“Unburdenerd by what has been…” is VP Harris’s go-to statement about changing America. She promises a turnaround.  But a turnaround, as many have noted, would mean turning away from her own policies. She wants to unburden herself from herself. Absurd, but obviously believed by insouciant followers hooked on her tautological generalities. Oh! Be assured. She’ll get their votes because she promises hope, joy, and…Wait, didn’t we hear “hope and change” from Obama, who did, in fact, change the national debt by ten or eleven trillion bucks and who gave us so much hope the seas would strop rising that he now owns not one, but two expensive homes on beaches?


If she gives us change, then by how much would a President Harris change what a Biden-Harris Administration wrought? Infinitesimal, I’m guessing, fractions of fractions of fractions in a Cantoresque drive to the infinitely small, half, then half again, and halves ad infinitum—a Xeno-esque set of changes by which no one reaches the end; no one sees the change because it cannot be attained. She’ll have us run in place—or backward with more socialism.


Measuring Change


Newton and Leibnitz gave us a way to handle a world of change that the ancient philosopher Heraclitus could only describe as the inescapable essence of the world, the cycle of the Pyr Aeizoon, the Eternal Fire becoming the vicissitudinal world of mortals. In a sense, we’re always being “unburdened” as we stand in the ever-moving river of time and in the cycle of the Fire which alternates between the world asleep and the world awake (That’s you right now—I think), Thus, in these changing conditions, the past no longer is, and changes both evident and imperceptible have made it so, that is, have erased it from all realities save the realities of memory. And with regard to Harris, memory itself is unreal. Can she not remember her record of the past four years? I haven’t forgotten. Have you?


Apparently, her followers have both retrograde and dissociative amnesia.


Harris Is a Function, Donald


Remember the oft-cited analog of a math function? Take a coin or a buck; put it into a vending machine. Get a bag of potato chips or a candy bar. The money, coming from one set of entities (coins, paper money) produces the bag of chips or bar, coming from another set of entities (snacks). The function—the vending machine—pairs something real from one set with something real from another set. In math the machine exchanges real numbers for real numbers. Functions are in the business of pairing, in the words of David Berlinski, “a function is a rule that assigns to each element in a set A a unique element in a set B” (68). *


Can a politician be an analog of a mathematical function or vice versa? I think so, especially when it comes to the money they take from us. Politicians assign some amount of tax to a set of some kind: A military set like guns and ammo, for example, or a social set like free medicine. Politicians pair tax dollars with programs, too. They do so with regard to both mandated and arbitrary programs. They vend weapons for foreign friends and enemies (For the latter think Biden-Harris’s equipment giveaway to the Taliban), healthcare, education, etc. We put money into the political vending machine, and the machine (politicians or their bureaucratic surrogates) pairs it with…whatever. The vending machine itself is packed with new and old eternal programs, but it has no glass front, just a general list of categories behind an opaque wall of unaccountable agencies. We can’t see the pairing for each tax dollar. We put in our coins and get in return whatever the politician decides we should get: Military protection, policing, emergency management or recovery, education for citizens or now education and preloaded debit cards for noncitizens.


Under Biden-Harris the function paired taxes with illegal aliens; they entered the country; they received from the elements in the available sets of transportation, housing, health care, education….


Generally, we’re now passersby walking through the mud of a sleezy carnival of governmental functionaries. Someone in the shadow says, “Pssst. Hey, you wanna deal you can’t pass up. Free stuff behind the curtain. The fee is minimal; you won’t even recognize you spent it. In return I’ll show you a way to change your miserable life and turn it into some Willy-Wonka joy. Chocolates for all, unending chocolates, gelato if you like.


“But didn’t you promise that before?”


Cackling, “It’ll be different this time. I promise.”she says. “And it will be measurable change.”


“But don’t we know change by contrast? To what will we make a comparison? The ‘wanderers,’ the planets, wander against the background of ostensibly unmoving stars. Against what background would we see your (Harris’s) proposed “holistic” changes? Would it be against some Biblical-like set of principles of ethical invariance like those set down, as she recently said, pretending to be a down-to-Earth ordinary Christian (with a Hindu heritage harking to the vedas), in firm principles as in the Book of “Ecclesiasics”—I suppose it’s a book she read in gymnastics class in high school.


Delta Stuff


Have economics become incommensurable? Do Americans have no basis for comparison? Seems so; we can’t contrast a Harris economy with a proposed Harris economy. What integers mark the change? Delta Poor minus Delta Poor = Poor. Delta cackling minus Delta cackling = purposeless laughter with no details on how to get past the present at the snails pace of half of a half of a half the distance to the goal of an “opportunity economy.”


So today, the function went to the border.


“What’s that, you say?”


I said, “today the function went to the border.” And what has been the pairing? Well, today the government released the numbers in the set of elements called illegal aliens who have murdered, raped, and committed other crimes. They number in the thousands. “No joke,” as Biden says. They have been paired with American families who have lost children, mothers, fathers. Harris has served as that function, pairing rapist with rape victim, murderer with murdered, minor with sex trafficker, drug dealer or whole cartel network with fentanyl death. And through it all she has cackled and served meaningless word salads.


She’s Not a Function, Donald


In math functions are structured associations. They can be graphed in predictable fashion, f(x) = x^2 yields a parabola on Cartesian coordinates, a “U” whose bottom rests on the origin, 0, where vertical line meets horizontal line; f(x) = x^3 yields a line whose positive side shoots off the graph into "Y-infinity" like the burgeoning debt imposed by agencies out of control with agents giddy on unending money they’ll never have to tally in a public ledger, so big and unwieldy the government has become.


