The Model


History provides us with many models of great leaders. One of the greatest was Alexander the Macedonian, who conquered the ancient world. Through charisma and action, Alexander amassed not only a following in his own time, but also a following through history. Few leaders could be called Homeric, but Alexander conjures up images of characters like Achilles, who faced his enemies unafraid.


If you go to the website called goodreads.com, you'll find a list of more than 120 books about Alexander. And of course, there have been movies and television series about him. From Alexandria in Egypt, a city that he founded to Alexandria, Virginia, places honor his name. Parents still name their children after him. His legacy endures more than 2000 years after his death.


The Image


What's your image of Alexander the Great? I think of him spear in hand riding on Bucephalus, his famous horse, leading his men in a charge against the Persians of Darius III. What, you might ask, is the reason I thought of Alexander the Great today?


Fast Forward 2000 Years


Yesterday, I saw a photo of Joe Biden, arguably the most powerful man in world history, given that he is backed by the United States military. Joe had his frozen smile on his face as he ate an ice cream cone while a sycophantic press seemed too timid to ask any difficult questions. It was that image of Joe Biden holding the ice cream cone that made me think of Alexander the Great.


Two thousand years from now, no one is going to know the name of Joe Biden. No one is going to immortalize him in marble or bronze. No one is going to make a movie or write a book or an epic poem about Joe Biden unless it is satirical. What could a sculptor sculpt as an enduring Image of Joe Biden? Would it be a bust of Biden with half closed eyes as he tries to frame a thought? Would it be a statue of Joe driving his little convertible sports car while holding an ice cream cone like a lance set for a joust?


The Hero’s Companion


If you read through epic stories, or even see movies about heroes, you will note that many of them have faithful companions. The metaphor of a hero and a faithful companion extends to characters like Batman and Robin and derives from an extensive body of ancient literature peopled by men like Achilles and Patroclus. The hero and companion metaphor has been parodied from Don Quixote to radio, TV and movies that depict characters like Cisco and Pancho.


Joe Biden's companion, Vice President Kamala Harris seems like a self-parody. How would a sculptor depict the vice president? Would she be sitting backwards on the Democrat donkey, cackling or braying, as she often does in public appearances? In a literary work, would she be represented by a character spewing word salads, and tautologies? Would she be shown to be the bumbling, incompetent character she has proven herself to be over the past three years?




What will be the legacy of modern American leadership? Will it be the decline of the country in a fall to rival the fall of Rome? Will it be the beginning of a new Dark Ages, truly dark as a green energy grid cannot supply a high-tech society with the power it needs to maintain itself and grow?


Much of the country is praying for an American Alexander the Great, but apparently not all the country wishes for such a leader. The Democrat faithful appear to be braying for an inarticulate and sleepy ice cream eater and a female version of Shakespeare's Nick Bottom, who, if you remember, was turned into an ass.

ME: Wow! I guess what they say is true, having a stroke really does put a crimp in one’s style.


You: Wait! What? Who…?


Me: Yeah. I didnt realize …well, I suspected…


YOU: Are you saying you had a stroke?


Me:  Yes, that”s what the MRI shows.


YOU: HOLY COW! YOU ALL RIGHT? How…


ME: Remember, I recently said I injured my wrist and hand?


YOU: Vaguely…


Me: I thjought it was the consequence of a recent bout of exercise…Turns out I had some minor bleed on the right side of my brain.


You: Oh…any …


ME: Effects? A little numbness in my left arm and hand. No problems walking, talking, or brushing my teeth.


You: Let me guess. You have some thought to share.


ME: Nothing too profound. Upon realizing I had a stroke, I rememberd two lines from Andrew Marvel”s “To His Coy Mistress”:


    “But at my back I always hear
    Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”


Time has been following closely behind since my birth, but I have largely ignored the sounds of those hoofs as I believed it was I doing the chasing or believed a finite being like me was winning the race against time. Ah! The folly of hubris. The folly of a finite being in a race with an ineluctable outcome.


