Tattoo ink lies in secrecy where the Sun don’t shine. 


Apparently, there are those who are so far Left that their next move can only be downward, all the way to the bottom--potentially, your bottom.


Where the Sun Don’t Shine


Ever put on one of those hospital gowns? No back. Yeah. Both revealing and a bit embarrassing. Walk-with-your-back-to-the-wall-for-privacy embarrassing. Hospitals aren’t places for the modest to hide when they need medical attention. And, as everyone understands, seeing the backside of a hospital gown isn’t anything new for hospital staff. They’re used to it; they find it practical. “Bend over. This will just be a brief pinprick. You need this antibiotic.”


So, it’s the very nature of hospital care to invade some privacy. That’s okay for anyone who seeks medical help. It’s a small sacrifice to reveal the sunless site to a nurse. But hospitals have been cautious about invading privacy in the main. Your medical records are supposed to be inviolate. So, also, except for those nurses’ and doctors’ eyes, is your butt.


Body Cams


Dr. Amanda Calhoun, co-Vice Chair of the Diversity Council of the Yale Resident Fellow Senate, says that hospital staff should wear body cameras to prevent them from treating patients according to their race. Yep. She wants a body cam on a doctor, nurse, or physician’s assistant during a rectal exam. What could go wrong?


Now, you know that none of that footage will make it to the eleven o’clock news or to TikTok. No set of hackers will ever take up the challenge to get video of a celebrity admitted to County General. Will now enter the age of reverse triage, a period when doctors will treat a minor injury of a minority citizen or an illegal resident before treating a major injury of a majority citizen—triage in the name of equity.


Could There Be Hospital Staff Who Are Racist?


The short answer is “yes.” Could there be, therefore, a justification for the tradeoff? Privacy Invasion vs. Civil Protection. And that dilemma shows where we are in the United States.


Dr. Calhoun says she would voluntarily wear one. Her argument lies in both anecdote and research. She says she has seen unequal triage in emergency rooms and heard derogatory statements about Blacks made by white staff members. And a 2016 study  by Hoffman, Trawalter, Axt, and Oliver concluded that “Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans.” * So, the long answer also seems to be “yes.”


If he study were run in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, would Hispanics receive better treatment than African-Americans? Do women doctors treat men and women differently? Adults and children? Elderly vs. middle age? (Hey, the elderly have already had their prime time) The cognizant vs. the incognizant? The cameras will tell, won’t they? The lawsuits will proliferate.


But about That Tradeoff between Privacy Invasion and Civil Protection


If you weren’t born independently wealthy, chances are you have or had a job. And unless that job was Lighthouse Keeper, chances are you interacted with others during your work. Lighthouse keepers can do whatever they want as long as they shine their light. Doctors giving rectal exams with cameras on their lab coats won’t shine their light in ears, noses, or areas where the sun-don’t-shine without bending over backward for patients bending over forward. In other words, wearing the camera will intrude on the patient’s privacy and inevitably affect the doctor’s performance. Yeah. As the Bard wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” but who wants to bow toward the back of the stage while wearing a hospital gown open to the audience?


It’s embarrassing enough to put on a hospital gown. Why make it more embarrassing by putting cameras on hospital staff: doctors, nurses, orderlies, and possibly cleaning staff and office workers? What if one of the admissions clerks, required to wear cameras for assuring patients equal treatment, forgets to turn off the camera during lunch break? Will that camera record the backside of a hospital gown flapping open during the walk to the hospital cafeteria? Will those who seek privacy because of fame and fortune want a camera in their operating room, triage room, or even admissions room?


And you? “So-n-So reveals secret tattoo during hospital visit.” Post posts pics.
​
*Hoffman KM, Trawalter S, Axt JR, Oliver MN. Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Apr 19;113(16):4296-301. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1516047113. Epub 2016 Apr 4. PMID: 27044069; PMCID: PMC4843483.

Background: The ice cream makers told the world on July 4 that the U.S. should return the land on which Mount Rushmore sits to the Native Americans from which it was taken. They talk:


Ben: You know what we should say, Jerry?


Jerry: What? Ben.


