When a policy affects all, each experiences all. We are living in a nightmarish allegory that lies beneath the consciousness of many but that is very real to the afflicted.


Would that the American Administration’s current (2022) belief that it is acting humanely at the southern border not be contradictory. The current policy is demonstrably not a simple contradiction in terms, and the deaths of dozens of immigrants left to bake to death in a locked smuggler’s trailer make that point. The policy has had real, not just argumentative, results, because its negative effects affect individuals, not hypothetical phantasms. The detrimental effects can be measured in individual abandoned children, abused women, and in criminal activities by illegal aliens, including the murders of American citizens. Each victim is an actor in an allegory like The Somonyng of Everyman, the medieval play. In that drama, Death summons Everyman to account for his life before God. He asks for a companion to accompany him only to realize that he is alone, save for his actions. Those migrants, like Everyman, had no Washington politician to accompany them when Death called.   


Social policies always have contradictory results, as intended actions engender unintended consequences. That goes for just about every policy, even those that an overwhelming majority might desire. The contradictions arise from our inability to anticipate all that will transpire over the course of a policy’s life. Once enacted, policies become embedded in large bureaucratic networks that become so massive that they acquire an increasing inertia. What will it take, for example, to stop the flow of thousands per day streaming toward the border? The emptying of other countries?


Those who believe an open-border policy is humane seem to be convinced that their actions have more pluses than minuses. But when asked to explain how the scale of justice tips in favor of humanity in light of the reported and underreported but responsibly estimated crimes against individuals seeking refuge in some “promised” land of free stuff and golden opportunities, the current policy-makers give no logical answer. Their argument that some are emigrating from places of persecution is undeniable; the “persecuted” coming to the border do not, however, number in the hundreds of thousands or millions. What is true is that a preponderance of immigrants are probably seeking a better life than what they had, not escaping persecution. And maybe as a consequence of the current border policy many individuals will find that “better life,” but many won’t. To accommodate the migrants, the government has been moving illegal aliens around the country at citizens’ expense. These diaspora will place further burdens on communities and their hospitals and schools, where individuals, not phantasms in some allegory, will suffer reduced resources.


So, as in the case of most, if not all, social policies, some will benefit, and others will suffer. Now some might argue that one has to take the bad with the good and that the good outweighs the bad. But what does such an argument mean to those who suffer from such policies? For them the “ideal” is contradicted by the “real.” The scale isn’t balanced—and even if it were balanced, that symmetry implies that some, if not the logical “half on the other side of the scale," will definitely suffer.


One might think after reading the day’s bad news, such as the June, 2022, story of those heat deaths in a smuggler’s trailer, that these are times without balance. Should we find consolation in what Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Such symmetry of good and bad appears an illusion at best nowadays and at worst is meaningless to those on the negative side of the equation. Those who live in this Age of Contradiction, of policies that are ostensibly designed to make life “fair” and “equitable,” find themselves immersed in a rising sea of degradation and despair. Were he alive, Jorge Luis Borges might have written about you as he wrote of his great uncle and Argentinian poet/philosopher Juan Crisostomo Lafinur: “Like all men, he was given bad times in which to live.” Yes, that’s you. You’ve been given bad times in which to live, and the reason they are bad times is the plethora of bad social policies that run contrary to their intended purposes.


Neither side of the political middle has a monopoly on sound policy-making for a pluralistic society. Americans are an agglomeration of diverse cultures and subcultures. In their attempts to satisfy all, policy-makers have leaned too far Left or Right and  dissatisfied almost everyone. Even those whose desires a policy was intended to fill become unhappy because the result falls short of their expectations. It’s bad times for both sides, one side arguing that a policy “goes too far,” while the other side argues that a policy “doesn’t go far enough,” the latter side taking that stand until its individuals experience a policy “gone too far” during a visit to a crowded ER or school, or during a crime.


In his essay “A New Refutation of Time,” itself a contradiction because “new” implies the passage of time and is thus a contradictio in adjecto, Jorge Borges quotes Bernard Shaw with regard to bad and good times: “What you can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. If you die of starvation, you will suffer all the starvation there has been or will be. If ten thousand people die with you, their participation in your lot will not make you be ten thousand times more hungry nor multiply the time of your agony ten thousand times. Do not let yourself be overcome by the horrible sum of human sufferings; such a sum does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain are cumulative.” That is a different approach from Dickens’s.


For each of those immigrants baked to death in that trailer, the suffering was the product of a bad social policy. Like Everyman, each migrant discovered that in the midst of a crowd the irrelevance of the American Administration’s policy that an open border does more good than harm. Each migrant suffered and died and that was all the suffering and death that ever was, or is, or will be.


And in Washington, where the cries of abused and abandoned migrant children aren’t heard, the policy is good because some few thought it would be good. The contradiction between intention and reality is irrelevant. Members of the Administration thought it would be good, so in their minds, it is good—the facts aren’t real, but even if they are real, they are irrelevant because no individual policy-maker has experienced the negative consequences.


Remember my adage that “what you anticipate is rarely a problem”? That works more or less on an individual scale. When one tries to anticipate what might happen in a nation of a third of a billion people because of a seemingly good social policy, failure is just around some future unanticipated corner. And when policy-makers lack either knowledge or insight or both, they set in motion an inertial system that has real consequences for individuals they most likely will never meet and surely will never—like those allegorical figures Everyman asks to accompany him—accompany on a journey into a locked trailer under the summer sun.


You can think of your own example of results contradicting intentions, but one that stands out for me is the policy of banning DDT. How many people have died or suffered from malaria because DDT was unavailable to kill mosquitoes? The estimates run into the millions. The policy-makers determined that their inclusive policy was best for all. Which of those policy-makers, driven by the arguments of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, accompanied individuals into a rainforest or walked over crops decimated by swarming insects? The consequence of a policy designed to save people from DDT’s potential to cause cancer was the real death of some individual, some Everyman.


You are Everyman. You ultimately experience all there is to experience just as each of the migrants experienced all there is (or was) to experience, and no policy-maker will accompany you or any individual along the Mosquito Coast, through a decimated cropland, to the gasoline pump, or in a hot trailer.

1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4. Four/four time. Hear that count on violin strings. B-B-B-B, repeated, repeated eight more times; take a step downward to four As; down again to eight Ds, and then up to eight Es, followed by eight D-sharps, Es again, and back down to D-sharps. Listen to the beginning of Vivaldi’s Winter that sets the tempo on violin strings that play measures of eight notes. The beginning is a crescendo of repetitive notes, four at a time, that rise to a feverish bowing of a trill followed by that 4/4 beat.


You want to set up your audience, structure what you say the way Vivaldi structured Winter. Even the ostensibly boring use of the same notes becomes a lively presentation.


Think the method doesn’t work to capture an audience? Bob Seger uses the same method in Hollywood Nights. Both Vivaldi’s Winter and Seger’s Hollywood Nights run in 4/4 time; both begin with repetitive notes, and both hit the listener with an abrupt change.


Of course, Seger’s work differs from Vivaldi’s in that the singer uses the human voice whereas the famous composer uses the “voices” of violins. But there is a similarity as both march the listener to the message. Listen to both and realize that the same kind of compositional structure can produce different kinds of messages effectively.


Just suggestin’. 


*YouTube. Vivaldi. Winter.
**YouTube. Bob Seger. Hollywood Nights.

