Oh No! Fires in Canada. Must be that damn climate change in action. What else could it be? How can deniers deny after seeing the orange skies over New York City? How can they continue to question after having to hold up indoors till the smoke clears? It’s time to put these people in jail, what with their whining about high gasoline prices, the coal- and gas-fired power plant closings and subsequent rise in electricity costs and blackouts, and their anxiety over losing their beloved internal combustion engines. Hey, didn’t people get along without internal combustion engines for a couple hundred thousand years? Did the Egyptians have them? The Romans?


End Times? Tell Me It Ain’t So.


Canadian fires! Is the END upon us? Could it be that THIS FIRE EVENT is just like the Hurricane Sandy flooding of New Jersey and New York City the ACTUAL END? Where to run? Where to hide? I think of Nina Simone’s prophetic song “Sinnerman.” *   


But the June 2023 fires in Canada aren’t, regardless of the alarmists’ claims, an indication that the end is upon us—no, that will come from the firestorms that we might set off in the madness of a nuclear holocaust. Think the Canadian fires are bad? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet if the world goes nuclear. And, by the way, thanks for threatening that this past year, Mr. Putin.


But since the alarmists want to blame the fires on climate change and carbon dioxide, which, ironically, would put out a fire, then we should address the issue. There are some nagging facts about forest fires to consider, and they aren’t just facts about bad fires in historical time (see below).


Way Back


Let’s go geologic time, you know, not just thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, but tens to hundreds of millions years ago. Let’s go back to the first forests. And golly, by coincidence New York just happens to be a place where you can get a hint of those forests. You just have to go to the Gilboa Dam to see their fossil tree stumps. Really, I’ve been there. The stumps are there. I’ve not only seen them, but touched them. In the current forests of southern New York there are fossils of its ancient forests.


Devonian Forests


Let’s take a quick time trip to the Devonian Period, 419 to 359 million years ago. New York during that period harbored some of the first forests. Their development began with plants belonging to the taxon Eospermatopteris. You can see their remnants in those Gilboa Forest fossils. Maybe growing to a height of about 25 feet, their tops have been called Wattieza, and they serve as a good indication that the leafless branches of these “seed ferns” were photosynthesizers. They lived in somewhat wet areas, making me think of today’s environments where ferns thrive. Forests of these plants go back to about the middle of the Devonian if not earlier. And their contemporaries included other tall ferns like Cladoxylopsida. In fact, Cladozylopsids seem to have aggregated in “forests” even before the Devonian, that is, in the Silurian Period over 419 million years ago.


Now, it might be inappropriate to call these aggregations of seed ferns “forests” because the “true trees” evolved a bit later. But let’s not quibble over the word forest by relegating it to populations of gymnosperms and angiosperms that make up today’s forests. A rose by any other name… Anyway, during the Devonian some very large “trees” evolved, including the group known as the Lepidodendrales, exemplified by the Lepidodendron whose fossil is common in the coal fields of New York’s close southern neighbor (Pennsylvania being that place). Lepidodendron grew to about ninety feet tall. That’s pretty big, so a forest of them probably looked much like today’s mature forest that hasn’t been decimated by logging.   


Can we miss the forest for the types of trees in this discussion. Where was I? Oh! The forest fires of today and the alarmists claim that climate change is the cause.


Carbon Dioxide and Oxygen, Both Components of the Atmosphere


Today, the alarmists are alarmed that carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has risen to over 400 parts per million. Any idea what the evidence shows for the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere during the Devonian when those first forests formed? And what about the oxygen content of Earth’s mostly nitrogen atmosphere during that same time? Remember that carbon dioxide is “plant food” and fire is oxygenation, rapid oxygenation.


Today, O2 comprises 20.99% of our air. During the Devonian, the oxygen levels changed from about 20%—about the same as today’s level— to about 27.5%—and as an aside, I should note that there’s evidence Devonian seas became in places woefully anoxic, woeful for life, that is, so much so that marine extinctions occurred and black shales accumulated in lifeless zones. But generally, the Devonian atmosphere had a pretty rich oxygen content, just the right stuff to fuel a fire.


What about the carbon dioxide necessary for photosynthesis and thus terrestrial plant growth in the Devonian? It seems to have been about 4,200 parts per million at the beginning before dropping to 2,900 ppm in the Middle Devonian. Then it rose again to over 3,500 ppm in the Late Devonian. That is, between 363 million and 259 million years ago the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was close to nine times today’s content. Keep those figures in mind: Oxygen content was greater and carbon dioxide content was very much greater by comparison with today’s numbers.


Must have been a pretty warm world back then. Probably on occasion a bit smoky. In the absence of careless campers, thoughtless smokers who cast still lit cigarettes out car windows, and human arsonists, the Devonian world had the same natural ignitors that the human Pleistocene and Holocene worlds of recent and present time have had and still have: Lightning and lava.


Ancient Forests Burned just like Modern Forests


Surely, there would have been natural fires fanned by downslope winds on the leeward sides of the Acadian and Caledonian mountains, much like the western American fires that the Santa Ana winds fan in our own times. Surely, there would have been extensive droughts over old forests where accumulating dead woody plants served as fuel—much like the accumulating dead wood in the poorly cared for federal lands in both Canada and the US. [You humans never learn, do you?]


The Devonian Period was a time of continental buildup prior to the formation of Pangaea. Canada and the US were part of the northern supercontinent called Laurasia, a landmass that lay on the equator and whose formation included the Acadian and Caledonian mountain belts caused by continental collisions that made a landmass stretching from Canada and New York through Scotland and Scandinavia to sections of Russia.


Fires? I can’t think they didn’t occur even in a world with less total continental landmass than today’s world (15% more of the world was covered by water back then). And droughts? Take a drive from Maryland’s I-68 to New York’s I-84 and I-95. You will see redbeds, that is, reddish rocks indicative of long dry periods probably associated with the leeward side of the Late Paleozoic mountains [think Nevada as an analog]. The redbeds have some thin layers of glauconite, a greenish mineral that formed in a relatively shallow epeiric sea]. The point? Yesterday’s, deep-yesterday’s, world was very much like the world today. Some places were forested, some not, some transitional. And the weather? Well, it was probably as unpredictable as it is today—especially since there was no conscious being around to boast prophetic powers nightly on TV.


But the Alarmists Say…


Do you recall what Andrew Cuomo said when Hurricane Sandy flooded New York? The governor said it was a “wake-up call” forced on New Yorkers by climate change, which he said was undeniable. He said that “when we built and designed New York [City], we didn’t have hurricanes and floods.” ** Is that so, Cuomo?


