Climate alarmists could teach Himalayan Vedic or Buddhist monks how to meditate by repeating a mantra. I don’t mean “ommmm.” I mean, “It’s climate change; it’s climate change; it’s climate change….” It must rank among the most significant mantras because it's in the mind and on the tongue of most of the world's population. It's the dominant earworm that pervades the brains of reporters and politicians. 


What were the climate alarmists saying about the drought and fire in California or the Hawaii’s tragic fire in droughty conditions? Oh! Yes! Climate change will forever alter the states and drive people to seek more humid climes—if they can find anywhere to resettle as the oceans rise and inundate all but the highest elevations.


And now, after a wet season, we find that almost all of California is drought-free and that the Hawaiian fires were caused by a rundown electrical grid. In California the water has recently returned as it has many times after many droughts over many years, decades, centuries, millennia, geologic periods, eras, and eons. The state’s northern reservoirs are full, and the southern “spreading basins” have captured some of Hilary’s water—though not much of it.


Chances are that on a planet mostly covered by water, rain or snow will eventually fall, interrupted by droughts with subsequent wildfires (and arsonists’ fires). Storms are inevitable everywhere, also. And on a planet ubiquitously covered by a population of eight billion people, chances are that somewhere someone is going to suffer from the vicissitudes of planet Earth.


Rain has, indeed, fallen over the past rainy season. Who-da thunk it? Obviously not the climate alarmists who now have to switch gears, reverse themselves to claim that the inundation of the state is the product of climate change. They never lose an argument: Drought: blame climate change. Floods: blame climate change. Blizzards: blame climate change… Get the pattern? They can’t lose the argument because they ascribe all to climate change.


And yet we know that weather is not anything if it is not fickle, even in the most sable environments and under the most stable climatic conditions, as in the Atacama Desert. Its vicissitudes are what define it as “the current condition of the atmosphere in a specific locality.” But we do know that climates have changed naturally, and we know that some of those changes have been affected, exacerbated, or enhanced by human activity.


Desertification and deforestation are examples. From the drying of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union’s redirecting river flow to the dune-ification of Provincetown on Cape Cod by early pioneers’ chopping down the trees for ship masts, we humans have altered the landscape and in doing so, altered the albedo of Earth’s surface. Where rainforests have grown in the Amazon since the last advances of Northern Hemisphere ice (yes, they had a worldwide effect), there was an ice age patchiness. But since the regrowth, the now denuded landscape has changed from dark green to light brown or tan. Where sunlight was abundantly absorbed, it is now abundantly reflected. This same process has occurred over the surface of the planet since the rise of agriculture. Look down from a flight westward from eastern Pennsylvania or New York to Indiana. Do you not think those forests now turned farmland don’t absorb or reflect sunlight differently from what they did 300 years ago? So, yes, climate alarmists, humans have effected change all over the planet for millennia—even the Sumerians irrigated the land and, thus, altered the flow of water and the albedo of arable soils.


Weather is driven by large, often cyclic patterns like semipermanent high and low pressure systems (the Bermuda High, for example), shifting ocean currents or Hadley Cells subject to seasonal effects mostly produced by changing Sun angle on a tilted, rotating round Earth. Yet, even well identified patterns can fully account for weather’s fickleness. The larger influences on atmospheric conditions are coupled with smaller disturbances like cold, warm, and stationary fronts, the first of which is notorious for its squall lines.


Think of  that “butterfly effect,” the idea based on Mandelbrot’s chaos theory that suggests a small event somewhere can effect a change in the weather elsewhere. Consider the weather as  physical fractals that subtly repeat patterns influenced by phenomena like the movement of the semipermanent High northward or southward off the coast of California, a shift that usually, but not always, matches the changing Sun angle and that either allows moisture to enter the state from the Pacific or that blocks its movement landward. Think also of the Bermuda High that strengthens and weakens over the course of four seasons.


The mantra “It’s climate change” is here to stay, at least for a generation or two. Too many people have fallen into a trance over its repetition. Too many have adopted it as a go-to explanation for daily shifts in atmospheric conditions, and too many people cannot see that if one lives in a tornado zone or hurricane zone, then one should expect either or both kinds of storms, none of which would be the product of carbon dioxide.


The climate alarmists are mentally attuned to the mantra: It’s climate change caused by carbon dioxide. It’s climate change caused by carbon dioxide. Ommmmmmmm…..


Without going into details, such as the demonstrable fall of temperatures after a rise in carbon dioxide and a dramatic decline of that gas’s presence in the atmosphere over the last 50 million years, I’ll end with “Just because you repeatedly say it’s so, doesn’t make it so.”

Two Chicagoans talk about an announcement from their mayor’s office:
    
Jim: You seen this?


Ben: What?


Jim: Here’s what it says. This is straight from the Mayor’s office.  No kidding.  “Mayor Brandon Johnson announced today that the City has filed a civil lawsuit against Kia America, Inc., Kia Corporation, Hyundai Motor America, and Hyundai Motor Company for their failure to include industry-standard engine immobilizers in multiple models of their vehicles, resulting in a steep rise in vehicle thefts, reckless driving, property damage, and a wide array of related violent crimes in Chicago.” *


Ben: Crazy. Or should I say, car-zy?


Jim: No end insight for liberal insanity, blamin’ the car for the theft.


Ben: Well, they blame guns for the shootings, don’t they.


Jim: I thought we were over this stuff when Lightfoot left office, but now we have Johnson.


Ben: Hey, I didn’t vote for him.


Jim: What’s next? Suing stores for shoplifters? Suing homeowners for home invasions?


Ben: He should sue his brain for its stupidity and his office for its incompetence.


Jim: It’s always the same story with these Left-wingers. Find someone or something to scapegoat. Never look to individuals where the fault lies.


Ben: Not going to change, you know. It’s the Way of the Lib. Always someone else’s fault. Blame racism, Caucasians, the rich, the Republicans, Trump, MAGA, police… Blame anyone but those responsible for their actions. It never occurs to them that in a previous era when cars had absolutely no anti-theft devices, there were fewer car thefts, far fewer. They just can’t understand that there were fewer people with a criminal mindset when society was a bit more ethical, kids had homes with engaged parents, and police had a bit more respect in a justice system that caught and punished evildoers. Chicago’s DA will probably indict Trump.   


Jim: But it’s so frustra…so insane.


Ben: Sorry, Jim, Johnson’s in. The voters put him in. He’s here to stay. Sell your car or move away. **




*https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2023/august/SuitAgainstAutomakersKiaAndHyundai.html


**https://wirepoints.org/chicago-car-thefts-spike-sharply-in-2022-up-100-percent-along-lakefront-compared-to-2019-wirepoints/

Fashion Systematizes Life


It doesn’t matter which fashion one chooses, from carrying a Birkin to wearing a burka, all fashion is a product of systematizing a way of life. And the same can be said for fashions of the mind, particularly the political mind. We can apply this principle of systematizing (or systemizing) to a variety of human endeavors and philosophies, including the push by companies to be both politically correct and adoptive of social media driven movements. But there are dangers in adopting any system; it pigeonholes thinking; it stereotypes attitude; it quashes freedom and variation; and it promotes empty promises. It’s in the last, those empty promises, that we discover one motive for migration at the American southern border.   


Carrying a Birkin Makes a Definitive Statement of Wealth


Many of the millions of migrants who have appeared at America’s southern border traveled under the promise of wealth very much in the manner of nineteenth-century domestic migrants driven by gold rushes. But without some newly discovered gold deposit, what could be the migrant magnet?


It’s still the promise of wealth, even inordinate wealth. Americans tempt foreigners with their seeming unending material wealth. And one place where that wealth is on flashy display is New York City, now the site of a migrant crisis.


In some sections of NYC, say on Fifth Avenue, maybe in Columbus Circle, outside Jeffrey’s, Louis Vuitton’s, or blueberi’s bougie women carrying their expensive purses present a flashy show of wealth that beckons the destitute and desperate of Central and South America as effectively as Homer’s Sirens and the 1849 Gold Rush. Their haute couture bespeaks a lifestyle system that’s well defined in the eyes of some migrants.


I can’t fault those women for the rush of migrants into their cities because some of the poor might have seen their ostentatious lifestyle as a representation of an American system; that’s a generalization gone too far. Those wealthy women are merely part of a social system marked by high fashion, and that means very expensive fashion.


But I will blame the sanctuary mayors and councils for their cities’ migrant problems and bags of empty promises. Had they systematized a set of clearly defined rules for any incoming migrants to follow, they might have warded off the current crush of humanity crowding their sidewalks and makeshift shelters. That the Left typically has no well developed plan doesn’t surprise me. Any complete system is difficult to develop, and most, if not all, systems contain flaws. That the Left’s minions in the councils and mayors’ offices could not anticipate their problems does not surprise me, also. Once the “rush” began, it became a self-sustaining system producing a seemingly never ending flow of people at the southern border, a flow that spilled into the “sanctuaries” that had no defined system to handle the crowds.


