Have you ever said sentences like the following to a baby?
 
            “Here’s Uncle Joe. You might be unaware of this, but he developed a software to enhance machine aided cognition. He developed a program called ELIZA that he named after Shaw’s lead character in Pygmalion, the street vendor Eliza Doolittle. Essentially, in writing his AI, Uncle Joe addressed the problem of knowledge representation, particularly as it might apply to psychology.” *
 
You haven’t? But why not?
 
Of course, you know that the baby would not understand. However, you might argue that your using such sentences actually prepares the baby for a future vocabulary, English phonetics, and complex concepts. You might also argue that eventually, the baby will come to know the words and possibly later understand them in the context of artificial intelligence, psychology, and epistemology. 
 
So, how do you talk to the baby? Well, you sometimes reduce yourself to babbling, to looking directly into the baby’s eyes to entertain it with expressions that accompany sounds. Basically, you condescend because you don’t believe the baby has attained your level of intelligence, of accumulated knowledge, of understanding, and of language. 
 
You have spoken to people from all walks of life and from various cultures. Do you use the same level of speech, the same level of complexity, or the same level of colloquialism with all, regardless of their social status? In short, when you walk into a convenience store or a tire dealer, do you speak as you speak to a medical doctor, a biomedical engineer, or a tech CEO? You don’t? Why not? Is it because you have stereotyped your audience? 
 
In Pygmalion or its Broadway version My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza to speak “properly” enough to pass for a duchess. The question, of course, is whether or not just using words “properly” entails understanding of complex ideas. Think SIRI. Or, think typing that text and sending it only to realize a split second after you hit “send” that your smart phone changed a word you intended to send, causing you to send another text with the corrected word. Because smart phones are used everywhere, the question of which language they use is important, but that’s not the only question. Which dialect and which vocabulary should the AI be programmed to hear and understand?
 
I remember hearing some politicians addressing southern Baptist congregations during campaign stops. During their speeches, the politicians used a dialect and a vocabulary they believed “fit” the audiences, a dialect and vocabulary that differed from what they used in addressing groups of “Northerners,” or “West Coasters,” or “the Rich and Powerful.” What caused the change? I also remember my first trip to the American South as a youth and saying to an elderly woman, “Yes, ma’am” in a dialect easily distinguished from my usual western Pennsylvanian speech. As I said it, I thought, “Where did that come from? I have never talked with a southern dialect.” Was I young and stupid, young and unsure of my identity, or young and politely deferential as I believed the woman wanted me to be?
 
Was I stereotyping? 
 
Consider recent studies by Yale social psychologists Cydney Dupree and S. T. Fiske on the language used by conservatives and liberals. According to Dupree and Fiske (2019), “Most Whites, particularly sociopolitical liberals, now encores racial equality. Archival and experimental research reveals a subtle but persistent ironic consequence: white liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites—that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent” (Abstract). ** In a second study, Dupree (2021) found in a follow-up study the opposite of the “downshift” as Blacks and Latinos used a decidedly “upshifted” language to self-present as competent and knowledgeable and to separate themselves from stereotypes based on their racial or social backgrounds. ***
 
I suppose Dupree and Fiske could just as easily do another study on upshifting and downshifting within any racial, social, or professional group of people: Students, for example, relative to professors; professors, relative to grant providers; salesmen relative to clients. Across the human spectrum stereotypes often dictate how we self-present as either competent or incompetent. And much of it is based on a personal utility: The white northern politician seeking the votes of the deep southern Baptists adopts the “crowd-appropriate” language, even raising the voice at the end of a thought as if to say a loud “amen.” Comedians, of course, do the same, and in some sense there’s nothing wrong in downshifting or upshifting, especially when one seeks approval or laughs. But there is harm in pretending to be an advocate for equality while either subtly or blatantly expressing a belief in inequality through vocabulary or dialect. **** That makes the speaker a mere pettifogger, charlatan, deceiver, or pretender no different from a scam artist.  
 
And I could suggest another study for Dupree and Fiske. “Do audiences detect overt condescension or flattering deference?” Do those to whom speakers self-present as incompetent understand that the self-presentation is a ruse based on the speaker’s stereotyping the audience as incompetent or inferior? 
 
Further, I could suggest that you consider my own writing as an upshift, my effort to impress you with competence I don’t actually possess (as indicated by my use of the contraction). Am I a charlatan? Maybe. Just a thought.
 
But unlike a politician seeking votes or a salesman seeking sales, I want nothing from you other than what I post in the frontispiece to this website: My goal is for you to use what I write as a point of departure for your own insights. Regardless of any faulty thinking, unwarranted pretension, or genuine or false humility on my part, if I can inspire you to think, I’ve done more than just babble. 
 
 
Notes: 
 
*From its inception, artificial intelligence required a technology that tied either or both sounds and symbols to understanding. See J. Weizenbaum, “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 1 (19656): 36-45, and by the same author, “Contextual Understanding by Computers,” in ACM 8 (1967) 474-480. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168
 
**Dupree, C. H., and Fiske, S. T. (2019) Self-presentation in interracial settings: The competence downshift by White liberals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(3), 579-604. https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000166  Accessed July 30. 2021.
 
***Dupree, Cydney H.,  22 July 2021. Black and Latinx conservatives upshift competence relative to liberals in mostly white settings. Nature Human Behaviour (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01167-9   Accessed July 30, 2021.
 
****I offer the following as examples.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCyvyyo6dtQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCyvyyo6dtQ  Both accessed July 30, 2021.

Picture this: It’s the future; you are driving your electric vehicle in Indiana. Golly, your batteries are low, and there’s no charging station for miles. No problemo; as you drive, your vehicle gets a recharge from the magment, a magnetized road pavement recently developed and now being tested in Indiana. * Sounds pretty amazing. No worries about the location of a charging station. Just get on the road and drive.  
 
Magnetized cement? What could go wrong? It’s not as though a group of tap dancers will be in the crosswalk unable to get out of the way of oncoming traffic. Certainly, workers in steel-toed boots won’t find themselves stuck, abandoning their footwear in the middle of the highway, and walking home in their socks. Lightning? No one seems to have asked that question yet. Will a magnetized road surface attract lightning? There, I asked it. 
 
Now I can imagine the complaints and the law suits. I can see special insurance rates. I can envision that old rusted tail pipe requiring two to pry it from the road. What of the wrecks, those scattered pieces of steel that are not so easy to pick up? And the pranks! Oh! The pranks. Inventive Purdue University engineering students trying to outdo another engineering school: Can we try levitating something, maybe a metal effigy of a Michigan quarterback? What about the power source for the magnetism? “Sorry I’m late for supper, dear, I was driving home when the road went out; some car hit the generator beside the road in South Bend.” “How many times have I told you to charge the car before you leave for home? Anyway, I told you to avoid that section of the highway. The tolls are excessive. You’re paying for everyone else’s charge. By the way, who’s paying for the electrification of the road?”
 
Maybe “magment” is the future of pavement. I only facetiously suggested that pedestrians with metal in their shoes would be stuck, but pranks by engineering students don’t seem out of the question. So little of what we do is simple. So much of what we do generates unintended and unexpected consequences. Making life simple in a complex technological world is a difficult task, and as you have experienced, the greater the complexity, the greater the chance of surprises. 
 
Remember the famous lines Robert Burns wrote in the second last stanza of “To a Mouse”
 
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
 
 
A magnetic roadway. Great technological scheme. What could go wrong? 
 
*Yirka, Bob. 28 July 2021. Indiana to test ‘magment’: a magnetized concrete to charge electric vehicles. TechXplore. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-indiana-magment-magnetized-concrete-electric.html

Who knows the truth about Lucrezia Borgia? Did she poison people with toxins hidden in a hollow ring, leading them to food that would kill them? Did victims or friends trust her as she offered them food or drink during the Banquet of the Chestnuts in the Vatican Palace? Is the whole story of the ring a fiction? Who could tell? Maybe Fido.
 
Let’s make this succinct. The title of an article by Lucrezia Lonardo and others is “Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief.” * Lucrezia—the twenty-first-century Lucrezia, not the Renaissance Lucrezia—ran an experiment that involved dogs following the instructions of a person with a false belief or the instructions by a person with a true belief. The belief centered on whether or not food was available in one of two buckets that had been switched in the presence of the dog by a third person in either the absence or the presence of the persons with true or false beliefs. Go back. Look at that title again. 
 
Here are buckets publicly offered. Bucket A: Newscaster #1 believes falsely the claims of a politician who is lying. Bucket B: Newscaster #2 believes claims by a truthful politician. 
 
Here’s your test: Determine which informant has a false belief in the truth of a claim. 
 
