Watching the current and past American Administrations of both parties has convinced me that large governments operate on expedience and not on prudence.


Vetoing Means Taking a Stand on an Issue Popular Enough to Pass Both Houses


I draw my evidence for this conclusion from the two terms each of Bush and Obama, under whose administrations the debt snowball plummeted off Capitol Hill and now seems to be driven under Biden by inertia. Did neither president Bush nor Obama know they had veto power? In their individual eight years in power, each used his presidential regular veto power only 12 times and neither used his pocket veto power (letting legislation die for lack of a presidential signature). In contrast, during their similar 8-year reigns, Reagan and Clinton used their veto power 39 and 36 times respectively.


Whereas many factors play into the motive for a veto, such as the mood of the nation, the composition of the Senate and House, the pressures of the contemporaneous economy and the effectiveness of lobbyists, plus the election-campaign cycle, presidents play a role in maintaining the “health” of a country that is the world’s oldest surviving democracy. Approaching 250 years, the US could extend its longevity indefinitely…unless


Pocketing Prudence


…unless the current and future administrations act more on expediency than on prudence.


Expediency might ensure a president’s popularity, but prudence ensures the health of the country whose existence can extend beyond the current generation.


So, for example, take three current issues: 1) Biological men In women’s sports, 2) the border crisis, and 3) seeming fecklessness on the international stage. This last issue wrought by appeasement (Iran), capitulation (China), and that catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. In all three expedience seems to have outweighed long-term prudence. The Biden Administration is bent on destroying the gains women made under Title IX. The product of this expedient policy that is based on a vocal minority ready to fling epithets like “bigot” when they don’t get their way, will be injuries to women and loss of individual championships as men outclass women. It will also force women into situations that were deemed anathema just two decades ago—like having to share locker rooms and nudity with biological males (Are the rumors true that Biden swam nude in the presence of female Secret Service agents? Hmmnnn; maybe now I understand)*


With regard to the border crisis, the open border policy established by Biden as a ploy to win voters and to bash his predecessor has meant cities flooded by immigrants, tax dollars spent to transport, house, feed, and educate hundreds of thousands of non-citizens, and a strained health care system (not to mention increased crime). The lost tax revenue will only add to the burgeoning national debt. In spite of all the evidence that runaway illegal immigration has exacerbated the country's problems, the President has merely pocketed a response, effectively allowing the policy that he initiated to continue. And then there are the expedient but imprudent policies on the international stage. The actions of Neville Chamberlain prior to World War II revealed the imprudence of appeasement. Yet, the Biden ministration seems not to have learned the importance of prudent international policy over expedience. The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan initiated this snowball of weakness that has gathered mass during the past three years. It has emboldened enemies like Russia and China to take actions that threaten America's future.


There’s Always a Rationalization


I suppose it’s prudent not to consume sugars. They spike the glycemic index. But, hey, you live only once, right? And what’s a birthday party without cake and candles? Then there are the holidays, retirement parties, graduations—all good reasons to indulge. And how much can a couple social drinks hurt?


In the government any popular idea, even untested and failed ideas, can drive inordinate expenditures. Upward Bound, for example, was discovered to have no long term effect on student achievement, but the funding keeps coming in the inertial system. The same throwing good money after bad characterizes the “Green New Deal” that is destined to cost billions to trillions without any substantial effect on global temperatures.


Inertial Government Cannot Be Stopped
​
Driven by expediency and not by prudence, the US government is the proverbial snake devouring itself. Can the country survive?




*Easter, 2024, and Catholic Joe Biden will celebrate “transgenderism” and oversee an Easter egg hunt that bars eggs with any religious symbols. Expediency on display! (Offending Christians is fair practice, but offending any vocal group with a special agenda is forbidden) The irony escapes the feebleminded president that having an Easter egg hunt is based on the primary Christian celebration.

#How do you respond to this endorsement from a friend?
“You should watch … [name of show] on Netflix. We’ve been binge-watching. You’ll love the characters. Great show.”


#Or this?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a celebrity announces,
“Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (standing ovation) and the current President Joe Biden.” [cue the music, drop the confetti]


That’s the scenario for a NY fundraiser for Joe Biden on March 28 in the heart of the city.


