Apparently, I might have been onto something when I said years ago that place is primary and time is secondary—the main theme of this website.


Now a brief counter argument: So, what if I say, “Ten minutes ago I was thinking about thinking. There’s no mention of place in that.”


Countering the countering argument: But the thinking took place in a place, and even if one wants to say “in the mind,” he has to include by association that the thinking occurred in a brain (in a head, on a body, in a place). In other words, all time passes by in a place, and it has done so since the Big Bang, Brane collision, or whatever else one can envision as the start of Everything and Everywhen. No universe, no time. No space, no time. No place, no time. Time cannot exist outside place, from the biggest and most inclusive place called the Cosmos to the most insignificant of places, such as your front porch. Naked time doesn’t exist. Time is clothed in matter that lies in place.

Physicist Richard Muller, argues that as the universe expands it “creates” new space, and in that creation, it also creates time. He says that the LIGO observation of colliding black holes revealed the addition of millions of [cubic] kilometers of new space and “about 1 millisecond of new time.” *


You know that annual argument about Daylight Savings Time? Well, adding an hour—or subtracting one—is not unusual in a Cosmos that can add time at any time that black holes collide. Going from Standard to Daylight Savings and back again has, it seems, a random cosmic analog. Now, the question becomes “What would happen to time if the universe underwent the Big Crunch, the total collapse into a new singularity? Would it erase time? Probably, if one accepts that time occurs only “in a place.”


I don’t know about you, but I spent that millisecond in “my place.” It occurred during the night, and I awoke the next morning feeling refreshed because of the extra millisecond of sleep. 



*Now: The Physics of Time. 2016. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.

Representative Cori Bush (D-MO), speaking to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America, defended her calls to defund the police by saying “we can’t get caught up in words.” In the seriocomic series The Orville, the main character Ed Mercer says, “Why do we have to have all these labels and things?…Why even call a box ‘a box’?”
Mercer’s friend Gordon responds with “Maybe it’s just easier to have words.”


I’ll admit: Going public with any statement today invites nitpicking, and not just ordinary nitpicking, but hounding, relentless nitpicking. But there’s some justification in our singling out a word or phrase made into a public icon. Unless we can flawlessly interpret gestures and expressions, we have to rely on language. It’s just easier to have words with clearly defined definitions.


Yet, therein lies another problem, the problem of definition. What does defund mean? If the key word that encapsulates a movement is variable or undefined, then it is meaningless. We need to “get caught up in words” because they are the avenue to understanding—even if that understanding is imperfect because of nuances. 


Language has long been a boon and a curse. Very often not precise enough to have the same meaning for two people or two groups, misinterpreted language has confounded relationships and even led to conflict as small as disagreements and as large as war. The “defund the police” movement, given no specific workable alternative for violent offenders, has resulted in depleted police forces and increased crime. Put into action on the simplest understanding of the term, the “defund the police” movement has led to destruction, injury, and death. Those consequences by themselves are good reason “to get caught up in words.”


“Choose your words wisely” is good advice because someone somewhere is going “to get caught up in words.”

We are boring because we can be interesting. But maybe we are just a little more boring than we are interesting. Interest peaks over a boring base state. Should I add that we are also stupid because we are wise?


Capable as we are of discovering  and achieving much, we often get stuck on old grudges, daily weather, and the topics and perspectives that sundry media repeatedly force on us: Fashion, gossip (about some celebrity or person we do not know and will never meet), climate, racism, gender, political extremes, government (overreach, waste, corruption), and abortion. Such topics are centers of discussions that we just can’t resolve in some gray compromise, mostly because we can’t complete or choose in our sloth not to complete complex arguments in a fast-paced world of TikTok and YouTube shorts and Twitter aphorisms. “Just give me the headlines.” So we harp. And harp. And harp, strumming the strings of just a few tunes repeatedly, simple tunes, really, nothing complex. The lyrics for the strummed notes are just about as predictable as the rising Sun. What, may I ask, have you heard recently that you might label “new” with regard to any of these topics? What primary or secondary research have you done to make your own perspective “interesting”?


“Whoa!” you say. “Maybe you find discussions of those topics boring, Donald, but I see them as crucial to a life well-lived in a complex society. By the way, those topics aren’t minor matters, my friend. They are the heart of today’s social interactions. They keep us engaged. You’re missing the reality that these topics do peak interest and make living in the twenty-first century interesting. Sure, we divide ourselves on our perspectives, but that’s a product of our wisdom and freedom to express. And you miss that each person finds identity by taking a stance on these matters. Remember the Delphic maxim? Knowing oneself is primary. Finding identity in these topics gives one identity.”