Inspiration occurs anywhere and at any time. Typically, we say that a “new” idea simply pops into our heads unexpectedly. Whatever we are doing might be totally unrelated to the inspired thought. Inspiration happens randomly and often effortlessly. It is not a method of thinking; it is a product that differs from the process of  meditation and contemplation, both of which might produce thoughts that we term “inspired.” One of the most famous of insights occurred to Albert Einstein when he had “the happiest thought” of his life, the insight that led him to explain General Relativity and change the Newtonian understanding of gravity.


There is no place that holds a universally accepted First Place among places where inspiration occurs. Ancient Greeks, assuming inspiration meant prophecy, designated Delphi as a place of inspiration because of its association with three muses. In noting those muses, I should also mention that the Greek goddesses of inspiration were the children—in most versions—of Zeus and Mnemosyne, that is Memory. Different cultures have marked high elevations and even ancient ruins (Stonehenge, for example) as sites that facilitate insightful thinking.


In some ways inspiration is dreamlike: There you are in REM sleep, partially unaware (you don’t fall out of the bed, for example, indicating some proprioceptiveness) of the environment and totally aware, somehow, of a dreamworld put together by random actions of neurons. That dreamworld can tell a story, as we all know, though it often violates the structure of consciously manufactured tales. Those somewhat structured and unstructured thoughts come from years of experience, the day’s activities, hormonal surges, anxieties, fears, and even hopes. The dreamworld pops up without effort and unfolds however the neurons make connections both random and ordered, but largely based on one’s past, thus Mnemosyne plays her role. Inspiration even occurs during dreams though many inspired thoughts are forgotten by morning, leaving only a hint that “Hey, I had a great thought. Now, what was it? Shoot, I just can’t remember exactly, but I know I had an insight.” There’s a scene in a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry wakes during the night, scribbles a joke his brain devised from a sci-fi movie he saw, and then falls asleep, only to forget what he scribbled illegibly during the night. When he finally deciphers his writing, he realizes that his inspired joke was, in fact, not funny. * The episode makes a significant point about inspiration acquired during sleep: Much of it is useless and meaningless though each inspired thought seemed profound during partial consciousness.


The word meditation, which is sometimes associated with having insights, has a complex derivation that relates the modern word in gerund form to “judging,” “measuring,”“rehearsing,” “practicing,” “studying,” “devising,” and, of course, “contemplating.” The noun would therefore be equivalent to “contemplation.” Before the rise in popularity of transcendental meditation during the Age of the Beatles, the word was associated in many minds with “thinking about religious matters, about a deity, or about a relationship with some higher entity.” After that, it seems to have become a secular process devoid of some specific religious connotation yet one that connects the individual to the Cosmos—sometimes in “out of body” feelings. Monks still meditate in the older sense, of course, but no one has to climb the mountains of Tibet or  ancient Greece or to sit in a dark medieval monastery to meditate.


The word contemplation seems to have had a similar history with regard to its association with religion or religious matters. Templ in contemplation derives from the practice of marking out a space by augurs. To make it simple, I’ll say that before the advent of architecture devoted to religious practices, augurs threw their instruments of prophecy (bones, chicken insides, whatever) on the ground or maybe on a table. Eventually, places originally set aside became formalized in an edifice, like the temple at Delphi, where Apollo’s oracle and eventually three muses dwelt and spoke. And in that context, contemplation is associated with religion or with a “higher power.” *


Whereas inspiration pops into the brain from a partially understood process that seems to involve making analogies, meditation and contemplation are conscious efforts, and both seem to engender inspired thinking at times. People who meditate or contemplate will note that they can practice both in any setting, but a quiet setting is preferable to a noisy one. Clashing dishes, random noises and overheard bits of conversation in a local diner make concentration difficult even for the most practiced of meditators and contemplators. Thus, place plays a key role in someone’s efforts to meditate or contemplate. For this reason, “temples” (outdoor or indoor) serve as backgrounds for such mental activities. And for whatever reason, certain places, such as Sedona, become natural edifices for meditation, as many believe as evidenced by swirling lines of rocks set by visitors as “labyrinths.”


That some believe a nonphysical (“spiritual”) place exists is best exemplified by what Milton has Satan explain in Paradise Lost: “The mind can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” And it is in this ability to transform a place mentally that enables people under duress in captivity, for example, to ignore or minimize their circumstance, including even their pain: The mind fashions its own “temple.” That the brain has the capacity to make a world separate from the physical environment is both a strength and a weakness, the former because of “the will to endure,” and the latter because of “delusions”— for delusions might also be classified as “insights.”


It’s the bane of popular thinking that enables Americans, mostly young Americans, to associate opinion with insight and “truth.” Lacking experience (and, therefore, memory) and a willingness to pursue an idea through concentrated mental effort, Americans say, “Well, that’s my opinion, and I’m entitled to it.” Derived from “free speech” in a relatively “free land,” Americans have raised opinion to the level of insight. For many, opining is thus an insightful activity even when it is far removed from reality very much like Jerry’s dream joke that, upon true contemplation, proves to be meaningless.


By no means have I exhausted the topics of insight, meditation, and contemplation in these musings, but they lead me to ask you two questions: Do you have a temple, a place, for concentrating? Or do you carry one in your brain wherever you are?


*YouTube: “Jerry write something down in the middle of the night”


**Seems that the oracle at Delphi was under the influence of carbon dioxide that seeped from a
faults in the rocks. The gas made priestesses dizzy and often incoherent—thus, the confusion about many prophecies.

“Male blood donor, 66, turned away from clinic after he refused to answer a question on whether he was pregnant as part of a pre-donation questionnaire.” That appears to have happened in the UK—actually, no really, I mean, truly, I’m not joking.


We’re done. No longer can we humans consider ourselves to be the apex of evolution, no longer to mark ourselves as “a little less than the angels” on the hierarchy of beings, that Great Chain of Being that runs from God to rocks.


The questionnaire designed for “inclusiveness” reveals how far we humans have fallen off the pinnacle of intelligence we spent 200,000 or more years climbing. If we include our sister (brother, related, person) species, it’s been a climb for as many as five million years, starting with ancestors of Australopithecus.


If I were a sculptor, I might carve a statue of Leslie Sinclair, the rejected blood donor. On the pedestal I would inscribe: “Leslie Sinclair: The Last Victim of Stupidity.” And I would place the statue outside the Albert Halls Clinic in Stirling, Scotland, where the clinicians rejected his donation because he refused to answer a question irrelevant to his ability to donate blood.


This is how far we’ve fallen: The “inclusive” health care administrators of England would rather see the blood bank depleted rather than accept a donor because they will not acknowledge that an elderly man cannot become pregnant, that the chance of such a pregnancy is one in infinity. Maybe Sarah conceived in her old age, but the God of Abraham didn’t grant a pregnancy to old Abe.    


That we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by the terminally stupid is our own fault—my fault, your fault, everyone’s fault. But I can understand how the tumble off the pinnacle happened. We were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the bureaucrats with little to do and an agenda to fill. No one can keep up with the madness. The only refuge for the sane seems to be a cemetery as Thomas Gray noted in his eighteenth-century elegy and Thomas Hardy wrote in the title of his novel: “Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.” The madding, or maddening, crowd is the chief bane of the commonsensical. And as the human population grows, so does its perversion of commonsense. There are just too many agenda-driven stupid people to handle. We’re done as a dominant species, and the rejection of Leslie Sinclair marks the moment.


