Me: Can’t imagine anything more hypocritical than Dem Congressmen and Congresswomen during the impeachment inquiries of Trump and Biden. Can’t imagine anyone saying, “There is no evidence of colluding with a foreign power in the Biden inquiry” while maintaining that “There is absolute evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians” in the face of evidence to the contrary.


Lefty: Oh! Come on. You’re just upset because Trump was impeached like a gajillion times or maybe more times. I couldn’t keep count. He made that call to Ukraine. What do you have to say about that?


Me: It’s almost not even worth the effort to tell you the difference between calling to ask for an investigation and calling to ask for no investigation plus a little walking around money, say about a million a year for one’s son.


Lefty: Huh? You don’t have any proof…Where’s the evidence?


Me: You see. Nothing, not even the appearance of impropriety matters in the Biden affair whereas even the slightest accusation of impropriety in the Trump affair is a Watergate-level scandal.


Lefty: You January-sixers are all alike. Conspiracy theorists and whatnot.


Me: You certainly realize that we’re talking about different kinds of events; certainly you have the ability to distinguish. I’m focused on the Biden impeachment investigation and the effort by Democrats to dismiss it as mere politics.


Lefty: Because that’s what it is.


Me: Let me tell you a little story.


Lefty: Here we go, one of your pointless anecdotes.


Me: In my state, the legislature mandated an environmental study that had to be performed every five years with the results reported directly to a committee in charge of the study’s oversight. I was chosen to perform that research, which I did. After completing that research and other research over about a decade for the state, I was told that what I had done was beyond reproach. It was objective and accurate, and its findings and their associated recommendations were accepted without objection. In fact, what I did was accepted by both the legislature and by the environmentalists who voluntarily stood as watchdogs. Both groups praised the work for its objectivity.


Me: So, where’s this going. Is this a puff piece for you?


Me: Five years later the legislature’s mandate required a redo. But in the interim, I had worked as a researcher for a large private company in its dispute with the state over environmental matters. As a result, when the state’s environmental agency approached me to repeat the study, some in the Department of Environmental Resources said I was ineligible because of an apparent conflict of interest. I had, after all, consulted for a coal company.


Lefty: I can see that. You worked for a coal company as I remember, and the mandated research dealt with environmental damage to the environment caused by mining. So, yeah, conflict of interest stuff.


Me: So, here’s that point you said was going to be pointless. After all my previous research for the state, I received commendations for my complete objectivity in my work—by everyone, both Left and Right, both officials in the government and concerned citizens. It was my integrity and the objectivity of my work that drew the state to initially approach me for the ensuing five-year study. But because of the “appearance” of impropriety and regardless of my demonstrable objectivity, the state officials concluded I should not do the followup research. And when the state gave the research project to another group, ironically led by a former student then working at another university, it declined that group’s request to allow me to assist them because of my expertise, again on the grounds of the “appearance” of conflict of interest. Okay, I had no problem accepting that. Besides, I had recently retired and was ready to move onto other things like traveling, writing, playing with family, and losing some weight.


Lefty: Sure, I can see that. You can’t work for two masters without conflict.


Me: No problem. I understand the appearance of conflict of interest principle. But I also know that the unfounded accusation of conflict of interest was all it took for the state to choose another researcher and research group while still acknowledging personally that what they liked best about all my previous research projects was the objectivity I brought to the table—and the integrity I exhibited in doing the research.


Lefty: So, where’s this going?


Me: Emails, actual transfer of funds from foreign actors, and telephone calls all add up to Biden’s “appearance of impropriety” and “appearance of bribery.” Heck, they even add up to colluding with foreign powers. But you Democrats, so intent on tying Trump to Russia or Ukraine, can’t accept that accusations against him were ‘trumped up’ charges but that the appearance of wrongdoing is as tight as a Gordian knot around Biden and his family. Yet, you refuse to accept this “appearance” while still maintaining the falsity of the Trump collusion, with that collusion demonstrably the work of the Democratic National Committee on behalf of Clinton’s campaign.


Lefty: But, but…


Me: No buts. If appearance of impropriety or appearance of colluding was a valid reason for an impeachment inquiry in one instance, then it should be a valid reason for such an inquiry in all instances. Flat out, it appears that your guy was making his family rich by selling influence. How else do you account for a senator to accumulate millions—was it money he saved by riding Amtrak? And how did his entire family become rich when they had no real skills or products to sell? Appearance. On appearance alone, you should want an inquiry—the same as you wanted for the previous president even in the face of the falsity of those charges.


Lefty: Well, you righties haven’t expelled George Santos. So, look who’s talking hypocrisy.


Me: If he deserves the expelling, then he should be expelled. But look at what you just did.


Lefty: What? Point out a corrupt congressman who’s a Republican?


Me: You didn’t address the main issue. I don’t favor keeping Santos in the Congress. I don’t favor keeping Swalwell in Congress because of his Chinese girlfriend, or, for a number of years when she was alive and being chauffeured by a Chinese spy, keeping Feinstein in the Senate. I’m not suggesting either did anything wrong, but I am suggesting that both opened themselves up to the appearance of impropriety on a grand scale, one that would make the stuff of a spy novel. I don’t favor keeping in the House or Senate anyone whose integrity can be questioned objectively. And I should throw in your guy Schiff who went national in nightly statements that he had evidence for Russian collusion when, in fact, he had nothing.


Lefty: Duh…


Me: Look, I understand the need to protect your party. But when hypocrisy is blatant, it’s blatant. And when protecting the party is more important than protecting the United States, then it…


Lefty: Okay, okay. I get it. But you still don’t have any evidence against Biden.


Me: I’m not the one gathering evidence. I’m just the one pointing out the appearance of impropriety. That was enough to go full impeachment on Trump. You Lefties don’t even want a moderated inquiry.

Dulce et Decorum Est


Like most sports activities, golf has its rules for play and rules for those associated with the game, rules that are especially evident at country clubs, where a John-Fetterman oversized sloppy hoody, shorts, and running shoes would beget ostracism if not outright banishment. On the course and in the clubhouse decorum is everything. Those who choose to participate in this gentleman’s and gentlewoman’s activity, must comport themselves with dignity as defined by tradition centered on “good-natured competition and sportsmanship.”


But just as anarchy lifts its angry head in the midst of a functioning civilization, so impropriety raises its hooded head amongst the plaid pants, golf shirts, and smartly designed golf bags on the many links around the planet. The fairways aren’t always as fair as intended; the relaxing pastime is not always as relaxing as presumed.


Leisure activities don’t always breed leisure. Nonessential pastimes like golf, for example, can engender frustration as well as reward, social disruptions as well as unity, and anger as well as peace. Pastimes can be ramps for bad behavior to merge onto the main highways of life. Those clubs lying at the bottom of ponds on golf courses, those marriages interrupted by long hours of frivolous play for one while the other tends to home duties, and those incidents of rage over petty circumstances all make golf a microcosm of human society lived on a pretend geography and in a purchased social setting.


Whereas living in the “actual cosmos” of society is generally free, living in the golf world comes with a price. Public golf courses require fees; country clubs require both deposits and fees, usually too exorbitant for the commoner. The point is that one pays to play on both types of golf courses. One buys into the microcosm that is golf, and in buying-in, one commits to the local and international rules of decorum, violations of which have social and financial consequences.


The Incident


As an example of indecorous behavior in a golf setting, take the recent story of a guy I’ll simply refer to as NAME WITHHELD who was playing on the Crooked Creek Golf Course in Ottawa Lake, MI. For whatever reason, the 41-year-old man threw a temper tantrum, ripped off his shirt, and challenged other golfers to fight him. *


Foreshadowing NAME WITHHELD’S Incident


I’m not a golfer.


But I have played golf about a dozen times, most recently about 40 years ago if I don’t count a few miniature golf outings with grandchildren whose timing of that obligatory windmill obstacle seemed greater than mine. Those decades ago, my father, brother-in-law, and another golfer asked me to join them on the links (as they say). Reluctantly, I went. I knew I could drive a ball far but hardly ever straight because I never had a lesson, not even from a relative or friend. I knew I had little patience for putting and very little skill at it. I had learned about golf by seeing it played on TV a couple of boring times. So I thought I could imitate the stance, stiff left arm, and clock-hand rotational swing. How hard could it be? I had played baseball, a game with a ball moving at varying speeds and through different planes. This little golf ball just sat there.


While we played, a few young guys for whatever reason thought they should play through us. Ordinarily, that isn’t a problem, I assumed, but these guys became belligerent for no apparent reason, much like the story of NAME WITHHELD in Michigan. And, believe it or not, one of the guys in a fury challenged us to a fight after ripping off his shirt in the manner of NAME WITHHELD. Highly indecorous behavior, right? Even I, unfamiliar as I was with golf etiquette,  knew that. But nothing seemed to calm the guy down, though his threat of violence ultimately amounted to nothing. His anger rose to the level of rage much like NAME WITHHELD’s rage as reported in the press. And even though I cautioned him that it would be unwise to fight my 6’3” brother-in-law who was a former professional athlete drafted by the top NBA team of the era, he frothed. Fortunately, his anger did subside, and he went stomping off with his buddies who seemed to be a bit embarrassed by the incident.


Contact Golf


“Holy cow!” I thought. I’m glad I don’t play this game. Frustrations abound throughout the golf courses around the world. People angry with themselves. People angry at others. Maybe the PGA should adopt the rules of Contact Golf that I devised 55 years ago as an alternative to the game of gentility: Two or four can play, but they use one ball and no cart. A flip of the coin determines who hits off the Tee, but then it’s a free-for-all on the fairway as they run to make the second stroke until someone, Polo-like, hits it onto the green. At that point only one rule applies: No blindside tackle on a putt. (Years after devising contact golf rules, I saw that the idea had spread with others joking about contact golf)


Some sports like football, hockey, wrestling, and boxing have built-in violence. But even in those games anger is just as anathema as it is in golf. So, violence doesn’t have to derive from anger. It seems that for millennia, we humans have been able to dissociate one from the other, thus there are penalties in those sports for unsportsmanlike displays. Do you find it interesting that we can distinguish between a violent legal hit in any of those sports and an “illegal” unwarranted one stemming from a player’s anger?


