One of the tenets that underlies this website is that place is primary. So, I thought I should make a few comments, especially after reading the New York Post: 1) "Field of screams: First migrants arrive at NYC’s Floyd Bennett Field—only to scoff and leave isolated site after just one look-around”; * 2) “Mom desperate to change baby’s inappropriate name after moving to English-speaking country”; ** 3) “Fed-up Sedona residents begging LA hippies to stay away: ‘Hate what it’s become’”;*** and 4) “25 Haunting Photos Of California City, The Desert Ghost Town That Was Supposed To Rival Los Angeles.”****  The four reveal that the perception of place depends on desires, culture, indigenous and new residents, and physical environment. I could speak to each in detail, but the titles seem to be self-explanatory. But in summary:

1. NYC thought to offer an abandoned area to its burdensome illegal alien population. They took one look, and said, “No thanks.”
2. The baby’s name was appropriate and common in the native culture, but became a potential source of ridicule in a different language.
3. People seeking a place they deemed “sacred” overwhelmed locals who just want to live without intrusions and environmental degradation.
4. Under the premise expressed in the movie Field of Dreams, someone thought, “If I build it, ‘they’ will come”; but ‘they’ didn’t when they saw what the place was. To these four I could add the story,
5. “Fed-up migrants who trekked thousands of miles to US already heading home: ‘American Dream doesn’t exist’.” It’s anecdotal I’ll admit, but still telling a tale about the significance of place, or the differences between a sunny warm place and a wintry cold and snowy one.*****

But what is place?


Understanding the concept of place requires an extended definition. A simple, “a location,” won’t do. ******


Place is more than location, more than the objects at a location, and more than mere appearance. It is the whole inorganic setting intertwined with the organic setting.“Inorganic setting” is pretty encompassing: Climate, soils and hydrology, weather patterns (Yes, they are different from climate), elevation, topography, and geology (the latter including resources and hazards), distance from or proximity to oceans and their effects, and ecology. Place is what it is holistically, and as such, it influences lives as much as humans affect it. Place can also be artificial: New York City exists on an island whose appearance before colonial America was just slightly like Central Park and nothing like Wall Street.


Why Should You Give This a Moment’s Thought?


Why should anyone give the concept of place a moment’s thought?  Simple answer: It’s almost always on everyone’s mind anyway, isn’t it?


Even if you are living in a tent on a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, you have sense of place, your place. Is it a territorial thing? Not always, but often it is. And you, like everyone else, define places by how you personalize them: My office; my cubicle; my garage; my home; my yard; my section of the sidewalk. My goodness! Even “my desk,” “my vacation spot,” “my local whatever: grocery store, bank, danger zone.”


To What End? For What Purpose?


Ordinarily, people don’t seek anxiety. In fact, they do what they can to avoid it. It’s a bit of an existential thing in the sense of existentialism, Sartrean or Kierkegaardian, not just surviving, but also in the sense of what life means and how it’s lived meaningfully and safely, efficiently and productively, pleasurably and satisfactorily. All these purposes center on places for the significance we see in them.


Do I Need to Say More?


Food for thought here. Think about your own relationship to places. Think about how you have shaped them and how, reciprocally, they have shaped you. Enough said.
  


*https://nypost.com/2023/11/12/metro/first-migrants-arrive-at-floyd-bennett-field-only-to-scoff-and-leave-isolated-site-after-just-one-look-around/
**https://nypost.com/2023/11/12/lifestyle/i-accidentally-named-my-son-semen-i-need-to-change-it/
***https://nypost.com/2023/11/12/lifestyle/fed-up-sedona-residents-begging-la-hippies-to-stay-away/
****https://nypost.com/2023/11/12/lifestyle/fed-up-sedona-residents-begging-la-hippies-to-stay-away/
*****Fed-up migrants who trekked thousands of miles to US already heading home: 'American Dream doesn't exist'




******https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/place/

Confusing Messages from the Catholoepistemiad


So, are universities inclusive as they say they are?


It’s tough to be everything to everyone, especially in an Age of the Easily Offended, or, as some might say, the Age of Absolute Narcissism. And yet, that’s the ostensible role of modern massive university systems, with the seeming exception of banning conservatives from speaking on campuses. Where’s truth fit in? Certainly, some universities, like the University of Michigan, make “truth” (veritas) part of their mottos.   


