An alarmist and skeptic talk.


Skeptic: Gosh, I’m getting worn down by all the climate change haranguing. I think the notion of climate change has made people not only irrational but also delusional. I do believe they believe in their cause to save the planet, but I also believe they’ve been duped by a cult of pseudoscience. And the latest example of that occurred at another one of those awards shows.


Alarmist: Typical “denier.” How can you, a “denier,” not be sure that you aren’t delusional? You’re that frog in the continuously warming pot of water, not recognizing that you’re about to be cooked.


Skeptic: At the 48th César Awards ceremony in France, an entertainment industry’s moment of self-gratification akin to the Oscars, a protesting woman identified as Nina wore a white T-shirt with “We have 761 days left” written in heavy black letters.” * Let’s look at the rationality of her warning. Nina is a member of Dernière Rénovation, a group obsessed by climate change. So, they have determined, it seems, that the planet has 761 days left. Tell me that that’s not extreme off-the-rails-of-reason thinking. They prove my point. And you? Boiled, cooked?
    How can you, an “alarmist,” know the tipping point of any future climate change. You might be relatively sure about the timing of those changes in millennia past, like the previous glacial and interglacial periods and the intermittent warming and cooling trends within those periods? But the future? I will grant that there’s evidence for the “sudden” cooling of the Younger Dryas that temporarily interrupted the beginning of the current interglacial period. It occurred in the absence of any human activity such as we have today, and it might actually have occurred over a period of decades 12,900 years ago. It also ended rather abruptly. But 761 days? Come on, not even you can believe in such doomsday predictions.


Alarmist: I don’t know how they got that figure, but that Younger Dryas cooling does indicate that climate change can be relatively fast.   


Skeptic: Yes, but also often geographically limited. Do you believe it affected the entire planet? And if it did, did it decrease or increase permanently the geographic ranges of plants and animals or limit adaptations, both purposeful in the case of humans and non-purposeful in the case of plants and animals, adaptations that have occurred and will occur again, but not in the next few years unless the Russians decide to go full-out nuclear to initiate a worldwide holocaust and nuclear winter that would occur after an exchange of bombs.
    But, please, my friend, don’t misunderstand. I know that climates can change because I’ve personally experienced the evidence. I’ve stood on drumlins in New York, sailed past little islands of Alexandria Bay, and driven along the valleys of the finger lakes. I’ve seen glacial grooving on Mt. Holyoke in Massachusetts and leaned against Doane Rock on Cape Cod, both remnants of glaciers-past. I’ve driven over the moraines near Erie, Pennsylvania, and stood on an esker at Moraine State Park in western Pennsylvania. l’ve looked over a cirque in the Siskiyou Mountains and a glaciated landscape in the Adirondacks. And I’ve seen the compressed glacial gravels along the Northwest’s Pacific shore, the hanging valleys of Yosemite, and the polished rock above Lake Tahoe. So, yes, we have plenty of evidence that climates can change and have changed. But as I sit in your “pot of boiling water,” let me further the point: Just as a “watched pot never boils,” so climate change can be inexorable but rather slow on human scales, and certainly not 761 days across the entire planet. So, this is how I conclude that you alarmists are delusional.


Alarmist: The water is getting warmer, Frog.


Skeptic: Hey, I’m not French. Don’t you belong to a group of like-minded thinkers who also, in addition to its obsession with climate also obsesses over cultural appropriation and micro-aggressions? But, I’m beyond the ad hominem attack which is your counterargument. I prefer instead to take on the thinking that would lead to the claim of 761 remaining days. I assume that February 24, the day of the award ceremony is the starting point. So, let me think, 365.25 days per into 761, is 2.08 years. Oh! Wait, I forgot that 2024 is a leap year. We don’t count the 0.25 day this year, but add a day next year. Anyway, it seems that in March, 2025, we’ll reach the end of those 761 days. We get two more years according to Dernière Rénovation. I guess it’s time to wrap up those final touches on your will—that is, if you believe anyone who escapes being boiled off Earth will be around to inherit your wealth. Given that human bodies are mostly just big bags of water, I actually like your frog-in-boiling-water analogy though I find it indicative of your panic.


Alarmist: Go ahead, make fun; how are you not invoking an ad hominem logic?


Skeptic: Com’on, surely you don’t buy into the 761-day scenario. Surely, you don’t find that prediction to be anything other than a Chicken Little story.


Alarmist: Scientists have told us we’re near the tipping point.


Skeptic:  In 761 days? Who are you, Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Bill Gates, or some IPCC sycophant who hasn’t read all the caveats its many “scientists” have published? We’re always near a tipping point. This is Earth. There have been at least 11 tipping points of cooling and warming each during the past 2.5 million years.    
    If you look at the oxygen-isotope analysis, which is a good indicator of paleotemperature, you’ll see that climate fluctuations over the past ten million years are common and that our ancestors like Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and Paranthropus evolved under widely swinging temperatures accompanied by both arid and humid conditions and lower and higher sea levels. If they went through “761-day” changes, those 761 days were a bit “biblical,” you know, the way people say the length of the “seven days of Creation” weren’t 24-hour periods—sorry, just thought I’d use that as an analogy. No one can point to a specific two-year period that preceded climate change; no one can point to that short a period as a recognizable beginning of the end. Anyway, we’ve been told that “the end is nigh” by too many Al Gores, and you know what they say about hearing anything repeatedly? The more something is repeated the more truthful it sounds. Want examples? Think think German anti-semitism before World War II, “Russian Collusion,” or think COVID-19’s origins from a “wet market” in Wuhan and not the lab that actually did genetic research on coronaviruses in bats, and especially think about all those prophets of the Second Coming like Heaven’s Gate and the people interpreting the Aztec calendar.


Alarmist: But we are reaching the tipping point.


Skeptic: Of what? Becoming warmer or colder? We’ve been in a ten-to-twelve millennia interglacial period interrupted by wide temperature swings like the Younger Dryas, another cooling about 8.2 thousand years ago, the Medieval Warm Period of a millennia ago, and the Little Ice Age of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all of which punctuated the general temperature trends. And so what? We’ve seen evidence of rapid sea level rise from ten to six thousand years ago and evidence for higher and lower sea level stands. Will the seas rise rapidly because of climate change as Al Gore prophesied? Where was Al when they rose rapidly during those four or five thousand years at the beginning of this interglacial? Again, so what if they do rise? Have we not consciously decided to live in Bangladesh, Florida, or the Netherlands? Aren’t the Netherlands as much a “land” because of human intervention against a rising sea as any place on the planet? Remember that not too long ago the English Channel was a land bridge, the Aleutians, also. And if sea level is rising at the rate of a few millimeters per year or about eight inches per century right now, we’re a long way off from the complete inundation of southern Florida and the American East Coast.
    But let’s take a little responsibility here. If people choose to build a house on the shore or at sea level, they risk being either inundated or left high and dry. The current Delaware and Florida shorelines were not shorelines during the last low stand, when the sea was 400 feet lower. Both were well inland, and that’s no secret like the documents found at the shoreline homes of Biden and Trump. The relative position of a house constructed near the water’s edge isn’t guaranteed in stone—and even such a guarantee is rather meaningless in a world of tectonic change. As an island, Great Britain seems to be tilting, one end dipping downward. And the people living on coral atolls have above sea level homes on the tops of subsiding volcanoes. Whether or not sea level rises, their residences will sink beneath the waves.    


Alarmist: There will be massive shifts in population, costing trillions of dollars, first in trying to protect coastal communities and then in trying to move them.


