Teacher: What do you want to be when you grow up?


Bobby: A linguohydrologist or hydrolinguist.


Teacher: A what?


Bobby: A linguohydrologist or a hydrolinguist.


Teacher: I’ve never heard of…


Bobby: I’ve always been interested in both Nature and communication.


Teacher: So?


Bobby: I hope to solve an enduring problem.


Teacher: What’s that?


Bobby: Why do brooks babble…?


Teacher: Brooks…babble? Oh! You mean babbling brooks. That’s just an onomatopoeia. And what do you want to be, Alyssa?


Alyssa: A soothsayer like Cassandra.


Teacher: But that’s a myth.


Alyssa: No, look at all the soothsayers around today.


Teacher: Huh?!


Alyssa: Weather forecasters. Tarot card readers. Climate alarmists. Doomsayers in general.


Teacher: But how would you make money? How would you make a living?


Alyssa: I looked it up. I could work in a little shop along the boardwalk in Ocean City, for example. Just need a pack of Tarot cards and a chart of the Zodiac. I'll put up a sign: "Alyssa's Psychic Readings." Lots of people would come eager to learn about their future, maybe about who they really are, about their love lives, even about their investments. It’s a profession without any blowback consequences. When did you ever hear of a fortune teller who got sued?


Teacher: No, no. You’re too young to remember, but back in 2013 a Houston attorney sued a fortune teller. *

Alyssa: I looked that up. He sued over the theft of $2,700 or some amount for helping a couple that the fortune teller says she never received. I think the suit was more for stealing the money than for a faulty Tarot reading. But anyone can be careful to avoid such a litigation simply by not promising too much, maybe couching a prediction in "if you do this, you increase your chance of...." Or by saying, "this could happen if the stars align for the other person...." Or even, "if you don't offend the gods...." 


Teacher: But this is a litigious society. Someone somewhere will sue you for making a false prediction.


Alyssa: I could argue force majeure. I could say that some god intervened. Or that the person whose fortune I told changed the circumstances ever so slightly, changing the future. I could even say some artificial satellite blocked the stars from fulfilling the prophecy. 


Teacher: I guess that could be a protection against making a false prediction.


Alyssa: Or I could forget private consulting work on a boardwalk and work instead for a TV station. It doesn’t matter how many times weather forecasters miss the mark; there are no consequences; no one docks their pay. No one in the public even checks their past accuracy. Like the weather they predict, everything for most people occurs in the present. I could predict anything, cloudy with some Sun, sunny with some clouds, a chance of rain, maybe a dusting of snow or more than a dusting, or some tornadoes somewhere, but not exactly where, just a general region, you know, “Torcon of 3 in Missouri possible between midnight and noon.” It’s like saying 40% chance of rain; people only show some disgust when they cancel something like a picnic because the forecaster says there’s a 90% chance of rain, and nothing but some light passing sprinkles occur in the hours after the scheduled event. And if I’m wrong with a prediction, it won't matter. I’ll make a new forecast the following day, and I’ll say that something unexpected happened in the upper atmosphere or in the jet stream. Forecasts are as renewable as appetites; you’re not hungry now, but I’ll guarantee you will be hungry again.


Teacher: I guess I never thought of that. You have a point.


Alyssa: Or I could be a stock market pundit telling everyone how bad things are and that they will definitely get worse before they get better. Again, if nothing I say comes true, then I’ll simply revise the past by saying something—again a force majeure— occurred on the world market, like an invasion of Ukraine by Russia or a war in the Sudan and that such an incident altered economic thinking.


Teacher: I guess you’ve thought this soothsaying thing through.


Alyssa: But that’s not all. The field is wide open. How about the climate doomsayers. Weren’t we supposed to see more storms, more forest fires, more droughts than ever before even though the records indicate that days of old had sometimes more of all of those than today? No one in the public bothers to check, so I’ll be able to say anything about the future when no one knows the past. Heck, I’ll make a prediction right now: The climate will change. I’ll just be cautious to make the change for the end of the twenty-first century. Who’s around today who will remember what I say, old people in the throes of dementia? In the meantime I’ll be feted by the believers; I’ll be given grant money to fly to conferences in exotic places; I’ll live well simply because I am a climate soothsayer. The uninformed young will follow me like children following the Pied Piper. There are many Greta Thunbergs out there eager for more dire predictions about climate change. There are more politicians out there eager to throw more money—other peoples’ money— for more studies that show that something is happening, maybe a droughty future for the already parched and historically dry Southwest that lies in the rain shadow of the mountains. And if the seas don’t rise as predicted or the ice expands instead of contracts on Antarctica, who’s going to know in the general public? Who is actually going to see a change in a short and very finite lifetime? And any prediction goes awry based on any circumstance. Global warming will make the world warmer. Global warming will lead to a new ice age. Global warming will… the possibilities are endless, but the consequences to the soothsayer are practically, if not completely, nil. I’ll still get to go to conferences on someone else’s dime. Still get to make predictions, albeit new predictions. And like the stock market pundit, I’ll get to blame under force majeure, events like a volcanic eruption, or an El Niño or La Niña, or a shift in some giant cyclic atmospheric phenomenon like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Causes and effects in predictions are as bewildering as the old chicken vs the egg origin. Results are as tenuous as baking bread for the first time in a new oven.   


Teacher: You’re making me think about changing professions. What’s it take to become such a soothsayer?


Alyssa: Not much. Just hitch yourself to some university’s climate scientist or to some politician. Do a little research on a bug or an animal and connect either to the weather; write a paper on the need for green energy. You can guarantee years of free vacations to places you always wanted to see but could never afford on your teacher’s salary.


Teacher: And Greg, what do you want to be?


Greg: I don’t want to be anything. It’s easier than being something. No responsibilities, no consequences for bad decisions, and no worries. I want the government to give me…give me anything I can think of: food, clothing, housing, transportation, healthcare, education, paid holidays…I know I’ll think of more as I go. I’ll simply say I have a right to…


Teacher: Same basic argument as your soothsaying classmate Alyssa. But how would you survive?


Greg: The way I survive now, totally dependent on parents and government.


Teacher: There’s the bell. Class dismissed. [babbling to herself] I’ve got to do something with my life.

*https://www.law.com/texaslawyer/almID/1202633833068/ 

Anger. The inner brain overwhelms the frontal cortex, takes over, so to speak, the controls. Reason succumbs to emotion, outer brain succumbs to amygdalae. William Blake provides us with the perfect metaphor:


Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? *


Unbridled emotion doesn’t submit easily to bridling. It doesn’t submit to any contextual or environmental awareness. You’ve seen it in public places; you’ve seen it just about anywhere and at any time. You’ve seen it in others; hopefully, you’ve not seen it in yourself. Oh! Maybe you’ve been mildly perturbed, but certainly not so angry that you pick up a knife to stab someone or a gun to shoot with shaking hands driven by adrenalin.


Anger erases time and place, doesn’t it? And there’s no better example of that than a video of an angry woman getting out of a car on safari and walking to the driver side to berate her husband about who knows what. The video shows her shouting through the driver’s window; she’s unaware of all else. The question “Where am I now?” never enters her head. Suddenly, a tiger approaches from behind, grabs her, and drags her off camera. **

In what distant deeps or skies. 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire? *


The husband gets out of the vehicle, takes a few steps toward the tiger and wife, and then he retreats unsure of how he could possibly approach the wild animal. Another passenger emerges from the car, and they both take a few cautious steps toward the woman and tiger, both still off camera. Then a truck appears from the bushes, apparently driven by a safari ranger who drives toward the tiger, going off camera, supposedly to save the woman. **


What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? *


Anger. It can erase all awareness. It can put Self in danger. It cooperates with real tigers in real settings to ambush. And those who try to restore the outer brain’s control find themselves in danger by trying to “grasp” a tiger, not by tail, but by claw.