An Angry World


To say that the Ottawa Lake golfer’s anger is a sign of the times is to ignore history. From the tale of Cain and Abel to today, humans have been angry, often violently so. Personal and social peace is elusive, even rare. Our species exhibits anger for an indefinite number of reasons, not just incidents experienced on the golf course. Go figure.


Anger often begets anger, so the angry usually suffer some blowback consequences of their loss of control. NAME WITHHELD, for example, has a rap sheet born in his anger and public outbursts, and now he is banned from the golf course in Ottawa, Michigan. He is paying the price for indecorous behavior.   


That persistent anger in our species might be the reason that civilization’s moral systems generally aim at a common goal: Peace, both individual and social. Little is more valuable in the continuance of life. But convincing any of the “angry” that their public display is detrimental not just to others but also to themselves is very difficult. NAME WITHHELD appears to have been angry for years as police reports document. One even wonders how he attained a relationship with three other golfers willing to play with him. Surely, they were aware of his public displays of anger. Were they just enablers? Did they play golf with him in hopes that his documented anger would not affect them directly? Is that kind of peaceful coexistence a microcosm of enemy countries armed with weapons of mass destruction?


Isn’t failure to confront people over their detrimental actions one of the reasons for chronic anger and crime? Do we fail our species by enabling? Do we fail our species by cowering in the presence of a potential outburst? Do we fail because we just don’t have the “tools” to handle anger and angry people?


Better to ask, “Are there such tools?”


NAME WITHHELD and His Golf Partners Should Read Walking through Anger


As an outsider, I’ve been privileged to attend conferences held by specialists in anger management. I’ve also been privileged to be the father of one such specialist. The books these specialists have written all aim toward a more peaceful world. They range from psychological categorizations of anger to mechanisms for managing it in self and others.


One might think that getting control of anger is just a matter of self help. It isn’t. The experience and insights of anger management specialists like my son provide them with practical mechanisms for achieving peace and understanding behavior. And whereas it’s true that some among us might spend a lifetime in rage—like NAME WITHHELD—it’s also true that many of us can learn techniques to manage who we are in various challenging circumstances, being in the company of an angry person one of those circumstances.


The problem of anger is like most human problems: It is complex because it incorporates not only the actions of and consequences to the angry person but also the effects on and responses of others affected by the anger. This complexity of doer and receiver or doer and responder lies as the foundation of Yield Theory, a methodology that my son created for psychotherapists but that anyone can access and use in dealing with self and others. The fullest treatment of this methodology appears in his Walking through Anger.


Had NAME WITHHELD’s golf partners read the book, the incident on the golf course in Ottawa Lake might not have reached national attention, which is in today’s social media culture “par for the course.” They might have saved themselves from an unpleasant incident by defusing their potentially explosive acquaintance beforehand by preemptive actions. That three other people chose to play golf with an explosive person is an indication of hope in the absence of effort, however. Hoping is not a mechanism. Wishing that there won’t be an incident does nothing to prevent the incident.


Giving both the doer and the receiver the wherewithal to preempt anger with peace is the goal that anger management specialists like my son aim to reach through not only their research, books, and articles on the subject, but also through videos, therapy sessions, and public talks, some of which are available free on YouTube. **


Much Anger


A perusal of just the last millennium’s year-by-year history reveals that no year has been without its anger and violence. No year has been free from war, from local tribal wars to regional and international conflicts, some of them ongoing for not just decades, but for centuries. Some regions are steeped so deeply in continuing conflict that even small gains in peaceful relationships are hailed as triumphant accomplishments. The Middle East comes to mind; its a region in which for centuries “peace” meant either genocide or subjugation, both of which engendered more anger and violence than peace. The world of humans has long been an angry world though in every age people assess their own circumstances as extraordinary.


And whereas it is true that modern rapid 24/7 communication makes more people aware of incidents of anger they might never have heard about in previous eras, there’s no evidence that today’s “anger world” is any more angry than previous eras. Today’s political turmoil, for example, probably can’t compare with times of civil wars, such as the one that tore England apart in the seventeenth century and the one that tore America part in the nineteenth century. Consider that civil wars have occurred in every location and that all such wars engender intense anger.


But social media and 24/7 news coverage have exacerbated and widened the reach of anger. As one living in southwestern Pennsylvania and as a non-golfer, I would never in a previous age have known about NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the links at Ottawa Lake, Michigan. Just opening a link to an online newspaper exposed me to that angry outburst. Similarly, many people are daily exposed to angry political pundits, politicians, and special-interest individuals and groups. All this anger feeds anger.


The idea of an entity that persistently preys on human anger isn’t new, of course; that’s what the Satan (the Adversary) does in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ahriman does in Zoroastrianism, and the Dragon Nidhogg of Norse mythology does. Could there be a more insightful dramatization of this self-feeding or self-propagating anger than the script Jerome Bixby wrote for the original Star Trek series entitled “Day of the Dove”? Directed by Marvin Chomsky, the Gene Roddenbury sci-fi episode centers on an entity that feeds off anger as it motivates warring factions in a continuing cycle of anger, fighting, death, and rebirth. The details are unimportant save to say that the two leaders in the fight agree that the only way to stop the cycle of anger and violence is through peaceful cooperation, even in mutual mockery of the entity.


That so many religions include belief in an entity similar to that portrayed in “Day of the Dove,” indicates to me the historical persistence of the idea that anger comes from “without,” that is, from some external cause. Although it is true that angry people react to “triggers,” the anger that manifests itself in NAME WITHHELD’s outburst on the golf course can be triggered by the most trivial of events. In the instance of NAME WITHHELD’s anger, it was the landing of an errant golf ball hit by a woman golfer. It didn’t hit him, by the way. But to reveal there is no place on the planet that is free from the spirit of anger, there in the fresh air of the great outdoors on the Crooked Creek Golf Course that spirit arose as it does in the Star Trek episode. And true to modern form that chooses recording an incident over nullifying it, someone in the group videoed NAME WITHHELD’s ugly outburst; that video got him banned from the course.


The 24/7 ubiquitous coverage of our times is both boon and bane. It is the latter because it is a constant intrusion on our privacy. It is the former because it holds us up to public view. I wonder whether or not NAME WITHHELD’s attitude has changed and whether or not after seeing himself nationally and internationally exposed as especially angry, that he might say, “I reject this obedience to this evil entity that has plagued humans from their outset.” Probably not, of course, because a rap sheet of similar incidents hasn’t wrought any change that could have prevented his golf course outburst.


If there is an entity that seeks to feed off anger, NAME WITHHELD’s behavior is evidence for it. And maybe the widespread anger across America is also evidence that some external force is at work. But to accept such a force is to reject responsibility and free will. The anger management specialists believe that personal responsibility is the only real solution to humanity’s persistent anger, that it is the only way to nullify anger’s manifestations.


Much Peace


As Dr. Christian Conte, author of Walking through Anger and other books on behavior management is wont to say at the end of any of his talks, including those on YouTube, “As always. I wish you much peace.”


I wish you much peace.








*https://nypost.com/2023/09/22/viral-full-hulk-golfer-has-history-of-run-ins-with-the-law/


**See Dr. Christian Conte’s YouTube channel.

Trust is the antecedent of it in Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy.” No truer words have been uttered for our times. I don’t mean that trust associated with love relationships. That’s always been a concern as high divorce rates over the past half century indicate. Couples—even thruples—have long had issues with trust. In our own contentious age, distrust now pervades more than human romance. Trust that we used to have to a greater degree in the sciences continues to erode, and that is especially true of the social sciences. This distrust has two causes: Questionable authorship and questionable data. With regard to the former we ask, “Is the researcher human?” With regard to the latter we ask, “Are these data being manipulated to serve a special interest agenda?”


I Don’t Have the Time. Do You?


We’ve seen the manipulation of data since people began collecting it. It’s a good tool for fruadsters and a great one for propagandists because of the widespread association between numbers and inviolate objectivity. In fact, one needs only to cherry pick some facts or fudge some numbers, snowball them into a cause, and send them rolling through society to influence thinking. Not a hard process: Anyone can do it. There are books on the subject: Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and Kit Yates’s The Math of Life  & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives both come to mind. * And this morning I stumbled onto an article in the online Wall Street Journal that addresses the trustworthiness of researchers, namely, of “scientists.” **


The Journal’s article relates the work of Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, three “debunkers” who have voluntarily taken on the task of cross-checking the data in “scientific” papers and who have as a result debunked published work. Thanks, guys. I don’t think I have the energy to go through tens to hundreds to thousands of annual publications in print or online to discover mistakes, manipulation, or outright lies. That’s a time-consuming effort that I lazily leave to others because I prefer to trust even though I know from experience that such trust is naive in a world of “p-hacking” and AI in service of some special interest agenda or self-aggrandizement.


Fight Numbers with Numbers, Not Innuendo    


That the three cross-checkers have done this yeoman work for the rest of us is commendable. That they have received pushback not on the grounds of accurate and detailed data, but on the grounds of “gender” bias from one of their targets is typical of our times. In our litigious times of wokeness, attacking the critic and not the criticism is a common defense tactic.


Apparently, it’s easy to rely on some “special interest” theme for those who cannot argue facts; it’s always a matter of suing anyone on the grounds of some phobia or bias. And that’s what the three “debunkers” now face in a suit filed by Francesca Gino. “In her lawsuit, Gino said Harvard’s investigation was flawed as well as biased against her because of her gender.” Can you imagine? Touchy-feely Harvard going anti-woke. It’s beyond me. Could it be true? Could Simmons, Nelson and Simonsohn spent all those hours sifting through data because they are heartless “gender-phones”?


“Whoa, Francesca!” I shout. “Is this another of those throw-some-mud-and-hope-it-sticks arguments used for distraction and defense? That’s using more non-science to combat the charge of non-science, of unscientific work, a ploy typical in an age of social media that fosters ad hominem attacks as refutations: Kill the messengers, not their message. Wouldn’t a “scientific” Francesca Gino have been better off in restoring her supposedly lost reputation by citing the validity or by proving the validity of her data? If Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn are wrong, then prove them wrong through logic and the data they say you manipulated.”