Are you as insightful as a dog? Would you have known whether or not the Renaissance Lucrezia was offering you edible or toxic food and drink? On what grounds do you decide to follow the instructions of an informant? See whether or not you can sniff out the truth in tonight’s news. Choose your bucket wisely; otherwise, you’ll look for truth in an empty bucket. Read well the intentions of those who invite you to dine at their tables. Both truthful and untruthful Lucrezias throw banquets. Look out for the one wearing the hollow ring.
 
*Lonardo, Lucrezia, et al. 21 July 2021.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.090  

Live in a green building? That’s great. You use less energy and, because of that alone, you save yourself some money. And, of course, you’re doing your part for the environment. No one can fault you for increasing atmospheric carbon and its consequent radiative forcing of the lower atmosphere. We all want to say thanks.
 
Oh! Wait. You actually live in a green building, meaning the color? It’s what? It’s made of green pigmented concrete? Sorry, I was thinking passive and active green energy systems like south-facing big windows for collecting heat in the winter, deciduous trees on that same side to block the sun in summer, insulated walls, a large overhang to block the high summer sun, solar panels on the roof, and/or geothermal heating and cooling systems. But you’re telling me that the building is green, the color green. I guess that still saves you money. If the concrete is green, no one has to spend money on paint. Again, that’s a win-win for you personally though it probably doesn’t do much for the environment. Of course, much of what we do is just for appearances. There’s an increasing demand for colored concrete, and not just along Collins Avenue in Miami or on the hillsides of Bermuda, where all those pastel—colored concrete buildings and houses provide an art nouveau architecture. Barcelona has such colored buildings in the Ciutat de la Justícia.  
 
But did you see the recent story about green pigments in cement, specifically those with muscovite mica for coloring? Seems that the green concrete is structurally weak because of increased prorosity.* Now, if your green comes from cobaltous aluminate oxide and iron (III) oxide, you don’t have to worry. Those pigments don’t weaken cements. You ought to check with your contractor, nevertheless. He (or she) probably did the math to determine the safety of your concrete and the durability of your building under stresses. 
 
Yes, equations. Mehreen Heerah, Graham Dawson, and Isaac Galobardes improved the equation used to determine the structural integrity of colored concrete. Galobardes says that using the equation “avoids making the destructive tests used to estimate the mechanical properties of concrete.” 
 
Makes me think of Don Quixote. Remember Quixote’s fashioning a helmet and then testing it by striking it with his sword? Destructive testing. The helmet didn’t withstand the impact. So, what did Quixote do? He fashioned another helmet and decided that it would withstand the impact without the destructive testing. Good to know that the same thinking works for green concrete, for pigmented concrete, buildings, and for the current drive toward socialism.  
 
In matters less concrete than concrete, isn’t this what we do? Isn’t this the testing methodology behind educational engineering and social engineering? We don’t really run the tests that tell the tale, or we ignore the tests that show failure. We say that since we have a good idea, let’s live it. Or, we say, “Sure, it didn’t work before, but it’ll work this time.”
 
Sorry to tell those of you who favor socialism and communism, but you aren’t different from Quixote, the dreamer. The helmet you don has been tested and broken. Putting on another that is a duplicate of the first will yield the same results, regardless of your well-meaning intentions. As part of his quest for living the chivalrous and noble life, Don Quixote donned a helmet that did nothing to protect his life or the lives of others. But then, he did tilt at windmills. 
 
 
*Fraass, Robert. 23 July 2021. Fatal flaw uncovered in green pigmented concrete. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-07-fatal-flaw-uncovered-green-pigmented.html   Accessed July 27, 2021.  See also  Mehreen Z. Heerah et al, Characterisation and control of cementitious mixes with colour pigment admixtures, Case Studies in Construction Materials DOI: 10.1016/j.cscm.2021.e00571
 

Two guys talk at a picnic.
 
“Hey, Charles, you’re a scientist. Gotta question for you.”
 
“What’s up, Buddy. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer it, but shoot.”
 
“Whoa! First, Charles, I gotta say, ‘Watch your language.’ Shoot’s been banned you know. It’s on the proscribed list of words that indicate you are either insensitive or dangerous; hope no one at the NSA is at our picnic.”
 
“Okay, just ask the question.”
 
“Well, I was readin’ this morning that 18 elephants were killed by lightning in Assam, India.”
 
“Elephants? I’m not an elephant scientist, and I’m not a lightning scientist. I work for a company that develops chemicals for industrial use. I develop chemicals that enhance enzyme-mediated reactions.”
 
“What?”
 
“Ever drink beer, Buddy?”

“Of course, what am I holding right now?”
 
“Well, I see it’s a light beer. Guess what? You can thank people like me for that. We’re the ones responsible for the amyloglucosidase and pullulanases that save you from drinking those extra calories.”
 
“Okay, okay. Whatever. Anyway, I was readin’ about India’s weather gettin’ worse because of climate change. Floods, lightning, and big storms, you know. Look, here’s the article. It says, that Ma-ha-ba-lesh-war, had about an inch of rain every hour for 24 straight hours.* And one place hit 122 Fahrenheit recently. A heat wave took lives in early July. Glaciers are melting. And, and, give me a sec, here it is, ‘Scientists say climate change may be making lightning more frequent.’ And here it says that that Uttarakhand flood that went viral on YouTube earlier this year was a ‘tell-tale of our future’ according to a glaciologist. So, you’re a scientist. What do you think?”
 
“As much as I’d like to assuage your fears about roasting to death as the heavy rains fall and flood waters rise, nothing in my years of enzyme research gives me any authority to speak about Indian weather. From general knowledge, I know that over the years I have read of numerous poorly constructed and earthen dams breaking during a monsoon season and about catastrophic storms. Without anything more than general knowledge about that particular glacier that broke and caused the YouTube starring flood, I can guess that as a mountain glacier’s mass increases, so does its potential to fall downhill, or as it moves, it hits a no-return point, maybe at the lip of cirque or paternoster step. So, I don’t know whether or not climate change caused a particular glacier to break to cause that flood. What if the glacier had actually increased in mass to make it less stable? What if its inexorable movement downslope reached the point of chaos like stacking too many cards onto a house of cards?”
 
“Uh. Well, what about what the scientists and experts say? There’s a lot in this article. Let me see. Yeah, here’s one. Six thousand people died in a flood in 2013. Here’s another. Cyclone Tauktae killed 155 in May and Cyclone Yaas killed 9 and forced 1.5 million people to evacuate their homes. And a third one. Get this: The Hindustan News reports that 17,000 people died in heat waves since 1971. And a fourth. The article says, ‘India’s average temperature rose around 0.7 degrees Celsius—that’s 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit…
 
“Thanks for the temperature conversion.”
 
“One point seven degrees Fahrenheit ‘between the beginning of the 20th century and 2018.’ Isn’t that a lot?”
 
“Did you hear what you read?”

“What?”
 
“You said ‘around 0.7 degrees Celsius,’ didn’t’you?”
 
“Yeah. So?”
 
“What if I said to a customer who wanted fewer calories that I could make a chemical that would more or less do the job he wanted? That I could make a beer that had ‘around’ a certain number of calories? I can read the label now. ‘Calories: Maybe between 100 and 250.’ What would you think?”
 
“Uh?”
 
“Did the temperature rise by exactly 0.7 degrees Celsius as measured in the same places in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, say in 1901, as it was as measured in all the places Indians measured temperatures in 2018? I have another question: Did the Hindustan News say how many died in heat waves before 1971? Is it possible that just as many or even more died in unreported heat waves that occurred in the 14th century or in 8th century?” What about in ancient India, say three millennia ago? 
 
“Doesn’t say.”
 
“And isn’t the monsoon season a product of seasonal switches in pressure systems that change with the solar energy available? I mean, look, I learned that high pressure over the continent and north of the Himalayas dominates the weather in western India and over the Deccan Plateau in the winter, making it arid, but in summer low pressure develops over the Arabian Sea and dominates the region, sending massive amounts of water vapor that has to rise over the Deccan Plateau, where the vapor condenses because of orographic lifting, causing the annual rains.”
 
“Uh?”
 
“Point is, even though I’m not a weather scientist, I know that weather fluctuates, sometimes greatly, over seasons and decades. Otherwise, we’d never talk about a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, or any glacial advances bookended by interglacial warming periods. And as far as the effect on humans is recorded, I’d have to say that with 1.3 billion people, many Indians living in valleys below the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas and many living along coasts where storms hit and do the most damage, that deaths are inevitable. And as for the heat waves, well I assume that the reason there have been fewer deaths in the developed world than in India is that abundant energy and booming economies have made air conditioning available. I’ve been to Phoenix and Mono Lake in the height of summer, and I didn’t die because I knew to step into an air-conditioned building or car and because I had city water or bottles of water wherever I was. That just isn’t the case with the poor people in India. And as far as flooding goes, well, I live at an elevation of 1004 feet just a half mile from a river that occasionally floods and damages homes people have built right next to the river. The river’s flood gauge in my area is set at 735 feet. Look for an Ark if my house gets flooded.” 
 