Flashback to the Fifties


‘More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” * That’s a statement typical of cigarette commercials in the 1959s and 1960s. Appeals to authority—like the medical community— and to celebrity are still in play today. Obviously, advertisers believe such tactics work.


Do you find yourself persuaded by appeals to authority and celebrity?


Obviously, politicians also believe the tactics work, thus the Clinton-Obama-celebrity endorsement of Joe Biden in NY. Is it a homily to the choir? Who in attendance will favor another candidate? Who in attendance needs to be persuaded?


Dead Doctors


How many Camel-smoking doctors died from lung cancer or smoking-related ailments? Now, there’s an example of “ostensible” expertise. Which celeb-expert has been affected personally—like the dead doctors and millions of cigarette-smokers—by the rampant illegal immigration caused by Biden? Which of the wealthy willing to pay $100,000 for a selfie with the three presidents have been affected by Biden’s inflation?


Of course, it's easy to simplify. The commercials for cigarettes in the 1950s fell on the ears and eyes of people probably already addicted to cigarettes. It is difficult to know whether or not the endorsement of Camel cigarettes by doctors had any influence on non-smokers.


How many will vote for a politician because of endorsements? How many will vote because they rationally evaluated policies?


I suppose that in an age of influencers endorsements might be effective, but…


Let's return to that original question: How do you respond to an endorsement of a TV series? Let's broaden the question: How do you respond to endorsements of any kind?

​Your response indicates the level of your independence and the extent of your rationality.




*See YouTube for the video of this specific endorsement of Camels and for other 1950’s cigarette commercials with celebs.

This morning I woke to the news that a 984-foot-long container ship rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing a collapse. The incident immediately reminded me of the 1980 collapse of Tampa Bay’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge after it was struck by a freighter called Summit Venture. In that previous incident 35 people died. The extent of human loss from this morning’s collapse is unknown at this time, but early reports indicate at least two people might have died while the number of people missing is still under investigation. The collision occurred at 1:30 AM when traffic was light. There were, however, construction workers on the bridge at that time, so drivers might not be the only victims. Thus, the extent of the tragedy is still unfolding.


Bridges


There's no escaping the need for bridges on a planet with an uneven topography. From small gullies to deep gorges, Earth’s surface obstructs the easy flow of human traffic. In our ingenuity, we humans have constructed bridges and tunnels to overcome these obstacles. From simple logs to complex suspension spans, bridges make a statement that “No natural barrier impedes us from moving where and when we want to move.” The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia, for example, crosses over a gorge about 900 feet deep with a single steel arch. Impressive.


In spite of that ingenuity, however, all of our bridges are precarious structures because of natural forces and human error. The collapse of both the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and the Francis Scott Key Bridge are evidence of error. Rusting steel and raging flood waters are evidence that Nature itself poses a threat to every bridge. In other words, all bridges are at best ephemeral structures.


Human Gaps


The same ingenuity that enables us to bridge physical gaps has enabled us to bridge all gaps. Pick up your phone to connect with a distant relative.We humans can bridge any physical obstacle—at least for awhile. But human gaps are far more difficult to cross. Take the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a prime example. No bridge seems to connect the two groups. Similar unbridgeable gaps occur between religions, political parties, and social groups. We humans have spent our entire history making gaps. We have also spent our history building temporary bridges. Think treaties and truces, ceasefires and renewed fighting. Think of tenuous bridges and outside forces like a terror or subversive group hitting the bridge like a runaway ship.

Although some natural geographic barriers inhibit crossing some of these gaps, the reality is that in most instances people merely refuse to cross the bridge. Some just don't trust the bridge. Some want one-way traffic. And some would prefer to take a circuitous route, going for out of their way rather than meeting on the bridge or crossing it.

Think of the many bridges in your life. Have they been stable and trustworthy? Have they been affected by natural or human forces of decay and collapse? Have you been the architect of bridges that connect you to others? Have the bridges you have built to connect with others withstood collisions with people or events?

To live among others peacefully requires us not only to build bridges, but also to consistently maintain them. Every human bridge is a work in progress. Only constant maintenance will ensure that you can cross gaps when you want to reach those on the other side.

