The appearance of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in February, 2025’s night sky * draws to mind the coincidental (?) conjunction of bizarre incidents in human affairs: Murderers lionized, rapists in schools and women supporting rapists, religious leaders in sin, and other tales too numerous to list. Bizarre because some of us humans have juxtaposed in our brains good and bad, smart and stupid, weak and strong, and just and unjust without commonsense judgment.


You Decide the Appropriate Juxtaposition


My paired opposites aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive categories. In fact, I’m not sure that any of the examples below fit neatly in those listed or in some other sets of categories. You’ve seen the news. Do the following have you scratching your head?


Luigi Could Open a Successful Pizza Restaurant


Take the Luigi Mangione stories. Up for trial on a murder charge for killing a healthcare executive in an act that was captured on street video, Luigi has garnered fans, some of them rabid followers who have not only praised him for killing but also sent him money for legal fees. Luigi has become somewhat of a heartthrob and trendsetter. His female admirers want date him, and his male admirers want to buy and wear the style of loafers he wore into court. * Huh? Is this an example of waIking a mile in someone else's shoes? I find the attraction and mimicry a bit bizarre; maybe you don’t. I’m also puzzled by the women attracted to him, finding all reminiscent of Leidy Figueroa, a woman Joran Van der Sloot met, impregnated, and married in prison. Recall that Van der Sloot became infamous for Natalee Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba before he moved to Peru to murder another girl. He eventually confessed to Holloway’s murder. What went through Leidy’s mind? “Well, maybe he killed two women, but that makes him all the more attractive.” Anyway, like Van der Sloot, Luigi is inundated by messages from admirers. Call me narrow-minded, but, again, I find bizarre the mental and emotional stability of women who want to marry murderers. In our bizarre world some dismiss murder because they dissociate themselves from the loss of life, the pain of relatives, and the reality of blood spurting from the body of a once fully aware human. And for what? Does lust override empathy and commonsense and fog the mind, concealing that such relationships can foreshadow more violence and killing?


It ain’t just women. A also bizarre, the desire of some to imitate Luigi with full knowledge that he was caught. A mimicking perp sprayed SAIF CEO Chip Terhune’s house in Lake Oswego, just outside Portland, with multiple rounds at about 4 a.m. Friday — shattering the home’s glass front door. ** Surely, this couldn’t have been a random happenstance like the conjunction of seven planets. We humans, unlike the celestial bodies can purposely align. Think “celestial,” by the way, not “heavenly.” Luigi, Van der Sloot, and the Lake Oswego shooter aren’t cherubic but are rather angels of death.


Barnard’s Girls Will Fade like Barnard’s Star


Tiresome, isn’t it. Watching a Gay parade in support of Hamas, a terrorist group who would without compunction kill gay people or watching young college women protest for Hamas without knowledge that under Hamas rule they would be suppressed and, if captured for any reason, would be raped, tortured, and murdered. Such is the irony of the privileged young of Barnard’s college, the origin of a group of girls wearing Palestinian keffiyehs as they interrupted a course at neighboring Columbia University and occupied a campus building, and then harassed a female dean on her way to the restroom. *** The consequence? Little to zilch as of this writing though Barnard did expel two girls who had participated in a previous protest. What’s that you say? Yes, some of the young and privileged in American society live in a universe where the black-and-white keffiyehs symbolize good as black and evil as white. The Barnard administration and multiple Jewish students and the school’s Jewish alumni supporters seem as powerless as Gov. Hochul in the face of antisemitism and disruption.


If you squint, you can see Barnard’s star, a red dwarf some 6 light years away. In 1998, the star had some explosive event, but it has since faded. I’ll hazard a guess that the female protestors, once expelled or allowed to graduate, will move on to similarly less explosive lives, but will (some of them) harbor unrealistic Leftist antisemitism that turns moral outage on its head. They will probably never examine closely the degradation imposed by Hamas on the Palestinian people nor the atrocities imposed on more than 1,000 Israelis on October 7 and during ensuing captivity. They won’t recognize how Hamas fires rockets from Palestinian neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools knowing that Israeli response will injure and kill Palestinians.


Righteous Sinners


Also in the news are two stories of religious leaders caught in sin. Thought we were beyond the Jimmy Swaggart/prostitute scandals and Catholic priests/young men scandals, but I guess not. Now, I don’t want to be one who casts that first stone, but…heck, here’s a pebble: Lucas Hunt, 25, from Asheboro, North Carolina, was arrested and charged Tuesday with one count of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor. ** Lucas designed the “Thank you, Jesus” yard signs. Not to be outdone in depravity, the husband pastor of Mica Miller, who committed suicide, is now accused of allegedly using his church as a “sexual playground.” ***** Praise the Lord and pass the condoms!