Ben: We should tell the Press that the U.S. should return Mount Rushmore to the Nez Perce or to whatever tribe owned that land before we chiseled all those privileged White men’s faces into the rock.


Jerry: Yeah. That’s a good idea. I’ll bet we get lots of coverage. Hey, let’s make an ice cream flavor about the subject. I’m thinking a combination of buffalo meat, elk, and high plains grasses. How’s that sound?


Ben: We can work on it. But what about my idea. Why should the U.S. take a large chunk of granite and carve it into idols of American hegemony? It’s terrible what we did to the Indi…er…Native Americans.


Jerry: I agree. It’s been their land since they took it from the previous owners. Makes me think we should also ask that the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee become the Clovis People National Forest. And what about the Mounds People territories?


Ben: No, no, no. We need to make a statement that draws the ire of our customers. Let’s just go after Rushmore. Oh! I just remembered that it was the Lakota Sioux and not the Nez Perce—forgive me, Chief Joseph.


Jerry: Okay, but we can’t leave anyone out or else the people will think we are exclusive and not inclusive. How about a flavor called Chief Joseph to honor the Nez Perce?


Ben: Works for me. Giranimo Flavor, also.


Jerry: Wait. That might be offensive because the paratroopers, I believe, used to say that upon jumping from airplanes to kill the people of other lands, like those poor Nazis whose lands we invaded during WWII.


Ben: I don’t think…


Jerry: Or what about Tecumseh? Flavor of deer meat, sycamore bark, and wild berries.


Ben: Well, I see a problem. We can’t include every Indi….er…Native American chief’s name. We’re bound to miss some. And then there’s the problem of all those inter-Indi…er inter-Native American wars, like those between the Huron and Iroquois. We might be accused of choosing sides. It’s one thing to go after police, even though many cops are Blacks, with our support of Defund the Police, but it’s another to ignore one tribe for another. Maybe we should just stick with Mount Rushmore. We’ve already done our share of social justicing, what with that support we gave to Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick for defunding the police.


Jerry: [Opening a letter] What’s this?


Ben: What’s what?


Jerry: We just got this letter. It’s from some guy named Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation. Says he wants us to return our Vermont property to his nation. That we are on their land.


Ben: Can’t be. How could this happen. I thought the land always belonged to white guys like us. Call the lawyer. This could be bad.


Jerry: And what’s this?


Ben: Not more bad news, I hope.


Jerry: We’re being boycotted, Targeted, so to speak, Bud Lighted. Market cap has already dropped. Ben, we’re losing some of our wealth. We’re losing some of our customers. Damn privileged white conservatives. And the Governor of South Dakota has attacked us.


Ben: I’m getting peeved. Here’s an idea for a flavor: Damned Privileged White Guys.


Jerry: But what ingredients? I don’t want another incident like that “Milk with Dignity” stuff we went through a few years ago.


Ben: Vermont’s been nice, but maybe you and I should move back to Long Island.


Jerry: Wasn’t that once owned by Indi…er…Native Americans?

Learning Political QWERTY


Face it. We have our biases. We have our convictions. And we all have our contradictions. Not just Leftists, mind you, Rightists and Centrists, too.


Ah! Agendists. Their concerns have no limits when they can fault their political opponents for egregious behavior, real or fake.    


On the Left Side of the Chain Link Prisons


Take those unaccompanied border children, for example, more than 100,000 of them, way more under Biden than under Trump. Recall the hissy fit Left-leaning commentators took on TV during the Trump years when they released photos of the Obama-Biden chainlink “prisons” and ascribed the conditions to Trump-Pence. And their cry of feigned desperation? “There are children for whom we can find no parents or guardians. Thousands of them.” Feigned, I am convinced, because they emitted no such cries during the eight previous years.


Ever lose a child for a minute or see a parent who has momentarily lost track of his kid in a grocery store or department store? Heart-dropping moment, that. So, what did you or that parent do? Ask the government to reunite parent and kid? Or, frantically look till you found the lost one. At the reunion with the kid: “Stay by my side. You gave me a heart attack.” During the Trump years, the Left’s agendists—who must never have momentarily lost track of their children— wanted to blame Trump for parents who made no efforts to ask, “Where’s my kid?” Followed by, “I sent her with some very trustworthy human smugglers to cross the border, and now strangely, she’s missing.”