Skeptic: Choice, isn’t it. Live on the side of an active volcano, expect an eruption. Expect a devastating pyroclastic flow. Build over a fault line, expect an earthquake. Live near the ocean that has been as much as 400 feet lower and many feet higher than today’s sea level, then expect change. And don’t expect the temperatures of your comfortable zone to remain comfortable.
    But an abrupt change in 761 days? A worldwide change in 761 days? That’s the kind of prediction that makes one seem as foolish as an Al Gore predicting dire consequences that have not occurred on his time scale.


Alarmist: Look at what’s happening to the coral reefs. Look at the melting glaciers. Look at the polar bears. At desertification at Timbuktu.


Skeptic: All attributable to other causes or misinterpretations. Desertification of the southern Sahara has been ongoing for a longer period that the human burning of fossil fuels. Glaciers have retreated and—by the way—grown in some places over the past 200 years. That glacier in Iceland called Okjökull Glacier, that has been used by alarmists as a direct connection to carbon had begun to shrink before the rise in anthropogenic atmospheric carbon. The polar bears seem to be doing just fine in most of their genetic “tribes,” but the demise of large animals has many causes: Where are the mastodons, the mammoths, the sabertooth tigers? And those coral reefs? If the oceans warm outside the topics, won’t the corals follow? Want to see an ancient coral reef in New York? Go to Lockport; go to Brown’s Creek not far from SUNY Geneseo.


Alarmist: You just don’t care about the planet.


Skeptic: No, I care. And I’m probably just as big a hypocrite as you alarmists. I fly to places in planes that spew hygroscopic particles and carbon compounds; I drive a gas-guzzling truck; and I buy stuff made from earth-stuff taken from the ground.
    But do you really care about current living humans who have longer lives because of fossil fuels, have products and even medicines derived from those fuels, and the ability to travel inland when the seas engulf their vacation homes because of fossil fuels? Don’t you rich alarmists use planes, have material wealth beyond that of kings, and have homes or vacation homes along the shore?
    If you think sea level is rising rapidly, I recommend you buy property that stands at least 70 feet above current sea level, then you can sell it for a profit when it becomes shoreline. And if chances are you’ll not live to reap the profits, maybe some grandchild or great grandchild of can sell the shoreline property. Leave a will. Call it your “climate will.”


Alarmist: Trillions of dollars! Wasted because you won’t change your lifestyle.


Skeptic: Trillions? What do you think the cost will be to go total alternative energy? What will the cost be just in the mining of materials like copper and rare earths? And even if we did have abundant supplies of those earth materials, what costs will come as countries like China say, “No soup for you,” or rather “No rare earth for you.” The distribution of such materials as those used in windmills and electric vehicle batteries isn’t even. How much lithium do you think the United States has?
    But if you think you can reverse the climate trend you believe is occurring, show me by example what to do and convince the billions of people who want the lifestyle, health, and comfort you have that they should renounce their desire to improve their lives. Did Nina at the awards show have to use cotton to make her T-shirt? If she did, did she source it locally? Did she eat food on the day of the awards show, and did her food go by delivery truck to a grocer where she bought it? Did she cook her food or eat it cold? Please don’t tell me she likes green tea that is not grown in France. But more importantly, what has she done that wards off her inevitable climate change? Talk? Demonstrate? Throw soup on paintings? And if she uses any product from a foreign land, does she know how many hygroscopic particles formed because of the interaction of ship and plane exhaust, particles that collect water and form clouds or how much carbon was released into the atmosphere because of those transport vehicles?
    I’m really a bit tired of the haranguing by you alarmists.


Alarmist: We’re just trying to save the planet.


Skeptic: But you really aren’t saving it, are you? Let’s have this conversation again in March, 2025 after the passage of those 761 days. Tell Nina to keep her T-shirt, because she can once again announce another 761-day prediction to the world on live TV and in front of those who show grave concern about climate change, such as all those in entertainment and media who jet around and live the high life. In the meantime, I’m going to the shore where I won’t have to walk far from a hotel to stand in the swash zone because the water just rose this past year by two to three millimeters, or about a two-penny-thick rise onto the land. Two pennies. One atop the other.


     


*https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/02/25/watch-frances-cesar-awards-disrupted-by-climate-change-protester-we-have-761-days-left/
    

Why did the chicken cross the road, and why did a billionaire financier shoot himself?


To get to the Other Side.


Certainly, for most humans, death is no joking matter though one might reasonably assume that murderous dictators consumed with wars of conquest are at least indifferent to it, if not pleased by it. Thus, the thousands killed in the meat grinders of Verdun in 1916 and eastern Ukraine in 2022. But “ordinary Janes and Joes” most likely think, when they can’t avoid thinking of it, of death with trepidation.


HEADLINE: February 23, 2023. New York Post. “Billionaire financier Thomas H. Lee found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound in NYC office: sources.” * I have little further information at this time, but it raises those old questions: What makes one person who ostensibly has “everything” commit suicide whereas another person sometimes even in the worst of painful cancers love life so much to hold onto it tenaciously? What’s the driver of suicide? And what’s the driver of continuing life?


OUR LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERS


I don’t know any information about Lee other than what I read today; I can only speculate how a 78-year-old guy came to a point in late life that another day was unbearable. Fifth Avenue office, expensive home in the Hamptons, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, balls, and parties, and public dinners too numerable to recount, vacations, expert at leveraging buyouts, wise enough to buy Snapple in 1992 and resell it in 1994 for 32 times his purchase price, recipient of many awards for philanthropy and patronage that included a $22-million gift to Harvard…Lee seems to have had everything including a wife, children, and grandchildren. His only public “failure” seems to have centered on Vertis Communications, America’s fifth-largest printer; Vertis filed for bankruptcy in 2008. But other than that, he still died with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.


But, as we know, no one takes “it” with him into The Great Whatever. And that brings me into a speculative reverie. What is the nature of The Great Whatever? And why should we hasten to get there?


Circle on Screen Goes Round and Round, loading, loading...


Play the eerie reverie music here: Ta-daa’-dada; ta-daa’-dada. The screen goes blurry. Am I asleep or awake? Life seemed so “normal” before I read about Thomas H. Lee’s death.


In my dream state, I see Tron-like lines; they’re lighted, bright against a dark background. They are boundaries. I see them all around me, blocking my past and limiting my lateral movements: Stay within the lines, Donald. Stay within your limitations. And remember, up ahead is the ultimate boundary, you know, the one that billionaire Thomas H. Lee purposely crossed for whatever reason. Once beyond that line, he was as much over the horizon as a star sucked into a black hole. Whatever he took with him, the information that defined him, except for that retained in memories, disappeared into the blackness where the only certain boundary is the event horizon, the boundary that prevents reemergence. Once dead, always dead. One “event” prevents all other events.


Walk through Any Cemetery


In my dream, I walk through a cemetery with graves of my ancestors. One generation back, yeah I know most of them; they live in my memory. Two generations make things get a bit fuzzy, more incomplete, and even, in most instances no more familiar than those images in antique photos hung on walls of Cracker Barrel to lend a sense of human continuity and homelike belonging. Pictures portraying characters whose images could have been made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. “Look, that one resembles Aunt Betty. I wonder…” Such is the dream state, ta-daa’-dada.


BOUNDARIES


One of the significant human restrictions in this seemingly boundless universe is boundary. Each of us is bounded by an ineluctable finiteness. Boundaries define us, but in life they are subject to changes in kind, shape, and position. But when we cross that last boundary…


What I could not do as a youth I can do as an adult, but that does not include my retaining what I could do as a youth, at least not physically; some boundaries form behind us. Even a “Tom Brady” eventually retires either by choice or force. And if the argument is that Einstein was working on The Equation of Equations on his deathbed, never seeming to stop, the boundary of death did stop him.


