Coffee houses are not new. They arose not long after the discovery of and addiction to coffee. You’re on the road. You’re in the trendy part of town. You see a Starbucks. The lure is irresistible. But why? You could just as easily stop in a diner for coffee. Is there some promise of something other than a drink in a coffee house? Can you "find Yourself" in there?
 
Let’s say Starbucks was around in the nineteenth century, and you, a busybody with good hearing, chance to sit at the table next to two gents (it is the 19th century) discussing, as people do today in any café, the world in general. You hear one of them say, “Although it is evident to my mind that the world is growing more healthy and more moral with every generation—speaking of civilized nations—it is still, as all agree, in a most pitiful state as regards both moral and physical health.”
 
And then the speaker continues, “The two are indissolubly associated…and it is difficult to appreciate which leads—whether man grows more healthy as his moral tone improves or more moral as his physical state is exalted. Both are, in fact, constantly acting and reacting upon each other.”*
 
“Okay,” you think over your venti expresso-filled mocha frapp with nonfat and no whip, “another guy with all ‘the answers.’” But then the guy goes on.
 
          “The chief constituent of the coffee berry, the alkaloid caffeine…is built on the chemical type of alkaloid…that include[s] narcotics, stimulants, hypnotics, deliriants, poisons, tonics; some of them affecting the whole nervous system, one to excite and another to depress…It cannot be questioned that the administration of coffee…is entirely in accord with the theory and practice of medicine at the present day. It is, however, a fact well known to practitioners, and indeed generally to ‘laymen,’ that the constant and long-continued use of any medicine transforms its ‘remedial’ influence into one promotive of disease that may perhaps demand the curative aid of some other drug.”**
 
And the monologue continues with supposedly scientific information about the benefits and ills of drinking coffee. You’re not in Starbucks, really, but in the mind of C. E. Page, M.D. whose book with a chapter on coffee appeared some 130 years ago. And now what do we know?
 
First, we seem to have come full circle about human wholeness, that whatever we are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually seems to affect whatever we are physically. And we definitely are of a mind that physical state affects mental, emotional, and spiritual states. Go to any “wholeness” center to find sundry methods of achieving a personal or even communal holism.
 
Second, a 16-year study of coffee drinkers conducted by the Annals of Internal Medicine and published by the American College of Physicians suggests a lower risk of death can be found in drinking three cups of coffee a day. Wait! You don’t have to run to your Keurig. Veronica W. Setiawan, the study’s lead author says, “We cannot say drinking coffee will prolong your life, but we see an association.”***
 
“Shoot,” you think over that mocha frapp, “maybe I should have gone with just straight coffee and skipped the milk products. But I like sitting in Starbucks, and straight coffee can be kind of boring at times. So, why do I visit this or any other coffee house? Am I seeking a kind of personal and communal holism with all these other people, these total strangers and the frozen-smile barristers? Is it the place that makes me whole, at one with my fellow coffee-drinkers and myself, or is it some desire for stimulants in an otherwise bland and boring world that requires me to stay awake? If the former, can I find the same wholeness in another place? If the latter, can I find other ways to stimulate my mind, body, and, as they say, spirit? Is the paper cup in its cardboard sleeve the contemporary equivalent of a chalice? Is this a spiritual experience in the Church of Coffee, Starbucks denomination?”
 
Obviously, Dr. Page had little of our current knowledge of biology, but as a human seeing the same human foibles, maladies, and problems we see today, he does have a valid point. He knew that humans are complex beings whose various attitudes can impose physical ailments, and he knew that there’s a correlation between a “moral” (or ethical) life and, if not happiness, at least freedom from self-imposed stresses. Dr. Page wrote during the rise of the temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition. With regard to both coffee and alcohol Page quotes from one of his mentors, Dr. Oswald:
 