*https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/woman-ventures-out-of-car-in-the-middle-of-safari-gets-attacked-by-tiger-8582300/. Accessed April 29, 2023. The video shows stopped cars on a “safari” and a angry woman getting out of the passenger side to approach her husband on the driver side. Facing the driver and seemingly arguing with him, she fails to notice the tiger that grabs her from behind and drags her off camera. The video went, as you might easily guess, viral.


**For the complete Blake poem see  https://poets.org/poem/tyger

In “Well-intentioned, but Foolish Helicoptering MAWS” (This site, 4/24/23), I wrote that the new government watchdog created by presidential fiat to oversee “environmental justice” will eventually lead to more armed government agents wielding power without safeguards and accountability. I framed that idea in the words of a character named Sense and put it in his dialogue. Today, I opened the website of Americans for Tax Reform to read their report on the IRS call for new agents who will be armed. Yes, armed.


We have already experienced the IRS under the Obama Administration going rogue in the arbitrary actions against Tea Party organizations by denying them the same tax status as Left-wing and Democratic counterparts. We’ve seen the weaponization of government agencies against those who merely stand for policies that differ from the Administration du jour. And recently, we have observed the IRS sending an agent to the home of Matt Taibbi on the day he testified before Congress.


I don’t know your experience with the IRS, but mine has simply been through filling taxes and one letter I received many years ago. IRS agents of the past were armed with pens and typewriters. That, however, seems to be the circumstance in America of old. All that cordial communication professionally written could henceforth be replaced by an unannounced group of IRS agents knocking on the door at, say, 2:00 AM. Armed IRS agents? For what purpose? Doesn’t the IRS have peaceful means of collection? Why the guns?


That’s what $80 billion gets when a Congress forgets its role as stewards of the people. Some 87,000 new IRS agents could conceivably and without bullets do all the accounting work that an enormous economy engenders. So why the bullets? Will a restaurant server be shot at home by mistaking IRS agents for home intruders, just for not reporting all the tips?


If someone owes unpaid taxes, doesn’t the IRS already have legal mechanisms for collection, legitimate collection processes written into codes and acts? And if people make money through illegal activities, aren’t there already agencies assigned to quash those activities and bring the perpetrators to justice? Are these armed IRS agents to be the new G-men who will go off into the woods in search of moonshiners and meth labs that have no tax records? Will these new IRS agents go after human smugglers and fentanyl cartels that pay nothing into the government coffers, thereby duplicating the roles of FBI, ATF, ICE, and other agents? [Robert Stack, please come back. There’s a new TV series role for you] Will these IRS police show up on the doorstep of a journalist like Taibbi, or on my doorstep, or on yours?


And when these new armed agents arrive dressed like SWAT team members and carrying assault rifles, will they knock on the right door or on the neighbor’s door by mistake? Will they coordinate with local police and other government agents? I mean, what could go wrong? They are agents sworn to uphold the Constitution, including all its guarantees against foreign and domestic threats. Certainly, that guarantees a citizen’s safety in matters of a past due tax of, say, $200, $2,000, or God forbid, $more.   


Nine IRS sites in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and six in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will be added to the national list of IRS offices with armed agents. There will be 20 such offices in Texas, 18 in California, and 13 in each of Florida and New York. I assume that these armed agents will need SWAT-like vehicles and all the gear associated with a police force. I suppose the Commissioner of the IRS is elated with the prospect of getting eighty billion bucks, but such an amount is hard to spend, even for the government. So, why not spend some of it on the proper policing equipment, right? The IRS can’t have a single armed agent showing up in a little electric sedan to encounter Matt Taibbi on his doorstep. After all, as a reporter, isn’t he armed with a pen? And don’t we all know that the pen is mightier than an assault rifle? Surely, it is. It used to be the weapon of choice for the IRS.

The camera’s on, it must be so;
We just can’t let the old man go
In front of all without a script.
Remember last time when he slipped?
It’s just a little bit unnerving
To see reporters never swerving
From questions they were asked to ask
In front of all; it is their task.


But what would be so dangerous?
Would off-the-cuff endanger us?
Or have we all become so mute
That all new thoughts become quite moot?
I think of all past interchanges
In which my mind with yours exchanges
A thought or two that just comes up
Free thinking, not a planned setup.
When did we need a teleprompter
Or aides that hover and helicopter:
“This way, Dear Potus, you should walk;
“This way is how you now should talk.”


In front of crowds both mute and humble,
No one admits that you just mumble.
“What was that word, you once did say?”
“America’s defined this way:
“It’s ‘Asufutimaehaehfutbw’” today.
Oh! Well, that thought just went astray
Like others that you voiced aloud.
Your jumbled thoughts so pleased the crowd
Of fawning newsmen, all quite bowed,
Afraid to ask that followup,
“What did you mean, can you sum up?”


Or, “Why, dear Potus, do you need,
“A card to tell you what to read?
“Are there no ideas in your head
“That aren’t exactly what you read?”
Or, “Dear Potus, is it true
“On Pennsylvania Avenue,
“That no one asks or questions you
“On how you say you never knew,
“How Hunter’s bank account just grew?”


It seems so funny and yet so sad,
That Potus seems to get quite mad
When questions posed are questions new
Not written by his faithful crew.

One of tenets in a paper by Limor Raviv, Sarah L. Jacobson, Joshua M. Plotnik, and Antonio Benitez-Burraco is that humans comprise one of only a few species that have undergone self-domestication. The researchers include bonobos and elephants in the short list of such species, the latter the subject of their paper “Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.” *


The concept of self-domestication encompasses a species’ evolution toward fewer and less intense incidents of confrontation or aggression. And that surprises me because we “self-domesticated” humans seem to be highly aggressive, what with all the backyard arguments, angry pundits, and, of course wars. I find us highly aggressive as a species; otherwise, how account for the last three millennia of wars and especially the last millennium of wars? In the last thousand years, there is no single year without a war somewhere. There is no single year without unnecessary aggression and killing. Why, just yesterday, I saw a local news report on a gunfight between two neighbors that left one of them dead and the other critically injured. Self-domesticated? The term seems to have little in common with less aggressive behavior.


Nevertheless, those four authors, in looking for human analogs, believe that elephants reveal, for want of a better definition, the peaceful cooperative side of self-domestication. We love human analogs, don’t we? We ascribe human emotions, for example, to our pets. We look to read those emotions into the actions of animals, and we even love cartoon animals that echo human emotions and behaviors. We want the rest of the animal kingdom to see the world through our eyes, but not just our physical eyes, through our perspectives, especially our perspectives of ideals. Sure, we have organized civilizations, and aren’t civilizations evidence of tendencies toward reduced aggression?   


But we have not, as those millennia of wars suggest, reduced our aggressive behavior. Our cultures seem to hang, to use the metaphor of Puritan Johnathan Edwards, like a spider on a thread over a fire. It’s a very thin thread, and we’re only fortunate that spider’s silk, our own silk with which we weave the fabric of civilization, is a relatively strong substance that breaks only after we decide to break it and plummet into fiery aggression.


And that’s just the problem with declaring us “self-domesticated.” We can and do decide to break the thread that holds us so tenuously over the fires of anger and aggression. How else account for so many triggered aggressors among us, so many domestic incidences of violence that have spilled into and out of our communities?