That makes me think that one reason for not prematurely ending one’s life is that familiarization with a bounded existence is the first parameter of life to disappear in death. The second parameter to disappear is the chance to tweak the boundaries of life or to push them off a bit in an expansion of what we are.


EAT THIS AND THAT, TAKE THIS SUPPLEMENT, AND EXERCISE FOR A LONGER LIFE


I encountered an acquaintance during a jog several years ago, engaging him in a brief conversation before our paths departed. In his seventies then, he was a faithful runner-power-walker, a one-time Marine going through the neighborhoods daily, running through the neighborhood park, and even on weekends participating in a group run up the local mountain, an elevational change of 1,700 feet stretched over three inclined miles. On that day when our paths chanced to cross, I told him he looked fit. He said, “I just want to make it to 80.” Duh!


Not 80 and a day, not 80 and a month, not 80 and twenty more years. Duh! If you are not inclined to push that final boundary as far into the future as you can, then you might be like Thomas H. Lee, who said at age 78 and for whatever reason, “This is far enough. Eighty is too far. Even seventy-nine is a stretch. Seventy-eight is good enough.”


WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? A GEOMETRY OF LIFE AND DEATH


There are more pages of research devoted to understanding suicide than there are pages in a bloated congressional budget (over 4,000 for the last one). It’s a topic that begs answers. The personal tragedies of suicide constrain those left behind, those who always want to know “why” as they experience the closing off of an avenue of relationship. But the new boundary for those left behind isn’t a temporary set of cones across a road under construction. That boundary is labeled with a sign that reads, “Dead end.” But we really don’t know, do we? Is it a “dead end”? For the living, yes. For Thomas H. Lee, there’s really no way to know.


But what we do know is that in the choice to commit suicide a human says, “No more boundaries as I understand them.” It’s the end of geometric life, then end of axiomatic existence.


Remember geometry class? Now there was a time of trepidation, of dread. I sometimes wonder whether or not Nietzsche and Kierkegaard weren’t just expressing their feelings after taking geometry from a chalk-dusted teacher, “If this, then thus. You skipped a step in your proof, Friedrich. You forgot the second postulate, Søren.”


What is that boundary from which we seem to start and understand? Is it a set of axioms and postulates? Recall that they do serve as starting points that, we’re told, are self-evident. “Two points and one straight line, that does the trick. You can’t have two points connected by two different straight lines. And straight lines? Well, they can run indefinitely while still remaining finite.” Euclid was so kind to pass on his axioms and postulates to more than two millennia of struggling sophomore minds. But maybe those stern geometry teachers had a point to make that wasn’t just applicable to shapes and proofs. “We learn geometry,” they told us, “because it teaches us how to think and understand our world.”


SHAPES ALL AROUND


Maybe they had a point, not so much a “location” represented by a “dot” with no size, but rather an emphatic notion. Life is, l after all, much ado about shapes located in space and bounded by time. We can’t get away from finding shapes around us, from faces that look similar to cloverleaf off-ramps. Circles and polygons, all framed by lines, all bounded. It’s how we distinguish this from that. The flowers in the garden aren’t each unbounded; they have edges, and we see them against a background. The stars, also. Everything seems to be bounded in this reality of life: Cell membranes limit the cell; skin limits the body; circumferences edge the wheel. An axiomatic life is one that starts with some postulates and builds to a personal geometry of recognizable shape, a bounded shape.


SUICIDE TAKES ONE OUT OF THE POSTULATES AND AXIOMS TO THE NON-EUCLIDEAN


There’s no way of knowing the current geometry of Thomas H. Lee. We don’t know even know whether or not he exchanged one kind of geometry for another, like going from Euclidean geometry to non-Euclidean geometry (maybe to Riemannian manifolds). We don’t know whether he now encounters any boundaries or even whether straight lines are for him not indefinite, yet finite, but infinite. Lee decided to leave the bounded for who knows what, the last boundary he crossed was the last boundary he crossed. If he still exists, he exists in the background against which we see shapes. That background is the formless, the non-geometric.


Remember all those manifestations of forms in this life—from UPS boxes to tree branches that might seem to be chaotic but that might also be fractals of repeating patterns—can be distinguished one from another by the backgrounds in which or against which they appear. And all those shapes of life rest for us on postulates and axioms. So much of what we are psychologically and mentally is axiomatic. So much of what we do proceeds through “a logic” that mimics geometry. And once we leave this geometry as Thomas H. Lee did, we enter an uncertain geometry or maybe a non-geometric realm, shapeless, incapable of being connected as in this life we know that “things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”


We have no idea whether or not even as simple a statement about equal things is meaningful to Thomas H. Lee now that he has gone beyond life’s boundary. Here’s an axiom: Those who are alive can rely on the self-evident and run the proofs of their existence to find meaning.


I have no way of knowing whether or not Thomas H. Lee found this life meaningless. Maybe he was depressed enough to think that thinking itself, largely an axiomatic process that accepts certain postulates as a priori truth, was a useless wondering in chaos. Certainly, he had a rather well-ordered life from the perspective of an outsider. Maybe his inner sense of an axiomatic world that made some sense because of that which is self-evident, had collapsed into a formlessness. With no meaningful life-geometry in which proofs make sense because they rely on truths, entering a non-geometric realm might have been his logical alternative.


The “shape” of his life now lies in memory. The shapes of living he bequeathed those around him will last for a generation or two at best. Then they’ll possibly appear as an antique reminder like those antique pictures in trendy cafes and Cracker Barrel restaurants that we are similar to what he was, the shapes of some coffee-drinker’s life equal to the shape of Lee’s life. The axioms seem to be rather limited in number, so we all seem to use them as the bases of our lives until we cross that final finite boundary.




*https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/billionaire-financier-thomas-h-lee-found-dead-of-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound-in-nyc-office-sources/

“Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…”


Butler County, Pennsylvania, recently ended its status as a “sanctuary county.” The argument for the change centers on fentanyl, a drug seeming to arrive in the pockets of illegal border crossers. What about this “sanctuary” policy that swept the nation over the past decade or two? Doesn’t the Statue of Liberty invite everyone with “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Isn’t America the melting pot into which millions from across the planet mixed? My wife’s ancestors came from northern Europe; mine from southern Europe; my late brother-in-law’s, from Africa. Melting pot. What’s going on in Butler? Are they xenophobic? Racist?


Or, is there a difference in the nature of immigration today, something about the immigrants, or something about the “holding capacity” of America? Isn’t the driver of many immigrants the same as it was when the English, Germans, Norwegians, Polish, Irish, and Italians arrived a century or so ago? You know, that “huddled” stuff? The “yearning”? Why should any be turned away? Is there a “new reality” that affected Butler’s citizens? Or what of New Yorkers? What’s this I hear about sending immigrants to Canada? I thought NY City, home of the Statue of Liberty, would be among the most welcoming places in the country; Queens, after all, has the most diverse genetic population on the planet. And in Chicago, another “sanctuary city,” the mayor bussed the illegals to the suburbs, taking the same position as those poor people in Martha’s Vineyard who kicked illegal immigrants off the island: “Yeah, we are a sanctuary, but not for you.” *


The Old Reality


The huddled masses of the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries contained some bad actors. That’s the nature of humanity: Some of us, regardless of point of origin, regardless of race or ethnicity, and regardless of religion, are bad actors. Thus and because “birds of a feather flock together,” some neighborhoods became enclaves where gang activity associated with the local “ethnic” population spoiled the human landscape of those who had arrived to “breathe free.” What’s the principle? Bad before emigration; bad after immigration. And the same principle applies to the good: Good before; good after. Sufficient historical evidence suggests that not everyone in the melting pot came to America with the best intentions, but the majority probably did. Some among the “huddled masses” were, as some are now, especially bad actors. Thus gangs from every ethnicity have disrupted the peace and security of many citizens, including the naturalized.