Economic Status in America as a Systemized Lifestyle


Judging a “book by its cover” is what we do when we assess the nature of strangers, and by that I mean here judging the wealth of someone by material possessions. A late friend of mine who was not just wealthy, but very wealthy was driving from one of his businesses to another when he stopped at a foreign car dealer. Dressed in khakis and a work shirt, he walked to a Bentley convertible in the showroom to see the car. A young salesman approached him and asked skeptically if he could help. My friend said in his down-home way, “That’s a pretty nice car.” Unaware of this stranger’s wealth and past dealings with the dealership, the salesman said, “Well that’s a very expensive car; I don’t know you could afford it” and some other statements implying that it was out of reach for this poorly dressed guy off the street. By chance the owner walked into the storeroom and greeted my friend warmly, calling him by name and asking him what he needed. My friend, who had previously bought Rolls Royce. Porsche, and Bentley models and who had a car collection worth millions, said, “Well, it seems this fellow doesn’t want to sell me this car.” Yes, that salesman, lost his job, not knowing that the fellow he had categorized as poor was a billionaire. He had judged him by his fashion. He assumed he could “systematize” a life by a superficial appearance. But then, don’t we all do that at times? Think of neighborhoods with expensive homes that have expensive cars in the driveways.


I can assure you that by my possessions and fashion, you could judge my economic status more accurately than that salesman judged my friend. In 1965, I bought a new VW Bug for $1,600: Rear-mounted 40 hp engine, stick shift, crank-open sunroof and side windows, rubber floor covering, and no radio or air conditioning, well, it did have a heater that after the second year worked whether I wanted it to or not. In first gear I could accelerate to 15 mph. In fourth gear I could zip over 70 mph on long downhill highway stretches if the wind was at my back. I bought it on payments. Had I kept the car that was too small for my growing family, it could be worth between $2,500 and $18,000 today, depending on its condition—which would probably be in my case both rusted and broken down since my policy is to wash a car once a year whether it needs it or not. That means my first car started at a price below that of a 1965 Hermès handbag and that it wouldn’t come close to the price of a modern Birkin by Hermès, the price of which could exceed $28,000 this year. As an aside I’ll note that my Bug was bigger than a handbag—not by much—and that it looked like one on wheels.


A Life in Hand-stitched Fine Leather


A New York Post (8/22/23) article on “bougie” purses and New York’s fashion-obsessed who spend thousands of bucks on purses triggered my memory of that story of my rich friend and my little VW. According to the Post, Victoria Lagg, the centerpiece of the article, owns 60 bags by Hermès and other haute couture houses. * She spends as much as $10,000 per month on handbags. Try to imagine—unless you are inordinately wealthy, in which case you’re probably an odd follower of this website. Victoria’s clothes make a similar statement that defines her as wealthy. The system of her life and the lives of other bougies can, it seems, be readily assessed by a glance and summed up in aphoristic explanations.


I can’t imagine spending, even with inflation, that amount of money on fashion of any kind. But I do not begrudge Victoria her wealth. I’m happy for her, and I wish others had similar resources though, of course, few do. For the others, the less fortunate, knock-offs, or dupes, as the haute couture crowd calls them, are available, and according to the Post, you can find such “dupies” in West Virginia and similar states. New York is the number one bougie state for expensive purses, probably most of them in NYC; California comes in second, probably most of those located in Hollywood; I imagine that Florida’s Palm Beach is a close third because I remember walking down Worth Avenue years ago wearing my old jeans, running shoes, and a T-shirt and passing by a young woman wearing a casual outfit probably worth more than my new VW. Definitely, she was a bougie if I judge correctly. (Am I guilty of being the reverse of that young salesman who judged my rich friend? Am I no different from the migrants who see a system they want to join?)


Systematizing Life


In a way, I can’t fault Bernie Sanders and his followers for struggling with a definition of “Democratic Socialism.” The term, in light of socialists’ history of quashing the freedoms of the Demos and annihilating whole populations, seems to be an oxymoron. Any complete definition should include shining darkness on those 160 million dead who were murdered at hands of socialist/Marxist governments. So, Bernie and friends use the term in an open-ended way, giving us hints without precisely laying out a Democratic Socialist System. In that open-endedness, Bernie allows for variant interpretations, much like, yet not like, Friedrich Nietzsche.


During his productive years Friedrich Nietzsche avoided systematizing his philosophy. He was, he hoped, impossible to pin or categorize because he believed that no knowledge system could be complete. His writings are, in fact, difficult to categorize though many have tried to force his thinking into a box of some sort. The closest Nietzsche ever came to systematizing his thought was his Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the reason for his anti-systematizing stand lay in his somewhat troubled life and his recognition of the chaos that envelopes everyone at some time. Systems are antithetical to organic thinking, he believed, organic in the sense of growing fruit.


Friedrich would probably see the affectation of bougie life as an analog of aphoristic, and therefore, easily understandable, thought: “Let us not hide and spoil the actual way in which our thoughts have occurred to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will most likely always have something of the aphoristic and success character of Pascal’s Pensées. The driving forces and valuations are far beneath the surface; what emerges is an effect” (22). **


The Left Uses Aphoristic Explanations to Systematize a “Warming Climate”


If one considers the arguments of the Left’s climate alarmists who have cherrypicked a few weather data to run the world’s biggest ever scam, he sees a mental fashion that is every bit as pretentious as a handbag full of empty promises. The standby expression of the Left that “the science is settled,” shows the superficiality of their ideas because they have no true systematized science; yet, they believe they have systematized one of the most complex of natural and open-ended phenomena.


The systemizing they proclaim lies on a base of failed computer models and failed and exaggerated predictions. Their system touts “settled science” that suggests: “We have only twelve years left!” “We have only eight years left”—those numbers keep changing and will continue to change with the weather.


Climate alarmism and the bougie life are, in the word of Nietzsche, effects. The former is replete with aphoristic statements like “The corals are dying,” “People are dying,” “The planet is dying,” and “The hottest day on record.” Alarmists encapsulate meaning through statements so conveniently understood that one can carry them around in a mental handbag.


Vandalized VW


I parked my VW on Fifth Avenue on a winter night in 1968 when I went into the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. When I returned to my car, I found that someone had jimmied open the triangular wing window, reached in, unlatched the door, and stole a paper bag of stuff I had in the back seat. Surprise for the thief: That bag contained my sweaty gym clothes from earlier in the day. Somehow the thief believed that my little cheap purse on wheels carried something valuable inside.


But not all was lost. When summer returned hot weather, that broken wing window kept the air flowing inside where my broken heater never stopped working. My lost gym clothes had been converted into air conditioning. An open window became my substitute for an energy efficient air conditioner, much the way people in New York and California who have bought into the alternative green energy systems have found that opening their windows is their realistic clean energy option when the electric grid is overburdened.


The Left’s Promise of Free Stuff for All: Do I Have to Say More than Bougie “Martha’s Vineyard”?


I have a feeling that the millions of migrants who crossed the border during the Biden Administration under the lure of a bag of stuff left in full view have discovered that the bag they’ve come to take doesn’t contain the wealth they thought they were getting. That appears to be the case in bougie NYC that is struggling to provide shelter of any kind to house the thousands inundating the city. As Mayor Adams has said, his handbag of handouts is running empty. He wants you and me to give our taxes to support his sanctuary city’s mess; he wants your money in his handbag. Ah! The Left. They love the haute couture ideas they carry around and profess with ease; it makes them look much better than those lowly and stingy dupies from places like West Virginia. But they now cry for dupies to supply them with stuff for their ransacked bags.


It’s one thing to walk around carrying an expensive handbag; it’s quite a different thing to have something of value inside it. In the case of Leftist NYC, it seems that the politicians mistook dupies for bougies, fake for fine handcrafted leather, cheap for expensive. Too bad my VW is probably in some scrap metal pile; otherwise, I could offer it as a place for NYC’s burgeoning crowd of illegal aliens seeking the bourgeoise—or classy bougie—life of affluent America.


Would Systematizing Ideas Have Prevented the Migrant Mess?


The open-endednes of the Left’s policy on migration has created a mess. Biden and company have flashed a fancy purse before the poor and desperate of other countries, enticing them to rush the border. And those migrants, having opened the purses of sanctuary city mayors, now find themselves as poor and as destitute as they were in their native lands, save a few diminishing handouts. Now, they live in makeshift housing, crowd sidewalks, and wait for handouts from those carrying the purses. Like the thief who raided my little VW, the migrants went through the wing window to grab an enticing bag they now discover was not worth the suffering, the abuses, rapes, and murders of untold numbers who made the journey under the promise of a bougie life. They've been duped by the promise of a system that doesn't really exist, even in Bernie's democratic socialist America. 


  


*https://nypost.com/2023/08/21/new-york-is-most-bougie-state-in-thanks-to-birkinmoms/   See also an article about some relatively wealthy people who think they’re poor: https://nypost.com/2023/08/14/some-of-the-richest-people-in-america-feel-very-poor-survey/


**Morgan, George A. 1941. What Nietzsche Means. New York. Harper Torchbooks (Harper & Row, Publishers).

In our busy lives, we often seek categorical shortcuts. We want to know, for example, where a politician stands on domestic and international issues. With regard to the former, we want some exactitude from the candidate on matters like education, the First and Second Amendments, abortion, taxes, and energy. We expect definitive answers, but we often get only hints and sometimes evasive gibberish (such as the word salads of the VP Harris). In short, we desire an understandable system of thought that earns our votes, but we're often too impatient for detailed explanations. Maybe if we were more patient, we could expect more thoroughness.


Some politicians do make an effort to comply with our intellectual needs though they fall short of a full system of political philosophy. What they offer are partially defined shortcuts. Bernie Sanders comes to mind; so, also, do America’s Marxist/socialist politicians whom he has influenced. What, I’m still asking, is “Democratic Socialism,” Bernie? It’s a handy phrase, but does it stand for a clearly defined political philosophy? Is it a different "system" from socialism? From democracy? Or is it simply a mask that a socialist wears to make voters think one is “democratic” or "capitalistic"?


