Three old guys talk at a local diner. One of them, a retired truck driver [you’ll note the stereotype doesn’t hold] called TD, is perplexed by modern culture; the second guy, labeled EG is an evolutionary geneticist. The third guy, called E, is an ethologist.

TD: What have we become? We have biological men competing against biological women in sports and biological men dancing in taffeta. Hell, I went to a highway rest stop the other day and saw a guy go into the women’s room. What’s next?


EG: Well, then, if you haven’t seen the New York Post for today, TD, you’ll be even more puzzled by this story. * Seems there’s a guy who calls himself Toco who spent $14,000 on a dog costume to make him look like a collie. So, now we also have humans pretending to be dogs. Yeah. As the President says, “No joke." Toco’s been seen in public on all fours, rolling over Fido-style, and—who knows?—maybe peeing on a fire hydrant or tree. I can see your frustration with our species, but as a geneticist, I can note the mix of genes we all carry, and maybe some of those genes influence behavior. What do you think, E?


E: There are still many patterns of behavior for which we have little knowledge about their origin. But acting like a dog and having a dog costume is possibly more an economic matter nowadays than some psychological aberration. Here’s that article. The guy’s YouTube video has pulled in 32,000 subscribers. He’s on his way to making money from his dog behavior if he monetized his YouTube channel.


TD: So, if I understand, this guy Toco is like those costumed people on Times Square and along the Strip in Vegas who make money by posing for pictures with tourists. I’ve always wanted to tell those people, “Get a real job.”


EG: Maybe he is just another Bourbon Street actor trying to hustle some money. I don’t know his motivation. I just know that I’m as perplexed by human behavior as you are. I can point out similarities between humans and dogs, however. Open your mouth, TD. Yep. Maxillary and mandibular canines right there near your incisors. TD, you have incisiform fangs! Help us out with the behavior stuff, E.


E: There’s a line that separates animal behavior and human behavior. Most animals I have studied, like dogs, have predetermined behaviors according to their breed. But they can imitate others’ behaviors, dogs learning from older dogs, for example. And dogs originally bred for one human purpose can be behaviorally modified by conditioning, an “attack dog” becoming rather calm around strangers. Imitation seems to be part of many animals’ behavioral repertoire. I just saw a younger dog imitate an older dog drinking from a running hose. And birds imitate one another, for instance, in learning how to catch a worm; parrots learn to “parrot.” Among all animals we humans are highly imitative, thus a world of theatrical performances and rituals that dominate our communities. We can pretend to be everything from a snake to a robot, so why not also a collie? Think of all those films with humans dressed like gorillas or chimpanzees. Acting for the sake of acting alone breeds human behavior. It’s that “ars gratis artis” logo above the MGM lion. And once introduced into any society, any behavior can breed imitation. Those men dressed in taffeta are mimicking a behavior they believe to be “female,” even if such behavior is an exaggeration of femininity. Then others imitate them and so on. The recent “furry” craze has college students pretending to be animals. With all that said, it doesn’t surprise me that the so-called ordinary human finds animal-mimicking behavior to be anomalous behavior. All of us wear masks of some kind, I’d say; all of us imitate to some degree those who influenced us along the road of life. We might not have been raised by wolves like Romulus and Remus, but we have been been reared with dogs for more than 30,000 years. Call the behavior convergent behavior. Heck, aren’t some variations of Kung Fu modeled on specific predatory animals?


EG: Great thought. I can say that we certainly seem to have some convergent evolutionary traits with dogs as well as shared genes. We get similar cancers, for example. We have shared a taste for some of the same foods. We appear to have some of the same emotions, though this is your area, E. And if I am correct, dogs have learned that human smiles which expose those canine teeth of ours are not threats that wolves and dogs make when threatening each one another or some perceived enemy. Maybe we just project our emotions onto dogs. But of course, we have those canine teeth which genetically link us.


TD: But putting on a collie costume? Again, I want to say something like “Get a life.” I’ve traveled across the nation delivering stuff for 35 years, and I’ve seen all sorts of humans: Some very strange, some deranged, some dangerous. Always kept my crowbar handy when I traveled. But even if these strange people pose no threat, they serve no productive purpose. Drive a truck, I say. Make a gizmo to be shipped by truck. Provide a service. But walk around like collie? I can’t see it other than the end of a culture of human value…er dignity.


E: Wonder whether this Toco guy will inspire someone to dress like a wolf. By the way, I know of another ethologist who studies the differences between dogs and wolves. We’ve long assumed that sometime during our hunting and gathering prehistory, we domesticated wolves….


EG: There’s some evidence that wolves had produced dog-like breeds before domestication. The evidence is morphological and comes from buried remains.


E: Yes. Well, it seems that at the Wolf Science Center in Austria, Zsófia Virányi has detailed some differences between wolves and dogs. In their experiments, the scientists can teach dogs and wolves to follow some similar commands, but when it comes to refraining from eating a piece of meat under the command “No,” dogs obey; wolves don’t. They exhibit a greater independence than dogs. **


TD: Well, maybe some people could learn from wolves. All this imitation stuff. All these people acting like animals after all the years we’ve had to become civilized humans. What’s next, people acting like trees, maybe bacteria, ultimately viruses? We are, what do you guys call it, in some sort of retrograde, some sort of infinite regression—see I might be a trucker, but I also read.


EG: Good point, TD. That’s why E and I like to talk to you.


TD: it just seems to me that every time we take a step forward, we have a new generation that wants to take a step backward. Maybe it’s because we have so much and because like domesticated animals, our children have been coddled and buried in affluence and abundant food. Or maybe it’s because education has gone off the deep end as more and more people who have no useful skills teach subjects that have no productive end products. Think of the stuff college profs are teaching nowadays.


E: Look. Behavior is a complex subject. We know that it can be influenced by culture and health, both mental and physical health. It can also be influenced by economics. If there’s money available to support a college position, someone is going to occupy that position. If the bottomless pockets of politicians fund education, then educational programs of all sorts, useful or not, will have proponents. And the proliferation of majors in college is just as complex as human behavior. During my career, just about every cultural fad has generated some academic discipline, most of them just self-perpetuating studies with students becoming professors in the same field and little else. Not that I’m advocating a purely utilitarian educational system, but a civilization does need some sense of reality to continue. Otherwise, it succumbs to various degrading and evil forces like drug addiction, crime, and even outside enemies. Utilitarianism has its flaws, but no one can get around having the minimum utility, growing food, for example, or making gizmos necessary for interstate commerce like your truck, TD.
Yet, as a behaviorist, I can’t really define what exact behaviors truly enhance a civilization’s development and maintenance. I certainly don’t want to live in a culture that is devoid of entertainment, devoid of entertaining people. But I might point to industriousness as one potentially good behavior—or should I say positive behavior? Can I define industriousness? Toco certainly had to have some industry to make the $14,000 for his collie suit. He had to have some industry to put up his YouTube video. But other than that self-serving utility, Toco hasn’t really done much for advancing civilization.


TD: Call me a philistine, but I know I need a truck, spare parts to repair that truck, and diesel to run that truck. I know I need to make good time in crossing the nation to get fruit from California to other states. I know I need to transport chemicals and materials to make the stuff on which we built this civilization. I guess I’m utilitarian. And that’s made me upset with all the frivolous antics of people like this Toco guy. What’s Toco’s role? To show some collie stereotype? I’ve seen collies. They imitate collies better than any human. I’ve seen other furry animals, also. They, too, imitate their species better than humans. And I’m now not sure that some of these strange people could actually imitate humans. We’ve gone to the dogs in more ways than one.




*Brooke Kato. Updated 31 Jul 2023. Man who spent $14K to transform himself into collie steps out for first-ever walk in public. New York Post, 28 Jul 2023. Online at https://nypost.com/2023/07/28/toco-the-human-border-collie-steps-out-for-first-ever-walk-in-public/


**Virginia Morell. 1 Jul 2015. How Wolf Became Dog. Scientific American. Originally published as"From Wolf to Dog" in Scientific American 313, 1, 60-67 (July 2015)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0715-60   https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=0CDkQw7AJahcKEwjA_J67k7mAAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAw&url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wolf-became-dog/&psig=AOvVaw33RwMn3RwrL-dlk1Zfozgu&ust=1690889487751696&opi=89978449 

Furry little critters, beavers are highly industrious, building dams from the Cascade Valley of the Adirondacks to the Cascades of the Northwest. In their industry, they change ecologies by interrupting stream flow. In some instances, they interrupt human flow, also.


Beavers! Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Shoot Them without Permission


You can go to Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, chain and local hardware stores, and garden centers to buy peat for your garden or yard. That peat comes from bogs in previously glaciated areas like northeastern Pennsylvania. A bog owner and peat producer in the region once told me that he might have to close his business because of beavers that kept damming the stream and flooding his peat bog. He used a small tracked vehicle to “mine” the peat, and the flooding made it unusable. As he said, “We just can’t keep up with the beavers. Every time we destroy their dam, they reconstruct it.” Guess “busy as a beaver” isn’t just an expression. Their industry can make them persistent nuisances requiring incessant human work.