And in an age of political correctness that views “white privilege” as a crime against all humanity—even, strangely, white humanity (particularly poor or middle class white humanity)—one might think that the University of Michigan’s marching band needs some lyric politically correct rewrite for “Yellow and Blue” to comply with the principle of inclusiveness. The song contains the stanza:


    Here's to the college whose colors we wear,
    Here's to the hearts that are true!
    Here's to the maid of the golden hair,
    And eyes that are brimming with blue!
    Garlands of bluebells and maize intertwine,
    And hearts that are true and voices combine;
    -Hail!
    Hail to the college whose colors we wear;
    Hurrah for the Yellow and Blue!


Woah! “…the maid of the golden hair,
    And eyes that are brimming with blue”?


Really? Golden hair and blue eyes? I know the Upper Midwest has many Scandinavians. About four percent of Michiganders (c. 400,000) have Scandinavian ancestry, but the Norse stereotype of blue-eyed blonde isn’t much more than a myth as anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn pointed out long ago in his Mirror for Man. * Michigan is also home to many Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and Middle Easterners. Is there a bias at the University of Michigan in favor of blue-eyed blondes? Are only the blue-eyed blondes worth a line in the lyric? And could it be that the University discriminates in other ways? Aren’t universities safe places for every race, gender, and creed?


Most likely the folks at the former Catholoepistemiad are caught in the web of conflicting needs, desires, and purposes that makes being “catholic” difficult, if one considers the term’s definition as “universal, all encompassing, and broad in sympathies, tastes and interests.” The University of Michigan began as such a “catholic” place, supposedly open to the wide swath of “universal” epistemology driven, it seems, under French Catholic influence harking back to the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth century. That song? Well, no one among the easily offended appear to have noticed the exclusive message of those words. The words are probably well off the radar of any Snowflakes who are easily offended not only by commissions of politically incorrect sins, but also by omissions of politically correct virtues. Why has the University omitted the description of every human being now alive, including especially, those who aren’t blonde blue-eyed cisgender females. Quick! What campus building houses the cry room? And do they play “Yellow and Blue” with revised lyrics there?


But do those exclusionary lyrics tarnish Michigan’s reputation as a “university devoted to arts, sciences, and truth? Including every human descriptor in “Yellow and Blue” is just not possible for a song played either at commencement or at special university events. And maybe they aren’t off the reality of Michigan’s student population: Fifty-five percent of Michigan’s students are white; 16% are Asian; 7% are Hispanic; 7% are foreign nationals; and 5% are Black (in a state that is 13.8% Black). Ten percent are listed as “other,” which could mean people from the Pacific islands, Aborigines, and Native Americans (See, it’s impossible to list everyone—I forgot, for example, the possibility of Inuits and Tierra del Fuegians in the student body). And 82% of its students are listed as “affluent.” Hey, where are the poor kids? Just 18%?  And why is the Black student body not 13.8%?


But the song? Maybe maids with yellow hair and blue eyes dominate the crosswalks.   


Impossible Inclusion Isn’t Michigan’s Only Problem


What if the business of a university is to make money and not students proficient in the arts, the sciences, and truths?


The University of Michigan whose motto is Artes, Scientia, Veritas (Arts, Sciences, Truth) now has a problem other than inclusiveness. It’s accused of cheating. Seems that the Board of Regents needs to consider adding another word to the motto: Ethica (or Ethicae, plural). Or, at least the Athletic Department needs to add it.


Universities: Formerly Happy Party Places Known for their Young Drunks, Class-skippers, and Nerdy Students Serious about Artes, Scientia, and Veritas, many schools have become such big businesses that the crass needs of humanity have insidiously crept into the recesses of gyms and football stands. Cheating on tests and reports? Old stuff and even more common in an age of AI’s Chatbot writing student essays in seconds or minutes than in days gone by when quill met parchment.


Now, it’s the football team, the Wolverines, who are embroiled in alleged spying on rival football teams to secure an advantage in the big business of national championships. And just before a big game! Michigan’s coach was suspended right before the football team, ranked in the top four, was about to play Penn State, ranked in the top ten. Fortunately for the Wolverines, they outplayed the Nittany Lions.


But should we make a fuss over a little cheating?


Will We Ever Return to Those Simple Days of Yore?