Nope, no phone calls. No letters to Mayorkas. If tens of thousands of migrant children were unconnected, could it be that tens of thousands of parents didn’t want to be connected? But the narrative of an uncaring President fit the agenda during the Trump years though the situation is far worse now under Biden-Harris than it was under the previous administration.


Agendists are more often hypocrites than not. Think of Bill Clinton’s wanton abuse of women just as feminists were becoming highly vocal and their cause was morphing into “Me, too.” No feminist, including his “believe-the-victim” spouting wife, came to the aid of the abused. And now, agendists on the Left can’t admit that the Biden family has some very suspicious financial dealings with foreign entities, dealings that verge on criminal activity, such as bribery for foreign money by the “Big Guy” now sitting in the White House.


Back to the Left’s concern for children during the Trump era: There’s Grandpa Biden refusing to acknowledge one of his grandchildren, a little girl who is demonstrably his son’s offspring. What’s that the Left says about caring for THE children?


Are the Right’s Agendists as Bad as the Left’s?


It might have been justifiable to censure Adam Schiff for promoting lies about Russian Collusion, but shouldn’t the Right’s agendists also censure George Santos for promoting lies about himself?


Could there be a discernible difference between two liars? Santos’s lies centered on his own fictional life as a basis for being elected. Schiff’s lies lay at the heart of an attempted coup by impeachment. Yet, lying is lying. And once a liar…How can one trust a “Santos” to run the government?


Or consider Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Republican, and Senate candidate Roy Moore, accused of preying on teenage girls. The guy ran for office, and he had his backers even though he was twice removed from office by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. What’a little sexual predation among Party members? Can anyone say Clintonesque?


Whatever motive keeps the Left’s agendists from acting against their own seems to be the same motive that keeps the Right’s agendists from acting similarly. Power backed by hypocrisy all around: January 6’s defenders and Trump classified papers' defenders are testimony * to the unflinching support of agendists on the Right.


Ubiquitous and Historical


Aren’t you tired of it all? I admit I am, but I won’t let it depress me because there’s never been a time when agendists haven’t run their hypocrisy to the ruin of their opponents in an effort to achieve or maintain power. The forced suicide of Socrates makes that case; and even Pericles, under whom Greece achieved a “Golden Age,” crossed the wrong political agendists. As then, so now: Agendists nag like little kids desiring ice cream or toys. Could CNN, MSNBC, NBC, or CBS have said “Russian Collusion” more than they said it? Could Fox News have said “laptop” and “corrupt FBI” more than they said it?


Two Methods of Support: Yapping and Silence


Could Leftists have avoided saying “Biden family corruption” or  even “alleged Biden family corruption” more than they have avoided it? Could both Left and Right have made arguments so similar that at times not only the logic but also the wording is precisely the same? Hypocrisy’s echos reverberate across not just America, but across all nations divided by parties. In Serbia, protestors recently swarmed to object to Pink TV’s slanted coverage of Vucic’s government after two mass shootings. Seems that agendists like those who defend the government on Pink TV in Serbia are everywhere there are news outlets. The Press (Pravda) in the former Soviet Union, today’s Russian pundits, and commentators in other countries under dictators make the argument for the ubiquity and history of agendists.


Agendists use two methods to support their politicians: Nagging repetition of the sins of their opponents and censure of their own sins. Nothing speaks more as testimony to the latter than the recent social media closures of conservative sites on Twitter and FaceBook. Remember, no one was allowed to question or contradict Fauci, no one was allowed to say Wuhan Lab, and no one was allowed to question the need for six-foot distancing, arrows on grocery store aisles, vaccinating children, masks, store closures, and the efficacy vaccines in preventing the spread of COVID. Censure pure and simple: It’s the agendists’ tool that works. Go back to the last election and the regret some voters (some polls show 6%) have because they didn’t know about the Biden family history. (How could they? The silence in the media dampened the noise that might have hurt the eardrums of the electorate)


Spitting and Caning: What You Do Really Doesn’t Matter to Your Party as long as You Support Your Party’s Agenda and Serve That Agenda Productively


Now here’s a twist. During the term of John Adams in the 1790s, Congressman Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican from Kentucky narrowly escaped censure after he spit on Federalist Ralph Griswold of Connecticut. And then Lyon, convicted of violating the Alien and Sedition Acts, was imprisoned for four months. Yet, his constituents, true to their agenda, re-elected him --while he was in prison. Will this be a foreshadowing of the 2024 election?