“So, you’re sayin’ there’s no global warming involved in what’s going on in India?”
 
“No. I’m saying that the parts don’t necessarily add up to the whole, that inductive reason doesn’t yield flawless scientific results. Since all those extreme weather events occur in a decade or two on average, then to cite them as evidence of a trend isn’t science. And if one is using data from sparsely placed mercury thermometers for temperatures on one end of the century and full coverage digital data on the other end of the time scale, then one is not just comparing apples and oranges, but is, instead, turning apples into oranges.”
 
“What about climate…”
 
“I know you’ve heard the dire news. But you’re not taking the complexity into account. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were many, but not so many Indians. There are over a billion now. Let me give an American analogy. When the New Madrid earthquake occurred in 1811, there were no big cities in the region. Now, there are big cities. So, as big as that earthquake was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it didn’t wreak havoc on people as it would if it were to occur today in the early part of the twenty-first century. Today, well, let’s just say, ‘Look out, cities from Memphis to Cincinnati.’ Maybe even, ‘Look out Chicago.’ See. Things get more complex when you have more people. That is, the effects get more complex—and more noticeable in an age of instantaneous news reports. But is India getting warmer? Probably. I have no access to the India data at this picnic. I guess I could look up the temperatures. I want to assume that the climate people are honest and that they don’t fudge their facts to support their foregone conclusions. I guess I also want to know if they factor in that shift in ocean temperatures called the Indian Ocean Dipole. Didn’t it cause massive floods in eastern Africa recently? Hey, but what do I know? It’s probably wrong of me to suggest that big storms in western India or big storms in Bangladesh are just the product of alternating spots of warm water. Yet…”
 
“Okay. I get it. You’re not a climate scientist. You don’t have the info. You don’t like to jump from particulars to the general, to be inductive. I went to school, too. I know some of that stuff. And I see your point. I’m sorry I brought up those elephants.”
 
“Well, it’s time we all addressed the issue of the elephant in the room. Floods in Germany, droughts in the American Southwest, big storms in western India, and lightning strikes that kill elephants are all matters of concern, but they aren’t necessarily indicative of things to come, and they don’t convince me that there is a trend any more than the flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was a trend indicator in 1993. But you tell me. According to the records, at the confluence of those two rivers flood stage was reached 16 times between 1970 and 2018. That’s a period of 48 years. Guess how many times that stage was reached between 1898 and 1969.”
 
“Can’t imagine, maybe 5?”
 
“Thirteen times. Are those recent extra three floods significant? Should I worry that upper Midwest America is getting wetter while the Southwest dries out? Maybe. In the region around Cairo—the one in the United States, not the one in Egypt—the area’s annual precipitation averaged 28.49 inches for the first three decades of the twentieth century. If you average the second through the third decade, the average is 27.68 inches. As you play with decadal averages, you see precipitation numbers go up and down, but generally staying within an inch, hovering around 28.5 inches. But then in the last decade of the last century and the first two decades of this century, the decadal average precipitation jumped to 30.06 inches. So, there’s about an inch to an inch and a half difference. Is that significant? I don’t know. Certainly, there have been wide fluctuations before. By the way, except that humans have built where they can be flooded, would flooding be a problem? And if you choose to live on the leeside of a giant mountain system in an area that is naturally semiarid like the American Southwest, should you be surprised when your semiaridity turns into complete aridity for a number of decades?”
 
“I think I see your point. The elephant in the room is inductive reasoning.”
 
“I knew you were no Dumbo.”
 
 
*Kumar, Aishwarya. 25 July 2021. India: On the front line of climate change.  Phys.org. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2021-07-india-frontline-climate.html   Accessed July 25, 2021.

Right now the movement to wean humans off meat is ramping up. If you’re not a vegan, or vegetarian, or whatever kind of person doesn’t eat animals of any kind, including worms, insects, and platypuses, you are seen as one who doesn’t care about the planet. “Eat plants” goes the mantra. There are those out to control what you eat, to take away your freedom to get that medium-rare filet mignon. 
 
Would you say that one of the dilemmas humans face—have always faced—is a choice between control and freedom? I’m thinking not only family life with rebellious teens struggling against parental control, but also political, societal, and religious life. Have you noticed that those who seek freedom, then seek control once they have it? The Soviet Union rose from rebellion, but then became the controlling entity. Its fall demonstrates that the forces of freedom struggle against and sometimes win a battle over control. Many revolutionaries with the goal of freedom then become instruments of control, as in Cuba, for example, where Castro overthrew Batista, essentially replacing one tyrant with another. I know that’s a simplification, but it serves to explain the dilemma. Here’s another. Pope Francis banned (another simplification on my part) the Latin Mass. Seeking a control he deemed necessary for Church unity, he essentially quashed freedom and set some to thinking about disunity, the very opposite of his intention. And in the United States, proponents of Critical Race Theory have instituted educational programs that propose a singularity of perspective that is, in itself, the very antithesis of what CRT says it intends “to cure”: a one-sided racism. Forcing controls on others always breeds rebellion, either in thought or in deed. Deep down most people are rebellious teens as soon as someone imposes controls.   
 
It seems difficult for any human to balance necessary control with the freedom necessary for individuals to flourish. Outside privileged groups that seek control for various reasons, such as greed and hubris (elitism), lie the individuals or groups under control, often ready to rebel. But almost as soon as any group forms, it sees itself in the context of other groups that are in some way inferior. The group in control gets to make the rules, and those rules often entail actions that do not favor freedom for the controlled.  
 
Now all this seems like generalized rambling without a point—even to me as I reread it. But give me a moment. The reason for my focus on a dilemma that probably did not keep you up in restless worry last night is an article by Yu, Q., Liu, S., Yu, L. et al. entitled “RNA demethylation increases the yield and biomass of rice and potato plants in field trials.”* 
 
As we proliferate toward eight billion of us, we find that dilemma ever more pressing on each of us. Do we accept controls that limit freedom—our personal freedom—or do we fight for unlimited freedom? Apparently, no one put restrictive controls on Qiong Yu that prohibited the research on rice and potatoes. But what could rice and potato plants have to do with that dilemma I mentioned above?
 
If you read the article, you’ll see some exciting news. The researchers were able to use RNA to control what I call a “limiting gene” that prevents plants from becoming analogs of Jack’s sky-reaching beanstalk. Without an oversight by any watch group, say an ethics committee, Qiong Yu and friends made a simultaneously exciting and frightening discovery. They used transgenic expression of a human RNA demethylase FTO to change plant growth and production, getting about a 50% increase in biomass and potentially making plants more “climate change resistant.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Go ahead, Global Warming, give it your best shot, drought us into submission if you can, but know this: Because of Qiong Yu we have plants with bigger and deeper root systems; we’ll survive because a few researchers performed uninhibited transgenic experiments; we’re freeeeeeeee because Qiong Yu’s group was free to conduct such experiments. 
 
But what if that freedom finds it way into someone in our eight-billion “member’s only club” who decides to run the experiment in reverse, to perform a transgenic experiment that results in humans altered by plant RNA? Don’t laugh. That’s a scary thought and one that should keep you up at night. Just as there are people working in labs like the Wuhan lab from which there seems to be increasing evidence of a “leak” that caused a pandemic, so there are people who are experimenting freely everywhere: No controls because there is no one to exert control or controls because an evil-minded tyrannical government exerts its control. Eight billion people are hard to keep track of, even in an age of supercomputer tracing by big government agencies and Big Tech employees with an agenda. In a lab out there somewhere…
 
I’m reminded of the 1977 sitcom Quark, a short-lived TV series of parodies created by Buck Henry and starring Richard Benjamin. ** The crew of the space-roaming garbage scow in the year 2226 included two beautiful women, Betty I and her clone Betty II, Gene/Jean, a “transmute” with a male machismo and a gentle femininity, and—here’s the connection--Ficus Pandorata, a Vegeton, a sentient plant. By the way, Richard Benjamin’s character Quark has to answer to a petty, tyrannical bureaucrat named Otto Bob Palindrome, obviously his last name indicative of his first and middle names.
 
Back to Ficus. The sitcom’s inclusion of a human-like plant Ficus seems farsighted in view of the work in transgenic research by Qiong Yu et al. You might be thinking, “No, that’ll never happen. No one’s going to use plant RNA to alter human DNA.” 
 
Really? Have you been paying attention during the pandemic? If the coronavirus was altered in a lab either under government control or under no control, were you aware that people were conducting such gain-of-function research? And if the virus was, in fact, a gain-of-function product of human design or accident, who—or WHO—had control over the design and purpose of the research? Was it just a matter of a free individual or individuals who decided one day, “Hey, let’s take the common cold and make it into a deadly pandemic.” Remember, also, that at least two of the vaccines rely on RNA manipulation.
 