In fact, there’s probably little difference in kind, just a difference in degree in cheating on school papers and in various sports venues. Sign-stealing, the offense the football program is accused of doing, has always been part of sports. Baseball coaches and players attempt it in every game by watching the third base coach’s gestures. Maybe there never was a time when ethics dominated sports. Maybe “sportsmanship” is a myth and a practice constrained only under the watchful eyes of referees and umpires. Without them, games become gladiator events in the midst of screaming, blood-thirsty onlookers.


College football is big business; it became so in the Midwest with the success of Knute Rockne, one of those Scandinavians and the head coach of Notre Dame. The business is governed as much by the dictates of running a multi-million dollar enterprise as it is by the needs of the game and players and the desires of fans. According to one report on that business, the University of Michigan football program had a gross revenue of  $125,773,306, $44,684,585 in expenses, and a profit of $81,088,721 if one considers only the football program. The University releases a different report, one with and Athletic program’s $168,244,643 gross, $156,682,998 in expenses, and a profit of $11,561,645. It pays 29 head coaches and assistant coaches almost too numerous to count (football alone has a dozen coaches). The numbers are not Amazon, Walmart, or Apple numbers, but those revenues, profits, and employees make the athletic program a “big” business. And that football business at Michigan has a CEO who makes a reported ten million bucks per year. As I wrote above, it’s big business. And like every big business, it has to survive in a competitive world.


The Logic of Children


“Why are you punishing me? Sammy did the same thing, and you didn’t punish him.”** That is one of the defenses against the accusation of sign-stealing offered by Michigan’s and Coach Harbaugh’s attorneys. Yep. The argument is that cheating is okay because everyone does it. Ethica. See, it’ll never be added to the motto. Catholoepistemiad’s first President, the Presbyterian Rev. John Monteith and the first Vice President, Rev. Father Gabriel Richard, a Catholic priest, are probably turning over in their graves if they’ve been following Wolverines’ football.


But the University’s representatives did not deny the accusation according to Big Ten Conference Commissioner Tony Petitti. No, the argument offered was that “others did the same.” Ethica. It’ll never become part of the motto.


Total inclusion and “catholic epistemology” will never manifest itself as every “special interest group” vies for recognition and seeks to deny recognition to some other special interest group. The logic of children will prevail in an age of political correctness and campus activism over a wide range, a catholic range, so to speak, of topics. The University of Michigan, like so many other universities, will struggle to balance a booming business in the context of constant desires of those who seek rewards without catholic ethica. But that might be an unfair assessment.


It is possible that the original intent of the University’s founders to make a catholoepistemiad was an unattainable Norse eplepai in the sky.


*1963. A Premier Book. Kluckhohn was a professor of anthropology at Harvard.


**https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/38864724/sources-big-ten-ban-michigan-jim-harbaugh-field

Merrie Olde England was never really as merry as the phrase suggests. From the time of the Celts to the Roman conquest, through the Anglo-Saxon-Frisian and Danish invasions, and into the time of Norman and post-Norman rule, and past the reign of kings warring with the Scots and the Roman Church, England—and I mean the whole of the island group from Falmouth to Dover to the Outer Hebrides and Orkneys—has been a land of petty squabbles and pitched battles, of brutality and imprisonment, and deaths so numerous no one has kept track. Among those killed on these brutal islands in addition to victims of religious and political wars, were those killed because of their ethnicity, namely Jews. That ethnic group, Ashkenazi Jews who had migrated to central Norwich before the coronation of Richard the Lionhearted, were the victims of massacres in 1189 and 1190.


A Word about European Genes


If the Out of Africa hypothesis is true, then an emigration of Africans from their native regions about 60 or 70 thousand years ago moved people through the Middle East and then into Europe and Asia. The product of the multi-generational dispersal of humans was the genetic stamp of those who spent some time in the eastern Mediterranean before moving north-by-northwest and east-by-northeast. Add to this early migration of genes the later ancient and medieval movements, and the Brits end up with a pervasive genetic relationship that ties many of its residents to the eastern Mediterranean in spite of the drive by many to maintain some sort of “ethnic purity.” In other words, the Brits who killed Ashkenazi Jews in the late 12th century were probably distantly related by virtue of those migrations. In fact, many Europeans probably have a bit of Middle Eastern DNA, as well as African DNA.