The old reality is that in any population of humans there’s a chance, however small, that some are bad guys.


A New Reality


But the “bad guys of old” didn’t transport drugs in quantities and in potency capable of killing millions of Americans. Take, for example, what happened in Colorado in December, 2022, where a Sinaloa Cartel member was arrested for 45 pounds of a fentanyl and cocaine mixture. As Ryan L. Spradlin, Special Agent in Charge, HSI Denver, said, “Fentanyl related deaths rose over 70% in Colorado during 2021 and it isn’t slowing down. This poison that transnational criminal organizations increasingly smuggle into the United States is responsible for over 100,000 deaths nationwide while putting millions of dollars in the pockets of drug cartels.” **


This “ain’t” my grandmas’ and grandpas’ huddled masses. There’s no simple “yearning to breathe free” in this new reality. There’s a difference in what bad actors can do now that they could not do during that previous great migration. In the context of well-organized cartels with criminal intent, the true “huddled masses” arrive under a veil of suspicion.     

Is this what motivated the County of Butler to change its proclaimed “sanctuary status”? Is this what the supposed xenophobes were warning about when Butler proclaimed “sanctuary.” No doubt Butler wanted to be welcoming just as Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, and Chicago wanted to be welcoming. Probably (I want to believe) their intentions were noble, but they also derived from a very naive perspective of today’s realities. It’s one thing to welcome a poor person from another country; it’s another to welcome someone who wants to do you harm or who is indifferent to your safety.


When Trump sought to construct a wall across the southern border, his political enemies—and there were many—called the President a xenophobe and a racist. Some populations, notably those in large cities, defied him and proclaimed themselves to be open and free to one and all. “All” turned out to include some nasty people, rapists and murderers, for example, and drug and human smugglers. American citizens have been assaulted, injured, and killed by some of those not deported or prevented from entering. That appears to be an undeniable reality. And today, the interception (thankfully) of more doses of fentanyl than there are citizens to kill in a region makes that point to which I’ll add people on the terror watch list caught among illegal aliens.


The days of Ellis Island seem to be over. Should we welcome immigrants? Of course. Should we have inducements such as free stuff? I don’t think my grandparents got any government help. They didn’t get free transportation, hotel rooms, and health care. They didn’t get free phones. They came with nothing, worked, and put food on the table. Should we provide sanctuaries for criminals? Aren’t they people, too? How heartless can those in favor of a wall actually be?


The Ideal vs. the Real


Ideally, everyone is welcome on Martha’s Vineyard. There’s a welcoming sign. Everyone is welcome in Butler County, too. The ideal is that all humans have dignity and inestimable worth. But the reality is not all humans are well intentioned. Some seek to harm. Those who glibly decided to open sanctuaries are only now beginning to see that some restrictions are necessary. Without them, citizens are at risk. Even other migrants, as the tales of abuse and rape reveal, are at risk.


Is there a difference in attitude framed by political view? Did some citizens in some cities decide to open their doors as sanctuaries just for spite? Did they want to prove how noble they were in contrast to a guy they didn’t like? "Hey, if Trump’s for it; I’m against it, no matter what.” And, of course, the “what” rarely affects those who act solely on the ideal, rather on the real. Does reality never hit them? Oh! Wait, didn’t an illegal, left-leaning nudist attack Nancy Pelosi’s husband? Doesn’t she live in an ideal sanctuary city? ***


Reality Reality


There’s evidence to show that illegal immigrants are NOT proportionally more prone to criminal activity than native citizens. In fact, they appear to be less prone according to the statistics. For that reason alone, many should be welcomed, but the very nature of sanctuary cities has prevented local authorities from cooperating with Federal agents in deporting those who do perpetrate criminal acts.


Consider this before dismissing this little essay as xenophobic, which I can assure you, it isn’t.
    The US Department of Justice released this statement on Thursday, June 7, 2018 under the title “Departments of Justice and Homeland Security Release Quarterly Alien Incarceration Report Highlighting the Negative Effects of Illegal Immigration and the Need for Border Security”:
    Of the 19,688 confirmed aliens in USMS custody, 10,971 (56 percent) were in custody for an immigration related offense. Additionally, 4,665 (nearly 24 percent) aliens were in custody for drug related offenses. Further details regarding the related charges of these inmates are as follows:

• 974 (approximately five percent) were in custody for supervision violations;
• 889 (approximately five percent) were in custody for property offenses;
• 391 (approximately five percent) were in custody for weapons violations;
• 378 (approximately two percent) were in custody for violent crimes

You are free to draw your own conclusions about what is ideal or real. In the list above some 889 property offenses might be small matters of trespass, maybe even unknowing trespass. Accidental property offenses happen. They happen all the time everywhere, don’t they, so, 889 offenses aren’t necessarily indicative of anything except to those whose property has been affected. Even 378 in custody for violent crimes seems small by comparison with all in jail for such crimes, but consider that this is just the first quarter report for fiscal year 2018. And consider that violent crimes is a category that includes assault and murder. Kate Steinle of San Francisco was a victim. Sarah Root of Iowa. Terry and Brenda Aultman of Daytona Beach. Kayla Hamilton of Maryland. Julie Graichen of Massachusetts. Want me to name the many others whose families will never see them again? If it were a family member of a sanctuary city’s councilman or councilwoman, would there be any statement about xenophobia? “What, you want to undeclare sanctuary status just because some illegal alien murdered you daughter? You xenophobe. You racist.”


Should those who have cautioned against unlimited sanctuary be censored and ostracized? What if they simply wanted to see an orderly Ellis Island processing to sift through the identities of those entering the country or to intercept dangerous materials. Can anyone say “dirty bomb” or “fentanyl”?


*The Island of Martha’s Vineyard’s welcoming sign reads:


    “We respect WOMEN. We value BLACK LIVES. We stand with our LGBTQ COMMUNITY MEMBERS. We stand with IMMIGRANTS, with REFUGEES, with INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, and with PEOPLE OF ALL FAITHS. We stand with our COMMUNITY. All Are Welcome Here.”


    Great sentiments, right? But not for the immigrants that a southern governor sent to the welcoming island! Forty-four hours of “breathing free” on Martha’s Vineyard, 44 hours; that’s all the immigrants got. Then they were shipped off.
    Remind you of some other place? How about the Vatican which is surrounded by a wall? The Vatican, from which the Pope decried the American border wall!




**DEA. December 5, 2022. Press release.


***San Francisco
A Sanctuary City.
We welcome all.
Watch where you step.

If you are optimistic—in general—you are a remarkable person. That is, if you are optimistic about the potential and kinetic good in your species, you are remarkable. Especially in the context of a single day’s report in The Guardian:


    “Tens of thousands of refugees flee from Somaliland clashes”
    “Patients dying as Nigerian cash crisis hits health services before election”
    “Mexico’s former drugs tsar Genaro Garcia Luna convicted for aiding El Chapo cartel”
    “Peruvian loggers given 28 years in jail for murder of four indigenous leaders”
    “Bangladesh shuts down main opposition newspaper”
    “Journalist and child killed near scene of fatal Florida shooting earlier that day”
    “Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ club shooter posted to neo-Nazi website, police say”
    “Southern Baptists expel Saddleback megachurch over female pastor”
    “Former attorney general in key state withheld evidence debunking 2020 election fraud”
    “Scientist convicted of editing babies’ genes has Hong Kong visa revoked over false statement”


War in Somaliland, the economics of patient care, a runaway drug trade with corrupt officials on the take, destruction of the environment tied to greed and murder, out-of-control killing by youth without compunction, extremists willing to shoot people because of who they are, fundamentalism at work in the Baptist community, the politicization of election processes, and the uncontrolled experimentation on humans—AND I DID NOT LIST ALL THE HEADLINES: Other headlines were very similar. 