But predictability—or rather its absence—is why Harris isn’t a function. In her vending machine those elements from the set put into the machine produce no regular outcome. Illegal alien or fentanyl pill into America has no one-to-one predictable output because each input might or might not mean an American injury or death. It’s random like a roulette wheel. Put your money on a number or color; get who knows what. Similarly, take her domestic vending machine, such as the money committed to building EV charging stations; billions into the program, just a few charging stations emerged. Plan to buy one of those mandated EVs? Purchase a very long extension cord. “Hey, you told us to buy EVs; you made them mandatory. Where are those charging stations? Taxes in; no charging stations out.”           


Change. Not fractions of fractions of fractions, but big visible change—visible to all but those in the sycophantic Press—change on a scale, a sweeping scale is what Americans got by voting into office Biden and Harris. Inflation chief among the elements of output. Inflation the change noticeable by all but by the very rich and that cover-their-asses-loyal-Press. More than 100,000 fentanyl deaths, also a noticeable change—again, except In the loyal Press. Not-so-noticeable raped and murdered women, and money-for -aliens that could have been spent on American citizens—these are un-tallied and as yet un-graphed because the numbers are still being generated, and might be generated for decades…


The function analogy, like all analogies, limps, but it—were it to be seen by the Harris followers—could possibly convince them to change their loyalty from big government politicians to small government politicians, from an incompetent woman who went to the border wearing an expensive necklace but Khaki jacket to appear outdoorsy just for a photo op that lasted a mere 30 minutes. (Did she never see the videos of children abused, trafficked, and abandoned by cartels? Did she never understand the hundreds of millions of dollars cartels made on her watch?)


We need to change the functions to change America to commonsense. We need a predictable one-for-one benefit for American citizens, not a vending machine of increasing costs without a goal other than Kamala’s promise of unquantifiable amorphous joy.




*A Tour of the Calculus. 1997. New York. Vintage Books.

In ancient days when kings did rule
Each court had knights and a fool.
The jester’s job? To make all laugh,
That is, the king and royal staff.


The king and court would gather round
And some of them were quite profound
“Your Majesty, do this or that;
Ignore the guy in tassled hat.”


And all assumed the king was wise
And his pronouncements were so, too,
“My subjects, hear, I will apprise
“And tell you what we all should do.


“Yes, our foes have done us ill
“In wars around the world they kill,
“But nothing they have done to date,
“Can threaten life and seal our fate.
“As climate can; It’s hit the fan.”


“Is this what we have come to hear?”
The UN envoys whispered clear.
“The world now faces total war
“But senile Joe says nothing more
“Than ‘Weather’s hot; so blame emissions;
“‘In Paris we agreed in sessions
“‘To spend our wealth and borrow more
“‘To change the trend and then restore
“‘The climate to what it was before
“‘We humans burned those fossil fuels
“‘And acted like so many fools.
“‘Today my court's in this UN.
“‘I'll change the climate back again,
“‘I’ll stop this hazard, this rise in heat,
“‘The droughts and storms we must defeat.
“‘Today I’ll speak of my great fear,
“‘That hurricanes will level cities
“‘The focus of IPCC committees.
“‘The weather will do more damage than
“‘The Ayatollah of Iran.’”


Thus spake the Ruler old and wise--
At least he is in Leftists’ eyes.


In fact he plays a senile jester
Allowed old wounds to grow and fester
In Middle East and Taiwan Strait
He’ll leave them all to fatal fate
As he retires for his long nap;
He’s washed his hands of all this crap.
And so old Joe makes his last speech
The teleprompter within his reach.

Ornithologists have studied the habits of opportunistic birds that use the nests other birds have built to lay their eggs. Lazy but clever, these parasitic birds don’t have to build anything. Their victims do all the house-building work, and even brood the egg of the intruder.


Sound familiar?


I’m thinking the Democrat candidate for President.


What has she built through her own efforts? Did she opportuistically use the nest built by Biden, a nest however poorly constructed, that could—unlike his plagiarized statements—be ascribed to his efforts over 50 years as Senator, VP, and then President?


What other process describes the actions of Kamala Harris, a candidate once thrown out of her party’s nest.


Yep. Parasitism on display in the Democratic Party.

Ever misplace your keys and have difficulty finding them, only to realize you passed over their location several times without seeing them? And yet, all along, you knew what the keys looked like as if to answer the question George asks Jerry in one of the Seinfeld episodes:


“What do they look like?”
“They look like keys, George, exactly like keys.”


You had the keys in mind as you looked, and eventually you saw them. As the joke runs, they were in the last place you looked.


In the Brain


No neuroscientist here, but I can hazard a guess on how we see things we formerly passed over. First, we look for lost objects with their image in mind. Second, we have cooperating neurons that can be attentive to a purpose. Third, our sophisticated visual centers enable us, even with our eyes’ blind spots, to sort through complex visual fields to recognize and categorize. It is this third property of the brain that enabled a Secret Service agent to spot a gun muzzle among the branches and leaves on the golf course, motivating him to shoot at and thwart the attempt of the would-be assassin aiming to kill Donald Trump.


But imagine the complexity of that process in the agent’s brain. Yes, he was looking for anything suspicious, but a gun barrel sticking out of thick vegetation? That’s a difficult task when we consider that “anything suspicious” could be a bomb, a drone, an axe, or a pearl-handled 45. Even if the agent had been predisposed to recognizing a gun barrel, he might have overlooked it among unfamiliar, even chaotic leaves and branches. If you can pass over familiar places where you placed your keys, then his spotting the barrel was quite a remarkable accomplishment. Imagine how much information the brain had to process in looking over that complex scene. Now consider how much your own brain processes as you drive down a pedestrian-lined street. Do you recognize those attempting to cross, a child running aimlessly, or an object, even a small potentially tire-damaging piece of metal?


Top Down or Bottom Up?


In a study titled “The Neural Dynamics of Attentional Selection in Natural Scenes” found in the Journal of Neuroscience,* co authors Kaiser, Oosterhof, and Peelen discovered “evidence for an early attentional biasing mechanism that facilitates the rapid detection of objects in cluttered scenes.” In short, the agent knew of potential threats, had seen them before, and was primed to spot any one of a number of objects in a cluttered scene.