I can think of a number of incidents that prove my contention. Take an education movement of a few decades ago called Outcome Based Education. Proponents of the methodology included this dictum: If seventy per cent of a class failed to make seventy per cent on a test, then everyone in the room had to retake the test. The result: Bullies would announce to their classmates that they had to do poorly on a test to give the bullies a chance to study, and the studious and bright classmates had to suffer retaking a test that they passed in a waste of their time. This educational program was foisted by university professors on public schools until parents finally realized what was happening and returned to commonsense.


Or, take the current administration’s wholesale acceptance of global warming as an “existential threat.” Blocking the domestic exploration for gas and oil through regulations imposed by bureaucrats, the administration has turned to foreign sources as though their oil and gas does not add carbon to the atmosphere. During the decline in commonsense centered on “warming,” the world fawned over a Swedish child named Greta who claimed that adults had robbed her of her childhood because of global warming—even though no data suggest that she couldn’t have played hopscotch, or hide-and-seek, or any other game or participated in any playful activity (if that’s how one defines childhood) because the world temperatures prohibited her from doing so. And in the process of fawning over Greta, the adult world gave her experiences I never had in my childhood, flying and sailing her around the world as a celebrity. Greta even has a bronze statue. The $33,000 likeness sits on the the University of Winchester’s campus. I don’t know whether it has any inscription, but I’m willing to offer one if the university asks.


We’re done. Truly done. Stupidity reigns. I have looked, but I can no longer see the top of the pinnacle. Dark clouds cover the top. The madding crowd envelopes me.

What to choose, what to choose. So many offerings on this menu of social concerns. Fortunately, the chef always features a daily special, and on this June day in 2022 gun legislation is the topic du jour.


I wish more gun legislation could eradicate gun violence, but with regard to stopping those heinous acts, I see most gun laws as ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst— the latter because they take away modes of self-protection and sport. That once peaceful places have become death zones has multiple causes. The mere presence of guns isn’t a direct cause of the demise of social order. Here’s my reasoning, and I’ll start with a question for you:


Would you have gone to a bar for a drink in Pittsburgh in 1932? Oh! Forgot. Sorry. Prohibition. But would you have gone, maybe with some friends anyway? You would have? Naughty. (Talk                                                      of an era of passwords! Every speakeasy had one) But then, what’s getting a little drink going to do in the big scheme of things? Maybe in the secrecy of your home then, eh? “Come on, who’s going to find out, who really cares beyond Eliot Ness, and what can a drink hurt? Who are you, Carrie Nation? If you are she, put down that hatchet. Someone could lose an eye with that thing. I mean, what’s more dangerous, a Scotch on the rocks or a big woman brandishing a hatchet?”


If you did go for a drink in Pittsburgh during Prohibition, you would have gotten the booze illegally thanks to people like John Volpe, a bootlegger locally known for driving a green Cadillac and helping others down on their luck. Like so many others who live ambivalent lives, Volpe did more than traffic in booze; he helped a lady pay off a $2,000 mortgage the day three mob hitmen shot him and his two brothers at the Rome Coffee Shop near the formidable courthouse. That the center of law lay in the vicinity had no effect on the behavior of the gunmen. Volpe died on the sidewalk where determined killers shot him in the back as he tried to flee to his green Caddy.


So well known was John Volpe that word spread fast through the neighborhood, and a crowd—and the police on horseback—arrived moments after the attack. Soon after, the police mounted more horses and a massive manhunt. But the mob, as you know, has its own justice system, and a guy named Bazzano who was responsible for the attack was killed (not by a gun but by multiple icepick stab wounds) after he arrived in New York for a meeting. Anyway, the 1932 Midday Massacre of the Volpes was a sign of the times—but then you’ve seen the multiple fictional versions of this actual history.


I live near Pittsburgh, a city that between 1910 and 1970 sported a population of more than 500,000 and that before its decline in the 1970s, had more than 600,000 residents.  Even during the Great Depression and the time of Volpe’s murder, it sported a large population, but about a third of the employable had no employment. Then in the 1940s the city underwent an abrupt social and economic change as Prohibition ended and the Second World War led to a demand for steel. Drinks all around and the wages to pay for them! No more reasons for mob assassinations of bootleggers at midday on the city’s streets.


By the time I entered the picture during the war, gun violence was relatively rare. But don’t think I am naive; I know there were still bad guys and evil acts. Those lawbreakers of the 1930s did not suddenly vanish. Nevertheless, most people felt relatively safe most of the time; most families had multiple steelworkers, coke oven operators, miners, and bartenders who were gainfully employed. The high schools brimmed with the influx of war babies, destined, their parents hoped, for a better life than they had during the Depression. In my hometown not far from Pittsburgh, many front doors remained unlocked, and some adults and even teens with pickup trucks had a rifle on a gun rack across the back window, even pickup trucks parked near the high school. In those early fifties my pre-teen cousins and I went on long hikes to catch salamanders in a stream that ran through land owned by Seton Hill College (now University). Making those hikes required us to cross the tracks. My mother’s only warning was “to stay away from the hobos.” I know what you are thinking. “No right-thinking parent today would allow nine- and ten-year-olds to wander unsupervised for a few miles into woods and past the homeless and the open box cars that transported those hobos around the country. Such, however, were the times. Sure there were evil people and evil acts, but…


Back to that du jour topic: Guns, gun violence, and gun laws. Growing up, I heard of crimes, but not of daily gun murders. (Of course, access to what was going on wasn’t a 24/7 phenomenon in my youth; TV stations ran news at noon, six, and eleven) Since the demise of its steel industry and a halving of its population, Pittsburgh and its suburbs have seen an increase in shootings punctuated by some mass murders, such as the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. Shootings that injure and kill multiple people bubble to the surface of consciousness and roil the emotions of most citizens—but, of course, not those whose hearts are indurated by persistent exposure to violence, especially those growing up in gang-penetrated slum neighborhoods.


In 2022, reports of shootings seem to be an almost daily occurrence. By June 17, Pittsburgh had seen 47 murders by gun. Denizens of both city and suburb wonder whether they will be safe in once relatively peaceful places like the Theater District, the Strip District, or South Side. The Hill District that supposedly inspired Hill Street Blues is no longer the center of crime news. The center seems to be as ubiquitous as the Cosmic Background Radiation. So, yes, I can understand why people are concerned about gun violence. But as many gun rights proponents point out, guns don’t pull their own triggers. People with evil intentions do. And just as neither Prohibition nor the War on Drugs failed to quash what they were intended to quash, so gun laws have demonstrably not quashed gun murders. Otherwise, Chicago and other cities with strict gun laws would be havens of safety. And murders in and around schools would cease in those gun-free zones.


People aim guns and pull triggers. And bad people with guns can’t be stopped by laws because the law means nothing to the lawless, the impetuous, and the pathological killers. But for the sake of argument, let’s say gun laws work as intended. A great place to run an experiment on gun prohibition as a prophylaxis is an island, and one that comes to mind is Bermuda, where guns are, in fact, prohibited.


The tiny island sports a population of a little over 60,000, just a tenth of what Pittsburgh had in its heyday. So, let’s paint a picture of a serene tourist destination of pastel-colored houses with white roofs, where men wear dress shoes, knee socks, shorts, dress shirts, ties and sport coats to work, and where for decades the population has had a very high literacy rate. I have seen neatly dressed workers reading thick novels as they rode the bus to their jobs. I have witnessed an obsession with community cleanliness, also. After the garbage men collect, another person in a little three-wheeled vehicle follows to stab any loose bits of paper that might have fallen off the truck. Within that setting, one can imagine little crime and even less violent crime. Yet…This is a BIG YET…the murder rate in Bermuda is 123.91 per million people. That rate stands in contrast to the 42.01 for the USA. Say WHAT? Sure, one could say that in absolute numbers the thousands killed in the United States with its large population is staggering in contrast with Bermuda, but that rate per million on that small island and in the small population is at the very least noteworthy (and the rape rate is about six times higher on the island than on the nearby continent). And it’s not as though guns arrive with an invasion of gun smugglers walking across a border: Look at a map. Bermuda is surrounded by deep ocean. How, one might ask, does a gun appear on a gun-free island? And to what end does it make its appearance? There is no hunting on Bermuda save possibly for invasive vermin and tree frogs.