     “’The road to the rum-cellar leads through the coffee-house. Abstinence from all stimulants, only, is easier than temperance.’” [In the nineteenth century many thought alcohol, though a depressant, to be a stimulant] Everywhere do I find temperance reformers essaying to lead rum-drinkers back by the road they came, viz: back through the coffee-house—taking a drink en route. I think that, in the long run, they will do better to try to conduct them from the ‘gin-mill’ squarely into the street, and thence home. While not desiring to furnish arguments for the opponents of temperance (I would that all stimulants were done away with), I cannot forbear pointing out what seems to me a glaring inconsistency among my co-laborers in reform. Of course all must admit that, in many respects, there can be no comparison drawn between liquor-drinking and tea and coffee-drinking: Other things equal, the man who drinks ‘rum’ to excess, works vastly more misery in the world than the coffee-toper [sic.]; though, individually, if the latter were to indulge as copiously as does his spirit-drinking contemporary, he would suffer as much, probably more, in his health—would die more speedily. Of course we know that few coffee and tea-drinkers indulge to this extreme; but when we consider the almost universal use of these beverages—by women and growing children, as well as by men, it is more than doubtful whether they do not, per se, from a health point of view (considering, moreover, the influence of disease upon morals) aggregate more harm than their more ‘ardent’ rivals. Added to this, the fact that the use of one stimulant often leads to the use of others and stronger (as we have always argued that beer and wine lead on to whisky and brandy), the friends of true reform may well ask themselves whether, in their own indulgence in tea and coffee, and in the effort to increase their use among the people, they are not hitting wide of the mark? I am well aware that wine-drinkers, and those who indulge moderately in stronger drink, often pertinently reply to temperance workers, ‘When all the temperance reformers leave off their favorite stimulants we will leave off ours.’ Says Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, Professor of Physical Culture at Harvard College, ‘I am convinced that coffee works more injury to mankind than beer.’”
 
Third, we still take drunk people to coffee houses before we put them in cars, even though what we accomplish isn’t their sobering up, but rather their becoming wide-awake drunks.
 
You think, “Am I on the road to perdition because I might go to a place where people who are elsewhere unfriendly become somewhat civil though a bit standoffish (or sitoffish with laptops)? Do I go from drinking coffee to some addiction to uppers that I try to balance with an addiction to depressants? While I sit at the bar of a local tavern or at a table in the local coffee house, am I mentally and spiritually bouncing up and down. Do I drink through cycle of stimulants and depressants in a community of the ostensibly like-minded? And is my lifestyle affecting my body negatively? This is all too much. I just wanted a mocha frapp in a friendly place. Next time I go to for a mocha frapp or coffee, I’ll sit in the corner away from any conversation I might overhear.”
 
* Page, C. E., M.D., The Natural Cure of Consumption, Constipation, Bright’s Disease, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, ‘Colds’ (Fevers), Etc.: How Sickness Originates, and How To Prevent It; A Health Manual for the People, New York, Fowler & Wells Co., Publishers 1886, pp. 8, 9.
 
** Ch. XVII “Coffee, Medicinally and Dietetically Considered.—The True Theory of Stimulation,” p. 245. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40184/40184-h/40184-h.htm#Page_243
 
*** https://thetaste.ie/wp/coffee-lovers-prolong-life/

Are we predisposed to deceive or be deceived? This little blog will take you through some twists and turns. The question you need to ask is whether or not we are being deceived about climate change data.

What if, just what if, we live in a deceptive universe and human deception is just a consequence of our physical makeup. Just about every contemporary scientist follows the dictum of Karl Popper, the principle that the only way to the truth is to attempt a falsification. That’s why scientists are of a mind to test and retest, to experiment and re-experiment, to model and re-model, and to check and recheck. On the most basic level of the universe, the quantum level, falsification is incredibly difficult. People use expensive equipment and clever experiments to arrive at “the truth.” The discovery of the Higgs boson is an example. The truth of the universe is still hidden, however, because we haven’t identified whether or not other entities fundamental to our makeup exist—strings, for example. And when did you last see a graviton? What we do in the context of knowing a fundamental part of the universe is somewhat hidden is to accept what seems to work for us until we falsify it. But we can never finish the task because one truth always leads to another mystery, and even though we often seem to know how, when, and where, we seem to rarely know why. Why, for example, do quanta entangle? Why do photons reflect off glass? Magic? And why does climate change? Is the very nature of our universe deceptive?

We do like tangible reminders of significant people and events. Thus, we keep mementos and visit museums. In mid-nineteenth century P. T. Barnum, following his instinct to collect whatever he might be able to exhibit to paying customers, went to the “field of Waterloo,” one of the sites anyone visiting Brussels at the time was advised to see.
 