As the Pennsylvania Game Commission notes about Castor canadensis, “Beavers can and do become troublesome for some people. Water backed up by their dams floods pastures, crop fields and roads, disrupts public water supplies and kills trees. They also cut down valuable shade trees and excavate unwanted channels. Trapping has proven to be an acceptable and economical method of controlling their numbers.” * Those numbers across America range from 10 to 15 million beavers (down from an estimated pre-Colonial 100 to 200 million).


Before 2023’s deluge in the West, droughty conditions prevailed, and wildfires met no beaver-constructed reservoirs as they burned through wooded areas. It seems that beaver dams do some good. So, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife has recently funded a program—why not, it’s California, where endless tax dollars fund every environmentalist’s wishlist—to subvert beaver eradication—Save the Beavers! The program aims at foiling North America’s largest rodents’ work in some areas so that it isn’t a call for extermination. Where there is no beaver problem, such as a flooded pasture, forest, or home, Californians will not seek permission to kill a beaver or beaver colony. The funding goes for flow devices in streams that circumvent but do not interrupt dam building or for protective wrapping around tree trunks (even beaver teeth fail on galvanized sheet metal). Of course, there’s a catch-22 in trying to make human habitation compatible with beaver habits. Beaver control adds to the proliferation of California’s bureaucracy; there’s even a “beaver restoration program manager who oversees the beaver population. The rodents’ incessant activity no doubt keeps her busy as a beaver. **


In Washington’s Yakima and Methow valleys, landowners have dealt with beavers by moving them to other locations, where their dams don’t interfere with human activities but can even enhance salmon runs (their slack pond water gives salmon a resting spot). *** 


Why Tell You This?


Unless you are plagued by beavers, you might think all the foregoing is irrelevant to your life. You might never have seen a beaver or a beaver dam. But consider the following:


1) In pre-Colonial North America beaver fur was a valuable commodity, so valuable in fact, that trappers risked their lives in confrontations with Native Americans. In their quest for wealth, trappers went up East Coast streams in search of the animals. Where they encountered rapids and falls (like Great Falls on the Potomac) that were unnavigable in canoes, they established trading posts. Some of these trading posts, which began as a single shack, became the sites of towns and cities along the Fall Line (where durable metamorphic rocks were not as easily eroded as the sedimentary rocks found upstream). So, beavers played a role in the historical distribution and urbanization of Americans.


2) Felted beaver fur became highly popular material for coats and hats in Europe during both the 18th and 19th centuries. The demand for beaver fur was a driving force in both the initial colonization and exploration of North America, and it nearly led to beaver extinction before fashion tastes changed and other materials were deemed more comfortable and cheaper. (If you want, however, you can still get a beaver hat) After centuries of culling beavers for their hides, humans began to seek ways to live harmoniously with these large rodents while still not allowing their populations to return to pre-Colonial numbers. 


3) As Americans moved across the continent, they inevitably encountered the work of those 100 million-plus beavers. We humans might be part of Nature, but our nature is often destructive in support of our interests. Thus, European frontiersmen and settlers decimated the endemic beaver populations and changed the ecology wrought by them. Farming a field-turned-wetland by beavers is only feasible if your crop is rice. As in #2, our species decided to "save the beavers" by introducing them into places like Finland, from where they have moved into Russia. We're good at solving problems by causing other problems with invasive species. Can anyone say "Pythons are in the Everglades"?


4) The conflict between The Natural and The Artificial is inevitable wherever we decide to settle.   The economics of both human needs and desires makes us more enemy than friend at the outset of every human-animal and human-plant encounter. It’s only after we establish our “ownership” that we begin to see that management is often necessary. Want an example: To build a house in a wooded area, people cut down trees. After establishing the house, they plant trees in the yard. When we can’t be “one with Nature,” we make “Nature one with us.” Lake Mead is larger than all beaver ponds combined.


5) There will never be a time when humans do not attempt to control and use natural phenomena and other life forms. And there will inevitably come a time when humans realize that in their attempt to control one aspect of Nature, they destroy what they later realize was useful and necessary. And that’s because nothing is as simple as we want it to be, not our use of place, not our use of plants and animals, and not our shifting desires. Fur might be anathema as a textile today, but if beaver populations burgeon to pre-Colonial numbers, you will probably see people wearing beaver skin hats and coats. Some will see that just killing the rodents will waste an economic opportunity (You can buy beaver fur on Amazon by the way).


6) We can’t live on the planet without conflict of some kind. All conflict leads to attempts to modify or eliminate the perceived source of the conflict. Your current dwelling, be it an apartment building or a house, is the product of conflict of some kind, such as that between the land’s former “natural state” and its artificially altered new state. Unlike beavers that use "local" resources to build their dams and bank lodges, humans can transport materials like marbles from Italy to line the floors of mansions on Long Island and redwood from Oregon to build picnic tables in Indiana. (Note: Although my house sits in a temperate hardwood forest of maples, oaks, hickory, and ash, it is made of nonnative cedar on a structure of southern pine) 


7) Unlike many humans, beavers live in close, if temporary, family units. The temporary nature is generational because beaver parents kick the older “kits” out of the bank lodge or dam to make room for the ensuing litter. As anecdotes seem to indicate, that expelling of older beaver kits is not mimicked by post COVID human parents since many “older” kids still live at home. Also unlike humans, beavers, by expelling the kits and forcing them to make their own way in life, do not live in overcrowded units like those big city tenements. 


8) Beavers never stop growing, so some can be almost three feet long and weigh as much as 100 pounds. Without exerting the kind of ceaseless calorie-burning efforts of beavers, we human couch potatoes also seem to never stop growing. Maybe if we chewed on cambium instead of potato chips...


9) Unlike so many homeless humans, beavers know how to construct a house from raw materials. And once in that house, they know how to maintain it.



*From the PA Game Commission website.


** Any Taxin, 26 Jul 2023. Huffpost: California Aims To Tap Beavers To Help With Water And Wildfire Issues. Online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bc-us-california-embracing-beavers_n_64c1abb8e4b097ee0589c193


***By By Phuong Le. Associated Press 7 Oct 2014. Online under the title:  Often pesky beavers put to work restoring streams.

I admit I’m always fascinated by political cartoonists. Their ability to encapsulate a thought in a single drawing relies on succinct analogies, making them to me among the most creative people on the planet, and I’m not bothered that they mock both Left and Right. Today, I discovered the work of A. F. Banco.


One of Banco’s recent cartoons draws on the nature of black holes to mock woke holes. In his cartoon, a black spot draws in the following:


Humor
Common sense
US Legal System
US Military
Religious freedom
Women’s sports
US Economy
Hollywood
And
Freedom of speech. *

What Would You Add to the List?

If I were asked about adding to the list, I would respond with “higher education” because university curricula during the past half century have gravitated toward self-propagating majors like specific ethnic studies, race studies, gender studies, and age studies. The graduates of these programs have few lucrative job avenues, among them: Becoming well paid professors in their discipline to perpetuate the discipline. An online perusal of gender studies jobs, for example, revealed “jobs” in education, health and social services, public service, philanthropy, business and industry (How? In human resources to handle complaints about pronoun use?), media, and law (of course: Look at the opportunities to sue people for using the wrong pronouns, for refusing to yield their beliefs to the whims of others, or for objecting to multi-sex public bathrooms).


That those components of American culture and other American entities are vanishing down the “woke hole” seems undeniable. Some, however, are just approaching the event horizon. Among the first to be driven into the woke hole is humor. Apparently, comedians can no longer “offend.” Where’s Carlin when you need him? Where are the remnants of offensive jokes all told  “in good fun” to open minds with a sense of self-deprecating humility? Now humor is nothing if not targeted at conservatives. Is it really possible that comedians can find nothing humorous about a cackling inane Vice President or a seemingly corrupt President steeped in a mythical past of jobs he never held and false claims of academic accomplishments, a guy who has trouble speaking off the cuff and walking up stairs? A guy who has to have note cards to tell him to “enter the room” and “sit down”? Comedy—humor—has definitely disappeared in the woke hole.


Black holes are inescapable gravity wells that differ dramatically from the gravity of our daily concerns. They are unforgiving in warping space-time, but they could be considered just “more of the same” in that our own paltry gravitational field is also unforgiving when we trip. Born with the ability to withstand the crushing of One Earth Gravity, or One G, we can maintain our shape. Near a black hole we would be flattened and spaghettified, lengthened upon approaching and entering the hole (crossing the event horizon), and ripped apart. There’s no survival. And into the hole everything goes: Including, as the physicists like to say, information (for all is information: structure, process, and the words I now write).


So what of the list from the Banco cartoon? Will any of those on the list survive the spaghettification in the ever-consuming woke hole?