Maybe it’s unfair to ask anyone to fully systematize a philosophy. Don’t we all risk contradicting ourselves by our daily choices, lifestyles, and statements? Can’t each of us be accused of hypocrisy in some way, especially if we run our thinking to its logical self-contradiction? Because we generally answer in the affirmative to both questions, we are generally satisfied with shortcuts because long versions could run ad infinitum. Those shortcuts, however, are like looking at a book’s cover to judge the contents.


It’s probably also bordering on the unfair to ask anyone to systematize any thinking. In an open-ended world with time running on toward an indefinite future, any finalization of thinking is probably foolish. Want to reach an end? Then wait till the Sun turns into a Red Giant and fries Earth some five billion years hence. Otherwise, don’t expect any human endeavor (philosophy, politics, science, fashion) to be fully systematized.

There’s a line in Ezekiel that seems most appropriate for August 23, 2023. It runs, given the translation of your choice, something like “God will send brutal men to seek vengeance on evildoers.” It’s predictive for almost all evildoers.


You remember Ezekiel, don’t you? He’s that 6th-century BC prophet who was carted off to Babylon in the forced exile imposed by Nebuchadnezzar II. And the Babylonian king? He was a would-be emperor whose hegemony took him all the way to both Syria and Egypt in a Putin-like attempt to conquer and control. By his writings, I’m guessing Ezekiel wasn’t a willing exile and that his Babylonian captors were in his eyes evildoers. They did, after all, take him from his native land and take his native land from him. Can anyone say, “The Crimea and Eastern Ukraine”?


Through centuries of records, we know that some evildoers do escape brutality and die rather peacefully. Nebuchadnezzar ruled for more than 40 years of his 80-year life and died in power. But like Caligula and the late Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, onetime leader of the Wagner Group and slayer of innocent Ukrainians, many ruthless men who raised themselves to high status and control succumb to violence by other brutal men. On August 23, our contemporary version of a would-be Nebuchadnezzar, Yevgeny Prigozhin fell from on high—literally—when his former friend and another modern Nebuchadnezzar, the brutal Russian President Vladimir Putin, had his plane shot down or had it bombed. *


It’s a tough lesson that evildoers learn the hard way and usually too late. In fact, for so many former evildoers, it’s the last lesson they learn. However brutal they were in life, they find that someone equally brutal rids the world of them.


That Old Conundrum: How Can a Merciful God Allow Evil?


The unfortunate circumstance for the innocent is that they become victims before God sends the brutal men to avenge them. And so, over and over, generation after generation, the bodies of the innocent pile up. We ask, “Why does it take you so long, Lord?” Apparently, God has a pattern here, one that every generation sees unfold slowly: Bad guys become worse, and good guys become worse off. The bad guys generally survive until other bad guys decide their fate—no doubt, we think, by doing God’s will as told by Ezekiel. Is it God’s fault we are so slow to act against the bad guys? Couldn’t we have intervened sooner? Should the innocent become brutal to fulfill the prophet’s prophecy?


You might ask that of “police department de-funders” that have let cities fall into criminal ruin as evildoers degrade modern civilization. Or of irresponsible educators or parents who stand by as a generation of young people turn to mindless destruction and injury. Maybe you might ask that of yourself if you had a suspicion that someone was about to do evil, but you said or did nothing to prevent that evil. Should you have become a “brutal man” inflicting brutality on an evildoer to save the innocent from harm before they imposed that harm?


To Be Peaceful or Not to Be Peaceful, That Is the Dilemma


It’s usually difficult to displace or dispatch a powerful bad guy, thus the sometimes multi-decadal reigns of gang leaders and ruthless dictators and would-be Nebuchadnezzars. Putin, for example, is well protected, and he has a following among Russians who cannot fathom the havoc he has wreaked on Ukrainian civilians by bombing their homes and infrastructure. Many Russians have accepted Putin’s invasion just as the Germans of the late 1930s accepted Hitler’s invasions throughout Europe and the Soviet Union, and those who cannot accept such invasions have remained silent in fear of retribution.


So, here’s the dilemma of the innocent and peace-loving: Isn’t brutality toward Putin just another evil perpetrated by man? All those across the world who want to see an end to his war on Ukraine could ask themselves the moral question: Do we become the brutal men of Ezekiel’s prophecy without losing our innocence and morality?


Fictional Vengeance


I know that movies are movies and that fiction is fiction, but if I had to choose one piece of make-believe that best captures that line in Ezekiel, it would be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a film replete with all the irony one could want: Brutal men seeking vengeance on evildoers and at the same time often “saving” others, even other brutal evildoers. In the film Tarantino has Samuel Jackson mouth a fictional passage from Ezekiel. Maybe Quentin knew that Ezekiel prophecy I quoted above, but purposefully omitted it in favor of acting it out, pictures being worth more words than the Book of Ezekiel holds, actions serving as parables. Good fiction with a message can hide in pulp fiction. Ars gratia artis can also be subtly didactic.


The real-life death of Prigozhin and the fictional deaths of characters in Pulp Fiction bring to the fore the age-old questions about evil and evildoers: Why do they persist through history? Why do they wreak havoc on the innocent for prolonged periods? What can the innocent do to rid themselves of evil without becoming evil in the act of riddance? It always seems to come down to either acting like the evildoers or waiting for brutal men to undo them.


Stalin Died a “Natural Death” like Nebuchadnezzar II—We Think


I’m old enough to remember my mother pointing to our local newspaper’s picture of Stalin lying in state. She simply said, “That was a very bad man.” Stalin, who reigned over 30 years and lived into his 70s, had suffered a stroke. No brutal men came to avenge the millions he put to death or impoverished by his tyrannical Communist regime. Hundreds of thousands of Russians actually mourned his passing. I suppose they were either unaware of the millions of their countrymen he had killed, or they just didn’t care that he killed them.


Like Stalin, someday, Vladimir Putin might die peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, by his supporting church friend, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill who condoned killing Ukrainians, and by many adoring Russians who will remember all the “good” he did for his country by initiating a war in which thousands of Russians died. Such a peaceful death is beyond the control of those who have been killed—both Ukrainians and Russians—in the war and in other conflicts under his command. But it is possible he might die as Prigozhin apparently died this August in an act of brutality by some domestic or international enemy. That, too, is beyond the control of those dead innocents that will never know whether or not God sent brutal men to seek vengeance for their deaths.


Excuse the pessimism here, but that is the way of the world. People minding their own business, going to work, school, place of worship, picnic, party, or some other social gathering find themselves in the grip of evildoers and often killed by them. The dead then have no recourse; the living live in fear until Ezekiel’s prophecy comes to fruition in the elimination of the evildoers.   


Guns and Brutality, Not Social Workers


There isn’t an end in sight for the rise of more evildoers. Every generation since Cain killed Abel has produced its stare of them. Just as innocent people suffered through human history, so for generations ad infinitum more innocent people will suffer. After our own era’s evildoers lie buried, others will plague our progeny .


Over the centuries appeasement and peaceful overtures seem to have had no effect with very few exceptions, such as the withdrawal of Attila from Rome at the request of Pope Leo I—though there are some doubts about the exact details for his withdrawal. That withdrawal by Attila who most certainly would have brutalized the populace, plus a later withdrawal by Genseric without brutalizing the populace makes an argument for peaceful solutions. But those stories are, as I indicated, exceptions. And today, in the tradition of Genseric’s tribe, we still have “vandals” who wreak havoc on innocent people.   


But such retreats from Rome by invading armies by fifth-century AD evildoers are exceptions, and their withdrawal without conflict did not occur in the context of peaceful invasions of Roman territory. Others they encountered did not fare as well as the Romans. In other words, appeasement works only when evildoers acquiesce of their own volition. Otherwise, evildoers do evil.


In twenty-first century USA no peaceful solution has as yet been discovered to eliminate mass shootings and drive-by shootings that take innocent lives. The police can’t be present everywhere and all the time to prevent evildoers from inflicting harm. Even in response, they operate under a lag time that on a local scale reflects the months-long lag time between Putin’s invasion of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine and Ukraine’s and the rest of the world’s response. Evildoers initiate evil. Brutal avengers are a posse requiring informing, convincing, organizing, and acting—all taking time during which the bad guys hurt the innocent.


That makes the argument for the innocent becoming less innocent. It makes the argument for the innocent to become when they need to be the brutal men who seek vengeance on evildoers— or at least to protect the innocent under threat by either the threat of brutality or the actual brutality toward evildoers. And that means the more immediate the response, the less harm to the innocent. If European nations and the United States had responded more quickly or even had preemptively armed Ukraine when Putin threatened the invasion, would he have been emboldened to carry out his presumed conquest? Likewise, should free nations arm Taiwan to the teeth to ward off the Chinese by the threat of brutality?


Give the Good Guys the Wherewithal to Be Bad Guys before the Bad Guys Kill Them                                


Putting guns in the hands of the innocent can save the lives of those under the threat of evildoers. They might have to become as brutal as the characters in Pulp Fiction, the Italian populace who murdered Mussolini, the Libyans who killed Muammar Gaddafi, or as brutal as other men that God has sent to seek vengeance on evildoers.


If Ezekiel is to be believed, then brutality against evildoers by the innocent is justifiable.


