Cornhole? Cheating at cornhole? Is nothing sacred?


Professional (Yes, “professional”) cornholers can earn six figures on the American Cornhole League circuit. A quarter million bucks for tossing a bean bag into a hole from a distance of  twenty-seven feet. A quarter million bucks.


And when money’s on the line, so is cheating on the inclined table. It is apparently part of human nature to bypass rules to win. “BagGate,” as the scandal is known, required the cheaters to cut, empty, and re-sew bags that did not conform to the official size of one-pound, six-inch squares. Supposedly, an investigation revealed that the bags were not “intentionally altered,” but that some form of cheating might have occurred. *


We had a rather big Latin test to prepare for in high school in an age before digital watches replaced the old spring-wound time pieces. Taking an old watch, a classmate of mine devised a tiny paper scroll with Latin conjugations to roll past the glass face of his ingenious “cheat sheet.” He spent a great deal of time making and perfecting his cheating device, probably more time than would have been required to learn the material for the test. Nevertheless, he made the device rather than study.


As often happens, cheaters fail to win, particularly when the cheating gets discovered. And often that cheating requires the expenditure of more energy than might be needed to succeed. Such is the human way. Rather than conform to rules, we tend to bypass, if not outright break, them on the chance that no one will notice.


And on scales of human activity larger than games are the efforts of political parties to win elections and governments to bypass the dictates of treaties. Do we just not like rules? Do we not like to follow procedures? Is a “little sin” acceptable? That paperclip pocketed in the office is just one of thousands, isn’t it? That tax dollar with no tight audit won’t be missed. That dollar accepted from a foreign political donor becomes part of a pot so large that no one will notice. If cornhole bags, major league spitballs, NFL offensive linemen holding, and other forms of cheating can occur under watchful officials, what bureaucratic cheating, boardroom manipulation, and business scams must be occurring all over the planet? Can anyone say Bernie Madoff? Fishermen Chase Cominsky and Jake Runyan putting weights in their fish in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail championships? Deflategate and Spygate on behalf of the New England Patriots? The sign-stealing Houston Astros? Russia's coordinated Olympic doping? Rosie Ruiz on the subway winning a marathon? 


Cornhole? Is nothing sacred? I guess not.

*https://www.foxnews.com/sports/baggate-creates-worldwind-cornhole-cheating-scandal 

Writing about the evolution of alphabets and languages, Frederick Bodmer argues, “In the ancient world and in medieval times, mankind had not got used to rapid change. Great innovations were possible only when circumstances conspired to force people to face new problems without the handicap of old habits” ( 54).*

You live, by contrast in an age of rapid change—in some ways. Ironically, in midst of such vicissitudes, habits often remain unchanged, especially habits of attitude and mind. Elections bring this unwavering adherence to the “old” to the forefront of most pundit programs and editorial pages. Regardless of circumstances apparently forcing Americans to face new problems without the encumbrance of old thinking, pundits, editors, and many Americans refuse to relinquish their long-held beliefs and allegiances.
In 2022, after two years of the Biden Administration’s failed policies that led to 1) the loss of 11,000 union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline (a pipeline that passed every environmental test thrown at it), 2) a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the loss of a vital airbase and billions of dollars in military equipment to a confirmed enemy of the United States and the loss of freedoms for Afghanis and especially for Afghani women plus the needless deaths of Americans and their Afghani allies, 3) the loss of oil independence achieved under the previous administration, 4) the refusal by the Federal government to secure the southern border, leading to a rise in drug cartel and human trafficking activity that led to rapes and abandonments of children and the deaths of smuggled illegal aliens plus the crossing in the States of dozens of terrorists and the fentanyl deaths of at least 100,000 Americans, 5) an inflation rate that soared to more than 8%, 6) a perception of weakness that emboldened Xi to threaten Taiwan, Putin to invade Ukraine, and Kim to threaten S. Korea and Japan, 7) the coverup of the President’s son’s illegal activities and the Biden family’s selling influence, 8) the Biden Justice Department’s nonexistent or slow response to real crimes in favor of pursuing investigations at the urging of school boards of parents who protested school board policies, 9) false claims against border agents, and 10) spending binges of trillions of dollars with billions lost to scammers—after two years of such governing and other detrimental dealings, many Democrats will continue to support Democrat candidates because they will not relinquish their long-held beliefs in an ever-widening socialist grip on what was once the world’s prime model of a democratic republic. In short, when democratic voters go to the polls next week, many of them will pull the levers for their party’s candidates, including an inarticulate stroke victim running for senate in Pennsylvania. Onto these charges of incompetence in the current administration, I’ll add the charge that the President, a proven inveterate liar and gaffe machine coupled with a Vice President who apparently can only laugh when asked a question and can only repeat phrases when giving a speech, make this administration one of the most incompetent governing bodies on the planet. But I will not throw all Democrats into the same barrel. Some understand the dangers of America’s current path, but I have yet to hear dissenting voices. Apparently, for most representatives and senators, voicing dissent rings a death knell for a political career and a relentless attack by the Leftist Press and social media trolls.