YOU: Are you confessing to hypocrisy? Aren’t you the one always declaring, “This is not your practice life”?


ME: As I’ve said elsewhere, There’s hypocrisy or contradiction in every life. There’s always the problem of hubris, the “root” of “sin.” That’s that tale in Genesis about the fruit: pride prevents the obedience; pride encourages an artificial independence and convinces the Ego to self-apotheosize. I believe there”s a god-drive in many of us. It drives the young to take risks because of an assumption of invulnerability.


YOU: Consequences?


ME: Personally? Yes. I ignored the first signs of the stroke, such as my ring finger on my left hand not hitting its assigned keys as I typed. It was also sluggish to respond. Then, still believing in my invulnerability, I drove a 20-hour round trip to see an ailing relative in a 3-day period. Hubris, folly, and a risk to my lovely wife and those I passed on two-lane roads. Fortunately, nothing happened. The minor stroke stayed minor; no loss of any speech, awareness, right hand, legs, or desire to yap out another blog.
YOU: BRIEF LESSON?


ME: Self awareness. Humility. We reduce ourselves to fools without both.






  

So, now the plan is to brighten cloud cover to reflect sunlight—all done in the name of saving you from global warming.


But what if you want the warmth? What if you favor summer over winter? Hot over cold?


Too bad, “scientists” are already planning to brighten the clouds, cool the ocean with Tums, and save the planet. Now what could possibly go wrong? They’re “scientists,” aren’t they. They know stuff. They want to do what every massive volcanic eruption does, that is, lower world temperatures, the examples par excellence being the ancient (74,000 years ago) eruption of Toba and the more recent (1815) eruption of Mount Tambora, that latter volcanic blast responsible for “The Year without a Summer” and accompanying famine.


Altering the Longshore Transport: When Humans Play God


Would you stand in front of a moving car, put your hands up, brace yourself, and attempt to stop its movement?


If you stand on the shore of the East Coast (USA) for a year, some 250,000 to 300,000 cubic yards of sand will wend their way past you in the longshore currents. This longshore transport system has been active for thousands of years from New York to Florida. It makes beaches moving collections of rock and mineral fragments (and, in our modern world, fragments of artificial substances). At some coastal locations, humans have altered this flow of sands by constructing rigid concrete and rock groynes and jetties that collect the sands on the upstream side of the longshore currents and also redirect the longshore transport of those sands. The construction effects two changes: It temporarily halts the flow of sands until those sands reach the seaward end of the structures, and it robs the down current areas of sands they would naturally receive in the more or less continuous transport system. In other words, when humans attempt to control nature to solve one problem, they often cause a different problem. In making a beach up current, humans destroy another beach down current. **


What’s the story here? Certainly it’s not about beach sands. No, This centers on atmospheric temperature. Awhile back, I mentioned the Biden Administration’s toying with the idea of injecting dust into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. I noted that if such a process could be carried out  efficiently, it might coincide with a random eruption, exacerbating the effect of cooling by volcanic ash and sulfur compounds, possibly even causing a “manmade” Year without a Summer, such as the one that caused famine in the early nineteenth century.


Now, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal online a startup firm called Stardust Solutions has been testing a process of “solar radiation management it intends to use off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution intends to spill 6,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the ocean south of Martha’s Vineyard, essentially, dropping a bunch of Tums into the sea. *


What could possibly go wrong?  They’re scientists, aren’t they? Surely, they’ll fix the problem they intend to fix without causing any other problem. Haven’t such scientists redirected beach sands with predictable outcomes beneficial to all? Surely, one can’t cite the beach control problems as an analog of atmospheric tampering.


Actually, one can.