But how can a civilization remain civil if even the innocent are encouraged to become brutal? Consider that in arming themselves, the innocent aren’t really encouraged to become brutal; they are simply given the wherewithal to protect themselves and other innocents.


We all know that somewhere on the planet, maybe even in our own neighborhoods, there could be an evildoer plotting at any time. There’s no foolproof protection against a surprise attack, but the potential for an immediate response and an actual rapid response shortens and possibly even prevents that attack. Evildoers, unless they are suicidal or pathological, fear brutality as evidenced by conquerors who have surrounded themselves with select protectors, such as “Royal Guards,” “Imperial Guards,” “Praetorian Guards,” “Varangian Guard,” “Hangu Beykalun,” “Tobang,” the Konigliche Ungarische adelige Leibgarde,” and sundry others sworn to protect leaders both good and evil.


Apparently, no brutal men effected a vengeance upon Nebuchadnezzar II who warded off, probably brutally, attempts to overthrow him or displace his armies. Prigozhin wasn’t as lucky, betrayed as he recently was by Putin. And as for Vlad, well, he’ll do what he can to protect himself from injury just as you or I might protect ourselves. But the threat of brutal men will always be on his mind, and he will find himself moving in smaller and smaller circles, probably using body doubles as Saddam Hussein did and supposedly the late Prigozhin did. That can’t be a sign of complete confidence. Thus, just knowing that potentially, there are brutal men seeking vengeance dampens the evildoer’s lifestyle. Vlad isn’t going to take his yacht for a cruise on the Black Sea at this time.


Not All Prophecies Become Reality


Regardless of Ezekiel’s statement, we know from history that some evildoers don’t succumb to brutal men out for vengeance in God’s name. And that’s why the innocent need the option to protect themselves from some would-be Nebuchadnezzar II attempting to victimize them.


Would the prophet Ezekiel think that armed innocents are doing God’s work?


*At the time of this writing, there is speculation that one of Prigozhin’s doubles was on the plane and not Prigozhin himself.

There’s a problem with any generalization: It limits by its expansiveness. The “All” never does justice to the “Particular.” That’s especially true of generalizing humans and humans generalizing.


Are there recognizable specific molds from which we make humanity’s casts? Sure. I probably fit into a number of them: Senior citizen, retiree, father, grandfather, and others not worth your concern. We use them often during introductions to strangers and on forms (Check “male,” “female,” or “indescribable”). That’s the human mind seeking patterns to make sense of a chaotic universe that is made more chaotic by many individuals’ needs to declare their peculiarities to a largely uninterested world.


We can’t fault ourselves for wanting to see meaning in an unfathomable universe comprised of the known and unknown. Meaning is the mother of purpose, and she wants to keep a tidy house. Think of it as “when I grow up, I want to be…” which is a reflection of seeing meaning in some set of activities that gives a life purpose. Purposelessness breeds despair and self destruction.


But at the same time we strive for recognition as individuals, we see ourselves as casts from clearly identifiable molds. So, we live in duality: Belonging and at the same time not belonging. And we complicate the chaos by making others aware of our peculiarities or the special casts we deem important.


Handed a form in the waiting room, we must select the mold from which we were cast: “Check ‘male’ or ‘female’ in this box.” And now that form becomes more complex—and thus more chaotic—by the addition of ‘other’ or some series of letters that designate the casts from very specific “gender” molds. Complex world, right? And getting more complex and thus seemingly more chaotic. What used to be a simpler and faster process easy to complete is now one that is more complex and slower. “Hmnnn, what gender should I mark? What does ‘preferred pronoun’ mean?” That new complexity arises, by the way, not from conservative, but rather from liberal minds.   


It’s in the above context that I write about the casts produced by the current mold of liberalism in America (and maybe throughout Europe) and the selective impediment to people cast from a particular mold, that is, the conservative mold. Moving through life has never been easy, but it’s become harder because of slowdowns, many of them completely unnecessary and almost all of them derived from the need for identifying a special mold.


The Mold of Liberalism and the Casts of Progressive Movements


What is it about the modern liberal mind that assumes superiority over the conservative mind? Both minds are housed in human brains. Both have access to knowledge, and both can develop an ability to reason and debate. Both often rely on the same kinds of flawed thinking. Yet, the liberal mind in modern America exhibits an unwarranted hubris and folly that actually slows human achievement: Progressives aren’t as “progressive” as they believe themselves (if one can use a traditional pronoun) to be. Their supposed avant-garde thinking often ignores common sense, processes and structures that work, and true freedom of rational expression in favor of fashionable causes du jour. But if you listen to their surrogates in the mainstream media, you might believe they make, as Mussolini’s propagandists proclaimed, “the trains run on time” and turn the Ideal into the Real. They believe the flow of their movements are inhibited by a conservative slowdown cast from a mold of an inferior brain.


Neither liberal nor conservative has a lock on intelligence, but the former have somehow come to think of themselves as more intelligent, and that seems to apply to Hollywood’s “elite,” TV pundits, and to reporters who think that flybys by asteroids and arsonists’ fires are caused by global warming and that all social interactions can be reduced to perspectives driven by racial divisions. The common notion—that is, common among liberals themselves—of liberal superiority has given us a number of generations of snooty smug know-it-alls whose major arguments comprise ad hominem, ad populum, and if…then fallacies. And those fallacies make debate between the two sides as fluid as a traffic pile up on a foggy night.


Consider the following syllogisms:


    Liberals favor progress.
    So-n-so is not a liberal.
    So-n-so does not favor progress.


    Liberals have open minds.
    So-n-so is not a liberal.
    So-n-so does not have an open mind.


    Conservatives are xenophobic.
    So-n-so is not a conservative.
    So-n-so is not xenophobic.


    Conservative are afraid of change.
    So-n-so is a liberal.
    So-n-so is in favor of change.


The premises are too general and assumptive, and the conclusions are illogically derived. But if one generalizes (a mental exercise of dubious value) the division between liberals and conservatives today, he finds that each faulty syllogism represents a liberal assumption about conservative minds. To be fair in generalizing, however, I should note that conservatives often believe that liberals are also cast from an identical mold, one that rejects both tradition and common sense and one that produces casts of hypocrites.


Take a Deep Breath for Some Particulars Interlaced with Some Generalizations


Egged on by a liberal media that buys into the conservative “redneck” metaphor, many modern liberals are incapable of addressing issues with pure reason. Rather, they dismiss conservative arguments as impediments to social progress that, nowadays, amounts to: 1) Putting men in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms and on athletic teams, 2) Permitting euthanasia for any reason and at any age (in liberal Canada), mocking loyalty to a country that has avowed enemies determined to destroy it, 3) Fostering drug use without restrictions that protect non-druggies, 4) Teaching little kids about sex with graphic images of oral sex to the exclusion of more hours on the three “Rs,” 5) Defunding police without a viable alternative to peacekeeping, releasing repeat criminals without reform, 6) Opening the country’s borders without guaranteeing the health and safety of citizens as well as the health and safety of migrants, 7) Forcing people to remain indoors, including assisted-living facilities for the aged, where they demonstrably spread a virus among themselves or among family members, 8) Forcing people to wear masks and follow arrows down grocery store aisles that ended with six-foot separation marks on the checkout line floor, 9) Ignoring deaths that result from fentanyl and tranq trafficking because mentioning either would entail accepting responsibility for the policies that led to the overdoses, 10) Ignoring sex trade and enslavement of minors, 11) Chasing after greenhouse gas emitters to the detriment of national and personal economies and pursuing supposed green tech that uses heavy metals and materials that will increase water pollution, and, of course, 12) Shutting down dissent on any topic they favor, including all of the above.


And all of the above are cast from the general mold of Progressivism. But are they really “progressive”? Do they really move humanity forward? Is, for example, the banning of fossil fuels that since the Industrial Revolution supported the growth of modern civilization really a progressive policy? Should we in the name of Progressivism eliminate the thousands of products, including the fuel for transportation, air conditioning, and city water pumps upon which much of modern civilization depends because Liberals fear a debatable change in climate? Is that the thinking of superior brains? Really?    


Are some conservative minds and policies as equally flawed as those liberal minds and policies? Of course. Adherents of strict fundamentalism often lack open-mindedness. That some conservatives advocate book-burning and banning, acts that solve no social problem, is an identifiable intellectual flaw because both burning and banning are self-defeating as they pique curiosity and defiance (the same can be said for liberals’ war on movies like Sound of Freedom and books criticizing liberal philosophies and practices that Barnes and Noble’s sales staff, to the detriment of company sales, hid in the back of the stores while placing books by liberals up front in a blatant example of book banning).


But, as I have written elsewhere, we are given to conflating topics and ignoring hypocritical stances: No doubt there are “liberals” who own businesses that “harm” the environment and humans, just as there are conservatives who exploit the planet’s resources, including its human resources, to the long-term detriment of all humanity.   


Conservative adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake can be an impediment to both technological and social progress. One might have become accustomed to using a typewriter or an 8-track player, but there’s little denying that neither is better than—or even equal to—their modern replacements. In casting off some traditions as liberals are inclined to do in the name of avant-garde policy, they rid us of the clumsy and inefficient, but it is only in replacing the old with something less clumsy and more efficient that liberals fulfill their progressive ideals. Much of what modern liberals do actually slows down civil justice in the name of social justice, for example, and that is a throwback to times when only the privileged were guaranteed justice and mercy. (Is it just, for example, to encourage unbridled migration that has become entwined with drug and trafficking cartels, the abuse of migrant children, and the growth of sex slavery?)