Ten headlines on a single day’s news! And not one of them bespeaks joy, compassion, understanding, open-mindedness, respect for life, and a respect for law. Yes, as I wrote above, if you are optimistic, you are a remarkable person. Certainly, today’s headlines challenge anyone’s sense of optimism.


Maybe we humans are only potentially good and rarely kinetically good.


But, as “they” say, don’t give up hope. Maybe tomorrow’s headlines will be full of joy and love. Maybe tomorrow will dawn on a peaceful world of cooperating individuals seeing good in one another. One can only hope. I'll remain optimistic. How about you?


*The headlines for The Guardian on February 22, 2023, online at https://www.theguardian.com/world

Just once in Earth’s long history
Of wars and crimes, I’d like to see
A year of love, not misery.
But my desire is dumb at best
Unless my words convince the rest
That by their love they will attest
That evil’s good when it’s suppressed.


The endless war each year renews
From when Assyrians fought the Jews
To Caesar’s march nearby the Meuse
With many later conflicts still,
In every valley, up every hill
And in the ocean, Bougainville,
More recently, among Tamil.


And now we see another war,
Another one at Europe’s door,
The Russian playing manticore.
And as they have in all wars past
The innocent will not outlast
The end so easy to forecast
With all their bodies then amassed.


One wonders whether nothing’s new
From land to land, and me to you;
Persistent hate and anger, too,
Reveals all culture as quite tribal
And shows that war is archetypal.
It lies within the homicidal,
And surfaces as genocidal.


We see war’s workings in Ukraine;
We see the death and the pain
Where peace and love do not restrain
The ancient drive just to destroy
The nun, the baker, and plowboy.
The tanks that mass in long convoy
Have but one goal: It isn’t joy.


The bellicose continue loud
And beat war’s drum before the crowd;
The cheering mob shouts “Mushroom cloud!”
They somehow think the bombs will end
The threat they think that some intend.
“They must be evil, so they must bend
To what we want or face their end.”


The episodic tale’s retold
With all new people in the mold.
Remember hence that I foretold.
When this war’s done, another will
Arise upon a Bunker Hill
And blood will flow in every rill.
Our offspring shout not “Peace,” but “Kill!”

Here’s The Guardian’s online headline: “Weather tracker: world braces for sudden stratospheric warming event.” *


As one who lives at the bottom of the troposphere, I’m not worried. The stratosphere is, after all way up there. (Anybody see a Chinese balloon lately?) The stratosphere is one of four general zones in our atmosphere, topping the troposphere (the zone of mixing or “weather”) and underlying the mesosphere and thermosphere. Most people have never been there. It’s bottommost boundary with the troposphere varies in an inverse relationship in altitude mostly by latitude; the boundary is higher in equatorial (low) latitudes and lower in polar (high) latitudes, ranging from about six miles to 12. Yeah, as I said, it’s way up there.


The online article by Matt Andrews suggests by the use of “braces for” at the outset that a sudden atmospheric warming event is a coming catastrophe. Typical and nothing new. We’ve been hearing for twenty years that imminent worldwide weather disasters approach or occur because of climate change. What were we given about two decades ago? End of the world in 2012, then 2020? Now when? “We have only eight years left…” The sky is falling, or should I write “the stratosphere is falling”?


The troposphere is the zone of mixing, the lowest level of the atmosphere characterized by the vicissitudes we call “weather,” the state of the atmosphere in a locality at a certain time. I look outside my library window now to see gray late winter sky. If I opened that window, I would almost certainly feel the season’s average morning temperature at forty degrees north latitude some 300 miles inland. Sometimes it’s sunny and warmer “than usual.” Sometimes colder. The vicissitudes are not limited to one season. I’ve shivered in June and perspired in late winter.


In western Pennsylvania on Wednesday last, the temperature approached 70 degrees Fahrenheit under very strong winds. On Friday the mercury fell and approached 20 degrees Fahrenheit under strong breezes with snow flurries swirling in late afternoon. Sweating and freezing, I carried on some outside activities this past week. The wind chill on Friday chilled me. In the coming week, the fluctuation so typical of spring and a sudden warming event in the troposphere will drive the temperatures once again to 70 for a day; and then the temperatures will crash by 25 or 30 degrees F. Big deal or no deal at all? It’s weather. It’s late winter. It’s the end of one polar vortex and the beginning of another, both rather short-lived. Cold and warm air masses meet, wage a war at their mutual boundary, sometimes cause tornadoes, and generally make people say, “What can you do; it’s the weather.”


Those in the media have been brainwashed to believe the swings toward higher or lower temperatures or toward humid or arid conditions portend the end of the planet and all its life. In truth, a warmer troposphere would ideally make the stratosphere’s lowest altitude rise; that’s what happens in the equatorial zone. The colder and more dense air of the polar troposphere is a bit squashed, so the stratosphere starts at a lower altitude, but the air’s destiny isn’t written in stone; if it were, then we would seek a geologist for weather predictions.


For millennia we humans have had a Second Coming Complex. Almost all beliefs incorporate endings; after all, if there was a beginning, there is probably an ending.  Remember Harold Camping? He predicted (prophesied) the end of the world for May 21, 2011. I know because I saw a large billboard with that message in Reno, Nevada, on May 22 that year. That I can write this blog more than a decade later indicates that his prophecy was incorrect. Harold wasn’t the first to predict “The End” (his own came two years later), and he definitely won’t be the last as people like Matt Andrews will take up the cry “Apophis is coming, Apophis is coming” in a decade or two. And haven’t Al Gore and Greta Thunberg been warning us about “The End.” Lord, protect us from the doomsayers—that is, until Doomsday. Harold Camping, instead of religion, you could have used climate as the basis of your prediction (prophecy?). That’s what Al Gore was using when you made your prediction about "The End," and Greta Thunberg uses it now under the aegis of Al.


From Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, through a few of the earliest psychoanalysts, and into our own experiences with nightmares, we know that dread storms the human mind and makes us shiver in anxiety. Sometimes, and usually when we least expect it, a frightening tornado of despair approaches every brain, maybe, as Dickens has Scrooge say, as a result of an “undigested piece of meat.” For so many journalists today, everything indicates a “climate disaster” because most of them are unaware of what Charles Lyell, echoing the Father of Geology James Hutton, called “uniformitarianism,” the principle that what occurs as geochemical and geophysical processes today had occurred before, and that just as streams flowing downhill in the past eroded their valleys, so streams now do the same (when they aren’t subject to structures that we build: dams and levees, for example). Just as “ice ages” and “interglacials” have come and gone over the past 2.5 million years, so they will come and go again, often driven by Earth’s wobble on its axis and the shape of its orbit, well known as Milankovitch Cycles. And in the process of chilling and heating, gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane play a role that is enhanced or diminished by Earth’s albedo, including the reflectivity of both clouds and land, the latter sometimes covered by ice, sometimes by dark vegetation, sometimes by dust.    


Fear sells newspapers and TV attention; fear sells politics; fear sells religion. Dread is in the air as much because of the constant stormy rhetoric of climate alarmists as it is because of deep-seated archetypes nested in our inner brains. Do I care what Matt and other reporters report because they are eager to tell a tale over-told? Whereas Matt's article is just a mote, it occurs in the context of a mountain of such articles. We’re all going to die because climate change is an “existential threat.” Even the President has said that, and we all know his expertise as professional truck driver, award winning university professor, top-of-his-class graduate, great speech writer, articulate politician, and whatever else pops into his head at the moment.