You Don’t Get a Say


Just as you had no say in the spending of American money at the Wuhan Laboratory, the suspected development site of the SARS-COVID pandemic,  so you have no say in what individuals sold on “climate change" are doing “in your name” or “for your benefit,” as the money for such projects comes from wealthy climate alarmists and government officials who use taxes as they please on any project they please without accountability and because “they know better than you.” And now, it’s cloud brightening.


But what if you want a slightly warmer world? What if you want slightly longer growing seasons? What if you know that droughts and floods and atmospheric rivers and Arctic bombs occur for both known and unknown reasons and at times often unpredictable? What if you reason that natural climate controls might cycle as they have always cycled and that tampering will only create an unpredictable new problem?


Late Winter Flowers


Recently, I visited family in North Carolina. That meant leaving in February my relatively cold Pennsylvania home, where my spouse and I won’t plant flowers until late May. Upon our arrival in North Carolina, we noticed blooming flowers. Would a little warmth hurt us back in Pennsylvania? Would some extra growing season be bad? Would I shun some warmth and relish the cold spring that often extends into June? I’ve shivered watching spring baseball games. I’d rather sweat.


$64.55 Million


If I had known how lucrative climate research would become, I might not have retired. Sure, I made money off global warming research for the US EPA and PA’s similar agency, but my largest grant supported by the Feds and the Commonwealth of PA was a pittance compared to the $64.55 million from which the cloud brighteners will fund their experiment. That money comes from the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program funded by the partnership between the Australian government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and by conservation organizations and several academic institutions. There’s big money behind “climate science.” Climate change is big business. Academicians fly to conferences like COP28 on someone else’s dime to “discuss their findings,” not one of which is a “solution: to the problem of global change—if such a change is, in fact, a problem in search of a solution and not a solution in search of a problem.


The money, I suggest, is more important than the science it supports. Academics the world over are thriving off the global warming teat. Each year the udder gets larger, and more milkmaids go to work. The nourishment flows profusely.


Think about $64.55 Million


Given carte blanche to run experiments on Earth’s systems with little to no accountability, the “scientists” will do what they want; they’ll run experiments on the planet “in hopes that” their work will lead to predictable results or in hopes that another grant, and another, and another will become available in “the system.”


But Earth is a complex planet; it’s changing and cycling as I write this. It reacts to orbital changes, to tectonic changes, to precessional tilt, and to volcanism at varying rates and in varying durations. Epochs butt up against epochs; ages against ages, periods against periods, and eras against eras. Changes often occur over periods that cover many human generations; some changes will occur over periods that exceed the rise and extinction of species. “Scientists” know this. But grant money is more transitory—as are research careers. So, “Heck, let’s try this. It might work. Besides, we have the grant.”


Say it slowly: s-i-x-t-y-f-o-u-r m-i-l-l-i-o-n dollars, dollars that might or might not make a desired change and that potentially might make an undesirable change like robbing the sands of one beach to make another. We have allocated the funds. “Go run the experiment.” No questions asked because we are locked into a self-perpetuating system. In the meantime, Earth, totally indifferent to the whims of special interest groups like climate alarmists, will continue to warm or to cool, to cast ash and sulfur into the stratosphere, and to go into disequilibrium and then into temporary equilibrium.


$64.55 million. $64,550,000. And they don’t care what you want.










  

• Found under the headline: Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet

**https://coastalcare.org/2009/02/the-negative-impacts-of-groins/

I…uh…uh…uhhh…uh...Getting impatient? Want to say, “Spit it out, man. Geez, how long do we have to wait for you to remember what you wanted to say?”


Ever provide a word or finish a sentence for someone who had a temporary lapse? A broken chain of thought? It can happen to anyone, right? But… infrequently for most until we fog out in complete dementia.


That’s what happened recently when a reporter had to interject “Hamas” into the President’s press conference. He seemed to have forgotten the name, substituting the generic “opposition” for Hamas. It was a week of forgetfulness for Old Joey. Or should I say a week of false and inaccurate memories, such as meeting with François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand long after the Frenchman had died? * But then accurate memories aren’t demonstrably the forte of Joe Biden, the “top of the class student with three degrees,” and “big rig driver.” Joe’s world has strange colored clouds.