“In the middle of things” is a relatively common plot device. The reader or audience first encounters the action and characters in the context of an unknown past. At some point, by verbal revelation or by a scene introduced with a caption like “Five years ago,” the author brings the bewildered audience up to speed: “Oh, so this is how we got here…,” “Now I know why she’s sad…,” and “I get it; the aunt is her real mother….”


In Medias Res


It’s “in the middle of things” where a group of debating geologists recently found themselves. The International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the addition of the Anthropocene to the long list of eras, periods, epochs, ages, stages, and phases that comprise the geologic time scale. In spite of arguments, the members rejected “the age of Man (“anthrop,” Greek for ”Man,” or more generally “human”) and the term Anthropocene that some wanted to emplace in the scale that includes Holocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, all the way back to Jurassic and earlier time.


The rejection was contentious because there’s good evidence that since the rise of agriculture and the proliferation of our species, humans have altered Earth’s surface to a considerable degree. Think Aral Sea, reservoirs like Lake Mead, sea walls, and levees. Think denuded forests, asphalt, concrete, and steel cities, open pit and deep mines, and plundered ground water, natural gas, and oil. And think extinctions: The Dodo, mammoths and mastodons, the western black rhino…


The human impact is undeniable and ongoing, but can its true significance be understood as we understand periods now long gone whose effects we can see in total and in retrospect? Ordinarily, autobiographies and biographies come near the end or after the end, not before.


That’s not to argue against insight into the present. Just about every intelligent person knew, for example, where Biden’s open border policy would lead though the magnitude of that policy’s effects won’t be fully felt for years.  Similarly, just about anyone with a modicum of insight knows that human activities, like highway construction and both urbanization and suburbanization alter habitats and exacerbate natural rates of extinction and species stress.


But to rank an Anthropocene age with, say the Maastrichtian, that time frame at the end of the Cretaceous associated with the dinosaur extinction event, is a premature designation. The past is easy to categorize in generalities, such as the Enlightenment of the 18th century or the Roaring 20s of the last century, but the present? What categorizes your present in the context of an incomplete lifespan?


Of course, that some period is ongoing doesn’t in itself inhibit us from categorizing. But Earth has a 5.6 billion-year history marked by biotic and abiotic events. The time frame of the past allows us to mark beginnings and endings on grand scales. We can see Earth-altering events encapsulated by relationships left in fossil and petrological records. In contrast, our current modifications to the planet might be fleeting, just as, for example, natural drainage systems are fleeting. The destiny of drainage divides like the Appalachians on either side of which rivers flow to the Gulf or to the Atlantic, is to be worn down. Sure, that’s a multi-million-year process, not visible to short-lived people in the present, but it is happening, nevertheless. What’s the end of the Anthropocene look like? Right. We have only conjecture, good conjecture, but still just conjecture.


The Present Is Always the Middle: That’s Why We Prophesy

Prophets—every age has its share of them. Well, maybe our age of political polling and scientific predicting has more than previous ages. Prophecies—even negative ones—provide us with a sense of security that comes with predestination. The climate alarmists are steeped in this security, ironically so because the prophets they follow have failed to predict their supposed consequences repeatedly over the past quarter century. A grey-beard Al Gore, dressed in kaftan and descending from Mount Sinai like Charlton Heston's Moses holding the Ten Commandments admonishes us to keep holy the IPCC, to abandon our black calf made of coal, and to amend our ways by going green lest we suffer the consequences of Earth’s wrath in never-before-seen storms, and droughts, and coastal inundations, all of which his sacred tablets proclaim with surety.


But hasn’t the past 12,000-year period been only a middle, one of maybe as many as 11 interglacial periods of the Pleistocene and Holocene that marked the last 2,58 million years? Even if the prophet Gore had been alive 13,000 years ago and had all of current science at his disposal, could he have predicted the Younger Dryas and its drop in temperatures that interrupted the Pleistocene warming? Could he in the midst of change have been able to point out the beginning of that cooling 12,800 years ago or its ending 11,700 years ago?


Nevertheless, we often follow prophets and adopt the generalizations of historians who frame beginnings and endings. Those geologists who recently argued about the legitimacy of the Anthropocene played the roles of both prophets and historians. Those arguing for the Anthropocene cited among other phenomena the anthropogenic rise in greenhouse gases, somehow, equating fossil fuel emissions with agriculture, deforestation, and fresh water impoundment. Yet, neither agriculture nor any other human activity had any effect on ending the Younger Dryas, a period that occurred and ended before humans adopted their modern lifestyles.