And Then, There’s the Page from the Mary Kay Letourneau Book of Seductions


Sure, we know teachers are human and thus subject to frailty and folly, but don’t we expect some semblance of righteous behavior in our schools? Following in the footsteps of Mary Kay Letourneau who had children with her onetime student in a scandal that surfaced during the 1990s, is Spanish teacher Dulce Flores, a teacher at Riverbank High School outside Modesto, who is charged with having sex with a 17-year-old while he was a student in 2023.****** May we say “Shame on you”? Should we deem love between a thirty-something-year-old teacher and her hormonal teen boy student as wrong? Is this a perversion of the teaching profession? The word teacher derives from the Anglo-Saxon tacn, “guide” or “guidepost.” Don’t we expect teachers to be guides for children? We don’t expect the conjunction of student and teacher to be conjugal.


Endless Conjunctions of the Bizarre Turn Ideals into Nightmares


Almost every day one can read a couple to several stories that show how we humans live in constant juxtaposition and conjunction. The juxtapositions reveal our hypocrisy and folly, our ignorance and hubris, our immorality and morality, and our gullibility and subsequent disillusion. The conjunctions and human syzygy of juxtapositions reveal that a commonness of contradictions pervades our species.


We are a species of opposites, opposites of intentions and actions, opposites of ideals and realities, opposites of freedoms and restrictions, and opposites of knowledge and ignorance. Unlike those planets gathered by chance in the night sky, we are self-conscious; yet, by chance our stories merge in the daily news.

*https://nypost.com/2025/02/24/lifestyle/luigi-mangiones-fancy-trial-loafers-spark-1400-google-search-spike-the-new-summer-footwear-fashion/

**https://nypost.com/2025/02/27/us-news/hooded-gunman-shoots-up-saif-ceos-oregon-home-who-received-email-threats/   
***Barnard’s spoiled protesters expose the spineless leadership of colleges and New York’s pols — again https://nypost.com/2025/02/27/opinion/barnard-protesters-expose-spineless-leadership-of-colleges-and-new-york-pols/   
****’Thank you Jesus’ sign creator charged with child sex abuse as ministry removes all references to him https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=%E2%80%98thank+You+Jesus%E2%80%99+Sign+Creator+Charged+With+Child+Sex+Abuse+As+Ministry+Removes+All+References+To+Him&eventans=1&eventland=0&eventrel=0&qpvt=%e2%80%98Thank+you+Jesus%e2%80%99+sign+creator+charged+with+child+sex+abuse+as+ministry+removes+all+references+to+him&FORM=EWRE
****https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/mica-miller-s-pastor-husband-allegedly-raped-15-year-old-girl-used-church-as-sexual-playground-lawsuit/ar-AA1zUSNP?ocid=BingNewsSerp
****** See NY Post: “High school Spanish teacher, 33, accused of having sex with 17-year-old student: police” and multiple reports.

The numbers are there. They say “billions” wasted, misspent, stolen. And eventually, we’ll know the exact numbers because knowing exactly how much money American taxpayers lost through mismanagement, fraud, and giveaways is what accounting is all about. Sure, we can generalize, but what we want is specificity. That’s why the math is important. The numbers will tie the bloated bureaucracy to its bloating. They will show a relationship between numbers of dollars lost and number of unnecessary programs, such as the funding of transgender operations for Guatemalans in Guatemala. You want that revealed because you went to an accountant, an online tax form, or your savvy Uncle Bernard to do your taxes last year and you’re about to go through the anxiety-ridden process again before April 15.


The Arrow of Accounting


If the “arrow of time” can fly in only one direction (forward, in case you don’t live in this Cosmos), the “arrow of accounting,” when released, does the opposite. It does fly into the past. And the archer who shoots that arrow, shoots at a target in the recent past. Like a statute of limitations that eliminates every crime but murder as a target of justice and accountability, the deep past restricts the aim of the accountant-archer. Past waste is a moot point. Whatever the government spent farther back in time, say in the recesses of the 1960s, on overpriced wrenches and pens that work in space (The joke goes, “Russians used a pencil”), might be a target, but it’s not worth hitting. The target of the recent past, however, lies within the arrow’e easy reach. In fact, a meticulous accountant can hit the bullseye unless someone purposely obstructs the target.