Oh! Look. The clouds are breaking outside my library window; the sun is brightening my woods; the weather is different just ten minutes into this writing. UV light strikes the ground and reradiates in IR light, unseen but no doubt not unfelt by the squirrels, birds, deer, and bugs outside. My world warms slightly this morning. Now that was unexpected; the prediction called for continued cloudiness. What’s going on? Is that what they call “weather”?


To give Matt some credit, I should note that he does say in his article, “It is important to note that not all SSW events are the same.” Golly, should that thought have influenced The Guardian’s editors to reframe the headline? Do we really need to “brace” for the coming change in the stratosphere and the end of a polar vortex? Have there not been polar vortexes before? Remember that it snowed in Miami on January 19, 1977. Even Freeport in the Bahamas saw a wet snow that January. Freeport, mind you. Freeport! The last time I was there was in a January; the weather was pleasantly warm.


It’s weather. Not climate. It’s often uncomfortable; sometimes very dangerous; but also pleasant at times. For ten thousand years the world has been in an interglacial warm period, sometimes interrupted by anomalous cold, such as during the Little Ice Age, and sometimes interrupted by warming as during the Medieval Warm Period. But you can rightly guess that not all years or seasons had predictable weather during the past ten millennia. Sweating and shivering is our lot—as far south as Miami and Freeport, it seems.


Every story seems to be tied to climate, from asteroids approaching to earthquakes in Turkey. In the minds of journalists, “If I can make a connection, I’ll write it. Who just wants a story about a cold or warm spell, a humid or dry spell that occurs in isolation? In my Pulitzer-desirous mind, I want to put a story in a larger context.” And that makes me wonder how entrapped the minds of the media are: They can see the world and its events only through a single topic, only from a single perspective.


When people hear repeatedly, “The science is settled” coming from “experts” and “self-proclaimed experts” their minds run to the default setting. The problem is that in a complex world, few people have the interest to peruse the volumes of research that by virtue of being on the periphery of climate studies, tend to add to the perception that “the science is settled.” And because individuals don’t live long enough to see climate swings driven by multiple causes in multiple areas, they tend to take shortcuts, sometimes at their own economic peril by accepting the “solution du jour,” such as electric vehicles, the demise of fossil fuels, and giant bird-killing windmills that produce electricity at higher costs and don’t work, as Texans discovered, on cold and windless days. And because those “in charge” have bought into the “settled science,” individuals across the world have lost the cheap energy they had in abundance and could have until non-fossil-fuel technologies demonstrate their value as replacements.


Once collective human brains get stuck on a perspective, they tend to stay stuck. That particularly applies to dread and to a pervasive anxiety fostered by those in news and entertainment media. Scare tactics, even subtle ones like “braces for” work. The Guardian’s editors seem to know that and use it to sell what they say. Sure, as I indicated, it's just one short article. But it isn't because it occurs as another addition to the mass of such articles that suggest climate change is responsible for...Well, you name it, and you'll probably find an article on it. 


Of course, Matt might argue that “it’s just semantics”; don’t take it so seriously. “I saw a weather channel report and decided to turn it into an article. Boss liked it.” But then, isn’t everything said justified as “just semantics”? Even messages that tell us “Be afraid; be very afraid." Harold Camping, Al Gore, and Greta Thunberg were all correct; it’s just that they “got the date wrong.”


Want some advice?  1) Read through some of that IPCC research and its conclusions. 2) Read through articles, such as “Modulation of ice ages via precession and dust-albedo feedbacks” by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer.** 3) Suspect the motivation of those who take government and private money to jet off to exotic locales to discuss how the rest of the world is ruining the world or to go off to study how climate change is affecting the mating habits of puffins, penguins, and people. 4) Realize, as Freud realized about cigars, that sometimes it’s just weather.


Brace yourself. More such reports that try to tie weather to climate change are coming your way. Brace yourself for droughty or humid conditions, for storms, for ice and snow, and for heat waves. And as an aside, I’ll mention that as I write this, a winter weather advisory has been issued for the Midwest and the Northeast because a mass of cold air spilling out of Canada and into the United States will likely trigger snow, rain, and icy rain. Be afraid. Or just be prudent and dress for the weather of the day.




*  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/17/weather-tracker-world-braces-for-sudden-stratospheric-warming-event

** https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305

Start with this: The essence of big government is its inertia. With so many chains of command, rapid response to emergencies is difficult at best. That seems to be the case with the E. Palestine, Ohio, train wreck. Only now, February 18, two weeks after the wreck will the Biden Administration send CDC and HHS to the town. And only a day or two ago did it send the head of the US EPA to address residents’ concerns and get an in situ assessment.


Apparently, the best advice given by government “authorities,” including by the Ohio governor, for the residents of E. Palestine, Ohio, is “to go about your lives as usual, but monitor yourselves.” The Ohio EPA declared that the town’s water supply, drawn from five wells and not from surface water, is safe to drink; yet, today it is drawing on water reserves. Yeah. Nice to know. Might very well be true that the city water is safe because it is derived from groundwater and not surface water. But let’s personalize the circumstances: Would you, yes you, want to prepare the baby’s formula with E. Palestine’s tap water? Let’s say I take the officials at their word. Do I automatically alleviate my anxiety over drinking water, especially after the Governor said he recommended drinking bottled water? And what about that burning sensation in your throat and on your skin? Would you, yes you, ignore that because the government says the air is also good?


Sarcasm? Skepticism? Anyone who remembers the Three Mile Island accident in neighboring Pennsylvania, has some motive for harboring both. E. Palestine is now a town of anxious people as parents worry that their children will be exposed to carcinogens that will manifest themselves in sickness months or years hence. The government and train officials can’t quash anxiety with dubious assurances, especially not in the context of a few thousand dead fish in local waters, dust from the burned vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol mono butyl ether, and local pets either dead or showing distress.   


The dust of the explosion has settled, and it is rather ubiquitous across the community, covering houses, cars, and soils. The chemicals it carries will eventually infiltrate the ground and will be difficult to remove, coming back in dust devils over the local little league infield and off the farmland. Neighboring Pennsylvanians will be the unlucky recipients.


In E. Palestine the city’s five wells run from 50 to 100 feet deep; the water lies in alluvium laid down during two most the recent glacial advances, that is, in silts, sands, and gravels not capped, as they would be if they were much older deposits, by impervious shales and indurated sandstones.


It doesn’t take an education in geochemistry to recognize that hazardous chemicals, once in place, might be difficult to remove. Through repeated cycles of rain and snow melt, they might resurface in playgrounds through capillary action, returning as persistently as dust bunnies return under the bed. Inevitable chemical degradation to harmless compounds is the only longterm solution, but who among the residents wants to wait? Would you? Would you even with caution not be concerned that in the purposeful burning of the vinyl chloride two other dangerous compounds, hydrogen chloride and phosgene (the poison gas of WWI) would form?


It’s difficult for any outsider to offer solutions that don’t place the people under duress. Live elsewhere? Work elsewhere? Go to school elsewhere? Drink bottled water, but bathe in the public water? Those with sensations of burning throats and skin problems might find themselves financially incapable of moving for varieties of reasons. Do they sell homes that few people might want? If they sell, do they get the value those homes had before the train derailment?


And in all this, as of this writing, the Biden Administration was as slow to respond as it was during the continental passage of a Chinese spy balloon, and the major networks have ignored the incident as an ongoing story. That visit by the head of the US EPA was blanketed by the excuse that he had to remain in Washington to summon the resources. Doesn’t he have a phone? In truth, many procurement and logistics managers have been able to move staff and materials around by phone, email, Zoom calls, and faxes. They don’t have to be “in the office” to order nuts and bolts.