I wasn’t surprised to hear one of the ladies of The View and a CNN host link Hurricane Ian to climate change. Why wouldn’t they? Both are convinced that this topic, that is, the topic of climate change or global warming, is one of those few topics over which people—at least people in the news—obsess. And since the obsession to tie climate to politics is now endemic in the minds of billions, then neither I nor anyone else should be surprised by the supposed link the lady and the guy see between 2022’s Ian and global warming. And—b-o-r-i-n-g—every topic like climate change is today a political topic, so if one can link individual storms and climate, then one can easily see the difference between “right views” from “wrongheaded ones.” I suppose that one can also link climate change to morality because even the Pope has entered the climate debate.


As Ian formed and approached Florida, I noted to my spouse that the storm would be linked to climate in the mainstream media—and we all know which media that includes. Thus, the devastating storms of the Caribbean and Gulf, having raged over the land since there was a Caribbean and Gulf—go ask the Arawaks, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Seminoles, and the conquistadors—are now somehow manmade and not part of some cyclic natural phenomena. Shouldn’t we all wise up? Not to see popularized indisputable link and not to obsess over the storm’s assumed cause puts one in a minority labeled “deniers.” There’s a message in the storm, and only a foolish few—I suppose like me—are incapable of reading it. Boring.


“Get with the program. What’s wrong with you, Donald. Can’t you reason that very warm ocean water made the storm as powerful as it was, causing probably more damage than all but four previous hurricanes?”


No. Actually, I do know that the water was warm—as it usually is by the end of summer’s prolonged daylight—and I might even accept that the water was “warmer than usual” for Ian’s development. But usual is one of those catchall boring terms. How far back can we go to trace surface water temperatures? We have no temperature records of those temperatures when a hurricane following almost the same path as Ian sank the Nuestra Señora de Atocha and other Spanish galleons in 1622 near the Florida Keys. Anyway, do you think that 1622 storm caused as much devastation on the land as Ian caused?


“What?”


Yep. In our boring arrogance, we humans have decided that we can live anywhere—regardless of the physical phenomena of a place. Build on the San Andreas Fault? No problem. Build along a coast or on a low-lying island that will inevitably get hit by a hurricane or tsunami? No problem. Build in the shadow of an active volcano? No problem. What are the chances, right? And one might live a century on a fault or coast or low-lying island or at the foot of a volcano without a disaster. Then again… The 29,000 people who died in Saint-Pierre in 1902 when Mount Pelée erupted made their homes beneath a volcano that had erupted at least a couple of dozen times over the previous five millennia, and even after the 1902 eruption, some chose to re-inhabit Saint-Pierre. Are we really wise? Isn’t settling at the base of an active volcano a man-made disaster in the making? In fact, in 1929, residents of Saint-Pierre evacuated under the threat of a second twentieth-century eruption. Is it our arrogance or our stupidity that makes us live where Earth proves to be more dangerous? And is it our boring nature to ascribe an individual event to a disputable global trend?


In 1966, my spouse and I had reservations for a cottage on Sanibel Island, that same place where Hurricane Ian wreaked its havoc on September 29, 2022. Sparsely populated and underdeveloped at the time of our trip, Sanibel was an island wilderness known for its sea shells and not for expensive accommodations. Property was cheap. An acre went for about $2,500. In 2022, just before Ian hit, some half-acre and smaller lots were on the market for as much as $900,000, and condos and homes ranged from $300,000 to $4,000,000+. Pricey.


As we traveled toward Florida, we became aware of a June hurricane called Alma, the first June hurricane since 1951. (In fact, June hurricanes are so rare that no such storm had made landfall in the U.S. since 1825) Alma headed for Sanibel and eventually trekked a path almost identical to that of Ian, crossing into the Florida peninsula somewhat farther north, causing $10 million in damages overall in the state, drowning two, fostering heart attacks in another two, and with downed power lines, leading to the deaths of another two Floridians who were electrocuted. A ten-foot storm surge washed over New Port Richey. Was the ocean water “warmer” than usual that year? Was the 1966 storm the product of global warming? Was the storm that sank Nuestra Señora de Atocha the product of global warming in 1622?