I recently saw this ostensibly feeble old man shuffle up to the mic to address the American people on the issue of the border. Essentially what he said is that any border crisis is Trump's fault. He completely ignored his own involvement in opening the border through executive orders. He completely ignored the lure of Democratic-run “sanctuary cities” and offers of free stuff, from phones to education to healthcare to transportation to housing….and now in New York, to cash handouts. ** Although I am not an expert in the executive powers of the president, I assume, I think reasonably, that a president can rescind his own executive orders. Like so many others, I also wonder why he seems to put more emphasis on the borders of other countries than he puts on American borders, but maybe I have an idea (see below). And for the first time that I have heard, he mentioned fentanyl in his talk, seeming to arrive a little late to the party, I’d say by more than 100,000 Americans who died during his watch.


Counting


Why mention the border now? Is it because it’s a leap year? That looming election? The 300,000 encounters at the border in a single month? Democrat mayors—complicit in the surge—complaining?


I have mentioned elsewhere, quantities and numbers seem to carry little importance in the modern liberal mind unless they result in inordinate spending, that is, in giveaways; thus, the 34 trillion-dollar debt we’ve accrued, much of it under Obama and Biden—and under feckless Republicans. Numbers are only relevant in “context,” largely the context of special interest groups. *** Right now, for example, the  inflation rate is decreasing, a “fact” the Administration is happy to mention without saying, “Yes, everything we did in the first year of the Biden Administration accelerated inflation, and no high prices will fall to their former low level, but inflation isn’t nine to eleven percent anymore. You’re welcome.”


Quemoy and Matsu


I assume that Joe, who is just a pinch older than I, remembers the Nixon-Kennedy debate that centered on defending the islands Quemoy and Matsu that had come under Communist attack. I also assume that deep in his brain lies the mantra “If we don’t stop Communism there, it will take over the Free World.” It might be that argument that underlies his desire to protect the borders of other countries. But as he implements that Cold War policy, he simultaneously has allowed an insidious Marxism to fester in this country, has opened the cyber and real borders to Chinese and Russian operatives, and has shown evident weakness in his withdrawal from Afghanistan, where he left an air base and military equipment for the Taliban to use.


Jill’s Upset


I can understand the First Lady’s anger at any news detrimental to her husband’s reputation. **** Robert Hur’s recent report that Biden is a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” was a direct attack on her husband. But we’re looking at the “leader of the Free World,” the commander of the most powerful military, and the guy with the pen that writes the executive orders.


Sorry, Jill. We’ve seen you lead the guy around as he wanders confused on stage. We’ve seen him slap-walk, and we’ve seen him stumble. We’ve heard him utter gibberish. We've heard him say, "I better not say, or I might get in trouble." Consider, Jill, that many of us are upset by the thought of a guy with diminished faculties leading a nation of 330 million people--if he is, in fact, the actual leader.












*Or, maybe, he communes with the dead like Mrs. Clinton, who channelled Mrs. Roosevelt. You know the truly comedic circumstance encompassing comics like those late night guys Colbert and Kimmel? It’s that they can’t see the treasure chest of humor in Democrat politicians, particularly in a guy who falls off a bike, makes up a false past, plagiarizes, and trails off into uh-ness when he addresses reporters.


**https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/opinion/hochul-and-adams-never-ending-migrant-money-spigot/


***Great for publicity, of course, unless a transmanwoman like Rose Montoya flashes hisher breasts on the White House lawn shortly after meeting POTUS.


****https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/opinion/jill-biden-can-spare-us-the-fake-outrage-over-the-damning-special-counsel-report/

I didn’t pay much attention as the dome of sky was changing. Yes, occasionally, I looked up and took notice of a darkening night sky, but I did so without assessing how many of the stars I knew during my childhood had faded or altogether disappeared. Looking back, I realize they left the sky one-by-one, hundreds disappearing as I focused my attention on mundane stuff over the decades of my adulthood.