The authors of that article believe that human history coupled with the rise in language, led to our supposed self-domestication and lower levels of aggression since the last major glaciation. But is that really so? Haven’t humans of necessity and even during our early hunter-gatherer days been interdependent, as interdependent as lions who share a kill—even if unequally? Here’s what the authors say about domestication among our ancestors:


    “Out of the many factors that were suggested to trigger this selection for less aggressive behaviors in humans, the two most prominent explanations for HSD [human self-domestication] are a) changes in our foraging ecology, where humans began relying on more diverse and nonlocal food sources that resulted in a need to move around and/or share resources with others, and b) climate deterioration and harsh environmental conditions during the last glaciation, which have increased the need for exchanging and sharing resources between groups. In both cases, selection for intergroup tolerance and less aggressive individuals would have benefitted the survival of the entire population, and as such may have triggered the process of self-domestication in humans.” (see article)


You buyin’ that? Certainly, we know that children seem to need “domestication practice.”  Sharing doesn’t always arise spontaneously among four-year-olds. And even if it did, it doesn’t seem to arise in many adults as evidenced by the empty store shelves just before a coming storm or pandemic. Maybe what the authors believe to be self-domestication is just the status when all things are comfortable and without threat. Yet, even in comfortable times, aggression emerges.


But we are very complex critters. Sometimes in the face of some threat, we see cooperation and mutual compassion dominate. People gather to extricate even strangers from earthquake damaged buildings, wrecked cars, and raging flood waters, for example. At other times threats, even as short-lived as the passing of a snow storm when people run to empty the shelves of products they want to hoard, bring out the aggressor and selfish nature that the authors attribute to our very ancient, preglacial ancestors. Domestication seems to require some overriding authority, and maybe even some overriding punishment-reward system.


And we can see this need for some kind of overriding system even in elephant behavior. During musth, when testosterone levels are high in elephants, males aggressively engage one another, sometimes injuring and even killing. But there are also, the authors point out, incidents of elephants killing rhinos, “this kind of unusually aggressive behavior has been attributed to the lack of ‘mentoring’ by older males and to other trauma-inducing conditions such as poaching, habitat reduction, premature weaning, witness to family deaths, etc.” Think of those toddlers being taught to share, the teaching necessary for “domestication.” Un-mentored young elephants are very much like fatherless teen gang members, operating without compunction or compassion in drive-by shootings. And I guess elephants have their own “snow-storm-run-to-the-grocery-store-mentality-and-behavior” as habitat reduction seems to engender anti-social non-domesticated aggressive behavior.


Intra-species violence? Here the elephants, when not pressured by external factors like poaching and habitat reduction, seem to be aggressive toward one another only during musth. With regard to other kinds of intra-species violence and aggression, the authors write, “Moreover, in wild elephants, no evidence of infanticide has been found.” Whoa! Maybe elephants are more “domesticated” than we are.


Oh! How we self-domesticated humans differ from self-domesticated elephants! Is there a month gone by when we have not read or heard news stories about human adults killing children? Heck, former Virginian governor Ralph Northam argued that post-birth abortion should be considered, and even past President Barack Obama, voting in the Illinois legislature, did not support healthcare for a baby that survived abortion, arguing that providing healthcare to the just born baby would entail making the mother have to rethink her decision about aborting. Self-domesticated? Less aggressive because we self-domesticated? No infanticide among elephants. Infanticide among humans. Is the latter not an act of aggression even without any threat? Or is the baby a threat?


Less aggressive as a function of self-domestication? I think not. At least not among humans.




*See PNAS at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.220860712 and https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208607120

The Ship of State is foundering now;
Its aft is forward, and back is bow.
Who’s the pilot? who’s the mate?
Who runs a crew so enervate
While on the seas the other captains
Can steer their ships without distractions.
How did the boat turn ‘round so soon?
Is our captain a buffoon?
Seems we’re sailing backwards now,
The aft, I see, becomes the bow.


Let’s ask him why he steers us so;
The Press must ask for us to know.
“Oh Captain, dear, what flavor’s this,
“‘Nilla, chocolate, or Cosmic Bliss?”
Reporters know what not to say.
Some questions will make him inveigh
As he ascends the ship’s gangway,
They hope he doesn’t trip going up;
They dare not mock the old grownup.
To ask the pilot where we’re going
Or why without some fuel we’re rowing
Invites a walk off some gangplank
Into the sea both dark and dank.


The independence we once had
In energy has made him mad.
“Who needs a fuel to drive a boat?
“We’ll just plug in, and then we’ll float.”
And like some Ahab after whales,
Against the weather he now rails.


And in the pilot house aloft
He listens to the first mate’s boff.
He cannot tell her, “Take the helm.”
To her all tasks can overwhelm.
She’s better suited to ship’s galley,
Where she can make a word tomalley.


This is the Ship of State of late;
And foundering seems to be our fate.

At some point the kids just have to take responsibility for their own lives.


Folly meets Sense in a coffee shop; the allegorical dialogue ensues:


Folly: Wow! Really good news today. The President will sign an executive order to make all government agencies up their environmental game. America is finally turning to  environmental justice with a new watchdog in town.


Sense: Up their environ…? Game? Oh! You mean make everything more expensive by adding layers of regulations to stacks of already existing regulations in the name of Mother Earth. Environmental justice…ssssthat one of those equity things? I think I recently heard some TV personality say that climate change was “racist.” That is, of course, possible only if skin color determines where climate change occurs. Is that one of the issues that this new watchdog will watch? Imagine what the cave commentators must have been saying at the beginning and then at the end of the Younger Dryas when temperatures first fell precipitously and then skyrocketed a millennium or so later.


Folly: Look, the new agency will coordinate other agencies’ environmental efforts. It should get them all on the same page. Anyway, Sense, people like you…Let me guess, Sense; you’re one of those redneck, gun-toting, flag-waving religious climate-change deniers in favor of or ignorant of plastics everywhere and pollutants destroying lives, especially the lives of nonwhites.


Sense: Whoa. People like me? Always best to start a debate with an ad hominem or an ad populum. Attack the person or persons, not the message. Go with emotion. I’ll reply with an ad populum: You Greenies, in your efforts to become the ultimate in helicopter mothers, you’ve fallen for a narrative that will continuously weaken the economic strengths of the country. You belong to the Make America Weaker Still, the MAWS. It’s the kind of helicopter parenting a runaway leftist government imposes on its “children.” ‘Fraid the kids will just mess things up without your constant oversight? Afraid of their independence? Envious that some have reaped the benefits of the minerals and chemicals you have so readily incorporated into your life?


Folly: No, but I am afraid of the potential damage to the environment. Ever hear of Love Canal? Ever hear of the burning waters of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River? Ever hear about Donora in 1948 or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Are you against environmental responsibility, environmental ethics, environmental safety? Look what the world was before the government imposed rules about clean air and clean water. Look at the pollution that entered the environment before the government forced businesses, industries, and farms into environmental compliance. Look at all the unnecessary premature deaths from cancer, maybe also the unnecessary cases of autism, and the unnecessary endangerment and extinction of species. When there are no governmental restrictions on exploitation, humans don’t impose restrictions on themselves. Exploiters have no regard for the future. Much of what we humans have done to degrade the environment is irreversible: Lost soils, diverted rivers, radioactive and chemical wastes that last for centuries, landscapes buried under billions of tons of garbage that will never be reused and that will continuously pollute ground water, clear cut forests, drained wetlands, and plastics everywhere. I could go on…Someone has to stand up against the innate shortsightedness of modern humans who think nothing about preserving a sustainable environment. And that also means that the government agencies must also be environmentally responsible. So, what’s wrong with the President signing an executive order to make government agencies more environmentally friendly in the context of justice? I see that his order will require agencies “to better understand and prevent the cumulative impacts of pollution on people’s health.” That’s a good thing, even for you. But it will definitely help nonwhites who disproportionately suffer from toxins in the environment.


Sense: Aren’t there already researchers in universities, medical schools, and government agencies who do that, who study individual and cumulative impacts? Anyway, the job is now overwhelming.