Calling ahead to assess the conditions of the cottage, we were told by the owner “to give us a day or two for cleanup.” So, we postponed our arrival in an era before 24/7 news coverage and sophisticated modeling of storm tracks. I had to rely on my car’s AM radio and on newspapers to discover where I could shelter without encountering the storm. When we eventually drove over the now damaged causeway and onto the island, we saw no apparent destruction because Sanibel offered little to damage, even for a category 1 storm.


Not so with Ian. Granted, Ian was stronger than Alma, but Ian also had something—lots of things, really—to destroy. Sanibel and neighboring Captiva Island in 2022 were pre-Ian highly developed landscapes, not the largely wild islands of 1966 when Alma hit.


And that might be something the lady on The View and the guy at the CNN news desk might have taken into account instead of the boring and unprovable link between worldwide climate change and the intensity of a specific storm. No doubt the experienced Spanish sailors of the 16th and 17th centuries thought the hurricanes they encountered were extraordinarily strong storms to which their sunken treasure ships attest. And no doubt, since I brought up the subject of building over the San Andreas Fault, the damage of the next earthquake will generate a larger economic and human impact than the last major earthquake. (Also, the next large earthquake will probably generate speculation that its intensity is related to climate change in the minds of CNN reporters, just as the passing of an asteroid was linked by a CNN anchor to global warming during an interview with Bill Nye)


We are boring when we obsess over standardized ways of discussing any topic. “Just give me the short version” is an admission that our patience runs out when someone wants to pursue a topic through an elaborate argument. (And, of course, we are boring when we go into great detail with someone not willing to listen) It’s what I call the Algebra Teacher Principle. Algebra teachers want students to show all their work; their students want to take short cuts. The lady on The View and the anchor on CNN wanted the “short version” of Hurricane Ian, and that version involved standardized talking points, boring talking points that advance no new knowledge, but rely instead on popular assumptions.


Should I fault the TV personalities for being so predictable and boring? Probably not. True, they could delve into the actual complex science of climate, a subject that includes ocean currents, land-water distribution, latitudinal effects, orographic barriers, altitude, continentality, prevailing wind systems, evapotranspiration, Hadley Cells, Milankovich cycles, and other features, including soil development and processes like the molecular interactions among atmospheric components and the relationship between albedo, clouds, and the thickness of the troposphere. For the host or anchor of a TV show, it is just simpler to connect global warming and a specific storm, and it’s made especially truer for them because of the popularization of the idea of climate change serves a political agenda.


But it is all so boring. And it’s especially boring when talking points are all we hear. For a species that prides itself on wisdom, we seem to rely more on hearsay, innuendo, rumor, incomplete knowledge, presumptions, and foregone conclusions.


I think of the movie Amadeus and the entrance of Mozart while Sallieri plays a rather simple composition he wrote in honor of the young genius. Mozart, not one to follow etiquette and refrain from insult, sits and replays from memory what Sallieri wrote, but in doing so elaborates in the best tradition of ingenious improvisation. He makes the work interesting by adding details.


So, yes, I’m bored with the climate-change, global-warming talk and incessant connections that further an agenda without advancing knowledge. Individual storms have come and gone not only in Earth’s atmosphere, but in the atmospheres of all planets that have an envelope of gases. Maybe Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot, which is twice the size of Earth, is an exception to the ephemeral nature of storms, but it, too, seems to show signs of change.


All the boring talk would be simply boring if it was not dangerously boring. The prattling few with a microphone have ensured a conclusion in the political class that they must act drastically and alter a thriving economy with decrees that must be enacted overnight, such as California’s decision to “go electric” on a power grid that can’t handle the current draw. The prattling few will say, regardless of historical data to the contrary, that hurricanes are strengthening because the damage they cause is greater. They assume climate and not population distribution and construction in hurricane-prone areas is solely the cause of such destruction.


If you step in the path of a bullet, you are likely to be hit. The Gulf and Atlantic Coast communities survive only when the shooter has a poor aim. But the target is large and has been getting larger over the past four hundred years—and with regard to Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach, larger just over the past half century. Man-made disaster? Think building rather than climate. Electric cars in California—or elsewhere-won’t prevent the next disastrous hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, tornado, or volcanic eruption (or, CNN anchor, bolide impact).

You’ve seen or heard the saying, “The children are our future.” But are they?


I can’t remember where exactly, but it was a sign on some road, maybe one on a school marquis, and it read, “The children are our future.” Ordinarily, I would have passed the sign with a mental note that “Yes, they are, obviously.” But I had just seen a couple of on-the-street interviews on YouTube involving college-age students. Those interviews elicited in me a rejection of that old saying as an encapsulation of optimism. I’ve come to believe that the opposite is true.