The Massacre


The details of the massacre of Ashkenazi Jews in central Norwich are not the sharpest of historical points. There is some controversy about its motivation and its execution. But it follows a pattern of exiling, persecuting, and killing one ethnic group by various other ethnic groups, that is, the scapegoating by historical precedent. For sundry reasons, such as blaming them for killing Christ and ancient rivalries over eastern Mediterranean lands, the Jews have suffered more than two millennia of persecution that has included attempted genocides.


In 2004, a medieval well discovered by archaeologists contained the remains of 17 people who were the Ashkenazi Jews that the locals massacred in Norwich. The bodies of men, women, and children had been dumped into a well. Were they the victims of that massacre? DNA evidence seems to suggest so. *


Rwanda and …


Remember the attempted genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Some 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths in a mere 100 days. ** Like the recent October massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists, Tutsis were subjected to unfathomable brutality during that killing period. But as everyone knows, that attempted genocide pales in comparison to the Holocaust during WWII.


And to what effect? No doubt there have been such genocides and attempted genocides over the past 200,000 years as one supposed ethnic group has attempted to eliminate a neighboring ethnic group. Attempted genocides surface in almost every generation. Some madness envelopes one ethnic group to slay another, even those with close genetic ties like the Palestinians and Israelis.


But throughout the past two millennia, no ethnic group has experienced more genocidal attempts than the Jews. And now, as Caucasian kids in universities and political leaders in America shout for their annihilation, we see that it’s not just one group against another, as in the Hutus against the Tutsis, but a wide swath of ethnicities all banded in their fury, their seeming hatred of a single ethnic group, the Jews, and not just the Jews in Israel, but Jews everywhere.


Who can fathom the reasons that someone belonging to African-American and European-American heritage can side with those screaming for genocide? Who can fathom that some supposed representatives of elite Hollywood, actors who wouldn’t even have a job without a history of Jewish entrepreneurship by people like Loew, Mayer, and Bronfman who made Hollywood a center of moviedom, that those elites would be either quiet about or advocate for the genocide of the Jews? The very business that made them rich and famous stands on the shoulders of Jewish producers, directors, and script writers. In fact, a large number of actors and actresses with whom actors of every ethnicity practice their craft are Jewish. And what American among those who should be aware of radical Islam’s history of abusing and killing people with “alternative sexual tendencies” just because of those tendencies, would back a radical Islamic group with a proven history of such brutality?


And yet, here we are. From some alphabet people through American Blacks, to American Caucasians, the young are marching for the end of Israel, an outcome that can only be achieved by genocide. Fortunate fools, aren’t they? All this comes after decades of Israeli concessions to Palestinian demands and the same decades of Hamas rule that has deprived Palestinians of freedom and economic success, conditions that no pampered college protestor would endure without complaint. With no millennia-long fear of genocide, these useful pawns have taken up a cause that can only result in more destruction and death, more torture and rape, more senseless acts of violence that might, if history tells the tale of such violence, spread into their own comfortable backyards.


I’m befuddled. I don’t understand this genocidal drive. Do you?


*Massey, Nina. 30 Aug 2022. DNA from remains found in medieval well ‘shines new light on Jewish history’ Independent online.

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

First Quantum Minerals operates mines from Panama to Australia. They dig up lots of stuff you and I use daily: copper mostly, and also zinc, cobalt, nickel, molybdenum, silver, and gold. The company produces more than 775,000 long tons of copper yearly and employs almost 20,000 in places  like Las Cruces, Spain, Pyhäjärvi, Finland, Akjoujt, Mauritania, and the Rize Province in Turkey and the North-Western Province in Zambia. All places on your potential vacation spots, right? Well, probably not. Some are rather remote, really off the beaten path, but that mine in Central America is very near the Pan-American Highway, and its location affords eco-warriors an ideal opportunity to protest the company’s operations by blocking the major north-south highway. How ideal? Say about $80 million in daily losses to blockades the protestors set across the road.


Roadblock for Mother Earth


The roadblock of the Pan-American Highway has now cost more than the loss of millions to businesses. Panama’s schools have shut down for over a week, and now two protestors are dead, shot as they protested by a frustrated Kenneth Darlington, described as a lawyer and professor with US-Panamanian citizenships as the story by Jesse O’Neill in the New York Post relates. * Heads up here: Standing, sitting, or lying in the middle of a highway isn’t as good an idea as it might initially seem in an age of road rage.