But, hey, what do I know? It just seems to me that—to borrow Bodmer’s words—when circumstances conspire to force people to face new problems without the handicap of old habits, modern minds are not much different from ancient minds. No political party is without its flaws and mistakes because all parties are composed of fallible—and sometimes corrupt—humans Nevertheless, what I enumerated above seems to be more than enough to warrant a change.


*The Loom Of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. (1944). New York. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1985.

Lamarck argued that giraffes had long necks because they stretched them for generations in an attempt to eat leaves that grew where shorter-necked giraffes could not munch. In short, Lamarck believed that habits were inheritable. But that famous experiment of cutting off the tails of mice demonstrated that he was wrong. Mice generations later still grew tails though their ancestors had theirs severed. Purposeful evolution is on the grandest scale of speciation an oxymoronic idea though variations in domesticated animals and plants are the product of human engineering. Randomness still plays a role though many like the Nazi eugenics practitioners who sought to form some perfect Aryan race were as misguided as the Soviet-Ukrainian botanist Lysenko who thought he could change how seeds responded to colder climatic conditions by exposing them to cold conditions--resulting, by the way, in failed wheat crops. *


Regardless of biological demonstrations to the contrary, Larmarckism and its followup Lysenkoism haven’t gone the way of phrenology. The idea that what you do today can be passed on to your descendants is alive and well. You can see this in Nobel prize-winner sperm banks, the progeny of which have never been shown to have any specially heritable genius characteristics. **


Yes, taller people tend to produce taller children and shorter people tend to produce shorter children. Pygmies and Watutsi (plural of Tutsi) are respectively shorter than average and taller than average. But a mix of humans, such as we have after millennia of migrations and conquests, has led to an “average” and a limited range of physical characteristics. In families composed of heritable tallness and shortness, some children are tall and some short, with the mix tending to average-out to a “norm.” And in a coupling of “geniuses” there can be a child with limited intellectual abilities—that old problem of nurture vs. nature arising.


I remember seeing as a kid This Island Earth, the 1955 science fiction film in which actor Jeff Morrow had a very large forehead, supposedly indicative of a greater frontal lobe and greater intelligence that evolved on his planet. And I recall an article in some magazine with a picture of “future humans” with large skulls much like so many fictional depictions of extraterrestrials. I suppose all such depictions and predictions are continuations of popular perceptions that from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, heads have gotten larger in a neat progression of ever higher foreheads, though human species with bigger brains than ours have existed.***


Anyway, now comes an article by Chris Melore entitled “Humans may evolve to have deformed bodies, second eyelid from overusing technology.” **** The gist? Your offspring will have deformed “claw hands,” permanently bent elbows, and hunched backs because you use computers and cell phones. In short, like Lamarck’s giraffes, you, according to the hypothesis, will pass on your practices as physical manifestations. Lamarck and Lysenko are saying from their graves, “See, we were right.”


