Zimbabwe has more than 80,000 elephants. One just killed a German tourist, a woman who got a little too close as she tried to get a picture, maybe a Selfie. Wild elephants are wild, so wild that not even big game hunters are exempt from being trampled or crushed, as 51-year-old Theunis Botha was in May, 2017, in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Botha, by the way, was a friend of Scott Van Zyl, another hunter. Van Zyl’s remains were found inside a crocodile the preceding month.* 
 
Is there something in us that makes us risk an early death? Here’s some advice: See potential danger, avoid potential danger. Run away. Where’s the shame in surviving? 
 
Yet, people like van Zyl and Botha seem to have had a different mindset. Maybe they should have been animal-behavior researchers instead of hunters. The risks there are intellectual, and not physical, ones. 
 
What intellectual risks? Well, the elephant in the room here is the belief in Truth by Analogy. We all succumb to it. Such-n-such is similar to Such-n-such. At least we see the similarity. So, for example, reading animal behavior and projecting it as a lesson for or reflection of human behavior is a common fallacy. At least, that’s the conclusion of Espen A. Sjoberg.** Understanding the animal brain might be worth an effort, but we still have a long way to go in understanding the human brain. Attributing the supposed predictability of our own behavior to animals might be, at times, only wishful thinking. There is always the susceptibility we all seem to have toward accepting what Sjoberg points out: The false analogy, where “inferences based on assummtions of similarities between animals and humans can potentially lead to an incorrect conclusion…[and]…false positive results…particularly if the experiment is not conducted double-blind.” 
 
Botha and Van Zyl appear to have taken an intellectual risk that led to a physical one. After their many years of experience with predatory and large animals, none of it conducted in double-blind experimentation, both seemed to think they had things well in hand. Both no doubt believed they understood animal behavior—maybe because both might have believed they understood animal “motivation.”
 
Now, you might not be out there taking physical risks, not be out there risking being crushed or eaten, but you might be out in the wilds of humanity, believing that Truth by Analogy is a guiding principle for your own responses to what you perceive to be the motivations for the behavior of others. If so, you, like me, might succumb to our own confirmation biases. Sjoberg gives us a lesson:
 
            A common fallacy is affirming  the  consequent. This involves the following line of reasoning: if  A   is  true , then  X  is observed . We  observe  X ,  therefore  A  must  be  true.
 
Sjoberg then explains: “This argument is fallacious because observing X only tells us that there is a possibility that A is true: the rule does not specify that A follows X, even if X always follows A…25-33% of scientists make the fallacy of affirming the consequent and conclude that X --> A is a valid argument.”
 
You think Botha and Van Zyl might have fallen into that 25-33% if they had been animal behavior scientists? Certainly, belonging to that class of intellectual hunters would have been a safer career choice to fall into since one fell beneath an elephant and the other into the mouth of a crocodile.
 
Four lessons here: Animals aren’t people. Sometimes people aren’t the people you think they are. Analogies might confirm biases. One thing associated on occasion with another thing doesn’t prove anything. 
 
*BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39996592
**Sjoberg, Espen A. Logical fallacies in animal model research, Behavioral and Brain Functions2017, 13:3, 15 February 2017. 

Big Foot. Sasquatch. Yeti. Yahoos. Yes, Yahoos, not as in Web searches, but as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Here’s the story. “Australian National University researcher Debbie Argue may have solved one of English literature’s most enduring mysteries: Jonathan Swift’s inspiration for the Yahoo characters in his famous novel….”* Actually, the details of her “discovery” are just that Swift might have gotten his ideas for Yahoos from descriptions of Sasquatch that four Native American Kings carried to England in 1710. Argue’s argument lies in Swift’s using the date of the Four Kings’ arrival in his book: “He places this date within three sentences of introducing us to the Yahoos.” Maybe this finally resolves that “enduring mystery” you’ve been spending your time trying to solve. 
 
Argue makes a reasonable argument that resolves the “mystery.” Okay, but what about that other component of the mystery, that Sasquatch critter? We’re still looking for Sasquatch with no concrete evidence. People make TV programs about it. As one might ask, “What’s up with that?” Seven billion people on the planet. Billions before this time. Not one sighting with accompanying hard evidence, not one demonstrable “Encounter of the Third Kind”? Only that trace fossil footprint that might or might not be a random impression from a bear or some other forest animal or from a prankster.
 
Neurologists have a potential research topic here. What part of the human brain seeks Sasquatch? What part of the brain obsesses over Yetis? What part of the brain accepts a Sasquatch reality? Could the brain be seeking a reward in its search for Big Foot?
 