Folly: What job?


Sense: The job of curtailing chemical pollutants. Pretty much everyone has been exposed. Not that that’s not worth trying to change, but world production of industrial chemicals exceeds 250 billion tons of more than 100,000 chemicals every year. * You and I both have hundreds of chemicals in us that didn’t even exist before the twentieth century. Every government agency—because every government agent—has some of them or uses some of them. So, if the newly formed office is going to ask government agencies to coordinate and unify their environmental justice efforts—I want to get to that in a minute—does that mean each agency will control the inks it uses, the composition of the vehicles, the materials in the offices, the MacDonald’s wrappers that its agents use when they go into the field…?


Folly: But they don’t have… They aren’t chemists. They are IRS agents, FBI agents, EPA agents…The President doesn’t expect them to be chemists or DOE cleanup crews; he is mandating that all agencies act in ways that reduce environmental injustice among nonwhite populations. They suffer the most from…


Sense: Isn’t doing something the job of the legislative and judicial branches of government?


Folly: Not if special interest groups control them. Look at the influence of Big Pharma, big industry, and…well, every exploiter of land, sea, and poor people…


Sense: Any executive order that makes an agency will add simply add a layer of government to layers of government, making the government less efficient and giving unknown government workers hiding in the cubicles of power the ability to make through regulations de facto laws, bypassing Congress. Agencies will be able to impose more fines, more punishment, more restrictions, giving them more powers over the little people, the common citizens who will have to defend every action that has even the slightest hint of an environmental effect. And “environmental effect” and “environmental justice” will accrue changing and new definitions according to the agendas of highly paid government employees. It’s going to be a further infringement on freedom with probably very little actual impact on the environment except to make foreign entities richer and tilt the economy in an artificial direction that makes government pick winners and losers.


Folly: It’s always about money and profit for you, isn’t it? As long as profits keep adding up, you care little about the environment. Americans can’t control what others are doing to sicken the environment, but we can control our backyard environmental health. Sustainability is the goal, not the wealth of a few people at the expense of many people both now and in the future. Environmental justice is an ethical goal that makes all people more important than profit. It will enhance the lives of many nonwhites who suffer from environmental injustice.


Sense: No, I’m not just about profit, and no, I don’t reject responsibility for the environment. I object to the new executive order for a simple reason: Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue already has the Council on Environmental Quality under its wing. You know what that agency is supposed to do?


Folly: Not sure, but it sounds good.


Sense: Look it up. It’s run by an environmental lawyer who led The Climate 21 Project. That got the ball rolling on “environmental justice.” That got the ball rolling on…


Folly: Oh! Here we go. This is gonna be another one of your diatribes on climate alarmism.


Sense: No, again, although that’s not unrelated. But no, I object to the executive order because the Office of Environmental Justice created by the President will have its own coordinator called the Chief Environmental Justice Officer. That adds a layer of government to the already existing Council on Environmental Quality. Tell me that new agency doesn’t initiate the growth of a multi-layered agency that will need assistant officers, secretaries, desks, chairs, computers, printers, branch offices, cars and pickup trucks, and eventually, like FEMA, a branch of armed officers. Yes, mark these words. There will eventually be a branch of enforcement agents who will be armed; there will be monitoring and special powers. Environmental Quality Police will show up dressed like SWAT teams to arrest some poor farmer who builds a pond for his animals or a guitar manufacturer who stores his wood scraps on the back of his property and next to a slum landlord’s tenement house that is the real environmental problem for the poor.


Folly: You’re exaggerating. Armed…That won’t…


Sense: Really? What about Gibson Guitar? ** In what appears to be a blatant political hit in the name of protecting the environment, the feds sent an armed team to raid the guitar maker and then kept them in business limbo for a long time, but never charged the company with a crime for importing rosewood and ebony—legally. Nevertheless, the company had paid $300,000 to avoid court costs and had to give $50,000 to Fish and Wildlife, supposedly for planting trees—but who knows where that money went? By the way, most rosewood goes to China. What’s the EPA and the Justice Department going to do about that rosewood? Overreaching environmental agencies can ruin companies and lives, especially when they act politically. Gibson’s competitor uses the same wood for which Gibson was raided. Why not the other company? Wasn’t the environmental concern for rosewood and ebony the same? Well, Gibson’s CEO gave money to Republicans; the competitor’s CEO gave money to Democrats. Want to talk environmental injustice? Were you in a coma when Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson built a stock pond where his horses could drink and his three little girls could play? The EPA threatened him with a $75,000 per day fine. He had gotten a permit from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office, but the EPA, in spite of the pond’s attracting wildlife, said it was a violation of the Clean Water Act. And the EPA required Johnson to prove his innocence.


Folly: But he probably dammed some stream and changed the environment.


Sense: Yeah, on his own property after getting permission from the state. You tell me that you are happy with the threat of a $75,000 per day fine. Seem reasonable to you?
What do you think is going to happen with this new sub-agency that Biden ordered up by executive fiat? There will be thousands of pages of new regulations and thousands of government employees who, like so many current government employees will be able to work from home, be incapable of responding in a timely way to citizen complaints about their imposing restrictions, and be a burden on taxpayers ad infinitum. You’ll see. And if one agency can’t impose a fine, this new agency will “coordinate” with other agencies. There’s a runaway effect already in place. Already there are various government employees and elected officials who want to eliminate gas stoves because they believe they are bad for the environment. What’s next, no cooking? I can envision that under this new sub-agency, restrictions will increase and freedoms will be lost without changing much to any environment. It reminds me of adding new layers of gun laws that mean nothing to criminals and pathological killers. But it also reminds me that the agenda of the current government is more focused on a one-degree rise in temperature as harmful but that is quiet on a flood of fentanyl that kills tens of thousands. Which is more an immediate concern, environmental justice for people labeled as “people of color” or death by fentanyl and other drugs that disproportionately affects nonwhites in rundown cities? Which is the pressing health issue? Why is there not an Office of Fentanyl Poisoning in the FDA, FBI, ICE, or ATF? Because there are already federal agents tasked with controlling the illegal drug trade. Redundancy will do nothing there. Redundancy will do nothing about environmental injustice except throw more money at it to assuage the conscience of the President and his influencers.


Folly: You’re simplifying. Protecting the environment is a complex task. It requires many watchdogs. And no, there won’t be thousands of new employees with some carrying guns as part of the new agency. This new office will be a coordinating office.


Sense: Yep. I’m simplifying, but I’m doing it from experience. So, you think a few new agents and a chief of the agency are going to coordinate the actions of 438 federal agencies already in existence. Coordinating environmental justice in those agencies is the goal, right? Name a government agency that has become purposefully smaller and has reduced its paper output. And as for all the governmental duplication of agencies, I guess that’s why the Environmental Protection Agency launched its own Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights last year. No reason not to take advantage of the Democrat-passed Inflation Reduction Act that added $60 billion tax dollars to the trillions Americans already owe. And all of these new and redefined agencies will spend those billions and more billions without a measurable effect, save costing Americans more money and reducing American national independence while increasing foreign national profit and foreign threats. So, what’s next after decreasing coal production, oil output, and drilling for natural gas in the name of environmental protection and justice, while the Chinese, Indians, and other nations that have their own self-interests at the center of policies? Russia and China will make themselves richer with far less regard for preserving the environment than this country, which has numerous laws and regulations to protect both environment and people. Will this new environmental justice chief issue regulations to quash the sale of all internal combustion engines to the feds? Will some branch office of the agency be required to use electric vehicles with 300-mile ranges to drive around tiny Texas or little Alaska to check on environmental justice? Or will there be more offices so the ranges of travel can be shorter?


Folly: No, no, no. Americans can lead the world in environmental protection and serve as a model of environmental justice.