The Past’s Night Sky


I grew up in a small town of about 15 or 16 thousand people, where even in my city neighborhood at night in the 1940s and 1950s, I could look up to see stars, many of them. And then I grew up, married, and my wife and I moved into the countryside outside an even smaller town, one that was half the population of my hometown but that has since dwindled to about an eighth of the population it was upon our arrival.


Rural and countryside: The words conjure images of starry night skies. But not so. Over the decades of our residency and during the local population decline, I took note on occasion that my once wooded property gradually seemed to lie under a hazy glow on the horizon and rather dark dome arcing above. Now, the stars have all but disappeared. Some of the brightest stars occasionally dot the dome, and Orion’s Belt is prominent on cold clear winter nights. Of course, the bright planets are still there; the moon, too. But gone is that starry sky of my childhood and the early years of rural life. Like youth turned to middle and then to old age, the change occurred unnoticed until it was noticeable. One night I looked up and realized what was missing.


And that same kind of insidious and hardly noticed disappearance is at work in fading American freedoms. If the trend continues, we’ll awaken to find ourselves living beneath the dark dome of a socialist government, our freedoms gone like those stars of my childhood, our privacy gone, our individual wealth gone. Ensuing generations of children will know neither the twinkling lights of the universal dome nor the pinpoint brilliance of five freedoms: 1) The freedom to speak one’s mind, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) The freedom to control one’s own destiny, 4) The freedom to question anything and anyone at any time, and 5) The freedom to own.


Germini in Mono Lake


If you’ve never visited Mono Lake at nighttime, I recommend putting it on your bucket list. Clear desert sky, placid alkaline water, both shielded from city lights by mountains to their west. When it’s their turn to occupy the sky, Castor and Pollux shine so brightly that one can see them reflected by the surface of the dark water. It’s the sky on Earth. The twins become quadruplets. The nighttime visitor sees the sky below as well as above.  Lights above and lights below; stars all around.


That’s an analog of how I saw freedoms during my youth, freedoms everywhere one looked,  freedoms that have undergone a gradual disappearance that I, like so many other Americans, failed to notice.


How did we lose the night sky? An obvious answer is that we electrified for convenience and pleasure. We artificially extended day into night, more so than the tilt of our planet does for the Northern Hemisphere between the winter and summer solstices. Ease has been a human goal unattainable by our ancient ancestors. Ease is easily obtained now,  a flick of a switch. And we have extended that goal into dependence, to a life of ease dependent upon others who will care for our needs. And chief among the caretakers are the government bureaucrats and their amorphous agencies grown so large that they envelop us from every angle, much as the stars seem to do for the nighttime visitor to Mono Lake, where the sky appears to lie below as much as it lies above.


My Failure—and Maybe Yours


I have never done anything to save the stars. They kept disappearing; occasionally, I noticed the changing sky, but and in fact, I believe I have contributed to their disappearance. I have security lights. I have a lamppost. I bleed photons skyward from my house and property. My rural neighbors also bleed photons. The small villages in the township bleed photons, the cumulative effect of which, coupled to car headlights, bathes the local heavens in a dull haze and erases stars once visible near the horizon. Some 16,000 years ago, the residents of the rock shelter called Meadowcroft about an hour's drive from my house would have seen about 3000 stars on the inside of the sky dome when they stepped beyond the protective fire at the shelter’s entrance.


Granted, I would not like to have lived 16 millennia ago. Harsh life. Dangerous life. Not a life of ease. Would the glorious night sky have made up for the hardships of sustaining life as  a hunter-gatherer among bears and wolves? Not from my well-lit perspective.That those ancient people probably had a fire at the entrance—their form of security light and convenience that I would have embraced—indicates to me that humans were long destined to erase the stars, choosing ease and security over raw freedom.