But this is the world as it is: Messengers, not messages, are the targets. Messengers must be untrustworthy because they plot against researchers on the bases of all those currently acceptable special interests, such as Gino’s gender—whatever that is, by the way. Whom or what should we trust as we sail the seas of data?


We Really Are Pawns until We Aren’t


It’s easy to trust some statement when it is centered on a number. Yates points this out in a discussion of BMI, a measure of “body mass” that insurance companies, doctors, and even athletic scouts use to determine the “fitness” of a person. But as Yates notes, “The main problem with BMI is that it can’t distinguish between muscle and fat” (48). Because BMI is part of the social psyche, it has become an “indicator of health,” which, by the way, it isn’t. You can find an app for your phone or watch, however, that tells you this supposedly important datum.


Thanks, Pythagoras. From your time to ours we have learned to love numbers because we’ve been taught that they never lie. As much as they were for you, they have become the stuff of our religion of truth.


So, we receive daily doses of them in polls, surveys, and research that “objectively” cover every aspect of personal and social life from that useless BMI to crime data used for enacting ever more anti-gun legislation. As Yates, writes, “Ultimately, the degree to which we believe the stats we come across should depend on how complete a picture the artist paints for us. If it is a richly detailed, realist landscape with context, a trusted source, clear expositions, and chains of reasoning, then we should be content in the veracity of the numbers. If, however, it is a dubiously inferred claim, supported by a minimalist single statistic on an otherwise empty canvas, we should think hard about whether we believe this ‘truth’” (143).


That “with context” encapsulates the data forced into the public record by “climate experts” like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Greta Thunberg. As evidence for this minimalist approach, the current graph on a “climate T-shirt” that Greta’s compatriots are selling with other “climate” paraphernalia shows a series of colorful bars representing temperatures from blue (colder) to red (warmer) that “paints” a cherry-picked data set to support inordinate global warming. Think, also, of the general claim that sea level is rising—which it has been doing for more than ten millennia. Or consider the panicked newscasters who echoed the claims of “the warmest day on record” with that record going back a mere 70 to 150 years on a 4.56 billion-year-old planet. Context? It is what frames the truth of numbers that are on their own meaningless. Take “five,” for example. It’s meaningless unless we apply it in context: Halfway to a first down; 50% of the survey’s participants; not quite a half dozen eggs; a child’s age; years of a contract; cost of a lottery ticket; speed of a car in mph or kph—the contexts are endless, but necessary.


Do the Trustworthy Choose the Algorithms?


Universities are prone to claims of superiority. Who, for example, would dare question the excellence of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League schools? Who would dare compare Westmoreland Community College to a prestigious research institute and a school whose alumni include presidents, ambassadors, and the movers and shakers of industry? But everyone wants some acknowledgement that a school ranks high on a list of “America’s Best Colleges.”  In 1988 journalists at U.S. News decided they could fashion a scale for ranking schools, one that included everything from the SAT scores of incoming freshmen to the financial contributions of outgoing alumni.


In her account of the ranking process, Cathy O’Neil writes, “Three-quarters of the ranking would be produced by an algorithm--an opinion formalized in code—that incorporated these [data] proxies. In the other quarter, they would factor in the subjective views of college officials throughout the country” (53). For me, the key words in this passage lie in the parenthetical “an opinion formalized in code.”


And that’s the heart of so many untrustworthy, but heavily data-laden research documents. It’s tough to take the human element out of the equation. It’s tough to do research in an era of grant financing and social media fame that does not rely on objective algorithms. And it’s especially tough to resist the temptation to fudge in the competitive world of “publish or perish” academia or in a world governed by censors who favor an agenda over doubt.


The war on anyone who bucked the dictates of the COVID restrictions and who questioned the science behind giving little kids the vaccine when they appeared to be rather invulnerable to severe consequences of the disease reveals what an opinion formalized in code can do. But the unintended consequences of censoring competing data and the conclusions they warrant has generated distrust. The ramifications of those algorithms aimed not just at those who questioned the wisdom of kindergarteners wearing masks every day at school and aimed at conservative speech has morphed into a wariness of data used to support any cause emanating from different branches of the government, from the Justice Department and its subagencies to the National Institute of Health to Homeland Security.


It is common now for media sycophants and those in power to proclaim that any data contrary to their policy positions are either purposely false or naively misleading. Think of the number of border crossings as a context for statements by the Secretary of Homeland Security that the “border is secure.” If the data don’t support the outcomes of the policy, the best tactic is to ignore the data or attack the doubters as xenophobes. But there are, in fact, some numbers that appear in real contexts, such as the number of illegal immigrants who have crowded into New York City to the despair of the mayor and the dissatisfaction of the city’s residents.


Inundated by Data, Devoid of Wisdom and Integrity


So, this is our world. We’re swamped by data on every aspect of individual, social, and political life. We have data on health; we have data on crime; we have data…well, we have data on everything we believe we can quantify. But in attempting to quantify all that is, we find we must rely on the data gatherers and interpreters, some of who are manipulators. And we find that those manipulators are highly selective in favor of social and political agendas.    


It’s not that manipulation is new. You know it isn’t. What is new is the facility any twenty-first century unscrupulous person has to influence behavior across not just America, but also across the planet. One YouTube video on “findings” in any field of research can reach hundreds of thousands to millions of people in a blink. And without checkers and balancers like Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, both true and falsified data set in motion movements and behaviors that might take decades to reverse. Recall that one lone doctor in the 1960s set in motion that notion of low fat, high carb diet as a panacea for heart health. Ancel Keys was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine and in the halls of government and medical centers. America swore off fat, and people became fatter, all on the basis of manipulated data that supported his claim and ignored data that didn’t.   


That’s why Cathy O’Neil says we need an analog of the Hyppocratic Oath for people who handle data. She also advocates for “data auditors” like Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn.


This is, as I said, our world. We began accumulating data in great quantities with the rise of the modern world. As more humans peopled the planet, more found purpose in exploring previously untapped and even unknown data sources. We went from those early encyclopedists like Denis Diderot, chief editor of Encyclopédie, to the many tomes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to Wikipedia, to online publications of research without peer review. Anyone can publish anything, and that means no one really knows whom to trust. That even “peer-reviewed research” contains falsified, misinterpreted, and misleading data should concern everyone because of our undeniable interconnectedness.


We have more data than any previous generation of humans. But we don’t have more wisdom, and it’s going to be increasingly more difficult to become wiser than our ancestors if the information we use is false. As Heraclitus wrote in the Fragments: One can’t have facts without wisdom nor wisdom without facts. The two are mutually dependent. Because of our interconnectedness, those who foist false data on any segment of society inhibit the growth of wisdom in all of us.




*O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York. Crown. And Yates, Kit. 2019. The Math of Life & Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives. New York. Scribner.


**Subbaraman, Nidhi. 24 Sept 2023. The Band of Debunkers Busting Bad Scientists. Online at https://www.wsj.com/science/data-colada-debunk-stanford-president-research-14664f3  Accessed September 25, 2023

Does food choice tell us anything about how our brains work? Probably, and no doubt there are big time studies on the topic, but let’s go with some speculation to see whether or not we can learn anything about ourselves through the appeal of food.


There might be no better way to demonstrate our minds’ malleability or rigidity than by offering unfamiliar foods to an adult. “Hey, try this stuff. It’s good” doesn’t get an enthusiastic responses from most adults who rely on food appearance and familiarity for appeal. I would be very hard pressed to eat a Maeng Da, for example, though it is probably rich in protein. Northern Thais like to eat them live and cooked. Had I grown up in northern Thailand, you might see me with a “rice bug” in my mouth right now, its legs wiggling as I munch on the body. But before you say “yuk,” know that there are foods that you eat that others would shun. We are creatures of habit, and nothing says “habit” more than foods we consume without much thought.


A conversation:


Carnivore: “I’d like to joke and say, ‘This tastes just like chicken,’ but I can’t because it tastes like celery.”


Vegan: “You mean it’s tasteless if I know you.”


Carnivore: “Pretty much, but whoever at Revo got the idea to 3D-print salmon will probably make the company a profit on this stuff, what with all the vegans like you out there.”


Vegan: “What’s wrong with…”


Carnivore: “You mean besides taste?”


Vegan: “No, what’s wrong with artificial fish? It saves real fish. It’s gluten-free, and it contains vitamins, amino acids, and omega-3. Really, think about it. It doesn’t have any sugar or cholesterol. And it’s based on a fungus protein. Plus, it’s relatively cheap.”


Carnivore: “I’’m not eating it. I’ve already tried that FDA-approved lab-made chicken, which, by the way, of all things that should taste like chicken, doesn’t. I like my chicken ‘on the hoof.’ Well, on the chicken feet, anyway.”


Vegan: “But an overpopulated world will have to develop plant-based foods. Certainly, we don’t want a fiction-come-alive Soylent Green. Yuk. You carnivores are just one bite away from becoming cannibals.”


Carnivore: “With a clever ad campaign, this new stuff will win over all you vegans. You want products that look like real products. If you see the commercial for Revo Foods’ 3D salmon, you’ll note that this artificial stuff looks like a real salmon filet, at least, looks like a farm-raised salmon filet, no deep color of the wild-caught Alaskan salmon. And why does it have to look like salmon? It’s fungi and plants. Could just as easily mash the stuff up and serve it as a pâté, or smash it flat, add some smoke flavoring and serve it with cheese and bagels.”


Vegan: “Well, it appears to be natural, and it’s made of natural stuff, plants.”


Carnivore: “Natural? Here try this celery. It’s not really celery, just made to look like it. In fact, it’s bacon with the taste removed and color bleached out with some added stringy-stuff, kinda fiber—y.”


Vegan: “You joke, but I don’t have to eat all those hormones forced into animals you cruelly slaughter for food.”