And then there’s the political side of the issue that rumbles around in the minds of those residents affected by the incident. E. Palestine is “Trumpian.” There’s a suspicion that politics are at play. It might be an unwarranted suspicion, but those desperate 5,000 residents are doing what so many under stress do, run through every possibility and ascribe blame to this, that, and the next process, person, and entity, private and public.
Would you respond differently? Would you put your trust in industry and government in light of history and politics? We’ve seen, as I mentioned above, what happened during the Three Mile Island event; we’ve seen what happened in similar train wrecks.


We’re all caught up in the dilemma related to the subject I broached recently and one addressed by Albert Einstein (2/12/23 “The Crisis of Our Time”): How does the individual fare under a centralized government that can control by force or by indifference? To the residents of E. Palestine, at least in the early days after the wreck, latter, indifference, appears to apply. One can only imagine their frustration unless he or she is also a victim of industrial-governmental disinterest and incompetence.


As one critical of the Administration that abandoned Afghanis, border communities, and even union workers on the Keystone Pipeline, I am skeptical that the President, Vice President, and cabinet members can act with compassion and wisdom or that they can exhibit leadership. It’s rolled sleeves on the site that the residents would like to see in E. Palestine; they wanted from the get-go to see compassion and prudent remedies. Can anyone blame them for their impatience? Just trying to allay fears through statements doesn’t work on people with burning throats, dead pets, and enveloping odor of chlorine. But just as the President and his minions have failed to go to the border where the border patrol has encountered a couple of million illegal entrants, so they will fail to go to E. Palestine, a little, mostly Republican community.
The United States is a big country. So, it is easy to excuse its top officials from on site analyses at every disaster. But it is also easy to blame those officials for simply offering advice like “drink bottled water” or for simply saying through intermediaries “we feel your pain.” The affected people want to see a Patton or an Alexander the Great, generals who lead the fight on the ground in the face of the enemy. They want generals among them.


All right, let’s say that the President, Vice President, Secretary of HHS, Secretary of the EPA, and the head of the CDC had a busy schedule. That’s possible. Even understandable. But not to residents immersed in a disaster that they know affects them in the moment and in the uncertain future. Surely, it would mean only a few hours to make the short trip from D.C. Both Pittsburgh and Cleveland have airports, and Marine One is a fully functional helicopter capable of making the trip right to the spot.


It took President Biden two years to go to the border where he did not tour a crowded camp of illegal migrants nor witness car chases of smugglers. He did not greet migrants crossing the Rio Grande. His VP also made a clean visit, failing to go where the problem is large and uncontrolled. This is big government in inaction. To be fair, we should acknowledge that other presidents have been slow to show up at a disaster: Bush over New Orleans after Katrina, Obama over the same are during the oil spill, and Trump over Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. It isn’t that they could have personally rolled up shirt sleeves to help, but rather that the people gain by their presence and show of concern. And as we all know, gathering evidence from afar isn’t the same as smelling phosgene on the ground.


To be fair, also, we should acknowledge that any President should be able to trust in the competence of those who serve him and the people. Is Biden a geochemist, hydrologist, or air quality expert? No, of course not (though given his penchant for mouthing false autobiographical details—that he drove a big rig, for example—I can imagine his pretending he was all three). In the minds of the E. Palestine residents, the government came late to the party and didn’t even bring a bottle of wine. Compassionate leadership starts at the top in a democratic republic, but the residents of E. Palestine, suspect they have just a Democrat indifferent to their Republican community.

In 1949 Albert Einstein, writing for the Communist magazine Monthly Review, identified what he believed  “constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence on society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence.” *


And then Albert goes on to cite capitalism as an “evil” because “Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.” Has that happened? Sure. Think Ford Motor and other large factories; think steel mills; heck, think Amazon. Does the “increasing division” continue to happen? Definitely. But does that justify what Einstein seems to offer as a viable alternative that generates “a protective force,” that is not a “threat to his natural rights”? Oh! Wait! Did I tell you that the alternative he offers is socialism?


Socialism?


Are you surprised that one who escaped life under the Nazis had such an opinion? I certainly was. I had assumed that a man who fled a socialist (Nazi) country would have embraced the chaos and competition of capitalism with all its inequities—all those derived from freedom to be competitive that is indicative of “natural rights.” But twentieth-century Albert seemed to foreshadow so many twenty-first century Americans proclaiming the wonders of socialism. He believed that a socialist economy “supported by an educational system oriented toward social goals” is the panacea people need to escape the imbalances that occur under capitalism. Was he anticipating the current belief among so many young Americans that though past socialist societies led to impoverishment of the masses and to mass killings--democides, as R. J. Rummel calls them (148 million killed)—a revitalized socialism would be different? Did Einstein really believe as so many college students and financially comfortable tenured college faculty believe in our time that a new version of socialism will be just, fair, and peaceful, and will iron out the wrinkles in the economic cloth to provide unshakeable security for all?


In the context of the approximate 150 million people killed by socialist governments in his century, maybe the genius wasn’t such a genius, at least not in social matters. In the same essay that he writes about the individual’s “dependence on society” that “he [the iindividual] does not experience…as a positive asset…but rather as a threat,” Albert suggests that lumping all into the same social dough kneaded by the state will result in an equal distribution of the dough to all. He seems to have ignored the failures of collective farms under Stalin and the disincentive to work that socialist societies foster.


Does socialism decrease competition? In the general population, yes, but not in the political arena. Thus, the rise of dictators and oligarchs, some of who become modern incarnations of Caligula or the sycophantic retinue of the last three French kings. We don’t have to look hard to discover the inequities in wealth that such societies exhibit: The yachts of the Russian oligarchs don’t ferry the masses on pleasure cruises. The personal coffers of the few overflow with wealth. The average Russian can only shake his head and say in feckless resignation, “What can you do? This is Russia.” What could any commoner do in any past socialist regime do but shake his head in resignation.


Contradictions Abound, but People Ignore Them
It’s interesting to me that all of us harbor contradictions, even the supposed brightest among us. With Albert—and now with many young Americans and at least an old one named Bernie Sanders—the contradiction lies in proclaiming the benefits of socialism while knowing the evils of a socialist government like National Socialist German Workers' Party. Maybe Albert meant to argue that though Germany’s Nazis killed six million Jews and would have enslaved or killed him, it was just their brand of socialism that was bad. Maybe Albert escaped to live in a capitalist nation because he had no alternative. And maybe Albert would not run from a socialist government today as he did in 1932 the month before Hitler became Chancellor. But you and I both know that Albert would not have enjoyed adulation and a soft life in a university town under Hitler. “If socialism was so wonderful, Albert, why did you leave?”


If I could have talked to him before he died, I might have asked Einstein how he planned to separate human vice from human virtue in his proposed socialist utopia. Albert didn’t live through the whole of the twentieth century, but he lived through enough of it to see the millions of people killed by socialist governments led by Stalin and Hitler. Surely, he must have recognized that the struggle between individual and society was not new and that in a centralized society, any vices or pathologies in those who rule can have devastating effects on citizens. I ask, “Albert, can you say ‘shot while trying to leap over the Berlin Wall?”


Inequities Are Endemic to Mankind


Inequities are endemic to mankind; compromises are literally lifesavers because of them. Individuals have to compromise to exist as members of the societal unit; if they don’t, well, then Cain kills Abel. And as we all know, many Cains have killed many Abels. Yet, the inequities derived from individual freedom have made capitalist societies the centers of high-tech life and a greater longevity for more people than our species had known over almost all of its 200,000 to 300,000-year history.