Hitting the Bullseye


Numbers reveal relations in very specific ways, like those associated with SOHCAHTOA, the mnemonic device you learned in trigonometry. Those relationships called the sine, cosine, and tangent are framed in simple rational numbers, the opposite over the hypotenuse, the adjacent over the hypotenuse, and the opposite over the adjacent sides of a right triangle. There’s no fudging, no room for making up whatever pleases you because you belong to a political party, religion, or race. The numbers are the numbers, and the accounting numbers like the ordinary “natural numbers” you learned on your tiny toddler fingers, one, two, three, four…. “How old will you be tomorrow, Suzy? Three fingers! Yay! Big girl!”


As David Berlinski writes about the ability of numbers to reveal connections in his A Tour of the Calculus, “It is this enviable specificity that makes mathematics something other than as form of magic” (100). Otherwise, the number of tax dollars misspent, lost, or stolen can be the stuff of dark magic. “Don’t concern yourself, citizen; we have your back; we have it ALL in hand. Besides, it’s too complex for you anyway. Trust us. We aren’t trying to trick you. We’re not magicians who make a scantily clad helper disappear from a trunk only to reappear from behind a curtain, or even more spectacularly, from the back of the room, sitting in the last row. How did he do that? Where did she come from? Wasn’t someone else occupying that seat?


No.


No, we shouldn’t trust them, those government magicians to whom we gave our wallets. They have spent; they have made the contents of many wallets permanently disappear. We won’t reach into another pocket to find that money. The magician won’t even pull a quarter from behind our ears.


DOGE’s Archers


DOGE seems to be in the process of revealing, tens, to possibly hundreds of billions of dollars spent during your recent lifetime, the money gone, much of it unaccounted for; some of it to your enemies, the people plotting to kill Americans—you specifically. And that “possibly hundreds of billions of dollars”could actually have yet another trio of zeroes—10 not to the ninth power, 10 not to the tenth power, not even to the eleventh power, BUT to the twelfth power (trillions?!): $1,000,000,000,000+ during your lifetime, not your entire lifetime, mind you, but your relatively recent lifetime, close enough in your personal past for even an amateur archer to hit.


But there are some who would obscure the target. Who knows why? Some even intend to stand in front of it, willing, it seems, to take an arrow in defense of waste, fraud, and abuse like mercenary North Korean soldiers on the battlefields of Ukraine told to rush across a flat muddy and mined field toward a battery of Ukrainian soldiers or like the French knights and mercenary crossbowmen during Battle of Crécy that were routed by Welsh and English longbowmen in 1346. Foolish battle tactic to achieve what? More waste, fraud, and abuse?


The accountants of DOGE have the high ground like the forces of King Edward III on that hillside above the muddy lowland. Why do Democrats want to make that perilous charge?


The numbers don’t lie. The numbers are irrefragable. The targets are so numerous the archers don’t even have to aim.

How would you react if you turned on The Weather Channel to see the staff talking not about weather, but rather about weather forecasters on other channels or on YouTube?


You’d probably say, “What?” Or maybe, “Whaaaaat?” Followed by, “Does that tornado watch include my area?” Or maybe, “Just give me the weather.” (Sorry, I’m guessing here; you might say, “#%&@^*^@@#$$%@&” for all I know, or WTF—“What’s the forecast?”) Point is, you don’t turn on the weather report to hear reports on weather people.


But that’s where we are today, finding ourselves inundated by reports about “reporters.” Thus, the recent shakeups at CNN, NBC, and MSNBC have become the message. Remember Marshall Mcluhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Message? * The shakeups have dominated the news, podcasts, social media, newspapers, and YouTube videos. **


Who Cares?


Honestly, who cares? Yeah, I feel bad that someone lost a job, but people throughout the nation have lost jobs on which they depended for their family’s well being, even for their family’s “survival.” That gajillion-dollar news people have lost their jobs is still a loss, but those firings aren’t tugging on America’s heart strings. They will make it; they'll survive unless they live extravagantly,  especially since those former network stars have made more money than and live in homes much more valuable than many in their audiences combined.


And honestly, aren’t we all a bit worn out by the bickering vituperative hosts and biased reporting? As the cartoon shows, networks could just as easily and with less cost put microphones and speakers on news desks to shout prerecorded and predictable slurs and epithets at one another.


I don’t want the media to be the message. Do you? I want to know whether or not the tornado will hit my house.