Carnivore: “No, you just want to eat the plants that the animals eat, insecticides and strontium-90, and some 50,000 chemicals that are now in the environment that no one a couple of centuries ago even knew existed. And you want your plants to look just right. Appearance or presentation is everything in fine restaurants and grocery stores. I guess we want what we eat to have a certain look because we’re far removed from the basic survival and subsistence phase of our ancestors. So, now there are vegan burgers; trendy restaurants serve them. They’re made to taste similar to a beef or bison burger, but trust me they don’t, something about texture…”


Vegan: “There’s just no reason to eat an animal when you can eat a plant that, I’ll grant, is made to look like an animal protein. But that’s because we’re still in a transition period in civilization. For centuries our food came directly from the animals, and we got used to their appearance. We all know the expression, ‘That doesn’t look appetizing.’ Well, that tells you that we are drawn to food by more than hunger, smell, and taste. The eyes might be windows to the soul, but they are also windows to the palate and stomach.”


Carnivore: “My point in a way. Why do vegans want to eat something that looks like something they supposedly abhor because of its source? I don’t want to eat a steak that is celery made to look like a steak. And who’s to say that a plant-based diet doesn’t have its drawbacks and dangers? You think, ‘if it’s organically grown, it’s good for me.’ But you might be getting chemicals that Nature never intended for you to eat—sorry for the teleology. And what about all those ‘natural’ toxins in plants?”


Vegan: “Natural toxins?”


Carnivore: “Cyanogenic glycosides in almonds, for example. Furocoumarins in grapefruit and celery; lectins in beans that are in those artificial burgers; solanine in tomatoes; pyrrolizidine alkaloids in green teas…W.H.O. says, ‘Natural toxins not only pose a risk to both human and animal health, but also impact food security and nutrition by reducing people’s access to healthy food.’ ** So, you can point out all the bad things that can be found in my carnivore diet, but you can’t point out all the bad in your own supposedly ‘healthful’ diet.”


Vegan: “But I haven’t seen anyone die prematurely on a vegan diet…”

​Carnivore: “Yet, you accept the potential health risks of those toxins that might be reducing the quality of your life. Your brain simply says, ‘Okay, there are two evils. I’m choosing one of them because I’ve been convinced that it’s better for me than the other one. But who did the convincing? On what grounds? If I recall, you used to be an omnivore. You used to love a medium rare steak.”


Vegan: “I realized that I don’t want to kill animals…”


Carnivore: “Noble thought. So, it’s probably an ethical matter. You’ve adopted an moral stand in a sort of religion, one that favors compassion for animals. I get that, especially in these times when social influence from various groups is pervasive, PETA billboards and all…”


Vegan: “Animals have personality, limited, I’ll grant, but identifiable. Betsy the cow raised by some 4H farm girl, has a way about her that differs from Bruno the bull raised by some 4H farm boy. You really should try more vegan recipes because plants don’t have personalities. You infuse your body with fats. Your diet is killing you.”


Carnivore: “And yours isn’t?”


Vegan: “Everyone knows that we should be eating more grains, nuts, seeds, fungi, fruits, and veggies.”


Carnivore: “You’ve been convinced by some very clever propaganda, and you’re about to enter an age of FDA-approved artificial food that someone down the line will discover isn’t the diet panacea you think it is. What we eat is really a product of enculturation, so soon, generations of kids will grow up eating this ‘Soylent Salmon’ and think that this is the way it should taste and look. They will accept food that ‘looks’ like food they have never eaten since eventually, you vegans will ban all animal consumption. And they’ll never realize that the look doesn’t have to be a mirror image of the real stuff. Is there any reason other than tricking the mind to have artificial salmon look like a real salmon filet?”


Vegan: “What should it look like?”


Carnivore: “I don’t know, maybe some colorless, orderless gray paste, as I said, some pâté. You could squeeze it from a tube right onto a cracker or directly into your mouth.”


Vegan: “That’s so unappetizing.”


Carnivore: “So, let me get this straight. We want our food to look like food that it isn’t. If it doesn’t appeal to our aesthetic, then it’s repulsive. And that’s why fine restaurants are so obsessed with ‘presentation.’ But then, we can train ourselves to eat almost anything, like a large rice bug in Thailand. Pop one in your mouth and chew even though its wiggling legs are dangling from your lips as you eat the body.”


Vegan: “Oh! Yuk. [shivers] Did you ever think that you eat a steak that doesn’t look like the animal? If they weren’t so big, you could have cow legs dangling from your mouth.”


Carnivore: “I know that I am far removed from my carnivore ancestors. I go to the grocery store with a preset image of what food should look like. I’ll grant that. Obviously, as a little kid, I learned to eat what my parents ate, and we weren’t farmers or butchers. Once a food becomes part of a society, each successive generation eats it. I think of the story that’s been circulating since the nineteenth century, the story, real or fake, exaggerated or exact, of Robert Gibbon Johnson. In 1820 the good Colonel Johnson, a horticulturist, announced that he would eat a tomato on the steps of his local Salem, New Jersey, courthouse. People gathered to see him die from the poisonous fruit. He didn’t. And people like you and me eat tomatoes today. What becomes acceptable stays acceptable unless there’s a propaganda campaign to change minds. Thus your vegan diet. You’ve been convinced that eating animals is bad for you. And though there is some evidence that your vegan diet contains some benefits, there is no evidence that my diet is any more harmful than eating tomatoes, which, by the way, are probably good for you and can be incorporated into many recipes. But I’m not eating fake salmon even if it looks like salmon.”


Vegan: “Someone had to take the first bite of something to find out if it was good to eat.”


Carnivore: “I wonder whether people who talk to their houseplants eat veggies. I can’t leave you without this anecdote. Years ago I read Roland Huntford’s biography of Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen, Nobel laureate and explorer. In his exploration of the Arctic he and a partner encountered the harshest conditions for life, and they were running out of food. Fortunately, for them, they had relied for transportation on dogsleds and dogs. They formed an attachment to their dogs as all pet owners do, but in the face of starvation, they began to eat them one by one, the last being especially difficult to kill.”


Vegan: “That’s savage.”


Carnivore: “But it isn’t, is it? They were facing starvation, and the dog was edible. What choice did they have. If they had chosen not to eat the dog, they would have died, and the dog would also have died.”


Vegan: “So, what’s your argument? That we are all just one Donner Pass away from becoming cannibals?”


Carnivore: “No, but that might not be a wild surmise. Essentially, the Nansen story is more about survival than about killing a dog. Nansen went on to become a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was also an inventor; his Nansen bottle still used by oceanographers. He had also figured a way to build a ship that wouldn’t be crushed if it got trapped in Arctic ice; thus, the Fram survived. That’s all part of a life that wouldn’t have been extended to include his Nobel Prize work if he had he not eaten his dogs, cute and faithful as they might have been.


Vegan: “That’s still repulsive. I would never eat Fido. I would never eat a cat. I can’t envision ever eating turtle soup. Give me my veggies, fruits, nuts, and seeds. You haven’t said anything to convince me otherwise.”


Carnivore: “And maybe that’s why our choice of diet is so indicative of the way our brains work. I know that I can eat your diet if I so choose, but I don’t. You know that you can’t eat my diet and would never choose to eat it.”


Vegan: “Sorry, I don’t see it. I don’t get your point. What is there in what we just said that indicates anything other than just a difference in culture and taste? I belong to a culture of vegans. You belong to a culture of carnivores or omnivores. It’s a choice, isn’t it?”


Carnivore: “But your choice has an ethical or moral component that mine doesn’t have, save for my putting humans above all other organic entities. I, too, wouldn’t ordinarily eat Fido, Kitty, or some Ninja turtle…unless….But I certainly find machine-made food like artificial salmon equally repugnant. So, in some ways even though we differ, we are alike, but consider those toxins you so readily devour in your healthful diet.”


Vegan: “And consider the suffering caused you your diet.”


Carnivore: “Who might have expected a discussion about artificial salmon would end up being a matter of ethics, enculturation, and aesthetics? I’m headed for the steak house. Care to join me?”


Vegan: “No thanks. I’m headed to the produce section of the grocery store.”






*Klausner, Alexandra. 19 Sep. 2023. Does 3D-printed ‘salmon’ taste like the real thing? Supermarket shoppers in one country about to find out. New York Post online at Revo        Accessed on September 21, 2023. The story had an accompanying company ad video showing how the product was made and how vibrant young people enjoyed eating it.


**https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food


***Nansen: The Explorer as Hero. 1997. Great Britain. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

Croesus


Croesus of Lydia had it all, riches, empire, power. But he wanted more power. After all, what is there left for the world’s richest man to gain after wealth and rule? His rival Cyrus of Persia also had an empire. As Herodotus tells the story, bound in mutual covetousness, they were on the precipice of war when Croesus got an idea: Why not consult the Oracle at Delphi before entering battle?


He did, and the Oracle told him that he would topple an empire if he went to war.


You know where this is going, don’t you? Yes, the empire Croesus toppled was his own. The power he sought fell into the hands of his enemy.


See any modern parallel?


Power


There’s more than one kind of power. There’s that definition of it in physics, a scalar quantity that equals the transfer of energy in some unit of time, usually in watts, which are joules per second (Think of a joule as the amount of energy needed to lift a lemon one meter in one second). Then there’s that psycho-social extended definition that makes up Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. * This is the kind of power Croesus and Cyrus sought, a control over individuals or entire societies.


In the modern parallel there’s a link between these two kinds of power, and a Delphic lesson to be learned the hard way.


The Proposition: Science Is Dead and a New God Has Risen in Its Place


Science is dead, and people who killed it formed a new religion to take its place, a fundamentalist creed with only one belief with one corollary: Climate is changing; climate has control over humanity.


This new religion has its own version of the Apocalypse which contains a story of plagues similar to those in Exodus: Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes of power never before seen, tornadoes, deluges, floods, Arctic cold, vast migrations of humans and beasts, diseases bacterial, viral, and parasitic, wars, rising seas, famines, locusts, and women in bikinis sunbathing by the locks at Sault Ste. Marie in the dead of winter. (It ain’t all bad, I suppose)


This new religion has only one theology: Escatology. The faith is, in fact, steeped in eschatological fear. As much as any other religion, it focuses on “end times” and the despair and desperation engendered by a rapidly declining prospect for salvation. The ineluctable disaster is the work of the devil spewing carbon dioxide and methane into the world of the living, both noxious gases derived from the Underworld. If there is an opening to the Gates of Hell, we’re just outside. Abandon all hope…because “The Science Is Settled.” It’s the End of Times.