The Future of the Woke Hole


Will woke holes undergo the same kind of “evaporation” that Hawking predicted for black holes? Maybe. Typically a next generation rejects and spits out the culture of a past generation though such rejection can succumb to a rebirth of a previous era’s values. At this time, however, it’s hard to imagine that humor will escape the destructive power of the woke hole. Surveys of college age Americans indicate that many are already too close to the hole of wokeness to survive as independent entities. Certainly, there are already adults who have committed their very social being to wokeness; thus, the acquiescence of Disney to almost every woke value. And that seems to include the Seven Dwarfs. ** According to Insider, a remake of the Snow White tale is steeped in a controversy over the inclusion of actual dwarfs. I can envision a new title for the remake of the 1871 story: Snow White and the Grocery Store Top Shelf Challenged Humans. ***


Just as black holes are indiscriminate in swallowing the components of the Cosmos, so woke holes are equally indiscriminate: Wokeness will eventually disappear from the universe because no woke person can anticipate the demands of further wokeness. Physicists speak of “information” that is “lost” in a black hole. Once in, the information of the universe—which is everything—stays in. That means the loss of structure, process, and meaning. The woke hole is in the process of swallowing all it can.


Want to postpone spaghettification? Tell a joke, and tell those who object to it that you don't care. "It's just a joke, and ultimately, like all the Cosmos, it will eventually disappear into a hole so deep that it can never escape. In the meantime have some fun for a change, and for your own sake and the sake of a free culture, get a sense of humor."



*https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cartoons-slideshow#d97b2acd-1b40-53e0-a6f7-d60690312c74


**https://www.insider.com/disney-snow-white-set-photos-stir-controversy-about-seven-dwarfs-2023-7

***Wokeness can solve the problem by eliminating shelves completely: Note that after a removal of all overlying shelves, the bottom shelf becomes the offensive “top shelf.

Do this: Stack some old towels, really old towels, maybe five of them. Then take off the top two towels. After that, place some new towels on the stack. You now have a stack of towels (who’da thunk it), very much representative of a geologic disconformity. You’ve just mimicked Mother Nature’s construction-destruction-construction process that is evident at certain gaps in the sedimentary rock record.


Sometimes, human history mimics that process. But first, a word from our writer:


Not Knowing Is Disadvantageous


I remember being ignorant about geology and its more specific sub-disciplines petrology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. Although during my youth I had been fascinated by rocks visible in road cuts and stones I found in streams and by fossils I saw in museums, I was ignorant of their formation and emplacement. Eventually, I acquired a bit of knowledge about rocks, enough to teach college students about them. In that acquisition, I realized that road cuts were even more fascinating than I had thought they were in my ignorant youth. Knowledge breeds fascination. It begs more understanding. And it provides insights and analogies applicable to history and mystery.


I realize that most people lack some basic geologic knowledge just as I lacked it in my youth. During a visit to Virginia Tech, I commented to one of the coaches recruiting my son that the school’s limestone buildings and gothic architecture were beautiful. He said, “Yes, they built the school from the rocks that were in the area just as they had originally come down from the sky.” Huh!


I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although some limestone formed from chemical precipitation in shallow tropical seas and lakes, none had fallen like rain from the atmosphere unless they had been blasted skyward by some bolide impact, such as the celestial body that crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, killing the dinos. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they are, however; not everyone cares to or wants to know information deemed irrelevant in a settled brain.


Many might even argue there’s no need for information about limestone or any other kind of rock. Well, that’s true with the exception of those who use anything produced from Earth’s materials—which, by the way, is everyone. One of my children asked me long ago why people should bother studying “rocks” or the earth sciences. My short answer: Earth is home, the only home we’ll likely ever know. Who objects to knowing the nature of the residence? Who doesn’t know where the rooms are, how to move from one to another, and what kinds of materials or furniture comprise the surroundings?


Unconformities


Without burdening your mind, let me make this quick: Sometimes the rocks have temporal gaps, that is, sometimes they house a boundary between layers far separated either by a period of non-formation or non-emplacement or by a period of erosion. That latter is the “destruction” phase in the “construction-destruction-construction” process I mentioned above.


The “gap” can lie between different types of rocks: Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Whenever the angular orientation is different between the rocks below and above the boundary gap, geologists call that dividing line an angular unconformity. When the gap separates parallel layers of rocks, it is a disconformity. There’s a famous unconformity in Scotland that led the Father of Geology, James Hutton, to recognize Earth’s geologic process were very old and rather the same in his time as they were millions of years ago. At Siccar Point, a tilted layer of sedimentary rocks underlies a more horizontally oriented sequence of sedimentary rocks. ** The rocks below the angular unconformity were originally emplaced as sediments that became layers of sedimentary rocks. Those rock layers were then tilted and eroded. Then after a long time, they were buried under new layers of sediments that also became lithified and eventually slightly tilted, followed by another period of erosion.  


A Siccar Point about a Sicker History


Santayana’s famous statement about being condemned to repeat the history one doesn’t know applies to many American voters whose gaps in knowledge make them elect “more of the same” regardless of failed policies or of corrupt actions. * Consider, for example, that more than 6% of Biden supporters would have cast different ballots had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop.


I think a similar gap lies in the layers of American history centered on civil rights. Republicans long championed freeing the slave population, acted to free slaves, and supported the civil rights movement. Democrats long pushed to keep slavery, balked at supporting emancipation, and became the party of the Ku Klux Klan and segregation. Yet, the Black vote now traditionally goes to Democrat Party candidates. Can anyone say "gap in knowledge"?


And so it will be with almost any layer of American history. The scandals of the past, for example, will be eroded by time. The political house in which we all live has missing materials. We really don’t know as a general population the history essential to avoiding the mistakes and the corruption of our past.


So, as with previous scandals, today’s Biden scandals will be eroded away. Democrats will turn out to vote for Joe because of the gap. The Left-leaning Press had worked to erode the Biden scandals from public view, whereas it has worked to preserve any scandal—fictional or real—associated with Republicans. Some few news outlets try to keep the deposition of layers consist, but the major news outlets preserve the gap by one of two methods: 1) They do not bother to report Biden’s scandals, so it is never deposited in the minds of the audience and 2) They erode any trace of a scandal.


Voting by Extrapolating the Missing Units


At angular unconformity and disconformity boundaries, geologists do not know the sequence of rock units that might have been eroded away unless they find some remnant rocks they can associate with the gap. Given that discovery, they can piece together what might have lain in the gap.


But finding related rocks requires extensive search and some luck. Mother Nature, for example, has eroded away tens to hundreds of millions of years of rock history. You can see such long gaps in depositional history in places like Alexandria Bay in New York, where along Route 12 a road cut reveals a 600 million year gap between a Precambrian gneiss and an overlying Potsdam Sandstone. ***


No doubt those who vote for Biden will forget the Afghanistan debacle, the closure of the Keystone Pipeline, and the lost funds that were supposed to be spent in COVID relief; they will forget the high inflation, the high gas prices, the overbearing restrictions on fossil fuels, and the push to make everything climate related. Want an example? Biden recently spoke to a gathering of union representatives who applauded him because he said he was “pro-union.” They have already forgotten his elimination of 11,000 union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline he cancelled his first day in office.


Those gaps in knowledge will persist through the next election, just as the gap in knowledge about the tens of millions of people killed under socialism in the last century keeps American youth (and college professors) from recognizing the evils layered on people by the likes of Soviet Union and current Russian leaders, Castro, and Mao. Those layers have been either effectively eroded away or never deposited in a free press.

The Great Disconformity

The gaps make Americans perfect examples of Santayana’s aphorism. We repeat past mistakes because we are missing parts of our history. Because so many partisans work to remove layers of the American past, the only way to vote intelligently is either by extrapolating the historical truths or by discovering by chance or search those units of time. Without that knowledge, the layers of America’s future will parallel the layers of its past, and no one will know why. ****






*“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
—Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 284. 
**See photos at. https://www.shutterstock.com/search/siccar 
***See picture by Chris Murray at https://tilife.org/BackIssues/Archive/tabid/393/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/615/Thousand-Islands-Rocks.html The photo marks the gap as a red line.
****No greater example of a "gap" exists than the admission of Mueller, who was responsible for discovering the truth about the Russian collusion hoax, that he did not know about Fusion GPS, a major player in the hoax.

Alarmist: Certainly you realize that Phoenix’s temperatures are a warning sign, maybe even a sign that we’ve reached the “tipping point.” This 2023 summer is the worst.


Denier: Phoenix, you say? Phoenix?


You Know Where This Is Going


Alarmist: Well, not just Phoenix. Look at the temperatures in Death Valley, also. People are suffering all over the American South. People are dying. And this is just the start. I hear some guy just died in Death Valley. *


Denier: Thus the name. It’s not called Life Valley. And the guy who died? I read about him in the L. A. Times. He talked to a reporter before going “walkabout” on one of the Valley’s trails. When he was asked about going there in the heat, he said, “Why not?” Wonder whether he discovered the answer to his own question as his life faded from him. And here’s the mystery: He was 71. Seventy-one. Too bad he wasn’t as wise as Joe Biden who publicly said he was wise. Won’t find Joe on a walkabout where chances of tripping and falling are more numerous than the short stairs he now uses to enter Air Force One. Anyway, I heard delirium, confusion, and disorientation are symptoms of heat stroke, and Joe already exhibits those. Maybe he’s onto something about “global warming.” Well, according to the White House and Secretary Graham, he’ll have plenty cool water to drink with the new ban on gas water heaters.