It seems amazing, then, that the agents failed to act before the would be assassin shot at Trump during the Butler gathering. Attendees were shouting, “He has a gun,” and one officer even confronted the shooter before withdrawing. And here’s the difference between the two assassination attempts: It’s not the brain; it’s the mind.


Mind over Brain


The Secret Service usually surveys an area where a President or former President might appear. That surveying entails planning, and the planning in turn depends on reason. It isn’t the back of the brain’s visual center; it’s the frontal cortex that sets the plan for protection in any complex scene, from bushes to buildings.


It was the mind that failed during the first assassination attempt while luck prevailed for Trump but not for the victim Corey Comperatore. And that difference between mind and brain is the difference between responding to stimuli in a predisposed set of neurons and an ability to anticipate based on experience and knowledge. All the elements were supposedly in place during the Butler shooting: Police and secret Service. But those minds made faulty decisions, negating the ability of all those predisposed neurons to recognize, categorize, and react.


*https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/41/10522

“Please come to Boston for the Springtime…She said, ‘No.’”—David Loggins (“Please Come to Boston”)


I can’t blame her. I’ve visited Boston and the Boston area a number of times, and almost every one of those visits stands out in memory as an experience with rudeness. So, I was surprised to see in a recent survey that Boston ranks only sixth in rudeness among America’s rudest cities. * And I was surprised to see the ranking for rudest city was a place where I once lived.


I wasn’t surprised to see that the City of Brotherly Love is ruder than Boston, but I was surprised by Louisville’s ranking at number 4 and Miami’s ranking as the rudest American city. I lived in Miami for awhile in the early eighties and found it to be not so much rude as indifferent. I attributed that apathy to the large number of snowbirds and the wary Cuban refugees who were still making their lives in a new land and growing city.


The list of cities ranked by rudeness is hardly objective. Its classifications are based on what irks people, like loud talking on a speakerphone in a public space. I do believe places have character and that even a casual visit by a stranger can reveal the nature of that character. But such character is based largely on anecdotal evidence.  I have such anecdotes from Boston and the surrounding area. But I suppose my own subjectivity is tainted by just a few such anecdotes.


For example, Boston traffic is mean traffic, that is, it’s streets are peopled by rude drivers who don’t yield unless they are headed for an imminent accident. Don’t look to be let into a traffic line in Boston. Once after waiting to merge in a van with the university’s logo on the side, I found myself ushered into traffic by a truck driver who, recognizing the school name and knowing its location, said over his CB: “This ain’t nothin’ like Pittsburgh. Nobody lets anybody in around here.” And Boston traffic wouldn't be Boston traffic without incidents of road rage. In warm weather drivers with windows down aren't timid about expressing their displeasure with other drivers. Similarly, during a visit to Harvard in a time before navigation systems, I tried to stop people on the street to ask for directions only to find myself ignored (head-turning leper-avoiding ignored) until a fellow from Pittsburgh stopped to direct me, saying  “Yeah, I’ve lived here for awhile and found people are like that here.” I could relate other stories of rudeness, but then, they’re only anecdotes, not hard evidence.


Places change as influences change. The survey of rudest cities indicates that rankings have changed because the pandemic and politics of the past eight years have influenced thought and behavior. All those shut-in days didn’t help socialization.


Since the rise of modern media and its obsession with round-the-clock political punditry and social media’s anonymous commentary, the country has probably become a bit more rude—okay, maybe a lot ruder. Certainly, it has become cruder, “effing” punctuating even the language of women who have adopted male construction-worker-site and locker room talk. Movies and even streaming TV series also reveal a creeping rudeness and crudity, the latter contributing to the nature of the former.


And there’s little shame exhibited by those who are crude or rude in public. I’ve witnessed both behaviors on sidewalks in small towns. You have seen it on YouTube videos.


Not that people haven’t always been crude or rude, but generally, I believe, we have across the western world raised the lowest common denominator of public behavior and language to mainstream and in the US to Main Street.


I doubt the pendulum of manners will swing the other way in the near future. The mechanism is rusted. But an historical reality check tells me that it might always have been rusty. The so-called polite Victorian society of England had a dark crude underside of pornographic novels and open prostitution. Maybe the crude and rude have always peopled civilization, and it’s just with the advent of 24/7 media and ubiquitous cameras added to a lust for polling by news organizations that we have taken notice of our darker side.


Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that manners, if not dead, are rare behaviors and will become rarer.     


*https://nypost.com/2024/09/16/lifestyle/the-rudest-city-is-not-what-youd-expect-survey/ and also:
Preply.com Online at: 
​https://preply.com/en/blog/rudest-cities-2024/?sscid=91k8_n03i4&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=cpa&utm_campaign=stu_aff_generic_all_0_mul_xx_multiplesub_r-shareasale-offernov2021&utm_content=314743

The Sea Was Angry That Day, My Friends…When George Costanza, self-proclaimed marine biologist, describes his pulling Kramer’s golf ball from the blowhole of a beached whale in an episode of Seinfeld, he says, “The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to return soup in a deli….” Well the angry sea seems again to have cast people about as it did to throw George atop the whale. But this time it was on stage, where it enveloped the lead singer of Jane’s Addiction in its anger. Frontman Perry Farrell punched guitarist Dave Navarro during an on-stage outburst during a performance of “Ocean Size.” *


Anger. It’s enveloping us like an angry sea. By the way, the lyrics of that song include


    “I've seen the ocean
    break on the shore
    come together with no harm done…


Not so. Harm done. The concert ended as people dragged Farrell off stage. A sign of our times? Anger is often entwined with evil. Today, we’re standing and swimming in an ocean of anger. And as for those lyrics? Waves that break upon the shore appear to come together again with no harm done, but every crashing wave moves beach materials, changing the beach. 