Let’s go humorous here. It’s your nightmare world of the future when others are in control of much of what you now freely hold dear. You’re in a restaurant. The waiter  approaches and says, “Hi, I’m Rice. I’ll be your server tonight. What’s your pleasure?” 
 
You say, “I’ll have the house salad.” 
 
A vegeton, the waiter immediately calls the anti-vegan police squad to throw you in jail. In that distant future, only purely carnivorous patrons are welcome.  
 
 
Note:
 
* Nat Biotechnol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00982-9  Accessed July 23, 2021.
 
** Corny show, but filled with parodies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ggR1eDgbc  Accessed July 23, 2021.  Ficus is an analog of Star Trek’s Spock.

Consider the following admonitions:
Beware historians and social architects. 
Beware experts and pundits.
Beware hypothesizers.
Beware doomsayers.
 
Consider the following advice: 
Think.
 
Consider before continuing: 
In this longer blog, you get to choose an ending, or, if you desire, to write your own. 
 
Consider this background: 
I’ve never been to Rapa Nui, but I’ve been influenced by explanations of what happened on that remote island famous for its seaward-looking Mo’ai. I accepted the so-called “collapse” of Easter Island culture that expert hypothesizers attributed to isolation, exploitation of limited resources like palm forests and soils, tribal war, and failure to manage water sustainably under changing climate and the vicissitudes of the Southern Oscillation/El Niño/La Niña events. Having heard all the “reasonable” hypotheses, I was convinced that Easter Island served as a model for twentieth- and twenty-first century practices and that what happened there hinted at the eventual demise of modern civilization. What happened on Easter Island, I thought, begs the question of whether or not we can sustain our lives on island Earth as we compete for its resources.
 
Not to worry, I learned. A new study seems to indicate that the island people survived natural and artificial environmental change. * The people were resilient. That they cut down their trees, a process linked by experts to the demise of their society, does not figure into the Easter Island equation of population collapse because there was no collapse, or, at least, there was no collapse as portrayed by the standard modelers. The equation can’t balance. Gardens kept the soils in place. In times of lake-draining drought, the islanders found springs. Life went on there as life has gone on for humans everywhere under risk and hardship, tough but for the general population, endurable.  
 
Our species is quite resilient because many individual members are quite hardy and resilient—even in times like these when some humans require “safe spaces” lest they suffer some existential verbal or ideological offense too unbearable for survival. Yes, even in today’s world of wimps, there are resilient people capable of surviving hardships like environmental change and war. You might be one of them—by reading this you prove by your presence in a time of pandemic my point. If you are resilient, thanks. Thanks? Yes, thanks for being the kind of human who will keep the species alive, at least for the immediate future and hopefully for as many millennia into the future as humans have endured so far. Sure, collapses have occurred, but they have happened in the context of an enduring species.   
 
So, why was I so easily convinced to adopt the standard explanations of a societal collapse that now, apparently, didn’t happen or that didn’t happen on the scale ascribed to it? And why did I let those explanations instill in me a doubt about the future? I was thinking without thinking. I accepted the standard model because in light of my having never been to Rapa Nui, those who had been there, the archaeological authorities, had accepted that “collapse.” Those experts seemed to make sense, at least, they made sense to me, a casual thinker on the subject. My thinking was their thinking.  
 
But no one who accepted the societal collapse actually took into account the size of the population on the island during the course of those centuries from initial settlement to European intrusion until Robert J. DiNapoli and others used approximate Bayesian computation of the radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record that revealed the resilience manifested in a steady or even increasing population on Rapa Nui at the very time when the standard model suggested otherwise. I realize now that I didn’t look at any data; I didn’t question any conclusions. Heck, I even mentioned the supposed collapse and its standard causes to college environmental studies students for whom I stressed the role of environmental degradation by overexploitation. What was I thinking? Now, years later, how can I go back to correct the misinformation—and maybe the negative attitude—I might have instilled in them (assuming, of course, than any of them were listening).    
 
Nevertheless, I still can’t discount that those islanders did cause themselves problems in the context of droughts and exploitation on an island not part of any archipelago. And I can’t discount that the same kind of backyard squabbles we see today were also part of Rapa Nui culture. People on the island were still people like people everywhere and everywhen. Apparently, over the decades ensuing their arrival, they separated into clans or tribes, and, as you probably know if not from your own family, then from others, that rivalries develop, estrangements occur. Cultures might differ, but the same human desires lie at the center of human problems as the Buddha taught, and individual needs frequently run counter to societal demands, even among a homogeneous people like the Rapa Nui. 
 
And if the homogeneous Rapa Nui had internal problems common to all humanity, does it not seem reasonable to assume that, as has occurred elsewhere, an introduced heterogeneity invariably increased any cultural tensions and environmental stresses? So, if, as DiNapoli and colleagues argue, the Rapa Nui survived internal and environmental stresses prior to an invasion by Europeans, should I not entertain the idea that they suffered increased over-the-edge turmoil after that invasion? The Dutch, finding the island first, and then the English, seemed to have introduced rats, plague, smallpox, and STDs into a biologically and culturally stable society that had actually survived previous hardships. Later, slave traders raided the island.
 
Do you, like me, too readily accept causes that are simple, and, as a corollary, also accept effects that appear to be anomaly-free? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by experts makes accepting effects easy, even when both causes and effects might be incorrect or mischaracterized. That collapse of the Rapa Nui seems to have been mischaracterized in both cause and effect, the latter demonstrated by the steady to increasing population size of Rapa Nui into the early 18th century. As a homogeneous population on an island, the Rapa Nui seemed to have survived both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes prior to contact with foreigners, but apparently, they suffered diminished numbers after contact with Europeans. 
 
 
Ending #1: Is Manhattan Just a Larger Rapa Nui?
Now I’m wondering whether or not I am an independent thinker or a mere parrot. If I was misled by a faulty account of Rapa Nui culture, am I also misled by a faulty account of current culture? Do I accept without thinking explanations of modern cultural problems? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by trusted experts makes accepting effects easy. And today experts abound, so many of them, I’m guessing, that at their rate of proliferation, just about everyone on the planet will be an expert before the end of this century (they’re multiplying faster than rabbits and lawyers). 
 
Are you stuck on explanations for American and European societies’ 21st-century problems that are based on hypotheses about environmental damage and rapid population diversification? Can homogeneous societies, such as Scandinavian countries before the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century surges in immigration survive untouched by social turmoil, disease, and environmental change after the recently introduced heterogeneity during this century’s mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa? 
 
Do cultural problems invariably arise from a contest between Homogeneity and Diversity? Is one better than the other? The Rapa Nui civilization was as homogeneous as a civilization can get. Any mixing of cultures and genetic backgrounds that made the Rapa Nui what they were until the Dutch and English seamen arrived had taken place before the islanders’ voyage across the Pacific to Easter Island. And then a new round of social and genetic mixing took place after the Europeans arrived in the 18th century. Oh-oh. Trouble was a-brewing after those encounters.  
 
It’s difficult to compare coconuts and apples. Easter Island is small and isolated. North America and Europe are large, with the former supporting an “indigenous” population for at least 16 millennia during which mixing probably occurred to engender the American peoples that the Europeans encountered starting in the fifteenth century. Over the long pre-Columbian centuries, those original migrants eventually mixed and then, as humans have always done, separated for the very same kinds of reasons that families separate today. Eventually, the separated “families” coalesced into units of relatively homogenous tribes and “nations,” such as the Natchez, Shawnee, Iroquois, Huron, Choctaw, and Mohicans. Then Europeans and Asians entered the mix of North American “indigenous peoples.” That mixing was sometimes biological and always cultural. 
 
In contrast with North America, Europe, with its longer human presence, experienced mixing over 30 to 60 millennia with notable pulses like the invasion by the Huns moving westward and the Vikings moving eastward. Geography made cultural mixing easier than it was over the vast Pacific. Movements of Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and others introduced heterogeneity throughout Europe and, in the process, diluted their own homogeneity. Interspersed with many cultural and genetic mixing episodes came the periods of homogenizing that led to our present-day concepts of Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, etc., all inheritors of mixing and all now seeing themselves identifiable by either culture or biology—or both.  
 
Humans will be humans, so similarities can be found to link people from all places and all times. The Rapa Nui, American, and European societies all exploited the environment. On continents populations decimated wildlife on which they depended for food, and they cleared forests, actions that mirrored those of the Rapa Nui. Migrations and conquest beginning with Columbus introduced heterogeneity rather rapidly in North, Central, and South America with settlements by the Dutch, French, English, and Spanish. 
 