Sense: What does that really mean? Does “justice” apply to animal rights? Will environmental justice mean the elimination of all hunting and fishing? Will it give beavers the right to block streams without permission from the Wyoming State Engineer? Will beavers be held accountable for blocking streams under the Clean Water Act the way Andy Johnson was?


Folly: Look, this new agency is merely going to coordinate the actions of the other agencies to make sure they are environmentally responsible and that they serve the needs of the environmentally abused minorities in this country.


Sense: So, all those internal memoranda already issued by every agency in the name of “the environment” and “environmental justice” will be coordinated into a single massive document that says …


Folly: That says that every agency needs to incorporate environmental justice into its proceedings.


Sense: Full circle: What, I’ll ask again, does the term “environmental justice” mean? Wait! Let me look it up on my phone. Here, here is the EPA’s explanation:


    “The environmental justice movement was started by individuals, primarily people     of color, who sought to address the inequity of environmental protection in their             communities.” The website also has this statement from some Professor Robert             Bullard: “whether by conscious design or institutional neglect, communities of             color in urban ghettos, in rural 'poverty pockets', or on economically                 impoverished Native-American reservations face some of the worst                     environmental devastation in the nation."


Folly: See, there is a definition.


Sense: That’s a history, not a definition. That’s a description, not a definition. And both of those statements are more about economic and cultural phenomena than about the environment. So, the President signed into existence an environmental justice agency. But look here, the EPA has announced it already has $100 million to give away for “environmental justice grants.” Look at this and tell me that the new office won’t be a redundancy:
    
    “The new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking (EJ TCGM)             Program is a competition to select multiple Grantmakers around the nation to             reduce barriers to the application process communities face and increase the             efficiency of the awards process for environmental justice grants. Grantmakers             will design competitive application and submission processes, award                 environmental justice subgrants, implement a tracking and reporting system,             provide resources and support to communities, all in collaboration with EPA’s             Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”


Tell me that the new agency isn’t a redundancy. One hundred million bucks are already available for “environmental justice.” The academics are probably chomping at the bit right now. Grants mean free travel, free hotels, free meals, and extra cash, not to mention the prestige that writing grant-funded reports brings to the universities. Does that mean that poor professors on six-figure salaries get “justice.” The nonprofits will also “profit” from those same perks as they work with local communities to right all those wrongs committed exclusively by bad-intentioned caucasians.


Folly: But they will be able to improve their environments.


Sense: And you, too, can help. Want a job in environmental justice? Here’s an EPA tweet I see on my phone, but it was for a March hiring: “If you have a passion for #environmentaljustice and want to start making a difference, apply now to be an Environmental Protection Specialist.” So, the EPA already has a program with a bunch of money devoted to “environmental justice.” Yet, the President has deigned to create another environmental justice agency. I find that typical of a government destined to spend its tax resources on the latest cultural ideologies and neologisms, the ideologies and new phrases that have permeated the minds in American government agencies and the brains of top elected officials. I can’t wait to read the hundreds of reports that the hundred million bucks will generate. I can’t wait to see the results of environmental justice warriors who will coordinate the efforts of 438 federal agencies and their more than two million employees, who, by the way make average salary of about $90,000 per year and have enough money to live in houses and condos outside poverty-stricken neighborhoods beset by pollution.


Folly: But they take care of a huge complex government.


Sense: I’ll say it again: 438 agencies. No, now make that 439 agencies with the addition of the new environmental justice agency. I wonder how much the environmental justice chief will make, his secretary will make, his assistants will make—all supposedly to coordinate what individual agencies have already required their agents to do. Helicopter parenting—it’s the nature of the American government whose children are unbridled agents. And the irony is that in the name of “justice” there will be enforced injustices, in the name of protecting one group, there will be enforced restrictions on another group, and in the name of saving the environment or restoring the environment, there will be wholesale economic limitations on free trade and entrepreneurism. In the name of environmental justice, jobs associated with fossil fuels will go the way of the Dodo. And when jobs go away, people lose interest in caring for their local environment. Tell me that the degradation of the human environment hasn’t been at least partially the product of people who live in those environments as much as the industries that polluted. Have there been bad actors among industrialists? Have they left landscapes forever changed? Of course. Among mining companies? Heck, remember the Romanian cyanide spill? Bad actors are everywhere. Careless actors, too. And all the bad environmental accidents of the last forty years have occurred under the rules and regulations of agencies at home and at abroad. This new agency will do little more than make other agencies look for tradeoffs that on the surface will enhance one group, but underneath will disadvantage another group. This new agency will make the President feel good and moral and noble.   


Folly: We need watchdogs.


Sense: I agree, but do we need watchdogs for watchdogs? Because that’s how I see this new sub-agency. Does the President not trust that the agencies now in effect will handle their interactions with the environment and with citizens justly? Don’t they all have internal documents outlining and even specifically declaring their environmental actions?


Folly: Your pessimism is what leads to environmental injustice. You’re probably a racist.


Sense: Contrary to your belief, I’m not. I want a reasonably clean environment for everyone. I can back efforts to make life safer for everyone. I don’t see the need to distinguish among Americans according to race or any other social or cultural designation. If environmental justice isn’t for all, then it’s not justice. It’s agenda. It’s payback. It’s reparations. It might even be vengeance. And certainly, it’s costly. Think of that 100 million bucks again. Check back with me in a couple of years to report on what the expenditure accomplished for nonwhites, who seem to be the only people to which the term environmental justice applies.


Folly: Look at the disproportionate number of nonwhite poor people who live with toxic materials not found in white communities of rich people. That’s racism.


Sense: Except that in countries and counties dominated by nonwhites, the same distinction would be made between rich and poor nonwhites. Economy and lifestyle are intertwined. Economy and environmental conditions are also intertwined. Now it becomes a matter of the chicken and the egg. Do nonwhites live in toxic environments because they are nonwhites? Which came first, skin color or environmental degradation? Did the two contemporaneously evolve or develop? Have not poor whites lived in toxic communities because they are poor. Which is primary, the poverty or the race? Does the inequity in environmental safety come from race or economy? You know there’s a good argument for you side of the issue in the Doctrine of  Double Effect, an argument you should be making. Peter S. Wenz wrote that such a doctrine occurs when production that people think is blameworthy “becomes blameless when it is incidental to, although predictably conjoined with, the production of another effect whose production is morally justified.”***


Folly: I’ll look into that.


Sense: And while you’re at it, look at the results of the Superfund, government handouts that discourage self-determination, education, and pride in neighborhood communities. Yes, apparently, poor people live in closer proximity to pollutants than rich people in disproportionate numbers. But that isn’t about race as the cause; it’s about poverty and lack of opportunity or even the lack of desire to be opportunistic.


Folly: But society forces nonwhites into…


Sense: Sorry, I think lack of employment outweighs your racist card in the game of life. There’s a term, however, that you might think of and that is LULU, or Locally Undesirable Land Use. Communities have evolved around centers of industrial production. When that production ceases, many remain in the communities where they once accepted the pollutants as a way of life. A second or third generation then suffers from a lack of jobs and declining businesses that grew in the area. Look at the steel mills in Pittsburgh’s surrounding towns. They became “brownfields” when the steel industry died out. The towns where once tens of thousands of gainfully employed people lived then fell into disrepair. Sure, some of the people moved; some simply stayed to live in the vicinity of brownfields. Population changes occurred. The failed industrial giants can be blamed to some extent for the pollution, but the workers accepted the pollution because at the time it was linked to their jobs. The Clean Air act changed some of that a little, especially after the Donora event made people aware that air pollution could be lessened by adding scrubbers to stacks and by shutting down industry during inversions that trapped the pollutants in the Monongahela Valley. But the community never took the course of action to clean their environments while their environments were being altered. Then, once the communities began to decline, another generation of people, a group taking advantage of the lower costs of housing, became the occupants. So, yes, poor people, not necessarily nonwhite people, are disproportionately situated where the environment was polluted.


