? Do I answer by saying war on the many is a justifiable revenge for evil perpetrated by a few power-hungry leaders?
 
The hacker who sought to poison the water was probably some disgruntled person who lost his Pinellas County or Clearwater city job, right? Clearwater?
 
No one, even the primary suspect, has been convicted of the Tylenol cyanide poisonings though that suspect was imprisoned for extortion. But whom do we hold accountable for the mass bombings of WWII? Truman? Isn’t the argument that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of casualties for the price of a few hundred thousand deaths? Didn’t the bombing of Dresden shorten the war in Europe? Was it just a matter of a backward technology? There were no smart bombs to limit collateral damage. What choice did the Allies have in dealing with an evil leader and his willing followers? You bomb London; we bomb Dresden. It’s that mutual destruction idea by which we still operate.
 
Would I have done any differently if I had been President instead of Truman? Would you? Neither of us would indiscriminately poison a county’s water supply, we say, so we’re not evil; neither of us is a medium through which evil passes to others. “But, Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking? You were asking for it, Japan; you were asking for it, Hiroshima,” we might have said.  
 
Brilliant and one-time rakish Augustine of Hippo was a follower of Zarathustra early on, but then as a converted Christian and Neoplatonist, he reasoned that he couldn’t accept the principle of a god of evil AND a god of good, basically, because he believed in an Infinite God and could not accept that there could be two infinite beings, one good and the other evil. Yet, he appears to have accepted the existence of The Adversary in what I would call the Jobian sense, that is, an Evil One who spreads evil with the permission of God. But that just runs us round the circle. Why would a “good” God allow evil? The typical answer is twofold: Evil is a test, and the test makes us stronger. You know the latter as “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The problem, of course, is that evil does kill. How are the bombing victims of Dresden and Hiroshima stronger?
 
Are we to accept evil perpetrated on individuals because the survivors and the unaffected generally become stronger? What are a few tens of thousands of deaths compared to making the rest of us stronger. Huh! I guess we learn their lesson. Had the people of Pinellas County suffered, I guess I would have learned a lesson. That surviving the test stuff isn’t much of a consolation, and it isn’t even necessarily a lesson. What have the people who deny the Holocaust learned? How has the Holocaust made them stronger?
 
If I step on an ant, the colony continues as usual. Bad times for the squashed ant, but relatively insignificant for the colony. The Queen will lay another egg. Even if recognized at the time, the evil is soon forgotten or, if not forgotten, diminished in significance. Are you thinking of Tamerlane and the pyramid made of skulls right now? Is Caligula on your mind? Are you stronger because he existed as evil incarnate?
 
Evil is an abstraction when it’s not personal. And if there were degrees of abstraction, then mass killings are higher degrees of evil, incomprehensible for individuals. Say you live in Montreal but you read of a successful poisoning of Pinellas County’s water supply and the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands. Now what? Can it happen to you? Does evil spread to a would-be Canadian mass killer, a Canadian poisoner?
 
When the COVID-19 virus first spread, did you cautiously approach your mail, a public doorknob, a store package? What do you think happened to Tylenol bottles all over the Northern Hemisphere in 1982? Do you think people went on taking Tylenol as usual? Do you think that the people of Pinellas County will switch to bottled water for a while? Will they wash their fruits and vegetables under the tap? And even though lye has long been used in the making of soaps, do you think they’ll enter the shower with confidence?
 
Maybe the expression should be, “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you painfully and neurotically aware that you might be killed, that you might be the next innocent victim of anonymous evil as imposed by man or virus.” But even in your fear, you won’t have an answer for the question of evil. You will be like Job and like every other victim of evil, wondering about its source and its seemingly perpetual existence and ubiquity.
 
In an age of statistics, one could reason that an incident like Job’s losing his wealth and family or someone’s dying from poisoned Tylenol is inevitable. The numbers lend themselves to such incidents we term evil. “What are the chances?” we ask. “With so many people alive and living in all kinds of environments from crowded cities to mountainside hermitages, something we term evil is inevitable.” And we comfort ourselves in the shelter of numbers. “Sure,” we argue, “there are poisonings and bombings elsewhere, but there are so many people living in so many places, that my chances of being a victim are relatively low. Statistically, I’m safe though statistically someone else isn’t. Some people die from the virus; others survive; some people pick up the poison Tylenol bottle; some people pick up normal bottle. You know, ‘what doesn’t kill you,’ as they say.”
 
But considering evil statistically doesn’t account for its source or existence. What was Job supposed to say, “Well if it had to happen to someone, it might as well have been me.” Small consolation for victims. When is the last time you considered yourself just a statistic? When is the last time you said, “Oh! Woe is me, but I understand it was my turn to succumb to evil”?      
 