Fact Check: No, Governor Cuomo, that’s not so. *** According to the list compiled for a Wikipedia article, New York has been affected by some 85 tropical storms, including hurricanes, since the seventeenth century. That’s relatively recent times as Earth history goes and covers the period when the Dutch and the British colonists began to construct the villages that would become New York City. And I think we can safely say that forest fires have also occurred not only during the development of “European” New York, but also prior to its development. Is it just a lack of knowledge about the past, or is it just a lack of foresight, like building a village at the foot of an active volcano? Is it a lack of historical perspective, making people believe that the Now is a Forever and that the Now had no variable Past? Ah! The hubris based on ignorance and exhibited by a sitting governor idolized by an equally ignorant Press. New Yorkers built New York just as everyone has for all human history built encampments, villages, towns, and cities: Convenience of resources, accessibility to trade, and just plain, “Well, this seems as good a place as any to plant ourselves; besides, I’m tired of the nomadic life.” As the “wise species,” we aren’t really known for our ability to foresee the consequences of our actions and the choices of our settlements. Although they might have been naughty, the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah also chose to live in a fault zone. Can anyone say, “San Francisco”?


Target Oxygen


As I have written numerous times, Earth is a risky place. Granted, it’s the only place for us, but we’ve had a rough go of it here. There’s no alternative, of course. But our inability to plan for the vicissitudes of weather, seismic and volcanic activity, and tsunamis shows how vulnerable we are. And we increase that vulnerability by living in the midst of more, rather than less, danger because of our hubris and shortsightedness.
Want that vacation home on the shore? Want a cabin at the base of a mountain? Want a dock on a river for your boat? It’s our desire that fuels our hubris that we can have whatever we want wherever and whenever we want without risk.


Did the people of San Francisco in 1906 ever feel the ground shake before the devastating earthquake? Sure, seismology was in its infant stage prior to that event, but the ground did, in fact, shake at times, rattle the dishes, and even knock down something. Name a place where some natural disaster has occurred and recognize that sans humans, sans disaster. We choose by pride or necessity where to live.


And living in a forested region, such as eastern Canada south to North Carolina, means living in a region that is a potential fire zone. Fires happen where burnable stuff accumulates.


So, the alarmists would have us cut out our fossil fuels. But what chance do they have of altering the atmospheric content? We know that carbon dioxide has increased to at least nine times the current quantity without any human intervention, without anthropogenic emissions. We also know that it has fallen to the low of 250 parts per million without our undoing any anthropogenic emitting—that 250 number being the amount at the start of the Industrial Age. Earth did that all the pre-human increasing and decreasing all by itself. No help from us, just as it did the increasing and the decreasing all by itself during the Devonian.


So, do the alarmists believe they can stop forests from burning? Is that an additional reason to reduce the quantity of “plant food” in the atmosphere? And will their next target be oxygen? What about targeting the trees themselves? After all, no trees, no forest fires. **** But also, no humans, no human disasters.


If a Tree Burns in a Forest

​If a tree burns in a forest and there’s no one there to observe, does the wood still crackle as it burns?


None of this, of course, will mean anything to alarmists. They are committed to their belief in a science that cannot quantify the amount of global cooling America’s going off grid will effect. They see the future as a consequence of only human actions. Unfortunately for them, they won’t be around to hear the crackling wood or smell the smoke from the future’s fires. But that doesn’t mean those fires won’t happen. They happened before. They’ll happen again—unless we eliminate oxygen and wood.




*Click on YouTube: Nina Simone. “Sinnerman” and NINA SIMONE - Sinnerman (1965) [Video Clip]


**See YouTube: NYS Governor Cuomo: Hurricane Sandy is 'Wake-Up Call' on Extreme Weather & Climate Change. As for New York City itself, consider that in 1938 a Cat 3 hurricane killed 10 and knocked out power in both the Bronx and Manhattan above 59th St, plus it toppled 100 large trees in Central Park. You can see a recounting of some of the storms in more than one site online. Suffice it to say that though Cuomo, born in 1957, didn’t personally experience the 1938 or even the 1955 hurricanes, nor most of the other storms that occurred since the seventeenth century, he might have thought as governor to read about the history of violent weather in his state.


***Leave it to good old Wikipedia to have a list: See “List of New York hurricanes”


****Any forest fires in the Mojave? In the Gobi? In the Sahara?

In the Diner

​George: See this morning’s headlines in the New York Post?


Bob: June 10, is it? No, I like to have this coffee before I see the news, not as I see the news. Too much acidic content in the paper, more so than in this coffee. Okay, so let me have it. What’s got your attention?


George: Look at these headlines. Do you realize how different the world is from our childhood days?


Bob: George, the headlines. Read me the headlines. You’re off track.


George: Oh, yeah. Okay, here’s one: “The Trump Files.” So, the DOJ wants to put the guy in prison. From what I understand, it’s for carrying some papers from the White House to his residence.


Bob: Well, that could be serious. I mean, what if those papers had government secrets? What if Trump for no good reason took papers with top secrets about nuclear war or some plan of attack on an enemy? I can't see any reason that he might have to remove them from a government facility to a private residence. No, I don't care who the government official is if he or she jeopardizes national security. 


George: Okay, I agree with you there. I don't know what motivated him to keep those papers in his house. It seems stupid to me when I think about it. But weren't they kept in a house that was guarded by not only security systems but also by Secret Service agents?  Now, that would be an easy break in, wouldn’t it? I'm just frustrated by the headline because I think things have gotten out of hand with double standards and government agencies that appear—more than appear—to be party operatives, and the news reveals it. What if the DOJ like the IRS and DOJ under Obama is really corrupt and weaponized to an even greater extent than it has been, say, under Nixon’s administration. I think things are out of hand. I don’t know whom to trust. And it makes me angry. I will agree, however, that taking those papers to Florida was most likely unjustified, so when I say "out of hand," I guess I could include Trump, and Biden, and Clinton, and...