Alarmist: What? You mock. It’s a sign of your ignorance.


Denier: Well, let’s get specific. What actions can you take to reduce these high July temperatures?


Alarmist: I drive a Prius.


Denier: Okay. How’s that working out for you? Could you use it to drive from Los Angeles to Vegas across the Mojave? Keep that 200-mile extension cord attached just in case and hope there are no “anthropogenic” brown outs or black outs where you plug in. Makes me think of the Stephen Wright joke about the kid who goes into the parking lot to return all the grocery carts. Wright says to him, “You know, someone else might want to use one of those.” And so it is with electricity. Hey, didn’t California’s governor ask people not to charge their vehicles a summer ago? Someone else might want to use your energy.


Alarmist: I’m doing my part, unlike you. If everyone does his part, we wouldn’t have global warming.


Denier: Just thinking here: What if an El Niño and not carbon is the cause of the South’s warm summer? And what if an El Niño gives the U.S. a very snowy winter? Maybe blizzards where there are now heat waves?


Alarmist: You can’t accept global warming and the role carbon plays. Global warming can cause severe winters. It’s all anthropogenic.


Denier: Afraid to say “manmade”? You know that άνθρωπος (anthropos) means “man”? So in your PC lingo, you use a foreign word that means “man.” But to your point: Actually, I do understand that the industrialized world pumps billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The problem is the thinking of you alarmists. Earth’s atmospheric carbon has fluctuated greatly—even before the species that used to be called “Man” existed.


Alarmist: Well, what’s that argument?


Denier: You want to point out a July in the Northern Hemisphere as a “warmest on record” month. And you cite the warmth of the South. First, your record is a paltry 170 years out of 4.6 billion years. Second, a complex atmosphere is influenced by a complex ocean, which happens right now to house an El Niño in the eastern Pacific. Third, you cite deaths from heat as evidence. You even cite the story of a guy who purposefully went into the summer heat of Death Valley. Would he have died if he had chosen to hike in a cooler location or if he had just stayed at home until the heat wave subsided?


Alarmist: What’s wrong with citing deaths? We’re all going to suffer and many will die.


The Denier Cites a Comedian and Tells an Anecdote


Denier: Consider modern humanity’s hubris best exemplified in the guy’s death. We live in deserts because of our technological ability to fulfill desire. What sense is there in that? I think of the late comedian Sam Kinison’s bit on the Ethiopian feminine. * I’ll paraphrase, but you can find the skit on YouTube. Kinison, who incorporated some screaming in his comedy, says in the skit that he empathizes with starving people. But he says something like “We’ve been sending film crews for 34 years to record the plight of the starving [in Ethiopia]. He then says, “Surely, the film crew could ‘hand the kid a sandwich.’” Kinison then goes on to say that he could solve the problem of world hunger: “Just don’t feed them; stop sending them food. Send them U-hauls instead.” And he argues that the people live where they can’t grow food. Kneeling down, he pretends to grab the soil and says, “You see this. This is sand. Nothing grows in it. Pack your stuff up and move to WHERE THE FOOD IS.” He then says—and this is decades ago—“We have deserts in America. WE JUST DON’T LIVE IN THEM.” Funny, very funny, but not true then and even less true now. Since his death in a car crash, the population of places like Phoenix has ballooned. We DO live in deserts. And we even have lawns around some of our desert homes. Lawns, Mr. Alarmist, LAWNS. In a desert! Do people have their heads up their cact-asses?
    When Kinison was killed in 1992 in that “accident” caused by a drunk teenager, Phoenix’s population was 2.18 million; today it’s population is over four million. We do, sorry for the joke spoiler, live in deserts. And although there are cold deserts like the Atacama, Phoenix happens to be a “hot desert” in summer. I know; I’ve been there.
    I climbed Camelback in Scottsdale, which is closer to Phoenix than a needle to a cactus. On a summer morning, starting at 4:30 a.m. when the temperature was in the low nineties, I made my way to the top. By the time I descended the mountain with an empty Camelbak Hydration Pack on my back at about 9:00 a.m., the temperature was in the higher nineties, and by afternoon, the temperature was 114 Fahrenheit. That was no problem for me, however, because by that time I was lying comfortably face up on a raft in the pool at the resort called Sanctuary, where i could stare at the mountaintop which I had climbed . From my position in the shade of some palm trees that overhung one side of the pool, I could see a helicopter rescue team hovering over the summit at the hottest time of the day. Yet another climber had succumbed to heat exhaustion on Camelback, a seemingly rather common problem on the mountain because I noticed the same kind of rescue effort after completing another climb on the following day. Who climbs a mountain in Arizona during the blistering afternoon heat?
    So, “No, not true” to Kinison’s great punchline about not living in deserts. Americans do live in deserts, and they do so because of our giant economy, energy supply, and energy infrastructure.  And having food shipped in from around the country and from other countries, we can survive better than the poor Ethiopians did in the heat of the 1980s. There's a certain unreality to our expectations because of all we have. I'm proof of American hubris and sense of invulnerability because I went to climb the mountain in summer. Looking back, I wonder what I might have done had I fallen and injured myself, preventing a timely descent.
    We humans do succumb to limiting phenomena, and a rather extensive heat wave driven by a strengthening El Niño is one of those. With regard to living with limiting phenomena, I could make the same argument Kinison makes for those bitten by sharks. The answer to the problem isn’t some protective device; it’s not some relationship between humans and the ocean other than the simplest relationship: The answer to shark bites is, in a Kinison scream, “GET OUT OF THE WATER WHERE SHARKS SWIM.” Want to avoid the extreme summer heat that has hit the American South and Southwest for millennia? Don’t live in Phoenix. Or, at least, don’t live in Phoenix/Scottsdale in the summer.
    Any of you alarmists remember the heat wave in Chicago in 1995? Hundreds died. Heat waves occur, just as one now in 2023 is occurring in Europe. But so do cold waves. I think the mid-to-late seventies in the Northeast, when, if I remember correctly, temps fell to the minus 15-20 Fahrenheit range with wind chills going to minus 45 or 50 in my region. I remember that because I could not stay outside chopping wood for the fireplace for less than about five to ten minutes without suffering frostbite.


So, Now We Hear the Standby Argument


Alarmist: But the heat waves will become more frequent.


Denier: More frequent than…Are you sure? They were pretty frequent when the Hopi had their civilization disrupted by decades of droughty conditions. And since you aren’t old enough to remember the Dust Bowl, I’d say that your personal experience with droughty hot conditions is probably limited. Go read, Of Mice and Men. Read about the great migration of Midwesterners to the more hospitable weather of 1930’s California.


Alarmist: You can’t deny that there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there was before the Industrial Revolution.


Denier: No, I can’t, but I can say that over the past 55 million years give or take a week, the carbon content of the atmosphere has generally declined with some intermittent peaks. In other words, we were living with 250 part per million during the recent past of rather  exceptional low carbon dioxide content. And there's been a rather steady rise in temperatures since the end of the massive continental glaciation while the overriding trend of decreasing carbon dioxide dropped to that pre-Industrial level. Just know that there have been times when Earth has warmed to the point of being largely ice free, and carbon content doesn't seem to have been the direct cause. 


Alarmist: But we need to consider that we do have a large population that will suffer. And if the planet does become ice free, where will the population of the Coastal Plain go? You know the seas are rising.


Denier: To what extent? Millimeters? A meter in the next 850 years? And where will they affect the land? Southern Florida? Delaware? Just remember your history. Seas were as much as 400 feet lower during the peak of the glaciation. They've been rising for 10 millennia.


Alarmist: People just can’t pick up and move.


Denier: You’re right, generally people, even in industrialized nations can't move. But the Delaware Biden family can move to all those countries where they’ve established strong financial connections. The economic opportunities have to be right for ordinary citizens to move.
    The reality is that all of us choose to stay in hardship or potential hardship, don’t we. And I’m not just talking drug addicts and inner city poor. i count myself. I live in the woods. If some severe drought hits my area, I might lose my house in a forest fire. In fact, western Pennsylvania did have such a drought some three decades ago, making me somewhat concerned about the potential for a forest fire. And like so many living in Phoenix today, I didn’t move. But no amount of driving Priuses is going to alter forces that are as large as an El Niño, La Niña, or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And no number of wind turbines will counter a change in solar energy driven by the presence of absence of sunspots, or of volcanic eruptions such as those of the early nineteenth century that cooled the Northern Hemisphere and caused the "Year without a Summer." And in addition to eruptions cooling the planet, there are the unaccounted for volcanic eruptions on the sea floor’s giant divergent ridge systems. If I remember, researchers out of the University of Texas at Austin discovered that geothermal heat from beneath Antarctica was melting the underside of the famous Thwaites Glacier. ** That geothermal heat has nothing to do with “anthropogenic emissions,” but it might be pumping heat into the oceans, heat that bleeds into the atmosphere and causes currents to alter their courses. We really don’t have a handle on the total undersea volcanism or on its possible trends toward increased or decreased activity. There are almost 20,000 undersea volcanoes in addition to that magma under Thwaites. Ever think that they might be warming the ocean from below?