So, I ask myself whether or not we humans, upon becoming civilized and soft with ease, were not inevitably headed from our beginning toward socialism and the nanny state.

If You Seek Wisdom, My Child, Listen to the Rodent


Ah, Groundhog day—both the actual day and Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie. On February 2, 2024, Punxsutawney Phil did NOT see his shadow, his failure foreshadowing an early spring. I’m not quite sure that a rodent with a 137-year record of being accurate in only 39% in its predictions should be trusted as a weather forecaster, but given the 2022-2024 El Niño, his prediction this year might be on the money for people in the Upper Midwest.


Groundhog Day predictions aren’t scientific, but when weather is the object, even the best science fails the accurate predictions test. * We keep trying to predict the weather, however, so much so that an entire weather industry has flourished.
    
Groundhog Day, the Sequel


Are you as excited as I am about 2024 COP 29 scheduled for November, 2024? It seems we just finished 28, and all the world’s a-buzz over the progress toward solving humanity’s existential problem, you know, that climate change threat. Twenty eight conferences and counting… **


November’s meeting will be held in Baku, Abseron, Azerbaijan, strangely in a country whose economy rests largely on petroleum production. Bet the Azerbaijanis can’t wait for Al Gore and John Kerry to fly into Baku to advocate for capping the wells.


COP30 will be held in 2025; COP31, in 2026; COP32, in 2027; COP33, in 2028; COP34, in 2029; COP35…IT’S GROUNDHOG DAY, THE MOVIE! More sequels than the James Bond series! Your descendants will attend COP1,000; Their descendants will attend COP10,000…Every generation henceforth will awaken to Groundhog Day. ***


Oh! But They’re Doing This for All of Us


Here’s a goal  from COP28 that the illustrious COP experts want to accomplish: “Support grid infrastructure resilience by reducing electricity consumption for cooling by approximately 30% (1900 TWh per year) by 2030.” **** People of Phoenix, rejoice! You will get to live as the Pueblo lived hundreds of years ago. Build your rock shelters now because your homes six years from now will have little or no air conditioning.


Less Accurate than Phil


Punxsutawney Phil has an accuracy rate of 39%. What’s Al Gore’s accuracy rate?


ClimateS—and the plural is significant—have always changed: Thus, wherever you live today was different just 12,000 years ago. The seas, about 100 meters lower at that time, have been rising since that last “low stand,” rather rapidly at first for six millennia and rather slowly since then. That’s the opposite trend from climate alarmism, which is reaching warp speed.


Let’s ask what Phil’s prediction for an early spring might mean. What’s the down side? Let's ask what reaching COP28's goals might mean. What's the upside? We know we might spend trillions of dollars on climate alarmism with very little effect on global atmospheric vicissitudes while reducing the quality of life for billions of people and prohibiting billions more from achieving a better quality of life.
                                                          


*https://thisisnotyourpracticelife.com/blog/science-is-dead-really-really-dead


**https://thisisnotyourpracticelife.com/blog/cop28-or-how-to-save-the-planet-in-dubai


***https://thisisnotyourpracticelife.com/blog/flood-amnesia-and-ants


****2030 Climate Solutions: Implementation Roadmap. Online at https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Summary_GCA_COP28.pdf

The brain, no, my brain intrigues me. It has become addicted to writing almost daily blogs. But four days ago, I injured my left hand, inhibiting my typing skills. The result is that I’m suffering from not producing  blogs that for whatever reason, have attracted as many as 1,000 daily visitors. I’m both humbled and honored by the number who take a few minutes to read and, I hope, to take my essays as points of departure for their own insights. 


Typing this with one finger crimps my style, slows my thinking, and frustrates my ability to produce. In short, If you have become accustomed to seeing a new blog posted daily, I apologize for the hiatus. If you are new to this website, please note that you can read from the archived blogs, some 2,000 of them.