That payback for evil has generated more evil is undeniable. The mutually assured destruction principle might play out someday. Nuclear weapons will be the effective medium that spreads evil like floodwaters over the continents. Will those who survive say, “I certainly learned a lesson, and I’m stronger for it”? Or will they scratch their irradiated heads and ask, “Now just why did God create the Leviathan?”

We love stories. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have all those epics, narrative poems, short stories, novels, TV shows, films, anecdotes, and parables. See what I just did? If people didn’t love stories, we wouldn’t have so many of them. Rather circular as arguments go, I’d say. Or, I could say that I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love some kind of story, and I don’t know anyone who has encountered a person who doesn’t like, use or refer to at least some kind of story. Would you think it reasonable to suggest that even in the absence of stories told by others, people create their own stories, mostly to establish self-identity and a personal feeling of security? “And this is why I am what I am” would be the example.
 
One of the problems we face lies in the myriad tales we accept as proof that underlies our behavior and belief. We hear or read about someone’s getting sick after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, and we respond emotionally. It is, after all, a story, true or untrue. “Could it happen to me?” we ask. Well, yes, possibly, but what would be the cause of the sickness? Why should the anecdote change or dictate my behavior? If outcomes A, B, and C occur, there’s no guarantee that D will.
 
When we hear several similar anecdotes, we use them to conclude. Much of our life is a product of responding to stories. What if someone said “Did you hear that a group of people living on the side of a volcano eat garlic daily and live into their hundreds?” Nice story. Flavorful lifestyle, we think. But is it the garlic or the volcano, the altitude or the rural lifestyle, or the genetic heritage that contributes to the longevity? Or is the story even believable? Could someone have falsely concluded or been given faulty information before relating the story? Isn’t that the assumption of those who question the moon landings?
 
We grab onto personal story after personal story, looking for models for living, hoping that by emulating we achieve something desirable, a better body, for example, or a more healthy or longer life. Isn’t every testimony a story? Every infomercial? Every “before and after”? And we don’t look for the exceptions to the tales we accept because in giving the general plot, authors presume we will fill in appropriate details. Audiences are also authors. If I say "the glen was quiet in winter and noisy in summer," do you provide details, such as "deep winter snow that dampens sound and breezy flowery meadow with buzzing insects and chirping birds"?
 
So, in almost every story lie details of our own making regardless of the story’s author. What do we do, for example, with anecdotes about this person who reportedly became ill after taking a vaccine? Do we add up similar stories to conclude we shouldn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine? Tough decision. “But all those anecdotes can’t be wrong,” we think.
 
And every such decision is made more complex by the plethora of stories through which we have to sift for truth and the fictions we create. How many times have you applied a logical filter to determine your decisions, to determine your behavior, and how many times have you simply run with the stories and the inductive reasoning that led you to a conclusion? Look through 2020, for example. What stories led to conclusions that affected not just individuals, you in particular, but also whole populations?
 
What stories did family members, friends, acquaintances, or associates use to inductively derive conclusions about their lives and their society? Think of the consequences of conflicting stories that were told during 2020, and think of level of detail supplied by the various storytellers. As you answer my questions, remember that few, if any, stories are replete.
 
Societies periodically undergo paradigm shifts driven by inductive reasoning based on stories both true and false and both detailed and general, none of which are truly replete and all of which stir creative infilling by the recipient. Know, too, that stories engender personal and cultural paradigm shifts.  Driven by stories such paradigm shifts are like interactive stories, with individuals and groups rarely seeing the role they play in writing a tale for future generations. Each of us is a character in and a co-author of numerous stories that influence lives.
 
There’s calculus at work here. We can take any set of similar stories, such as anecdotes about people getting sick from the COVID-19 vaccine or the moon landings, and smooth those stories into a single conclusion, or we can look at the details, find the gaps, see discontinuity, and reject a rash decision or a faulty conclusion based on apparent continuity. The difference between the inductive mind and the deductive one is like the difference between those who believe Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon and those who know he did and the difference between those who will get a vaccine and those who won’t because they heard tales.
 
 
 
 
 

Charlie: “Hey, Clyde, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, does it make a noise?”
 