Was the end of the Younger Dryas the beginning of the Anthropocene? Were its beginning sometime around 12,800 years ago and its ending about 11,700 years ago abrupt events?  The Younger Dryas didn’t end in a day or few years like the Maastrichtian extinction of the dinosaurs—though it might have begun the way the Maastrichtian ended with a bolide impact event. *


Sudden Beginnings and Endings


It is inevitable that every human will encounter some sudden beginning or ending: An unexpected job opportunity or job loss, a winning lottery ticket or slot machine hit, a fire that destroys a residence, a car accident that alters life, or a chance encounter with a soulmate that leads to a lifelong commitment.


Our lives are marked by many such events. They interrupt “middles” and initiate new episodic sequences. But more sweeping sets of episodes, like beginnings of epochs and periods, are usually foggy smears of time. The attempt by some geologists to frame the Anthropocene met with failure precisely because of such smearing. But the attempt gives all of us a point of departure for examining our lives.


So, I urge you to see your life in the context of beginnings and endings and to ask whether or not you currently find yourself in medias res—assuming you could actually determine a middle when “middle” in fact occurs only in the context of a beginning and ending.


*Nothing in this blog is meant to deny the temporal markers we call beginnings and endings. There seems to be evidence that the Younger Dryas began “all of a sudden” with an unpredictable impact event 12,800 years ago just the way the dinosaur extinction event occurred to end the b See “The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence” in Earth Science Reviews online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825221001781 .  The abstract has the following statement: “Firestone et al., 2007, PNAS 104(41): 16,016–16,021, proposed that a major cosmic impact, circa 10,835 cal. BCE, triggered the Younger Dryas (YD) climate shift along with changes in human cultures and megafaunal extinctions. Fourteen years after this initial work the overwhelming consensus of research undertaken by many independent groups, reviewed here, suggests their claims of a major cosmic impact at this time should be accepted.”

My late brother-in-law, a self-made African-American, grew up poor. I miss him dearly for the many talks we had about the nature of society and economics. One statement he made that remains locked in my memory is that if I thought I owned my house, I needed only to quit paying my property taxes to find out otherwise. That the state of New York intends to abscond with Donald Trump's properties in an obviously politically motivated legal maneuver demonstrates that anyone's property is, to use the metaphor of Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards, like a spider hanging by a thread over a fire.


Marx on Property


In 1843 Karl Marx wrote an essay that seems applicable to the current New York case and judgment against Donald Trump. Marx wrote: “is private property not abolished ideally speaking when the non-owner has become the lawgiver for the owner?” * Was Karl Marx a 19th-century reincarnation of Nostradamus predicting 21st century, New York?


Are You Next?


Are the case and judgment against Donald Trump limited to Trump? Does the case not foreshadow a potential case against you even if you are not a New York resident? With so many Left-leaning politicians and voters peopling America, your ownership isn”t assured.


We should all keep in mind, the post-Holocaust poem by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who wrote about the silence of those who recognized what was going on around them, but who said or did nothing:


    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –
    Because I was not a socialist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
    Because I was not a trade unionist.
    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
    Because I was not a Jew.
    Then they came for me--
    And there was no one left to speak for me.


Will we we rewrite those lines a decade from now to include the words neighbor, property and Trump?



*Mclellan, David.(2000, Second Edition) Karl Marx: Selected Writings, page 52.

In his book Walking through Anger, Dr. Christian Conte enumerates what he calls “the five errors of communication.” The current political scene provides numerous examples of one of these errors, the error of inaccurate language.


Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of the error that includes generalizations and extreme descriptions. (akin to someone's saying to a loved one, “You never listen to me.”) Both Biden and Trump are guilty of this error. Biden’s inaccurate language centers on what he calls MAGA extremists. Trump’s inaccurate language focuses on elections past, present, and future. The danger in using such inaccurate language on a national stage lies in the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies motivated by fear and hate.


Hook, Line, and Sinker


Inaccurate language would not be a problem if listeners had a logic filter. However, most people appear to listen not through a logic filter, but rather through an ideological one. Extreme language isn’t different from any form of language in that it is subject to misinterpretation. Yet, there is a difference: Extreme language often results in extreme action. Two examples: The January 6 mob action at the U.S. Capitol and the attempted murder of a Supreme Court Justice.