What’s going to happen if we do ban and confiscate guns in the US? Will knives be next on the list? Then hammers, icepicks like the one used to stab Bazzano, ropes, and fists? Will you be required to register your palms in case you, like a famous actor at the Academy Awards, decide to slap a jester in public, maybe even becoming a serial slapper or mass slapper? Will slappers be strapped with large foam gloves like those sold in sports arenas?


Yes, there is a problem. There’s a problem with the human spirit and imposed controls. It’s the problem of self-control that’s been with us since Cain and Abel. It’s a problem that even our close relatives have as Jane Goodall discovered when she witnessed a band of chimpanzees she once thought peaceful attack an individual from another tribe of chimps. It’s a problem that was manifested in the Hutus’ massacre of more than 600,000 Tutsis, many of those deaths coming from machete-wielding murderers. Tell me, should machetes, the weapon of choice among roving Hutus, have been outlawed? What about sticks and rocks? And stairs? And pushes down steps and off subway platforms? Do subway platforms kill? (Should Newton be blamed for the definition of a force as a push or pull—or for gravity?)


Repeatedly, the foes of legal gun ownership fail to comprehend that they can no more make the world safer by gun legislation than they made the world safer by banning the illegal fentanyl that killed about 100,000 Americans in 2021. What is there about the mindset of those anti-gun lobbyists and politicians who fail to address the pervasive sickness of spirit? (Those same people are often protected by people with guns as everyone knows) There is no guaranteed control over humans save self-control, and that guarantee is a limited warranty.


I remember some decades ago being in Bermuda and noting to my wife the disregard American tourists had for the formality to which Bermudians had become accustomed. And I remember that the hotel TVs had at the time Chicago news. And I remember seeing a couple of young people carrying boomboxes on their shoulders or wearing headphones and not reading thick novels. And I remember saying to my wife, “This pleasant little island is going to change for the worse because its young are becoming steeped in American culture and the violence of Chicago.”


Of course, one could say that I’m a simpleton because I’m arguing from anecdote and not from logic and absolute numbers. That “rate per million” I mentioned above doesn’t amount to many murders on an island with 63,000 citizens, just 8 in 2021. But why has Bermuda’s trend toward violence increased in a population whose numbers have remained rather steady for decades? The gun laws haven’t changed; guns are still forbidden. The country remains ostensibly gun free. Yet, there are guns on the island and people who use them with malicious intent—and on an island that has no slums.


On this website I refer often to the role of place in human life. Place is more than a physical environment; it can be a mindset. Bermudian children listening to music with the lyrics of violence derived from American cities grow up with a mindset of a place that is steeped in violence. Inner big city has become the mindset of people on an island 700 miles off the coast of North Carolina. But it would be foolish of me to imply that Bermudians were unfamiliar with  crime before Chicago TV and anti-police hiphop lyrics encompassed the island like the Gulf Stream.


A cursory look at Bermuda’s history reveals the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1775, when a Bermudian trader arranged to steal for the Continental Congress 100 barrels of gunpowder that the British kept in Bermuda. In return for the gunpowder, the Continental Congress lifted an embargo it imposed on other English colonies until Bermuda reverted to its support for England. Then with the reimposition of the embargo, Bermudians robbed of their trade turned to privateering, preying mostly on American shipping. The island population’s penchant for crime is, therefore, not a new phenomenon and not without its tie to gun violence. Those privateers didn’t seize vessels by peaceful request.   


And, of course, Bermudians are humans, you know, members of that species that kills its own by tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions in wars during which the wishes of a few determine the destructive actions of many. One need only look at Ukraine in 2022 to witness how easily we can shoot tens of thousands of both invaded and invader. Humans. Can’t live with them, so we shoot them.


Thus, American legislators have a dilemma. How without 24/7 surveillance and immediate response times can any controls imposed on a large population stop individuals from doing what the controls supposedly control? And how does surveillance prevent either planned or impetuous acts? (It hasn’t in London, one of the most surveilled cities) Just as a Constitutional Amendment failed regardless of efforts by Eliot Ness and Carrie Nation, so gun-free zones have failed in cities and schoolyards. Look at Bermuda. Look at hypothetical you at a speakeasy or buying some booze from John Volpe in the 1930s.


The only truly effective gun control is self-control.

During the height of the pandemic, school districts went into distance-learning mode, essentially, into “We’re-afraid-your-kids-are-going-to-kill-the-teachers-by-transmitting-COVID-19 distance learning.” Suddenly, America became the largest homeschool since the Neopaleolithic Period—though, one could argue for such ancient times that cave-school, lean-to school, or rock shelter school are a more appropriate terms than homeschool.”


Now, there is something positive to be said about trained teachers committed to educating youth as opposed to untrained people educating them because they happen to be home (or in the cave) at the moment. The former is often formal and structured; the latter, often informal and unstructured. Formal schooling has the added merit of its supposed cosmopolitanism: Teachers from many universities add diversity of perspectives and a supposed wealth of knowledge in a school equipped with many educational resources. Formal schools aren’t perfect platforms of learning, however, in that they tend toward standardization and a least common learning denominator—an approach to learning characterized as “one size fits all.”


Having grown up during the depression in a poor family of nine children, my mother had to leave school after her freshman year to help support her siblings. Thus, she never graduated. She did, however, have a fondness for crossword puzzles and the news, even world news. She read both the Greensburg Tribune-Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (It was my mother who, showing me the paper with the famous picture of Stalin lying in state, said, “This is very bad man who died”—I can’t remember the rest of the conversation) Anyway, however she managed it, she grew up literate with a sense of grammar, particularly with a sense of subject-verb agreement.  That is, Mum would say, “He doesn’t,” and not “He don’t.” In contrast, my father, who did graduate from high school and became a linotypist first for the Trib and then for a private printing company, always said, “He don’t” and “It don’t.” Paradoxically, he corrected sentences reporters and private individuals submitted for publication, and he did so reading the “chase” of metal letters that were, if I recall properly, both upside-down and backward as they emerged from his linotype. * That he could see subject-verb disagreement and syntax in the written word but fail to do so in the spoken one, reminds me of my own past.


As I grew from childhood to teen hood, I began to adopt the faulty agreement I heard my father, my classmates, and other adults speak. I lived in a sea of “he don’ts.” But my “uneducated” mother corrected me—repeatedly. And she scolded me for using “yinz,” that Pittsburgh-area version of “y’all” and “you-uns.” No doubt as a teen, I, like so many of my peers and elders, could not connect my formal education that involved diagramming sentences and memorizing the rules of syntax to my everyday speech. So, my mother “schooled” me in both—at home, in the car, at the store: In that sense, I was not merely homeschooled, but everywhere-schooled.


She was relentless in her task as my personal “teacher,” a characteristic often missing from formal settings with teachers overwhelmed by vast numbers of strangers they will never see after graduation day. She was determined to see that I acquired a proficiency in “proper” American English—I use that term instead of “Standard English” because she would not have, for example, required my (note the possessive before a gerund here) using formal shall instead of informal will, as in “I shall go to the store” instead of “I will go to the store.” ** Like other mothers, she wanted her son “to shine,” and she believed that faulty agreements cast a shadow over intelligence.