Hangry Man


Nothing is too trivial to spark anger in public, anger with tragic consequences. In North Carolina, a customer fatally shot a teenage worker because his Waffle House order was taking too long. ** Today, Ryan Routh of North Carolina is in court for trying to assassinate Donald Trump on a golf course. 


What’s going on? Is there something in the air or water of North Carolina that is driving anger and violence? Is there something going on on planet Earth?


There have always been angry people. Many have been able to control themselves or to keep their anger private. But now anger is out in the open and as wide and as deep as the sea. On stage? Yep. In front of fans. At a chain restaurant. Yep, too. Even on airplanes.


Living in a B Horror Movie


Did you ever see the 1985 film Lifeforce? Quick summary: A returning comet spreads madness among us earthlings. Madness? I should say lethal anger, uncontrolled rioting anger.


It seems we’re all subject to such a force nowadays, subject to a worldwide angry spirit spewing hate everywhere, infusing the peaceful with violent tendencies. And it’s insidious. Like water, it penetrates every refuge through the smallest openings.   


Forewarned Is Forearmed


In these post-Freudian times we can easily argue that anger is the inner brain’s self expression. From the seat of emotions bad emotions arise. Were these pre-Freudian times, we might argue that anger comes from without as evil forces like that unleashed by the comet in the movie or by the Satan in the Bible pervade human psyches.


Seeking the source of anger and evil has long been an obsession. Think Zoroastrianism with its explanation that evil exists during the reign of a god of evil (darkness, in Star Wars, the “Dark Side”) who takes a turn with a god of good. Depending on which one is active, the world is filled with evil or good.


No, I’m not a follower of Zarathustra, as I would argue with Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) that existence can’t support two infinite, eternal deities one light and the other dark. One infinite deity is all that existence can logically have; there’s no room for two in a spiritual analog of the physical Pauli Exclusion Principle. But if evil comes from “without,” then…


Surely, there must be some influence from outside the inner brain, maybe as in the Book of Job, from the Adversary (aka the Satan) to whom God granted permission to wreak havoc on Job and his family.


Back to that age-old question: Why does God allow evil to exist? Why does he allow angry people to hurt others?  Why did He give permission to the Satan or to his emissary outside a Waffle House or on the golf course?


Look no further than that Book of Job for an explanation. God gives in Chapter 38 his answer to that question in a Kamala Harris word salad, a word salad for the ages.


When It Comes to Explaining Evil, God Speaks like Kamala Harris


God: So, you want to know the source of evil.


Job: Please, Lord, tell me.


God: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? I will question you,
 and you shall answer me.


Then God goes through a list of all he has made and done, asking Job if he can explain it all:


Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
    Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
    Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
    or who laid its cornerstone--
while the morning stars sang together
    and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
    when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
    and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
    and set its doors and bars in place,
 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
    here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
    or shown the dawn its place,
 that it might take the earth by the edges
    and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
    its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
    and their upraised arm is broken.
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
    or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
    Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
    Tell me, if you know all this.

Not a very definitive explanation for evil’s presence among us, is it? It’s very much a precursor to a Kamala Harris word salad. Lots of talk, no satisfying answer. We know as much at the end as we knew at the beginning--nothing.

Basically, God tells Job, “You humans are too limited to know the answers. But, hey, blame me if you want. I made you with those limitations. Evil is here, and you’ll never understand why. Bad things happen because bad things happen. Live with it.”

Will We Ever Understand Why the Sea Is Angry?

Throughout the human population, there are those who can’t control themselves, who impetuously punch or shoot without compunction to harm or destroy lives of the innocent—Biblical Jobs whose lives mean nothing to them. And then there are the evil planners, people like Putin who does the methodical work of the Adversary to wreak havoc on whole populations of innocent and moral Jobs. There was a boundary. It was called Ukraine’s border. Putin initiated a period of now two years’ duration of death and evil. Ukrainian AND Russian Jobs have suffered, hundreds of thousands of them, families in Russia and families in Ukraine. And now he threatens a wider war, one that would surely bring total destruction to his homeland in any nuclear holocaust. From whence does such madness derive?

Autochthonous or Allochthonous Sources of Evil?

If the source of evil is inside us, maybe we’ll eventually reduce its occurrence to the product of biochemistry, and we’ll eliminate it with a happy pill, a peace drug. If it comes from an outside entity like the comet in Lifeforce or a Russian in a tank from outside Ukraine, then pills won’t work; and only behavioral training will protect us. But how do we defend against such evil? Do we merely sit on the dungheap of destruction like Job and say “Woe is me,” or do we stave off evil with evil, with, for example, our own tank?

Should Waffle House provide its employees with guns? Should rock band members wear protective gear on stage?

Maybe, but insidious hate and its companions anger and violence are in the cyberspace and radio airwaves around us, enveloping us like an angry sea.


*https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/entertainment/janes-addiction-apologizes-cancels-next-gig-after-singer-perry-farrells-onstage-fight-with-guitarist-dave-navarro/


**https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/nc-waffle-house-employee-shot-dead-by-disgruntled-customer/

So, Pope Francis, often at the center of some controversy, has said that the American election has come down to a choice of the lesser of two evils.


Catholic: “But which one, Papa? Which one? Give us some guidance. You’re the Pope. Surely you know  the lesser evil in a choice. You’re not going to leave us hanging, are you? We want guidance, firm guidance from the guy who sits on St. Pete’s chair. Don’t you have some hotline connection to God? We’re thinking God’s saying in some James Earl Ray/Morgan Freeman voice: ‘Francis, lead my people.’”


Pope: “You must choose the lesser evil. Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don’t know. Everyone, in conscience, [has to] think and do this.” *


Confused?