But What’s a Company to Do?


Here’s a message from First Quantum Minerals’ CEO Tristan Pascall:


         “The current high cost of energy has highlighted the importance of energy security, and emphasised [sic.] the importance of the energy transition. The metals that we mine are fundamental to this. Without more copper and nickel, the world won’t be able to achieve the increased use of renewable power and electric vehicles that are required for global decarbonisation [sic.]. New projects will ultimately be required.”


Yep, if you want the world to be carbon-free yet still electrified, you’re going to need a metal that facilitates power transmission. Copper’s ideal. And as far as those EVs might travel, the other metals First Quantum mines are also important; thus, the mining of cobalt and nickel that are essential to their manufacture.


The demand exists. The company fulfills that demand. And no temporary roadblocks will decrease that demand as a world led by other eco-warriors transitions to green power that unfortunately is both on the agenda and off the agenda of the very people who blocked the Pan-American Highway. Apparently, the demand for “green energy” will increase, and First Minerals intends to take advantage of a materials gap that is more extensive than the famous 80 kilometers (50 mi) of the Darién Gap on that roadblocked highway.
Having and Eating One’s Cake


Poor eco-warriors! In their efforts to “save the planet,” they come up against a stressful dilemma framed in a single question they must ask. “Do we save a locality from the real and supposed ravages of mining essential metals while depriving the burgeoning clean energy industry of its essential metals?” Doesn’t that question sum up the problem all environmental warriors face? It’s akin to trying to keep the cake one is eating.


And the warriors aren’t the only ones with the dilemma. The mining company has a policy of environmentally friendly mining practices—within reason and responsibility to shareholders, of course. Pascall includes one of those “we care about the environment and local community” statements in his online letter, and he relates the company’s projects to turn it into a “green company.” Without those statements, the company would face increasing criticism. And the renewal of the company’s contract comes at increased costs. The Panamanian government will get more moolah from the renewal contract that permits continued mining.


All this seems like a win-win-win scenario that the eco-warriors ignore. The host country gets money, the company produces more essential metals and continues to make a profit for shareholders, the many employees and transport companies make money by mining and moving those metals, and the eco-warriors get a promise for eco-friendliness backed by some new technologies that are, in turn, supported by the very metals whose extraction they now attempt to block.


Be Careful What You Wish For


Energy. Can’t live without it and can’t diminish the demand for it in a growing world population. Ask the next eco-warrior intent on shutting down all forms of energy because they require raw materials drawn from Mother Earth how they intend to energize a population of eight billion. Ask what a world of inadequate, but expensive, energy would look like. Those raw materials First Quantum Minerals extracts are essential to civilization as it now exists across the planet.


As energy becomes more expensive, look for the many to suffer because those few eco-warriors hold onto or wish for some ideal not backed by the realities of life. Humans have always exploited natural resources. Without that exploitation neither you nor I would probably exist; the eco-warriors themselves might not exist.


Americans, caught in the middle between the eco-warriors of Panama and the mining company in Canada, have recently learned about the costs of energy when the ideal overrides the real. Biden’s shutting down American energy independence has had a deleterious effect on individuals’ personal finances. Those who support his attempt at a rapid withdrawal from fossil fuels have, unless they are immune by virtue of wealth, suffered increasing costs from the policy they supported in 2020. How a large population has endorsed energy dependence and expensive “green” energy remains a mystery to me. And how some of those support shutting the very mines that would make green energy possible is an even greater mystery.


Sure, I want to “save the planet”; it’s the only world I’ll ever know. But any Ideal has to be tempered by the Real. And any environmental policy needs to be framed in a context of humanity’s needs. Do mines threaten a locality? Sure. Do they supply the world with what it demands? Sure, also.


What’s the alternative to extracting essential metals?


*https://nypost.com/2023/11/08/news/gunman-seen-shooting-dead-eco-protesters-in-panama/


**Https://first-quantum.com. and other websites linked to First Quantum Minerals, Ltd.

Good stop to see the breadth of humanity: The Daily Mail online. * Some hard news, but lots of people stuff revealed in photos and stories you might encounter at a checkout line in a grocery store. Intriguing in a gossipy-libelous-slanderous-hyperbolic kind of way. People at haute couture parties and young women in bikinis on holiday with celebs. Murder victims and movie stars, kings and princes and spouses favored and despised, disputed hedgerows and fizzy drinks that lead to alcoholism, advice on love and finance, sports and fashion…


I wonder whether there was any such complexity in the daily life of a Neandert(h)al (henceforth Neanderthal). ** Surely, as members of a big-brained species that seems to have interbred with members of Homo sapiens sapiens, these relatives of ours must have had some similar daily concerns. And as paleoanthropologists apply more accurate reconstructive techniques, this relative might easily pass among us unnoticed as a recent image of a Neanderthal reveals. *** Well, maybe a sideward glance…”Did you see that guy we just passed?”