Alarmist: The emissions of carbon are changing the weather. You just don’t want to admit it, so you look for other causes.


Denier: That’s not actually demonstrable at this time. Even the data-fudging IPCC researchers can’t prove that irrefutably. Much of what they publish can be attributed to local effects. Much is developed on non sequitur reasoning. We won’t know for decades or even centuries whether or not there is a direct correlation. Many past rises in carbon content have actually followed global warming. And many peaks in carbon content have foreshadowed global cooling. But really, even you have to admit that the last great ice advances were not the product of human-caused warming. Humans might have caused the extinction the great mammals, but the extinction the great ice sheets is another matter. We’ve been in an interglacial for thousands of years with some small variations like the Little Ice Age. Warming and cooling seem more closely aligned with Milankovitch Cycles.


Alarmist: Argh! There it is. No doubt you’ll tell me about the Medieval Warm Period next.


Denier: No, have a nice day, and remember to drink plenty of water. I’m going to the pool to enjoy the summer because I know from personal experience that winter, severe or mild, is sure to arrive by December. That’s one prediction I have never gotten wrong. And if Mother Nature decides to give me another rather mild winter, I say "thanks." I didn't have to use my snowblower this past winter. You should be happy about that because it's gas-powered. See, I'm doing my part to "save the planet" by not using that internal combustion engine. 

Alarmist: Argh! You deniers are murderers just the way anti-maskers and anti-children-vaccinators were murderers. I follow the science. 

Denier: Whatever. You forgot to mention that you also follow Greta. 




*Brian Brant, 24 Jul 2023. Hiker Who Died in Death Valley Spoke to Reporter about Risking Extreme Heat Hours Earlier: ‘Why Not?’ Online at https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/hiker-died-death-valley-spoke-211647757.html


** "Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," by Dustin M. Schroeder, Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. PNAS, 2014: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1405184111

Have you ever seen one of those “Blanks That Changed the World” videos. The “blank” could be any invention, the steam engine, for example, or the light bulb, or some event, the Battle of Midway, for example, or the discovery of the DNA structure. Whereas it is true that some inventions and events have changed lifestyles, only one, I believe has changed humanity: The Camera.


Obviously, this is highly argumentative. “What about the A Bomb?” you ask, “or the airplane?” Good points, but I’m sticking with the camera, from its earliest form in daguerrotype images through black and white glass plate photos to 35 mm to digital cameras. I decided to elevate the camera’s invention to first place after perusing recent headlines in The New York Post this morning. This is what I saw:


https://nypost.com/2023/07/20/reason-for-scantily-clad-las-vegas-brawl-revealed/ As in other instances, the first reaction by witnesses is to record the event rather than to intervene. Human interactions are governed by an entertainment factor rather than by a compassion factor. And whereas it is true that bystanders have long chosen to simply stand by, it is now a practice for bystanders first to video rather than directly intervene or call for intervention. And if you go to YouTube, you can even see Ukrainian drone footage of Russians being killed as though the process were some video game.


https://pagesix.com/2023/07/21/artists-disturbing-utterly-fascinating-act-confuses-crowd-at-upscale-hamptons-benefit/?_gl=1*1n0c4x7*_ga*NTMxNDU1ODU2LjE2ODk5NDAxODE.*_ga_0DZ7LHF5PZ*MTY4OTk0MDIwMi4xLjEuMTY4OTk0MDI1OC4wLjAuMA..&_ga=2.25003194.1640671373.1689940181-531455856.1689940181  Almost anyone can achieve Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” because of the camera, and often those 15 minutes derive from attempts by individuals to “be unique.” And though there might not be a “normal human being,” there is certainly enough sense of one that motivates some people to act, clothe, or even disfigure to reveal their difference “from the normal.”


https://nypost.com/2023/07/20/biden-bribe-file-released-burisma-chief-said-both-joe-and-hunter-involved/  What drives a coddled rich kid with a history of drug and sex addiction to photo himself naked with women? And what drives an entire political party to react to such behavior with ad hominem attacks on those who expose the choices made by a senator-turned -VP-turned-POTUS’s son? Didn’t he turn the camera on himself? This was not the work of some chance bystander.


https://pagesix.com/2023/07/20/kevin-costners-ex-hits-beach-in-hawaii-after-nearly-130k-child-support-award/?_gl=1*v4x5b*_ga*NTIyNTE5NzgxLjE2ODk5NDA0MzA.*_ga_0DZ7LHF5PZ*MTY4OTk0MDQ0OC4xLjEuMTY4OTk0MDU0NC4wLjAuMA..&_ga=2.115104839.1392969171.1689940430-522519781.1689940430. The obsession with entertainment and political idols has generated the paparazzi and the tabloids that publish the images they take in the unceasing quest to eliminate privacy. So also, are the cameras so ubiquitous in our society that one can’t even drive through a toll booth without being photographed.


Sure, you can cite numerous other inventions and events that have changed the world, and I have no doubt that you can make better arguments for your choice than I can for mine, but I’m stubbornly going to stick with the camera’s invention for now.

Living the Dream


The Left’s dream society manifests itself in San Francisco, where Safeway is installing security gates at self-checkout stations to thwart thieves. And in other cities, stores that once housed products on open shelving have encased shelves, also to prevent thieves from taking at will. Then there are the smash-and-grab mobs, and now, the Governor of Illinois rejoices over an as yet unproven consequence of eliminating cash bail. But the kicker comes from Oregon where Leftist policy and pipe dream utopian idealism have conjoined with disastrous effect.


But first, a little background.


Mithridates


In “Terrence This Is Stupid Stuff,” A. E. Housman tells the tale of Mithridates, the king who in fear of being poisoned, “gathered all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth;/First a little, thence to more,/He sampled all her killing store.” Mithridates' purpose lay in his desire for poison resistance lest someone poison his food.  As the legend goes and Housman reports in the poem’s last line, “Mithridates, he died old.”


That intentional “first a little, thence to more,” isn’t the usual avenue of drug addiction. Rather, it’s “first a little without knowing that that little leads to more,” just as caffeine fills the brain's receptors for the drug, requiring more receptors that require more caffeine. I suppose nicotine and chocolate do the same. Once the sampling begins, it becomes a way of life, one into which the addict becomes driven by only partially-intentional habituation.


The partially-intentional process has occurred throughout the world and throughout history, and it accounts for such practices as chewing Betel (Areca) nuts wrapped in Betel leaves and both smoking and chewing tobacco leaves. Almost any plant-based substance can become an addiction. Try taking chocolate away from a chocoholic. 


Coca Cola


Addiction begins simply enough. People discover a use for a plant, find its flavor enticing and its effects pleasing. Wintergreen flavors products from chewing gum to mouthwash, for example. Coca Cola began that way, containing cocaine from its inception into the twentieth century until the drug was recognized as an addictive substance. It took Coca Cola years to overcome the bad image of its flavorful ingredient, eventually doing so by releasing a statement that its cocaine wasn’t activated by some alkaline substance like calcium carbonate (lime).  Without alkali processing, the cocaine is inert, the company argued, and, well, walla! Coke became so popular that one of its advertising jingles, written by Bill Backer, became a theme song of a generation seeking peace, love, and harmony. “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” made drinking the product a social statement. And thus it is with using certain drugs, such as the lines of cocaine sniffed at parties. And as for the so-called “gateway drugs,” one need only think of the smiling reception Clinton received when he said he didn’t inhale. No big deal, right? I suppose the smoke wafting past his nose was somehow rerouted and that no one else in the room smoked weed.


If you have paid attention during the last several years, you know that America, which has always had a drug problem, has entered into an Age of Overdose Deaths. The country slid into the Age on the slippery slope of gateway drugs” whose bottom runs into fully addictive drugs. But in sliding, America is no different from many other regions where such sliding has a long history, as those Betel chewers exemplify. 


Oregon’s Grand Experiment with Human Life


Supposedly, Oregon’s decriminalization of drugs mimics Portugal’s decriminalization. That’s just a supposition when one considers some troubling data that the Left-leaning politicians seem not to have anticipated. In “Oregon Substance Use Disorder Services Inventory and Gap Analysis “ (2022), researchers discovered:


1.    Oregon ranks 2nd in he nation for deaths due to drug use.
2.    Oregon ranks 1st in the nation for percent of population needing but not receiving treatment of substance use disorders.
3.    Oregon ranks 6th in the nation for deaths due to alcohol. *


Suffice it to say: Oregon has not solved its addiction problems by fiat. Just declaring a decriminalization hasn’t solved the state’s problems. And as is usual, that failure arose from putting the Ideal over the Real. There’s no substitute for hard work, for anticipating problems, and for revising. (Trust me on this; I’ve hastily published sentences that lacked scrutiny for typos I missed by wearing the wrong glasses) If the decriminalization law demands adequate rehabilitation facilities, it has not motivated Oregon to establish those facilities. 