So, if you are a Catholic, you’re getting virtually no guidance from the Pope, no information, moral or otherwise, that helps you make your voting decision. Yet, he clearly thinks that evil is involved, maybe the Adversary, the Satan himself is interfering in the American election by giving us a false choice: ‘Choose one evil over another. Either way, I win.’”


Not that you, a Catholic, want someone to tell you how to vote; rather you would just like a fleshing out of a statement that the American candidates both embody evil and that one of them must be less evil than the other. Otherwise, why make the statement?


Why indeed?


If the Pope sees Harris as an evil, on what grounds does he identify that evil. Since he seems to be a bit of a closet socialist himself, Francis probably doesn’t mean her socialism. Then what? Let’s guess.


The Moral Issue


The Church’s position on abortion has to be the Pope’s motive. Harris is for it, full throttle for it. She’s on the side of unbridled abortion. Isn’t her position in direct contradiction to the moral standard upheld by the Church? Wouldn’t that be “evil”?


And Trump? Well, he says he’ll accept the exceptions (incest, rape, health of the mother). Is that a partial evil? After all, the baby is still a baby regardless of the act of insemination. But with regard to saving the mother? Well, I guess the person you know is better than the person yet to be known. Come on, Francis, you’re leaving us hanging. Didn’t Trump appoint the Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade? Does that count for anything like points toward getting out of Purgatory early?


Is Trump evil, Papa? Or have you been fooled by matters like the Russian Collusion hoax, the impeachment over the phone call to Zelensky to inquire about Biden’s withholding support unless the prosecutor looking into his son’s corruption was fired, or the booming American economy that took a pandemic and dictatorial Democrat governors to quash? What’s your problem with Trump, Papa? Is it because he’s a sinner? Hmnnn… Didn't you say early on in your papacy, "Who am I to judge?"


*Under the headline “Pope Francis scolds Trump and Harris, instructs American voters on election choice: Pick ‘the lesser evil’” Online in the NY Post, Sept. 13, 2024.

Both Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588, d. 1679) and John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) had lives shaped by civil war (1642-1651), motivating both to consider in turn the nature of a Social Contract between citizens and their leaders. Essentially, both men asked whether a population was obligated to obey the dictates of bad leaders or even to remain under their control.


Enter Tiffany Henyard


Disregarding the implications of her name, I’ll note that Tiffany Henyard appears through her controversial decisions to be an example of a bad leader.  As mayor of Dolton, Illinois since 2021 and as Thornton Township supervisor since 2022, Henyard, according to Wikipedia and other reporting sources, has become embroiled in “scandals involving allegations of financial mismanagement, corruption, fraud, and other misconduct. She has been at odds with the majority of the village's Board of Trustees. In early 2024, the Illinois Attorney General’s office office began scrutinizing Henyard's activities as mayor and her nonprofit organization. The FBI also interviewed witnesses and subpoenaed records related to Henyard's alleged corruption. Henyard is also under civil investigation by the Illinois department of Human Rights, and is a defendant in a number of lawsuits.”—Wikipedia


A NY Post headline reads: “‘Dolton Dictator’ Mayor Tiffany Henyard throws extravagant, star-studded $85K town party — then pouts when colleagues pull plug on other events” --https://nypost.com/2024/09/11/us-news/tiffany-henyard-has-time-of-her-life-at-85k-town-party/


So, what to do? What to do? But what can the people do short of letting lawsuits, challenges, and election cycles run their courses? It’s the Social Contract to which we all agreed.


Essentially, we elect from among us those we entrust with the common treasure and common interests, such as safety. But of recent, we have seen political leaders using, as Henyard has used, public safety officials for personal safety. And we have seen public officials—most notably in the GSA’s $800,000 Las Vegas party—have to resign over misuse of public funds. *


The Financial Contract


Hobbes and Locke wrote in a time before governments grew to leviathan size, so large that no one can oversee all that goes on. That’s the condition of not just the American federal government, but also the condition of state and local governments, as the Henyard scandals indicate. The ordinary citizen has neither the wherewithal nor the time to investigate every expenditure that elected officials and their governments make.


For Hobbes and Locke the Social Contract centered in human rights, guaranteed under Locke’s thinking by a constitutional government. Neither political philosopher knew the kind of misuse of public funds by “elected” officials and government employees. They saw the extravagance under monarchical rule, but not under the “people’s rule.” Both philosophers laid the groundwork for a “people’s rule,” without the safeguards for the people’s money.


We can’t trust them.


We can’t trust them. Or, so it seems. Fraud is rampant in modern governments, best exemplified in a report by the Covid-19 Fraud Task Force.
        
    CFETF’s coordinated approach has resulted in:
        • Over 3,500 defendants criminally charged
        • Over 400 civil settlements and judgments
        • Over $1.4 billion in fraudulently obtained CARES Act funds seized or
        forfeited **


And what of those “stimulus bills” passed under the Obama and Biden administrations? Yep. Fraud. ***


We need officials to sign a Financial Contract when they assume office. Otherwise, we allow fiscal ignorance, such as that displayed over the past four years to put us further in debt while enriching special interest groups and fraudsters (some foreigners). History tells us that a Kamala Harris Presidency would simply further the irresponsible and extravagant use of public funds. She intends to comply with Green New Deal principles that would have us spend billions  on reducing temperatures across the planet by an unknown percentage, a reduction in rate of temperature rise that no one can quantify because of the unaccounted for natural variability and selective and often fraudulent data based on a 150-year incomplete and inaccurate record of temperature on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet.


But, Alas…


But Democrats and Republicans have committed themselves to or resigned themselves to government waste and fraud. Big government fosters waste. And because the money comes from lending sources and taxes in the general fund, few individuals—especially on the Left side of the aisle—seem to care or even be aware. But Republicans are also to blame. If I recall accurately, George Bush II didn’t use his veto power to quash inordinate spending.