Basically, you could assault your political opponent and escape serious consequences as long as you stick to the Party’s agenda. Democrat Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with his cane until it broke. Congress couldn’t muster the votes to expel him, and he received a very light sentence in a criminal trial. He then resigned his seat, but his constituents, all opposed to abolition as he was, re-elected him to the seat he had relinquished. The lesson lies in the sentence I repeatedly typed to teach my fingers a QWERTY keyboard: “Every good man comes to the aid of his party.” My father, a skilled linotypist and diehard member of the Democratic Party taught me that line when he surprised me with my first typewriter.


And speaking of caning without consequences to the Congressman wielding the cane, an even better example is Republican Lovell Harrison Rousseau of Kentucky. In 1866 he used his metal-headed cane to beat abolitionist Republican Josiah Bushnell Grinnell from Iowa until his cane broke. Rousseau resigned only to be elected to his vacated seat. Even intra-party sins can be forgiven in defense of the AGENDA.


Bouncing off the Wall of Self-Contradiction


Throw a rubber ball against a wall. What happens? Well, an analogy lies in self-contradictory stances taken by agendists. Agendists don’t play catch with “other teams”; they play against a wall off which the ball rebounds. They play catch with themselves, often without realizing the nature of their game.


All agendists play off the wall of self-contradiction. If I examine my own motives, I see that I, too, am at times and on certain topics a self-contradicting agendist. I oppose socialism and its corollaries Marxism and Big Bureaucracy. But that wall of self-contradiction stands firm at reasonable public health care and Social Security, both of which I support as long as neither becomes excessively intrusive on individualism. Because both health care and SS require me to support some big bureaucracy, I am a hypocrite. Aren’t all social programs a slip away from a slippery slope into the pit of Marxism? If I want to avoid the label agendist, I must acknowledge some grey and oppose a purely black-and-white stance on social programs.


However contradictory I might seem, I have accepted some ethical reasoning that can justify my support for aiding the indigent and the abandoned. I’ve seen too many people suffer in trying to care for family members with Alzheimer’s. I’ve seen too many aged veterans who struggle to pay for necessities. And I have seen the burden that personally caring for the elderly places on the young and how it strains their ability to tend to their own needs. So, my opposition to social programs is self-contradictory on the surface, but in retrospect, it seems to be rooted in the reality of the third most populous nation with citizens in various stages of need.


I also oppose abortion, but I hypocritically favor capital punishment for terrorists and serial killers. Go figure. Pro-life, yet pro state-sponsored killing. Yes, I confess to having supported agendas that end in self-contradiction.


And, if you’ve read my blogs, such as the recent blog on the government plan to inject aerosols into the atmosphere to block sunlight, you’ll know that I object to climate alarmism and consider that agenda a foolish degradation of economic growth and an ultimate threat to public health based on plans that will do little to curb worldwide temperatures from rising—or even from falling. On its own, Earth has warmed and cooled significantly more than the estimated and unproven temperature predictions pushed by climate change agendists. I’ve written about this elsewhere, noting the folly I see in climate alarmists, even though all my research for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the US EPA centered on identifying and solving environmental problems—both real and exaggerated. Sure, “Conserve,” I argue, “but give me my air conditioning, my gasoline, my plastic, occasional antibiotics, and my lighted city streets. And please look the other way when I use insecticides to protect my house from carpenter ants.”


If the Ball Bounces Back to You, You Are an Agendist


After a recent decision by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty that blocks agents of HHS, CDC, DOJ, State Dept., and FBI from contacting social media companies, a number of Left-leaning TV and news-outlet pundits criticized the temporary injunction. Thus, people in the media whose very livelihood and purpose depend on freedom from government interference in speech, argued against free speech. It wasn’t a surprise response, however, because the criticism originated from the Left, whose speech was never censored by social media platforms. The pundits believe it is all right for the government to interfere, even in light of the evidence that the speech that was censored proved largely to be true, such as that vaccines were not foolproof aids that stopped the spread of contagious COVID or that masks and closures caused more damage than good.