Folly: So, that’s why the President created a new office, to give those people environmental justice…


Sense: As I said, get back to me in a few years to tell me how his new agency has improved the lives of the poor, the poor of any race, religion, or ethnicity. Just one more comment to remind you. Every agency has already made some sort of internal environmental policy. I have no doubt that the new chief of environmental justice will probably ask all 438 agencies to submit their revised environmental policies. So, instead of having agents actually working to improve the environment, there will agents working to improve their paperwork, paperwork that will mean chopping down trees that seem so precious to the environmental activists who motivated the President to create the new agency.




*The World Counts website: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/toxic-exposures/polluted-bodies/chemicals-in-the-human-body


**Investor’s Business Daily website: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation/


***Wenz, Peter S. “Just Garbage: the Problem of Environmental Racism.” Originally in Faces of Environmental Racism by Laura Westra and Peter S. Wentz (Lanham, Maryland. Roman and Littlefield, 1955) and found in Environmental Ethics, Ed. by Pojman, Louis, and Paul Pojman, Thomson/Wadsworth. 2001 and 2008. p. 667.
    

Did you know that our living generations are not the first to have resided on the planet? I can only imagine the lifestyles of the estimated 100 billion humans who preceded us. I can only imagine the billions who will follow us.


Great-great


Think of family members whom you might label “great-great.” They belong to not the last generation, not the one before that, but the one before great uncles, aunts, and great grandparents. Try to imagine their lives, their concerns. If you are 25 in 2023 with parents aged 50, you are removed from grandparents aged 75. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones whose still-living great grandparent is 100. Chances are almost nil that you have a still-living great-great grandparent at 125 years of age. As a twenty-five-year-old, you likely have parents who were born in the late sixties or early seventies; theirs, in the early to late forties; and theirs, in the first or second decade of the twentieth century. Just indulge me for a few more: The twenty-five-year-old in 2023 has a deceased great-great grandparent born in the nineteenth century before cars, planes, ubiquitous kitchens with refrigerators, paper towels, and plastic wrap. Your Great-great Grandma had parents and grandparents who knew life when outhouses outnumbered indoor bathrooms and salt and smoke were commonly used to preserve meat.


Lost in Their Unrecorded Lives


And save for the possible black-and-white picture without smiles common in selfies, nothing much tells you about the lives of anyone labeled “great-great.” You might even wonder why so many photos taken before 1900 depict such serious demeanors. Didn’t those people have any fun? Didn’t any photographer say, “Say cheeeeeese”?


I remember my maternal grandmother’s telling me about crossing the Atlantic. It was a time just before refrigeration became a necessary component of ocean liners. The passenger ship she took seems to have had an onboard slaughterhouse because she recalled sneaking away with her sister, both children wearing “clodhoppers,” running to see the “place where they slaughtered the cows at the back of the ship.” Definitely a different experience from a modern Norwegian or Carnival cruise ship: She made the voyage in the late nineteenth century—three times, once on her initial migration to America and then twice more as a young married woman on a visit to the homeland. No refrigerators? No problem. Fresh off the hoof was it. True, by the time the Titanic was built, refrigerated rooms cooled by machines the size of pickup trucks were incorporated into the aft decks of ocean liners built in the early twentieth century. But Grandma was already a young woman in 1912 when that ship hit ice, and she was already in the midst of giving birth to nine children (whose ages spanned a generation from oldest Michael to youngest Edward, five boys and four girls).


She crossed the Atlantic before Ford made the first Model T. She crossed before the Wright brothers made their historic flight. She crossed as Tesla and Edison fought their “current war” and probably when Tesla won that war by lighting the Chicago World’s Fair in 1895 with AC power. And she definitely seems to have crossed when home refrigeration systems were called ice boxes, essentially fancy cabinets with a galvanized metal liner and a compartment for a block of ice and a catchment tray underneath for the meltwater. Although some cargo vessels had air conditioning and even ice-making machines in the nineteenth century, the ship that ferried Grandma and her sister to America on that first trip during their childhood had no refrigerators that she could recall.


I can only imagine her life without refrigerators, even though I know I could visit many places today both in the United States and in all Third World countries where no one has a refrigerator. In fact, I have visited such a country where people live much as my own Great-great Grandma probably lived, and I am old enough to remember seeing some of those old ice boxes. There was an ice plant in the neighborhood of my pre-teen years. Cold building, that ice house. My cousins and I would ask the workers there for a piece of carbon dioxide ice—dry ice—then put it in a jar, tighten the lid, and wait until the sublimating ice built up enough gas pressure to make our little bomb explode on the sidewalk.


Are you now reliving a moment in my childhood? You were just there with me, watching and waiting, but not there. In my short and incomplete description, I could not take you “all the way back there,” just as my grandmother could not take me “all the way back there” to her life before she bore my mother.


Looking Back


What about my grandmother’s grandmother or great-great grandmother? Could anyone today resurrect those lives beyond superficial melodramatic or method acting like some Civil or Revolutionary War buff? Go to Williamsburg, Virginia. You’ll see people in “period dress.” They will tell you about life in colonial Williamsburg lived on the wide street leading to the Governor’s mansion. But what they describe isn’t the actual life that was. It’s the best re-creation that historians can give, BUT IT IS A STEREOTYPE OF THE TIMES. The details of actual lives are missing as evidenced by the re-enactors getting into their cars to drive home when the tourists return to their hotels. And the same goes for those Civil and Revolutionary War buffs, who temporarily live in costume and eat as the soldiers ate—eating, however, without the threat of botulism and salmonella and then driving home, stopping during their return at a highway rest stop with indoor plumbing and MacDonald’s with refrigerators. There are coolers carrying ice from their hotels in the trunks of their cars, a convenience unknown to Civil and Revolutionary War soldiers.


Unrelated but Related


On the drive from Asheville, NC, to the Ocoee River and the copper mining district, I passed by a “trading post,” essentially a gift shop with a re-enactor Cherokee. The trading post lies within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, the territory from which Jackson forced the indigenous tribe to move under the Indian Removal Act. Many died along the infamous Trail of Tears to their western exile. Let’s relive a fragment of the past. The re-enactor Cherokee at the trading post wears a fringed leather outfit and sports a feather headdress like the one that chiefs wore in many cowboy movies made during Hollywood’s early years stretching into TV’s early years.    


Most tourists would think nothing of the feathered headdress the trading post Cherokee wears. But Cherokees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more commonly wore turbans. The past that we commonly know isn’t often the past that was. It’s a past of re-enactment, and it’s often stereotyped and rigidly fixed, bearing little actual resemblance to the specific realities of those denizens of ages gone by. Not far from the trading post is the casino; the life of a modern Cherokee differs greatly from the life of a long-gone Cherokee.


Looking Ahead


If you are 25 and are not, as so many of 2023’s young adults seem to be inclined, of the mindset that “I’m-never-bringing-kids-into-this-terrible-world” (as though there’s another), then a few of your descendants a century or two from now might wonder about the nature of your life. “What was great-great-great [heck, let’s add a few] great-great You like? How did You approach the problems of your times? What were Your concerns?” If your selfies survive magnetic deterioration and the organic inks in your color photos haven’t faded, those images will, short of your having left a detailed autobiography, be all that those great-great-great descendants will have. At least they will see that you smiled. In fact, every one of your contemporaries smiled. “What was going on with these old people? Were they really all very happy?” The selfies will preserve a stereotype of your times.