With an intimate knowledge of gullibility, Barnum went to the house where Lord Uxbridge, Marquis of Anglesey, had a leg amputated. Inside the house Barnum bought a piece of Uxbridge’s boot. It wasn’t the leg, but it was, nevertheless, a relic. In making the purchase, P. T. remarked that if the lady in charge of the relic “was as liberal to all visitors, that boot had held out wonderfully since 1815.”* In the vicinity of Waterloo, Barnum also encountered a number of young guides who claimed to know the spots where each of the combatants had stood, and although it was mid-century and some thirty years after the battle, the guides even claimed they participated in the fight, hoping to impress gullible travelers. Barnum, of course, wasn’t born a sucker.
 
            “After having the location of Napoleon's Guard, the Duke of Wellington, the portion of the field where Blucher entered with the Prussian army, pointed out to them, and the spots where fell Sir Alexander Gordon and other celebrities, they asked the guide if he knew where Captain Tippitiwichet, of Connecticut, was killed? ‘Oh, oui, Monsieur,’ replied the guide confidently. After pointing out the precise spots where fictitious friends from Coney Island, New Jersey, Cape Cod and Saratoga had received their death-wounds, they paid the old humbug and dismissed him.
          “Upon leaving the field they were met by another crowd of peasants with relics of the battle for sale. Barnum bought a large number of pistols, bullets, brass French eagles, buttons, etc., for the Museum, and the others were equally liberal in their purchases. They bought also maps, guide-books and pictures, until Mr. Stratton expressed his belief that the ‘darned old battle of Waterloo’ had cost more since it was fought than it ever did before.
          “Some months afterwards, while they were in Birmingham, they made the acquaintance of a firm who manufactured and sent to Waterloo barrels of these ‘relics’ every year.”*

Apparently, Barnum didn’t mind the ruse. He intended to do the same to his own customers—and probably for a larger profit. His understanding of humanity’s underbelly of deceit had made him financially successful, and his name and circus lasted long after his death.

It’s relatively easy for cons to con. And Barnum was the icon of cons. Human gullibility is one of our weaknesses.
We become skeptics by experience. Born innocent and open, many people become hard-edged and closed off for what we believe are good reasons. Purposeful deceit is ubiquitous, and deceivers are numerous. Bernie Madoff, the guy sentenced to 150 years in prison for the largest fraud in U.S. history, demonstrated that there will always be people selling barrels of relics and pointing out the sites where fictitious heroes fought.

It takes one to know one. Barnum recognized the falsity of the guides’ claims at Waterloo, but instead of succumbing to their ruse, he used what they had to establish greater wealth and fame for himself. He put the “relics” he acquired in both stationary and traveling “museums,” drawing crowds of gullible onlookers.

What is it in us that enables the Barnums, Waterloo guides, and Madoffs to deceive? And how is it that those who purposefully deceive find the wherewithal to continue their deceptions without compunction? And what of those who bought the relics thinking that they were real and returned home to show relatives and friends “historical objects”? Surely, they don’t deceive on purpose. They merely carry the relics with unquestioning surety.

​So, every once in a while someone shows up with a barrel of relics, and we are supposed to take them as the actual objects. NOW, we have barrels of climate data, and we’re supposed to take them as genuine. (I know, I’m a long way from P. T. Barnum and Waterloo relics here) In fact, we’re supposed to take them as so genuine that we don’t need them. Here is what Michael Mann, an expert in climate science said:

          “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle.”*
 
Wouldn’t it be nice to reach into that barrel of data anyway? What if, just what if, someone slipped an artificial relic into it? And what do we do with the Popper principle of falsification, that if something is accepted, we need to verify its “truth” by constant attempts to falsify it, to re-examine it scientifically.
 
Can we see the impacts of climate change? Of course. Did the people who occupied the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter 16,000 years ago see the impacts of climate change? They inhabited that western Pennsylvania site at a time when the edge of a giant glacier lay just 100 miles to their north. Maybe they didn’t recognize the impacts—too busy finding food and warding off bears and wolves—but over the course of centuries their descendants lived in increasingly warmer times with a time of particularly fast warming that wasted away all the ice. The glaciers are gone now, gone long before the Industrial Revolution.
 