Are there conservatives who cannot argue reasonably? Sure. Are there extremists among conservatives? Definitely. But conservative objections to social issues like men in women’s bathrooms, graphic sex education in early elementary school grades, and dissolving a police force that serves as a check against criminals, all amount to a desire for a practical social order that works better than a system in which anyone can do anything regardless of harm to the freedom of others. The effort to slow down or stop movements that liberals espouse might just as easily be ascribed to the desire for common sense with regard to mores, government size, and national security. Objecting to cigarette and marijuana smoke, for example, is born not from a desire to restrict others from doing whatever they want with their own bodies, but of a desire to protect oneself from having to breathe on a public sidewalk a smoke deemed injurious. “You want to smoke pot? Fine. But I don’t, so go somewhere else.” Conservatives might not really object to any liberal doing anything in any manner if the act or policy does not affect them, but to argue such about conservatives requires, of course, a generalization.


Is conservatism an impediment to social interactions or individual freedoms? What of conservative objections to matters like abortion and euthanasia? Aren’t conservatives backward and freedom-inhibiting there? Yes and No. The supposed rational argument of liberals that “it’s my body” ignores the separate and scientifically provable DNA identifier of the fetus; and the supposed rational argument of “let them die with dignity” assumes in many instances a preference for economy of the healthy over life of the unhealthy or poor, as in Canada’s euthanasia system. In both abortion and euthanasia, convenience seems to be the ultimate value. So, I have to ask, “Is Convenience the guiding principle of modern liberalism?” Is it the mold from which a liberal life is cast? Does the Liberal driver steer, accelerate, and brake without regard to others sharing the same roads?


Are these generalizations worth the cyberspace they occupy? In part, yes. If we’re all on the road of life, then we should understand the vehicles we ride to our sundry destinies.     


Traffic Slowdowns


Have you ever driven on a major highway? If you have, then you know that almost anything can slow down traffic: Accident, pot holes, road construction, and storms. If you drive Pittsburgh’s Parkway, you encounter yet another cause of slowdown during rush hour, namely, going through one of two long tunnels: From the east, the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, and from the west, the Fort Pitt. * Apparently, entering the tunnels, which house the same width highways that lead to the tunnels, causes drivers to slow down in a domino effect, even though there is no sign or toll booth cautioning a slowdown. Someone in the lead driving 60 mph slows to enter; the person behind subsequently slows, and behind that driver another does the same, backing up traffic. Halfway through and upon exiting the tunnels, drivers find themselves back up to speed among thinned out cars zooming toward downtown. The slowed flow is daily pain in the seated portion of the human body—but the reward of coming out of the city-side of the Fort Pitt is a spectacular view of Pittsburgh, the Monongahela and Allegheny confluence, and the wide Ohio. ** So, once out of the slowdown, drivers soon forget the slowdown. That’s the way with all of us in part, but it is especially true of liberals who cannot remember the failures they impose on society, such as stopping the border wall and opening the cities to more crime by defunding the police. The glorious Ideal Future is ever present in their minds. The failures of past policies can be attributed to faulty execution; this time we’ll get it right (an argument made by socialists, Marxists, and fascists).


It doesn’t take much to slow the line of traffic, just a single driver’s dropping speed to continue on the same size highway through the tunnels (or a single lawsuit to require yet another category on what used to be a simple and understandable form). Maybe entering the tunnel causes a perception of difficulty. But it’s only a perception. Maybe the solid double line separating lanes through the tunnels affects drivers because it forbids crossing lanes. I don’t know; I just know everyone slows down before entering and then speeds up halfway through and exits the tunnel up to speed. The only exceptions to this phenomenon are an official government car, such as an escorted limo carrying the President or a governor, or the ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars for which everyone makes a path. 


Where’s This Leading? You Started by Driving My Mind toward a Discussion of Liberal Minds, and Now, You’re Talking Traffic


Granted, this might be a strange analogy. “What,” you have the duty to ask, “is the connection between slowing down to enter a tunnel for which there is no reason to drop speed and the liberal mind or modern liberalism?” Maybe not a clear one, but there definitely seems to be at least a loose connection between liberal Democrats and the slowdown. Certainly, the past years of pandemic policies inhibiting the free flow of commerce, education, and dissent relate one to the other. And now liberals want to slow the political flow of their opponents.


I think we are witnessing The Tunnel Effect in American politics at this time. We were headed toward our quad-annual election cycle as usual when every (an exaggeration) Democrat DA or AG put on the brakes, slowing and possibly even stopping that flow of political traffic except for one car, the current President’s limo. It speeds along without interruption by a disinterested Press that, among society’s drivers, actually has an obligation to slow things down by questioning both the direction and the speed of the Executive Driver.


If John Locke Were an Uber Driver 


Make John Locke a modern Uber driver. Although he died in the early years of the 18th century, he drove America’s Founding Fathers toward his version of civil structure. Locke argued that the executive and legislative branches were separate. And as in Uber driver/customer relationships, the customers give their consent to allow the Uber driver to take them to their preferred destination. In particular, Locke argued against a civil structure led by an executive who also had the power of shaping law and justice.   


But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Americans have found themselves in the midst of an apparent slowdown of justice because of an ostensible control over Justice by the Executive. And that slowdown is being selectively used at this time against a political opponent—just the very thing the Founding Fathers, under the influence of Locke’s philosophy, tried to avoid.  


No doubt you could think of a number of slowdown examples here, but I’ll mention a few driven by the Executive’s appointed minions in the Department of Justice: Nixon’s Watergate (John Mitchell), Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair (Ed Reese), Obama’s Fast and Furious (Eric Holder), and now Biden’s Hunter Laptop and pay-to-play hustling that made the Bidens rich (Merrick Garland). In each instance, the Justice Department seems to have impeded the flow of justice, not expedited it, and it has done so as a surrogate of the Executive.


Would Locke exhibit some road rage over the slowdown in the progress of justice? If we read him correctly, he might be at least more than a little perturbed at what Classical Liberalism has become. Liberals in control of the speed of information and the speed of justice today appear to stand in contrast to his “ideal” liberals. Those latter would, under Locke’s tutelage, be at the very least tolerant (Tolerance was the subject of one of Locke’s famous letters--Letter Concerning Toleration). But when we look at the Jew-Catholic-Black-hating KKK emerging from the Southern Democrats, the  obviously liberal Deep State members of the FBI who handcrafted the Russian Collusion Hoax and who wrote directives in an FBI office to infiltrate traditional Catholics and to recruit “spies” in their churches, we see little evidence of a tolerant government facilitating the free flow of justice. Liberal intolerance is apparently as far right as any fascism can get as evidenced by a Justice Department’s Merrick Garland’s letter identifying concerned parents as domestic terrorists and supporting an armed contingent’s midnight raid on a family of pro-lifers over a scuffle on a sidewalk that the local DA refused to prosecute. All these examples of a corrupted government occurred under a media’s dismissive “look-the-other-way-because-it’s-not-us” prejudice against any dissent by perceived enemies of the current administration. Goodness! Locke, who was a 17th-century physician would have found himself fleeing once again to Holland to avoid persecution for questioning Dr. Fauci’s shutdown of America. Was any liberal slowdown more telling than that of the pandemic?


Austin


But Democrats continue to slow down true progress toward “civilizing” humanity. Look at Austin, Texas, for example. The defund-the-police movement led to a $150 million cut in police support. The city now has under 1,500 cops when it could easily use 2,000 for its growing population. Did the city’s liberal council achieve the “progress” they hoped to achieve? Crime appears to have increased across all categories though the cause-and effect relationship between the policy and increased homicides might be difficult to prove. Certainly, detectives pulled from solving cases assist in answering 911 calls inhibits their police work. Given the rise in crime, the council appears to have made driving toward the tunnel slower and getting to the beautiful city a longer process. And as the voting citizenry will probably show, few seem to understand that halfway through the tunnel of folly, their lives have become less “progressive.” How is a policy that enhances crime progressive? How is a return to barbarism progressive?


We’re Not in the Tunnel; We’re in the Traffic Leading to the Tunnel


The part of the Tunnel Effect I find interesting is that once people enter the tunnel, they usually realize they can resume the speed of their travel. They discover there was no physical cause for the slowdown. Drivers just unconsciously slowed their vehicles after the leading driver applied brakes, causing the chain reaction traffic backup. All the drivers seem to have acted in unison, forgetting their individuality and their freedom to move at reasonable speed. For the liberal drivers, thinking becomes a common cast from a mold shaped by government and media. They consent to drive at the speed they are forced to drive by the leader, and they go where the leader leads. And yes, before you object, there are also conservatives who drive where their leaders want them to go. But look at Austin. The drivers drive slowly toward, through, and out of the tunnel of modern liberalism. The time it takes to reach the destination of progress has been lengthened by the progressive policies of modern liberals.


Is there any more blatant example of traffic slowdown than the election of John Fetterman, the inarticulate stroke victim who began his debate with an articulate doctor by saying, “Goodnight,” or the elections of a VP who can only cackle and speak in childish tautologies and inane explanations, or in a President who believes weather phenomena should dictate a decrease in energy supply that led to energy dependence on foreign powers? Is there any more blatant subservience to a political party than the Democrats re-electing the same people whose regressive policies in the name of “ideals” and “trends” led to increases in crime, drug deaths, and international weakness? Seems to me that cars driven by Democrats stay in reduced speed even halfway through and all the way through the tunnel. Are their EV batteries charged enough to make the journey to their ideal city?