And No Less a Prophet than the President of the United States Warns Us


Ever wonder what it might have been like to hear the ancient soothsayers and prophets? Wonder no more. We have our biblical analog. Here’s the United States President addressing the United Nations on September 19, 2023:


    “Blah, blah, blah, fires, blah, floods, blah, droughts. No one can doubt that climate change is occurring and that it is an existential threat. We need to keep warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade. Blah, blah, blah…”


Okay, I’l admit that those weren’t his exact words, but his speech to the delegates did run according to the dictates of “modern science.” If he didn’t cite the sacred text exactly, he at least paraphrased or plagiarized it (one of his skills, I’m told). If we don’t stop using fossil fuels, we’re all doomed. The world needs Green Energy, thus, Green Power. In his words, “We need to climate-proof the world.”


Excuse me? Climate-proof? Sorry for the crudity here, but what the h-e-double toothpick does that mean? Climate is a general term for a combined temperature-precipitation decades-long profile of a region in categories organized by various men, including Köppen, Geiger, Thornthwaite, and Trewartha. Their classifications include, for example, tropical-rainforest and tropical savanna, and tropical monsoon. How does one climate-proof the planet? What in the h-e-double toothpick can that possibly mean?
    
Like Fundamentalists Everywhere  the Clergy of Climate Change Label the Inquisitive as Heretics


It doesn’t matter that reasonable people have posed reasonable questions to believers. For them “the science”—pardon me, religion—“is settled,” and alternative views are neither scientific nor warranted. Alarmists have raised a new God, and He [She, It, They, Z] is very much alive, belying Nietzsche’s famous proclamation. Contrary to Nietzsche’s thinking, it’s science, not God, that’s dead.


For the living, there’s little to do but worship at the altar of the IPCC and join with the elite priesthood of a dual papacy in Gore and Kerry and their little altar girl Thunberg. “The Climate God Is Alive, but Science Is Dead.”


As in all fundamentalist times, heretics continue to question in spite of the ridicule and threats. Numerous “climate alarmism” nonbelievers have become incarnate pagans, atheists, and wimpy fence-sitting agnostics of our time.


Some of those nonbelievers have gone to great lengths to seek an alternate truth and have actually uncovered one: There is no existential threat from changing weather patterns that differs in kind from any similar threat humans and other life-forms have faced. But the fundamentalists in the religion of climate change won’t allow them to speak their minds or offer proof for their reasoning without ridicule and ostracism. This is a “science” that disdains doubt. Even if Earth is warming, a contestable contention, is it the devil called Anthropogenic Carbon like the Book of Job’s The Satan (The Adversary) that is wreaking the supposed havoc on Earth’s living?




What Would Our Ancient Ancestors Think?


It’s a tough world because it is indifferent to comfort. But comfort isn’t the only reason for people to colonize a climatic regime. People have moved into climates severe and mild over thousands of years and have stayed or moved as survival remained easy or became more difficult. Personally, I can’t imagine living in the cold land of the Inuit, but similarly, I can’t imagine living in the hot rainforests of Amazonian tribesmen. But Inuits and Amazonians live in those environments, just as nomadic people live in the Sahara and Arabian drylands. Note that human migrations throughout the Americas during the past 16,000 years are testimony to our ability to choose where and how we wish to live. And our choices differ. Otherwise, everyone would live in the same climate zone.


Whereas a move might seem to be a good choice for the first generation of migrants, subsequent generations might find the new locale falls short of its initial promise. Yet, populations have endured through harsh environmental changes. The settlement of Greenland serves as a model. No doubt the Viking settlers Leif Erickson persuaded to accompany him across the northern Atlantic during the Medieval Warm Period would have said “No, thanks” to a similar voyage during the later Little Ice Age. Once emplaced, however, people can figure a way to survive and even thrive. Those “Erikson” Vikings’ descendants inhabited Greenland for more than four centuries. Tell me, has your family descended in place for 400 years? No?


The Inuits, Amazonians, and Bedouins are testimony to human endurance and our ability to acclimatize. Both boreal and equatorial people show that neither extreme cold as in high latitudes nor extreme heat as in low latitudes is a detriment to continued life. If life is sustainable, then everything beyond sustainability is a luxury. And apparently the presence of fresh water is more significant than either high or low temperatures: Thus, Bedouins survive because of oases; Inuit have all the fresh water they want; Amazonians live with rain. And from the time of ancient Ur till now, people have dammed water and irrigated farmland.


Science Is Dead because It Has Become Inductive


Toss a coin. How did it land? What if it landed tails up 25 times without landing heads up? Could you predict the 26th toss? Of course, you know that you could toss a coin an indefinite number of times and still have no clue to the result of the next toss. Generally, it will fall tails up about as many times as it falls heads up. There’s no way to inductively conclude future results. Similarly, there’s no way to conclude with certainty that because there have been recent floods in Pakistan, Libya, and California, that such weather phenomena are only destined to increase in number and intensity. There’s no way to use a few weather specifics to derive a tenable generalization with regard to climate patterns, this is especially true of using today’s severe weather as a foreshadowing of tomorrow’s. Take the severe winters of the 1970s in North America as examples. Anyone living through them could easily say that the 1980s would be equally as cold—but they weren’t.


Consider these monthly average temperatures in Fahrenheit for some recent Januarys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:


January 1974: 34
January 1975: 32.6
January 1976: 23.5
January 1977: 11.4
January 1978: 22.6


January 1990: 36.8
January 1991: 29.7
January 1992: 30.5
January 1993: 35.1
January 1994: 21.1


The 30-year mean for Pittsburgh in January is 28.8. Will it change to colder or warmer temperatures? Who knows. I remember 1977’s 11.4 degree average because I lost power during part of that month, and on one morning I went outside to chop wood for the fireplace when the wind chill was close to minus 50 F. You can guess that I thought we were entering a second Younger Dryas. But the following January was warmer. Weather anomalies occur all the time, but they are not predictors of future weather anomalies. As their knowledge now stands, meteorologists are still not capable of predicting the exact effects of an El Niño, La Niña, the Aleutian Low, the North Pacific Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.


IPCC Coin Tosses


If you read through the many IPCC reports and documents associated with international agreements like the recent Paris Agreement or Accord, you’ll encounter many specifics tied to generalities, actually specifics supporting generalities. The field of climate science is filled with inductive reasoning. It’s filled with documentation of widely spread effects attributed to a single cause: climate change. And it doesn’t matter how unrelated the effects are or how accurately they are documented. Nor does it matter to climate alarmists that much of the “settled science” is derived not from reality, but rather from models of reality, many of them incapable of “predicting” past warming or cooling episodes.


The models and the inductive thinking combine in alarmists’ minds to prophesy an unquestioned existential threat from a warming world caused by increased atmospheric carbon even though the current carbon composition of the atmosphere is among the lowest levels of that gas over the past 55 million years. Strangely, none of the “scientists” or climate alarmists will accept that during the past 2.5 million years there have been inconsistent relationships between the amount of atmospheric carbon and temperatures. Nor will they willingly accept that some natural processes like Milankovitch Cycles, ocean currents, and atmospheric cycles play an undecided role individually or in conjunction with one another.


Climate is complex. We haven’t studied it for very long. We can derive some information about its past vicissitudes, but we often rely on proxy evidence for that information. Tree rings, for example, were important in the making of the “hockey stick graph,” but that graph, widely accepted, was adopted in place of another competing graph by another tree-ring researcher. And tree rings, even from the Little Ice Age might not be as good a clue about temperature as they are about moisture and disease. In other words, settled science isn’t really settled. Recall that elsewhere I and others have pointed to Naomi Orestes’s study from which Al Gore got his “97%” that the media keep repeating, a figure that was based on a small sampling of papers within a larger sampling. Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? The religion of climate change has an element of numerology: Two numbers, 97% consensus and 1.5 degrees Celsius are sacred.


And in front of the United Nations, the President of the United States declared that we must make the world “climate-proof.” Think he has ever studied a climate textbook?


A Future They Would Have Loved to Live


Plopped into the twenty-first century, our ancient ancestors would probably say, “If we would have known the world would be this hospitable, we would have postponed our births.” Certainly, the people roaming with mammoths and mastodons and saber tooth tigers might have a more optimistic view of their chance of survival with a change of a degree or two or with a sea level three-feet higher than today’s ocean level. Remember that as the last large sheets of ice melted off the continents, sea level rose by more than 400 feet. Surely, that would have displaced some generations of coastal dwellers. “When I was a kid, my great grandpa had a lean-to over there, but it’s covered by water now.”


How ever will we modern people survive a couple of millimeter rise currently washing over the land? At the rate of eustatic change, the seas will be meter higher in just under a millennium.


But isn’t it all a matter of migratory choices? As the coastal urban population increases, is it not more likely that there will be more structures damaged and more people put in jeopardy by storms? Aren’t we really moving into potential danger?


I think that our ancestors who lived during the Younger Dryas would think today’s weather, storms and floods, Arctic blasts, and tropical heat waves, would be preferable to the constant chill of their times. Heat is dangerous in the absence of water, but cold kills when the water is abundant but frozen. Death Valley is “death valley” because it is dry, not because it is hot though the heat and the rain shadow of the mountains to the west are the reasons for the aridity. Think POTUS understands rain shadows, semi-permanent Highs and Lows, and cold ocean currents like the California Current?


Two Quotations from Feynman


Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” In front of the United Nations, the current President of the United States proclaimed that no one could doubt that climate change is real. His surety is indicative of a dead science. Richard is turning over in his grave.


And Feynman is famous for this statement: “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” The fundamentalism of climate ideology can’t be proven by any experiment other than time. If the climate scientists are right, we have to wait decades to centuries to discover that they are. Time is the laboratory scientist, and it’s in no hurry as human lifetimes go.


Past experiments in its laboratory have indicated a swinging climate, a carbon pendulum, and both advantages and disadvantages to humans when climates do change. No one could possibly farm in Canada when the entire country was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet one to two miles thick from 90,000 to 20,000 years ago. I’ll bet Canadians are happy that ice melted. Or, am I wrong? Do you think today’s Canadians wish the Laurentide climate regime had never changed, had never turned toward warmer temperatures?