In fact, I should accuse Oregon politicians of myopic policy-making. They failed to SEE the ramifications of their poorly designed and inadequate funding of substance use disorder services. They appear to have believed a mere declaration makes the ideal into the real. And they did not anticipate the proliferation of drug addicts drawn to their state because of the decriminalization. 


The Counterargument


In voting for decriminalizing drugs, Oregonians probably made the argument that Nixon’s “war on drugs” has not minimized America’s drug problem. Its failure is especially evident under the avalanche of fentanyl that has cascaded into the country during the past three years. And maybe young voters, much like Coca Cola drinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had already incorporated drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and crack cocaine into their party life. Besides, tens of thousands of overdose deaths indicate that the 1970s drug war has been lost. The drug cartels have won. So, why spend money and manpower on policing what obviously cannot be policed, especially in an age when defund the police has decreased their numbers? Just decriminalize drugs, even hard drugs. That’s the simple argument. And it “kinda makes sense.”


But the Devil Is in the Details


In some ways, the effort to decriminalize drugs mirrors the illegal immigrant problems that New York City’s Mayor Adams is now facing.


After border state governors and the Federal Government sent illegal immigrants into cities like New York, the formerly-quiet-on-the-subject Adams has housed the immigrants in schools and hotels. He saw no need to establish an immigrant housing authority until he saw a need to establish one. “Let them all in or be condemned as a racist and xenophobe drawing the ire of the insulated elite in the media” probably sums up his and other New Yorker’s attitude.


But illegal immigration is an actual problem with actual consequences, as any victim of crime by illegals can verify. One just can’t by fiat say there is no problem. One just can’t say, “We’ll handle it down the road.” Now, as immigrants crowd into hotels that once housed tourists ready to spend money in the city’s economy, the major finds himself having to fund the immigrants’ hotel rooms. And in the meantime as videos have revealed, the immigrants treat those hotels like Third World slums, havens of drug users and pushers, and even sites where drunk minors have been observed. And all because of no thorough anticipation.


That’s Oregon. They made inadequate preparations for their burgeoning druggie population. The ideal has met the real.


When will the Left learn to anticipate the consequences of their utopian dreams?  Remember one of my little sayings: What we anticipate is rarely a problem. I wish I could have said that to Oregon policy-makers and voters before they decriminalized drugs and failed to construct and staff the buildings they might need to service possibly as many as 600,000 drug users.**


The addicts need help. Decriminalizing drugs without adequate rehab facilities doesn’t seem to have produced that help.




* Lenahan, Katie, Sara Rainer, Robin Baker, and Elizabeth Needham Waddel. Online at https://www.thelundreport.org/sites/default/files/OHSU%20-%20Oregon%20Gap%20Analysis%20and%20Inventory%20Report.pdf


** Could the same be said for the proponents of “defund the police”? No evidence can be obtained that shows the decline in police funding has made anyone safer—unless one considers the criminals.

Politicians. Some altruistic; others self-aggrandizing. Nice life if you can get it. Think of the current President. He’s been a politician for more than half a century. Now rich, he has survived all his gaffes and lies, all his contradictory stands, and all his scandals and disastrous policies, such as encouraging a rush to the US border under the guidance of drug cartels and human traffickers, shutting down energy independence, spending money on pie-in-the-sky green energy for the sake of cooling the planet while China and India do little or nothing to quash fossil fuel use, and leaving billions of dollars in military equipment in Afghanistan for the women-suppressing Taliban to use. Did he become President because of his wisdom, drive, and leadership? For his eloquence? Is Joe Biden the modern Pericles? Has he led us into a new Golden Age? And what of his political partner, Kamala Harris, the primary-race dropout Biden chose as his running mate?


Harris?


No bastion of wisdom there. Here’s her latest profundity: "Culture is a reflection of our moment and our time, right? And present culture is the way we express how we're feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy ‘cause you know — it comes in the morning.”


Like Olive Garden, Harris Offers Bottomless Salad Bowls


"I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing," Harris said. "First of all it's two letters. It means artificial intelligence, but ultimately what it is, is it's about machine learning. And so, the machine is taught – and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine – and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made through that process.”


And this one:
"This issue of transportation is fundamentally about just making sure that people have the ability to get where they need to go! It's that basic.”


And this gobbledegook that rivals all philosophers’ and physicists’ statements on time:
"So I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”


I could cite other…yeah, I will: “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”


And: “So, during Women’s History Month, we celebrate and we honor the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been.”

A banana is a banana: “You know, when we talk about our children — I know for this group, we all believe that when we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community.”

Location is everything: “We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community….”

Remember how much fun the Democrats had when Dan Quayle misspelled the plural of potato? How much fun they had when the very athletic Gerald Ford tripped? And yet, there’s no “Chevy Chase” on the networks to make fun of the physical and verbal stumbling of both Biden and Harris. Well, as Biden says, “Two words: Made in the Democratic Party.”* To which I'll add two more words: "Made with the aid of a highly complicit Press afraid of asking any challenging questions or of questioning the absurdity of the two leaders' statements." (Oh! was that more than two?)

The Modern Pericles?

Where’s Pericles when you need him? Not that Pericles was perfect. Thucydides (not the writer) accused him of mishandling funds, an accusation that might have been true. Pericles, however, silenced his accuser by offering to repay the treasury whatever amount Thucydides said he owed by giving the state some of his private property. His only stipulation? He wanted his name on the real estate he gave to Athens. Not an unjustified request given Pericles’ contributions to Athenian greatness.


Will Joe make the same offer to appease all those who accuse him of selling influence to foreigners via Hunter? Will the millions his family received in foreign business dealings go into the Treasury? He could make the same offer Pericles made, maybe turning over his vintage gas guzzler sports car as a contribution to some green energy fund.


A New Golden Age


Imagine Athenians sitting on stone benches listening to the great debater speak, hearing the defining words of their age from the wise Pericles. Compare the rhetoric of Pericles and Biden, the latter having said a sentence that will forever define the greatness of the country: “America is a nation that can be defined in a single word: Asufutimaehaehfutbw.” Truly, we have entered a new Golden Age. We are fortunate to have not one Pericles, but two.




*”Two words: Made in America,” Biden recently said to union members.

If you traveled the United States, you probably noticed different dialects, had difficulty understanding certain words and expressions, and discovered that English seems not to be on the surface an easy Lingua Franca. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” The differences across the land reveal both the dynamic nature of languages and the static nature of cultures. Yes, favored expressions and pronunciations do change, but regional dialects with recognizable colloquialisms indicate a linguistic inertia. In twenty-first century America a push for a new language dynamic appears to be an effort to quash colloquialism, dialect, and language diversity. More on that below.


Lingua Franca


I’ll acknowledge that America does have a lingua franca, as evidenced by the little effort required by people across the nation to understand one another. Regardless of their state of origin, most Americans can understand what reality show participants, reporters, and movie stars utter on screens large and small. Reading online and published stories poses little difficulty regardless of the geographic separation of people. People from Providence, RI, understand just about everything that people from Pittsburgh, PA, New Orleans, LA, and LA, CA say. There might be a little temporal gap between hearing and understanding, but the brains of most speakers of American English can comprehend the meaning in the expressions of others, regardless of differences like the Boston’s “ca,” and Pittsburgher’s “car.” Regional idioms, however, can present at least a momentary challenge.


In some states, visitors from other regions could voice an English equivalent of “Hablo muy poco español,” as in I’m sorry, I don’t speak “Appalachian,” or “Sorry, I never learned much Appalachian in school.” Yes, America has dialects that initially seem very much like foreign languages to interstate visitors. Classifications of American English dialects include major and minor variations, mostly by pronunciation, but also by idiom:


“Hauscome yinz guys wacha Stillers on TV?”
“Ow know. We're sposda go dahntahn for da Stiller game.”
“Nuh-uh! Ahn yinz stayed om?”
“Choobinuptoo?”
“Lassnite we went out the road; safternoon, we’re gazinta tahn.”
“Sup wit u?”


And so on across the country. It’s English, yes, but it requires some careful listening by a brain that knows the lingua franca. And those idiomatic expressions complicate the communication: “Chawt,” for example, is Pittsburghese for “watch out,” as in “Chawt for cops on 79.” Variations in pronunciation exacerbate the problems of inter-dialect communication, just as different words for the same object, process, or idea make communicating more complex than intra-regional talk: Soda in Philadelphia is pop in Pittsburgh.


An Anecdote


I remember the first time I learned I had a dialect. My mother used to say “red up after supper,” meaning “clear the dishes from the table.” When she used the expression during a conversation with Midwesterners, she elicited, “You must be from western Pennsylvania.” It was recognizable as a Pittsburghese. And of course, there are accompanying pronunciations that identify one as a western Pennsylvanian bituminous coal field resident: “Chowd” for “child,” “arn” for “iron”, and “fair” for “fire.”


Wending Our Mutual Way through the Evermore Complicated Maze of Communication


But the lingua franca gets most Americans through the local differences. Now, however, there’s a trend that separates English speakers from now another within a regional dialect. It’s the trend to overturn centuries of pronoun use for the sake of gender identification. Sure, English has long had gender identifiers in the masculine, feminine, and neuter pronouns. And some nouns in the language have just as long a history of being gender identifiers: Man, woman, boy, girl, male, female all come to mind.