Looks, however, can deceive. Maybe our relatives were no-nonsense beings. Maybe they would not be like the chauffeur who allowed a friend to drive and subsequently wreck his boss’s £380,000 Ferrari, leading, of course, to a civil court case and the firing of the 17-year chauffeur. **** Maybe they would not be like the woman who, feeling menopausal, went on a car-keying spree that cost her neighbors thousands of pounds in repair costs. ***** But, if not perpetrating similar acts, would it have been because those hominins died out  some 35,000 to 40,000 years before there were cars, nay, before there were wheels? If Neanderthals were not like us, their difference begs the question, “How did we come to be what we now are?”


I suppose there are corollary questions you might ask. Are we so sophisticated that we can spend our short lives engulfed in matters so transitory that they take only a short TikTok video? Or are we only ostensibly sophisticated but in fact are very simple because we spend our lives watching virtual reality, TikTok, and YouTube shorts? Did we reach our current occupation with frivolous stories about celebrities, civil disputes, fashion, and sports because we had a moment of technological invention and relative safety and satiety never experienced by any hominid or hominin relative? And in an age when encyclopedias in libraries and online, reports, and studies give us access to trillions of facts about philosophies, psychologies, sciences, world history, and current affairs can so many of us be not just unwise, but also ignorant?


You want a cross section of our species and its concerns? You want an encapsulation of  our species? Read through one issue of the Daily Mail online.




*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html


**Big problem here and so typical of my species: Do I accept Neanderthal over Neandertal? I suppose I should because the Britannica uses the former and not the latter. Nevertheless, some publications use the latter and not the former, among them Scientific American (https://grammarist.com/spelling/neandertal-neanderthal/). There’s a nice explanation of the controversial spelling at https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/is-it-neander-tal-or-neander-thal . But then, this whole footnote might be just way too much information and an indication of how the smallest things—that is, things that would never occur to a Neanderthal— occupy our human brains probably because the bodies that house them are fed, clothed, sheltered, and free from attacks by roaming predators like Smilodon, the sabre-toothed cat, and Aenocyon dirus, the dire wolf.


***https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9572715/handsome-face-neanderthal-man-digitalized-photo/


****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12724179/multi-millionares-chauffer-friend-boss-ferrari-crash-court-battle.html


*****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12722993/Moment-woman-keys-cars-8-000-vandalism-spree-leaving-owners-thousands-pounds-pocket-feeling-menopausal.html

Rise and Fall


I don’t remember the source of the joke about a guy who says to his friend, “I just came back from three months of isolation in a cabin, where I went to finish a book.” HIs friend says, “I didn’t know you were an author.” His reply, “No, not write a book.” 


That could have been me in the early 1960s, when I picked up William L. Shirer’s 1,249-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. With all else that was going on in my late teenage life, the book took me a seeming forever to get through all those pages. I should have gone to a cabin in the woods.


All these years later, I don’t remember much of what Shirer wrote with the exception of what he conveyed about those perpetrating the evils of Hitler’s regime. I remember the book’s introducing me to human depravity, to cruelty in the absence of compunction, and to sadistic tendencies of people without compassion. Yes, those 1,249 pages left me with a wariness and questions I still ask: Don’t evil people know that they, too, will die? Why do the innocent have to suffer when all they want is the freedom to live their lives without the intrusion of evil? And, “Have people always been like this? Were we lofty in our humanity at some time, but somehow fell into the well of depravity as so many Germans did before and during WWII?


The book also awakened an outrage in me, though it was a fruitless outrage. I wanted the evildoers to be punished. But it was a useless outrage, of course. The perpetrators were dead for the most part, and those who had survived and escaped always had to look over their shoulders for the Nazi-hunters who sought to bring them to justice. I suppose the analog of fruitless outrage lies in those who want some unrequited justice when a mass shooter turns the gun on himself.