The Commonality


In 2023, the world’s population continues to stand on the brink of nuclear annihilation and the destruction that began when the US bombed Hiroshima and on the brink of destruction of lives lived with the luxury of refrigerators—so common they are even found in dorm rooms. It stands on the brink of life lived under the influence of Artificial Intelligence. It stands on the brink of evermore intrusive governmental authorities, evermore numerous pathological killers, and evermore pressures from would-be Caesars running gangs, cartels, and corrupt governments. The twenty-first century hasn’t changed much, however, from all things human. There were always such characters peopling the world; think Caligula and Nero; think Tamerlane and Hitler. All those human experiences and dangers have simply been placed in a new setting. Vices and virtues of the past remain.


Your descendants will differ only in their technology. They might, if the world goes nuclear holocaust, even have less than you. They might live in a time when refrigerators are uncommon and outhouses are common. But they will exhibit all the same vices and virtues you see about you in 2023.


If they have less because of what your generation decides, they might look back with envy and wonder. If they have more, they might still wonder, “What was Great-great-great You like? What concerned you?” They might have an old picture that makes them say, “This ancestor looks like my younger sister. This one looks like my Aunt Betty.”


If you want them to know more, send them a detailed message. Write your story.

Chance meetings. They can unite people for a moment or for a lifetime. You can search your memory for them: How did you meet your significant other, for example? How did you meet a person you now think of as a friend? In your memory search, you’ll also note the influence of those chance meetings.They were points of departure for, as the sci-fi writers like to say, your current timeline. At the unmarked intersection of your road with another, you collided with someone, and the resultant vector of life is the one you are now on. Didn’t Robert Frost write a poem about this, something about a “road not taken”? Yours is the “road taken,” or the vector forced on both by that meeting.


Achilles Shoots an Arrow at a Tortoise


Remember Zeno’s paradoxes? There’s the famous one that keeps Achilles from catching a tortoise because any distance can be divided by half multiple times, making moving from point A to point B impossible (1/2; half of that is 1/4; then 1/8; 1/16; 1/32…) and the other famous paradox that stills an arrow in flight as it occupies specific spaces moment by moment. I think there’s a connection here with the chance meetings of your life—and mine. You were moving (maybe), but that chance meeting is frozen in memory and (maybe) in time.


A Life in Superposition


Chance meetings illustrate our dual perspectives that seem to lie in superposition. We see ourselves in moments and in continuations. So, life appears to be an uninterrupted continuation or it appears to be a series of discrete episodes loosely connected because they occur in the channel of your life. You were, for example, a third-grader, a high school student, a graduate, all separate yet somehow linked, discrete, yet continuous, the same person, yet different in isolated moments over a lifetime. You are that third-grader; you aren’t that third-grader. Those who have known you since third grade see you as a continuation. Those who meet you now do not see the third-grader in you.


Stopping in the Middle of Movement   


Somehow the flow stops. On a shallow rocky stream in the mountains years ago, one of my children and I put our small rubber boat into the water and paddled across the flow to where a pool of glassy water exhibited no movement—in the middle of the stream! The quiet water had been isolated between two turbulent flows, water in the turbulence churned as the Bernoulli principle manifested itself in narrow channels between the coarse sandstone boulders and in the eroded stream’s bedrock. We remained stationary between two such flows; no effort was required to keep the little boat on the placid water. After sitting there for awhile in still water discussing the physics of flow, we paddled into the more turbulent water to cross to the bank. We’re humans, modern humans; that made us impatient with the stillness. The rest of the family, waving to us from the bank, was ready for a picnic lunch. Time pressed us to move through space. We reached the channel’s side and pulled the boat onto the bank. It might have been a better tale if one of us bore the name Achilles. I could then have written, “Achilles actually crossed the river and reached the other side.”


Illusion vs Reality


We live lives of illusions and realities, and the problem in knowing which is which lies in part in what Zeno said about distance and time. We know that whenever we stopped in a chance meeting, we also continued, just continued on a different vector. We think of the stop that lay in superposition to life’s flow. Strange. Did we actually “stop”?


Is space continuous or discontinuous? Big question. Arguments on both sides have been both convincing and unconvincing. Planck’s minimum length of 10^-35 m and his minimum time of 10^-43 throws quantum physics on the side of discontinuity, at least on the subatomic scale. On the macro scale we just don’t see the divisions as we walk from point A to B, with both space and time seeming rather continuous. We know we can reach B from A; we’ve done it many times, and during no drive to the grocery store do we envision half after half after half with the bread, milk, and eggs never quite within reach. The moving car continues to move and even pass slower moving tortoise cars, you know, the ones driven by the guys in the short-brimmed fedoras who use turn signals as they round every curve. Our movement stops only where intersections in our journey are the actual intersections where stop signs and traffic lights command blind obedience to traffic laws—at least when the cops aren’t looking. Disobedience to the laws of interrupted space there could result in an unpleasant fender bender or even fatal chance meeting with cross traffic.


Time, too? Both illusion and reality. Haven’t we all experienced interruptions in time as we stop going where we’re going, maybe during a trip to the beach, our stopping along the way for an overnighter in a motel before we resume. Yet, we perceive that the journey lies before us and that we could easily do without the rest if we so desired, traveling uninterrupted for hours, the travel time never stops even during the motel stay. As passengers in the car, we stare into the distance down the road or off into wide fields making us stop as we move. Even a daydream interrupts the reality—if it is reality—of time’s flow. Tick, tick, tick…


Zeno’s Dilemma Is Your Dilemma


Zeno followed Parmenides, the older of the two philosophers and the guy seemingly stuck on unity and Wholeness and immovability, who wrote, “Nor is it [Being] divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it [Being] is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is” [translated by John Burnet]. Surely, Zeno, in spite of his teacher’s teachings, had had chance meetings, brief encounters, stops along the way of life that made him wonder what truth lies in Parmenides’ statement that “all is one.” Doesn’t that apparently moving arrow occupy a particular space at a particular time?


Can you understand the reason for Zeno’s paradoxes? His teacher taught that movement is an illusion and that Being is One; Zeno divided it into an infinite number of moments and spaces. Thanks to Calculus, we know that an infinite number of steps can produce a finite answer, the many divisions leading to continuity. Thanks to experience, we know that we can drive to the grocery store and catch and pass a turtle-driver. Head spinning? Mine is because I’m writing two topics: 1) The question of continuity in the physical universe and 2) The question of continuity in the life of conscious finite beings, each obsessed with defining Self or Identity.


Saccades


Is life-continuity an illusion? I think of the stops our eyes make as we read. That we do not scan a line smoothly is demonstrable by watching closely the eyes of a reader. The hesitant little jumps, or saccades, reveal that smooth scanning isn’t smooth; it’s jerky. It’s a discrete jumping from word to word or from units of words to adjacent units of words. Seems that we live with many such perceptions of smooth and uninterrupted processes that are, in fact, not smooth but interrupted. Smooth scanning is an illusion from the inside perspective of the Self; saccades are the reality from an outside perspective of another Self.


We can act in our macro world as though continuity ties actions together into a unit, the steps in the park become a unified “walk” whose discrete units an Apple watch or Fitbit enumerates and also records as “a mile” or “two miles.” That larger measurement is a coalescence of all the component steps.


Another way of looking at the continuity of life can be found in the writings of John Updike. Sorry to say that it’s been a couple of decades since I read his Self-Consciousness, and I lost my copy. I believe that it was in that book that Updike speaks of life in the metaphor of wave function and particle. Being the same person you were as that third-grader makes you a wave (or maybe even a “field”), but being a third-grader and then an adult makes you a particle, the wave function having collapsed into the past discrete younger you and the present discrete older you. As a “particle” you embody a collapse at every interruption to the flow of life; as a “wave” or “field,” you embody a Self. And that Self is continuous.