Bob: Well, it could be that things are out of hand as you say. But maybe corruption has always been the norm, and double standards we ascribed to Third World countries prior to this latest go-round now apply in our own country. It’s not as though the government papers Trump had in Florida were the first papers taken from the National Archives. Sandy Berger—remember him?—actually sneaked out archived documents in his pants, if you remember. He probably did that to protect Clinton. And what about the files lying around in Biden’s garage? Where’s the DOJ on that? In fact, where’s it on the Biden family’s many highly lucrative “windfalls”? And remember Hillary’s illegal server and the smashed Blackberries? The reality is that corruption seems to reign in every political reign. And coverups have been politicians’ salvation since the country’s founding, not just back to Nixon’s missing 18 and a half minutes of Oval Office recordings. Go back to Grover Cleveland in the nineteenth century and his sexual assault on Maria Halpin plus his subsequent getting her put in an asylum and the offspring of his rape put in an orphanage. He got government operatives and newspapers to paint her as a harlot or “white trash” à la Paula Jones and ruined her life. Think of those attorneys general like John Mitchell who went to prison over Watergate. What makes someone become corrupt in any country? Being in the government? Having access to taxpayer money and the adulation of the Press? Having the power to forward special agendas like proving American made guns were coming back into the country from Mexico? Really? Think of Operation Fast and Furious under AG Eric Holder who was eventually held in contempt of Congress and who was probably the one who oversaw that operation. Those guns were known to have been used in a massacre of teens gathered for a party in Mexico. Consequences? None. Well, maybe bad consequences, such as the death of border agent Brian Terry and those teens who were shot with those guns, but none really for Obama’s people. Or what about Loretta Lynch who suffered no consequences for not investigating Hillary Clinton or for meeting Bill on the airplane allegedly to “discuss children and grandchildren” during the time of the private server scandal. So, I guess I’m trying to say that things might seem to be out of hand right now with the Trump stuff, but that things have always gotten out of hand. Many administrations have been marred by corruption but protected by the Press and government lackeys to some extent. Maybe the difference now is that there are so many private and unaffiliated reporters with access to information and a mechanism to spread rumors, innuendos, and actual truths at the speed of electricity.


George: But I think that the so-called weaponization of the government is worse now, and it’s crept up on us since our youth, kind of like the way long skirts became mini skirts that became thongs on the beach.


Bob: Whaaaa? Your mind certainly wanders.


George: Remember back toward the end of elementary school and the beginning of junior high when we first recognized that girls were different from us? Really different?


Bob: So?


George: The girls back then wore skirts that covered all to the top of their bobby socks and black-and-white shoes. If as they sat at their desks, their skirts revealed a shin or calf, it was a big deal to us hormonal kids. And God forbid we saw a thigh! And then at the swimming pool each summer we saw girls in one-piece suits, then eventually in two piece suits, but always with their butts covered. Heck, have you been paying attention to swimsuits nowadays? There’s no more creeping change that can occur. The next phase is total nudity in public. Swimsuits of our youth have radically changed, and they have almost disappeared. They can be an analog of the evolution of scandals. Look here, farther down the New York Post page of headlines. Here’s a headline with photos: “Sea of love Doja Cat shows off hourglass figure in tiny bikini, packs on the PDA with comedian J. Cyrus.” What does that mean? What’s “PDA”?


Bob: I think it means “public display of affection.”


George: There, there you go. Just what I mean. Whoever Doja Cat is, just about all of her shows in the photos. When the editor wrote “tiny bikini,” he wasn’t exaggerating. Any smaller and it would be a bandaid on her bottom, the front side, I mean, because there’s nothing on her backside. *


Bob: Way of the world. Creeping acceptance fostered by paparazzi and a population of competing journalists that exceeds the population of many towns. I think the estimates I recently read count some 6,000 professional journalists all vying for attention in America. Add to that the private journalists and photojournalists and you probably double the number. They’re eager to capture our attention. Their only restriction seems to be to hide the corruption of whatever party they favor. But sometimes the corruption overflows the boundaries of protective party agents because there are so many others thirsting for the headlines that scandals produce.


George: So, back to the headlines. Just about every day I read or see something in the paper that I would never have been aware of in the 1950s, even if I had been older. We’re well beyond just seeing a shin or a calf on a girl; we’re well beyond seeing a president like Ike out on the fairway laughing with Bob Hope. And we’re well beyond seeing a Press that hides the affairs of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. We now have the contradictory reporting that is “in your face” when it comes to celebrities and politicians non grata and mute and withdrawn when it comes to members of the favored party. Behavior, unsavory behavior by the general populace, is more up front than it was when only strip clubs had tassle-covered dancers. Heck, now women wear them to galas. And we seem to be living in a time of targeted muck raking with the primary purposes of destroying the political opposition by showing us images that in the 1950s would have had the folks in Peoria running to the censor. Things just aren’t the same. And the irony is that we both want to know and don’t want to know. We don’t want to see what we don’t want to see, but we want to see what’s going on behind closed doors, especially government closed doors.   


Bob: We just didn’t know much about the inner dealings of the government back then just as we didn’t know much about what those long skirts hid. What did what’s-his-name say, Rumsfeld? “We didn’t know what we didn’t know.” I do remember from college history class that there were scandals reported in past administrations. Didn’t the country find Jackson’s marriage a Press-worthy scandal?


George: I hadn’t thought about… But now we know too much about Doja Cat and too little about the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and just about every other agency. And we’re kept in the dark by whatever political party controls those agencies.


Bob: Let me see those headlines. Geez. Look at this. We know even more about Hunter Biden than we know about Doja Cat. Did you see this headline? “Hunter Biden surrounded by nude women, drugs—and family—in recently released trove of laptop photos.” Biden’s not even wearing a thong. The editors mercifully pixelated his privates.** The President’s son with pixelated privates in a photo spread on the page of an urban newspaper!


George: That’s what I mean. We were embarrassed or shocked easily back then. Who takes such photos of himself? Hunter couldn’t just look in the mirror after a shower to see if he had a growing spare tire before running to find a loose fitting shirt in his closet that would cover it in public? Gotta take a selfie and store it on a laptop? And that’s also another hint of how the Press hides the ugly truths of the party they favor. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that the laptop was his. Think CNN and MSNBC will see the pixelated stuff? Wonder what they think about these new photos. We don’t need to see Biden’s genitals or Cat’s butt crack. We do need to see whether or not there is truth to the accusations of corruption. The world has changed. It’s not what it was.


Bob: And yet, it’s the same.


George: I think you’re right about having coffee well before reading the acidic news. What’s alkaline on this diner’s menu?


*https://pagesix.com/2023/06/08/doja-cat-shows-off-hourglass-figure-in-tiny-bikini-packs-on-the-pda-with-j-cyrus/?_gl=1*1bfctfh*_ga*ODczMjMzMTQuMTY4NjMwNjM2Mw..*_ga_0DZ7LHF5PZ*MTY4NjMwNjM2My4xLjEuMTY4NjMwNjU4My4wLjAuMA..&_ga=2.66105390.1691638283.1686306364-87323314.1686306363


**https://nypost.com/2023/06/08/hunter-biden-surrounded-by-nude-women-drugs-and-family-new-laptop-photos/

Sophia’s Choice


To sell or not to sell, that is the question. If the former, then for how much? If the latter, then resignation that one has to relegate oneself to living in a home worth only $17.99 million. Oh! The humanity. What will Sophia ultimately choose, to sell her Beverly Hills gilded home or to stay there and suffer the indignity brought on by the vicissitudes of real estate? *


But then, who could live on a mere half acre in a home with only seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, three powder rooms, a theater, pool, hot tub, and a three-car garage? And all that gilded stuff! Almost sounds like some tin-roofed hut on the outskirts of Barranquilla, Colombia.