Those who would change the lingua franca for the sake of personal identity have gone to extremes in some instances, such as objecting to the use of history because it begins with his. During a recent stay at one of Disney’s hotels in Orlando, I saw a poster for “herstory month.” It’s a great pun, but it alters the inclusiveness of the word history that no doubt will be echoed in the hallowed halls of academia, those outmoded bastions of Standard Formal English now giving way to texting syntax, grammar, and spelling. WTF!


Never having discussed herstory with any Disney “imagineers,” I can only guess they believed the word change to be a necessary acquiescence to political correctness. But rather than ascribe the neologism herstory to fanatics who will angrily “Karen the banner of PC,” I’ll admit that the new word quickens the more cumbersome four-word “the history of women,” the longer “a month of recognition of historical women,” and even “women’s history month.” Such brevity conforms to the needs of a people too lazy to pursue a topic through multiple clicks on a computer mouse. And I’ll also admit that a poster announcing “herstory month,” isn’t  surprising in a company that now has a mustachioed XY Snow White ushering little XX-chromosome-bearers into a children’s salon in Disney Springs, where the “little girls” aspire to be princesses (just like the XY princess usher-ette).


It’s Chinese…er Greek to Me


I think my iPhone was made in China. I believe the wood screws I recently used to replace a board on my deck also came from China. Trade is definitely more global now than during any previous era. And trade, like conquest, brings language shifts. No, I didn’t have to learn Mandarin to use the wood screws, and I text and speak in English on the phone, but the oceans that isolated North Americans are no longer a barrier to word and phrase adoption through trade.
It’s obvious that countries butted together enhance language learning out of necessity. One doesn’t have to travel far in Europe to encounter a different language though many European languages are related by some lingua franca, such as the Romance languages of French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, or those Germanic languages German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian. Take the following examples of a request in the Lord’s Prayer that Frederick Bodmer lists in his 692-page The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. *


Gib uns heute unser täglich Brot.— German
Greef ons heden ons dagelijks brood.— Dutch
Giv os i Dag vort daglige Brød.— Danish
Giv oss i dag vårt dagliga bröd.— Swedish
Get oss i dag vort daglego brauð.    — Icelandic


And, in English: Give us this day our daily bread. Unlike Europeans living close proximity, Americans find little need to speak other languages save for Spanish spoken by the large Hispanic population and French spoken by those in neighboring eastern Canada. Suffice it to say that one can drive over 2,500 miles crossing the contiguous states without having to speak any language other than English in its five major American dialects.


Consider Bantu languages, probably best known for Swahili, the lingua franca of African East Coast countries that originated as a dialect in Zanzibar. Bantu languages in general use clusters similar to those in English to build words. Consider “clusters” to be units like -er, -ship, -hood, -dom, and -ter and -ther. Take the last two as clusters in father, daughter, mother, brother, sister. Bodmer gives examples in Greek and German:


Greek animals: -x
Alopex—fox
Aspalax—mole
Dorx—roe deer
Hystrix—porcupine
Pithex—ape


German animals: -chs
Dachs—badger
Fuchs—fox
Lachs—salmon
Ochs—ox.


Other German names for animals end in the suffix -er. ** And as I remarked in a recent blog on the use of pronouns, recall that German has grammatical gender with articles like die, der, and das. Well, lo and behold, in the Bantu languages “the name of any thing, any person, or any action is labeled by a particular prefix which assigns it to one of about twenty classes of words labeled in the same way” (204). As Bodmer explains, “The other outstanding peculiarity of the Bantu family is that the noun prefix colors the entire structure of the sentence…The pronoun of the third person has a form which more or less recalls the prefix of the noun represented by it…In Swahili and many other Bantu languages, the personal pronoun is prefixed to the verb even when the sentences has a noun subject, e.g. ba-kazama ba-enda (the girls they go).” The point germane to this discussion is that in Bantu languages which range from sub-Sahara all the way to South Africa, there’s a recognition of a gender relationship between nouns and pronouns. Again, English’s heritage language German keeps grammatical gender in tact, recognizing feminine, masculine, and neuter words, as in Die hübschen amerikanischen Studentinnen (the pretty American coeds). Frankly, I can’t imagine many Germans changing "Sie hat sich ein Bild gekauft” (She bought herself a picture) to some genderless form, maybe with a plural, which even in English and under the current press for PC language gets us into a real linguistic bind: Do we replace it with “They bought themselves a picture”? I can imagine the confusion that this will cause in other circumstances when people try to understand on the basis of a lingua franca: “They want their ticket.”


“Say what? Is it one ticket for several people?


“They want their seat.”


“Plane seats, even in first class, are really cramped. Now you want to squeeze more than one person in a seat? Sorry, they, but we allow only one person in a seat unless it is a parent holding an infant.”


Dynamic Language; Static Language


Yes, the English of Beowulf differs from the English of The Canterbury Tales that, in turn, differs from the English of Hamlet. And that more recent English of Shakespeare differs from the English in am even more modern American play or film. So, yes, language does undergo change. But the Amish are still stuck with ye, thou, thy, and thine. And that indicates a persistent inertia governed by region or by local culture. Sure, there’s little problem of understanding when a Pittsburgher tries to ask directions from a farmer in Lancaster County, a seat of many Amish families. Certainly, I can understand what those antique personal pronouns mean. But grammatical number is different. If one person wants to be referred to by a plural, then I’ll stumble mentally in trying to comprehend meaning.


I’m not arguing for an unchanging language. I have no doubt that I have adopted the changes of the past and current centuries without conscious recognition of doing so. Trained in Standard Formal English, I write these blogs with contractions. I also infuse my writing with words and expressions I learned by inculcation though I do refuse to use some words (e.g., normalcy for normality) and spellings (e.g., alright for all right). My mother, a lover of crossword puzzles whose formal education stopped at ninth grade, hounded my teenage years with admonitions against the colloquial “yinz,” “younz,” “it don’t,” “he don’t,” and other words and expressions she did not want her son to use. I can’t imagine her accepting “they” for “she” or “theirs” for “hers.” And I can say the same for my immigrant grandmothers also spoke grammatically correctly—go figure.


Once learned, language becomes an unconscious mechanism. We don’t think about it unless we find ourselves in a new or artificial context. I am happy to now be outside academia, where every word must conform under penalty and even the least intentional error can infuriate those shielded from anything that offends them. The common language everyone spoke when I was a professor is no longer the common language. Goodbye, lingua franca; hello, whatever anyone with ultra high sensitivity wants others to use.


No doubt the constant haranguing by a Press and PC media either too afraid to laugh at the unnecessary use of a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent or too embedded with a particular agenda, will wear down the resistant. Hear something often enough and you’re bound to repeat it: A forced inculcation appears to be the goal of the pronoun warriors.


Let’s Go to the Trobriand Islands


Worried about plurals? Afraid of the PC police, some screaming Snow Flake, or a boss too afraid to say, “Sorry, you can use whatever words you want, but I am not complying just to protect you from a perceived offense”? Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski:


“Let us transpose [a ]…peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype…and imagine that no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature off the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer: ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull?’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’; wooden objects with the particle ‘wooden’’ flat or thin things with the particle leafy,’ following in all this the precedent of Kiriwina…’The women of Spain are female-beautiful….’” ***


The people who speak Kirwinian are going to have a difficult time understanding the new English use of pronouns if they leave the islands or receive tourists. But their culture itself poses a problem with plurality: Promiscuous pre-marriage relationships. Yeah, lots of partners is common, or as we English speakers say, “human-many-female partners” with the unfortunate result of human-many HIV infections. What’s worse, ascribing female gender and accurate antecedent-pronoun number agreement or acquiring a life-threatening disease?


If thee is an American in 2023, probably the former.




*Bodmer, Frederick. 1944. ED by Lancelot Hogben. 1972. New York. W. W. Norton & Company, p. 7.


**Bodmer, p. 204.


***Bodmer, pp. 206, 207. From Classificatory Particles ij Krirwina (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 1917-20).

I just saw a headline with a long list of letters, one of them repeated. You’ve probably seen the abbreviated version: LGBT. Honestly, I don’t really know what all those additional letters represent, especially the one with a “2.” I could research it, but by the time I looked it up, there would be yet another letter tacked on to the seemingly unending list. Soon every human being will have a letter designation unto his (or her, or their, or … own, mine, your’n). But then, that will mean a return to the idea that each of us is an individual, or to say Kamala Harris redundancy style, “unique.” Stick around, people, we’re head ultimately to where we started (though Cantor’s idea of infinity might apply, as he noted, to fractions, which can run to infinity between two whole numbers: 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111, 1.11111 and 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…1/263 millionth…1/billionth…); so, maybe we won’t really attain the individualism that we seek and will, in fact, be dubbed part of some group—ironically separated by inclusion.


And that’s what this is about: Being separated by virtue of being included.


Aren’t we all H?


Human. Homo sapiens. Better yet, wise, wise man, Homo sapiens sapiens.