Apparently, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is heavily involved in such matters. According to researchers at UCLA’s Brain Imaging Center, “When belief and disbelief were compared (in an experiment involving 14 adults and fMRI), the investigators saw differences principally” in the VMPFC.** The lead investigator, Sam Harris, said, "What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust."
 
Where are we going with this? Let’s start far out with robots, Data, and Spock from Star  Trek. The basic division seems to be between emotion and reason, those Star  Trek  characters all representing reason. The division sets up a basic idea, that thought is different from emotion, that it can take place in the absence of emotion. Well, now, what are we going to do with the role of the VMPFC? What are we going to do with this discovery that truth-testing is highly complex? Harris says, 
            
            “I think that it has long been assumed that believing that two plus two equals four and believing that George Bush is President of the United States have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question."
 
So, calling the opposition between reason and emotion into question, eh? And why not? Haven’t you experienced those moments when everything clicks, when ALL of you is in sync? Surely, in those times of personal harmony, you are not simply reasonable and not simply emotional. You are a whole.
 
Rejecting or believing in the existence of Big Foot isn’t a one-part-of-the-brain act. You think, and you get a reward or a punishment. As Harris says, 
 
            ‘What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust.”
 
When we process the truth of something, we don’t necessarily favor a content or focus on one (i.e., there is a Big Foot), but rather favor or focus on, as Harris says, a process that is “content-neutral.” That would be one that includes some rewarding neurotransmitter. “The involvement of the VMPFC in belief processing suggests an anatomical link between the purely cognitive aspects of belief and human emotion and reward.”
 
You can’t really be Mr. Spock or Data. You can’t really be robotic or blandly computer-like. Finding something to believe, you find something that rewards. And just as in the movie When Harry Met Sally, we keep bumping into the issue of Big Foot's existence just as Harry bumps into Sally over years; for us now hundreds of years of revisiting the issue or belief. Will we ultimately admit that we love to believe and that we believe because belief yields a reward? Ah! That hairy creature that may or may not exist. Am I just being Silly? In this mix of reason and emotion, will my brain ultimately side with those who search for Sasquatch in hopes of not just a glimpse, but an actual hairy creature? Will we, like Harry and Sally, eventually admit we are in love with each other? Sasquatch and its believers, a match made in infrequent and unsubstantiated encounters. Reason suffused with emotion. 
 
*Staff report, Sci News, September 24, 2018. Yahoo in Gulliver’s Travels Represent 18th Century Description of Sasquatch, Research Says, Online at http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/yahoo-gullivers-travels-sasquatch-description-06437.html (I’m not sure of your stand on this. Have you been thinking about Swift’s inspiration for Yahoos lately? According to the article’s emphasis on the literary “mystery,” I’ve probably been remiss in thinking about such an “enduring” mystery. Been too busy getting bread, milk, and eggs at the store or thinking about how my life is built on quantum stuff I cannot see and wondering whether that stuff is as insubstantially wavelike as the physicists say it is or as insubstantial as proof that Sasquatch roams the woods without leaving concrete evidence)
 
**Sam Harris, Sameer Sheth, Mark S. Cohen, "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty," Annals  of  Neurology , December 2007.

The search for identity is an old and persistent quest, and it brings to mind a simple question: Do we discover who we are or make who we are? “Both,” you say.
 
During a conversation when we were in college, my wife framed an answer to the question this way: “You never know who you are until you are.” 
 
The search for identity is a persistent theme in literature, one that goes back to Sophocles and Sappho and forward from then to Nietzsche, Freud, and even John Updike. It takes many forms, but it includes two kinds of wandering and two of wondering. 
 
Some wander purposefully to seek by traveling away from their place of birth. “I-want-to-find-myself” kind of people fill hostels and tents today. There’s a tradition in this that harks back to communes like medieval monasteries, like Brook Farm in the nineteenth century, Jonestown in the twentieth, or those gatherings of “hippies” during the 1970s. For whatever reasons—suppression, repression, lack of opportunities—being “at home” for such wanderers doesn’t seem to coincide with an envisioned identity that can be found in other places. Wandering in this manner implies that there must be another place where one can establish an “ideal” identity, and it starts with a self-imposed exile.
  
Others wander by an imposition of exile. The latter doesn’t have to be anything more than moving where work or love takes one, that is, an exile by necessity. In mobile societies such as the community of recent college graduates, this wandering is common, just as it is in times when long-standing manufacturing plants close or move, forcing workers to make their living elsewhere, requiring the wanderers to “start over.”   
 