Just a reminder: Many on the Left called those who refused to wear masks and to be vaccinated as well as those who balked at closing businesses and spending time in lockdowns  "murderers." (Gavin Newsome's and Nancy Pelosi's going maskless to a restaurant and to a beauty salon notwithstanding).


In “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COV:ID-19 Mortality,” by Jonas Herby, Lars Joining, and Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, the researchers found that little evidence exists that “lockdowns had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality” (32). ** They also found “no clear evidence that SIPOs (shelter in place had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality” (35). In fact, the researchers seem to think that sheltering in a home seemed to result in an infected person’s “causing more severe illness” (35). Yet, the Left-leaning pundits on CNN and in other media platforms criticized the injunction instead of acknowledging that the actual censorship as perpetuated by government officials acting through social media was not only an affront to the freedom of speech in America but was also an affront to the actual health practices that might have saved lives and prevented the degradation of the economy. I’ll go Kamala Harris here with redundancy: Left-leaning pundits infused by an agenda that includes hate for all things Right-leaning, criticized a court ruling that favored free speech, the very condition on which their jobs depend.

​Can anyone say, “I wonder why the ball keeps bouncing back to me.” 


Are You an Agendist?


Come on, be honest, and ‘fess up. Do you have an agenda that you cannot relinquish, regardless of apparent contradictions? Do you favor caring for children in a family setting while supporting Grandpa Joe who will not acknowledge his granddaughter who recently had to fight for child support? Do you favor imprisoning Joe Biden for having classified documents in his garage while you disfavor imprisoning Donald Trump for having classified documents in his home? Did you vote for a confused stroke victim like John Fetterman in support of the Party rather than for a popular doctor with all his mental faculties fully intact and the ability to articulate an argument? Did you vote for a lying George Santos regardless of his accumulating lies or for Eric Swalwell who dated a Chinese spy? Will you re-elect an Adam Schiff, or had you lived in the nineteenth century, would you have re-elected Matthew Lyon or Lovell Harrison Rousseau, all congressmen of the Democratic, Democratic-Republican, or Republican parties?


Are you the model agendist? Are you a modern example of the line I repeatedly typed to learn QWERTY? “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Party.”




*Just have to comment about the word testimony: I’ve heard too many people use testament (a “contract,” thus, New Testament) for testimony (“a witness statement”).


**Herby, Jonas & Jonung, Lars & Hanke, Steve, 2022. "A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality," Studies in Applied Economics 200, The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

Quick! What do Indonesian islanders, Pandora’s πίθος, a Coke bottle, solar irradiance, aerosols, an 1816 eruption, guns, and a government plan to geoengineer the atmosphere have in common? 

Expelling Evil (and/or Evildoers)


According to Sir James Frazer (610, 611), on Ceram (Seran, Serang) in Indonesia, islanders expelled evil by building a boat they carried to the water, gave it a sail, and pushed it seaward. The object carried off evils, such as physical ailments like measles. The islanders of Timor Laut (Tanimbar Islands) performed a similar ritual to rid themselves of evil. In Genesis, God expels the evildoers, Adam and Eve. I suppose that in America’s inner cities, expelling a murderous gang is an appropriate parallel. You want to eliminate evil? Cast it out. At least, perform a ritual of casting out some symbol of evil, an effigy like those put in the boat by Timor Laut islanders, for example, or a Coke bottle.


Coke bottle? Yes. The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1980 comedy about a San from the Kalahari who tries to return a Coke bottle to the gods because it embodies evil. At the beginning of the film, a bush pilot tosses an empty bottle from his plane as he flies over the San encampment. At first, the bush people believe the bottle to be a gift from the gods because it fell from the sky and has properties with which they are unfamiliar: It is hard enough to be useful in pounding tubers; it is miraculously transparent; and it is capable of carrying water. But the bottle, like Pandora’s πίθος (or pithos, ’jar’), then appears to incite evil in the form of greed, envy, and eventually violence as one child strikes another on the head with it during a dispute over ownership. The bushman, believing the bottle to embody evil, then sets off to return it to the gods, initiating a very entertaining set of episodes involving a microbiologist, a teacher, a playboy, and group of rebels.