That Trump wants Elon Musk to oversee government waste and fraud is reasonable idea, but the government already has Inspectors General and task forces whose job is to protect the common treasure. The problem, of course, lies in corruption spawned by unaccountability. Those scams and fraudulent uses of stimulus and Covid-19 money are evidence that the Inspectors General and task forces are always playing catchup, just as most policing takes place after the crime.


How do we prevent fiscal irresponsibility before leaders like Henyard and Harris waste our money? Just don’t put them in office. But, of course, we’re still stuck with big government that will buy too many paperclips or hire too many federal employees whose jobs involve duplicate services or unnecessary ones like the jobs in the Education Department that don’t involve educating anyone.


Hobbes and Locke would be appalled by the big governments of today. The Social Contract they believed would protect the individual doesn’t exist. The government can use the resources  of the collective without limitations while imposing limitations on individual freedoms.


An Anecdote


In the early years of the Bush II administration, a Democrat state legislator called me in to Harrisburg to discuss my redoing a study on greenhouse gas emissions I had done for the PA Energy Office and the US EPA. That’s not the point here. He was young and energetic but somewhat disillusioned. He told me he had gotten into politics to prevent government waste, but when he got to Harrisburg, he felt overwhelmed. He said the “spending was already beyond control.” It was too big. Legislators could use their so-called “walking around money” on any project they wished. Across all the legislators that amounted to millions of dollars. Some gave their WAM to local communities for events like parades in the hope they were buying votes. There was no way to control this discretionary spending.


Think now of the Biden-Harris attempt to pay for college loans. Think of the Harris plan to give $25,000 toward the purchase of a home. We need people to sign a Financial Contract or a Fiscal Contract, and we need them to comply with the provisions of that contract. Otherwise, we’ll never achieve a viable Social Contract that will protect individuals.
        




*See https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/gsa-threw-800000-party-and-all-you-got-was-bill/329797/&psig=AOvVaw2n3IqHLfnS7fRQBAACkOa9&ust=1726314709548000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CAYQrpoMahcKEwjgp_PJ7b-IAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBA


**See the COVID-19 FRAUD ENFORCEMENT TASK FORCE 2024 REPORT
APRIL 2024


*** https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-small-business-labor-fb1d9a9eb24857efbe4611344311ae78&psig=AOvVaw08ZYxg4hI5iekuA71Q_FEc&ust=1726316149547000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CAYQrpoMahcKEwiY4Kv48r-IAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBA

What’s at Stake?


Fossil fuels have been the cornerstone of modern civilization’s agriculture, textiles, transportation, communication, air conditioning, materials, and medicine. Remove them from history and you would look back on a medieval past extending to the present. Remove them from the future, and you will stunt civilization’s potential to feed and house people at its current levels. But today, after the Obama-Biden “war on coal” and the followup Biden-Harris “war on fossil fuels,” the future looks more “medieval” than “modern,” mostly because population growth supported by those fossil fuels from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries might not be sustainable under the promised, but only partially materialized, green tech energy development. There is, for example, no guarantee that green energy will be sufficient to transport all the commerce people now enjoy. And there is no guarantee that by eliminating that which made the modern world modern, we can “recreate” an idyllic Garden of Eden of calm air and shopping-mall temperatures. Futile efforts by nineteenth-century Romanticists to “return to Nature” reveal that humans are quite comfortable with artificiality. Endeavors to develop civilization are more powerful than drives to return humanity to more primitive times. Those who choose to go off-grid are few in number and still largely dependent upon the societies they leave (often temporarily) behind.


Questions for Urban Dwelling Greenies


Off to the woods to live? Where you gonna poop? Use leaves for TP? Not in a zone of deciduous trees that lose their leaves in fall. Natural clothing? What? From a bear you skinned after wrestling it to death with your bare hands? Food? Water? Air conditioning?


Would the urban greenie like to live in the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter where neolithic people lived 16,000 years ago just after the Last Glacial Maximum during end of the Last Glacial Period? Would a greenie prefer frozen tundra conditions in western Pennsylvania that prevailed just south of the large glacial ice sheets?


Growing Up with Coal, Oil, and Gas


I live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a land of some 18 million acres of  forests that has been home to fossil fuel exploitation for more than 260 years. In Pittsburgh, coal mining began in the 1760s on Coal Hill (now the city’s famous overlook known as Mount Washington). In Titusville and Oil City, upstream from Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River, “Col.” Drake discovered oil in 1859, and 19 years later the Haymaker brothers Matthew and Obe drilled the first gas well in Murrysville, 18 miles from Pittsburgh. To say Pennsylvania has been an historical energy behemoth is no exaggeration, especially when one adds its eastern anthracite fields to its western bituminous coal, oil, and gas fields.


From those early colonial times through the twentieth century, western Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh Plateau Province was a center for both bituminous coal extraction and subsequently  the steel production that was dependent on it. Coal turned into coke (by baking) plus limestone made Pittsburgh the “steel city.” Until the development of gas home furnaces, most—if not all—western Pennsylvanian homes were heated by coal. And, yes, before you ask, my small hometown (pop. 16,000), which was more bedroom community than industrial center, was sooty. As a child, I thought all tree bark, save for the sycamores which shed older bark to reveal a lighter color “skin,” was black. (Think of the famous account of England’s peppered moths whose wings were selectively dark during the coal-burning years, enabling them to hide against such bark, and the subsequent selection for lighter coloring when the soot ceased to fall) It still surprises me all these decades later that having breathed sooty air as a kid, I did not develop “black lung”)


Before you ask: No, I’m not advocating for a return to home coal furnaces. Been there; done that. Natural gas does not produce sooty air, and gas furnaces do not have to be stoked on a cold winter morning.