When the brain filter or lens is ideology, alternative actions receive little attention. The ideologue acts on emotion while justifying actions as perfectly reasonable.Thus, ideologues accept as truths extreme language that supports their perspectives.


Fish That Don’t Bite


Mental laziness and impatience drive us toward any lure. Specificity in any human endeavor requires work. It also requires patience. Accustomed as we are to rapidity in every phase of life (e.g., Amazon deliveries, fast food, microwaves), we just can’t wait for anything complex or nuanced. So, whenever someone drops the ear worm of extreme language into the pool of life, we bite.


This use of extreme language is a worldwide phenomenon. Moscow pundits serve as example.Taking their lead from Putin’s flippant remarks about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they spoke with a smirk about nuking the UK and the US, senselessly disregarding their own vulnerability to nuclear annihilation. And, of course, some in the threatened countries responded in kind.


Begetting


Extreme language engenders more extreme language in a feed-back loop that reminds me of a passage in Matthew. Chapter 1, versus 2-17 (King James) reads


2 Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; 3 And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; 4 And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon; 5 And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse; 6 And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias; 7 And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa; 8 And Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias; 9 And Ozias begat Joatham; and Joatham begat Achaz; and Achaz begat Ezekias; 10 And Ezekias begat Manasses; and Manasses begat Amon; and Amon begat Josias; 11 And Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon: 12 And after they were brought to Babylon, Jechonias begat Salathiel; and Salathiel begat Zorobabel; 13 And Zorobabel begat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and Eliakim begat Azor; 14 And Azor begat Sadoc; and Sadoc begat Achim; and Achim begat Eliud; 15 And Eliud begat Eleazar; and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; 16 And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.


That’s the analog for the heredity of extreme language. Like the biblical characters, today’s extreme language stands like Abraham as the father of extreme language yet to be born, different but members of the same family.

Bias. Outright hatred. Dehumanization. These are not just the ills of our times; they have been the ills and bane of every time. And because of their endurance, every generation has attempted, if only briefly and by only a few individuals, to wipe them off the face of the Earth and to replace them with tolerance, love, and respect.


Without success.


The lack of success can be traced to the origins of the ills. Sometimes the ills seem to derive from motiveless malignity, the best examples of which lie in the characters Iago in Shakespeare's Othello and John Claggart in Melville's Billy Budd. In both characters an underlying hate appears to emerge from deep within their personalities. They do not hate in reaction to offenses perpetrated upon them. At other times, the ills appear as reactions to both intentional and unintentional treatment by others, the latter manifesting itself in many instances of road rage. When bias, hatred and dehumanization derive from reactions, they can lead to revenge that in turn can initiate a cycle that runs through generations. Such is the circumstance we see today in the Middle East, where the three ills have been a constant for at least three thousand years.


The Perennial Approaches


We humans have tried it all: Religion, secular organizations, art, didactic literature and poetry, communes, and drugs, each ostensibly purposed to bring peace and harmony. Sad to say, nothing has worked beyond short term, and even then in places and people separated by culture, history, and belief.


We are as steeped in bias, hatred, and dehumanization as ever. And in our times, social  media, which held a promise of uniting us as one large family, have become Instruments of those ills, exacerbating rather than quashing them. Driven in part by anonymity, the cyber world has intensified the three ills and made them largely invulnerable to widespread diminution.


The most promising approach through the ages has been some form of education, as well as it should be. The word education derives from Latin for to lead out. Because ignorance is one root of the three ills, specific knowledge can mitigate feelings; cognitive approaches can reduce the effects of generalizations that lump people into categories. Specific knowledge can lead to understanding that leads to tolerance. Education "leads one out" of ignorance through familiarization with the previously unknown.


However, in the context of public education, a particular problem arises, the problem of the teacher. The word teacher derives from Anglo-Saxon tacn, which means “sign” or “guide post.” Because every teacher is a human, every teacher has a potential to guide students subtly or overtly toward a personal bias. Nothing illustrates this more than the recent  campus protests led by some professors for the terror group called Hamas and against Jews who were the victims of a 2023 massacre and World War II's Holocaust. Educators have so far failed to eliminate the three ills and have often infused them with new energy. Thus the current wave of antisemitism pervading college campuses.