*The idea preceded the co-authored book and was encapsulated in a chapter with title “The Medium Is the Message” in McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In Understanding Media he wrote: "The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name."[11] The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of "the medium is the message": a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence".[7] Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (the content), and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[12]


**MSNBC host Rachel Maddow rips own network for axing Joy Reid’s show and other ‘non-white’ hosts’ programs ; MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Rips Her Own Network In Fiery Tirade Over Joy Reid Ouster: ‘A Bad Mistake’ at https://www.mediaite.com/tv/maddow-rips-msnbc-for-axing-joy-reid-a-bad-mistake/
Don Lemon Blasts Megyn Kelly for Rejoicing in Joy Reid's Cancellation at https://www.newsweek.com/don-lemon-megyn-kelly-joy-reid-msnbc-show-canceled-2035492
YOUTUBE: Just go to YouTube and type in “Joy Reid Cancelled” to see all the videos
https://nypost.com/2025/02/24/media/lester-holt-leaving-nbc-nightly-news-after-a-decade/

Here’s there problem with some of us humans: We believe we can master society with mandates. It hasn’t worked for morality; it won’t work for California’s legislators. If a widespread moral code hasn’t prevented full to the brim prisons, why believe a zero emissions policy in California will result in universal or even high percentage compliance? And what happens when mandates aren’t met? More penalties? More economic hardships? More people trying to find loopholes? Outraged protestors at the Capitol? Articles online about hypocritical politicians driving gas guzzlers? Trucking firms charging more to transport products? Brownouts and blackouts in a strained energy grid?


“Starting next year [in California], at least 35% of manufacturers’ new passenger car and truck sales must be electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids or hydrogen-fuel cell vehicles, known as ZEVs (zero-emission vehicles) for short. The percentages step up each year until hitting 100% in 2035…While some carmakers like Tesla are selling more than enough ZEVs to meet the mandate, it’s estimated that sale rates for other manufacturers hover at 10% to 12%.” * So reports The Detroit News, a paper with some skin in the game since Detroit is the country’s center of car manufacturing.


The Folly


California has long been in the forefront of environmental regulations. That position makes sense in a state with more than 30 million people and a history of decimating redwood forests that stood for one to two millennia only to be chopped down in mere decades. Habitat destruction and deforestation merged as the population exploded. Sure. Take care of the environment. Try to manage the water supply in a land of droughts and floods. Enact strict building codes in earthquake zones.  


But then California’s population also included dreamers, not just in Hollywood, but in Sacramento, also. People who bought into super environmentalism that engendered ever tightening controls on the populace, each control purposed to save this or that corner of the environment from a particular stream to a particular animal to…holy cow! All the air? All the emissions? The state's politicians are Greta Thunberg's puppets. 


Should Californians be required to ride in soapbox cars? "They do work downhill," one might argue.


Vehicles on California’s highly trafficked city streets and highways do produce nearly half the state’s greenhouse gas emissions in nitrogen and carbon compounds. But the mandate to reach 100% zero emission vehicle sales won’t convince the ordinary citizen to buy electric even when car dealers don’t have vehicles powered by internal combustion engines to sell. Nevada and Arizona are not far off places. And ten-year old and older cars exist because people would rather fix than buy.


I think of those other mandates humans have tried since Moses: “Thou shall not kill,” for example, and “Thou shall not run around with your neighbor’s wife.” Yeah. Those mandates worked out for California, where murders and extramarital affairs never occur.


Dostoevsky also comes to mind, his character Raskolnikov in particular. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov deemed himself superior to others and plotted to kill to prove that superiority. Although you might think this is an extreme analogy, I hazard to say that individualism and the desire to prove its existence will undo the universality of California’s emissions mandate. I’ll note that there are numerous vehicles on today’s roads that have “forbidden” alterations that improve performance that the owners desire.


And personal economy will supersede state mandates. People mostly do what is in their personal self-interest. And most of us believe we know what’s best for ourselves. And then, there will be those like Nancy Pelosi going for her hairdo and Gov. Gavin Newsom going out for a dinner when most Californians were denied both activities during the pandemic. Were the two of them immune to the disease? Exceptions to the mandates because, like Raskolnikov, they believed themselves to be superior? Hypocrisy and privilege will abound to punctuate the folly of universal mandates.


*https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2025/02/21/should-california-back-off-on-2026-zero-emission-car-mandates/79427217007/

Years ago I read a clever article in some education journal that addressed the issue of college campus sidewalks. Should they be laid down in predetermined parallel and perpendicular patterns or laid down on trampled grass paths worn by students? If you have walked on a number of campuses, you will have noted that students take shortcuts, making diagonal paths that as seen from above would provide a trigonometry  instructor with homework assignments for students. Hypotenuses abound.