Clyde: “Technically, yes, Charlie. Nothing prevents the tree’s kinetic energy from being transferred to the air and ground. Wait! I’ll Google it. Okay, Merriam-Webster has three defs; one, it’s ‘a particular auditory impression; two, it’s the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing; and c, it’s the mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by waves in a material medium (such as air) and is the objective cause of hearing.’ So, in definitions one and two, an observer or hearer is involved. That would mean the falling tree causes no sound even though it is a process that generates ‘waves in a material medium’ that would in definition one cause an auditory impression. But definition c gives us an out because it includes ‘mechanical radiant energy that is transferred by longitudinal waves in a material medium’ that would envelope the falling tree regardless of an observer. So, I guess, as long as an observer is involved in the definition, I mean, a hearer, then a tree that falls in the absence of a person makes no sound. Silly, but that’s want the definitions imply.”
 
Charlie: “Okay, here’s another one. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, is it visible?”
 
Clyde: “What?”
 
Charlie: “Well, I just read an article that says scientists are working on creating transparent wood. * You know that old expression about not seeing the forest for the trees? Heck, if they do that, we won’t see standing trees, let along falling trees. I can hear the conversation between a cop and a puzzled and slightly dazed guy who is standing next to a wrecked car with a U-shaped dent in his bumper and hood:
 
‘So, how fast were you going?’
‘Officer, honestly, I haven’t been drinking and I wasn’t driving fast. I just didn’t see the tree.’
 
Invisible wood. Yeah, that’ll be our next safety problem.
 
‘Honey, what’s that bruise on your head? Did you walk into the door again?’
 
‘Damn invisible wood! I’m installing metal doors.’
 
Yep, gonna be a safety issue for sure. And it’s going to affect business, the economy, and climate.”
 
Clyde: “How is invisible wood going to affect the economy and climate?”
 
Charlie: “How’s anyone going to find the lumber yard? What’s that going to do to places like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and 84 Lumber? People will be driving around, burning gas they don’t need to burn, trying to find those places. The global warming. Lord, the global warming! And what if people want a wood-burning stove? Will they know they bought the wood chips by feel? And in those quaint mountain lodges, will flames just seem to spring from nothing in the lobby fireplace like the Cosmos originating from Nothing in the Big Bang?”
 
Clyde: “Now you have me thinking about all the problems caused by invisible wood. Can’t have a log cabin if you want privacy. Won’t know where the chair is before you sit. You’ll be asking where you put your pencil. And your desk? It’ll look like your desktop computer simply defies gravity. Visitors will see your messy closet. You’ll bang your head on the headboard. And what about getting a splinter? Who’s going to know where to pull it out with the tweezers? After a big wind storm, we’ll say, ‘I think his tree fell on his house, but I don’t know. Something definitely crushed the roof.’ And those quiet walks in the woods? Might as well just walk across the desert in Nevada.”
 
Charlie: “Yeah. Invisible wood would be a bummer for poets and painters, too. Think about Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’:
 
            ‘Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though;/He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow/…/The woods are lovely, dark and deep,/But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.’
 
Heck, Frost might just as well have been walking across a snowfield in Greenland or over a glacier in Antarctica, watching rocks fill up with snow to the horizon.”
 
Clyde: “You’ve hit on it. Invisible trees would be bad for all romantics. What about all those nature painters like Thomas Cole and his imitators in the so-called Hudson River School or Bob Ross and his ‘happy little trees’? Or, just thought about it, what of Ansel Adams, the photographer and all Adams-wannabes with cell phone cameras? Yosemite would just look like a bunch of granite. And speaking of Nature, how are the woodpeckers going to know where to peck? Or owls where to sit? In fact, there’ll be dead birds everywhere as they run into trees the way they fly into windows.”
 
Charlie: “And the mail. What about envelopes? Invisible paper means that I can’t send five bucks in an envelope to a college-age niece. Wait! What about paper money? It’ll be just green ink on invisible paper. And what if someone uses invisible ink to write on invisible paper? Someone has to stop this invention before it destroys our society, but how can I write a letter in protest?”
 
Clyde: “Email. But you’re right. Not all inventions improve life. Lots of them are cause for concern. I don’t even want to think of Musk’s experimental Neuralink brain chips ** unless they help my brain see invisible wood. But, hey, inventing is what we do, and not seeing the full consequences of our inventions is just one of our flaws. Someone thought atomic bombs were a good idea, also. Wasn’t that Einstein and Szilard who wrote that famous letter to Roosevelt? Inventing, it’s what we do. Thinking ahead? It’s what we don’t do.”
 
*Yirka, Bob. 2 Feb. 2021. A new way to make wood transparent, stronger and lighter than glass. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-02-wood-transparent-stronger-lighter-glass.html  Accessed February 3, 2021.
 
**Grad, Peter. 2 Feb 2012 Musk’s Neuralink creates ‘happy monkeys’ who play Pong with their minds. TechXplore. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-02-wood-transparent-stronger-lighter-glass.html     Accessed February 3, 2021.