Back to deception. Let’s follow some guys who reached into that barrel of data relics. The barrel is called GAST, short for Global Average Surface Temperature data. The peer-reviewed data by Drs. James P. Wallace, III, Joseph S. D’Aleo, and Craig D. Idso were released in a June 2017 report entitled “On the Validity of NOAA, NASA, and Hadley CRU Global Averagge Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Engangerment Finding Abridged Research Report.”***
 
They explain the study’s purpose thus:
 
            “The objective of this research was to test the hypothesis that Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data, produced by NOAA, NASA, and HADLEY, are sufficiently credible estimates of global average temperatures such that they can be relied upon for climate modeling and policy analysis purposes. The relevance of this research is that the validity of all three of the so- called Lines of Evidence in EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding require GAST data to be a valid representation of reality.”***
 
Now reach into the barrel and pick out some relics. That’s what they did, but not with just a few, rather with all the “best available and relevant data.” Okay, sit down for this one:
 
            “The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality” (Italics mine).
 
Whoa! P. T., say it ain’t so. Isn’t that really a piece of the actual boot that covered the foot on the amputated leg of the Marquis? Maybe it’s time to barrel away from this barrel. But, following the advice of Popper, I guess I’ll keep looking through the relics in the barrel.
 
* Benton, Joel, A Unique Story of a Marvelous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum, Chapter XIII, In Belgium, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1576/pg1576-images.html 
** http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/27/michael-mann-climate-scientist-data-increasingly-u/
*** https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062717.pdf

How do we come by our beliefs? Simple upbringing and anecdote? Experience? Logic?
 
So many of our beliefs are inculcated before we “come of age” that we might have difficulty distinguishing between them and those we eased ourselves into through the course of growing up. And then, strangely, there appear in the mix acquired by tradition and aging those beliefs somehow tied to “logic.” Logically held belief and faithful reasoning: Aren’t those among the ironies of human ironies?
 
That’s why I ask you about the origin of belief, any belief and beliefs in general. One key to the origin of a certain kind of belief seems to lie in abstraction, and that is social belief, not only how we perceive the role and status of others but also how we accept actions for or against them.
 
We might have difficulty, for example, understanding why someone might be for a particular law, or we might wonder how anyone can be against it. And although I usually refrain from addressing current news in favor of long-term concerns and issues, I want to mention the argument centered on Kate’s Law, which is an amendment to section 276 of the Immigration and Nationality Act relating to the reentry of removed aliens. Specifically, under “(b) Reentry of Criminal Offenders,” subsection 4, the Act states:
 
     “for murder, rape, kidnapping, or a felony
offense described in chapter 77 (relating to peonage
and slavery) or 113B (relating to terrorism) of such
title, or for 3 or more felonies of any kind, the alien
shall be fined under such title, imprisoned not more
than 25 years, or both.”
 
In absentia: The most directly affected human being related to this Act was the now deceased Kate Steinle, a San Francisco resident who was killed by a person to whom subsection 4 would apply. Then, of course, her tragic loss affected her family and friends. Now, some people oppose this “law” because they believe it will cause harm to immigrant communities. But the Act is very specific: three felonies of any kind or for “murder, rape, kidnapping.”
 
Let’s say you are for the Act. Is it because you knew Kate personally? Or is it a larger issue for you, that even though you did not know her, you empathize with her father who watched her die in his arms. Or is it in general a matter of bias of some kind?
 
Let’s say you are against the Act. Is it because you see no relationship between Kate’s death and immigration of any kind? Is it because you are a recent and illegal (undocumented?) immigrant or that you have a personal relationship with an immigrant or with the immigrant community at large?
But Kate’s Law isn’t the central issue here. Belief is.
 
“In absence” is one of the ways by which we adopt many beliefs. We can believe by abstracting ourselves and by applying a logic that is in itself based on belief. Because we are neither omnipresent nor omniscient, we deal with much of the world in abstractions. From those abstractions we “reason ourselves into belief” and accept our reason as universally credible.  
 
In almost every instance of social relationships and opinions on the nature of others and how they should be treated, we seem to rely on an ironic tie between faith and logic, with either underlying the other and both dependent upon our proximity to or affinity for others. Removed from being personally affected, we believe we can apply reason to judgment. We can decide even when those affected, or we, stand in absentia.
 
Absence might be a foundation on which many beliefs rest. With no personal experience we are free to hold anything as true because nothing in our lives contradicts such belief. 

Human nature is an individual driver. Legislation is a group driver imposed by self or by others to exert some control, ostensibly for a common good in any kind of relationship. Belief that legislation can transform human nature is not new. The question every generation might ask is whether or not a transformation can be imposed.
 