Today, one of the best examples of heterogeneity lies in the Borough of Queens in NYC. Queens is one of the most genetically diverse places on the planet, and next door, Manhattan Island is far from being a homogeneous Rapa Nui. About 3.5 million people of diverse genetic and cultural backgrounds live together in just those two New York City boroughs, and they flourish with limited natural resources. No farms on their radically altered landscapes provide ample food to support those millions of people. And like Rapa Nui, both boroughs are largely denuded of trees that once covered the area they occupy. Yet, the people of both heterogeneous boroughs have not only survived, but have also increased their numbers in spite of environmental changes and cultural mixing. 
 
 Of course, I shouldn’t compare coconuts and apples. Am I wrong in thinking I can compare pre- and post-industrial societies or island and continental cultures as though they were the same? Am I also thinking without thinking by comparing a globalized world with isolated pockets of humanity like that on Rapa Nui in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries? Could I be wrong in thinking that what happened on Rapa Nui in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doesn’t seem to differ from what happened in Europe and North America over millennia. Nevertheless, with regard to an island borough of New York City only half the size of Easter Island, globalization of resources has made the survival of millions easier than survival of a few thousands on the larger and largely resource-less Rapa Nui. 
 
Ending #2: Homogeneity Begets Hegemony
Here’s what I think: Homogeneity begets hegemony.
 
So, if the early standard model of Rapa Nui cultural demise was only partially correct, it might indicate that no homogeneous society that uses up its local resources is ultimately sustainable, particularly in the context of our planet’s unequal distribution of resources. In the US, for example, there is only one mine, the Molycorp mine, that produces rare earths necessary for modern tech. If Molycorp closes that California mine, then American tech companies will depend solely on foreign sources like China, the leading producer of rare earths, for metals like terbium, yttrium, dysprosium, neodymium, and europium. Will such a monopoly lead to conflict? Coconuts and apples? True, the Rapa Nui did not incorporate rare earths in their rather primitive technology, and they apparently did not explore once they established a life on Easter Island. But they did leave Polynesia for a better life, possibly in the face of war back home or possibly in a desire to conquer a new land—otherwise, why did they leave? But what kept a once seafaring people from further seafaring and exploring? Well, in that standard model of island collapse, the Rapa Nui, having cut down their forests, had no materials to make boats for further exploration even if they had wished to explore. 
 
Their survival on the island indicates they did not, under the circumstances of diminishing resources, simply resign themselves to a slow and inevitable decline. The common effort of groups under stress everywhere to find relief by invention, migration, and hegemony. For the Rapa Nui, invention, not migration or hegemony, appears to have solved some problems. The story of the Rapa Nui begins with their voyage to Easter Island. That drought occurred over the ensuing centuries seems proven, but they were inventive, finding water in the island’s coastal springs when lake water dried up. 
 
Add hubris to the equation for survival. In searches for resources, homogeneous societies on both islands and continents have sought relief beyond their borders. The Romans conquered Cyprus, where they mined the Troodos Massif for copper. Or think of Japan before World War II. The Land of the Rising Sun relied on outside resources to sustain its modern civilization. Unfortunately for the nearby Asian and Southeast Asian populations, Japan’s leaders determined that the only way to sustain their homogeneous population’s growing need for resources was by conquest. In pursuit of that path to sustainability, the Japanese started wars of conquest that ended in their own societal collapse and decimated population. Between 3.5 and 4.3 % of the Japanese populations were directly or indirectly killed by its wars of hegemony.
 
What if the Rapa Nui had in fifteenth century the capabilities for hegemony that Japan had in the twentieth century? Would they have left the island and conquered the Incas like Conquistadors? One last example, if you please. Wasn’t Hitler’s hegemony driven by his belief in a homogeneity of Germanic peoples, whom he referred to, strangely, as Aryans, a genetic group originating in India? It seems that even the perception of homogeneity is enough to drive hegemony. 
 
Ending #3: Hypothesizing Experts Model a Future That Might Not Happen as Predicted
Greenland’s socialist-leaning government recently decided to end all oil exploration because of global warming. The politicians have listened to the “experts” and have based their carbon-free future on a model that predicts an inevitable melting of the island’s glaciers. If that melting occurs, Greenland will be just like the Greenland of the Eemian Interglacial Stage of 124,000 to 119,000 years ago. *** I guess the government officials believe a warmer Greenland would be less hospitable, even though Greenland’s initial settlement began during the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings sailed to its shores and found the place hospitable.
 
Should we consider Greenland to be an analog of Rapa Nui?  
 
Seemingly isolated, Greenlanders are actually connected to a global economy and trade system that provides them with resources that now lie buried under the island’s glaciers. A warmer Greenland would probably provide a climate conducive to more agriculture. An ice-free Greenland would be easier to explore for natural resources. And a warmer island might even foster more tourism, not less. Would global warming be bad for Greenland? Would dependence on foreign sources of energy be good for Greenland?
 
Could those experts who hypothesize grave peril because of “global warming” be wrong? Recall that 2012 was supposed to be a bad year. Remember about all those “we have only 10 years left” slogans? Remember “save the polar bears”? Could the experts be wrong if not about the world in general then at least wrong about Greenland? Is it possible that global warming might, in fact, benefit many populations by extending growing regions and seasons? Might it benefit Greenlanders?  
 
Assume that the Rapa Nui had no way of predicting the climate change that changes in the Southern Oscillation brought to their small island. Had they climate experts, would they have altered their use of resources? Would they have done everything in their power to abandon the island? Note that even after the appearance of the Europeans, the Rapa Nui continued to carve their Mo’ai, indicating that the work went on regardless of climate-caused hardships. And if, like Greenlanders, the Rapa Nui had oil resources, would they have refused to drill for them because doomsayers hypothesized climate change droughts? 
 
Prediction is a gamble. So far, the prediction is that climates will change because of global warming. And the corollary of that prediction is that humans will suffer an existential threat. But will they? 
 
Ending #4
This is where you start writing. Consider what experts in various categories have told you over the past year. Consider what you accepted as true, but found out to be false. Consider how your acceptance of experts' opinions has shaped your attitude. And consider how you will protect yourself from using others' thoughts as your own. Now think and write. 
 
Notes: 
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-resilience-collapse-easter-island-myth.html
 
**https://phys.org/news/2021-07-greenland-scraps-future-oil-exploration.html
 
***Gramling, Carolyn. 15 Dec. 2015. Greenland was once ice free. Science. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/greenland-was-once-ice-free  

I’ve been told that the best way to stay in the game of communicating is to dance around controversial subjects. That is probably true. Making any definitive comment has always drawn opposition that has throughout history (and probably prehistory) led to ad hominem responses. I have not found a segment of human society that is free from people who attack the messenger rather than the message, and that includes academia, a segment one might think extols reasonable discussion. Nevertheless, in the context of a species that takes pride in its self-proclaimed classification as “sapiens” but that responds to adverse ideas emotionally, I intend here to make a few comments on matters that engender ad hominems.  
 
CLIMATE
It really isn’t a matter of climate anymore, is it? It’s become rabid politics. And the two sides on the subject are as divided as can be: Those on one side of the matter say there is no controversy because everyone agrees, that is, everyone save those goofy naysayers, those climate-change deniers, those unscientific dolts. And those dolts on the other side of the issue? Well, from their perspective the science is neither finally determined nor indicative of really bad consequences to come. Humanity, say the “deniers,” isn’t on the brink of extinction because the climates might be changing. They say, “Climates have always changed, sometimes even rapidly, as at the end of the Younger Dryas glacial epoch when climate changed radically in the course of little more than a single millennium (12,800-11,550 years ago), and sometimes in the course of little more than a few decades, as at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and as at the end of the Little Ice Age.” 
 
A BIT OF A PRIMER for Those Who Slept through That Science Lecture
Cimate is the “average weather” over a multidecadal period—usually three decades for a region. The first among meteorologists to classify climates, Wladimer Köppen, used monthly temperatures and precipitation amounts to delineate climates. His system, modified several times by Köppen himself and also by Rudolf Geiger, recognizes subclasses of tropical, dry, temperate, continental, polar, and alpine climates, all designated by letters or combinations of letters (E.g., Dfa and Dfb, two humid continental climates identified by differences in temperatures in certain seasons). Other climatologists like C. W. Thornthwaite added types of vegetation into the classification scheme, and in 1966 Glenn Thomas Trewartha modified the system further. If you look at any climate map, you’ll note that the borders between climates are somewhat debatable. Should climatologists place the boundary between Dfa and Dfb in southern NY or northern PA?  
 
The classification scheme includes not only temperatures and precipitation amounts, but it also includes when those temperatures reach their average highs and when the precipitation occurs. We know, for example, that the best time to vacation in Guatemala, the “Land of Eternal Spring,” lies between November and April, the country’s driest months. More frequent and heavier rains occur in the other months. This climate data is based on only a few centuries worth of observation, but no doubt the ancient Mayans knew when they didn’t need to wear their Wellingtons and carry an umbrella. 
 