Say it ain’t so, Joe (Manganiello). You had to relist the home at a discounted price (down from $19.6 million). Sophia Vergara, beautiful model and wonderful Emmy-award-winning comedic actress of Modern Family fame and Colombian by birth, must be disappointed. But, her upcoming Netflix role as the late Griselda Blanco, Black Widow husband-killer and cartel queen, should serve as a distraction during the slow real estate market. Pushing a mansion is tougher than pushing drugs.


And That, My Friends, Brings Me to the Subjects of Drugs, Glamour, and Human Nature


During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Blanco ran the Miami cartel responsible for a number of murders and shootings. Her cocaine industry spawned a number of TV shows like Miami Vice, Cocaine Godmother, the related Queen of the South, and the upcoming Vergara portrayal of Blanco. After serving time in prison, Griselda was deported to Colombia, Sophia’s homeland, where she was shot by a motorcyclist outside a butchershop.


Unaware, or Only Slightly Aware


While we lived in Miami in 1980 during my sabbatical leave to study oceanography, we saw about once a week a nighttime sweep by police helicopter searchlight for someone or some group attempting to flee police. And not more than a block away from the new complex of condos where we lived in Kendall, there was even a shootout late one night between occupants of two speeding cars. At a school bus stop one morning, two of my daughter’s elementary school friends told her they had just walked past a man standing by an open car trunk filled with guns. Unbeknownst to me because I was otherwise occupied with research and a young family, I was living in the Miami of Griselda Blanco.


And that was the nature of the illegal drug world of Griselda Blanco. It was both enveloping yet insidiously underground. I knew from the Miami Herald that South Florida was a seat of drug activity, so much so that even some money carried unknowingly by the Catholic Bishop tested for cocaine. Yes, it was as ubiquitous as a dusting of fall snow back in Pennsylvania. No doubt just about everyone in Miami probably carried dollars that could have tested positive. They were probably mixed among my own bills.


Griselda’s Legacy


So what’s changed? Not much except in the deadliness of the drugs. As everyone knows, fentanyl has undone the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in a single year. Here’s what the CDC posts:


    “Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020.” **


We know that that number has increased dramatically over the past three years, especially under the de facto open-border policy of the Biden Administration.


Boiling Frogs


And that brings me to the nature of our nature. We tend to move from accepting little to accepting more, I suppose exemplified by Clark Gable’s surprising, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn”—shocking audiences at the ending in Gone with the Wind—to just about every film’s inclusion of f-bombs. We are the proverbial frogs in the ever increasing water temperatures of a pot on the stove. Since the decades of Griselda’s murderous control and drug distribution network, the degree of decimation by more potent drugs has increased. Lives have been both upset and lost. Families have been tragically affected. In the same period of about a half century since Griselda began spreading addiction and death across America, news about drug overdoses has become so common that we hardly notice unless we are personally affected. It’s our nature to ignore the ever-increasing temperatures in the pot of water.


And the not-so-funny thing about the insidious nature of drug culture is that comedians have for all of those fifty years or so gotten laughs and claps over drug jokes or mere references to being “high.” They either knowingly or unknowingly increased the water’s heat. When comedy can center on self-destruction, self-destruction becomes inevitable. The culture begins to accept a fatalism, an inevitability. The burgeoning of deaths by fentanyl is ineluctable. It will cease only as a “new drug” replaces the goto drugs of the present, just as marijuana led to cocaine that led to crack that led to …and now the new threat comes from Isotonitazene and xylazine. Were you aware? Like fentanyl, they might become the next kudzu of addiction and harbinger of death.


I confess to a certain lack of awareness now, just as I wasn’t much aware in Miami in 1980. But I haven’t been totally naive about illegal drugs though in living among friends and neighbors who do not use illegal drugs, I just haven’t paid much attention to the next and upcoming threat to human life. The question I have to ask myself is whether or not I’m just not another frog in ever-hotter water.


Imagining Drug Deaths


It’s hard to imagine 330 million Americans. It’s not so hard to picture 56,000. I’ve seen football stadia filled with that many people. Those opioid deaths the CDC counts would translate to a stadium-full of dead Americans. Maybe I can picture that. Maybe I can imagine a stadium full of dead people, young and old, just out for a good time, but all lying in their stadium seats dead from overdosing. Against the background of an entire American population, 56,000 amounts to a mere 0.00016% of the country’s population. Such a small number doesn’t register as “many people,” but a stadium full of corpses does.


Maybe that’s the image we should paint for young people ready to experiment with their lives. Maybe we could add the stench of death to that image to immerse potential druggies into the full context of their choices. If the figures are what I think they are for the past two years, those annual corpses could fill larger stadia, say those like the “horseshoe” at Ohio State, or Penn State, or the University of Tennessee—100,000 corpses.    


Even in her youth Griselda could not have been a model like Sophia who was “discovered” as she walked on a beach and soon after given a role in a Pepsi commercial. *** That she is played by beautiful Sophia Vergara is a bit of a cheat, much like the promise of drug dealers. It’s a way to glamorize the hotter and hotter water. By featuring Vergara as the lead character, the producers have chosen to lend her glamour to the life of Griselda. Yes, the godmother of cocaine did live in luxury homes—until she was caught and then eventually murdered after being deported to Colombia. I don’t know what her home or homes in the United States looked like, but I’m guessing they were every bit as palatial as the one that Sophia and Joe are attempting to sell at this time.


The Real Estate Brochure


As in some realtor’s commercial for a home, drug pushers and their many minions in entertainment, especially in comedy, advertise a mansion of pleasure with amenities too numerous to mention. But the realities of both home ownership and drug addiction are not what they seem from the outside. The mortgage for drug use is not only difficult to pay off, but it is also for some impossible to pay. And living in the home of addiction includes spiraling costs and the entropy of dilapidation. Once occupied, it is far more difficult to leave than an expensive Beverly Hills mansion.


Will a film using a glamorous comedic TV star to portray Griselda at the height of her reign send a message? Will it be subtly didactic though ostensibly ars gratia artis? Could a portrayal of cocaine’s godmother send a false message to the next generation of drug addicts, that is, to those teens and twenty-something-year-olds eager to laugh at the next comedian’s jokes about “getting high”? Will is entice some to become the next Griselda?