But if alarmists are right, do they know something about Earth the rest of us don’t know. After a general cooling trend since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago, are we headed toward a warmer world that cannot support life? Isn’t that ancient warm period the initial time when mammals began to dominate the planet? And didn’t primates become bipedal during a droughty period in Africa?    


Dead Science Is Dangerous Science


Science is dead. Climate alarmists have killed it. In its stead, they have raised a god replete with a fully developed religion. Be aware. If you don’t  believe, you’ll be declared a heretic, shamed, and ostracized. But those in the clergy of this climate religion can say anything with relative impunity, even crazy ideas that involve geo-engineering.


Take the recent proposal by people in the Biden Administration and elsewhere to “seed” the upper atmosphere with sunlight blockers and reflectors. As I pointed out in a previous blog, that strategy could backfire if a few volcanoes also ejected sunlight blockers into the atmosphere as they did right before 1816, the Year without a Summer that caused famine and death by starvation in Europe and killed crops in the United States. Then what? Will the Biden Administration or whoever is in charge send big vacuum cleaners skyward to sweep away the blocking dust and molecules to allow needed sunlight in once again? Can anyone say, “The Science Is Settled”? Can anyone say that just like Croesus, the empire that falls is one’s own?


But if you point out such madness to the media or climate alarmists, you get no admission of absurdity. Among the believers the wildest statements are appropriate and beyond question or ridicule. That’s dangerous because a group in power might even try to pull off some sunlight-blocking. And yet, “The Science Is Settled.”


The religion of climate change is, unfortunately, here to stay because big money is involved. Whole industries are devoted to it as well as the academics and politicians that derive lucrative rewards for supporting it. There is no separation of religion and state in this. Climate alarmism has become the state religion.


Below the Broken Derna Dams


In his UN address POTUS cited the tragic flooding in Pakistan and Libya. In the latter country thousands died, but they died because they lived in the channel between impounded water and ocean. It was in the outlet to the sea down which the water from two collapsed dams above Derna washed away lives. The tragic loss during the storm called Daniel was probably predictable. People in the outflow channels below every dam are vulnerable to floods from water perched upstream. There are too many examples of similar incidents to cite.


In 1985 the Monongahela River valley suffered a devastating flood after some very heavy rainfall (Running an experiment at the time, I recorded 11 inches of rain in a 24-hour period). The people in the valley suffered damages to their homes and businesses. My house lies more than 300 feet above the river. No damage. If one chooses to live in a channel, then one can expect water damage at some time. The poor of Derna lived in a chaotic, terrorist infiltrated and corrupt government that failed to stop urban growth in the valley below the dams. Biden wants to blame climate.


I can think of some American analogs of the Libyan flooding. But they prove no connections between climate and catastrophic flooding, but they do prove connections between lack of foresight and disaster. The famous Johnstown Flood occurred after heavy rains could not be held in the reservoir behind a poorly kept dirt dam. Johnstown, like modern Derna, was situated in the valley far below the collapsing dam. What could one expect? Or, rather, why did the people of Johnstown not expect the inevitable?


But no modern flood can be as a specific tied to a generalization, just as no January temperature for Pittsburgh can be tied to a rebirth of the Younger Dryas.


Science is dead. You can’t convince the faithful to accept that. They believe what they believe. They have seen the specifics, so they know the generality. They have reasoned inductively and are sure that they know which side of the coin will fall face up.


Biden as Croesus


So, JRB Ware, alias Joe Biden, seeks to establish a new kind of power. To do so, he decreased energy supplies by, among other actions, closing the Keystone Pipeline. As a result of his attempt to acquire “green power” that is “carbon free,” he has decreased the power in the electrical grid. Like Croesus, he’s been to the altar of the Oracle—his located not in Greece, but rather in the IPCC headquarters. He’s been told that he will topple an empire, the empire of fossil fuels. In fact, his enemy, the giant Chinese empire’s economy that runs on fossil fuels, will acquire the power, both the actual physical power measured in watts and the socio-eco-international-political power measured in world domination.


The economic empire he is toppling is the American one.




*Greene, Robert. 1998. A Joost Elffers Book. Penguin Books.

The New York Post’s editorial board leveled an accusation of harm on the recently dissolved Columbia Teachers College. The Board contends that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, under the direction of Lucy Calkins and backed by an endowment in the $Billions, “failed to foster the building of knowledge and vocabulary vital to learning the love of reading” (18 Sept 2023). * In its criticism of Calkins and company, the Post’s editors say that Columbia pushed programs in reading that were based on ideology, not science, thus failing the “children who most needed help.” The editors also said the Columbia approach had diminished the value of phonics.


But what can anyone expect of a bastion of liberalism like Columbia? Didn’t they have an “ideal” educational system to propagate? So what if the methodology had no scientific evidence of its efficacy. They thought of it. So, shouldn’t it work? Look how many schools adopted it in New York and throughout the nation. Look at the fawning disciples in the flock of educators who abandoned other methods to adopt Columbia’s. Surely, there’s evidence in numbers.


OBE


The abandonment—finally—of a failed system in reading reminds me of another such failed system, one that absorbed the nation for a number of years (and maybe still lingers here and there). Called Outcomes Based Education (OBE), the system required students to retake tests regardless of their personal scores if the class as a whole did not achieve an average 70% grade on those tests. Yep. “A-students” had to retake tests because other students didn’t do well. Noting like lumping everyone together to foster excellence, right?


Like the Columbia approach, the OBE approach had no evidence of its effectiveness save a single limited study that itself lacked thoroughness and rerunning. In the instance of the OBE programs that swept through educators in various teaching universities, simpleminded adoption became a lucrative avocation. “Go out to spread the Word, my children, and school district superintendents will advocate for you at school board meetings and pay you as consultants.” They did, and they did. In the application of the the program, however, teachers encountered the unforeseen effects when they discovered a major flaw: Students who threatened classmates: “Hey, I didn’t study for this test, so you better not make a good grade.” It happened. “No joke,” as POTUS is fond of saying.


What Does It Take to Become an Educator?


One might ask how educators can buy into so many failed educational systems. The answer lies in the mass-produced teacher population. Whereas engineers might have to take more than 130 credits to acquire their degrees, most teachers reach the B.A. or B.S. with just 120 credits. And among those teacher-education credits there’s little emphasis on epistemology and the scientific method. There’s usually only one course in developmental psychology, and there’s virtually nothing about neuroscience, linguistics, economics, political philosophy, and the history of western knowledge.** Instead, there are courses in “presentation,” which amount to turning on some visual aid machine and showing a slide show, now called a digital slideshow (e.g., PowerPoint). Methodology, not substance, is the focus in many teacher-education curricula. Don’t ask a recent education graduate to fare well on Jeopardy.


And that has left us a with generations of teachers who follow rather than think critically. That might be one of the reasons that teachers’ unions vote as a “block” and support the party that makes the most promises and ingrains itself the most deeply in the union leaders’ minds. And since those in the ranks rise to become the principals and superintendents, no one can expect critical thinking from the majority of them—though there are many great principals and superintendents leading school districts in spite of the overall trend.


But Teachers Have Herculean Tasks


In a country that provides free education to everyone, teachers have a very hard soil to plow. Overcrowded classes and disinterested parents contribute to their hardships that have, with the loss of discipline led to chronically deficient inner city schools. And the task of teachers is made even more difficult by the forced insertion of ineffective educational methods.


That Columbia had an inordinate influence over reading and writing programs shouldn’t surprise anyone. Universities are expected to be “cutting-edge” by the masses. If an ivy League school can produce famous thinkers, writers, and scientists, why should it not also produce great educators?


A late colleague of mine whose life experiences included playing professional baseball to the AAA level and serving as a member of the Peace Corps in Africa, returned to education to complete his M.A. at Northwestern U. But before he entered that degree program, he attended Columbia, hoping to learn from the some of the more famous literary scholars of the time. He transferred to Northwestern, however, because in his first semester at Columbia, a famous professor gave the opening lecture and then disappeared as graduate students held all the succeeding classes. Apparently, the nitty-gritty of lecturing and pursuing critical exchanges with students were not his cup of tea. And apparently, also, the program initiated by Calkins operated similarly, that is, once accepted as “biblically true,” it became THE methodology, undergoing no further critical evaluation, but leaving a few generations of elementary and secondary students devoid of reading skills. Had OBE established a similar foothold on young minds, American education would be worse off than it is today. Just imagine being that teacher forced to retest an “A” student because classmates did not fare well.


It’s All about Hard Work in the Long Run, Isn’t It?


So, here’s your daily dose of anecdotal information. Among the many courses I taught is one key introductory class on historical geology, a topic that covers 4.5 billion years of the planet’s development. Massive amount of information.  In one very large class of geology majors, I gave lectures for about three weeks before testing. As I corrected the test, I realized I had one student who scored an almost perfect paper and the rest of the class that scored either barely passing or failing grades. The students were outraged. It had to be my fault. They went to the dean, they went to whoever they thought could help. They complained to me. I noted that everything on the test was either in their notes or in textbook passages I had noted for them. I also reminded them that I had suggested study groups so that they could build their knowledge together and question themselves.


Another three weeks passed, another test time approached. I reminded them once again to form study groups, to challenge one another, and to memorize, memorize, memorize. And they listened. In the evenings I saw them in the hallways and empty labs pouring over the material. They were in effect “busting their butts.”


On the day of the test, I walked in and handed out a one page test with three questions:

1. The theory of moving crustal units is called Pl_te Tect_nics.
2. The spreading of the sea floor is known as Sea Floor Spre-ding.
3. Three ways plates interact is by diverging, sliding-past, and conv_rging

The students looked at me, and someone asked, “What’s this?”
I replied, “It’s your test. No talking, Start now.”


They finished in seconds, of course. Came down to the front of the small auditorium, and handed me their tests. They then walked out and gathered in the hallway mumbling. When I walked out the door, one of the students asked, “What was that?” I simply said, “That was your test.”


As I began to walk to my office, one of the students said, “But we learned all that stuff.”