Of course, as a child I had no say in my place of residence or the manner in which our home was heated. It was “my” hometown, where I played with cousins and friends. We lived in the city where my father worked as linotypist and foreman of a printing company. The choice of residence was dictated by work and relative poverty. I assume that had he worked elsewhere, we would have lived near that work. It was a time before long daily commuter rides, such as those in the more densely populated northeast megalopolis corridor in which people from Hartford took trains to and from work in NYC, as they still do. My father walked to work. I walked to school. My friends walked everywhere. The streets were uncluttered with fewer cars on them than during today’s traffic mayhem. In Pittsburgh, a city at that time with 600,000, 50,000 steel workers lived mostly in walking distance of the mills in towns like Hazelwood, Homewood, McKeesport, and Clairton.


I remember passing through Hazelwood, Clairton, and Duquesne on occasional urban forays and smelling the “rotten eggs” air near the coke plants and steel mills. Even then I recognized that the locals had to breathe that air daily. But it was that foul-smelling hydrogen-sulfide air that indicated a vital economy. If people wanted to make steel for a living, they had to live with the consequences of steel-making in an age before scrubbers on smoke stacks. Their countryside was dotted with lines of coke ovens and gob piles in western Pennsylvania and culm banks in eastern Pennsylvania.


The Rise of the Principle of Stewardship: Pretending the Big Wide World Is a Little Village


There lies in Pennsylvania’s industrial and mining past a resignation to the by-product pollution of both mining and steel-making. Whereas I took as a child the soot and rotten-egg smell as components of life in many mill towns, some Pennsylvanians began asking why things had to be as they were.


In the middle of the last century, people began to notice detrimental effects to their regional landscapes caused by the extraction of fossil fuels and the accompanying pollutants. Not that such effects hadn’t been evident early in the development of mines and wells. Among the first such effects were denuded forests whose soils quickly became black with petroleum covering many square miles of the Oil City-toTitusville-to Wildcat Hollow region, especially during the oil boom that followed Drake’s discovery. Suffice it to say there were for a time in that oil-boom region more derricks than trees. And then, after years of underground mining elsewhere on the plateau, residents began to experience subsidence of the surface as old mine ceilings collapsed. Impossible to ignore were the many piles of mining waste I mentioned above. Piled into the large gob piles of the bituminous landscapes in western Pennsylvania and similar waste heaps in anthracite coal areas near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, the waste sometimes burned, as included coal fragments caught fire, smoldered, and produced a further waste product called red dog.


Not so recognizable was the danger from the pollution of groundwater and acidic effluents entering streams in some mining areas. Incidents of cancer were eventually associated with “yellow boy” (mine water) and heavy metals mixing with well water supplies in rural areas. Some streams ran orange with mine effluents. Slowly, the ill health caused by pollutants worked its way into the public mind until the 1970s, when environmental awareness became a cause célèbre.   


The growing awareness of environmental hazards and the will to mitigate them developed exponentially after the famous Donora smog event in 1948 and an ensuing more deadly smog event in London. People began to take notice of environmental hazards, and politicians noticed the people noticing. So began a period of societal development that brought the downsides of fossil fuel extraction and industrial activity to the forebrain. “Sustainability” and “environmental health” became part of the common lexicon pushed by academia, sensing a new avenue for research grants funded by the government. In colleges  environmental studies programs and courses like environmental ethics became commonplace. What happened in higher education then filtered to become concerns of those who reaped the benefits of cheap energy without being involved in its production. And then the Press, ever eager for a new line of reporting and editorializing, jumped on the environmental train. What had come to the attention of the forebrain then moved inexorably inward and entwined itself in the inner brain. Negative thoughts about fossil fuels and their effects became emotional social issues spreading like smog.


Today, protecting the environment has become a moral issue. A recent headline in the LA Times reads: “Earth Is in Peril. Will We Sacrifice Enough Today to Ensure Future Generations Will Survive?” * Poor kids. Their future is in our hands. Greta Thunberg, climate activist turned Hamas-supporter and Israel-hater, cried that we robbed her of her childhood, not to mention that we also seem to have robbed her of her ability to think rationally, argue reasonably, cite earth history, breathe air devoid of carbon, and solve complex problems. Such is the extent of fossil fuel hatred, supposedly motivated by a desire to “sustain” the planet in some arbitrarily chosen state of natural perfection. But give her credit; as a kid she inspired people like those at the LA Times to flail about in the despair that civilization had prospered on fossil fuels to the detriment of the environment and Greta’s childhood. (I wonder how those reporters get to work in LA. Do they commute?)


A Very Pretty Village: We Can’t All Live in Some Rural Shire Peopled by Hobbits


The air does what unconfined gases do: move rather chaotically and unpredictably, responding to pressure and density differences, the cause of wind. Such differences are beyond human controI, thus the wind blows as it blows. I thought nothing of it as a child. If a neighboring house’s sooty air cascaded into our yard, didn’t our sooty air cascade into other yards? Weren’t we mutually to blame for the pollution trespassing yards?


But elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Joseph Waschak sought to place blame. In 1954 Waschak lived in a house in Lackawanna Country that he painted with a lead-based white paint. In the borough of Taylor, the site of the house, neighboring coal-breaker and culm banks (gob piles) emitted hydrogen sulfide, a gas that reacted with the lead paint, discoloring it. He sued the company for “nontrespassory invasion.” Although Waschak won a judgment in the lower courts, the Supreme Court overturned that judgment. And here was the Court’s reasoning; read it through because it has some relevance to today’s green movement:


    The Court reasoned that the gob, waste, or culm banks had long been part of the district’s landscape and that the Waschak family was aware of the proximity and nature of those piles before they bought the house. (Thus, my childhood home with its coal-burning furnace was next to another house with a coal-burning furnace)
    Writing for the Court, Justice Stearne recounted the legal history. Three rules of law apply where an invasion of land occurs: 1) An English ruling by Lord Cranworth states that a person is liable for anything that escapes from his land to damage a neighbor’s property. This English law, common to both countries, declares that the responsibility is absolute regardless of the precautions a landowner might have taken to prevent the escape of the damaging entity; 2) the Absolute Nuisance Doctrine which says that a nuisance is an infringement on the rights of another, which is wrongful in itself, but only in the consequences which might flow from it; this nuisance rule is unlike the English rule because it does not distinguish between intentional and unintentional damage. Justice Stearne further writes that a person who builds a factory might risk emitting fumes that could damage nearby property, but “under varying conditions, the harm caused by the emission of offensive odors, noises, fumes, violations, etc., must be weighed against the utility of the operation.” 3) The Rule of Restatement that the Court followed in reaching its decision: Essentially, the “invasion” has to be intentional or otherwise unreasonable. In a case similar to the Waschak case, Chief Justice Frazer quoted from Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Sanderson to indicate that “plaintiffs knew, when they purchased their property, that they were in a mining region. They were in a district born of mining operations, a district that had become rich and populous because of that mining.