The children are our past.


If optimistically we can say the children are the future—our future—why does every generation repeat the mistakes of its forebears? And not just the immediate forebears, the whole of humanity’s ancestors?


Anecdotes aren’t proof, but they can be indicators. In one YouTube interview I saw, a girl said she didn’t like Donald Trump because “he was a capitalist.” When the interviewer asked what she was, she replied, “I’m a communist.” In response to his next question about where communism “had worked” for the betterment of mankind, she said something like “Here, in the past.”


Everyone knows Santayana’s statement about repeating past mistakes, maybe even the girl in the interview—though I doubt it. But ignorance of the past is exactly why I cannot see children as our future. Oh! Sure, some will know that socialist and communist regimes have been responsible for more than 100 million deaths, maybe as many as 200 million murders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but those will be few in number and will not be "the future." No, the future belongs to the ignorant, to those who will repeat the mistakes of the past.


Take little Vlad, for example. Born into the Soviet Union, he has grown to become the head of that union’s heart, Mother Russia. Desirous of having things as they were during his formative years, Vlad has set about conquering, or should I say, reconquering Soviet lands and peoples. In the process he has started a war, and armed with nuclear weapons, this child-turned-adult has threatened to use them. So, here we go again, would-be conqueror after would-be conqueror, from ancient times to modern, the child takes the misery of the past into his generation’s present, that past becoming the future of a generation and eventually becoming the past to be ignored by a future generation—those children proclaimed to be “our future.”


Thus, the current generation of anarchists, not realizing the futile nature of their anarchy, destroy as their ideological forebears destroyed—with no workable system in mind other than destruction in the name of some ideal. Thus, the destruction in Seattle and Portland and in other cities over the past 120 years. And always with the same result, always with the recreated past as the product of the “children.” Thus, the current generation of gangs wreak havoc as their forebears did in almost every “civilized” country. Thus, the next generation of warlords cause the same kind of misery their forebears caused in attempts to control those in their sphere of influence or in attempts to expand their control. And thus, a nation built successfully on capitalism will succumb to today’s children as they turn the future into the past.


And, of course, we have only ourselves to blame. We—the people of any generation—never seem to get the message to the following generation. No one ever seems to have taught Vlad and his like, for example, that the destruction and death they cause will come to them in return, that conquerors and dictators are never really mourned though the officials they emplace or who take their places might erect monuments to them. No one ever seems to have told the current young that socialism and communism are repressive and that unless they are among the ruling elite—whose own success will succumb with their own demise or to the next generation’s greed—they will repeat the failures that run, among Americans, for example, from Brook Farm through Jonesville and Heaven’s Gate. No one seems to have explained that the aimless destruction of past anarchic movements is the future of current anarchists and that they will themselves succumb to unwanted anarchy: The so-called CHOP district, where crimes and even murder occurred is one telling example, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, also bedeviled by crimes, including rape and assault, is another example.


So, no, I don’t believe the children are our future. Well, maybe some are, but they will as we, have to contend with contemporaries who seek to relive the past because they are unaware of its nature. Thus, humanity today, repeating the mistakes made throughout all of human history from Cain to Vlad, will find its future firmly rooted in its past.


Time to take down that often repeated statement that claims optimistically “Children Are Our Future” and replace it with “Children Are Our Past.” 

Is there a way out of the seemingly endless cycle of violence and folly? Generation after generation has tried. Heck, one can go back to Psalm 95 in which the psalmist advises against hardening one's heart. We can as our ancestors have, plead with the next generation in paraphrase of that advice, "If today you hear our voice, harden not your heart." It hasn't worked before, but why not give it a try on the odd chance that it just might work this time? 

Two guys, say, Gerard and Frank, talk about the news.


Gerard: So, I hear that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and Vineyard Owner, says that the immigrants are needed "to pick our crops."


Frank: Yeah, that’s what she said. One wonders, however…


Gerard: Wonders what?


Frank: Well, I wonder about the grape equation.


Gerard: The what?


Frank: Grape…grape equation. You know, how many pickers one needs to pick grapes in a vineyard.


Gerard: We can figure that. I read online that a typical grape vine can produce 40 bunches of grapes, maybe with a 100 grapes each. So, that’s 4,000 grapes per vine.


Frank: Sounds approximately right. But it could be an overshoot. Maybe not quite that figure, but let’s go with it. Okay, so how many vines in a typical vineyard?