All topics are on the table when producers decide to fund a film for profit. That’s been the motivation behind dramatizations since Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides penned their dramas. Art for the sake of art has its place in a culture of freedom. The house of drama has many rooms, so there’s one for a biography of a drug queen.  Yet, given the seriousness of the current plague of fentanyl deaths, some common sense and sense of morality might be prudent. Ignoring the reality of a stadium filled with dead people means ignoring the reality of America’s drug problem. One doesn’t have to be preachy to present a realistic portrayal that might save lives.


Simply show today’s youth a pot of dead and rotting frogs. Show them a stadium of rotting corpses. Portray the realities of drug addiction in its most stomach-turning consequences. Show the back alleys of the destitute rather the mansions of the pushers. And let them know that no matter how much they spend on building a house of addiction, they will find that it will lose value. If loss of value seems to be the case for Sophia’s beautiful home in Beverly Hills, why would it be less so for a drug house?


*https://nypost.com/2023/06/06/sofia-vergara-joe-manganiello-relist-beverly-hills-mansion/


**https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/fentanyl.html


***https://www.bing.com/search?q=Pic%20oif%20griselda%20blanco&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=5330

Lefty: “Hey, did you year that Governor Gavin Newsom wants to impose kidnapping charges on Governor Ron DeSantis? Yeah, something about transporting immigrants to California.”


Righty: “Isn’t that a sanctuary state? Aren’t its cities sanctuaries? Have they become Martha’s Vineyard, putting out the welcoming sign of love for all while shipping the unwanted migrants elsewhere within about a day or two? Doesn’t the California governor want the migrants? Is he, dare I say it, a white supremacist? A racist?”


Independent: “Who knows? Maybe it's a ploy to garner votes for his run for the presidency. California, long dependent upon seasonal migrant workers, now is off limits to migrants.”


Lefty: “Newsom is accusing DeSantis of kidnapping, saying the migrants didn’t know where they were going when they boarded a plane.”


Righty: “They boarded, didn’t they? This wasn’t a reenactment of Nazis with guns forcing Jews into box cars headed to concentration camps. Did any migrant under the threat of being shot have to walk up the steps to enter the plane? Were the migrants being sent to some concentration camp in Sacramento under armed guard?”


“Independent: “Who paid for this?”


Lefty: “Gotta be the misuse of Florida taxes. These xenophobic people have no compunction, no compassion, no authority…”


Righty: “To what? What’s their choice? Open the borders of Florida just as they did to all those Cuban migrants forty and sixty some years ago? Remember when Fidel released prisoners in that more recent wave of Cuban migration? Florida did allow most of the migrants to join its population. Just go to Calle Ocho in Miami, a kind of hub of Cubanity, a center of 'Little Havana.' You might know it as Eighth Street.”


Independent: “You’re making me hungry for some tapas and margaritas at La Taverna Calle 8.”


Lefty: “Go ahead, you two. Show your ignorance. Newsom is showing his compassion for the poor migrants.”


Righty: “How? By threatening those who might make their journey to his sanctuary cities easy?”


Independent: “He seems to be making a valid point, Lefty.”


Lefty: “No. Florida is showing its xenophobia.”


Righty: “So, let’s get this straight. You’re saying that a state that is 26.8 % hispanic or latino with a governor who has Italian heritage and a middle name Dino is anti-immigrant? But you say nothing about a governor and a state that claims to be compassionate and welcoming now threatening those who facilitate the passage of immigrants to Sacramento? Surely, the governor’s mansion has some extra bedrooms. And given the kind of meal we saw Newsom eat at an expensive restaurant that remained open for him and guests at the time he closed most restaurants in California during the Covid year, well, given that money spent on expensive meals, I’d say California certainly has enough money to buy immigrants food.”


Independent: “He really does seem to have a point.”


Lefty: “You’re ignoring the human tragedy here. You just can’t ship people around the country.”


Righty” You mean the way the Biden Administration ships them around—on planes and in the dead of night to locations pretty much unknown and unreported by the compliant media.”


Independent: “Do they do that? I didn’t know.”


Lefty: “They do so in a compassionate way. The people get free phones, some toiletries, maybe some bags of food for the trip.”


Righty: “But aren’t they ‘kidnapped’? Aren’t they sent off to some location where they might not be welcomed? Say Chicago, where the former mayor sent them to suburbs? I’m beginning to think that you Lefties are all talk and no welcome beyond an initial show for TV coverage. You opened the border, but you really don’t want the migrants. Newsom should be praising Biden, not condemning DeSantis. By the way, did you know that DeSantis hit .336 as captain of the Yale baseball team? That’s a pretty good average. I wonder how successful he might have been had Yale played Santa Clara when Newsom pitched for that team. Or, conversely, I wonder how well the left-handed pitcher Newsom might have been against DeSantis. Well, I guess we’ll never know because Newsom ‘threw out his arm,’ as baseball jargon goes, and didn’t pitch after his sophomore year, and then there’s the age difference, Newsom being eleven years older than DeSantis. Not that Newsom hasn’t turned pitching in baseball to pitching himself.”


Independent: “There is that. But I have to say that Newsom’s accusing DeSantis of kidnapping might have some redeeming value. He doesn’t want his own state flooded the way Texas is flooded by immigrants. There are only so many mutual resources, even in a state the size of California. Maybe he’s just looking for a more humane process to transfer immigrants.”


Lefty: “Yes, and he doesn’t want them treated like subhumans.”


Righty: “So, a plane ride is a terrible way to treat them?”


Lefty: “Yes. They are just flown wherever DeSantis or Abbott want to fly them.”


Righty: “But you haven’t objected to Biden’s Homeland Secretary sending them on planes to unknown destinations.”


Lefty: “That’s different.”


Independent: “I have a feeling that you two will never agree. But I do see Righty’s points because they indicate a certain hypocrisy among Lefties. Do you, or do you not want open borders and sanctuaries? You can’t say you want them and then do what you can to ship migrants to ‘convenient’ places outside your professed sanctuaries. Make up your mind, and lose your hypocrisy.”


Righty: “One more thing. Certainly, most migrants today are probably just like most migrants of the past, people seeking a better life in a land of opportunity and plenty. But Biden has either consciously—hard to associate that word with him—or unconsciously given the world the idea that America has no closed border by his executive decisions to undo the building of the wall and by eliminating the ‘stay in Mexico.’ Isn’t the whole dilemma one of ideology framed by Leftists? The Rightists simply wanted to maintain legal entry and eliminate the free-for-all mentality that has led to many human tragedies like rape and murder by cartels that are making money hand-over-fist for trafficking. Your so-called compassionate Left has engendered human tragedy after human tragedy. And now you’re complaining about a couple of planeloads of migrants you say you welcome.”