Religion, too, has failed in its mission to quash the three ills. Yes, it has motivated individuals to become peaceful and tolerant, but past and ongoing conflicts between Sunni and Shia, Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and non-Muslims, orthodox and reformed in several religions offer little hope that religion is a viable approach to eliminating the three hills. What of New Age movements? At best, these are temporary and usually dissolve into distant memories even within the generation that produced them.


The Stoic Solution


Self deprecation might be the only solution to the problem of the three ills. This ancient Greek and Roman philosophical approach to the three ills, associated with, for example, the Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, would have us all take ourselves “less seriously.” It encourages humility that fosters tolerance. It preaches moderation that reduces extreme responses to “environmental”—including social—stresses. In terms of our own times, it accepts realties over political correctness and group-thinking. Finally, in supporting individualism, it elevates others to equal levels of respect without the burden of imposed equity that so many in the political and media worlds keep promulgating ironically to the detriment of individuality and individual responsibility.

But self deprecation runs up against the barrier of pride, one of the most difficult to penetrate.


But What of Humanism and Liberal Ideals?


Am I the most depressing pessimist and misanthropist in suggesting that humans are destined to live in generational loops of the three ills? What of liberal ideals manifest in entities like sanctuary cities and government agencies devoted to uplifting the destitute through generous handouts supported by taxes. Surely, the liberal world will free humanity from the three ills. Surely, when everyone is equal, there will be no reason for bias, hatred, and dehumanization.


Not so, of course. In fact, attempts to impose liberal ideals to eliminate those ills have exacerbated them. Liberal hypocrisy reveals itself in the common attitude associated with the practice of “ideals” and the implied “Do as I say, and not as I do.” How many liberals have opened their homes to further peace, love and harmony among migrants  or between migrants and citizens they claim to welcome with open arms and  for whom they seek public accommodations? How many liberals have made personal sacrifices, refrained from personal attacks via social and mainstream media, and joined hands with ideological opponents in the name of peace and harmony? No. Liberals are fond of talking, fond of philosophizing.


Just as Voltaire argues through the ending of Candide, such endless philosophizing amounts to little moral progress regardless that it’s being done by Progressives.


All Solutions Are Local
​
Voltaire leaves his readers with a rather simple thought, basically, “Tend your garden.” Cultivate what is in front of you in the moment. If everyone adopted this approach to life, bias, hatred, and dehumanization might one day dissipate into the fog of human history, that amorphous past of harm and neglect, power struggles and war, and petty rivalries.

When I hear the secretary of homeland security, the President, or other democrats and their minions in the media speak about the border without acknowledging the bad policies emplaced by Biden in 2021, I wonder whether or not I have left the macro world of everyday existence and entered the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be waves, and waves can be particles, where cats are alive and simultaneously dead, and light traveling to any place in the universe takes all possible paths to get there—much like the many paths taken by migrants from all over the world to reach America's southern border.


Superposition


In his famous thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger imagines a cat in superposition, that is, both dead and alive. The cat in both states sits in a box with a radioactive substance that upon randomly decaying, releases a poisonous gas. Is the cat dead? Is it alive? There’s no way of knowing the cat’s status short of opening the box to look. No one knows the fate of the cat until someone makes that observation. Erwin’s Gedankenexperiment  calls to mind the duality of light demonstrated in the two-slit experiment: Light is an electromagnetic wave when you want to observe it as a wave and a particle called a photon when you want to observe it as a particle. In other words, the observer plays a fundamentally important role in determining the quantum reality of cat and light.


The Box


For the past 3 1/2 years, the secretary of homeland security has gone before Congress to claim that the border is secure. Essentially, he has said repeatedly that there was no crisis, but mostly he obfuscated or skirted the direct questions that only
Republicans seemed to ask. He has not led a bipartisan group to observe the border, especially at key crossing points for migrants. Few, if any Biden supporters, have looked into "the box.”


The Observation


In the case of quantum physics, the observer does not have to be human. It can be a detector of some sort affixed to a recording device, just like the detector you call a radio which detects or “observes” radio waves that you cannot see and reports the “observation” to you through amplified sound. If you leave the radio on in your absence, it will still detect the radio waves. If the radio is attached to a recording device, you can find out later what had been broadcast.