All this autobiographical and biographical stuff isn’t an exercise in “biographia gratis biographiae.” I offer it not for its own sake, but rather as an analog of the times. Whereas it is true that many “educated” people do not use the contraction doesn’t with the third person singular, it is true that most of those same people would flinch if they heard “He do…” instead of “He does.…” Somehow, throwing the negative into the mix erases 12 or more years of public schooling on subject-verb disagreement—don’t it?




Why is there a faulty connection between learning and doing? The question has a wider sweep than subject-verb agreement. Take economics and history as examples of the same broken connections. Personally, many people learn in the School of Hard Knocks that they have real limits to their wealth, that they cannot put more on a credit card than they have the ability to repay and that interest rates consume more of their earnings each time they overspend on the “card.” Yet, when people are given carte blanche on spending taxes, as congressional representatives are, they forget the lesson they learned repeatedly “at home.” Thus, Congress spends, and spends, and spends. And there doesn’t seem to be any “mother” to correct the representatives. The same forgetfulness applies to school lessons on socialism. No lesson on the subject seems to stick in practice with many Americans—with the exception of naturalized citizens who fled socialist and communist regimes. More than a century of socialism’s failure to secure prosperity for any but the elite few never rings a bell of warning. That socialism has led not only to impoverishment, but also to the quashing of individual freedoms is a lesson taught, but not remembered. That socialist governments killed more than 160 million people in twentieth-century “democides,” such as Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians during which a minimum nine million people died, never seems to matter. The current war in Ukraine seems to be proof of the disconnect between learning and reality.


Think of the binding energy in atoms here. I’ve known physicists who use “He (she, it) don’t” in social settings. These were “highly educated people.” I assume that their college physics lessons on election orbits stuck more tenaciously than their English lessons on subject-verb agreement because, like my dad, they saw the lessons in light of their work.


Electrons, every physicist can tell you, have a ground state. To move from one orbit to the next requires energy from an outside source. To shine, to give off light, electrons need to break the binding energy of the nucleus much the way my mother put energy into freeing her son from a ground state of persistent ignorance. Without her efforts, I might be writing, “In the eyes of some modern social democrats, socialism don’t hurt no one because it do help everyone.”


Many people stay in their ground state unless an external source of energy, some mother, moves them. Does you agree?


Now think of your reaction to that last sentence. You realize that because I put it online, it will be around for a very long time, present not just in your mind, but also indefinitely present in the cyberworld. Do that bother you? It bothers me, and I’m the one who put it in this blog just to make a point.


What is that point? There appears to be no external source of energy to move the electron of truth about uncontrolled spending by Congress and the folly of believing that socialism is a humane political construct that provides equity. No amount of pointing out the failures of socialism to “democratic socialists” seems to effect a change in thinking. The pattern is set even though the truths of runaway spending and socialism are evident; the “he don’t” of today’s budding socialists has no persistent corrector. With an ever-increasing number of “he don’t-ers,” the chance of establishing a connection between the folly of overspending and the country’s economic health becomes rarer. And with no one constantly reminding democratic socialists that impoverishment, imprisonment, and even death are the legacy of socialism, the chances of their implementing ever-expanding socialist programs increase yearly.


That today’s world is literate is the result of formal education in schools from Murmansk to Johannesburg and from New York to New Delhi. Yet, billions of educated people cannot escape the binding energy that keeps them in a ground state. Like electrons bound to nuclei, those who can’t apply learning can’t escape their orbits of ignorance and folly. They are destined to repeat the “he don’ts” of overspending and socialism.




*A bright man, as foreman of the private printing company, he taught himself and the employees how to use computers as printers phased out linotypes in favor of computers.
**Although I did not then and do not now say “I shall go to the store,” I do have picture of me as a three-year old dressed in an Eton suit. However, lest you think I was an incarnation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, note that though I know both to be incorrect, I like Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” and Bread’s “It Don’t Matter to Me.”

Take a feather and tickle a nose. It could be any nose, yours or another’s. What’s the result? Obviously, some sort of reaction occurs. The nerves in the nose sense the swipe of the feather. The brain reacts; if it is your nose, it might twitch or sneeze, but anticipating the action you possibly tolerate, maybe even enjoy the sensation; it might bring back memories or elicit a stream of ideas about noses, nerves, birds, gravity (as in “light as a feather”) or even flight. if it is another’s nose tickled unexpectedly, the reaction might be movement in neck muscles to remove the nose from source of the tickling. And in the brain? Neurons record the experience, filing it in its reference library in the section on enjoyment or displeasure.


Now tickle the nose on a bronze or marble statue. The process is the same, but the nose has no nerves and no complex brain to record the experience. For the you, the tickler, tickling the bronze nose has no personal consequence other than to draw ridicule from a nearby observer who wonders about your sanity.


The objects, both feather and nose are insentient; the statue, however brilliantly it depicts a real human in detail, is emotionally and physiologically inert. In the process, the feather itself is merely an object outside the mind of the tickler and any observer, and the tickled nose on the statue also exists outside the mind. And it doesn’t matter how much the tickler “imagines”: The statue feels nothing and only reacts insofar as the atoms of the feather and the statue interact: Maybe something occurs on an atomic level, but whatever that is, is too “micro” to be perceived in the macro world that the brain experiences through sensations.


For thinkers like Galileo, ** who used the example of tickling the foot of a marble statue to make a point about experience, and like Descartes, Locke, Malebranche, and Berkeley, reality could be described in terms of what lies inside the mind and what lies outside the mind. Essentially, their thinking was that idea of an object differs from the actual object. If you think of a bronze statue (note how unspecific that condition is), your idea doesn’t have the form of the bronze statue; to put it another way, thinking of a pyramid doesn’t require the thoughts to be pyramidal. In this you’ll realize that the word pyramid evokes the idea of a pyramid. The word is not itself pyramidal. It is not a hieroglyph, and even if it were, it would lack three dimensionality. The same logic applies to a feather and the process of tickling. You acquired the idea of the process described in the opening line of this essay without experiencing—except possibly in imagination or in memory of being tickled—the actual process. As Descartes argued, any word can trigger an idea of what it represents: Elephant, skyscraper, rocket…all become ideas without themselves having the shapes though the mind can picture the shapes.


One of the problems that the above mentioned philosophers centered on was distinguishing between “independent” and “dependent” reality. They wanted—long before The Matrix— to demonstrate if there was, in fact, an external reality outside the mind, that is, outside of ideas. To explain the relationship between the “external” and the “internal,” some of them fell into the trap of circularity: “I have a sensation because an externally existing object causes me to have a sensation that becomes an idea of the reality, a tickled nose on a bronze statue, for example.” (The “problem” continues, marked in the twentieth century by Einstein’s argument against a quantum world in which the act of conscious observation determines reality and for a world in which an objective determined existence lies outside the mind, one that is not dependent upon being observed, such as those as yet unseen galaxies in the most distant part of the universe)


For Berkeley, external existence—all passive objects outside the mind—was dependent on the mind, or to paraphrase him: “If I see no reason for believing,” there is no reason for believing the existence of anything. Although this is a simplification of Berkeley’s philosophy, it lays the groundwork for what we are currently experiencing. Apparently, all political thinking makes “reality” dependent on having a reason for believing in the existence of anything. No public statement is more indicative of Berkeley’s point of view than one made by Congressman Nadler of New York when he was asked on the street about violent riots of Antifa in Portland, Oregon. Nadler said that the riots were a “myth spread only in Washington.” * The question, of course, that this statement begs is this: Are the burned and looted buildings, closed businesses, and injured people mere figments of someone’s imagination? Have they no objective reality because Nadler sees “no reason for believing” and because of that labels them a “myth”?