Independent: “I’m kinda with him on this. The current administration’s policies have certainly exacerbated a criminal condition that has resulted in abuse of the migrants.”


Lefty: “You guys are just xenophobes and racists.”


Righty: “Really? That’s your argument? And your solution, other than filing kidnapping charges, would be…?”






*https://news.yahoo.com/california-threatens-legal-action-over-234056529.html

It’s been decades since I had the privilege of teaching a group of visiting French-speaking teachers from African countries. They were studying at the University of Quebec when a colleague of mine with connections to that school suggested the university enhance their education during the summer session by sending them to my university in southwestern Pennsylvania. Ordinarily, as residents of colonial Afrique-Occidentale française, they conversed in French. Unfortunately for them, much of the graduate level literature they needed to read was written in English, thus their need for tutoring. For whatever reason, I was given the task of improving their English, not an easy job for someone who spoke no more French than Pepé Le Pew, the Looney Tunes animated skunk. But, hey, no guts, no glory.


So, I entered the task with some trepidation. I was about to spend five hours each day in a classroom and longer on Fridays as I took them to sites both natural (like a state park) and artificial (like a museum) where I would engage them in conversations about things and processes. I believed that my task involved more than just trying to communicate with people of a different tongue and culture. I wanted to to instill in them an unfamiliar perspective and idiosyncrasy. These people from Senegal, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and the Cameroons, were already teachers in their home countries, and were pursuing advanced degrees in French-speaking Canada. All of them were Muslim, a cultural heritage that differed from my Judeo-Christian and western world perspective.


I ended the task with joy. Not only did my charges become quite proficient in English, but they also imbued in me some hope. They were, generally, among the most friendly and peaceful people I ever met, and they were kind and inquisitive. With a caveat. And that was a very pleasant large man whose yellow teeth, covered in a thick layer of plaque, seem never to have met a toothbrush. He hailed from Upper Volta; and though I don’t remember his telling me, he probably spoke Moore as well as French.


Honestly, I’ve tried to remember, but I just can’t recall his name these many decades later. I do remember his descriptions of life in his homeland. Let’s go with its current name, Burkina Faso, which means “land of incorruptible people.” BK is a hot land, so much so that the locals in the north, he told me, will put flammable materials like kerosene in the shade for fear that they will ignite under the persistent heat of the Saharan and sub-Saharan country. Now, that story of kerosene seemed to me at the time an exaggeration and one akin to stories of spontaneous combustion I’ve yet to see materialize unless it’s the product of dropping the alkali metals Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs, and Fr into water under lab conditions. But his point was easy to take: Burkina Faso can be summer on steroids. It is a hot place, lots of sunshine interrupted by a four-month rainy season. During the mostly dry year, the country can be swept by the harmattan, a phenomenon akin to the Santa Ana winds that fan wildfires in the American Southwest. And BK was at the time—and still is—poor. Really, really poor. Most (maybe 80%) of the people rely on subsistence farming. Few are gainfully employed in manufacturing.


For most citizens of BK living was not then and is not now easy. But the capital does have its share of “upper class.” I take the anecdotal evidence for that from a graduation ceremony I attended at expensive ($50K/yr) Western Reserve Academy in Ohio about a half dozen years ago. A classmate of the young friend I saw graduate that day lived in Ouagadougou, making him a Burkinabè, a caucasian Burkinabè if you care to ask. Obviously, someone in Burkina Faso has money. That makes some sense because in its founding, Burkina Faso, nee Upper Volta (the River Volta), was originally called Kumbee-Tenga, or "the land of princes.” Its capital, the aforementioned Ouagadougou (I love saying it), a city of 2.5 million Burkinabès, hosts the pan-African film festival known as the Ouagadougou Film and Television Festival; the area also has a wildlife park, and the nearby forest harbors elephants if you’re interested in being one of approximately 200,000 foreign visitors every year. Just be aware because…    


Life has been even harder for the people in BK over the past five years than it was when he and I discussed the conditions of Upper Volta. But I predicted that worsening of conditions after hearing him discuss his homeland. He was a communist, he said. And whereas I could understand his motivation born of ubiquitous countryside poverty, I also recognized the dangers in his politics. I believe those dangers manifested themselves in the sudden increase in Ouagadougou’s population, a burgeoning of about a million people in under a decade. People with very little, people drowning in the middle of a desert in a sea of poverty, were—and still are—desperate for relief. People living under the threat throughout the rural areas run to the cities for protection.


People with no hope engender rebellion. Rebellion then precipitates indiscriminate cruelty and harm, often in motiveless malignity. Subsistence farming and a very weak economy make something like the American Dream rather impossible unless one turns to the windfalls of political corruption. Could this “land of incorruptible people” harbor corrupt people?


But why should any American, European, or Asian care? Most have probably never heard of Burkina Faso. On-the-street surveys reveal that many American youth believe Africa is a country. Practically no one seems to know of the downward spiral caused by the militias and by international neglect and incompetent government officials. Right now, on the world stage Ukrainian refugees are front and center. Right now, the charitable resources of European and American agencies go to those refugees. Besides, how can the world care for all the problematic poor in African countries? What’s next, taking care of people that have been displaced by cruel Rwandan-supported M23 militants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? This “caring for the poor” around the world is becoming increasingly more burdensome because of endless violence, much of it by people with a totalitarian bent.    


BK’s harmattan blows despair over much of the country and makes me think of that Burkinabè I once briefly knew. I don’t know what happened to my charge from BK. I assume that after completing his graduate studies at the University of Quebec, he returned to his country with degree in hand. But to teach what to whom? I wonder whether or not he instilled in his students a communist perspective that they now enact these decades later as members and maybe even as leaders of a militia. With his international experience and education, did he become a leader?


Today, I even wonder whether or not he is still alive, or whether he ever brushed his plaque-encased teeth. Has he died in some skirmish either as a fighter or as an innocent victim of a terrorist attack? Did the harmattan of violence sweep over him? Did he become a “prince” in the former Kumbee-Tenga? Does he, as an educated person, attend the semi-annual film festival and live a life of relative affluence and self-care?


Whatever his fate, I assume it has been different from life during his brief sojourn in North America. And not just because of a different physical climate: He lived for a short while basking in the dimmer sun but brighter conditions of Canadian and American affluence of abundant toothpaste and toothbrushes and numerous dentists, where he was free from threats by militias and explosive cans of kerosene and where for many people the biggest threat of pain is a trip to one of those dentists or a flossing accident.   