It really doesn’t matter whether or not a campus architect waits to see where students make paths. They will over the course of a few semesters find alternative routes, shortening even the shortcuts they previously made through the grass. And every year a  new generation of fresh walkers leaves some new mark on the campus lawn. One might  just have paved the entire campus to avoid any pedestrian changes.


And that brings me to consider how we humans develop our cultures and subcultures.


Beards


Recently, New York Yankees’ owner Hal Steinbrenner announced that New York has amended its 1976 facial hair policy. The organization now allows players to sport “well-groomed beards.”


Now an anecdote: I’m a reluctant shaver, so I’ve had at least a little stubble on my chin for decades and during the early seventies even a beard. At best I’ve been a Don Johnson/Miami Vice-facial hair guy: Almost, but rarely clean shaven. I suppose I adopted the scruffy look when the seventies made it more acceptable and my then rather stoic university president had passed on—literally. The rise of the Hippie movement probably influenced me without my knowing it. I remember not ever liking bell bottoms, but being unable to find more straight leg jeans and pants in stores at the time. Just leave it at: I have worn stubble. Recently, my grandsons and sons, all sporting beards of various sizes, asked me to grow mine longer. I complied.


With more men sporting beards nowadays, I believe I have been unconsciously influenced. But isn’t that what happens in every society? Fashion usually creeps in, maybe getting an impetus from someone famous or some event. It’s the college campus sidewalk effect. Someone starts the shortcut; others follow.


So, here we are, many years after the NY Jets initiated a kerfuffle over Joe Namath’s facial hair and George Steinbrenner’s iron hand rule forbade facial hair. The Yankees can now sport beards that are the fashion of the times. The muddy paths have been paved over in acquiescence to the culture at large, all those “random walkers seeking shortcuts.”


Is there a lesson about political trends in the foregoing?

​One wonders how they survived the last 25,000 years. I’m talking  about bears, polar bears, specifically. Or more so, survived the last 300,000-500,000 years. What with climate change and all that. The last 25,000 have been especially cruel: lots of warming interrupted by the cooling periods like the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age.


Polar bears are supposedly not long for this world, at least according to a report from CBS. They’re going to succumb to a glacier-free world. Surprising, I’d say, because polar bears don’t live on glaciers of which there are two kinds: 1) Continental, a category that includes ice sheets, ice caps, and ice fields like those of Greenland and Antarctica and 2). Alpine, also called valley and mountain glaciers.


No, polar bears aren’t in danger because of retreating glaciers. They roam sea ice, tundra and taiga in some 19 subpopulations. They should not be affected by the comings and goings of glaciers. If the diminution of glaciers were an extinction event for polar bears, the species would probably not still exist in their current numbers.


But this isn’t a blog about polar bears; it is, rather a note about the laziness of reporters—and their gullibility. CBS has, it seems, bought into the extinction of polar bears hook, line, and Nunavik harpoon. That CBS would throw up a video on the demise of polar bears that associates them with glaciers reveals a laziness: How long would a brief perusal of polar bear literature take? And then there’s the just plain ignorance revealed in the report.


The polar bear is classified as Ursus maritimus. See the cognate? Yes, “maritime.” Yes, polar bears are classified as an oceanic species, not as hard land sheet glacier or mountain glacier dwellers. They do hunt on sea ice, but not all year, and as human victims of polar bears can attest, in addition to purely marine environments, they also hunt in shrubland, forest, grassland, marine coastal/supratidal, and marine intertidal environments, so all apply as the habitats of polar bears.


So why the CBS interest in polar bears? Well maybe some young editor or reporter who grew up when children were making posters and wearing t-shirts with pictures of polar bears said, “Hey, let’s do a story on….” After all, it’s been awhile since the world’s children were conned into believing pictures and a National Geographic video of emaciated polar bears indicated the status quo of all polar bears was dire. The video was seen 2.5 billion times, too many for National Geographic’s subsequent apology for misleading the public to counter the belief the video generated. Goodness! Even the supposed site (Baffin Island) where the videographer shot his film was a lie (it was Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic).


And that sea ice?


Well currently there’s a patch of sea water around Nova Scotia that has less ice this January (2025, see image) than it has had during some years. But there’s no way to predict that the same area will be ice free next year, in 2050, or in 5025. Was the same area ice free when Erik the Red, founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland (Grœnland)? Was it open water when his son Leif “The Lucky” Erikson and company explored Vinland during the Medieval Warm Period? If so, what happened?…Oh! Yeah, the Little Ice Age that followed the Medieval Warm Period. And today? Could a repeat of the Maunder Minimum (Sun spots) throw the Arctic into another super freeze?