That brings me to the two kinds of wondering. Some make their identities the goal of a conscious effort; others simply wait for identities to reveal themselves in reflection. One looks forward; the other, backward. 
 
In the former, there’s always the danger of “wearing a mask,” just as one chooses a character costume for Halloween. I suppose all of us have worn such masks at times as we attempt to enter any society of strangers or attempt to maintain an “established” reputation or image. Masks are the product of conscious efforts. In the Freudian sense, masks hide underlying desires and histories. But masks can play a positive role, also. Parents wear them when they wish to present a consistent model for their children to emulate. In such instances, they are consciously aware that the masks are essential to the lessons of life they want to teach by example. You have probably worn such masks in your conscious effort to frame an identity.
 
The second kind of wondering centers on reflection. It’s the product of that idea my wife expressed. “You never know who you are until you are.” Take Sigmund Freud’s burial site as an example. Sigmund’s ashes were in an urn damaged in 2004 by vandals who apparently tried to take it from the Hoop Lane Cemetery in North London. Not a plain vase, it was a Greek urn decorated with images of Dionysus and at least one maenad, a female member of the Dionysian thiasos, or worshippers. Why Dionysus? Was Freud influenced by Nietzsche’s youthful interpretation of Dionysus in, as Camille Paglia argues, the chthonic, or dark, sense? Did Freud decide that burial in a Dionysian urn was more apropos to his identity governed by deep-seated desire than to his identity as a rational human that would have been represented more accurately by an Apollonian urn?
 
You can’t, however you try, put your identity in a single urn. You are more than Dionysian or Apollonian. You can look at who you are currently, of course. That’s the “you never know who you are until you are” identity. Of course, that assumes that you actually know yourself completely, a condition Freud would have rejected even though he chose a Dionysian urn. 
 
So, how do you define your identity? Do you do so on the bases of others’ definitions of who you are? “No,” you say, “because no one knows the ‘hidden’ me.” And if you are still wandering and wondering, I guess not even you can define your identity except on the basis of what you now see, what you believe you have become in this place at this time.
 
You looked different when you were five years old. Different from that at 13. Different now from ten years ago. In all that change which identity is yours? Do you argue that you are the culmination of all those identities, but that you are still forming an identity? In Toward  the  End  of Time, Updike draws an analogy between identity and quantum wave theory. At any moment you are a collapsed wave function, a particle. The wave allows you to identify yourself as that five-year-old, the 13-year-old, and as the person of ten years ago: All of them “you.” But in the current moment as in each of those moments, the wave had collapsed in the particle of your identity at that time. 
 
Considering the wave is a bit of a psychoanalytic thing, something Freud might want you to do. Considering the collapse of the wave isolates the identity particles you have been and the one you are now. 
 
And the future you? Well, if you think about it too much, you might as well get out your Halloween costume, because you’ll be wearing a mask. Why don’t you just wait to see who you are when you are?      

Why do you read, listen, and see news reports? What dictates the reports you choose?
 
As an American (i.e., citizen of USA as identified differently from other Americans, i.e., South Americans, who are also “Americans” and Central Americans, who can also use the term), I have tunnel vision with respect to events. If something happens in “America” (the one to which I belong) or affects Americans, I hear about it, provided the various news agencies choose to report the event or some viral video catches my attention. It’s like some Disney or Universal ride that keeps the rider in the dark except for any highly coherently themed images the park’s developers want to show. In other words, my knowledge of world events is limited because I can’t be everywhere, and I rely on others to shape my focus. Apparently, I live in a park. 
 
It has to be a park. For you, also. Like the surprises provided in Disney and Universal rides, news stories emerge from the darkness or from around the corner to catch the eye. Of course, you can exit the park to return to hotel or home, where outside information ostensibly flows freely, though chaotically. If you wish, you can peruse the daily news across the planet, but you will, like some stretched elastic, return to things local, things you find immediately germane to your life, and things that seem to be coherently linked. Even outside the park, riding the Web is very much like those park rides. 
 