Consider this summary of a principle of Locke’s written in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “If the rule of law is ignored, if the representatives of the people are prevented from assembling, if the mechanisms of election are altered without popular consent [as they were during the pandemic], or if the people are handed over to a foreign power, then they can take back their original authority and overthrow the government” (Locke, Two Treatises.  2.212–17). *** Locke’s conclusion justified the American Revolution in the eighteenth century. Today, under the established Constitution of the United States a peaceful act of voting could overturn the regression if those voting drivers recognize that their leaders are not truly progressive.


Let’s hope that modern Liberals can wrap their minds around a real freedom of movement and expression that the originator of Classical Liberalism was driving at. But that’s just a hope. I’m looking at a line of traffic backed up many miles and at a driving time lengthened by the slowdown leading to the tunnel.


I’m trying to get to the other side of the tunnel, where I can resume my speed toward a beautiful city, where humans cooperate to make progress without interference by agendas executed without their consent. In the contradictory “liberal” mold, liberation is not a universal right; it is cast by liberals for liberals only. Its leaders seek more to control where we go and the speed at which we travel there.


And, yes, I know that is a generalization.


*A third tunnel, the Liberty, carries drivers arriving from the south, but those have a gauntlet of traffic lights on routes 19 and 51 that prohibits highway speeds. 


**See YouTube under the title “Fort Pitt Tunnel into Pittsburgh Pa.” The video reveals the slowdown at the western entrance to the tunnel, a slowdown that backs traffic far up Green Tree Hill.


***Online at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#ConsPoliObliEndsGove

According to Julia Olsen, the fires that plague the American West are “fueled by fossil fuel pollution.” That’s the claim of the director of the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, the group that won a recent court case against Montana over the state’s laws that allowed the use of fossil fuels without assessing carbon emissions. * They won the case on the grounds that a Montana law violated its constitution, which states:


“The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

So, buying into the argument that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—pity the status of future plants; they’ll look back to say: “In the old days we could photosynthesize”—the judge accepted the argument that releasing that gas is a violation of the constitutional mandate to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment.” I guess the health of Montana’s plants don’t count. Who needs plants?

The Fires, Oh! The Fires! And the Smoke!

The plaintiffs aged between 5 and 22. I could not find any statement from the five-year-old, but Claire Vlases, 20-year-old plaintiff, said: “When I think about summer, I think about smoke. It sounds like a dystopian movie, but it’s real life.”
How one connects Montana’s carbon dioxide emissions to fires and their consequent smoke is a difficult stretch to me, but that’s the logic of alarmists (see yesterday’s blog on conflation). Oh, I know the argument: Anthropogenic emissions lead to global warming that leads to droughty conditions and incessant  fires. Not only are we humans warming the planet, we are also burning it.

Having done the first emissions study for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one that the USEPA said it was using as a model for other states to follow, I have enough background to note that Montana is not an industrial giant spewing a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Its fossil fuel production leads to about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Obviously, that comes from its fossil fuels being used in other states or countries, those industrial states hungry for fuel to run their businesses.

Protect the Helpless Little Gretas of the World

“Today, for the first time in US history, a court ruled on the merits of a case that the government violated the constitutional rights of children through laws and actions that promote fossil fuels, ignore climate change, and disproportionately imperil young people,” Olson said.


You might be tempted to mouth sarcasm here: We wouldn’t want the children of Montana benefitting from the wealth generated by fossil fuel production. We wouldn’t want the child victims of Montana obtaining any of the thousands of byproducts of fossil fuel production, including medicines. Poor kids, victimized by the land exploiters, they cannot breathe air free from smoke caused by fossil fuel emissions that generated fires.


But sarcasm never convinces anyone in a debate. As Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in the eighteenth century, one can’t reason someone out of something he or she hasn’t been reasoned into. And although the alarmist will argue that “science” and “97% of scientists” are on their side, they have turned the argument into an emotional response devoid of scientific doubt and Popper’s famous principle of falsification.

Can Popper’s Principle of Falsification Apply to Climate Change?

How does one falsify “climate change that might take not just decades or centuries, but maybe even millennia. Keep in mind that the Wisconsin Glacial Episode ran from about 70 millennia ago to about 10 thousand years ago and that the current interglacial episode has been, therefore, ten thousand years in the making. Climate is among the most complex topics we humans attempt to understand, involving not just atmospheric composition, physics, and chemistry, but also land-water distribution, orographic influences, latitude, solar energy, albedo, clouds, and ocean circulation—and that list isn’t all inclusive. Climates have changed repeatedly without any human intervention. Should we blame plate tectonics for the current distribution of climates because the crustal movements have raised the high Himalayas that subsequently affected the climates of not only India, but also of other regions?

But the alarmists like to keep it simple. To them, it’s all about the anthropogenically caused “greenhouse effect,” and not patterns and anomalies going back not just millions, but billions of years.

Numbers. Isn’t That What Science Is?

What’s the quantity of Montana’s emissions? The state’s extraction results in an annual seventy-million tons of emissions. Compare that to the 37 billion (metric) tons emitted annually across the world. Isn’t 70,000,000 just 0.00189 % of the world total emissions? Montana produces just 5% of US coal, far less than states like Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The greenhouse gases wafting over the state are probably derived from other states and countries. And as for fossil fuel emissions affecting Montanans, maybe they should consider closing down tilling the land and grazing on it. Phew! Those cattle…that methane…those nitrogen compounds…

That, I readily offer to plantiff Claire Vlases, is “real life.” So, also, is this: Montana contains state forests and significant parts of national forests that cover millions of acres. The Nez Perce forest alone is 4,000,000 acres. If an acre sequesters two or more tons of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis annually, that one forest absorbs more than eight million tons of Montana’s 70,000,000 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Add into the acreage of the Nez Perce, the 1.5 million acres of the Bitterroot Forest, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest’s 3.3 million acres, the Kaniksu National Forest’s total area of 1,627,833 acres, and other state and federal forests, and you get carbon sequestration that cannot be ignored in the climate debate—unless one is an alarmist.

Constitutional Mandates

Since the Renaissance and the rise of the modern world, populations across the world wrote, junked, and revised constitutions. The reasons for revisions vary: Change in ruling class, for example, or popular amendments that won majority approval. And the need to revise also arises from the modern world’s rapidly advancing technologies: Freedom of Speech had to be adapted from oral speech to newspaper speech to radio and television speech and film speech to internet speech that eventually included social media speech. The writers of the First Amendment could not have foreseen today’s variations in speech delivery.

We could ask whether the court read the Montana state constitution too literally because it accepted terms like “clean” and “maintain” without qualification. Should the state return the land to its pre-Colonial condition when Montana’s twelve native tribes roamed the land? Would that mean “maintain”? Then the judge should have included an order to unpave the roads, destroy any dams, and eliminate any landfills.

Couldn’t the plaintiffs’ lawyers have made a better argument by citing mining’s potential release of mercury and lead into the environment? Obviously, what counts is what wins, no matter the logic of the argument. But the judge should have reasoned that carbon dioxide, the gas without which photosynthesis cannot occur, is neither a pollutant nor a cause of fires however loosely the plaintiffs said it was.

But let’s blame the state’s lawyers for a weak defense. Shouldn’t the state have argued that every Montana child can benefit from fossil fuels? Is there any way to quantify the “damage” done to the “clean” environment by fossil fuel production in Montana?

No doubt the state will appeal the ruling. It did not call its climate expert, Judith Curry to testify in its defense. I don’t know why; her testimony would have devastated the plaintiff’s argument. Curry is well known for her opposition to the climate alarmists’ claims of existential danger.

​If Judges and Juries Are Uninformed…

Complex issues require complex thinking.

We’re off the deep end, here, folks. No reasonable argument applies. “The science is settled,” alarmists say. And their proof is a very hot summer and fires. Imagine what they might have concluded during the Dust Bowl Years that ruined farmers, the Medieval Warm Period that enabled the Vikings to settle in Greenland, or the 16th-century droughts in the American Southeast that might have contributed to the fate of the Lost Colony vying for food resources with stressed native inhabitants.

The next time a climate alarmist makes the claim of “science,” ask how that science can be falsified (Popper’s test). What can their answer be? “Wait and see.” To which you should respond, How long?”

Of course, alarmists will reply that once the “tipping point” is reached, it will be “too late to turn back.” But turn back from what? Will a warmer world be definitively bad for all or just for some in selected places while benefitting others in other places?

I wonder whether the denizens of the interglacial period that preceded the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn colder or the subsequent denizens of the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn warmer. Climate is only briefly, as Earth time goes, in equilibrium. It’s hard to keep a teeter board horizontal. Only the slightest variation in weight shifts the balance. The imbalance can occur for natural, as well as for artificial, reasons.



*https://www.breitbart.com/news/montana-court-rules-for-young-people-in-landmark-us-climate-trial/

Conflation plagues the modern mind. We have so much to think and do daily, that we often mix things up a bit. Such is the nature of the human brain: The more it gets, the more it conflates, or, at least, the more that it has the potential to conflate.


But, short of an apocalyptic nuclear war that reduces us to groveling primitives, our lives aren’t going to change: We’ll still have brains overpacked with intrusive social, psychological, and physical concerns that are indeterminate orders of magnitude greater with every new technology.