One might think that after thousands of years of civilization, all our problems would be solved. We don’t have a shortage of well-intentioned people who work individually and in concert to find solutions. Goodness! Aren’t local diners and coffee shops filled with debaters? There’s a Roman Forum and Acropolis in every town. We even elect or appoint people to solve problems in big public buildings constructed and maintained at common expense. Yet, regardless of individual and group efforts, we seem to have the same problems the ancients voiced. Isn’t there some way to eliminate the ills of mankind?
 
It’s not that we haven’t discussed perfect worlds. And it’s not that we haven’t tried all kinds of cooperative ventures ranging from family through commune to country. It’s just that we can’t figure a way to alter human nature in general, and we can’t impose solutions regardless of the good intentions from which they arise.
 
We still reproduce people who grow to think imposition is the path to Utopia.  We have many examples, but one that pervades city-dwellers is the repurposing of rundown neighborhoods. Revitalization comes with a cost to those whose lived the rundown. Build a new stadium; eliminate a neighborhood. Build a new office complex; eliminate a neighborhood. Build a new mall; eliminate the local barbershop. “Those who know what’s best,” often external motivators, plan the repurposing. A similar set of motivators imposes regulations and laws. Almost endless in their complexity, regulations are the product of burgeoning bureaucracies. Gordian.
 
According to translator Moses Hadas, a primary theme in Aristophanes' play Ecclesiazusae is that “human nature…cannot be transformed by legislation....”* But here we are about 2,500 years after the Greek playwright entertained his Athenian audiences with his insight, and we are still adding threads to the Gordian Knot of civilization, still operating under the belief that we can legislate changes in human nature. Just as Prohibition did not eliminate alcohol consumption in the United States, so drug laws will not eliminate drug use. And, as we see from deaths by maniacal terrorists driving onto sidewalks and using knives to stab people at random, gun laws won’t prevent murders.
 
I suppose that it is only fitting that a writer of comedies should lay the criticism on all subsequent governments that seek to transform human nature through legislation. Our efforts have been comedies of errors. A proliferating species that occupies more and more of Earth’s surface means that somewhere and somehow some regulation or law will not affect the desired transformation. Within any society individual drives drive individuals.
 
Ecclesiazusae, the Assembly Women, centers on the political rise of Praxagora, a woman, and her desire to impose equality on Athenians. Think Marx. Think socialism and communism. Yes, way back then others dealt with the same problems we have today, and they offered the same kinds of solutions that some of our own contemporaries offer. That Praxagora is a woman is irrelevant. Aristophanes could just as easily have written the part for a man, a transgender, or an alien from Planet X.
 
Now think turmoil in Venezuela. Think Cuba. Think oppression under Hitler or Stalin. In Ecclesiazusae, as Hadas writes, “the exploiting officials whom communism was expected to reform…promptly turn up as even more grasping commissars.” Think expensive parties thrown by the U. S. General Services Administration. The GSA, the agency for responsible financial management,  spent $835,000 on a 2010 “convention” for 300 government employees that included payments for alcohol, food, a commemorative coin set, a mind reader, a comedian, and a clown. Communism always seems to work for the good of the commissars whose “equality” is just a bit more equal than those they govern.
 
No, we’ll never transform human nature by legislation. We haven’t learned the lesson so clearly taught by a Greek dramatist more than two thousand years ago. Human nature cannot be transformed by legislation. Think about that during your next visit to the diner, the coffee shop, or some intellectual “forum.” At best, legislation can exert only a limited and temporary control over human nature.  
 
And since Industrial Revolution, we have new “Praxagoras” proposing that technology will effect the transformation that legislation has always failed to produce, that AI, for example, will lead to Utopia. Are you ready to be transformed? What do you think?

*Hadas, Moses, Ed. and Trans., The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, Bantam Books, New York, 1962, p. 9.  

According to Online Etymological Dictionary,* the noun whirl took on a figurative meaning of “confused activity” in the 1550s. The beginning of that decade also saw the birth of Pope Paul V, the pontiff under whom Galileo faced an inquisition over his support for heliocentric cosmology and under whom Copernicus’ book on the subject was proscribed. It is a tale well told by many. Why should we retell it here? Indulge me.
 