“I was unaware,” I say to myself when I stumble across news from another country via the Web. I was unaware of the significance of takfiris until I read a report in the Egyptian  Daily  News that recounted that country’s attack on their outposts in the North Sinai. Takfiri militants are opposed to anyone that doesn’t profess their brand of Islam, not only labeling them infidels , but also attacking them. Takfiris make IEDs for terror attacks, produce hashish and marijuana, and smuggle people and narcotics into Egypt. The Egyptian army sees them as a threat to the nation and conducts raids, such as the counter-terrorism raids reported by the news service in February, 2018.*
 
During the raids, the army killed six takfiris while losing two of their own. Eight deaths. And I was unaware at the time because no one in the tunnel deigned to let me know. My stumbling across the information occurred in a Web-ride I had not previously experienced, one called the Egypt  Daily  News online. But, at this very moment, I’m guessing similar incidents are occurring in the Park Planet. Even if I were to devote my entire existence to uncovering worldwide events, I would lack the omnipresence necessary for omniscience, just as it is difficult if not impossible to experience all the offerings in a giant park like Disney World during one’s usually relatively brief stay—as we are all only in Park Planet for a finite time   
 
Before the rise of the modern world and its ever-entwining connections, my isolated park ride would have been sufficient for my survival. But those connections make knowledge from outside the park potentially useful, potentially personal. Does this mean that I now have to concern myself with Takfiri attacks in America? Probably not, but not necessarily not. That I have read the Egyptian  Daily  News once or twice doesn’t make me any less finite and local in my concerns. Just as in the expression “all politics are local,” so also is the idea that all interests are essentially local. That locality is elastic, stretching at times to faraway places, but it usually snaps back and resumes its original shape dictated by the park designers in the parks we frequent.
 
As the physicists are wont to say, the world is local; nonlocality violates Einstein’s relativity. My being limited to a single park is the way of the world. Information has to travel, or I have to travel to it. I am bound by two kinds of places, the physical one that forms the boundaries of the park I wander into and the mental one that forms the boundaries of my interests and abilities. I’m definitely bound physically. I’m also bound mentally. Someone might say, “Oh! You should go to such-n-such park. It’s great. The rides there are so different.” But even if I go, I find I can’t stay. If I do, it becomes my new locality. My old “locality” usually draws me back after a brief excursion. 
 
So, I’ve been to the Egyptian park, not to see the pyramids or the Sphinx, but to see what is happening currently there and that is of interest there. I’m back now, back in my own park, the familiar one, riding the rides I know and expecting to be surprised in a way I’m used to being surprised. The whole experience points to how limited I am by place, particularly by place of mind. 
 
*http://egyptdailynews.com/detail/six-takfiris-killed-in-past-week-of-operation-sinai--egypt-armed-forces 

“Scientists determine four personality types based on new data” (ScienceDaily, 9/17/18).* Yeah, just four. Which one are you? Average, self-centered, role model, reserved? Those are your choices. 
 
“Surely, there are nuances,” you argue. “I can’t classify myself as a singular type of personality, though I can see others I would classify simply.”
 
“That’s the nature of our worldview: We attribute complexity to ourselves and simplicity to others. So, when someone has a perceived failure, such as addiction, we reduce that personality to a simplistic category we can easily dismiss. Attributing simplicity to the lives of others is the root of prejudice and an easy guarantee of personal psychological security. We can quash our self-doubt by making the world around us easy to understand. Accepting a world of indisputable definition eliminates unanswerable questions.”
 
* https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180917111612.htm

After studying rocks associated with the Great Dying 251.9 million years ago that killed 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species, Shu-Zhong Shen and others concluded that the extinction was very rapid. The researchers found no evidence of a slow dying off in the 30,000 years prior to the extinction event, and they believe the event might have occurred over just a couple or maybe over a few centuries.* That’s rapid, kinda like the current extinction event we have caused, but ours is spread over tens of millennia, as spear points in mammoth skeletons attest.
 
Yes, there’s no doubt we’ve done our share of harm to species. “Where’s the Do-do?” we ask. “Where’s the elephant bird?” Not that species don’t go extinct naturally all the time and always have done so, but we’re really efficient at it. 
 
Have natural phenomena done their share of annihilating life-forms? Sure. In his study of the Great Dying, Peter Ward drew a different scenario for the extinction: Increased carbon dioxide coupled with increased atmospheric and ocean temperatures and decreased oxygen.*  Ward also argues for a prolonged extinction event, and Shen’s group doesn’t seem to agree with that conclusion. One of the researchers, Ramezani, says that “big changes in temperature come right after the extinction, so we can rule out that ocean temperature was a driver of the extinction.”
 
And that brings me to what is scary. Here we have reputable scientists studying the same event without agreeing on its cause or its duration. Who’s right? Both Ward and Shen would argue for their conclusions. And while they and others debate the causes of extinction, the clocks of every species on the planet continue to tick. Will we hear the alarm when we’re already late for rising on a new day?
 