Buy an electric car? Then this pops into your head: What brand? What technology? How many passengers? Room for luggage? What mileage? What comfort? What warranty? What repairs done by whom and where? What charging portal at home? Where to recharge on a trip that exceeds the mileage range? Where to park? What are the chances of theft? How much for insurance? What insurance company? How much is the deductible? Do I clean it today? Pay for detailing? Are the tires appropriate for winter roads? Does it have planned obsolescence or a length of service I determine? Will the car bring me an acceptable social status in my or the larger community? Does it hold its value? And all that plus more thoughts, objects, and interactions not related to the car fill our heads. Wasn’t life simpler for our ancient ancestors? Sure, like them you have to obtain food, but in just the last 200 years alone our food choices have gone from about 500 to more than 50,000, and more food choices bombard our brains stimulated by commercials, cook books, magazines, and food shows. Yes, life was simpler.


So, we conflate when we can’t keep things straight under the speed of modern life. And among the matters we conflate are our personal economic circumstances and the propagandized topics the professional and social media thrust on us daily, no better example of which is the subject of global warming and its corollary climate change.


Background for the Foregoing


I saw part of a climate alarmists’ TV spot yesterday. Because I did not see it in its entirety, I cannot relate it verbatim (and I’m too disinterested to search for it), but I believe the following captures its essence accurately. Appearing as a chat or exchanged texts, the video runs something like this:


“I can’t take this heat.”
“We can’t afford to run the air conditioner and simultaneously pay for food.”
“We have to move.”


See the connection? Yeah. Neither do I. But it is clear in the minds of climate-change alarmists eager to send humanity back into a time before mankind controlled fire.


Somehow the video got around to conflating climate change and personal economics. And somehow the video’s producers missed the point that the costs to run an air conditioner are more related to energy prices inflated by nonsensical public policy that takes fossil fuel power plants offline while simultaneously making the country dependent upon fossil fuels produced elsewhere.


Under the conflated thinking of alarmists who made the video, the USA should abandon the extraction of its 44.4 billion barrels of petroleum, its 625.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and its 471 billion tons of coal and replace all with wind-, hydro-, nuclear-, and gerbil-power.


Fire and Climate Change


What are those lines by Robert Frost in “Fire and Ice”? “Some say the world will end in fire….” I haven’t seen the alarmists use the tragic Maui fire yet, but I’m sure it will be part of a media argument in the aftermath of almost 100 deaths. That conflation will come soon though the suspected cause of the fire at the time of this writing isn’t global temperatures, but is rather the electric utility’s equipment.


Forest fires killing off koalas? Yep, that’s what Greenpeace suggests with a video of a cute little koala clinging to a eucalyptus tree in a burning forest (edited?). And fires in Canada spewing choking smoke into the northern USA? Have they somehow spontaneously started because the climate is changing? Does it matter that some of those Canadian fires were set by arsonists? No, has to be global warming, right?


With regard to the tragic fire in Hawaii, I’ll make the alarmists’ argument for them: Global warming has led to more and more intense hurricanes, such as the one that fanned Maui’s fire, killing people on Maui. Does it matter that hurricanes have occurred in the Pacific (called typhoons there) since the Pacific formed? Nope. Does it matter that hurricane intensity and number have not risen as predicted? Again, nope.


For the alarmists, modern fires are the product of too much anthropogenic carbon dioxide, a gas that ironically puts out fire supposedly started under an overabundance of carbon.


Those Rising Seas


And what of seas rising so fast that they make Noah’s Great Biblical Deluge look like a damp floor immediately after a mopping with white vinegar and water? Why, in a mere 900 years at the current rate of sea level rise, the ocean will be a full three feet higher. Obviously, that’s bad news for coastal residents, but not so bad as to deter alarmist Barack Obama from building two expensive houses at the water’s edge—one on the site of the TV series Magnum, P.I. and the other on Martha’s Vineyard, that demonstrably (un)friendly sanctuary to illegal aliens.


Ouch, Ouch, Ouch


Let’s not forget Phoenix’s sidewalks, so hot during the 2023 summer that some falling pedestrians suffered burns. Can anyone say, “Don’t touch the car hood during a Miami, Dallas, or Phoenix cloudless July afternoon”? “Hot enough to cook an egg”—a standby reference used by reporters for decades. “No joke,” as POTUS says, “I’’ve seen it. No, really, I remember how hot my car was in Miami in 1980, how hot it was in Huntsville, Alabama, during a summertime visit to relatives” (at least the high temperatures were accompanied by high humidity in both places—otherwise, I would have said, “Yeah, hot, but hot like Vegas in summer”).


Past vs. Present


Why do climate alarmists fret so much that they have generated a new kind of therapy centered on their anxiety over climate change? Do they believe this to be the first time humans have had to deal with warming? Steeped in an historical vacuum that relates no Earth or human history—thank you, educators— they appear to have been propagandized into unwarranted fears by little kids like Greta Thunberg and an uncritical Press and political class willing to give up prosperity for a dubious hypothesis that links carbon dioxide causally to atmospheric temperature when past rises in temperature cannot be definitively linked to carbon in the atmosphere.   


The human past was also riddled with very hot summers, as during the heat waves of 1743 in China, 1808 in England, and 1900 in eastern United States—too many historical  heat waves to mention and many never recorded by their victims. What of the Roman Warm Period that Theophrastus reports? it lasted about150 years.


It’s Not Just Fires That They Conflate with Carbon Emissions


What about the Tropical diseases like leprosy spreading into Florida? But wasn’t malaria a problem in the Chesapeake area until the 1950s? And those other tropical diseases? Aren’t they the obvious result of climate change? Or are they invasive diseases related in some way to the influx of aliens who never have to go through a quarantine as so many immigrants did on Ellis Island in New York or Fisher Island in Florida? Did one of the three or four million illegal aliens admitted by the Biden Administration enter the continent with leprosy? Yes, hot summers are not the only product of global warming according to the activists; deaths by tropical diseases are a serious concern for alarmists. A warmer world will kill us in more ways than one, they argue. As the video I reference suggests, all of us should move (but we don’t know to where).


Conflation is a selective process when an agenda is the motive: Alarmists can easily conflate the spread of diseases with global warming but not with global migration, evil intent, and people who have never had reasonable healthcare or running water, screens, and public sewage disposal in their previous homes. A mobile world population spreads diseases, just as the early colonizers spread small pox in the New World.


What Do You Prefer?


Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, makes a point worth considering in his recent book. Cold is more enemy to humans than warm  (352). * Our species, he reminds us, evolved in tropical conditions in Africa. I might add that hominids-turned-hominins probably became bipedal during droughty conditions that decimated forests and replaced them with hot savanna, forcing our ancient ancestors out of the trees and onto the ground. Alarmists “walking” around today owe their bipedalism to a warm and droughty Africa. Would they prefer walking on all fours without opposable thumbs?


Cold is more challenging than warm for all life-forms without adaptation. Cold-adapted life-forms migrated from warmer environs. But if cold is life’s enemy, how does one account for herds of caribou and stocks of cod? Note a general biogeographical trend: More species in the tropics each represented by relatively small member numbers and fewer species in cold climes each represented by large member numbers. Heat favors diversity. Migration with cold adaptation favors high membership numbers.


But as with most generalities, there are exceptions, and human distribution is one of those exceptions. Humans apparently survive rather well in warm conditions as the populations of tropical countries attest. They do not do as well in the permafrost without the aid of technology. The population of Indonesia, where the temperatures range from a low of 70 degrees F to 94 degrees F, is 277,000,000, making it the fourth most populous nation. The distribution of India’s 1.3 billion people seems to be unaffected by high temperatures, but is, rather, affected by the amount of rain with the exception of the Assam valley, the Circars coast, and the southern face of the Himalayas where population is less dense though rainfall is abundant. Brazil, Bangladesh, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, all warm countries, are all highly populated. Without technology, humans don’t fare as well in cold climate countries if population numbers are the test. Moore also points out that most Canadians live near the warmer regions next to the US border. The frozen North of Canada is sparsely populated.


Before the technological development of transportation systems that connected warm to cold, hunting and gathering provided food. Agriculture began in warm climatic conditions: The Norsemen were not known for their extensive croplands. Moore argues that during the entire Phanerozoic (the half-billion year era of multicellular, and thus, “visible”—phaneros—life) is dominated by higher temperatures with just three intermittent cold periods, the last being our own times beginning about 2.5 million years ago. His message: The current Earth is an exception; the planet is normally warmer and has been cooling for the past 50 million years (after the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum).


The current “interglacial” period could reverse itself just as previous interglacials ended in the spread of vast sheets of ice like those that covered most of Canada and northern United States and Europe just 12 millennia ago. What’s better? Canada completely covered by massive sheets of ice more than a mile thick, or Canada with available arable land? New York City’s Central Park under ice, or New York City with a three-foot rise in sea level? Yeah. Being able to grow food in Canada is a plus and a three-foot rise over the course of the next 900 years is, as changing coastal cities have discovered over the past four millennia, not a process that New York City can’t handle as successfully or more successfully than all ancient coastal cities.


The Media behind the Conflation


The American media has fully accepted the global warming hypothesis, and their reporters tie any hot weather to carbon. To account for cold weather, they also blame global warming under the term climate change. They do not have an out: Their commitment to the propagandized climate debate prohibits them from considering the complexities of weather systems, climate systems, atmospheric physics and chemistry, and overriding large Earth cycles. It prohibits them from acknowledging that humans have chosen to live in harms way, as the over developed coastal cities reveal. Want to live near the water’s edge? then expect to be affected by hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones).