To understand the “problem” of subjective and objective reality, consider how people from differing political sides see the current world mass migration, such as the past year’s attempt by about two million people to enter the United States. For people along a border region, the objective reality thrusts itself on their minds as they experience the intrusions of migrants. Thus, a rancher in Texas finds himself and his family in “real” danger as trespassers move through the property unchecked. The farmer has a “reason to believe” in the external reality of uncontrolled migration because of its “real” effects on property and maybe even on safety. For those deep within the country and thus far removed from the southern border both physically and empathetically, there is no reason to believe in the reality outside the mind; illegal migration is a hyperbolic figment by a certain segment of society. Its potential dangers and complications, including economic ramifications and public health, therefore, don’t exist.


Thus, one political side, in this instance the Left, sees no reason to “believe”—and therefore, accept—the reality experienced by that Texas rancher because to do so would jeopardize other related beliefs, such as the belief that conservatives are, if not all, at least in the majority, racists and xenophobes. If the Left “believed” like the Right that there is a problem with unchecked mass migration because it has an independent existence—outside the mind—then the entire country would be concerned about the “reality” of unchecked mass migration. But as things stand, the generally Left-leaning media prefer not to accept the phenomenon of mass migration as a reality, or at least as a meaningful reality.


Essentially, we humans are often like Berkeley: There’s no problem if one has no experimental or experiential proof (no personal experience) with the problem. A lack of meaningful experience in this matter might lie at the root of the Left’s inaction on migration. That the Left’s taxes are used to support noncitizens who cross the border illegally just as the Right’s taxes are used to support those same migrants isn’t an objective reality for the Left. Why? Well, it’s a matter of “seeing a reason to believe” and having a personal experience. Once the IRS collects taxes and places them into the general coffers, no one can track an individual’s money. If I go to a store, see an illegal alien, and generously pay for his groceries, I have experienced the spending out of my own pocket. I have a reason to believe in the reality, but in a large country with a third of a billion people and a budget of trillions of dollars, the chances of having such a personal and meaningful experience of spending one’s own money on an illegal migrant are slim at best. That border area rancher in contrast to the Left-leaning journalist in New York perceives a different reality. The rancher has reason to believe in an external reality that imposes itself on his brain whereas the journalist thinks the brain makes the perceived “reality.” It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that if that same journalist were to lose a loved one to marauding MS-13 gang members, the “external” reality would suddenly seem to have an independent existence.   


And the same reasoning might apply to the problem identified as global warming or climate change. In the minds of climate-change activists, the external reality is, in fact, a “fact”—i.e., real. It has an independent existence. To those who are deniers, the “alarmists’” reality is internal, and the “reality” is an imposed one insofar as it has “real” physical consequences. Climate-change alarmists point to “reasons to believe,” such as an extended drought in the American Southwest, even though extended droughts have characterized the region for millennia. (Does aridity exist in the semiarid lands, or is it a figment? Does actual rain fall in a tropical rainforest, or is it a figment? Can the mind impose a reality of rain in a desert or a reality of aridity in a rainforest?)


One can also apply the same “reasoning” based on belief to the phenomenon of eustasy. Is sea level rise real and independent of mind? For example, President Obama campaigned on stopping the seas from rising—a process that seems to have been ongoing since the melting of the great ice sheets thousands of years ago—and he must obviously have succeeded in stopping that rise as he promised since he now owns two houses on oceanfront property—one in Hawaii and the other in Massachusetts. That “deniers” point out that the seas have been rising (and falling) for more than three billion years or since seas were subjected to evaporative outflow and river and ice-melt inflow and to vertical movements in the crust because of tectonic activity and isostatic rebound, seems to alarmists to be irrelevant and not a cause for “belief.” (Great Britain is, for instance, “tilting” as I write, rising in the Northwest and sinking in the Southeast, causing sea level to both rise and fall for the island). *** Deniers also point out that the effect of sea level change is enhanced by population growth in coastal areas, a “fact” that makes awareness of sea level a social, and therefore, mental, phenomenon. They also point out that the seemingly objective measurement of a rise of less than 2 mm per year during the first two decades of the twenty-first century would objectively indicate the need for 800 years to pass for a one meter rise—if the world has an objective (i.e., external) existence. Given the past changes in demographics and population centers over the past 800 years, such a rise of three feet is more a mental problem than a physical one. Little remains of coastal communities exactly as it was 800 years ago. The denizens of eight centuries ago are gone, their buildings have decayed, and new people have rebuilt as “reality” has allowed them (Nowhere is this more evident than on the eroding cliffs of Cape Cod, where the Nauset Beach Light had to be moved inland in 1996 lest it fall into the sea). Deniers also might point out that if climate activists were actually concerned about the “real” and mind-independent effects of sea level rise, they would move out of coastal cities because nothing they do will change a rise that they say is “global” and external to the mind.


Interestingly, both alarmists and deniers are like and unlike Berkeley because they pick and choose which realities are associated with “reasons to believe” and which are “experiential.” If subjective mind rules, an emotion like fear might determine how seriously alarmists consider the “climate change reality,” whereas indifference might characterize the seeming nonchalance of the deniers who find the threat rather unimportant in the scheme of everyday living. In the world of political divisions, subjectivity and objectivity are perched on a sea saw much like tilting England, where sea level is falling in the Northwest as it rises in the Southeast.


Convinced, it seems, that global warming is anthropogenic, the current President closed the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office in the belief that Americans should eliminate carbon emissions “to save” the planet. At the same time he saw no reason to stop the Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline as though the carbon emissions from a Russian source differed from the emissions from Canadian and American sources. What would Berkeley think? Can the mind “make reality” because it has a “reason for believing”? Will the atmosphere know the difference in carbon because it comes from one source rather than from another? Does carbon dioxide have a mind-independent existence in the United States but a mind-dependent existence in Russia?


Are there undeniable objective realities? Does burning the same amount of oil and natural gas from a different country produce the same amount of warming that Canadian and American fossil fuels produce? Does President Berkeley think that closing the Keystone Pipeline while opening Nord Stream alters external reality? Stop for a moment to consider the atmosphere as an analog of Galileo’s statue and anthropogenic carbon emissions as Galileo’s feather.


Does the atmosphere, unlike the marble or bronze statue, “feel” the carbon feather with a sensitivity that distinguishes between sources? And if it can distinguish as an objectively existing “external” reality—a “statue” that feels—does the atmosphere actually and mind-independently respond by heating up? And if it does so, is the  degree of heating arguable? Finally, if the heating is an objective reality will it take a geometric, exponential, or logarithmic path? Alarmists suggest the reasons for accepting the reality of climate change—that is, warming—lies in either a geometric or exponential rise, whereas deniers suggest the reasons for downplaying climate change—that is, warming—is that it will follow a logarithmic path (in other words, a doubling of carbon dioxide will not produce a doubling of heating).


As a result of his belief, President Berkeley has reason to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming and that he can act to eliminate as many climate “feathers” as he can to prevent any further tickling. But he has at the same time asked Opec, Venezuela, and even Russia to produce more fossil fuels.