*Shu-Zhong Shen, et al. A sudden end-Permian mass extinction in South China, GSA  Bulletin . (2018), Jennifer Chu, Phys.org, September 19, 2018. Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-09-end-permian-extinction-earth-species-instantaneous.html
 
**Ward, Peter D., Gorgon, New York. Penguin Group: Viking, 2004, p. 226. Ward concludes that the two agents of the extinction were heat and asphyxiation. “Now I am convinced that two things caused the Permian extinction: a sudden rise both in temperature and carbon dioxide near the end of the Permian Period and an equally sudden drop of oxygen in the atmosphere” (224).

The famous scene: In Jerry  Maguire ,  Renée Zellweger tells Tom Cruise, “You had me at ‘Hello.’” According to researchers at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, “Multiple experiments have shown that the brain is able to anticipate the information it will hear and know exactly what the speaker is going to talk about.”* So, why did Cameron Crowe, the director, give Cruise, playing Maguire, the long apology to offer Zellweger’s Dorothy?
 
Zellweger’s line might be as famous as any spoken by one of Shakespeare’s characters. It’s been used as a name for a pressed powder shadow palette that sells for $18.00, as lyrics in a song by Kenny Chesney, as the title of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, as a point of departure for discussions on websites and in pick-up bars, and, gosh, the expression is ubiquitous. 
 
So, do I need to write anything else here? Your predictive brain already knows what I’m going to say.
 
BIG GAP ON PAGE WHILE READER THINKS… AND PREDICTS…
 
 
 
 
 
 
Okay, I had you at the title. Having already heard the expression from the movie in its many forms, you established a context of possible meanings. No, I know it’s not the same stuff as the BCCBL’s study that covered the spoken word and the ability of people to predict actual phonemes. The written word is a bit different—but not much. What the BCCBL discovered we can extrapolate to mean we are easily bored by most speakers because we already know the context of the talk (lecture, speech, address, sermon) and have heard variations seemingly ad  infinitum. What could possibly be new in the saying? 
 
This is where you come in. You can actually increase your predictive power. Meditation does the trick. Your predictive abilities won’t increase overnight, but they will increase as you become more self-aware. I’m serious. Try it for a couple of minutes each day and get back to me in a month.**
 
I know, you want a guarantee before you commit to daily meditation. I can’t offer one, and if I did, it wouldn’t be more valid than that offered by the serial killer in There’s  Something about  Mary, when, in offering a product for six-minute abs to compete with  “8-minute abs,” he says that if the buyers aren’t satisfied, he’ll send them two more minutes. 
 
Those BCCBL researchers from San Sebastian used magnetoencephalography to record brain activity. As Nicola Molinaro, one of the researchers says, “The brain is always trying to estimate what the future will be like….” And this isn’t just blind guesswork. Your brain’s auditory region isn’t just a passive receiver waiting for a stimulus. It’s not just an ear attached to the side of the head waiting for sounds. It predicts. The brain “knows exactly what the physical form of the word it is going to hear will be like, even before it is pronounced.” And this predictive activity began as much as a second before hearing the auditory stimulus. “We have found clear evidence that the neuronal system can predict the form of a word before it appears….” 
 
Even if you choose never to meditate to sharpen your predictive power, you can’t stop yourself from being exposed to all the ways people behave and speak. You sharpen that predictive power daily. Maybe you don’t like that ability and don’t want it sharpened. After all, knowing the future invites boredom when it arrives. Knowing what the preacher is about to preach is a surefire way to drowsy eyes and nodding head. 
 
Nevertheless, in your conversations today, pay attention to your predictive power. ***
 
 
*Online report at Medical press https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-brain-words-pronounced.htmlScientific Reports (2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-27898-w , Provided by Plataforma SINC. 
 
**See the short video on meditation by Dr. Christian Conte at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhroD8WPT6s&t=49s

***Need a topic for your neurological research? Try using magnetoencephalography to determine whether or not the same part of the brain that predicts words also predicts the next musical phrase in a song someone hears for the first time. Think about it. Based on one's knowledge of notes that usually come in sequence and harmonic and complementary sounds, almost everyone can sing along with others as they voice a new song. Why is it that audiences know when that final note is about to sound at the end of a symphony or at the end of a popular tune they hear for the first time?

It seems that human history is filled with people other people idolized, Pharaohs, for example. Certain military and political leaders, even tyrants, have had their crazed fans. How else explain the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, the armies of Attila, and the sometime suicidal loyalty of the Japanese to their emperor during WWII? You can find examples today, but I won’t mention any lest I insult your idol. And of course, the TV show American Idol comes to mind. Now a reference to an ethnographic story I read when I was a teen. 
 
The Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf(1593-1649), honored by three Canadian Christmas stamps, by sainthood in the Church, and by school and towns in Quebec, lived among the Huron and reported on his time there, Huron language, and culture. His experiences included seeing, if I remember correctly—it wasn’t yesterday—a warrior captured in battle with another tribe, probably, if memory serves me, an Iroquois. The captured warrior tried to attack his captors who cut off his hands and feet. But that didn’t stop him. He went after them on knees and elbows, gnashing at them. They ripped flesh from him to eat to gain his ferocity and courage. And, as the story goes, when de Brébeufhimself was tortured and killed by the Iroquois, they drank his blood to acquire the courage he showed during his ordeal. Why the cannibalism?
 
They wanted what he exhibited. Turn now to any human idolized by others, even a rock star idolized by teens. What drives one to idolize, and is idolizing a form of cannibalism? 
 
Is there something of figurative cannibalism in the idolization of humans? Is there something about following and idolizing that attests to some unspoken, and maybe even unconscious, belief that whatever the idol is or has, the idolizers can somehow absorb through objects, if not the flesh, associated with the idol? 
 
You could, if you desire, read the many volumes of Sir James Frazer’s The  Golden  Bough to see accounts similar to that told by de Brébeuf. If you read T. S. Eliot’s The  Wasteland, you know Frazer’s book. It’s filled with the kinds of tales that anthropologists are wont to collect, especially when they try to understand the mythology and cultural heritage of various peoples. Frazer refers to the process of consuming as “eating the god,” a process that, whether one wants to admit it, is reminiscent of Communion.*
 
Now, there are many who would argue that an English prince is different from a clerk at a big-box store, is somehow “better,” but there are also those who see no separation in human value, regardless of social or economic status. There are some who look for the latest news coverage, even a tabloid story, about actors or actresses, singers or politicians, and royalty and the superrich, seeing in them something of note, something “elevated.” But there are those who couldn’t care less about the rich and famous, the movers and shakers, and the darlings of the Press. Also, there are some who strictly adhere to beliefs that prohibit any kind of human idolization, any worship of a golden cow.
 
Here’s one of Frazer’s tales. “As usual, the corn-spirit is believed to reside in the last sheaf; and to eat a loaf made from the last sheaf is, therefore, to eat the corn-spirit itself. Similarly at La Palisse, in France, a man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried on the last harvest-waggon [sic.]. The tree and the dough-man are taken to the mayor’s house and kept there till the vintage is over. Then the close of harvest is celebrated by a feast at whch the mayor breaks the dough-man in pieces and gives the pieces to the people to eat” (49).
 
This is what my sister told me about her experience at a Beatles concert in Pittsburgh. She, like so many teenagers, liked the band. She lined up with others to see them and actually saw them walking across the lawn to the venue. There she saw a girl about her age reach down and pick some grass on which they walked and proceed to eat it. As a rational human, you would say as my sister, a teen at the time, said, “That’s just plain crazy,” or “dumb,” or “foolish.” Some popular idols engender similar behavior in fans who swoon, faint, cry, or buy souvenirs and signed pictures. 
 
Where do you fall on the spectrum of idolization? Where do you stand with respect to figuratively “eating the god” to acquire attributes as the Huron and Iroquois warriors did during the time of Jean de Brébeuf, and a young girl did at a concert? 
 
 *Frazer, James George, The  Golden  Bough : Volume VIII,  Part V: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, Volume 2 of 2. “Eating the God,” Chapter X.  New York, MacMillan and Co., 1912., p. 48. The Gutenberg Project. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42336/42336-h/42336-h.html#toc13

Either/Or thinking has been a catch phrase since 1843, the year that Kierkegaard published his two-volume work Enten – Eller. We fault anyone guilty of either/or thinking because, as highly sophisticated and perspicacious people, we think such thinking is simplistic. Surely, there can’t be just two sides to any issue. Surely, “fifty shades of grey” aligns more with our ambivalence about most issues. But a California satellite in the context of either acknowledging global warming or denying it?
 
“What’s that?” you ask.
 
“I guess Governor Brown wants California to launch its own satellite to track global warming ‘pollutants and polluters.’ Sorry, correction: In the Governor’s words, to launch its ‘own damn satellite.’”
 
“No way. Isn’t that state stretching its resources that might serve people in fire-storm areas, flood areas, and droughty fields? Isn’t the state concerned about its burgeoning homeless problem, about gang violence and urban decay, about defecation on the streets of San Francisco? Shouldn’t it be concerned about preparing for the next—and inevitable—earthquake or landslides on highways cut through mountains? Is he really going to launch a satellite at state expense? I can see why his critics have given him his nickname,” you interject. 
 