But again, evolution is random. Adaptations are random. It is only in retrospect that we can see a pattern. Yes, foreheads have gotten larger, but we do not know exactly why or how. But intelligence seems to be little different from what it was thousands of years ago if we judge by human behavior. We still war. We still gather in similar groups. We still make the mistakes our ancestors made. And we still look pretty much the way they looked.


The subtle changes evolution makes are not individuals. Species evolve, not individuals. All reproducing humans have the potential to alter our future appearance, but not one among them knows a foolproof way of making alterations. Note that for any genetic characteristic to be passed onto to future generations, it must survive premature death by disease, accident, or malicious intention. One persistent obstacle stands in the way of any intentional evolution: the penchant for humans to destroy that which is different. Thus, genocide persists as a motivation among many cultures and subcultures. Think Holocaust. Think today’s Uyghurs.


Regardless of the failures of intentional evolutionists, every generation will produce its followers of Lamarck and Lysenko. Every generation will produce a Margaret Sanger, an Adolf Hitler, or a Hutu determined to kill a Tutsi. Probably our only defense against such genetic purists is a continued homogenization of our species and a recognition of that homogenization.


*Lysenkoism, supported by Stalin, led to multiple crop failures.


**Many have the idea that Nobel peace prize winners are elite geniuses because they instituted understanding or previously unknown phenomena or made discoveries, but some of those discoveries were partly accidental, such as the discovery of the Microwave Background Radiation by Penzias and Wilson, and some discoveries were further developments of predecessor scientists and engineers, such as Cormack and Hounsfield’s tying computers to tomography. Although they have to my knowledge never participated in stocking a sperm bank, Teddy Roosevelt, Yassar Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barack Obama, all receiving the award, don’t seem to me as men possessed of either “genius” or—with the exception of Carter who arranged for a Middle East peace deal between Egypt and Israel and Roosevelt who arranged a peace between Japan and Russia—evidence of actually furthering peace. Arafat was a terrorist, Gore was and still is a wealthy manipulator of climate “science” who made predictions that failed to materialize, and Obama just gave a few talks like one to a concert crowd in Paris, but continued the Afghan war while in office and allowed ISIS to destroy, rape, torture, and kill thousands, dismissing their Caliphate as the “JV team.”


***Read Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2008).


****”Humans may evolve to have deformed bodies, second eyelid from overusing technology.” StudyFinds. November 2, 2022. https://studyfinds.org/humans-deformed-bodies-technology/  Accessed November 3, 2022.

In trying to reach goals, each of us operates on a foundation of causes that we accept as just, important, and noble. If the goal places us in contention with others, the intensity of our belief in the cause determines the intensity of our efforts to reach the goal. Of course, determining what is just, important, and noble is largely a subjective matter. I’ll go out on the proverbial limb to say that some causes, however, meet one or more of those qualifiers in the minds of many people. Liberty was a just, important, and noble foundational cause behind the eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France. But what of today’s motivations? What are the causes at the center of actions? Well, they seem to range from legalizing drugs to prohibiting the use of fossil fuels, from maintaining or gaining political power to advancing “gender agendas” in elementary schools, and from unrestricted opening of borders to unrestricted opening of prisons. Within these causes lie sub-causes too numerous to mention save one: The quashing of conservative voices.


While the brouhaha over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter ruffles the feathers of the Hollywood and Journalistic Elites and generates in their most vociferous representatives wrathful proclamations derived from fear they might suffer loss of control over conservative voices, more damaging ideological causes are affecting lives in places far remote from the generally affluent lives of those elite. I find two of these causes to be ignoble.