But let's stick with a human observer, one that is unbiased and logical who goes to the border, sees hundreds to thousands of illegal migrants entering the country, and videotapes what he sees. Can he demonstrate that superposition exists, that is, a circumstance in which there is both runaway migration and simultaneously no migration? Remember that the act of observation essentially seals the reality.


To determine whether or not, the cat was alive or dead, an observer has to look into the box. Now consider Joe Biden to be the observer. What did he see when he went to Brownsville Texas, where the Lone Star state through the efforts of its Governor had reduced the number of illegal migrants crossing into the country? Joe thought he was looking into the box with a cat, but in fact, he was looking into a different box, a box without a cat—live or dead. That same box, which is the elongate border of the United States, was observed about the same time by Donald Trump. What Trump saw when he looked into ‘the box” was a different state of existence. He saw the migrant situation very much alive, whereas Joe Biden saw the migrant situation very much dead.


The quantum world is radically different from the macro world in which we live our daily lives; Superposition and entanglement make that fact clear. By comparison with our macro world, the quantum world is bizarre. But is it so different? Has the Biden administration emplaced superposition and entanglement in the macro world? The members of that administration look into the box and see one thing, whereas the rest of us look into the same box and see something entirely different. Most of us see thousands of immigrants rushing the border, invading sanctuary, cities, and using resources that would otherwise be devoted to citizens.


What if there's a flaw in our powers of observation. Certainly, most Americans do not see what the Biden administration's officials see. Most see live migrants; the Biden administration believes the issue is dead unless it can use it for political purposes to fault Republicans for Joe Biden's actions.


Bizarre World


Quantum mechanics has led to the “many worlds” interpretation of existence. You have probably seen the concept portrayed in movies. The Biden administration has made the “many worlds” interpretation a reality for Americans. As in those movies, the beings in one “dimension” or “world” have little or no contact with beings in another dimension. The world Joe Biden observes might be contemporaneous with the world that you observe, but it is different by an unknown number of orders of magnitude from your world.


Bizarre, isn't it?

Call it a snarky smugness. Call it a manifestation of an ideology so embedded in their minds that they have lost any claim to realism and compassion.


During a panel discussion on MSNBC that included Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow, the ladies downplayed the importance of illegal immigration in this year's election. * Did I just say downplayed? I mean mocked Republicans in Virginia for their concerns over illegal immigration.


Apparently, for these women illegal immigration is largely a myth foisted upon the American public by networks like Fox, not a reality that has led to rapes, sex slavery, fentanyl deaths, and murders. It does not in the minds of those pundits rise to the level of concern. The millions of dollars being spent to transport, house, and feed hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens in so called sanctuary cities does not touch MSNBC’s pundits personally. They seem to have no empathy for the families that have lost children like Laken Riley to illegal immigrants with criminal records. They laughed as others mourned.


Their obvious hatred for all things conservative, and especially for Donald Trump, makes them blind to the suffering of both illegal immigrants and victims of illegal immigrant criminals. Their indifference to the problems associated with illegal immigration reminds me of a thought I  have posted numerous times on this website: “That which is not personal is meaningless.”


What will it take for these ladies to recognize that Illegal immigration poses a grave problem? My guess is that short of their experiencing a crime, they will continue to snarkly dismiss the concerns about criminals and terrorists sneaking into the country with the intention to do harm to American citizens.

*NY Post  Anchors away MSNBC anchors mock Va. voters over immigration concerns: 'Does have a border with West Virginia'

The Left’s Anti-intellectualism: A Neanderthal Tries to Respond


Back to the cave, Donald. The “big guy” thinks you are a Neanderthal. Yes, the paragon of intellectualism and storehouse of experience, Joe Biden, has called “climate deniers” and skeptics “Neanderthals.” It’s a great argument isn’t? It bespeaks the nature of the modern leftist mind:  Counter detailed questions and counter arguments with name-calling and ad hominem attacks.