Modern Pithos


The Industrial Age was accompanied by the proliferation of many objects that ostensibly carry evil: Guns, for example. Every time there is a shooting, people, mostly on the Left side of the political aisle, call for more restrictive bans on guns and even on ridding society of the evil “things.” It’s an easy argument to make: No guns, no shootings. But as we all know, the malicious will find a way to perpetrate malice. Evil lies in people, not in objects like guns or Coke bottles. We could put all the guns on a boat and sink it in the Mariana Trench only to discover that knives kill, and even pencil points can be objects of evil.


The Sun God


In yet another effort to quash global warming, the climate alarmists in the US government seem to have fostered a study on reducing sunlight by sending it back to Helios or Apollo.* They want to return the sunlight because it carries an evil they call global warming. The study suggests ways to block incoming solar radiation to cool Earth. What could go wrong? Really! What could go wrong?


After all, aren’t we sophisticated, scientific and modern humans. Haven’t we altered the courses of rivers, tamed and domesticated animals, cured diseases, and turned ordinary mineral matter into useful objects no primitive could have imagined? We’re not living in a simple San society. We exert control over Nature. And having exerted control on Earth, what better extension of our hubris than control over the Sun.


The Ultimate Bush Pilots’ Gifts


One of the proposals for casting off excess and evil solar energy is to inject aerosols into the stratosphere. Not an impossible task, injecting small particles or gases is merely a matter of flying high. In fact, modern jets already contribute aerosols to high altitude air. The report, entitled Congressionally-Mandated Report on Solar Radiation Modification enumerates ways to geoengineer the planet’s atmosphere through solar radiation modification (SRM). What could go wrong?


The Solar Constant


Hold a flashlight perpendicular to a table. That round spot of light can be measured as an amount of irradiance given in kilowatts per square meter or in kilojoules per square meter (or fractions thereof). So also the Sun’s irradiance as measured at the top of the atmosphere.


During a Solar Minimum, the irradiance is 1361 kW/m^2 or 81.65 kJm^2. At Solar Maximum, it’s a tiny bit more. To get more numerically astute to impress people at parties, you can throw in that those numbers are equivalent to 1.951 calories per square centimeter per minute or 1.951 Langleys per minute.


1816 and the Reason the Gods of Government Are Harbingers of Evil


From April 5 through April 12, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted explosively. The volcano sent volcanic ash and sulfide aerosols into the stratosphere, effectively reducing the Sun’s irradiance. As a result, 1816 became The Year without a Summer. Global temperatures decreased by more than a half degree Celsius (almost one degree F). And not since the end of the Little Ice Age had summer temperatures been so low. By coincidence, large eruptions had also occurred in 1812 (Awu), 1813 (Suwanosejima), and 1814 (Mayon). Big eruptions in consecutive years effectively blocked sunlight In 1816. The timing couldn’t have been worse for people who liked to eat because the Sun was at a Solar Minimum. Reduced sunshine and frosts decimated crops in the Northern Hemisphere. The Year without a Summer became a year of famine and disease.


What could wrong when government officials give the gift of reduced temperatures? Can anyone say “volcanic eruption coupled with Solar minimum”?


And This Is What Geoengineering Can Do


What could possibly go wrong with the government pumping sunshine-blocking aerosols into the stratosphere?


The climate frenzy has reached a point of no return. Wait till little Greta Thunberg shivers and starves in a volcanic year enhanced by artificially injected aerosols. Will increased deaths by starvation be significant enough for her to campaign for more warmth and life-giving sunshine?


Some in the American government plan to throw the Coke bottle out of the plane. It will land in some village of innocents who depend on subsistence hunting and gathering. And they will seek a way to return the gift to the gods because of the evil it engenders. But as the people living in 1816 discovered, the Coke bottle won’t just land on an isolated tribe of primitives. It will land on the encampments of everyone in the Northern Hemisphere. If you were slightly inconvenienced by the supply chain interruptions and empty store shelves during the pandemic, you will be far more inconvenienced during a coming repeat of The Year without a Summer.