Take the October 29, 2022 bombing in Mogadishu as an example of ignoble cause. Fanatically worried that western influences might attract Somali youth away from Islam, specifically away from Sunni al-Shabaab, fundamentalist Salafi jihadists’ beliefs, the terrorist group set off bombs in Mogadishu that killed over 100 and injured more than 300 innocents. The cause caused the death of children who, ironically, won’t undergo any Islamic education. The bombing did not use up much ink on American front pages or electrons in mainstream media broadcasts because matters as important as a rich guy’s buying Twitter and the American election cycle’s mid-term high point (though nowadays, every day of every year seems to be the apex of the cycle) used up both the ink and the electrons. So, 100 humans lost their lives to a group devoted more to destruction than to creation, much like the Antifa groupies who destroyed property and caused injury and even death in the American Northwest during “the summer of love.” And in eastern Ukraine, the now well known “meat grinder” born of another ignoble cause has taken both Ukrainian and Russian lives in a conflict that has received coverage mostly because it has interfered with the world’s wheat market and energy supplies. And to what end, for what purpose, for what cause, and for whom? Could any of this information be more important than fighting over a rich guy’s buying a social media company? Not, it seems, if one is among the chosen elites of Left-leaning Americans.


Have we entered the Age of Ignoble Causes? Or, is every age one rife with ignoble causes, reasons for hatred, destruction, injury, and death generated by groups (e.g., American Left or Right extremists, al-Shabaab terrorists, Antifa vandals) or individuals (e.g, Vladimir Putin).


That those whose feathers Musk ruffled are concerned over their loss of censorship of dissenting conservative voices is probably nothing new in American history. Subtle and overt censorship of dissent has always been the modus operandi of the media—dare I say a persistent or continuous cause sliding from one generation to the next. The media’s coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, his dealings with the Communist Chinese, the Ukrainian Burisma company, and Russian oligarchs, and the Biden family’s growing rich through political connections that bespeak of selling influence reminds me of the 1960s that reminds me of the media coverups of the 1960s. With the exception of Ted Kennedy’s involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick in 1969, very few Americans were aware of the Kennedy brothers’ extramarital affairs and shenanigans like the Bay of Pigs fiasco that a complicit Press refused to report negatively because they were motivated to protect the party in power. In the cause of politics, details be damned as Truth, like a wayward chicken, flees the coop. No example of this is a more telling than the Russian censorship of the word war with regard to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Pravda’s cause is Putin’s cause. The chicken of truth is pecking at seeds in the Russian countryside, where the locals “support” the war “against the Ukrainian Nazis who are puppets of the Americans and Nato” attempting to destroy Mother Russia. In the cause of defending the Motherland, the youth should willingly go to the meat grinder along the front. The Press—American and Russian, Brazilian and Burman, Iranian and Arabian—is peopled by reporters and editors with narrow political agendas, each a cause they support with only some exceptions.


So, Elon Musk vows to open Twitter to all causes. But can he do so without chaos? We already know that ignoble causes outnumber noble ones and that the former have relentless energy to destroy individuals and groups. Yes, those with noble causes might Tweet, but they will probably only get in a word “edgewise.” And part of the reason lies in the darkness of ignorance. Americans have been kept in the dark partly by our own lack of cosmopolitanism. From our insular setting, separated as we are from the rest of the world by oceans and paired with a similar country to the north, the causes motivating others around the planet seem unimportant. A bombing in Somalia by a group determined to quash cosmopolitanism among Islamic children is too distant for concern because Americans have to worry about Twitter’s future. Mogadishu’s bombing victims are not cause celeb in the minds of Americans concerned about maintaining political power and censoring dissent on a social media platform.


When we take the historical perspective to review the causes now as dead as the people who pursued them, we should be able to determine which were just, important, and noble. But our ignorance of the world around us is matched by our unwillingness to view any cause from a perspective outside that which motivates us.


I confess to being one of those unwilling and ignorant Americans, but I do so with some sense that I cannot determine that any of my causes is perfectly just, important, and noble. Although I find criticizing the causes of others easy, I realize that they can just as easily criticize my favored causes and that no cause is absolute save peace. Yet, even the cause of peace is open to debate as someone like Putin might argue that his goal is ultimately a “peaceful Ukraine” absorbed by the Motherland, returned through his efforts—and the deaths of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians—to the womb of Russia. And those irate Leftist Twitter users probably want to achieve “peace” through an elimination of all conservative thought.