Every chance meeting or every chance interruption is also a “collapse to a particle.” You can remember those specific moments that are significant. The other, not so significant episodes or events are a continuous blur. Are you getting the picture here? Like the dichotomous nature of light and electron, your nature is dual, comprising wave and particle, smoothness and jerkiness superposed, continuous and discontinuous simultaneously.


The Simple Takeaway


Most of us are given to self-definition. Our egos demand it because self-definition engenders a sense of security. How we define ourselves depends on our perspective. Do we see ourselves in discrete moments in space and time or as a continuation of Self? Multiple Selves or One Self?


And if we choose at times to see our Selves stopped in moments of chance meetings, do we acknowledge a “defining moment” or “defining place,” or even “defining event”?
Do we define or identify Self as a collection of Selves? Or does Self override and unify Selves as though we are immovable Being that encompasses particle selves and unites them all regardless of our perceptions of an episodic existence? Are both perceptions—wholeness or discreteness—simultaneously true even as they contradict one another? Is life merely a matter of observations made after the fact, like discovering that light or electrons can be waves or particles through the act of observation or that apparent smoothness is really a series of jerky saccades?


I guess that isn’t really a simple takeaway, is it?

Pucks. Dumb as a puck. Just thinkin’ of metaphors here. Rapid fans who sport their loyalties by the team shirts they wear and the paint on their faces. Fights throughout the stands. From the luxury boxes above, the owners oversee a world covered in ice on which heated violence occurs over a puck. And the puck itself? Dumb as itself as it takes hit after hit after hit by hockey sticks. And the hockey sticks? They consist of a longer shaft and a shorter blade, both made of various materials, including initially only wood, and then other materials, evolving into the carbon fiber composition of today’s sticks. Carbon fiber. Hmnnn. Makes me think of carbon. Strange thought, that. Combining carbon with the thought of hockey sticks. Or, maybe not so strange…Are we pucks? Certainly, we seem to be hit by either or both of two hockey sticks.


The Climate Hockey Stick


Millions of Americans have been driven into anxiety over climate change * because of Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick graph. If you are one of the few who have not been so driven, I’ll simply describe the graph. It shows time along the X-axis and temperature on the Y-axis. The line runs on a gradual incline (the shaft) upward against the Y-axis until the Industrial Age and the onset of fossil-fuel burning, at which point the line climbs sharply upward (the blade). Oh my! Since the Little Ice Age, temperatures have risen and have risen rapidly since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Mann’s graph shows an increase in the rate of rise, demonstrable by proxy records, such as tree rings and ice cores. The sharp rise, argued by some to be more a visual product of horizontal shortening of the graph, seems to put the world on course for runaway greenhouse warming that alarmists attribute mostly to a single cause: Anthropogenic carbon dioxide, a gas that is the by product of burning fossil fuels. In truth, the gas can demonstrably be shown to have risen to over 400 ppm in our atmosphere from a pre-Industrial approximation of 250 ppm. The hypothesis that the gas is responsible for any warming in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has its problems, however: 1) Temperatures have not risen according to the models based on carbon dioxide concentrations and the projections of an angry Al Gore because hiatuses in warming have occurred; 2) A complex and dynamic atmosphere responds to many interrelated causes as Mann and others have rightly noted, with causes as yet unknown and all variability somehow linked to both Pacific and Atlantic sea-surface temperature oscillations; 3) The Northern Hemisphere, where the greater area of continental mass, mountain systems, and human population lie is different from the Southern Hemisphere’s mostly ocean surface and paucity of human residents; and 4) The data history is largely “proxy” and derived from many sources, including tree rings, ice cores, oxygen isotope analysis of calcium carbonate shells, configuration of land and sea as an effect on ocean currents, the ocean currents themselves, mountain systems, and even solar insolation dependent on the Sun’s activity compounded by Milankovich cycles. Nevertheless, Mann and others make an argument, visualizable in the hockey stick graph, that the world is in a warming trend. The problem as seen by “deniers” is that warming now doesn’t approach warming that occurred in the absence of humans during, say, a period about 55 million years ago when the temperature of the Arctic Ocean was a tropical 70 or more degrees Fahrenheit. Since that time Earth has undergone persistent cooling—until, according to Mann and others, it recently began to warm (especially since the Little Ice Age and more than the Medieval Warm Period about a millennium ago that saw the Vikings settle in Greenland).


Whew! Has this hockey game gone into overtime?


The Debt Hockey Stick


There’s another hockey stick graph that should cause Americans anxiety. It’s the graph of the national debt, now standing at over $30 trillion. The debt was rising like temperatures since the Little Ice Age at a rather steady but gradual incline. And then, beginning in the Obama Administration, it took the hockey stick climb. Granted, some of the debt Americans have they owe to themselves. That’s about 20% of the total debt. Granted also, some of the debt can be rolled over, meaning that new debt can pay off old debt. But the entire national debt can’t be covered by the government’s paying itself “back” or by rolling over old debt into new debt. That makes the hockey stick debt graph one that should concern Americans. And here’s where the climate hockey stick graph meets the debt hockey stick graph. The one is motivating some to exacerbate the other, much the way that ocean waves increase in height when crests of one wave train merge with crests from another wave train, sometimes causing a very large rogue wave capable of knocking a cruise ship around.


If the current trend in government policies continues, the Mann hockey stick graph will soon be a major influence on the debt hockey stick graph to the economic detriment of all Americans—and maybe to the entire West. Actually, check that; it already is an influence because the Biden Administration has policies in place that will make what is now cheap and abundant energy more costly for everyone, and that means also for the government. The reason? Biden et al. (and not just Al, as in Al Gore) want to eliminate fossil fuels because of extrapolations based on the hockey stick graph of temperatures. Biden, demonstrably by his actions, believes carbon dioxide will kill us all, as he labels global warming an existential threat. His solution for saving all of humanity is the elimination of fossil fuels, even though it is also demonstrable that at 400 ppm carbon dioxide is not the sole cause of any warming and at that concentration is lower than its presence during previous geologic epochs and periods. As some reasonable scientists, including the founder of Greenpeace, have noted, the planet, compared to its past status, is in a carbon famine and historically, carbon increases have been followed some forty times by temperature decreases. More carbon also facilitates a greener world.


Two Hockey Sticks Collide in Superposition, and Every Player in the Game of Life Gets Hurt


The economic hockey stick is now almost inextricably linked to the climate hockey stick. More people have become convinced that to bend the blade of the climate graph toward the horizontal—straighten the stick—or even to reverse its orientation to a downward trend, the world must steepen the economic hockey stick graph. There’s no denying that the steepening of the economic blade occurred during the current and previous two Administrations. But wearing the skates of the Obama Administration that incorporated climate change policies, Biden has by fiat steepened the economic graph in the name of climate change. Biden has superimposed, possibly irrevocably, the one stick on the other.


Remember That in the Hockey Arena, the Ice Is Artificially Maintained


Hockey. Isn’t that the game that inspired the joke “I went to a fight last night, and a hockey game broke out”? Are there hockey players who still have all their teeth? Have all of us lost teeth to those two hockey sticks that are taking the bite out of our economic welfare? Certainly, the Mann (unintentional) climate and government (intentional) debt hockey sticks have taken a bite out of the American economy and the personal finances of Americans. Seems to me that both the climate alarmists--ignoring the economic costs that will impoverish and therefore, as a consequence shorten the lives of millions to billions of people--and the government spenders intent on eliminating carbon--ignoring the realities that they produce no products to earn wealth but simply take from everyone according to their agenda based on climate change scenarios—need to be put on ice.


If I were asked what I could do with both hockey sticks…








*I was tempted to write “driven into a frenzy” because I had just written a blog on frenzy (See entry for August 14, 2023).