Ah! Poor President Berkeley. What’s he to do? He has a “reason to believe” in an “objective reality” defined by mass media, people like John Kerry, and greenies, but in acting, he has demonstrated a reason to believe the very opposite as evidenced by his acceptance of foreign fossil fuels. It just makes me wonder whether or not a statue feels a feather, whether or not either the feather or the statue has a mind-independent existence, or whether or not everything “out there”—that is, everything external—has an independent existence.


Makes me wonder: Have I imagined writing this essay? Are you, my unseen reader, real?


*YouTube under the title: Jerry Nadler thinks the rioting in Portland is a “myth."


**This is what Galileo wrote in The Assayer (1623):
    “Suppose I pass my hand, first over a marble statue, then over a living man. So far as the hand, considered in itself, is concerned, it will act in an identical way upon each of these objects; that is, the primary qualities of motion and contact will similarly affect the two objects, and we would use identical language to describe this in each case. But the living body, which I subject to this experiment, will feel itself affected in various ways, depending upon the part of the body I happen to touch; for example, should it be touched on the sole of the foot or the kneecap, or under the armpit, it will feel, in addition to simple contact, a further affection to which we have given a special name: we call it “tickling.” This latter affection is altogether our own, and is not at all a property of the hand itself. And it seems to me that he would be gravely in error who would assert that the hand, in addition to movement and contact, intrinsically possesses another and different faculty which we might call the 2 “tickling faculty,” as though tickling were a resident property of the hand per se. Again, a piece of paper or a feather, when gently rubbed over any part of our body whatsoever, will in itself act everywhere in an identical way; it will, namely, move and contact. But we, should we be touched between the eyes, on the tip of the nose, or under the nostrils, will feel an almost intolerable titillation—while if touched in other places, we will scarcely feel anything at all. Now this titillation is completely ours and not the feather’s, so that if the living, sensing body were removed, nothing would remain of the titillation but an empty name. And I believe that many other qualities, such as taste, odor, color, and so on, often predicated of natural bodies, have a similar and no greater existence than this.”—Translated by A. C. Danto (1954) and available online in full at https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/galileo  Accessed June 11, 2022


*** The rising and subsiding of Earth’s crust isn’t limited to landmasses. Ocean floors also rise and sink in response to seafloor spreading, magma chamber infilling and volcanism, and redistribution of mass—An oceanic volcano, for example, subsides: thus, the younger Hawaiian islands are higher standing than the older islands, like Midway, and coral atoll formation is the product of the same kind of subsidence. Here’s just one of many abstracts I might have posted in this regard:
    “The most significant vertical movements of the oceanic crust in the Central Atlantic are characteristic of transverse ridges confined to transform fracture zones. These movements are also recorded in some local depressions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) and in older structures of deep-sea basins. The amplitude of such movements substantially exceeds that related to the cooling of lithospheric plates. Vertical movements can be driven by various factors: the thermal effect of a heated young MAR segment upon a cold plate, thermal stress, thermal energy released by friction in the course of displacement of fault walls relative to each other, serpentinization of the upper mantle rocks in the transform fault zone, and lateral compression and extension. The alternation of compression and extension that arises because of the nonparallel boundaries of the transform fracture zone and the unstable configuration of the rift/fracture zone junction was the main factor responsible for the formation of the transverse ridge in the Romanche Fracture Zone. The most probable cause of the vertical rise of the southern transverse ridge in the Vema Fracture Zone is the change in the spreading direction. In general, the fracture zones with active segments more than 100 km long are characterized by extension and compression oriented perpendicularly to the main displacement and related to slight changes in the spreading configuration. It is impossible to single out ambiguously the causes of vertical movements in particular structural features. In most cases, the vertical movements are controlled by several factors, while the main role belongs to the lateral compressive and tensile stresses that appear owing to changes in the movement of lithospheric blocks in the course of MAR spreading.” — A. A. Payve, 2006 Vertical tectonic movements of the crust in transform fracture zones of the Central Atlantic. Geotectonics 40(1):25-36.
Online at  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227319081_Vertical_tectonic_movements_of_the_crust_in_transform_fracture_zones_of_the_Central_Atlantic     Accessed June 11, 2022.

If you study paleontology, especially invertebrate paleontology, you will probably learn about ancient burrowing animals, Marine worms and mollusks are examples. They were among the earliest of organisms whose lifestyle altered place. When life moved onto the land in the Silurian, so also did organisms with a burrowing lifestyle. By the Jurassic there were mammalian ancestors like the burrowing Docofossor brachydactylus.


Seemingly simple animals from our perspective, burrowing invertebrates and vertebrates continue to alter Earth by digging holes. And they will do so long into the future. Humans are not alone in changing the planet, but among burrowing organisms, we are the most efficient at making nothing out of something and then making something out of that nothing. From excavating in natural rock shelters and caves, we have advanced to digging tunnels miles long through mountain ranges, burrowing beneath rivers and ocean channels, and even making a circular tunnel at Geneva that runs for 17 miles. And if we consider all the underground aqueducts and mines, such as the Delaware Aqueduct (85 mi-long), the Päijänne Water Tunnel (76 mi-long), and the Chilean copper mine called El Teniente (2,000+ mi), we find that humans are burrowers on steroids by comparison with all ancient and modern non-human burrowers. That 17-mile tunnel at Geneva run by Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, or CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), is the supreme example of making something out of a “nothing” that we made by excavating. CERN is one of the most sophisticated artificial devices ever built, and it’s built underground on a mind-boggling scale.


Nature abhors a vacuum as we all know, and burrows and holes of all kinds are among the abhorred vacuums. Unless they are maintained, they are destined for infilling by collapse or by sediments that wash into them. Ancient burrows aren’t holes anymore, but rather are preserved as lithified casts of sediments that filled them. Even modern mines and tunnels are destined for infilling, a fact confirmed by fatal mine roof collapses. The only exceptions to complete infilling are Black holes, which get larger as matter falls into them. Quasar Ton 618, for example, has the mass of 68 billion Suns, and there’s no limit on how big it might grow over the next tens of trillions of years though Hawking said that all black holes will eventually “evaporate.” We might think of these burrows in Space-Time as destined to destruction not by infilling, but rather by “out-filling.”


All planetary holes are temporary.  When they aren’t filled, they eventually collapse. Even long-lived caves like Mammoth Cave will eventually collapse, as sinkholes in Kentucky foreshadow, though that complete collapse might not occur for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, holes dug by nature, humans, and other animals are ultimately destined for destruction.


For finite beings locked into the importance of the present, not all holes seem to be temporary.  I’m referring to the “holes” in the economy, society, and relationships. We might be hole-makers par-excellence not only in the physical world, but also in the human one. Take the current rise in gas prices, ironically caused by the Biden Administration’s restrictions against making holes, the holes made by drillers. The political war on those drill holes has resulted in an economic hole in the personal wealth of the citizenry at large as people struggle to fill their gas tanks, which are cavities. And the same administration has caused an infilling of the country as two million migrants have passed through or attempted to get through holes in the unfinished border wall. Seems we’re always dealing with holes of one kind or another when political agendas clash with reality. The current administration shut down the holes of oil production that has produced a hole in the supply that it now attempts to fill with oil from holes in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia. For an organism that prides itself on having made something out of “purposeful nothings,” we humans have traded productive holes for economic ones. One has to ask, “What is the difference between burning oil withdrawn from holes in foreign lands and burning oil from holes in the homeland?” The answer might be, “Americans can now look forward to filling the holes in pockets of foreigners with dollars that they did not spend on imported oil when just a couple of years ago, the country was an oil-exporter.”