And seeing the headline “ generation alphabet: 40% of Brown University Students LGBTQQIAAP2S+, “ I thought of how divisive the Left is in the name of inclusion. Going out of its way to label every version of human being, it has pigeonholed each variation, limiting the interactions among all the variations to contentious squabbling or to unintellectual acquiescence that prohibits free thought and belief. These are truly dangerous times for individualism, and they evolved strangely enough from the desire of individuals to express their perceived individualism.


These are unfortunate times for those who believe they are fortunate times: Liberty to declare shades the declarations inside inescapable boxes. And those, for example the supposed 40% of Brown University students who declare themselves members of the multiple-letter group, who decide to jump into those boxes while they are young—and who might be a bit confused by a brain that hasn’t reached maturity— might find themselves living in self-imposed confinement when they are older, for once declared, always declared in a society with an elephantine memory and digital records. “Hey, didn’t he say…when he was at Brown? Look, here’s the video I found archived online.” A pigeonholed life is a restrictive one that perpetrates divisions in the species.


The Age of Declaration


Do so many young people really want to declare any sexual orientation for any reason other than the peer pressure to do so? I don’t know. I’m not young, and I suppose I passed through a rather ordinary—or even stereotypical—teen time way back in the fifties. Naive as I was, say at ages 14 and 15, however, I did recognize that we humans come in variations. My version seems to have made me think girls were different from boys—certainly more attractive to me and often smarter in class, and with few exceptions much better at handwriting. Yep. I was a “typical” teen of the times. My version also imposed on my brain that females deserved some protection by virtue of their generally smaller size and weakness in comparison with most males.


The generalizations that infused my mind seemed to make sense even in light of my recognition that some females were decidedly different from my stereotype: They were as fast or even faster than I, some taller, and others far more capable of tasks of endurance than I, who could never run cross country at their pace or distance. Yeah. I might have played football, baseball, and basketball, but I found myself to be an inferior human in the presence of some females, particularly in the presence of those who were far more intellectually capable than I. But they were “nice to look at, what with all those mysterious body parts suggested by swimming suits they wore at Mountain View Inn’s swimming pool, where we carefree young teens gathered during those two summers before we could “officially work” thanks to child labor laws in my state and hometown.




But then there were those males who did not fit the image of my father, a WWII Marine who had fought in Okinawa after a childhood of hardship —he lost his father when he was eight, the age at which he had to start working to help his mother and two sisters survive after his father’s death and during the Great Depression. Like the stereotypical Marine, he was self-sufficient, tough on himself, and hard-working. His idea of medical care is encapsulated in the expression, “Rub a little dirt on it.” So, yes, I saw him as a version of Male and saw others by comparison. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned the words effeminate and effete. It wasn’t until high school that in my naive state I wondered why some men chose not to marry, so sheltered was I in my stereotypes. But in my sphere of life, all those who had chosen the single life—that is, not bound in some way to a woman—were very pleasant human beings, neighbors, members of the parish, and guys who went about their lives without any noticeable fanfare. If they were members of the later-named Alphabet people, they made no outward declarations. It was, as I understood later, a time when people like code-breaker Alan Turing of computer fame were punished for being homosexual; danger lay in declaring. It was a travesty, for sure—Turing committed suicide—but one that was avoided by “staying,” as the term evolved, “in the closet.” Such was the world of my naivety. It was a society of surmise. We knew, maybe, but we didn’t say, and the cares of the day were far more important, anyway.


Of course, any perusal of Victorian underground literature reveals that even during an “uptight” era, intrasex relationships were not uncommon. Ask Oscar Wilde. So also, there’s little to doubt that the story of Hester in The Scarlet Letter could have been told about Puritan males in the manner of Petronius’ famous first-century tale of  Encolpius and his 16-year-old boy lover Giton in The Satyricon. Just because they kept their mouths shut about their lifestyles doesn’t mean that there were no Alphabet people in seventeenth century New England, Victorian England, and Muslim Iran today.  No one surveyed the population or studied human sexuality Kinsey-like; we can only assume that at least a small percentage of Puritan Harvard’s students probably could have responded the way today’s students at Brown University responded.


Sex and Vegetation


No, this isn’t about Vegans having intercourse. Call it a paraphrase of Sir James Frazer’s chapter “Sacred Marriage” in his voluminous (even in the abridged version) The New Golden Bough.


Let’s talk ancient rituals, the subjects of Frazer’s work, particularly those rituals associated with fertility and the month of May. First, who doesn’t love a parade? Parades from Rio’s and Bourbon Street’s Mardi Gras through Moscow’s Victory Day Parade and American Fourth of July parades, recreate ancient rituals associated with spring. You know, fertility, eggs, Easter’s risen Christ and the births or rebirths of nations. Second, who doesn’t know the system: Slow-walking a street lined with onlookers, marchers follow a format found in both developed and Third World nations—I’m thinking, for example, of six-hour long processions in Antigua Guatemala, a parade of saints’ statues encased in glass “coffins” held on the shoulders of colorfully dressed processors, each village having a specific design and color combination. Does this sound familiar? It should if you have watched high school bands march in their colorful uniforms.


Anyway, parades go back to long before modern times. Triumphant marches by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other Middle Eastern emperors and generals after victories come to mind, as do the North Hemisphere’s springtime rituals, aka parades, involving “leaf-clad mummers” dressed as woodland spirits (sprites), goddesses, and fertility icons. Now if you are offended by the actions of today’s marchers during celebrations of Pride, consider these words, and not a paraphrase, from Frazer:


    “When our rude forefathers staged their periodic marriages of the Kings and Queens of the May…they were doing something far more important than merely putting on a pastoral play for the amusement of the rustic audience. They were performing a serious magical rite, designed to make the woods grow green…the corn shoot…And it is natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf-clad mummers sped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective was the rite believed to be. Accordingly, we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that sin the opinion of those who performed them the marriage trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of human sexes” (125). *


Yes, our ancient Northern Hemisphere ancestors paraded and “profligated” their way down the public path in plain site of onlookers. Our species has been “marching for sex” for centuries, millennia even. Parades associated with sexuality are nothing new; their origins lie in the depths of ancient times. Their geographic locations make a net across the planet.


So, sex parades—gender? parades—aren’t new, regardless of their participants’ current attempt either to “shock” onlookers or to defy propriety. Consider that even the processions of Easter in cities like Antigua Guatemala and other Christian countries represent “rebirth,” and are thus associated with those ancient fertility rites with leaf-clad mummers (can anyone say, Philadelphia Mummers’ Day Parade?).


If you know Frazer’s work, you know that he records similar public displays in both hemispheres. Apparently, we’re pretty much all the same species with the same tendencies—particularly when sex (and gender) are concerned. However…


You know there’s always a “however.” What strikes me as interesting is that all the ancient “fertility parades” were associated with actual “fertility.” In contrast, reproduction doesn’t seem to be the motive behind Alphabet parades.


That H Parade


I don’t have any particularly profound insights on the issue of adding more letters to the growing alphabet list. While I was writing this, I looked up the letter with the “2.” Apparently, “2S” means “two spirited,” and it identifies a person who bears both a feminine and a masculine spirit. I suppose it's akin to my saying that we humans have both testosterone and estrogen; maybe a 2S has an equal amount of them, whereas “boys” have more T than E, and “girls” have more E than T—but as Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, now Supreme Court Justice, said when asked if she could define “woman,” “I’m not a biologist.” I guess she never heard of chromosomes.


Strange that response of hers. I assume she “knows” she is a woman even though she can’t define what makes her a woman (such is the peer fear of committing to something definite). Her response makes me wonder whether or not there’s a parallel to what St. Augustine said about time: “If no one asks me what time is, I know what it is. If someone asks me what time is, I don’t know what it is.”


I’m sorry that so many are so afraid of defining that they willingly refuse to take a stand (particularly troubling in a Supreme Court Justice) lest they offend current cultural sensibilities. Yet, all those who kowtow to the latest Alphabet list designations, are, in fact, taking a stand. They commit to identification by some general characteristic to the detriment of the multiple characteristics that we all possess. The same comment can be made with respect to the recent statement by an archbishop that using “Father” in the Lord’s Prayer is “troubling.” Sure, we can assume that in the absence of anthropomorphically imagining God, the Deity is not bound to human sexual identity—the roles of Alanis Morrisette as God in the film Dogma, George Burns as God in Oh, God!, Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty, and numerous other actors and actresses notwithstanding.


So, let’s make March each year Human Pride Month. We can celebrate our commonality. We can parade, even display our profligacy as in the new abbreviation PDA that accompanies pictures of celebrities kissing or hugging. Hey, we humans have been publicly displaying affection for as long as we have existed, pretty much like bonobos in the weeds. Show your pride next spring. Hold a march in March, the month of the Vernal Equinox, the day of balance between light and dark, winter and spring, death and rebirth. Human Day. Wear some leaves—or don’t. Show some affection for other humans, all other humans. 

*Frazer, Sir James. The New Golden Bough (Abridged) ED. Theodor H. Gaster. 1959.