Pittsburgh, the Very Pretty Village


Here’s how Justice Musmanno worded the problem: “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept. But it is an annoyance they have freely assumed because they desired and needed a residence in proximity to their places of employment. After all, one’s bread  is more important than landscape or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.”


Before You Object


Musmanno wrote that before scrubbers on smokestacks became part of clean air regulations and before communities sought to turn their brownfields (rusting old steel mills) into greenfields (often tech-related new buildings and condos). He wrote that before advancements in coal-burning technology changed the efficiency of coal-fired power plants. And he wrote that before we got so huffy and political about the environment based on our longing for an Idyllic Village of Pittsburgh, where during Colonial Times the only smoke came from campfires and canon as British and French fought over Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt.


The Shire


At this current stage of civilization, few people could live as Hobbits in The Shire. Could you? As the world’s population becomes more urbanized, more people become accustomed to civilization’s comforts and conveniences. (Wait! You’re not a farmer, are you?)


Anyway, we do have processes for making coal and oil burn more cleanly with less damage to the environment. Even today’s coal mines—deep long wall and surface in western Pennsylvania—are less polluting than they once were, though escaping methane is unavoidable. But to echo Musmanno’s statement, I’ll ask if you realize your choice of lifestyle produces pollutants. What tradeoff are you willing to make? When night falls, do you turn on lights? When temperatures rise, do you turn on the air conditioning? Do you refuse to drive on asphalt roads or use any product made with plastic?


Groundwater


From landscape changes to air and water quality, we’ve become obsessed with environmental purity, a reality that never truly existed. Near the towns of California and Uniontown, Pennsylvania there are springs where for years people collected water in milk jugs to take to their homes in the belief that because it is spring water, it is somehow purer than city water. In fact, both springs contain bacteria and metals dissolved from the rocks through which the water runs. Natural Earth isn’t the Garden of Eden environmentalists believe it to be. It can be radioactive, toxic, and unproductive.


Romanticism and the Birth of Environmentalism


As the Age of Enlightenment drew to a close, nineteenth-century artists began to paint natural scenes as Gardens of Eden. Their Edens also housed “the Noble Savage,” a type of Tarzan who was “naturally moral,” a person living in harmony with Earth.


As portrayed in paintings by Norwich School artists and imitators, specifically by Turner in England and by Thomas Cole in the United States Nature was idyllic. Today, just about every hotel room has some Cole or Turner knockoff landscape painting on a wall, each portraying an idealized nature scene, that is, a scene without human artificiality, Nature without natural predation, death, and decay—pretty nature, the nature envisioned by Greta Thunberg and city-dwelling environmentalists who worry about climate change as they swelter in urban heat islands in July and August.


If those artists started an environmental movement with paintings exhibited to a relatively small population, would not the overwhelming media coverage of environmental issues hav an even greater effect on the population’s psyche?


I want clean air, water, and land. Don’t you? Who prefers the opposite? Even the exploiters prefer environmental safety over environmental danger, but they are caught in the vice of economics: Produce and thrive or fail to produce and go broke, poor, and hungry. Those who choose to exploit also provide livelihoods for those employees who support families and local economies.


Pretty villages are the stuff of fairy tales and hotel paintings. **




*https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-09/our-climate-change-challenge-youth-future 
**Found this after I finished the blog: "Ana de Armas loves living ‘off the grid’ in rural $7M Vermont home ‘away from the craziness’" Online at NY Post. Nicki Cox, 9/11/24

Kamala means “lotus flower” and is another name for Laksmi, a Hindu goddess. I’ll not go into the complex world of Hindu gods except to say that one of Kamala’s/Laksmi’s depictions shows her casting coins to her followers. Yep. Kamala is a Hindu version of a Divine Socialist, or Democrat. Her tie to her worshippers lies in her giving stuff to them.


Inference or Reality?


I suppose presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s followers might argue that her largesse with the public treasure shows how she is concerned for her people. But the history of Democrats like Harris spells a reality of reckless spending, waste, and fraud. It’s summarized in the aphorism “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” With the history of the Biden-Harris giveaways well documented, no one has to infer that Harris, as President, would push for more wasteful spending favoring special interest groups.   


Coins Everywhere


Just consider the fraud associated with the large Biden-Harris spending bills for COVID relief and infrastructure if you want to know what happens to Kamala’s coins thrown like candies by princesses atop Disney carriages. Along the street children scramble to gather the candie s with the more aggressive picking up the most. Here’s a headline: 'Biggest fraud in a generation': The looting of the Covid relief plan known as PPP.” NBC’s Ken Dilanian and Laura Strickler published an account of the billions of dollars stolen from the large government grants. * Some of the theft was used to buy expensive cars. Some of the stolen money will never be retrieved.


Would Kamala’s coins make Americans richer? Answer: Some in the short term. Probably very few in the long term. Politicians have been promising “a chicken (Do Hindus eat chicken?) in every pot” for generations. Those who get the chicken eat it, and then…


*https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-fraud-generation-looting-covid-relief-program-known-ppp-n1279664.