Gerard: About 1,000 vines per acre.


Frank: So, 4,000 grapes per vine times 1,000 vines would equal four million grapes. Yep. 


Gerard: And what’s the estimate on number of illegal immigrants encountered at the border in during the Biden presidency?


Frank: That’s a tough one because there are estimates for "getaways" and counts for those caught, but let’s run with four million. There are estimates that take the number to five million just since Biden took office.


Gerard: So, let’s settle on four million to make the math easy for that grape equation. If each illegal immigrant picked just one grape, then they could handle an acre of vineyard easily. But, of course, vineyards have more than one acre. Nancy Pelosi has 16.55 acres. So, 16.55 times four million grapes equals 66.2 million grapes. That means that each immigrant has to pick 16.55 grapes—which doesn’t sound like the most effective use of cheap labor. Of course, I'm joking. An immigrant can pick more than that in a day, and given months of harvest...heck, a single migrant could pick thousands, tens of thousands...especially since they grow in bunches. It's not like going out into the woods to pick wild blackberries one at a time. 


Frank: There are thousands of acres devoted to grape-growing in California. I don’t know how many, but there have to be thousands with a growing-and-harvest season that probably runs from May to January. i wonder how many acres...


Gerard: Why bother to guess. There’s an official report by the CDFA. It’s online. Wait. Hmmmmnnn…Here it is. California Grape Acreage Report, 2019 Summary. * Let’s see…



    "California’s 2019 grape acreage totaled 918,000 acres. Of the total grape acreage, 860,000 were bearing while 58,000 were non-bearing. The wine-type grape acreage is estimated at 635,000 acres. Of the total acres, 590,000 were bearing and 45,000 were non-bearing. Table-type grape acreage totaled 130,000 acres with 121,000 bearing and 9,000 non-bearing. Acreage of raisin-type grapes totaled 153,000 acres, of which 149,000 were bearing and 4,000 were non-bearing."

Frank: Shrivel me up and call me Raisin. That’s a lot of grapes.


Gerard: Funny you should say that. The report also categorizes the number of acres used for raisins, and it mentions…look here…1,2,3,4,5,6.7….Geez! It lists over fifty kinds of grapes, from Allison to Vintage Red, used for raisins, and…Let me see…1,2,3…over 30 types for white wines and about the same number for red wines. Hard to keep the immigr…er…number of grapes in mind, especially because the report also lists synonyms, such as Trousseau Gris for Gray Riesling and Muscat Yellow for Moscato Gaillo.


Frank: Big business. No wonder Nancy wants immigrants to pick the crops. I mean, what else could they do? It isn’t as though they could enter the country, go to Massachusetts, get a job, get an education, start a business, become successful, and start a vineyard on, of all places, Martha’s Vineyard, where recent immigrants were personae non grata. I mean, they’re grape pickers in her mind, aren’t they? Suited to pick crops, maybe to do her ironing, and possibly cook for her. Talk about stereotyping! Talk about racism! Talk about demeaning an entire population! But it’s the conservatives who are racists—has to be. The President said so, and just about every mainstream media pundit echoes that as an indisputable fact. 


Gerard: Anyway, looks as though Nancy and the Democrats have a plan for four or five million immigrants, one that will be good for them and good for Nancy. And that work of picking grapes will have job security. Almost a million acres of vineyard in California alone at four thousand grapes per acre…that’s…Holy Cow! That’s a really big number of grapes. FOUR BILLION!


Frank: Now you see why a vineyard owner like Nancy Pelosi and many of the owners of the 3,000-plus wineries in California probably have no problem with illegal immigration. Keep ‘em comin’ and keep ‘em pickin’.


Gerard: You know, all this talk about grapes has made me thirsty for some wine. Am I a hypocrite if I go out to buy a bottle of California wine for supper tonight. The missus likes white, but I prefer red regardless of the meal. Take it like medicine, you know, for the Resveratrol…source of antioxidants and all that.


Frank: You’ll be no more hypocritical than some wealthy celebrity flying off in a private jet to discuss climate change at a conference that serves expensive wines made from grapes picked by illegal migrants in the service of Nancy Pelosi and her Napa Valley cronies.




*April 21, 2020. California Department of Food and Agriculture. California Grape Acreage Report, 2019 Summary. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publications/Specialty_and_Other_Releases/Grapes/Acreage/2020/202004grpacSUMMARY2019Crop.pdf   Accessed October 1, 2022.