To which I replied, “That’s the point.”


After that incident, I noticed pre-test groups gathering in the halls and labs, and the grades of all the students improved. Somehow they became self-motivated to do the hard work of learning. Was it something I said or did?


Educational Systems Lack Rigorous Questioning


My reasoning for including neuroscience and developmental psychology in education curricula lies in the reality that “I can’t larn nothin’ for ya.” But if I understand how your brain works and how it has developed, I might help you to “learn something.” That means influencing motive and instilling appropriate level skills in young minds. However my little test experiment might be criticized, it did motivate students at least in that one instance to do the hard work to learn. Isn’t that the point of education, from e ducere, to "lead out” or “from” (ignorance). The Columbia reading methodology kept a few generations of students in ignorance by adopting a fun way to learn, except that it resulted in little learning.


Like Columbia’s reading methodology, OBE and similar educational methodologies look to easy solutions that do not pass a test of experimentation except for a few initial subjects in qualitative research, not quantitative research. The people who initiate such programs are content with unscientific results and go on to proselytize in the name of their pet programs. And modern educators are quick to adopt those programs and to become disciples without critically examining them. One might say, “Well, what harm can they do? They have to try something to reach the masses.”


But the harm snowballs through generations and across the evermore intellectually flat landscapes of equity. Imagine being that “A” student who scored well on a test yet was required retake the test instead of moving on to the next subject.


There’s no ultimate educational methodology, no panacea. There is, however, hard work and individual effort that seem to find rewards in individual success. The word teacher derives from Anglo-Saxon tacn, which means “signpost,” “guide.” An educator can lead one out of ignorance by serving as a guide, but the guidance can’t be based on untested ideal methodologies that make university professors feel good about themselves and that obtain a following of uncritical disciples. And just as a “Keep off the grass” sign loses its effectiveness, so a teacher can lose it. Every educator must constantly renew with energy and a critical mind the way he or she approaches each child. That places a big burden on the shoulders of teachers, but to whom else can one go? Departments of education and teacher union leadership do not teach while consuming vast amounts of money for whatever: Political power, pet projects, untested ideals, failed redos of programs like OBE, and anything that results in travel to conferences to make people feel good about themselves while doing nothing for the kids in the classrooms.

Teachers have a tough job, but in trying to make it easier, university educators in places like Columbia only make it less effective. 






*Columbia quietly closes down Teachers College project that ruined countless lives. Online at https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/


**You might ask, “Why economics and political philosophy?” The argument for inclusion of those two disciplines lies in the value of the individual. Today’s left-learning educators seem to prefer equity over equality, that is, equal outcomes over equal opportunity. The choice of the former over the latter contributes to the development of people without the ability to think critically, much in the manner of Willam Lederer’s 1961 book A Nation of Sheep in which the author describes failures in Asia and ascribes them to the American intelligence community’s and State Department’s uncritical reliance on hearsay. Today’s social media drives much of the current “nation of sheep” who fail to question the legitimacy of information and who prefer simple answers and simple solutions. “Just give everyone a higher minimum wage.” “Just give everyone on the team a trophy for participating.”

It’s easy for us to think the world began with our own births. The present is always more important than the past. And thinking as we do that the world of Now is all that really is important, we think of our problems as “original.” But we know from the immediate past generation’s telling us and from our study of history that little that occurs in our societies differs from what happened in past societies. Let me give you a sample:


In The Rise of the Greeks, Michael Grant writes:
    
    “…most other cities of the Greek world, while not returning to dictatorships…were and remained all too liable to internal political troubles of their own: between oligarchs and democrats, between privileged and unprivileged, between rich and poor. The Greek word is stasis, faction, which means anything between legitimate differences of opinion on public affairs to savage inter-party violence—which all too often occurred. It was especially frequent in colonies where the families of original and later settlers, for example came into conflict… The city-state was a brilliant idea, and full of brilliant ideas, but it was destined eventually to fail because of the lethal combination of stasis within and constant hostilities with its Greek neighbors without” (22). *


Is there a better example of stasis than the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some 2,500 to 3,000 years after the periods covered by Grant in his history? I’ll answer for you: “NO.” We’re reliving what the ancient Greeks lived. And that gives us both joy and sadness, or optimism and pessimism.


Joy because in spite of their problems with stasis, the Greeks are still Greeks today. As a people they survived all the squabbles—petty and violent—of their history. Sadness because they in their society and we in our society have not progressed in our abilities to function internally in harmony. Every generation from ages before the Greeks arose as a culture to the American Civil War and into our own times, has replayed the world in stasis, the world of squabbling factions. And we can’t see a future that exists without stasis.


About the only differences between then and now are the dangers posed by factions that have access to weapons that far exceed the killing power of swords and the ability to quash by censorship, threat, or harm not just individuals but whole populations (Think Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorable” and Biden’s attack on anyone associated with “Make America Great Again,” or think of social media’s nationwide, nay worldwide, censorship of conservative voices coupled with the mainstream media’s compliance with one party in its disputes over another—an enhancement of stasis because it places great power in the hands of one faction over another) These are times when forces unknown to the ancient Greeks can exacerbate factional disputes and enhance the power of one supposed “democratic” social unit over another in a substitute form of oligarchy or dictatorship.


So, joy and sadness. Our culture will probably survive in some form beyond today’s factional disputes, but it won’t survive precisely as is. We live the Now as if there were no past to know. Our descendants will live their Nows as if our Now didn't exist. The status quo will always lie in stasis. 


*1987. And 2005 reprint for Barnes and Noble (where I bought it for $6.98, a bargain to me because I appreciate the effort Grant had to put into a detailed history of more than 600 years of ancient Greece and surrounding kingdoms and empires—more than 300 pages of text)

The Narragansett Surf Cam * provides a view of the bay that allows me to watch the waves this morning from my home in Pennsylvania. The bay might become a bit choppy as Hurricane Lee sweeps the nearby Atlantic, but for now, at 7:30 a.m., a couple of surfers are trying to ride unimpressive waves. So far, they have fallen off their boards a couple of times after a one- to two-second ride. But, hey, it’s not some international competition in Hawaii with towering wave heights. Narragasett this morning has nothing like the wave regime at Bioko (Fernando Po). I judge the surf to have wave heights of not much more than four or five feet at most and about a foot or two at least. The wave periods of the greater waves range from about ten to twenty seconds, so the surfers are doing much more sitting than surfing.


Surfers are, of course, only capable of doing what the ocean allows them to do. It’s the unchallenged authority of a distant storm whose winds drive the surface waves that create the surf on a shoaling seabed. Surfers in this grand scheme of authority are little more than bobbins.


Enter Stanley Milgram


The surf and surfers at Narragansett this morning bring to mind a famous experiment run by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In locations around New Haven and Yale, Milgram paid volunteers to participate in a supposed study of “memory and learning.” In reality, Milgram was running an experiment on obedience to authority that shed light, according to some interpretations, on how Germans cooperated in the Holocaust. In short, in Milgram’s experiment participants were unaware that they were being manipulated by two actors, one posing as a lab-coated clipboard-holding clinician and the other an unseen “participant” supposedly hooked up to electrodes. Under the instructions of and in obedience to the lab-coated experimenter, the unknowing participant delivered an apparent shock to the hidden actor whenever he gave an incorrect answer.**


The study has been controversial for many reasons, chief of them being the deception in the experiment. Another criticism is based on the temporary harm some participants incurred from guilt associated with their administering shocks to strangers. But in general and regardless of the applicability of the experiment to “true life,” Milgram’s experiment provides some food for thought in our own times and a bit of practical wisdom we gain through experience: People do obey authority figures, especially authority figures that stand over the horizon.


As I wrote above, people have applied Milgram’s experiment to the Holocaust in an attempt to understand the why of it. How did ordinary moral Germans become the agents of death? Within the context of Milgram’s experiment, the “clinician” was the authority figure who demanded obedience just as Hitler’s Eichmann did from a distance. The lesson in the experiment is that “ordinary human beings” can participate in actions without a sense of personal responsibility; they can displace the blame to an authority figure. They can say, “Oh! What can we do? We’re not in control.” But I have another reason for referencing the Milgram experiment, and that is the ease with which the participants found themselves giving increasingly more lethal, though fake, shocks. Turning up the dial is easy when one can fault a distant authority. Going about one’s life in New York while little by little waves of migrants entered the southern states was nothing of concern. A faraway storm is, well, far away.


Obedience to a Political Leader or Party


Every age is an Age of Influencers, but no more so than this current age, when the fame of an “influencer” can rapidly spread and magnify through social media, multiplying the “authority effect." The effect can be devastating on the weakest minds, thus the deaths of teenagers and adults who follow the challenges and suggestions posted online. I’m thinking, for example, of those who suffered injuries by jumping from speed boats and those who ingested or breathed toxic substances. For whatever reason, because the challenges were posted online or on social media, both distant sources of authority, some followed instructions that led to their own injuries and deaths, and others lashed out in anonymity to defame the reputations of other people simply because they held different views from those of the authoritative influencers. The many anonymous “haters” and “defamers” were rafting on waves from distant storms.


But among the most troubling of obedient behaviors are those associated with defending a party’s policies regardless of their deleterious effects on society.  At no time in the early stages of the Biden Administration’s opening the border did a Democrat in authority condemn the policy or refuse to obey its dictates, that is, until the consequences became a local nuisance like the mobs of migrants that have flooded New York City. Obedience to and defense of the party and its leadership seem to be analogs of Milgram’s participants’ obedience to the lab-coated clinician. New Yorkers went about their surfing in the quiet bay of life while a distant storm was brewing on the southern border. They didn’t know they were about to be hit by larger waves or they believed they were capable of handling the roughest surf.


It was only with the influx of migrants that the mayor and councils of New York began to feel what I call self-empathy. It is only after they saw the actual plight of those shipped into New York that they realized how they had participated in an experiment of obedience. The waves grew to Hawaiian and Bioko heights.