Unfortunately, except for proxy information, we have relatively reliable data on weather patterns going back only into the Industrial Age and only for isolated places until the nineteenth century. Even now, it is erroneous to think we have long-term data for every part of the planet, but meteorologists have ever more sophisticated means of acquiring weather information, including data from satellite-based instruments. But to determine past climates, paleoclimatologists have had to rely on proxy data, such as the ratio of O-18 to O-16 in the tests (shells) of foraminifera, the types and locations of fossilized terrestrial plants and animals, and types and compositions of sediments. 
 
Chief among public environmental concerns since the 1970s, climate change has become an ever-more-popular raison d'etre for politicians and public figures. Back then, during the first Earth Days, Chicken Little cried, “The glaciers are coming; the glaciers are coming.” By the 1990s, the cry became “The glaciers are melting; the glaciers are melting.” Climate science entered the world of news media, film, public discussion, and doomsaying. Everyone, it seemed was getting involved. William K. Stevens wrote The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate in 1999. * If there is a book on the subject, it must be important, right? Stevens, by the way, was a science reporter for The New York Times. Could there be a more scientific document? What had been science for Wladimer Köppen became a business, a political matter, and an ideology both for people running scared that, as the stereotypical guy holding the sign warns, the end is near, and for people cashing in on government-funded research and science popularization leading to fame. The future, “warmists” declare, looks bleak, baked bleak. Wasn’t the catastrophic moment supposed to occur in 2012? And we’re past that, so, everybody, look out. 
 
THE CAUSE AND ITS EFFECTS
 
First, Climate Controls
Here’s a list of climate controls: 

1. Solar activity
2. Orbital shape and cycles
3. Latitude
4. Altitude
5. Albedo of surfaces
6. Continentality 
7. Marine air masses 
8. Ocean currents 
9. Greenhouse gas ratios
10. Volcanic activity 

 
Second, Anthropogenic Activity as a Control
The determined cause of the predicted imminent demise by climate of just about everyone, as you know, is the burning of fossil fuels that releases carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are, in fact, undeniable. Hey, I measured them for Pennsylvania and the USEPA back in the 1990s. Have those emissions not increased since then? Measurements on top of isolated Mauna Loa confirm a relatively steady increase over the recent past, with quantities of carbon dioxide now reaching over 400 parts per million in our mostly nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
 
Human activities other than burning fossil fuels activities can influence temperatures and precipitation. Stripping forests, paving square miles of cities, altering types of plants from endemic to invasive all change the albedo of Earth’s surface. Creating urban heat islands adds energy to local and regional air masses. Emitting small (2.5 microns) industrially produced particulate matter into the atmosphere can block sunlight. Impounding water in reservoirs, such as Lake Mead, and destroying natural water bodies, such as the five-million year-old Aral Sea, also play a role in climate.  
 
Effects, Panic, and Hasty Conclusions
Now it has become common for people to support their claims that “the end is near” by pointing to droughts and floods, cold spells and heat waves, and hurricanes and tornadoes. Since most people live in the present with little regard to history, and since much of the history of droughts, floods, cold spells, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes is locked in an unrecorded past, any current weather phenomena deemed severe are taken as signs that “things are bad and getting worse.” In August, 2021, at the time of this writing a fire is ravaging the woods of Oregon, and shortly before I put fingers to keyboard, floods killed people in Europe. What more evidence could the common citizen want? 
 
Read this CNN headline: “Germany’s worst rainfall in a century leaves dozens dead and hundreds missing, authorities say.” ** Certainly, there are those who attribute the flooding to climate change. Why, even Germany’s Environment Minister Svenja Schulze tweeted “Climate change has arrived in Germany.” Am I missing something here? I assume that “worst rainfall in a century” implies that Germany had such flooding prior to this event. Indeed, 100-year, 500-year, and 1,000-year floods are called by those names because such floods can occur on average by the designated number. In fact, a location could be hit by two 500-year floods in consecutive years and then not hit again for 1,000 years on the same order of magnitude. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. In 1900 the Galveston Hurricane killed 8,000. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was a Category V storm. Don’t forget 1969’s Hurricane Camille, the second Cat 5 hurricane to hit the US in the twentieth century. Bangladesh lost 300,000 in the Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970. Floods? Well, consider that in 1932 the Yangtze River Flood killed more than three million people, at least a million more than the number killed by the 1887 Yellow River Flood. That recent flooding in Europe that killed dozens? Consider that in 1530 the St. Felix’s Flood killed 100,000 in Flanders and Zeeland, and forty years later about 20,000 died during the All Saints’ Flood in the Netherlands.
 
MOVERS, SHAKERS, AND SOLUTIONS
So, back to mobilized politicians and movers and shakers. They have determined that you, yes YOU, are at fault, you with your insatiable desire for energy. And since you are an addict without self-control, politicians, led by soothsayers from academia and the United Nations, have decided to impose a different way of life, to get you in energy rehab, so to speak. Ignoring that those who do the imposing find it necessary to burn fossil fuels to live comfortably. And ignoring their need to travel to pat-on-the-back friendly conferences, where good food and good times are as much a part of the conferences as policy-making that has yet to be universally turned into results, I’ll simply say that hypocrisy is a common human failing. If the future is really dire, shouldn’t the leaders lead by example? 
 
The consequence of movers and shakers meeting to decide how to get you into rehab, are real. They have convinced prime ministers and presidents, parliaments and congresses, CEOs and boards to take actions that directly affect your life. You, yes YOU, need to switch to renewable energy systems to save the planet from more climate changes, even though you probably owe your existence to climate change in eastern Africa a few millions of years ago when your ancestral hominins first stood upright, and even though climate change might be as good for some people as it is bad for others. 
 
Is there something to this climate change obsession? Probably, but what are YOU going to do about it? Are you going to be happy with low albedo solar panels covering a former high albedo landscape and serving as a heat island? With bird-killing windmills that have fiberglass fan blades that can’t be recycled? With electric batteries galore whose heavy metals will infiltrate soils upon disposal, making ground and surface waters carcinogenic? With energy shortages that bring not only discomfort, but also higher prices for transported goods and services? 
 
Are you listening to Greta, world-renowned teen who scolded the world for stealing her childhood? How, by the way, does the supposed theft of her childhood compare to the conditions imposed by a Syrian dictator, a brutal Caliphate, and an inner-city gang? Oh! Yeah. She got to ply the seas on a sailboat, something I didn’t get to do until I was an adult. Poor kid. And like Greta other kids have been told that the world’s future, their future, is bleak, baking bleak.  
 
And all because you, yes YOU, won’t act to Spartanize your life, the movers and shakers—exempt from their own dictates—now have to impose restrictions that will force you into energy rehab. And not just you. They will attempt to force everyone on the planet into rehab, even those who just want to reach your current level of convenient and abundant energy supply. In the meantime, you will hear all the necessary admonitions for change, such as the mantra about the fictional 97% of scientists that agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and dangerous.
 
THE CONSENSUS
If you ask for a list of names, will you see that those scientists aren’t universally climate scientists or paleoclimatologists? Will you see that the list doesn’t reveal the science of the scientists? Will you accept, then, that a medical researcher who is clearly a scientist has an opinion on climate? How about a chemical engineer who works in plastics? A theoretical physicist? Or maybe even a guy who plays a scientist on TV? What does it mean to say “97% of scientists”? I know some scientists—even pretended to be one myself by doing environmental research for the Commonwealth of PA and the Feds—but I don’t know of any survey they ever took. Are you one of the scientists that make up the 97%? If you are, have you examined the data supposedly available to all 97% of scientists, and if you have, do you conclude that the future is dire? That you live in a modern Ur that underwent, among political change, environmental change? Have you sold your house on the Florida coast in anticipation of rising seas, powerful storms, and unbearably hot weather? 
  
And if you wish to logically examine the evidence for a dangerous set of climate changes, what will you, yes YOU, do with temperature data that might have been manipulated or misconstrued to shape public opinion? Changes? You know you have changed the very spot where you live. A thousand years ago there was no house or apartment there. Humans have always altered the planet, and the planet has always altered the way humans live. If you live in a city, you contribute to an urban heat island. What are you going to do about it? Express an opinion? 
 
In 2021 the United States, Greenland, and countries too numerous to mention have leaders who are intent on quashing the use of fossil fuels. They see an urgency that many people agree with but refuse to act on. The U.S. President in 2021 wants to put charging stations across America so that everyone can drive an electric car. Are you going to buy one? Sorry, I didn’t realize you already drive one in your personal effort to save the planet. I’m sarcastic because I can’t envision where the charging stations will get the power for a highly mobile population that is used to being in a hurry, a population that has, by the way, 276 million vehicles.  
 