But why ask CBS, once home of venerable Walter Cronkite, to fact check? Isn’t it too busy fact-checking Donald Trump to fact-check its own reporters and editors? Doesn’t CBS have an obvious culture-driven agenda?


Journalism Schools


What do journalism schools teach other than obedience to causes célèbres pushed by entrenched vocal groups or political parties? For US undergraduate journalism students that means mostly following assumptions and goals of the Left and the Democrat party—as evidenced by the number of politicians who have been reeled into climate frenzy by hook, line, and Nunavik harpoon.


Is any of this worth talking about? After all, how many will see the CBS report? And isn’t the world already convinced that polar bears are headed for extinction? Those kids wearing “Save the Polar Bears” t-shirts are young adults now, pretty much with fixed assumptions and ready to spend a trillion of their future dollars on the Green New Deal, risking their supply of cheap and abundant energy.


I’ll bet that CBS and other news outlets will continue to prophesy the demise of polar bears even as some of their subpopulations proliferate. It’s the message that matters; not the facts. They’ll repeat Al Gore, who said, “The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.” “Entire,” mind you, “entire.” That “40%”? You be the judge: look at the map. Hey, I said, “LOOK AT THE MAP.”


And those journalism schools? I say revise the curricula. Make all journalism students take at least two courses in biology (one in genetics), two in earth science (one in climatology/paleoclimatology), and two in history (one in 20th century history). Require them to take historical geology, physics, statistics, and geography. And, of course, require them to take a course in logic. Skip the sociology course and replace it human geography.


The result of the curriculum change will be fewer agenda-driven journalists and more inquisitive journalists with no skin in the game of reporting. We’ll get more truth and less official narrative.


If the polar bears are (THEY AREN’T) headed for extinction, they’ll be late goers to termination. Journalism has already died.


https://www.cbsnews.com/video/polar-bears-increasingly-under-threat-as-glaciers-melt-faster-than-ever/

In a Gary Larson cartoon panel one farmer stands next to another outside a barn as he says, “It’s the only way to go, Frank. Why, my life’s changed ever since I discovered Stackable Livestock.” On one side of the panel there’s a stack of chickens; on the other, two stacks of animals, one of sheep on one another’s backs and one of cows. NY’s Governor should have seen the cartoon before she instituted a congestion tax that could have cost drivers up to $500 per month to go to work in NYC.


Hochul is now protesting President Trump’s declaring the tax null and void. “NYC workers, commuters rejoice over Trump’s axing of congestion pricing toll: ‘I’m ecstatic’” reads the headline in the NY Post. * Had the President not acted, I would have suggested the Gary Larson solution to overcrowded streets: Stackable cars.


*https://nypost.com/2025/02/19/us-news/nyc-workers-commuters-rejoice-over-trumps-axing-of-congestion-pricing-toll-im-ecstatic/

Poor us. Hit from all sides by unrelenting abundance and ease, we need a break from all the stress. Fortunately, we have an out in wellness centers and spas, even home spas. Whew! Don’t know how people used to hammer out their days of drudgery and woe.


A Bit of Background


According to Statista, Americans spent 300 billion bucks on wellness/spa tourism. That’s up from the low of 149 billion dollars spent during the pandemic of 2020. In 2023, the spa “industry” provided services for 182 million people, down ten million from the high in 2019 before COVID decimated the economy.


But we Americans aren’t the only people who seem to need days of respite. The worldwide wellness business raked in 6.3 trillion in 2023. Trillion, yeah, with a “t”; you read it correctly; it’s not a typo. Does such an outlay of wealth by customers (clients?) say anything about us? Anything about our priorities or character?


A Bit More Background


Although I question the validity of his conclusions because they ultimately came from self-reporting surveys, I see some value in Hans Eysenck’s classification of personality “dimensions.” Those dimensions are extroversion/introversion and neuroticism. I believe they might in a cursory way explain the modern need for wellness centers in a society not bogged down by a global war. (Eysenck surveyed soldiers in the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital during WWII, drawing conclusions from his extensive surveys of hundreds of soldiers) War resets priorities of people formerly living in relative safety and comfort. That Eysenck derived much of his thinking for Dimensions of Personality from a wartime world probably makes his work a little less applicable to today’s cushy life for the wellness crowd. Nevertheless, see whether or not you might want to draw your own conclusions from the following characteristics associated with extroversion, introversion, and neuroticism (summary statements by Tom Butler-Bowdon*):

Extraversion
    The extravert’s brain is the opposite of what we would expect; it is less excitable than the introvert’s. Because there is less going on inside, extraverts naturally seek outside stimulation and contact with others to really feel alive.
Introversion
    The introvert’s brain is more excitable, making them more vulnerable to moods and having intense inner lives. Introverts have a rich inner life, so they don’t need much social interaction. They have a deeper and more anguished response to life.
Neuroticism
    Apparently both extraverts and introverts can be neurotically minded. In Eysenck’s view,     for example, neurotically minded introverts over-respond to stimuli and are susceptible to phobias and panic attacks whereas neurotically minded extraverts tend to  undervalue the impact of life events and might develop neuroses of denial and repression.