I find it ironic that humans can make holes in the process of useful hole-making, that we can turn something of value into nothing. Oil and gas wells and coal mines are the primary reasons modern civilization is what it is. Cheap fuel has energized industry and agriculture and enabled people to live beyond a subsistence level that might characterize the lifestyles of worms, mollusks, and rodents. But that fuel has come only by making holes in the ground, by turning somethings into nothings and then deriving something from the hole-making process. The current administration seems to believe that they have accomplished a planet-saving goal by closing the hole-making at home while at the same time encouraging hole-making in other countries. And to what end? To "save" the planet from change? Organisms have been changing the planet as long as there have been organisms. That we are better at changing the planet than all predecessors is the reason our species has seven billion living members. That we can distinguish between developed and developing countries or Third World countries is the product of all that hole-making, all the burrowing for sources of energy and materials. Burrowing has long been a significant way of sustaining life, of making organisms independent and safe. To shift where the hole-making occurs simply makes a hole in the economy at home.     


It seems that the Biden Administration wants to turn burrowers into borrowers.

Let’s play the popular TV game Jeopardy. You win by giving the question. The first category is “It grows on a non-woody plant.”


Here’s the answer: “An elongated usually tapering tropical fruit with soft pulpy flesh enclosed in a soft usually yellow rind belonging to genus Musa of the family Musaceae.”


That’s an example of an extended definition that bears some intellectual weight. It could be extended further with examples of its use either alone or paired with other foods, specific places of growth, average height and fruit-bearing age of the plant, and its typical length and diameter as a cylindrical object (since it is “elongate”). Or, it might be further extended by including its popularity as a flavor-enhancing substance.


But the extended definition of the answer should provide even the weakest of Jeopardy players with enough information to say, “What is a banana?” Of course, it’s possible for someone to mistake that definition for the plantain, that hybrid of  Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana that is known as Musa x paradisiaca, the so-called “cooking banana” that is a popular food in many Central and South American countries and tropical islands.


Why should I draw your attention to an extended definition of an object you know so well? Because such a definition seems to be beyond the intellectual capacity of the current White House. Although there are many examples of this dearth of intellectual prowess on YouTube and in media reports, one example stands out. The current Vice President recently addressed the conference of mayors in Reno, where she said that mayors are up to the challenge of their jobs because they are “the mayor.” That’s akin to saying, “A banana is a banana,” a circularity that English teachers advise against when they teach composition and definitely one that debate team captains and philosophers say “goes nowhere.”  But, yes, the Vice President of the United States, arguably the second most powerful person, said essentially that “a mayor is a mayor.” That recent example of circularity comes on the heel of her statement that “Ukraine is a country in Europe.” Thank you. We would never have associated Ukraine with the word “country.” And thanks for the extended definition, that Ukraine is a smaller country than the one that it is “next to,” you know, the bigger one that invaded it—and that’s bad, really naughty.


Put that public definition of mayor on the list that includes the baby talk of the Vice President in the staged interview with child actors put out for public consumption. In that episode of Sesame Street government, she told the children that with regard to advances by the Space Force and NASA, “You’re going to see the craters on the moon with your own eyes, with your own eyes [pointing to her eyes].” I understand that all of us have a tendency to use sign language. I’ll grant that I’m as guilty as the next person is by pointing when I say, “The store is over there.” But “with your own eyes, your own eyes” is very much like opening a letter by writing “This is a letter to inform you that…,” as though the recipient does not know what the object in hand is.


How far down the ladder of mentality have we slid? How foolish we must seem to be when the country’s leader speaks as though we are all children. Addressing the professionals of the Space Force at Vandenberg, VP Harris said that “space is exiting…it connects us all.” She even mentioned telescopes, just as she mentioned them to the child actors. Whoa! Telescopes. My “own” eyes just got big as I thought about looking through a telescope with my own eyes. Will I be able to see things that are far away, even things in space?


Every country goes through tough times. I think we are going through especially dumb times. But given that we now have learned that a mayor is a mayor and that we can see with “our own eyes” (instead of “we can see”), we simply need to point to the elongate yellow fruit (and maybe grunt) without saying “I’d like a banana.”

When I think of the destruction, suffering, and death that Vladimir Putin has caused by invading Ukraine, my mind jumps to the topic of cosmology. It also reflects on the lives of all conquerors and would-be conquerers.


Why cosmology and conquest history? The hypothesized lifespan of the universe is—give or take a week—100 trillion years. Since a trillion is a thousand billion, the current age of Everything, which is 13.7 or 13.8 billion years, is young. The current lifespan of humans averages less than a hundred years. To put the temporal significance of conquerors in perspective, consider that Atilla the Hun’s 19-year reign was a mere 0.0000000013866861 % of Earth history. Are you getting the point, Vlad? You turn 70 this year. The land you are currently attempting to conquer covers 603,550 km^2 (233,032 mi^2), or about 0.0004% of Earth’s total land area. Unverified but reasonable estimates suggest that for this percentage of Earth’s surface you have already sacrificed the lives of more than 20,000 Russians, maybe as many as 30,000. Of course, my thinking “large” on a cosmological scale isn’t the perspective of a conqueror. No, the conqueror sees the universe in more immediate terms like those 603,550 square kilometers rich in mineral resources and arable land.


Putin wants to make Ukraine a Russian province, but in his attempt, he is currently laying waste to what he desires. “What,” one might ask Vladimir, “will you conquer other than broken cities and a century or more of hatred of your entire nation by the people you conquer?” The Ukrainians have already shown that they treasure those 603.550 square kilometers they have shaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. “In your attempt to conquer, Vlad, you have created enmity among a family of Slavs whose genetic relationships go back a long way. How long will it take to restore what you have destroyed? And it just isn’t the families of the dead Ukrainians that will generate loathing for you; those relatives of dead Russian soldiers will, upon realizing the nature of your motivation, come to despise you for the needless deaths among your own people. Let’s hypothesize, Vlad, that you have thirty more years of life. Given a lifespan of 100 years, you will have lived a mere 0.00000002 % of Earth’s 4.5 billion years, and your years in power as a new Russian Tsar, maybe 30, will be less than a third of that. All Czars, all Caesars, even the Great Augustus Caesar, have had a very short existence.”   


But trillions of years, nay hundreds of years, even, aren’t the focus of conquerors. They live in the eternal Now.


I remember a professor of mine saying that his wife is concerned with bread, milk, and eggs while he ponders cosmology. It is true that all humans must think in immediate terms; such is the nature of our finite and risky lives. But a lesson in cosmology, taught early on, might influence some would be conquerors to consider the ramifications of temporary conquest, be that conquest an inner city block controlled by a gang leader or a country controlled by a Czar. What if, for example, Vlad had been taught that all is temporary and that even the universe at large is temporary in that 100 trillion years is, as Carl Sagan once said, precisely as far from infinity as is the the number 1?


Nah! It probably would not have made a difference, but here’s something would be conquerors might consider: Ghengis Khan lived 65 years, so Vlad has already outlived him. And of course, Alexander the Great, arguably the most efficient of conquerors, lived only 33 years. Ruthless Timur the Lame, aka Tamerlane, died at Vlad’s current age. If Vlad lives as long as Ashoka the Great, he has a couple of years left. Or, maybe he might compare himself to Ch'in Shih Huang, whose short life was capped by a burial with 8,000 terracotta soldiers. Will Vlad be so “honored”? Will Vlad be “Vlad the Great?


Check back in one hundred trillion years.