The lure of socialism that snagged Albert in 1949 seems to be the promise of shared wealth, and that promise rests largely on the idea that wealth is limited. It isn’t. As I mentioned elsewhere, when I was in elementary school in western Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal country, my teacher told the class that we will soon run out of coal, oil, and natural gas, maybe as early as the 1970s. We didn’t run out of them as you know. And one of the reasons was the use of technologies developed by “greedy capitalists” and unknown in the 1950s: Longwall mining and fracking with directional drilling. Turns out that we have unused wealth just lying beneath us—with the only restriction on its use coming from an as yet undemonstrated claim that the world will warm to threatening temperatures, a dubious claim about imminent disaster that made New York ban fracking for the untold wealth lying in shales like the Marcellus and Utica.


Why Do Adults Have to Teach Kids to Share?


Unfortunately, regardless of society’s attempts to enforce a rule of sharing, individuals will be individuals with individual desires that conflict with the desires of other individuals. Albert doesn’t seem to have seen that even though he lived through two world wars and the Holocaust. He doesn’t seem to realize that his relatively cushy life of contemplating physics and hobnobbing with the wealthy and influential derived from the opportunities afforded in “selfish” capitalist societies. His contradiction makes me think of Bernie Sanders recently selling $95 seats for a conference on the glories of socialism and the degradation caused by capitalism. Yes, ninety-five dollar seats just to hear people go on and on and on about capitalism’s evils and socialism’s wonderful utopian lifestyles. Can anyone say “Russian oligarchs' yachts”?




Is This All a Matter of Envy?


Albert’s argument for socialism is that “private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands.” Think Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and those other ultra-wealthy people who have individually seemingly more money than some countries. Do you make that same argument? Does it bother you that Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Ted Turner have so much whereas you have to struggle to buy stuff you believe to be essential? Welcome to the real world. Does anyone think that dictators and oligarchs who rule socialist and communist societies have struggles equivalent to those of the commoner, or to use Albert’s word, worker?


The Contradiction in His Own Words


As I wrote above, we’re all a bit either hypocritical or contradictory. Albert finishes his essay with this: “A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to recent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?”


In fact, the demonstrable intrusions into individual liberty of the last few decades in America seem to indicate that as bureaucracy and centralization become stronger, individuals become weaker and more dependent. Does capitalism offer a counterweight? Not completely, but in its system individuals do have more opportunities to succeed than they do under a socialist centralization.


Backed by the Press, individuals do serve as a counterweight to government control. And that backing can come from a Press with either a Right or Left agenda. If the Press has an axe to grind because it disfavors the political party in power, it can root out corruption and expose efforts to control the populace. If the Press is neither rightest nor leftist, it, too, can ferret out the evils of a bureaucracy run wild, drunk on power. But in almost every socialist regime, if not every socialist regime, a free Press is anathema. Socialism ultimately takes control, and the Press becomes propaganda. Yet, history shows that in a capitalist system where competition is fundamental to society, the Press can act as an effective counterweight. Albert Einstein should have known that after observing a Press controlled by a socialist government that convinced the population that Jews were the cause of their woes, the very propaganda that led to Einstein’s fleeing Germany. He should have known that by reading Pravda or the very magazine for which he wrote his comments.


Social Goals Are Malleable


Yes, inequities are capitalism’s bane. But every effort to make everything human equal has failed because of the inmate desire to be “individual.” Should everyone receive the Nobel prize as Einstein did? Should every Little Leaguer receive a trophy? Should we keep score? In a perfect socialist world, there would be no recognition of individual achievement. In a perfect socialist world the “educated” would work “toward social goals,” to use Albert’s words.


The reality is that “social goals” are fashionable. In the 1940s and 1950s in England, homosexuality was a crime. Alan Turing, whose computer helped to save England during the war, was subsequently punished by the very people he saved, motivating him to commit suicide. Today, ideas about sexual orientation are so different that any open objection to sexual preference meets with labeling, ostracism and even economic ruin. Social goals do change, so which goals would Einstein accept as the legitimate ends of education? It seemed all right for Germans to send Jews to concentration camps and Americans to place Japanese-Americans in camps during WWII. In what political system favored by Einstein is that suppression of individual rights ethical?


The Crisis of Our Time


I think a problem that troubles many individuals is that crisis Einstein mentions: The conflict between individual and group. Maybe he should have treated the subject as an analog of math, specifically the math of sets. Political entities are sets. In this analog, sets can be homogeneous or heterogeneous because we can include whatever we want to include in a given set. Within any set of people we can include members who are only loosely associated by artificial similarities. We impose the similarities as much as discover them. Einstein wanted people to form societies that simultaneously included centralized bureaucracies and free individuals, which under this analog, would make the set heterogeneous. Mathematically, that would be all right. Sets, as I just said, can include different entities. We get to choose what is in the set; Albert envisions a socialism that does not enslave. Was his dream society the product of one of his famous thought experiments (Gedankenexperiments)? Albert could take a lesson from another Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, who said, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." So far, no experiment with socialism has matched the promise of its theory.


But the “math” of every historic socialist leader has been that all those in the “set” must be similar: Similar in philosophy, property, and subservience to the state. Socialism tolerates only homogeneous sets, not heterogeneous sets. Individuals lose their individuality in socialist societies unless they are members of the ruling class. Contradictory? Ironic? Laughable?


How could someone seen as one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, a person who had to flee the evils of socialism, proclaim the merits of socialism? As I said, we all harbor contradictions.


The crisis of Albert’s time is still the crisis of our time. As western governments like those of Canada and the United States become increasingly more socialistic, their citizens will see more intrusions into their lives, more enslavement to the state bureaucracies.** And if the twenty-first century capitalist societies succumb to creeping socialism, to where will this century’s geniuses flee?




*Einstein, Albert. 1982.  Ideas and Opinions. Trans. By Sonja Bargmann. Crown Publishers, Inc. New York. Based on  Mein Weltbild, ED. by Carl Seelig.

**Mandates? Debt-spending? Oligarchic rule by agencies?

Just yesterday, I saw a baby yawn.
And then, who knows, in my mesencephalon,
Or maybe deeper still, my metacephalon,
Inside, the reflex of a mirror neuron
Did make me also yawn.


Our gregarious species is under considerable pressure to conform, maybe to show the unity of humanity, possibly to shield us from our personal insecurities, or maybe to blank out the dread of mortality. For whatever reasons, and there are many, we have evolved with mirror neurons in different parts of our brain. They seem to exist in the supplementary motor area, the primary somato sensory cortex, the inferior parietal cortex, the ventral premortal area, Broca's area, Wernicke's area, the fusiform gyrus, the  angular gyrus, and the primary motor cortex. You yawn, I yawn, and vice versa. The reflex is hard to resist.


And we all have noticed it, haven’t we? Little twitches in our muscles. You can see it at a track meet in the fans observing the high jumper at the beginning of the leap. You can see it at a baseball game in fans observing the batter’s swing. And, as I note above, you can see it in the mimicking of a baby’s yawn.


Call it by whatever name you want, it’s apparently related on the most complex human scales in social contagion. Those we observe influence us from the time we are babies. Good thing in some ways: Watch the mother robin’s offspring observe her finding and extracting the worm. We learn much by imitating.


And thus, when we see a society under the influence of special agendas, we find ourselves succumbing unconsciously to the pressure to conform. Societies can change slowly through the process as ideologies not in favor in one generation slowly move into favor in the ensuing generation.


You can take this wherever you want. You can apply it to any aspect of society. I won’t lead you further mentally or farther physically along the paths of current social influence. I’ll leave you with two questions: When you look at what you accept as valid, healthful, or proper, can you see your own mirror neurons at work? When you look in a mirror is it you that you see or a reflection of those around you?