And whereas it is true that both Canada (more so) and the United States (less so) have turned in the midst of inordinate affluence toward socialism, a political and economic system akin to communism, he could, were he to return to his alma mater in this century, find a relatively safe land in which conflagration isn’t a daily threat either from exploding cans of kerosene left in the Saharan sun or from militia attacking individuals and infrastructure. North Americans generally live with less societal decay than most of the people in Third World Countries like Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic or the Congo. But without daily vigilance and care even people on this continent can be affected by a disrupting harmattan of socialism that blows ill over individualism and that drives some to attack their own country in usually futile desperation.


You might ask why I tell you this story. I wish had some profound lesson to tell or life-altering advice to give. Well, maybe this: Brush only the teeth you wish to keep.

There’s no doubt that Albert Einstein was bright. His model of the universe still underlies much of what we know about gravity and Space-Time. His work has been repeatedly verified by experiments, and his legacy continues through the LHC and the JWST. Take that Relativity matter: In the Large Hadron Collider muons that approach the speed of light “live” longer because time slows for them; and from images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope we see further proof that the masses of foreground galaxies bend the light from more distant ones into Einstein Rings, ala the Arthur Eddington observation just over a century ago. Add to Relativity his Nobel Prize for explaining those little bricks of matter we call “atoms” and his peripheral sendoff of quantum theory, and you have to say, “Yes, when it comes to understanding the physical, Albert was, and still is, “The Man.”


But I’m not so sure that when it comes to understanding the social, Albert really had much sense. In matters of economic and political theory, Albert, who left a country in the grasp of the Nazi Party, which went by the byname of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), wrote an article in 1949 pushing socialism. Go figure. He wrote that article in the comfort of American capitalism with all its attendant freedoms and protections. Had he remained in Europe during World War II, he almost certainly would have perished in a concentration camp. That manifestation of socialism led to the deaths not only of six million Jews, but also to the deaths of some 50 million people worldwide.


So, relatively speaking, to my mind, Albert wasn’t very smart in matters social. Of course, in the context of Relativity, my relative opinion of Albert’s genius is, well, merely relative. And one reason for the relativity of thought and opinion lies in the human failure to arrive at absolutes regarding human interactions.


We do, however, generally accept some absolutes. To me, axiomatic thinking, which Einstein found to be essential to his work, applies, at least it does in mathematics. If it didn’t, we could throw out all that geometry that worked so well for Euclid and Riemann and eventually for Einstein. Face it, if we didn’t have certain universally accepted assumptions, we could never agree on anything and never arrive at mathematical—and maybe even experimental—proofs. When Eddington demonstrated the Einstein prediction that light could bend around a gravity well like the Sun—that 1919 observation of the apparent shift of a star during a solar eclipse—he showed that certain truths are True and independent of our hypothesizing. The universe does indeed follow some very hardwired principles. Gravity seems to work the same everywhere. The axioms on which Einstein discovered Relativity do seem to be absolutes.


With regard to his work, Einstein noted in 1919 that there are two kinds of “theories,” those “constructed,” or synthesized, and those discovered through analysis, what he called the “principle-theories” that are analytic. As he writes, “The theory of relativity belongs to the latter class” [the analytic or principle theories]. He thus accepts axiomatic thinking. * Essentially, Albert says that the theory of relativity was there to be discovered, and Newton, for all his genius, just missed discovering it, even though he, too, used an analytical method—that still works, by the way, and that you can prove by tripping on a stairway.


Now, Albert wasn’t one to actually run the experiments that proved his work. He was given to “thought experiments,” also known as Gedankenexperiment make his discoveries. And he was good at it. But when he tried to apply his methodology to matters social and political, he wasn’t so astute. Take his take on socialism, for example.


In May, 1949, he published in the Monthly Review (New York) an article in answer to the question “Why Socialism?” ** In that article, Albert notes the inequalities of life that capitalism seems inevitably to produce, inequalities that separate workers from employers. You know it as the common complaint about the salaries of CEOs: Elon Musk, $23.5 billion, Tim Cook, $770.5 million, Jensen Huang, $561 million, Reed Hastings, $453.5 million, Leonard Schleifer, $452.9 million…and many others with salaries far greater than that of their underlings. Yes, there’s an obvious difference in compensation. We know that, Albert. And we generally agree—if we aren’t a CEO—the difference is rather astounding. Who can spend 452.9 million bucks?


But Albert insists that such disparity requires a socialist solution. Speak about “constructive, synthetic theories”! Holy cow, Albert—and I don’t mean fashioning the wealth into an idol to be worshipped in the absence of a Jewish leader visiting a mountaintop—didn’t you, in 1949, the year you wrote that article, just come through four years of socialism-run-wild? Were you not paying attention to Europe after you fled Germany? Didn’t you see an actual experiment run by socialists in Germany? I guess not. Nazi Germany wasn’t a Gedankenexperiment. It used real people. People who suffered and died. Millions of them.


ENTER GLOBALISM. Albert says, “The time—which, looking back, seems idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration got say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.” Then, noting those disparities between workers and employers, he writes, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils [salary disparity?], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanies by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.” ** Hey, you just read it; his words, not mine. The guy who fled a socialist government proclaims the necessity of establishing a socialist system. Relatively speaking, I’d say that isn’t smart. It’s akin to saying, “No, it hasn’t worked, but if we rerun the experiment, it’s bound to work.”


So then Albert says, “A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood in every man, woman, and child.” And in the matter of education, he writes that in addition to “promoting the innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”


Here comes, as Shakespeare might say, the rub: “A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?”


His answer? Well, he doesn’t offer one. And that’s the problem, the unsolved problem. Given human nature and the tendency of some toward evil and corruption, any all-encompassing bureaucracy both inhibits individualism and operates inefficiently.


Want an example? Take the wildfires in California, specifically, for that example, the 2018 Camp Fire that took dozens of lives and destroyed 18,000 acres and 13,000-plus homes. It was an “explosive fire” because the federal agency allowed fallen and previously burned trees and bush to accumulate. Federal lands operated by the Forestry Service are more likely to burn more wildly with more devastating effects to communities than privately operated forests. Now there’s an argument—tongue in cheek—for centralized planning!


Are you reading this, Bernie Sanders and all who seek to turn America into a socialist nation? Is your democratic socialism just another form of condemn-ocratic imprisonment of the individual in the name of equity? I got it; you’ll respond with “that’s because all previous attempts at socialism had bad and incompetent actors in charge. This time it will be different.”