Eysenck drew on Carl Jung to formulate his classification of personality dimensions.  About the same time that he was interviewing soldiers at the hospital Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, also based on Jung’s work, that categorizes individuals into one of 16 personality types based on their preferences in four dimensions: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.


I suppose these generalizations are insufficient for one to conclude what kind of personality dimension dominates the wellness crowd. If you peruse the Web for wellness testimonials, you will see numerous success stories, that is, autobiographical tales of people who suffered from physical and psychological maladies that disappeared during treatments of various kinds. And I have no reason to question those testimonials, but some of them simply indicate the need for a push to change lifestyle. I read one testimonial from a man who accompanied his wife to the wellness center to have a common experience with her. At the wellness center he learned to cut out bread and sugar, resulting in his “feeling” better. Sugar. One has to ask how new the concept of refraining from its consumption was for the man. My hasty conclusion by extrapolation is that much of what drives people to spas and wellness centers is common sense and already known.


Who Might Not Go to a Wellness Center


It’s a cultural thing, this wellness craze upon which people have spent $trillions. It’s a sign of the times, also. People barely subsisting and people in the midst of war just don’t have the time or wealth to support their desires for luxurious lifestyles. But in times of relative peace the affluent do have the time and money to pursue wellness. The absence of personal physical threats makes a society somewhat “soft.” Anecdote alert! Dive, dive, dive.


My father, a marine who fought on Okinawa, was reared in a home without a father (he died when my. Dad was 8). He went through the Great Depression with his mother and two sisters, not a life of luxury. In 1980, when I was on sabbatical leave and living in Miami, both he and my mother visited us. Showing them around, my wife and I took them to Bal Harbour. As we walked around, I saw a quaint courtyard with a little coffee shop that served baked goods. I walked them in and said, “Come on, I’ll get you two a piece of pie and coffee.” He looked at the suspended chalkboard that listed the prices and said, “Three dollars for a piece of pie? I’d choke before I would eat that.” It didn’t matter to him that I said I would pay for the pie and coffee and that it would cost him nothing. He had been through Depression and war. Both combined to make him “hard” rather than “soft.” There would have been no way I could ever have gotten him to go to a spa or wellness center, even though it might have eased what I later believed was PTSD buried in his brain since World War II and the horrors of fighting in Okinawa.


Pavlovian Desires


So, in a “soft” society of affluence, I’m of a mind that Pavlovian conditioning might be at play. Keeping up with the Joneses doesn’t just apply just to owning stuff. We keep up by adopting lifestyles and behaviors. Going to a wellness center can be a matter of “They did it, why can’t we?” And possibly the free-wheeling anonymity of modern communications via social media might make extraverts flock to wellness centers for needed outside stimulation.


But at the risk of contradicting myself, I’ll note that those inward people, the introverts, might also use wellness experiences to intensify their feeling in the presence of strangers with whom they will never again interact. The eventual separation protects that anguished brain from outsiders. And the wellness center experience can enhance the moodiness.


The Search for Identity


Long a theme in literature, the search for identity has been a goal for many since the rise of the modern world. I suppose the culture of “finding oneself” entered into everyday consciousness during the Romantic period of the nineteenth century and then turned into the existentialism of the twentieth century. Going off to discover one’s “real Self” has motivated many to travel to exotic places, mountain vistas, and gurus of various leanings stereotyped by the shaman, the monk, and the astrologer. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalists at Brooke Farm and others set in motion a widespread notion that one could a’find oneself,’ or indeed that one “needed to find One’s Self” to be a “whole person.” That “wholeness,” a unity of selves, appears to be the goal at holistic wellness centers.


To Sum Up


There might be as many reasons for people to go to a wellness center as there are people, but that seems to be a silly statement in light of similarities among humans. Those personality dimensions identified by Jung and refined by Briggs, Briggs-Myers, and Eysenck link all humanity. Someone, maybe you, could identify a limited set of reasons. To a common search for identity and meaning that drives some to those centers, I might add boredom in an affluent society. Even those who have not experienced much of the planet by traveling have nevertheless experienced much vicariously through TV and books (as Emily Dickinson wrote, “There is no frigate like a book”). Many have “seen and done IT ALL” either in person or through those media. What’s left but frivolous luxury?