From the Surf Zone No One Knows the Distant Storm until the Waves Arrive


Not everyone who participated in the Milgram experiment yielded to the authority in an unthinking manner. Some objected and refused to administer shocks of ever-increasing intensity. But even having administered the first shock, anyone with a sense of humanity should have said, “No more. I’m done.” When those first Jews were persecuted by the Nazis, the ordinary German citizen should have said, “No more. I’m done.” But as in the Milgram experiment the first Jews led to more Jews that led to even more in a geometric sequence: 2 became 4 became 8 became 16…became 6,000,000. And in those first heady days of bliss under the Biden Administration, New York’s Democrats thought nothing of Biden’s ending the border wall construction. And then two migrants crossed, then four…The storm was intensifying, but its first waves were inconsequential to New Yorkers. They had calm water.


It’s easy for any of us to allow a creeping intensity of human travesty. We enter water that we believe is calm, and we gradually ride ever larger waves. Think open borders and fentanyl. Hundreds of Americans die each day because one pill turned into two turned into millions. One American died because of an illegal alien criminal, then two, then…. One terrorists sneaked into the country, then two, then more than 160…


New Yorkers thought little of the border and any migration problem exacerbated by the Biden Administration’s policies. For New York Democrats, Biden’s opening the border was an offshore storm, one over the horizon of daily concerns. But offshore storms are the generators of waves, and the bigger the storms the bigger the waves they generate. And distance from shore is irrelevant when the storms are large. In fact, the distance over which the winds blow that is known as the fetch, which is greater for greater storms, say like Hurricane Lee that has a diameter of hundreds of miles, contributes to the periods and wave heights of the surf.


Apparently, New Yorkers are now bouncing around on waves of migrants that have geometrically increased because the breadth of their entrance to the country stretches from California to Texas and is now also stretching across parts of the northern border. New Yorkers, happy to support Biden’s decision to open the borders, are now clutching to their civil surf boards.


Self-Control


It’s up to each of us to determine who influences and controls us and to discern whether we are part of geometric sequence driven by a distant authority of some kind. But we can’t do that when like surfers bouncing on ocean waves we have no knowledge of the source of those waves. New Yorkers ignored the hurricane caused by the Biden Administration until the storm waves were upon them.


Somewhere in the distance a storm’s winds are sending ever more powerful waves to which we submit simply because we decided to enter the water in the belief we were in control. The waves of influence that we ride toss us around daily. The winds that create those social waves emanate from distant storms.


We can, however, definitely fault ourselves for entering waters over which we have no control. For that we have no justification in displacing blame.


*https://warmwinds.com/surf-cam


**For one review of the experiment, see Saul Mcleod. 11 Sept 2023. Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics at SimplyPsychology online at https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html#Milgram%E2%80%99s%20Agency%20Theory

A friend of mine and I have been tracking Hurricane Lee’s progress through the Atlantic Ocean. He’s a New Englander knowledgeable in matters meteorological and human-ological. When the hurricane reached Cat 5, he sent me pics of the storm that had a vertical temperature profile indicative of extreme atmospheric violence—extreme for Earth, at least; no doubt the violence of Jupiter’s centuries-old Red Spot and Little Red Spot (268 mph and 384 mph) is greater than any Earthbound hurricane’s winds.


Hurricanes on Earth


Oh! No! You’re wondering whether I’m just an old guy with a wandering mind incapable of making a point briefly. You ask yourself, “Does he have ADD, attention deficit disorder?” And then, “Focus, Donald, focus, I’m on a lunch hour break, and I don’t have much time to read one of your 4,000-word blogs. We didn’t need to know about Jupiter’s storms, just Hurricane Lee and whatever point you were about to make before your mind wandered into outer space. Besides, no one’s ever going to go to Ju—-Oh! My God, I’m doing what he does. Focus, Me, Focus. I need to get a life.”


So, my friend and I tracked the storm that posed absolutely no danger to me in western Pennsylvania, but that did pose a danger to him in Rhode Island. His area had been the target of past hurricanes and this new one could be the “next one.” But as of this writing, it seems that Lee is veering, taking the route of so many Northern Hemisphere storms by turning onto a clockwise path in spite of its counterclockwise winds, an effect of what is commonly called the Coriolis Force—though it is not in Newtonian terms actually “a force.”


What’s at play/ If you fire a powerful howitzer from the Equator directly northward, its shell will appear to take a curving turn to end up east of a target directly north of its location. Sitting in the howitzer before it is fired, the shell is already moving eastward faster than any location at higher latitude, either north or south. [ADD ALERT] That’s the reason NASA launches from say, Florida rather than from Maine. On the launchpad, the rocket is already moving faster there than it would on a Maine launchpad—where, by the way, many lighthouses look like rockets perched along a rocky coast (but I digress).


In effect, the Coriolis provides the USA with some protection from hurricanes that move northward through the Atlantic [ADD ALERT], but that didn’t stop Hurricane Agnes from devastating Pennsylvania in 1972 or Hurricane Sandy from damaging New Jersey, New York, and the New England. Where was I?


Sorry, I think there’s a mental Coriolis Force affecting my train of thought. Am I following the same path as Wise Old Joe who turns off topic as soon as he abandons the teleprompter? Focus, Donald.


Hurricanes in the Brain


Brains on Earth also seem to follow apparent curving paths, as, for example, liberal thinking turns conservative as it encounters realities. But not all. There are those periods when the liberal mind gets stuck in place, doing much damage to society just like Hurricane Agnes, which stubbornly sat in place long enough to pump its rain as far inland as western Pennsylvania, shrouding it in clouds for over a week. When liberal brains keep spinning in place, there’s little chance that a coastal environment will escape damage; just look at what has happened in New York and San Francisco.


The devastation continues as liberal policies have led to increases in crime, homelessness, and emigration of wealth. For the fortunate few who saw the storm coming and tracked it correctly, evacuation meant safety. Those who stayed behind, just like those 1,836 who stayed behind as Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, suffered the consequences of ignorance about the brainstorms of liberal minds.


Tracking Liberal Brainstorms


There’s an apparent trajectory associated with most liberal brainstorms: The ideal turns toward the untenable real. The unfortunate consequence is that the damage endures. Just as it takes years to rebuild an area devastated by a hurricane, so it takes years—even decades—to rebuild an area devastated by liberal ideals, most of them centered on utopian fictions, like Seattle’s hiring six people to serve as “alternative crisis responders” who will handle domestic disputes. These unarmed people will supposedly defuse the situations that in so many cases have resulted in harm to armed police. Those who accept the job should, in the words of William Kirk in a YouTube video entitled “Meet America's Dumbest and Soon to Be Most Dangerous City” have their wills in order, invest in more life insurance, and notify the next-of-kin. *


This is a brewing storm that will be easy to track. We know exactly where the devastation will occur and that it will include injuries and deaths. We know that it will take years of recovery. Maybe no recovery will be possible. There are models going back 12,000 years to Karahan Tepe that cities have been abandoned. The slums of today were once vital neighborhoods.


And although one could argue that social entropy is inevitable, the reality of liberal storms destroying society through unattainable and unrealistic ideals is already in evidence in coastal cities.


The Sanctuary City Storm


One easily predictable storm started not so much on water but on land, specifically, the land that separates Mexico from the United States. The liberal brainstorm to open the border and declare sanctuaries caused a storm surge of migrants that washed first over the southern states and then into cities like New York and Chicago. Yes, Chicago, even far inland and away from any apparent hurricane effects, is now seeing the consequences of “sanctuary.” And in New York, that storm has the mayor panicked. This isn’t just a matter of Hurricane Sandy’s water washing in temporarily and then receding. This is a flood that is here to stay, and it is also a flood that has long-time residents chased away. Predictable? Easily so. But not for the liberal forecasters who “knew better than the rest of us.”


National Brainstorm Center


We need an analog, a National Brainstorm Center, that mimics the work of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Those working in the new center will be knowledgeable about the natural trends of brainstorms and will make predictions. Yes, they will get some details wrong, some tracks wrong, but they won’t miss by much in forecasting the results of a storm. The liberal brainstorms follow somewhat predictable paths. The destruction they wreak is almost inevitable, the movement of their storms almost ineluctable.


But we have to try to predict and then warn. Of course, history shows that warnings often fall on deaf ears. It’s only in the aftermath that those stubbornly adherent to ideals realize that they have actually generated their own storms and placed them on paths so evident that the wise know when to get out of the way.


*Meet America's Dumbest and Soon to Be Most Dangerous City

I’ve addressed this issue before by saying I should attach a disclaimer to every blog entry: This document in no way represents the work of an artificial intelligence. Heck, it barely represents the work of a human intelligence.


Here’s the dilemma: Winston Cho reports online that authors are suing Meta and OpenAI for infringement of copyright because they used published works to train their AI. *


I understand the motivation for the suit. Who wants to know that in a potential infinite number of books written by a machine that his work has been copied without acknowledgement? But I also understand the motivation of the AI guys. What better way to give artificial intelligence a sense of the language than to expose it to more than a hundred thousand books, maybe a million books?


And I think to my own years of learning to write. In high school I tried translating a book in Virgil’s Aeneid in the writing style of Damon Runyon. Strange combo, right? But at the time it seemed like a creative approach even though I was mimicking Runyon. In college I adopted the writing styles of various authors, many from nineteenth-century nonfiction, those great essayists who went on and and on and… in paragraphs that today would be considered full novella.


Whatever this style is that you are currently reading, whether good or bad, it comes from my imitating many authors. Fortunately, all of them are currently dead, so I don’t fear a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Nevertheless, how I write, how I approach a topic is the culmination of many imitations.


AI won’t develop the skill to write well unless it sees what good writing looks like. It might also learn from bad writing. In imitation of either good or bad writing, however, AI needs to write with a disclaimer: I wrote this, but I didn’t use any phrases or words peculiar to a particular author without documentation. I will acknowledge that my style might be imitative of one author’s or of several authors’ styles and that my plots belong to a class of limited plots. If you don’t like this story, close the book.


As for my own creativity, I find it lies in juxtaposition, that joining of opposites and dissimilarities best exemplified by my translating Virgil in the Runyon style. And that leads to my advice to writers and speakers both human and artificial: See analogs that others don’t see. They lie in abundance in your experience.








*https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/authors-sue-meta-openai-class-action-1235588711/