But who is the Neanderthal in this? And why should we call those with a different view on supposed irreversible global trends Neanderthals, especially when it comes to matters of climate? The Neanderthals, the group of hominins that lived through more actual and demonstrably more pronounced climate swings for all of their existence, adapted to both warm and cold periods. If any group of humans knew about climate change, it was definitely the Neanderthals. During their 165,000-year reign they saw the extremes of Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods. But, of course, no individual Neanderthal would have noticed the change through which its subspecies lived. It would take a biblical Methuselah to notice climate change as it has occurred over the past 2 1/2 million years. I know Joe Biden is old, but he isn't that old.


Swings in weather? Yes. Swings in climate? No. Droughty decades? Yes. Droughty centuries? Sometimes. Ask the Pueblo. Ask “We’Are-the-World” 20th-century Ethiopians about a switch from seasonally slightly humid to very arid. Sure—definitely noticeable by individuals.. But that drought of 1989-1990, exacerbated by conflict is long gone, now replaced by a new El Niño-driven drought.


Look at the climate global controls, Joe. Latitude plays a role because of Earth’s tilt to the plane of the ecliptic. Semi-permanent Highs and Lows under Hadley cells that shift with changing sun angle control precipitation, and the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) plays a role. Cold currents off the western sides of continents and orographic barriers also exert influences on weather and “climate.” Think Sierra Nevada, Mt. Whitney, rain shadow, and Mojave.


Nit-picking


So let's examine what Joe has experienced over his eight decades of careful weather observations. The mean temperature in Scranton, Pennsylvania on February 27, 2024, was 30.7°F. By comparison, the mean temperature for Scranton on February 27, 1945, was 35.4°F. What's up with that, Joe?


Joe


Let me guess, Joe. You would say that one can't judge climate change by a single day or comparison between two days. And you would be correct, but hear this Neanderthal out. I could easily argue that one storm also does not make the climate, or indicate a climate change; yet, you and yours have used individual incidents as arguments for climate change. In my mind that's “Neanderthal thinking”; it's not scientific. Joe, you are simply echoing the vogue ideas spread by people like Greta Thunberg, whose knowledge of Earth history is  suspect.


What's that, Joe? You say the Arctic ice is melting, the Antarctic ice is melting. Also, the seas are rising at an unprecedented rate, and droughts, floods, heat waves, and cold spells all indicate changing climate. But what climate? The tropical rainforest climate? The tropical savanna? The subtropical climate? The tropical, monsoonal climate? The cold desert climate? The hot desert climate? T’he steppe? The tundra? The temperate warm summer, cold, winter climate? All of them? No, Joe, please don't tell me you mean all of them. But if you do mean all of them, are they changing at a uniform rate? What's that you say, Joe? Something about existential? Do you mean existential as in the demise of the Neanderthals 24,000-35,000 years ago? As in the demise of the australopithecines? Homo naledi? Habilis?You realize, don't you, that every human species survived thousands of years under changing climatic conditions?


Pros and Cons


You probably think you're saving the future, Joe. I believe you're destroying the present in favor of an unknown future. That’s suicidal thinking. People who commit suicide probably don’t envision the potential for a “change for the better.” You’re making America into a Jonesville, with despair the only option. Every climate prediction by so-called authorities over the past 30 years has failed to materialize. Yet, you intend to destroy a modern economy on the basis of similar predictions by people decidedly hyperbolic. You cannot say definitively that a warmer world is any more hazardous to human life than the current world or the pre-industrial world, or the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, or the Younger Dryas. You cannot say that no populations might benefit greatly by warmer temperatures. Do the tens of thousands Canadians who travel to Florida each year prefer bitter winter over warm summer? Wouldn’t Canadian farmers benefit from a longer growing season? In short, not all effects of Earth’s vicissitudes are deleterious.


Name-Calling


Give me a real debate, Joe. Give me one with Earth history, Earth features, and Earth processes as the context for a discussion on climate. Give me one that includes the physics and chemistry of planetary atmospheres and excludes anecdotal “symptoms” of change that are dubious at best, such as dying coral reefs and human diseases that might be spreading through migrations as much as through pervasive heat.


Frankly, Joe, if I'm a Neanderthal, you're an idiot. Sorry, uneducated, idiot. You have told us how brilliant you are, so I recommend that, instead of lying on the Delaware beach with your ball cap over your eyes, you pick up an historical geology textbook and read through it. Short of doing that, you demonstrate to me that you and not I, are the “Neanderthal.” My apologies to the Neanderthals for including you, Joe, in their group.