First a retelling:
 
The Church’s leader met with Galileo in 1616 (the year when both Shakespeare and Cervantes died). It was in February of that year that a Church committee of “qualifiers” denounced heliocentrism as an idea "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...." By March 5 of that year, the Congregation of the Index had placed Copernicus’ work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium on the famous list of forbidden books. Six days later Galileo had his meeting with Pope Paul.
 
By the seventeenth century the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology had been the standard model of celestial bodies for more than a thousand years. People were used to it. In that cosmology, all the bodies whirled around Earth, the center of the universe. For centuries there was no apparent confusion on the subject. And it made theological sense because geocentrism places the Creator, called the Prime Mover—that is, the One who started the orbiting movements of the celestial bodies—outside and above all. As a corollary, geocentrism placed the Satan, the Adversary, farthest from God—that is, in the center of Earth.
 
Thus, the hierarchy of moral authority for Paul V and his predecessors and contemporaries seemed soundly based on a physical reality: The Ultimate Moral Authority of God passed from “on high” through angels to the Church, its Pope and Prelates, and finally to the laity. The Great Chain of Being ran from God to the deeply buried devil whose existence seem to lie beneath even the plants and rocks. It was a truly a moral system without confusion. Then those two troublemakers came along.
 
Copernicus and Galileo discerned the end of that whirling geocentric cosmos and replaced it with a different model, and by doing so ended the moral certainty of the ancient and medieval minds. In introducing a new order, they introduced moral confusion. The ancient and medieval moral authorities long associated the physical cosmos with a spiritual one. Overturning one meant overturning the other.  
 
Copernicus and Galileo placed the Sun—the source of light and by association the most godlike of physical objects—in the position formerly occupied by the devil, a position that became a disturbing threat to the prevailing theology. What was one to think about the new proximity of God and the Adversary? How could the new model serve as a physical analog of moral authority?  
 
Second, some questions about the bases of your moral system:

Now centuries after the fall of the Ptolemaic model, optical and radio telescopes, space explorers and spacecraft, and a massive collider at CERN have elucidated whirling from the universe’s largest objects to the smallest. We have little or no confusion about the physics of whirls. But we now have about a half millennium of confusion about moral authority. Yes, there are still those who crave a hierarchy and see a need for it, and yes, there are those who see just confusion, a meaningless jumble that is independent of any physical analog of order.
 
How does this play out for you? Do you see in yourself any ambivalence in accepting authority? Do you have an affinity for an overriding stability while desiring individuality? Do you want, for example, a top-down hierarchy unless it interferes with your concept that you are a personal center of the cosmos? Or do you want bottom-up model unless it fails to protect individual freedom? Are you a proponent of an overriding ethical system or a proponent of unbridled freedom? Somewhere in between? Do you recognize any moral center? Or, following Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Paul V, do you accept an acentric cosmos as your moral analog? And in that instance, do you accept a moral system without an identifiable order?
 
Overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemy might be categorized as one of the chief early steps along the road to the moral confusion of our era. The events of 1616 exacerbated confusion about a hierarchy of moral authority that Martin Luther had questioned 99 years earlier. Mainstream western moral life was simpler during geocentric times. It became more complex under heliocentric times. Today, under the acentric models of either the Big Bang or colliding branes in a multiverse, moral life is often a whirling confusion.
 
Can you see a connection between your morality and your world model? Is your moral system an order imposed on whirling confusion? If it is, is it an order that you devised or one that you accepted? Is your moral system Ptolemaic? Is it based on an ostensible order that, in reality, is no more accurate than geocentrism?
 
The western world has whirled in moral confusion for 500 years. Will you be a modern Copernicus or Galileo and define a new model as the basis for moral certainty?  
 
*  http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=whirl&allowed_in_frame=0
​

So much effort. So much technology. So much hope. We put all into our exploration of Mars. And now we discover that in the presence of UV radiation the perchlorate salts on the Martian surface can kill bacteria, the creatures that are ubiquitous life-forms on our own planet and the ones that we hoped we might find on Mars.
 
Perchlorates are bad for little one-celled creatures. They are even bad for big ones like us. What might be the consequences of landing on a perchlorate planet for us creatures who have thyroids, one of the glands that exposure to perchlorate can impact negatively?
 
I’m not going to Mars. First, I don’t have the money to sign on to one of those expensive trips. Second, I don’t think anyone has a very good chance of making the trip safely at this time. Third, I like Earth, even though my kind of creature has produced many perchlorates of aluminum, potassium, and sodium. So far, I’ve been able to deal with these threats to my thyroid.
 