Okay, You’ve Read Enough


Conflation is an inescapable mental process in the modern world. All of us do it, but some do it blindly, drawing on a predisposition to see relationships where others tell us to see them. Hot in Phoenix? Then move—or don’t move. But don’t fault carbon for increasing your electric bill. Fault those who refuse to allow America to regain its energy independence.

*Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible EnvironmentalistPatrick Moore, Ph.D. Published 2013 

Be careful what you approve. It might be detrimental to your way of life.


So, NYC’s mayor Eric Adams is upset with having to spend over nine million bucks per day to accommodate illegal migrants. Why? Isn’t NYC a sanctuary city, proclaimed to be so because Trump was declared a xenophobe? Can’t have NY liberals letting that go without a compassionate response born of liberal idealism and the quest for power.


But now, the consequences of legislating for purely political reasons is hitting the city’s finances, crowding its available spaces, and introducing diseases, drugs, and homeless people to its environs. Who’s to blame here? And who has the temerity to complain to others for actions taken for political power?


Could there be any places more hypocritical than the sanctuary NYC, Boston, and Chicago? Oh! Yes, the sanctuary island of Martha’s Vineyard. Took those residents less than a day to start exiling the immigrants flown to them by Texas.


NYC’s Mayor Adams wants the Federal Government to help. He wants the taxes supplied by other places to fund his city’s broken policy. He wants your money to pay for his city’s policies.


Here’s a prediction born of experience: Regardless of the failed policies of liberal leaders of major cities, the citizens of those cities will continue to keep them in control. The citizens will step over the homeless on their streets—and over human feces—on their way to the voting booth and vote for the very people who have drained their cities’ coffers on Leftwing policies. Rising crime will not change their minds. Rising costs will not change their minds. Continuing neighborhood degradation will not change their minds. Rising death counts from fentanyl will not change their minds.


Nothing will change their minds unless they are personally affected. MS-13 violence? Now more than 200,000 fentanyl deaths? Now tranq’s living dead? Decreased police presence? More criminals released without rehabilitation to more peaceful lives? Increases in shootings and homicides? Exploitation of children run into the sex slave trade by drug and human trafficking cartels infiltrating the country? More men in women’s restrooms and locker rooms? Nothing. And possibly coming to a liberal legislature near you, more euthanasia ALA Canada, killing off Americans for reasons such as debt and disability—even children. Yeah, that’s probably coming to a compassionate legislature near you. But even such a shift toward Nazi-style society will probably not change their minds. And in the most glaring example of psychological projection, those who will not change and who will allow creeping control over citizens will shout “Nazi” and “Fascist” at any conservative or group of conservatives.


That which is not personal is meaningless.


I wonder how any voter might vote if the consequences of past votes were personal.


That which is not personal is meaningless. NYC’s mayor saw nothing personal in the sanctuary city status of his city until it affected his city. So, too, Boston’s, Chicago’s, and other sanctuary cities’ mayors. When they saw no personal effects, they saw no meaning in a secure border. Effects that affect are meaningful.


That which is not personal is meaningless. That which is not personal is meaningless.


That which is personal is meaningful. Too bad Mayor Adams had to learn that lesson the hard way. Now he has an out-of-control migrant problem that he can’t solve with his city’s resources.


Make your check payable to Eric Adams, c/o City of New York. In writing that check, you’ll make that which you thought wasn’t personal, personal, and, therefore, meaningful. Not going to write it? Where do you think the Feds will get the money to send to Eric?

Is there anything tomorrow’s historians will write about American politics that reflects positively on the past six years? As more details emerge, we now know, for example, that not only did government officials participate in a hoax (“Russian Collusion”), but also that at least one FBI agent was actually colluding with the Russians. And that agent was involved in the Trump-Russia hoax investigations.


Forget the dirty details: Suffice it to say Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the New York FBI field office, is accused of working for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch. McGonigal might eventually become a “type,” a person historians will say represents one of the most scandalous periods in American history.


Of course, the liberal media won’t mention anything detrimental to their leftist agenda, but somehow future researchers will uncover the coverups and make them part of the record of our times. At least one hopes that all the coverups and confusion will be sorted out by researchers. The research, however, will require more effort than anthropologists make as they wander around the Afar Triangle looking for a representative early human species. But McGonigal is a start. His involvement might be a starting point for those digging through the fossilized remains of our times.


Paleontologists, like those Leaky-inspired anthropologists, recognize various types of fossils. McGonigal is the most obvious type. We have the actual critter in hand, bones and all the paperwork. Apparently, they were all lying just beneath the surface of loose dirt.


But not all fossils “look” like the fossilized animal. Not all are whole. And some are just traces that something living was there, traces like footprints and drag marks, and coprolites, and empty burrows. We don’t have the actual documents, much as we don’t have the National Archive documents that Clinton’s Sandy Berger sneaked out of the building in his pants. We just know the documents were there at one time and that after his visit to the Archive, they went missing.


Fossils come in forms other than traces. Molds are exterior impressions, much like the outside of a seashell. We can guess what was inside, but we don’t have remnants of the “guts.” That’s pretty much what historians will have to interpret as they sift through entities like the shell companies set up by the Biden family. Casts are infilled molds, and they make up a different type of fossil. We see matter that replaced the “guts.” But historians will argue whether or not such fossil records are merely secondhand say so.


Some fossils are the product of permineralization, a process during which dissolved minerals seep into organic structures and replace them with crystalline solids. Think petrified wood as an example. It’s often quite colorful, and it sometimes reveals intricate structures previously made of soft materials. Historians will have both an easy and a tough time with such fossil records of our times. When the replaced materials are present in one-to-one accuracy, the task will be easy. When our contemporary media replace the truth with propaganda, it will be difficult. Yes, the history will be colorful and interesting, but no, the history will be false. Think of all those newspaper articles and TV reports that inundated the record with false claims of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and “Russian Collusion,” ala McGonigal, Adam Schiff, CNN, MSNBC, and others. Or think of the solution that the FBI used to replace the reality of Hunter’s laptop and Joe’s involvement in his business with some very shady foreigners and entities.


Yes, like paleontologists searching for fossils that reveal the nature of Earth’s past, so historians will have to dig in the hopes of finding the truth of our times. In fact, as one who has dug fossils, I can say that finding them is easier than finding the truth of a human era.


Easier for a reason: Environments conducive to fossilization are well known. Find the rocks produced in those environments, and you’ll easily find the fossils they contain. Shales, limestones, and sandstones are good places to start. They are sedimentary rocks, meaning that they were originally made of materials that “settled” out of a fluid like water or air—though some formed bottom up in situ, like coral reefs. Want an example? Go to the Fort of San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, and look at the walls. They’re made of coquina, naturally cemented ancient sea shells. Or stop by a coal seam exposed along a road cut. The plants that became coal left numerous impressions. Go to the Green River Formation to find intricate fossils of fish that died and settled to the bottom where fine silts covered them. But don’t look long through igneous rocks. Formed from magma and lava, they were not environments conducive to life—though some surface life-forms might have died on them after they cooled. Distorted and crystalline fossils can, however, be found in metamorphic rocks (those baked and changed older rocks). If coquina, for example, undergoes metamorphism, those constituent sea shells will become visually attractive shiny inclusions.


Reading the geologic past to discern the life habits of now extinct organisms is generally easier than reading the history of any era because we have a tendency to reflect our own times in our historical interpretation. Revising the past is common. If knowing the present is currently difficult because of all the subterfuge devised by deceptive humans, then all of us can imagine that those historians' accounts of our times won’t necessarily reveal the whole truth.


Large dinosaurs aren’t always found complete. Often the heads are missing. And that’s what we have to deal with in writing human history. Here’s an analogy: As a kid, I was enthralled by dinosaurs (What kid isn’t?}. When my father took me to the Carnegie Museum to see their fossils, I looked at the Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) and said, “That head doesn’t look right.” And I was correct as an eight-year-old. Years later, the museum replace the head, which was that of a predator, with the head of an herbivore. But for decades that head was the wrong one, and no one seemed to notice.


More unfortunate for those generations of little kids who saw an Apatosaurus with the wrong head and carried that image as “the Truth,” is that some “professionals”—those who assembled the dinosaur in the museum and those who walked past it, photographed it and put pictures in books—were also fooled by the “wrong” head. In paleontology, index fossils are those that serve as models and that are indicative of a particular period. But through the past two centuries or so, misinterpretations and hoaxes have given generations an untrue history. Remember Charles Dawson’s scam? Dawson said he had found a “missing link” in hominin history and produced a fossil skull of the now famous Piltdown Man. It was a hoax in the manner of Adam Schiff’s proof of Russian Collusion. But Dawson ran that hoax from 1912 to his death in 1916 and beyond. It wasn’t until 1953 that Piltdown Man was identified as bleached ape’s jawbone. (Is it a coincidence that Dawson was a lawyer who foisted other false evidence on the public eager to believe in his interpretation of history? Can anyone say, “Most politicians are lawyers”?)


Is McMonigal an index fossil for our times?


Will a Piltdown Man be the index fossil for the early twenty-first century? Will we long display the wrong head for each of the many scandals of our times? Will we manufacture a fraudulent head in the manner of Charles Dawson to fool generations of Americans?