To which I would add a statement by another Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman. He once said that “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t Agee with experiment, it’s wrong.” Apply that to the “theory” of socialism. The experiment has been run in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, in Venezuela, and elsewhere, all with the same results: Wealth accumulated by the few, the select few, and impoverishment of the many who are subjected to an ever increasing set of restrictions by an overbearing bureaucracy.


Relativity speaking, Albert was a genius; relatively speaking, Albert wasn’t a genius. Experiment verified the Truth in Relativity. Experiment verified the falsity of the socialist promise.






*Published in the London Times, November 28, 1919, in answer to the question “What Is the Theory of Relativity.” Found in the collection of his writings entitled Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein, Crown Publishers, Inc. New York, 1982 and 1954. Pp. 227 ff.


**Published in Monthly Review. May, 1949, under the title “Why Socialism?” Also found in the above anthology of his writings, pp. 151 ff.

Geography isn’t what it used to be. Or should I say, geolocation isn’t what it once was? You learned that in elementary school, the stuff about the All-Lands supercontinent Alfred Wegener called Pangaea. Go back about 250 million years—give or take a week— and you would see the continent emerging from the Southern Hemisphere and plowing into the Northern Hemisphere, North America, England, and Scandinavia lying in the tropics, the Equator running through the United States. A different world back then. It was especially different for its animal life. No people. Not even pre-people. So, no social media, of course, and none of that Seven Deadly Sin stuff humans introduced to the world. Not that it was without conflict, but animal contests over food and territory are definitely different from the squabbles generated by members of the Wise species.


What if Pangaea had not broken apart back then? Would today’s life have been different had all the now scattered landmasses once lumped together in the Southern Hemisphere, many right along the Equator, not broken up? What if humanity in “leaving Africa” made no journey into subtropics and then into temperate and boreal zones? Would we all be of relative uniform skin color? Would we all be a single race, all protected from deadly UV by more melatonin in our bodies, all—how should we say it?—dark skinned? Probably. That move to temperate and boreal zones reduced the shield against UV to enhance the production of vitamin D in less sunny zones. And the downside that we should mention, was that the evolution that made light skinned humans also made them more vulnerable to sunburn and melanoma. It was the price we paid for moving, but probably an unavoidable cost given our penchant for wandering and our insatiable curiosity and restlessness. Pangaea’s breakup merely foreshadowed the African diaspora.


So, there really isn’t a Pangaean race, unless one looks at the peoples of Africa, ranging from the Abbé (Akan) people of the Ivory Coast to the Zulu of South Africa, and between A and Z some 400 different “tribes” (or peoples), all of them finding some way to distinguish themselves from all the others, and all having darker skin on average than, say, Scandinavians.


Among this superficial distinction of humans based on skin color lie the cultural distinctions that produce conflicts like the genocide attempted by Hutu against Tutsi, for example. Imagine. In one of the hubs of Pangaea, peoples closer to its existence than any others on Earth got huffy over “racial” (ethnically speaking) differences. It appears that even people of similar hue have quarrels to brew.


Leaving Africa at some debatable 60,000 years ago—again, give or take a week—the dark skinned human ancestors of Scandinavians moved throughout the reachable temperate zones, their skin lightening over the last 2,400-plus generations. Now enter Danish Hans Christian Andersen and then Disney into the skin game. No doubt unfamiliar with the history of skin color, Hans probably envisioned the Little Mermaid as fair skinned—even though the 1913 bronze statue of the iconic character in Copenhagen is now weathered to a darker color—a reverse of what happened to the surface coloring of the people who moved out of Africa. And Disney, maybe under the influence of the statue’s color—who knows?— or under the influence of wokeness, has re-envisioned the mermaid as dark skinned. So?


So what? Well, some 1.5 million people posted dislikes over the latest remake of the story, seemingly because of the skin color of the main character. Would bluish dolphin skin be more appropriate? Would there have been any controversy making the mermaid reflect an oceanic environment from which she evolved in the mind of Andersen?


We former Pangaeans certainly have a tendency to work ourselves into a dither over our relatively superficial differences. I suppose, however, that if the Hutus were driven to kill Tutsis in Rwanda, even the slightest of perceived differences can drive us to conflict. Look, for example, at the many wars fought in Europe among peoples of similar skin tones. Ironic, isn’t it? Skin tones matter only when we want them to matter.


The rise of the Internet has generated two very noticeable exacerbations of our most debased motivations: By connecting most of us, it has made uniformity of thought a way of life for geographically spread groups, and by connecting so many diverse people, it has ironically emphasized the differences and brought out the irreversible tendency to see them. A modern paradox, for sure.


What if Disney had made a blue cartoon Smurf play the mermaid role? The lead character could also be played by a member of the Blue People of Kentucky, particularly by Luna Stacy, the bluest of the Blue Fugues, the one in which methemoglobinemia caused the most cyanosis? Would there have been 1.5 million dislikes over her blue skin? Probably. Some members of the family carrying the recessive methemoglobinemia gene do live near Troublesome Creek in Kentucky. Certainly, the creek’s name is appropriate.


You know those One Worlders, the globalists? The globalists want there to be a single world government and a unification of all eight billion of us from the Nunavut town Qikiqtarjuaq in Canada to the aboriginal town of Quorrobolong in Australia. Many of the globalists have a bunch of money. You’d think they might consider a plan of unification like putting Pangaea back together even though the continents, as an outer shell of the planet, are very much like the cracked egg shell that “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put back together again.” If putting together the Hutus and Tutsis of similar color and close ethnic practice is a hard task, then putting together all those human hues spread over the planet on separated continents is probably going to be mission impossible.


I’m going out on a limb here to say that the Pangaean race is an unrealistic dream. Oh! Sure, in the cycle of formation and breakup, the continents riding on plates at speeds varying from one to about 16 centimeters per year will probably make a new supercontinent Pangaea some 250,000,000 years from now. That new Pangaea will probably lie mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. If human species, probably long dead by then, reemerge in some later version of Sapiens, then a lighter skin color might evolve to a darker one as the new diaspora spills out of the boreal and temperate zones to populate the tropics and equatorial zones.


But I don’t think there’s much chance that our replacements, given the tendency of the Wise Ones to quarrel over matters as superficial as skin color, will live in peace and harmony or will accept a mermaid of any color other than the one that matches the story’s author. I might suggest a transparent mermaid, but that would make her as invisible as a box jellyfish, which, by the way, is highly venomous. So any color—or no color—saves us from contention and conflict, from pasting likes and dislikes according to our superficial whims, and from getting along as a single species whose members come in all hues.