It is, of course, possible that bacteria have found refugia on Mars, maybe underground, where groundwater is available and damaging UV radiation isn’t. We’ve found thriving bacteria deep underground on Earth, so why not on Mars?
 
All life exists because of refugia. Some places offer protection not found outside their boundaries. Our refugium is one beneath a protective layer of ozone and an atmosphere that blocks dangerous gamma rays and X-rays. In a sense, we owe our flourishing not only to the atmospheric shield and other physical refugia, but also to psychological refugia, circumstances in which nourishing promotes flourishing.
 
Outside the protection of refugia dangers abound. Outside psychological refugia, emotions undergo changes, most of them negative, some very destructive.
 
See whether you find this interesting: Perchlorates are used in making solid rocket fuel. Say we use some in getting to and landing on Mars. The very stuff that gets us to Mars is the very stuff that is likely to kill off the very life we are so interested in finding there.
 
Is almost every human endeavor filled with irony?

If you go online, you’ll find numerous sites that make claims about atomized colloidal silver. I have no idea whether or not the claims are true, but I do have a friend whose wife’s pneumonia disappeared when she breathed the stuff. Anecdotes aren’t science, however, so the story doesn’t constitute any proof of silver’s effectiveness.
 
If we could breathe metal, we might want to visit KELT-9b, a recently discovered planet that is so hot its only atmospheric constituents are metals. The surface of that distant Jupiter-size planet is as hot as a sun, most likely because it orbits close to its Type-A superhot star. We live in a very diverse universe, but there are pervasive connections.
 
Although breathing colloidal silver might possibly be a cure, it might, as a heavy metal, pose unwanted ramifications— possibly among them skin with a bluish tint or neurological interference. I don’t know. But those connections interest me. Atomized metals on another world would inhibit our breathing—assuming we could withstand the vaporizing heat—yet, here on Earth there are people who claim a curative power in those colloids.
 
It’s a strange universe that isn’t so strange. It’s a universe in which we see what I might call curative dangers. And we see that in commercials for various medicines. Take “this” to cure “that,” but be aware of the numerous side effects, including, as you have probably heard, death. Yet, we’re willing to gamble when we feel desperate and in the instance of pneumonia breathe a metallic atmosphere of our own making.  
 
Are most of our choices about curative dangers? That is, are we motivated in any choice by our willingness to take a chance that we won’t be the ones who suffer the unfortunate side effects? We obviously seem to be so motivated with respect to medicines. Does the principle apply to eating, borrowing against future earnings, going to a casino, playing dangerous sports, driving fast, or even developing interpersonal relationships? Certainly, there are many on whose tombstones we could inscribe “Died of Side Effects on a Personal Planet KELT-9b.”
 
I’m not advocating our breathing metal. I think all of us could use something more than anecdotes and guesswork when we make decisions involving side effects. 

How many Black Princes are out there? The answer: So many that retreating to the castle seems like the only alternative. General Sherman would have approved. Just lay waste to as much as you can.
 
What’s the alternative for the opposition beside retreating to a place where everyone is likeminded, some castle with impregnable walls of ideology? And so, today, we find ourselves more than ever living in a time of mental isolationism. All the surrounding farms have been destroyed, crops of new thought burned online.
 
Maybe attempts to obliterate opposing thought have increased in a nuclear age. Wars have always been hard on the innocent, and generals have long obliterated what they could without regard for collateral damage. Our nuclear age hasn’t changed that; it has simply provided a more effective way of accomplishing chevauchée, the method of warfare instituted by the Black Prince during that long struggle between England and France his father had begun in 1337 and that lasted until 1453.
 
A war that lasts for more than a century is bound to affect its share of innocents. Now we are in the midst of another war, a war of political ideologies that is also more than a century in the running. It’s newest weapon, a weapon capable of devastating the landscape of ideas: The Web.
 
What are the innocent left to do but retreat where the likeminded imprison themselves behind the fortifications of their likemindedness? And the product of this modern chevauchée? No conquest, but rather a protective, defensive isolationism.
 
The surrounding farms are no longer capable of producing crops of new ideas. Both warring sides have “heard it all” and label what they hear as “talking points” endlessly repeated. But behind the walls no one can hear what those on the other side are saying.
 