The gods must be crazy, and by that I mean that the government officials who believe they can solve perceived and real problems never foresee the consequences of their actions. Their solutions create new problems because they cannot anticipate the occurrence of natural phenomena that make Earth a complex of processes and materials.



*https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/07/02/white-house-examining-plans-that-deflect-suns-rays-to-cool-earth/

This isn’t just 1984; this is 1984 on steroids. Michigan House Democrats passed  House Bill 4474 with expanded protections under its previous Ethnic Intimidation Act. You know where this is going. Apparently, they don’t.


I hope this is fake news. Lord, make it fake news, please. Let’s just pretend it is if it isn’t.


According to a couple of online sources (Please, Lord, make it fake news), Michigan’s  Democrats want to make using the “wrong pronoun” a punishable offense. Yeah. Prison and a fine. And a FELONY!


Education in Olden Days


Using the wrong pronoun has always been a problem for English teachers. Many students use plural pronouns with singular antecedents. The grammar error has been with us for generations; it’s a problem for sure and one punishable with a lower grade and some extensive red marginalia written late at night by a frustrated teacher sitting at a table piled high with uncorrected compositions. “His!” NOT “their.” “Their!” NOT “There.” And as the night turns to early morning and increasing frustration, the fatigued corrector writes, “NUMBER DISAGREEMENT: If the antecedent is singular, the pronoun has to be singular.” That’s probably followed by some rather large exclamation points with the last one ripping the paper: !!!!!!!!!


Now imagine the marginalia centered on Standard Formal English after the Michigan Senate and Governor Whitmer sign HB 4474 into law. “That’s it. I’m calling 911.” Some future English teacher will write 911 in red ink, send the kid to the office, and actually call the police. “I felt threatened when I read that.”


Please, Lord, tell me it is fake news. Send me a sign with personal pronouns declined by person and number:


Nominative Case
Singular                    Plural
I                                we
you                           you
he, she, it                 they


Objective Case
Singular                 Plural
me                          us
you                         you
him, her, it              them


Possessive Case
Singular                     Plural
my, mine                    our, ours
your, yours                 your, yours
his, her, hers, its        their, theirs


Unintended Consequences: The Bane of Every Liberal Attempt to Impose Equity as a Mechanism of Unity


In their effort to “protect” Michiganders from hearing speech they find offensive, the legislators have complicated their justice system in ways they seemingly can’t foresee. I’ll come back to that.


How wimpy have we become as a nation? What happened to the childhood singsong “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Holy Cow! How psychologically weak have we become? And Holy Cow! Am I allowed to “appropriate” a part of Jewish tradition by referring to the golden calf that infuriated Moses when he descended the mountain? Is this one of those punishable offenses covered by HB 4474? I did say it intentionally, and intention is one of the requisite conditions in the bill—if it is a real bill and not a prank. Please, Lord, let it be a prank.


Back to the complications imposed on the justice system. Will there be 911 calls based on someone’s hearing some nasty children shout “He, He, He” in the presence of a human who identifies as “they”? Isn’t hehehe much like hahaha. What if the offended one has misinterpreted unrelated laughter as a slur? Children—like many adults—don’t always consider the potential consequences of their actions, as Americans found out when elementary schools made drawings of pistols and fingers pointed like guns punishable by expulsion. And what if one of those sixth-grade children, having paid attention in English class, has a brain trained in Standard Formal English, a brain that balks at using a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent?


What of the potential confusion that the new pronouns might create? Looking for members of the family who might be missing? Well, “Sheila says they are going to the mall.” Is Sheila “they”? Are the family members at the mall? And what happens to the plural pronouns? Do we strike them from the language? Except, of course, for Sheila’s preferred pronoun that only she knows when she is at the marketplace, where a clerk and stranger might use the singular feminine personal pronouns: “I think we have those in the back. Just a minute, I’ll call the storeroom. Charley, I’m out front. A girl just asked for one of those Lulu Lemon tops in pink. Can you see if we have one for HER? SHE also says SHE’LL take one in blue.”