“I’m a bit in agreement with you there. The problem as I see it is this: EITHER Governor Brown accepts the data and the conclusions of NASA, NOAA, and the IPCC, OR he doesn’t. 
 
“If you go to NASA’s website on carbon monitoring, you’ll find a list of satellites devoted to the distribution of water-rich and water-poor areas affected by EITHER weather Or climate, and you’ll find satellites devoted to atmospheric monitoring. NASA has ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station), GEDI (not Jedi, but rather Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation Lidar), GeoCarb, a stationary-orbit satellite, OCO-3 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3), PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem), ASCENDS (Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Nights, Days, & Seasons), G-LiHT (Goddard’s LIDar, Hperspactral & Thermal Imager), LVIS (Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor), and UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar), all sensing the atmosphere and surface for conditions that affect both weather and climate and that have an effect on agriculture.* The Feds have already committed a bunch of tax dollars—including tax money from California—to launch satellites associated with weather and climate studies.” 
 
“So, Governor Brown wants California to launch its own satellite? For? Isn’t this all redundant?” you ask rhetorically.
 
“My point exactly. So, what’s the governor up to? Spending more money that does nothing to change climate in a state that has had millennia of on-again/off-again droughts and deluges? Isn’t he already convinced that we’re undergoing a planet-wide warming with irrefutable consequences? If he is, what’s the point of spending California’s tax money? If he isn’t—well, that’s the Either/Or. What happened to all that California-Think, that situation-thinking (moral or otherwise), that fifty-shades of grey nuanced thinking that bespeaks of ‘I’m-more-sophisticated-than-you-because-I-understand-things-better-than-you.’? Shouldn’t the governor be putting the money into the green technology he claims to support, you know, maybe into a solar or wind farm to fry or slice up eagles and other birds? (You know they do that, don’t you?)
 
“It seems to me that Governor Moonbeam’s desire to launch a satellite shows the problem of politicizing any environmental issue. Governments are often inefficient because bureaucracies are often INefficient, and governments like California and the USA are big, big bureaucracies with agencies that can duplicate services.** The left and right hands really don’t know what each other is doing when they duplicate. Lots of examples, of course, such as DHS’s buying 15 million rounds of ammo. Shouldn’t the military and the police get that stuff? And so with monitoring the atmosphere. We already have NASA and NOAA and a number of academic researchers monitoring GHGs, temperatures, and ecologies. Are we going to make ourselves monitor from space a single state’s point sources for, as Governor Brown calls them, ‘pollutants.’ What of those ‘pollutants’ that wash over California from Asia? Will California’s satellite take them into account? And here’s an unanswered question: Isn’t the governor aware that the state has already made an inventory of its GHG emissions and that it has a mandatory GHG reporting program? Another: Does anyone know if the Paris Accord, the withdrawal from which got Brown into a huff, will do anything significant since China has postponed compliance and India says it will comply only insofar as compliance will not affect the country’s economic growth?
 
“Sorry, also, for belaboring the point. If one accepts global warming and already has agencies in place to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, what’s the point of spending money that merely duplicates what the Federal agencies do? And how specific can a satellite be in monitoring ‘carbon polluters on the ground,’ especially in the context of quantities already known by ground monitors and industry reports? We already know, for example, that burning a ton of coal produces more weight in carbon dioxide than that ton (C^12 + O^16 + O^16 = CO2 (12 + 16 + 16 = 44, more than the carbon alone, obviously). Add up your tons, Governor; it’s relatively easy to do, and your state already does it. How much more accurate do you have to be than California’s Air Resources Board’s GHG Emissions Trends Report for 2000-2016? The state already knows it emits 429.4 million metric tons in carbon dioxide equivalence, only ten percent from the production of in-state electricity.*** Either the governor is playing a political game or the governor is ignorant of his state’s comprehensive monitoring. 
 
“As I have mentioned elsewhere, most of us are hypocrites when it comes to ‘saving the planet.’ If we assume that adding carbon to the atmosphere is detrimental to future in situclimates, then what are we doing individually to decrease the amount of personally unnecessary GHG emissions? And in decreasing those emissions, how can we be sure that we won’t do ourselves and future generations a disservice because we might exacerbate a global cooling, as U. of Virginia’s emeritus professor S. Fred Singer says might be just around the corner? Maybe warming the atmosphere will delay or prevent a return of the ice that just 12,000 years ago covered much of North America and northern Europe. Either/Or is really difficult climate science. Carbon dioxide and other GHGs might warm the lower atmosphere but might cool the upper atmosphere, as a NASA report indicates after it used SABER (Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry) to detect the reflection of energy from a coronal mass ejection (CME) in March, 2013. The GHGs carbon dioxide and nitric oxide (NO) appeared to cast off the excess solar energy striking the planet during that episode.**** What’s a governor to do? Shoot, now will have to use the laws of thermodynamics to figure out the flow of heat from lower to upper atmosphere during increased solar activity. Maybe the moonbeam satellite should be pointed outward rather than inward. Oh! Just remembered. NASA already does that.”
 