There’s little benefit to laying waste to every aspect of the opposition. In doing so an army destroys what might serve its own interests at some unknown time. Look around, ideological attacks, like the Black Prince’s chevauchée and Sherman’s March to the Sea leave very little that’s useful to either side of a conflict, even an ideological one.
 
What are we conquering when there’s nothing left but ideological walls that isolate?
 

What could the discoveries of a marine megafauna extinction* during the past three million years and numerous brown dwarfs** in our galactic neighborhood have in common? In themselves, rather nothing, except in the context of our knowledge about both. More marine organisms died off during the Pliocene and Pleistocene than “had previously been assumed,” and more brown dwarfs, maybe as many as 100 billion of them, lie about our galaxy than “had previously been assumed.”
 
“Had previously been assumed” is the product of our experiential limitations. Our assumptions are the bases on which we go about our daily business and build for our futures, but in that path to tomorrow, we occasionally discover the previously unknown. How, after so many decades of paleontological research, did we miss a mass extinction? And how, after an equal period, did we miss so many brown dwarfs?
 
We could argue that both the extinction and the numerous brown dwarfs were hidden. When marine organisms die, they don’t lie about in the ordinary realm of human endeavors. They fall to an ocean floor, where low to absent light and sediment can hide them. The brown dwarfs are low-light objects, the so-called failed stars that are more massive than Jupiter, but less massive than stars. They shine in infrared, not a frequency our eyes see.
 
The occurrence of the extinction and the presence of the brown dwarfs in abundance can draw our attention to other gaps in our knowledge. What have we “previously assumed” that personal discoveries will alter? Of course, we don’t know until we know, but these two discoveries demonstrate that assumptions can be wrong. What else are we missing? What else is hidden at this time?
 
That we think and act on the basis of assumption is a limitation we can’t bypass. There’s just not enough time in an individual’s life to examine all the assumptions on which we base our lives. That’s probably one of the reasons that some nineteenth century philosophers turned to utilitarianism as their guiding perspective: If something works, great. If it works for most people and somehow enhances their lives, greater.
 
The problem is that we don’t really do everything on a utilitarian basis, but rather on an assumptive one. We might argue that our personal drives push us to what is good for us, but we have too many personal experiences of having done something that might not have been “good” for us. Not that we planned for something inimical or self-destructive, but rather that we were led to act by what we had previously assumed to be true about the nature of our personal worlds and the world in general.
 
Personal history teaches lessons the hard way. But there’s hope. We can always reexamine what we once assumed. We can look through the fossils of our lives to see the tell-tale signs of something we missed along the way, or we can search the heavens for faint signs of things we didn’t know existed in abundance.  
  
* Catalina Pimiento et al, The Pliocene marine megafauna extinction and its impact on functional diversity, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0223-6 
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-previously-unknown-extinction-marine-megafauna.html#jCp
 
** K. Muzic, et al, The low-mass content of the massive young star cluster RCW 38, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-milky-billion-brown-dwarfs.html#jCp

Is ennui a chief motivator? Look around. See all that unnecessary risk-taking? See the silly and sometimes dangerous postings? Imagine being so bored that you shoot your fiancé with his consent and your belief that a book serves the same function as Kevlar.* Imagine stepping to the precipice for that special Selfie. It appears that some of us will do almost anything to eliminate ennui, to liven things up, to make anew.
 
To some extent, we’re all a bit caught up in defeating ennui and in refreshing ourselves. Reading helps. TV, too. Then there’s music of every kind. Nightclubs, theme parks, hobbies, travels, obsessions…
 
Change the feng shui recently? Think of what it might be like to remodel? Want the same old place to look like a new place? Alter the way you cut the grass, comb your hair, make a drink? Out to find a new restaurant? Even wish a favorite restaurant would consider adding to the menu?
 
Making things new is a universal desire. We are in that constant search, and it is the search itself that wards off ennui. We don’t necessarily have to reach some goal, to, say, complete that collection of rare objects. Completion simply means reaching a new level of ennui. And from that level we go off in search of yet another level.
 
“I make new,” you say. And you “make new” in mind when body fails. How many of your actions today will be your attempt to reach the next level of ennui? What proportion of your thinking is an attempt to avoid ennui?

*http://wonderfulengineering.com/girl-accidentally-shoots-boyfriend-dead-youtube-stunt-gone-horribly-wrong/