Slow down, people. Have a conversation at a charging station for the twenty minutes to a half hour it will take to get you another 100 or so miles, at the end of which you’ll need to take the next charging station break. You’ll have the time to talk, time you don’t have in the five minutes it now takes you to fill a gas tank. I can see it now: 50,000 new charging stations and relaxing coffee shops lining the roadways of America; people taking time to meet new people; no one in a hurry; life as slow as it was during the horse-and-buggy days but with fields of solar panels accumulating heat on their dark surfaces. By the way, it will take between 6 to 15 solar panels to charge an electric vehicle. Along I-95 in eastern USA, as many as 300,000 drivers use the highway. Go low here: Six panels times 300,000 vehicles equal 1.8 million solar panels. A 20-square-foot solar panel produces about 250 to 300 Watts. That field of solar panels for just one highway will be huge. Ah! The dream conditions of a carbon-free world. But what if an occluded or stationary front beclouds the sky? 
 
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Should we be concerned about climate change? I’m up in the air, so to speak. A warmer world has existed before; a colder one, too. And both warmer and colder worlds have bookended the existence of all the various human species. What if, however, we, the last of the hominin species, pave the sunny Sahara with solar panels to supply North Africans with abundant energy? Almost every environmental solution generates its own set of problems. Square miles of solar panels will, as I noted above, absorb heat, make their own heat islands, and cause convection currents that will enhance sun-blocking cloud formation. That’s okay, you say. The result will be increased precipitation that returns the Sahara into its once green state—yes, the Sahara was once a land of greenery. The greenery will then alter the former albedo of the sands.
 
And what happens if the warming doesn’t happen as predicted? What happens if the warming occurs, but instead of dire consequences generates benefits for humanity that equal the losses? And what happens if regardless of temperature patterns, the politicians decide that cheap energy is bad for all? 
 
DILEMMA
Protecting the environment is everyone’s ethical obligation, and that means using electricity prudently. But life is complex. Should we turn off city lights that help to prevent crime? Should we force people to accept the dictates of others? How do we get everyone to cooperate when abundant energy begets abundant wealth, comfort, and freedom? 
 
We should discuss this sometime at a coffee shop by one of those charging stations as we wait our turn to plug in our electric vehicles for another hundred miles of travel. 
 
            
Notes:
 
*Delacorte Press.
**July 16, 2021 at https://www.cbs58.com/news/germanys-worst-rainfall-in-a-century-leaves-dozens-dead-and-hundreds-missing-authorities-say             

Apparently, we humans can’t live without contradiction. And when I say “we humans,” I include myself, for surely, I am as guilty of contradicting myself as any other and certainly as guilty of hypocrisy in some way as any other human I critique. But I find a particularly puzzling contradiction and possible hypocrisy in the current push by some on the American Left to require vaccinations against COVID-19. 
 
I’ll note here that I have been vaccinated, have been “Pfizered,” so to speak. But I would not force anyone else to receive any COVID-19 vaccine out of respect for an individual’s wishes and on the grounds that those who already contracted the disease probably have antibodies, have immunity, that, if enhanced by a vaccine, might make the body over-immunized, leading to something akin to that talked about cytokine storm, that is, to some auto-immune response. Yet, I see teachers’ unions and Left-leaning pundits and politicians pushing for that universal vaccination, regardless of one’s having natural antibodies. What happened to that argument about “it’s my body” so repeatedly expressed with regard to abortion? I guess that’s my simple question. What about that “it’s my body” argument?
 
Therein lies the contradiction and hypocrisy of one segment of American society. Of course, that segment will argue that I’m mixing fruit here, comparing my apples to my oranges. Regardless of that counterargument, I would suggest that if “it’s my body” applies to one issue, it also applies to the other. The Left advances causes like physician-assisted suicide. That’s a version of “it’s my body,” isn’t it? So, if someone chooses not to get “Pfizered” and then by chance dies, isn’t it that person’s right to choose non-physician-assisted death? 
 
Am I missing the point here? Isn’t the universal vaccination supposed to protect others? Isn’t that the justification for the vaccine? I suppose, but consider that the vaccine is designed to protect those who have the vaccine the way a castle wall once protected medieval populations. If the wall doesn’t work to protect those who chose to build and hide behind it, why did they bother? 
 
Sure, I might get some variant of COVID-19. There is that possibility. But life’s a risky business. I’ve taken what I’ve been told is a reasonable precaution; I’ve hidden behind the wall. Was I duped? Should I walk in anxiety that the wall of protection behind which I seek security will fall to the cannonball of COVID-19? Has the virus developed the trebuchet that destroys the castle wall? If it has, then what do the people do? Do they run to this vaccine, then to that one, all sought out in a panic derived from the threat of attack? Someone might call me out for hypocrisy: “Hey, don’t you get an annual flu shot?”
 
In fact, when I think about the flu season, I do get the shot, but I miss some years. And in some of those years without the flu shot, I get the flu; in some of those years, I have remained healthy. And if I should get the flu as some have gotten COVID-19, should I still get the flu shot during or after my sickness? Haven’t I developed through sickness a natural immunity? Haven’t those who already had the pandemic’s virus developed immunity? Yet, I recently read that universities are considering for the 2021-2022 school year a requirement for vaccinations, and that NCAA sports teams might be required to get the vaccination—even for players with antibodies.
 
Seems to me that those who keep hounding us about diversity want little more than uniformity. 

What, I ask, shaped your life? You might say, for example, that common human necessities, such as the need for food, have driven you to a pattern of eating, once, twice, three times a day, or of continuous snacking. Eating: Now that’s an inescapable necessity for all humans. You might also say that what you have become was contingent on all those little events that differ among individuals, from being born into a certain economic condition or faith system to being in the right place at the right time to get a job. I think, for example of the latter, a contingency that placed me in a job I held for four decades and of all the subsequent related contingencies that I see in retrospect. A serendipitous event that produced a career also produced governmental research projects that came my way, the very first one by accident, I believe, and then the others by personal motivation to seek more of the same.
 
Before I continue, let me speak about that personal serendipity of decades ago by running the video of my career. Hit “Play.” Seeking a job as a college instructor, I went to visit campuses one summer day. On a sidewalk of the first campus on my itinerary, I chanced upon the chairman of the English Department who was walking across the campus. Before I left that sidewalk, I heard, “You’re hired. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.” It was a serendipitous meeting that was enhanced by synchronicity. Fast forward now.... Stop. Hit “Play.” Eventually, another serendipitous event resulted in my switching departments to teach the earth sciences, specifically, oceanography. Fast forward again…. Stop. Hit “Play.” Just about everyone had gone home for the day, leaving me in my office and the departmental secretary at her desk to mind the store. A state government agent appeared at her desk and asked for a colleague, the most senior member of the department. Because he had already left, she sent the fellow to me, and he explained that the federal government had asked the state to perform such-n-such research. The agency, he said, was at a loss on how to proceed, so he was traveling to state universities in search of someone to do the work, “chancing” upon me that day. We hit a point of synchronicity in that meeting. Keep watching this video. I did the research for the state, and all my subsequent government research stemmed from that meeting. I suppose I could say that all of it was contingent upon that meeting which was contingent upon a series of serendipitous events. I might also add that all those graduate assistants and colleagues I hired on grant money over the ensuing years also owed something to those chance meetings with a chairman and a state agent. Serendipity for sure for them, their earning some much needed money coming at just the opportune time for them, all as a consequence of my personal serendipitous events derived, as my video shows, from contingent necessities: 1) Filling the need for an instructor in the English Department, 2) Filling the English Department’s need a few years later for someone to teach a new course in scientific and technical writing, 3) Filling a personal need to acquire more scientific knowledge by enrolling in science courses that motivated the chairman of a science department to ask me to teach for them, 4) Filling the Department of Earth Sciences’ need for someone to teach oceanography by acquiring even more knowledge and switching departments, and eventually 5) Filling the need of a wandering puzzled state agent to perform some research mandated by the federal government. Yes, the video shows that my career evolved because I filled contingent needs.   
 
Now, I wonder about you. What serendipitous event or events altered your life’s course? And I also wonder whether or not your serendipitous event or events might just as easily have occurred in someone else’s life. Had that senior colleague not left for the day, would he have conjoined the state agent synchronistically and then seized the opportunity to perform that research? Could the serendipity you have experienced just as easily have been the catalyst for someone else to walk in your shoes, to star in your autobiographical video. In other words, were you necessary? Were you “chosen” in all of Earth history to be where you are? Were your personal serendipitous synchronicities possible only with you as the actor? Did all the Cosmos conspire to place you in your current state of affairs through the accumulation of such events that filled contingent necessities? Was there an encompassing cause that produced you, the effect? Lots of questions, I realize, but I have another question.
 