*50 Psychology Classics.2007.

​As one who has taught both vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology to college students and taken them on field trips to dig fossils, I was attracted to the recent story about billionaires who sought and purchased dinosaur fossils. * Apparently, owning a dinosaur fossil is a status symbol. Hmnnn…Do I belong to an exclusive club of the ultra rich?


Think I’ll go downstairs to stare at the giant dinosaur footprint that’s leaning against the wall. It’s quite heavy, so once I carried it into the house years ago, I haven’t moved it. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t identified the species other than to say it belongs to the theropods like T-Rex and that it, when I see other full skeletons, appears to be from an animal as large as a full grown Allosaurus, but it might be from a juvenile T-Rex. Its origin in Utah’s section of the Upper (Late) Jurassic Morrison Formation makes me think “Allosaurus.”


Dinosaur footprints aren’t dinosaurs, of course. They are “trace” fossils that are evidence of dinosaur presence and that sometimes reveal the herding of dinosaurs. Their spacing also can reveal both the size of the animal (by stride length and depth of the imprint) and its velocity (both the vector of travel and the speed). Often the footprints are easily separated from the matrix rock in which they are found. The reason is that the impression in soft sediment is later infilled by other sediments washed in or blown into the depression. Differences in particle (clast) size between the matrix and the infilling make a boundary of separation. The sizes and compositions of sediments in matrices and infilling, coupled sometimes with plant fossils also found in the area, reveal the nature of the original landscape the dinosaurs crossed. A great display of such environments can be seen at Dinosaur State Park and Connecticut’s dinosaur museum at Rocky Hill that houses Early (Lower) Jurassic footprints. *


So, I guess my trace fossil excludes me from the class of billionaires who own actual T-Rex heads and full skeletons though I do have a friend in that category of wealth. I do on occasion mention to guests that if they want to see the footprint, I’m happy to show them. As impressive as it is to most people, it doesn’t match for me the significance of an even older fossil in my possession, a stromatolite that dates to the Devonian Period (419.2-358.9 MA), that is, millions of years before the first dinosaurs like Alwalkeria maleriensis and Eoraptor walked around Argentina in the Triassic. The stromatolite is upon a cursory look, just a plain dark grey rock. It was formed as bacteria mats and fine sediments accumulated to form mushroom shapes in shallow water as they still do today in Shark Bay, Australia. If fossil age bears significance, I’m one up on owners of dinosaur skeletons.


Take that, you ultra wealthy showoffs with your younger Mesozoic fossils.


*https://nypost.com/2025/02/16/us-news/billionaires-are-bidding-on-dinosaur-bones-as-the-ultimate-status-symbol/


  

Is Hollywood the Left’s main refuge? Is it the site that harbors rudderless ships? And center of counterproductive symbolic acts of virtue signaling?


Selling One’s Tesla


Ever write a college textbook? I have, couple of them, in fact. Made some money with my co-authors on the first printings of the books, and then nothing on the resale via all those college bookstores that repurchase used copies and then resell them for an exorbitant profit.


The point: Car manufacturers make cars and sell them for a profit. They make their money on that first sale. Whatever sales ensue are out of their control; whatever happens to the cars through resale has no effect on them, save in their business in parts that used vehicles might need.


Enter Sheryl Crow, successful singer and song writer, and, I’m guessing, liberal. She just sold her Tesla, I think in protest of Elon Musk’s DOGE’s reclaiming tax money from liberal NPR. * She said the money for the car would go to NPR. Great. Good for her. But, was it bad for Elon Musk?


Didn’t Elon already make a profit from Crow’s original purchase?


And if she is a true believer in global warming, didn’t she just give away her non-fossil-fuel-powered car? That is, non-fossil-fueled if California’s electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar. I think Sheryl is missing something. She isn’t punishing Elon Musk. He made his profit.


Oh! I forgot. There’s that symbolism thing, the virtue signaling. Seems Sheryl wants the government to avoid a thorough audit. Who knows? She might be happy with wasteful and fraudulent spending.


At the Next Gathering of Hollywood Elites


Sheryl might have scored social points with her neighbors by getting rid of her Tesla. No doubt her actions will be the talk at the next party she attends. In ensuing years Elon will continue to make money on parts for used Teslas, and NPR will scramble for contributors like her and advertisers to foot the bills.


*https://nypost.com/2025/02/17/media/fccs-brendan-carr-sarcastically-applauds-sheryl-crows-npr-donation/