Quick! Call die Notrufnummer 


But if language is a problem, then why not include any word in any form as a punishable offense? The absurdities HB 4474 can engender will outnumber the seemingly unlimited number of genders some believe exist, which is ironic among English language speakers that dropped noun-class gender in a split from Frisian, Anglo-Saxon, and German (Think Deutsch die, der, and das and English’s genderless the and a). What if a Michigander overhears someone speak in one of the languages that retain gender in nouns, articles, and pronouns. Should the person take offense? A survey of just 256 of 7,000 languages found 46% had noun-class gender. ** Take German (Deutsch) as an example, where words ending in ung, schaft, ion, heit, keit, tät, and ik (like die Musik) are all “feminine.”


Not even AI will be able to keep up as this group or that group decides willy-nilly what is offensive by virtue of being associated with gender either grammatical or sexual. Goodbye, First Amendment. Goodbye, intelligible English. And definitely, goodbye, Standard Formal English. The new law (Please, Lord, say it isn’t true) will divide more than unify.


Of course, we have already abandoned Standard Formal English with “he don’t,” “she don’t,” and “they don’t” commonly heard in the vernacular. Plurals? Well, consider “Fifty Cent.” And since languages constantly evolve—you do not speak Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s English—then this push to break with traditional “number agreement” between antecedent and pronoun will possibly produce a new Standard. If that happens, then we can acknowledge Governor Whitmer and the Michigan Democrats as the originators of New English.


Attempting inclusivity, We’ve Already Over-complicated the Language


In the 1990s with two co-authors on college texts and government research, I encountered publishers and agency officials who required numerous revisions of Standard Formal English lest the use of he offended someone. That led to a number of sentences with “he and she” or even, in government documents to “he/she” and to the use of she to replace what had been the universal use of the masculine as in “Everyone should take his book to the class” when both males and females are involved. Now, at the very least, people write “Everyone should take his or her book to the class,” or in grammatical number disagreement between pronoun and antecedent, “Everyone (a singular) should take their (a plural) book(s) to the class.”


But let’s run HB 4474 to its conclusion by noting words whose use should be punishable under future amendments:


1.     Big: This word offends those with a BMI over 30.
2.    Small: This word offends people who don’t reach a population’s average height.
3.    Fat: See  #1
4.    Lefty (not the political meaning): My late father (born in 1916), predominantly left-handed, told me that when he was in elementary school, his teacher tied his left hand behind his back to make him write with his right hand. Ultimately, it probably helped him to become ambidextrous. Imagine what that teacher might have done to someone using a “preferred pronoun.”
5.    Old people: I’m one, and I don’t care. But if there were a law against using the term on the grounds of discrimination against the aged that carried imprisonment and a fine, I would still use the term and risk the legal consequences in defiance. Hey, I can argue, “I’m old; I didn’t remember. Where are my glasses? Where am I?”


The Actual HB 4474


Here are some lines from HR 4474 as posted online:


11 (9) As used in this section:
12     (a) "Gender identity or expression" means having or being
13 perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression
14 whether or not associated with an individual's assigned sex at
15 birth.
16     (b) "Intimidate" means a willful course of conduct involving
17 repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would
18 cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or
19 threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized,
20 frightened, or threatened. Intimidate does not include
21 constitutionally protected activity or conduct that serves a
22 legitimate purpose. *


Let the legal wrangling begin. This one’s probably going to the Supreme Court probably after some very liberal school board or D.A. punishes a kid for disrespect. Fortunately for Michiganders, these legislators have focused on the most serious issue that Michiganders face today: Pronouns. Crime in Detroit? Not as important.


May each of those legislators be caught on camera using him, her, it in a moment of inappropriate pronoun-ing. But then, maybe those legislators say, “It don’t,” “Everyone went to their house,” and a sundry other non-Standard English expressions because they, him, them never paid attention in English class and each of they, him, her, it never read the red ink in the margins of their, him’s, herses corrected papers.


*https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2023-2024/billengrossed/House/pdf/2023-HEBH-4474.pdf


**Article included in Vanhove, Martine; Stolz, Thomas; Urdze, Aina; Otsuka, Hitomi, eds. (2012). Morphologies in Contact. Berlin: Akademie Verlag Berlin. p. 97. doi:10.1524/9783050057699. ISBN 978-3050057019.