Has your life been the result of synchronicity? There are many who believe their lives are contingent on a “special” occurrence. I just read a short autobiography of such a person. Gregg Levoy posted in Psychology Today online (2017) the story of his being in one job but thinking of possible others, listening to “Desperado” by the Eagles on the way home from work one day, hearing the line about the Queen of Hearts, stepping out of his car, and finding a Queen of Hearts beneath his foot, an event he believes was serendipitous synchronicity enhanced by other instances of running into the isolated Queen of Hearts cards in various places. He writes that such synchronicity is “A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path.” * 
 
Synchronicity? Here’s an example of synchronicity:
 
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.” 
 
Ralph: “Funny thing, Vera, I was just thinking you would.”
 
Now another question: What brought Vera and Ralph together for a life-long relationship that one day would have them thinking simultaneously about taking out the trash? Mere serendipity? Cosmic determinism? Forget the fictional couple. What about you?
 
With seven billion of us interacting, coincidence and synchronicity are likely. But when either occurs, we are usually astonished by our apparent inexplicable connection to others and to the universe. What are we to argue, that coincidences occur coincidentally? That synchronicity in any form is a matter of accident in a finite life? That we don’t have the connection with others we believe we have? Or, finally, that most “meetings of minds” and spiritual connections with nature ignore differences in favor of a single recognizable, and possibly imagined, common detail that a suffusion of neurotransmitters enhances in our brains? Do we impose connections where no connections by any objective standard exist?
 
That we ascribe meaning to synchronous and coincidental events is a normal reaction, but no one, I believe, has established that such events actually have objective meaning. Things happen. We happen to be where they happen. As Porky Pig says at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon, “That’s all, folks.” But, darn, don’t you get that feeling that there’s something more to synchronicity and coincidence than chance? Do you believe that synchronous phenomena suggest life isn’t “looney,” but that “There’s more, folks”?
 
Take dating, for example. How did you meet? The universe is 13.8 billion years old—give or take a week—the planet is 4.5 billion years old; it’s been more than three billion years since life first appeared and more than a half billion years since unicellular life evolved into multicellular life that proliferated; and your type of life, hominins, has been around for millions of years with the rise of your species maybe 300,000 years ago—that’s about 150,000 generations and 100 billion people. And now there are those contemporaneous billions of humans, and you met one of them, found a meeting of minds and hearts, and, as they say, the two of you became one. What are the chances? What are the chances of finding that “soulmate”? Was your meeting serendipitous? Well, maybe you should consider that, though unprovable, you could easily have met hundreds or thousands of soulmates among seven billion members of your species. “But there was that moment,” you argue. “There was that immediate connection.” 
 
From personal experiences, I tend to believe that we do have inexplicable connections; yet, my belief is tempered by my knowing that biochemistry, emotions, assumptions, culture, and learning control what I think and feel when I experience synchronicity and coincidence. Take the “love at first sight” experience as an example of synchronicity. Maybe you experienced it; maybe you saw it in a movie when two characters embarrassingly exchange that “knowing” flirtatious glance “across a crowded room,” as Emile sings in South Pacific.
 
            “Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger
            You may see a stranger across a crowded room
            And somehow you know, you know even then
            That somewhere you’ll see her again and again…
 
            “Who can explain it, who can tell you why
            Fools give you reasons, wise men never try”
 
I suppose that in giving you an explanation of love at first sight, of coincidence and of synchronicity, I might prove myself a fool. I also suspect that regardless of any insight embodied in the lyrics Oscar Hammerstein wrote for that song, neuroscientists do have an explanation. So, with some preconceived reservations, I checked some findings. 
 
With regard to “love at first sight,” I am a little skeptical of any findings that embrace a mingling of pheromones as a chief cause of synchronicity between supposed star-crossed lovers. Hammerstein’s lyric phrase “across a crowded room” provides me an image of too many intervening volatiles and too much volume to make such a mingling by pedesis anything other than the rarest of chances; so, forget Brownian movements. (Being in the same room as someone infected by COVID-19 isn’t a guarantee you’ll get the disease) But then, since I don’t know how many molecules are required for pheromones to work or how often “love at first sight” occurs, I should be skeptical of my skepticism. And yet, “across a crowded room”? I can’t prove that mingling molecules aren’t the cause of “love at first sight,” but that chance mingling seems rarer “across a crowded room” than finding the winning slot machine among all the slots in Vegas and Reno combined.
 
I suppose everyone has had a share of sitting at the right “slot machine” of life and found, in this mixed metaphor, a meeting of minds. So, I have to ask whether or not there aren’t visual or audio clues that work like pheromones, making that “across the room” connection just as likely as standing next to a pheromone-emitter. Yet, according to Dr. Trisha Stratford, a neuropsychotherapist, speaking in an interview with Emily Blatchford for the Huffpost, a woman can smell a man at ten feet. ** I suppose that’s the pedesis I mentioned above, and I also suppose that there’s a limitation by position upwind or downwind. Nevertheless, I met my wife, for example, in a crowd, but we weren’t separated, weren’t “across a crowded room.” Rather, we were standing next to each other in a crowded room. Could those pheromones have been wafting? We were only a couple of feet apart,maybe only 18 inches. In the context of billions of years of life and untold numbers of recirculated compounds, did those pheromone atoms and molecules intermix synchronistically just at “the right moment and place in the history of the Cosmos” to make us fall in love? What are the chances? ***
 
Although I would not place some Jungian paranormal meaning on a first meeting of “star-crossed soul mates,” I must still admit that I cannot explain my—or your—meeting the “right” person at the right time to form a lifelong happy relationship. Was Providence involved? Would that mean, then, that in 13.7 billion years of Cosmic History, a meeting that took a couple of minutes was predestined, that my life or your life was determined at the Big Bang in a string of causality?   
 
In fact, we’re all very complex. Those who seem to find several or even many soul mates might differ from me and my life experiences. Second, third, and more marriages are common. Look, for example, at the life of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who seemed to fall in love twice with Richard Burton whom she married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. And that brings me back to the inexplicable. 
 
We can never fully know how the other person might experience any event regardless of our supposed mutual feelings. We can analyze the brain to find serotonin and dopamine coursing through networks of neurons in the brain’s adaptive oscillators; yet, we can’t dismiss the holistic mind, the whole person that seems to be in perfect sync with us “across a crowded room.” Let’s get existential-like here: I am my brain that fell in love. I am my brain that experienced synchronicity. I am my brain that experiences a meeting of minds and hearts. But I am not, it seems to me, relegated to just a brain operating on sensory data. 
 
There appears to be a meeting of minds, a synchronicity that is real. And that synchronicity seems to take place outside the skull. I know of other stories like that of Gregg Levoy, stories about some object appearing by chance to symbolize a desire or a destiny and stories about meetings of minds that have brought people together. Of course, we can’t impose a meaning on any of them until after their occurrence, making serendipity and synchronicity both matter for retrospect. 
 
Now, I feel a need to tell you and Gregg Levoy that his chance of running into that odd and isolated Queen of Hearts card isn’t necessarily a sign of anything. The United States Playing Card Company was founded in 1867. It sells 100 million decks of playing cards annually. So, do the numbers for yourself. That’s 100 million Queen of Hearts cards every year. Go back ten years. That’s a billion Queen of Hearts cards. Now count up all the cards produced from 1867 to 2000. Queen of Hearts cards? There is just one in a deck of cards, but they are not so rare. Right? Chances of running into one are good, even in the wilderness, where campers might have played poker in their tents. Gregg says he stumbled upon one off the beaten path of a hiking trail. 
 
What of those current seven billion human beings? That’s a big number, more humans are alive each year than the number of Queen of Hearts cards produced in a half century. Chances of running into any of your potential soulmates are pretty good, it seems to me. If there is only a sole soulmate, however, your odds of finding each other are slim.
 
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
 
Ralph: “Funny, Vera, I was just thinking that you would.”
 
So, I have to ask you, “Are serendipity and synchronicity fortuitous only in retrospect?” Do you think everything has worked out well simply because everything worked out well? Think about that as you take out (or don’t take out) the garbage. 
 
Notes:   
 
*Levoy, Gregg. 19 Dec 2017. Synchronicities: A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path. Psychology Today, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/201712/synchronicities-sure-sign-youre-the-right-path   Accessed July 11, 2021. 
 
**Blatchford, Emily. 7 July 2016. We Talk To A  Neuroscientists About Love At First Sight. Huffpost online at  https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/20/we-talk-to-a-neuroscientist-about-love-at-first-sight_a_21435275/  Accessed July 11, 2021.
 
***I remember reading as a kid that someone had calculated the chance of a modern human breathing some of the same molecules that the Buddha, Caesar, or Jesus breathed.