 
* https://carbon.nasa.gov/missions.html
** See also: Korte, Gregory, Government often has ten agencies doing one job. USA Today, April 8, 2014. Online at https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/08/billions-spent-on-duplicate-federal-programs/7435221/ 
Korte writes, “It takes 10 different offices at the Department of Health and Human Services to run programs addressing AIDS in minority communities. Autism research is spread out over 11 different agencies. Eight agencies at the Defense Department are looking for prisoners of war and missing in action. And Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado has eight different satellite control centers to control 10 satellite programs.
“The report, by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, identifies 26 new areas where federal government programs are fragmented, duplicative, overlapping or just inefficient.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-gov-jerry-brown-launch-satellite-track-greenhouse-gas-emissions-n909811
***From the report: Statewide emission estimates rely on state, regional or federal data sources, and on aggregated facility-specific emission reports from ARB’s Mandatry GHG Reporting Program. Calculation methodologies are consistent with the 2006 IPCC guidelines.” Online at https://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/data/data.htm
****Online at https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber

Is there anything that motivates you to travel? Want to see something, some place? Pilgrimages have long been part of the human experience even though you might never have made one. Or have you? What’s this I hear about your going to a resort, a vacation spot, a scenic place? Tell me, now, what motivated you to go out of your way just to see something or be somewhere you deemed special and maybe still deem special? I think there’s a bit of pilgrimage in many trips.
 
We definitely have some obsession with special places, especially those we associate with individuals who have left their mark on humanity. Hyecho, for example, traveled in the eighth century the length and breadth of the Buddhist world from the Korean peninsula to Iran and back along the Silk Road to Wutaishan, the sacred mountain, keeping a journal about his experiences and Buddhism’s variations and “special places.”* His three-year pilgrimage is less well known than other famous jaunts, such as Marco Polo’s, but, is now available to us, and it relates something of the nature of pilgrimages: That they aren’t just visits to one place, that they stretch places. 
 
We  travel to a place because the place is special for various reasons: Historical, political, religious, academic, personal, recreational, social, etc. On the way we find that the going itself warps place, elongates it. The journey to and from is a stretched-out place along the route of which we discover new significance. Whereas it is true that some casual travelers never look out the window, that many people prefer an aisle seat, headphones, and IPads over views of the journey or stops between points A and B, many of us find the journey itself to be both a source of enlightenment and a new end-in-itself.
 
Regardless of the significance you find in a place, you eventually come to realize that no place exists outside a context. Here’s an example. 
 
Ah! Westerner. You travel a road or fly to a place, say the Acropolis, noting that you are going there because you believe it represents the beginning of the way you, a Westerner, think. You know that you “think Greek,” that most of what you act on is the product of two influences: your biology and your cultural history. And although you realize that “thinking Greek” is a way of understanding wrought by many ancient philosophers, many who lived outside the ancient landscape of Greece itself, you make the Parthenon a pilgrimage site because it represents all those sundry components in your philosophical makeup. Or, you are a Roman Catholic headed to St. Peter’s or a Lutheran headed to Castle Church in Wittenberg. But even at either of those two places you realize that an intellectual road leads from Rome to Wittenberg and from Rome to the Parthenon. You see the entire western civilization rooted in one symbol, the Parthenon, a ruin that you envision in its ancient glory as it sat atop the Acropolis.  
 
Your use of any place to represent all historical or intellectual roads that led to and from its symbolic significance is rooted in a desire for a center of some kind, a place for a tether of being, your being. You did not evolve in an emptiness. You carry with you the route back to your source—or to many sources. That route might even take you to a vacation spot or to a mountaintop for some exhilarating view or relaxation. You are what you are, and maybe what you are is rooted in beauty and leisure. Play, after all, is a significant part of your life, even if you have chosen to ignore or reject it under the pressure of adulthood. But make no mistake, whether for a simpler life or the fulfillment of a quest, you are on a pilgrimage; you are trying to find that special place that calls for your return or presence. Yet, you are much like Chaucer’s pilgrims in that the stories along the way are at least as significant as the place you strive to reach.
 
*Lopez, Jr. Donald S. with others. Hyecho’s Journey : The World of Buddhism . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017.