As I aged, I read of other incidents of depravity, most of them driven by warfare, but some, such as those of serial killers, emerged from a society with an overlying Victorian morality and an underlying savagery: Care-takers abusing children, gang members killing members from other gangs, neighbors shooting neighbors, jihadists serving as religious soldiers in theocratic groups, and cartels’ minions beheading people in Mexico, this last bringing me to current news on the HDN, that is, the Human Depravity Network.


Occisio causa Occisionis


You might want a recent report to be the untruest of the untrue, the fakest news of journalistic fakery, but it seems to have some credibility. A cartel in northern Mexico tried to set a record for killing. * Killing for the sake of killing. Like MGM’s “ars gratia artis,” or “art for the sake of art,” this motive is occisio causa occisionis, “killing for the sake of killing.” That’s the level of depravity to which we’ve fallen.


Do I mean “to which we have fallen” or “that surfaces throughout history and once again has surfaced in our midst”? Probably the latter because those Nazi atrocities weren’t isolated events. Even the Church’s Inquisition had its torture chambers. Depravity pervades human institutions as well as individual personalities.


The story of murder for murder’s sake comes from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office via El Diario de Juarez. The supposed plan of the Juarez cartels is to meet or surpass 100 murders in a single month. People be damned, the number seems to be all that counts, and the counting is among the most gruesome numbers one can imagine.


This headline about reaching a “goal of 100 murders” comes on top of the October 7 massacre in Israel and other places where depravity has also raised its ugly head. I mention these incidents because they reveal the difficulty we humans have in achieving and maintaining peace. They also reveal that compassion seems to be a learned behavior, one easily forgotten and one only partially taught.


The Depravity Is Nothing New


There seems to be no end to, but there are many proposed solutions to, the problem of continuing deadly violence. One solution lies in educating the very young who might fall under the influence of depraved adults. But every solution generates its own problem, and the problem with educating for peace instead of depravity is that we can’t reach into the recesses of the depravity’s enclaves. Right now, there are adults molding kids into machines of destruction and death, and those adults are insulated against outside pressure to reform. If it were otherwise, the good people of Mexico would stop the cycle of violence, most of it centered on the drug trade and its territorial imperatives.


And of course, there’s little help from those who profit from drugs and violence. Glenn Fry’s song “Smuggler’s Blues,” frames the reason for the complicity in these unnecessary deaths and the corruption of any moral fabric in a society through which  drug trade. He sings, “It's the lure of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal.”


So, how do we counter that strong appeal and the lure?


The short answer is we can’t counter it in groups controlled by individuals who never suffer the consequences of their depravity. I think of those who sent and who still send suicide bombers into crowds of innocent people. Why, if they believe in their cause, do they not wear the suicide belts? How do they convince others to shorten their already finite lives while they remain behind to live, often in relative safety and sometimes even in luxury?


Some Stomach-churning Examples


In Eyewitness to History, ** a compilation of excerpts from different authors and different times, editor John Carey includes stories of human depravity. Here are some of them.


August 1191. According to Bahāʾ al-Dīn Abū al-Maḥāsin Yūsuf ibn Rāfiʿ ibn Tamīm, Saladin’s biographer, forces of Richard I, after taking Acre massacred 3,000 prisoners who were bound together with ropes. ** The massacre appears to have been the intention of Richard even when he was negotiating with the Sultan over the release of Christian prisoners and the return of the “true cross” to the Christian King.  The Sultan, realizing that if he relinquished his prisoners, he would yield any bargaining power, delayed fulfilling Richard’s demands. Richard then turned his soldiers on the prisoners who were defenseless. (35-37) [Any analog here with regard to the hostages held by Hamas during the current war?]


June 1381. Skip 190 years to Richard II’s reign. According to Sir John Froissart, writing about “The Peasants’ Revolt” in England, revolt leaders John Ball, Jack Straw, and Was Tyler…marched through London, attended by more than 20,000, to the palace of the Savoy…here they immediately killed the porters…[set the building on fire and] not content with this outrage, they went to the house of the Knight-hospitalers of Rhodes…which they burned…After this they paraded the streets, and killed every Fleming they could find, whether in house, church, or hospital…they murdered a rich citizen…to whom Wat Tyler had formerly been servant in France, but having once beaten him, the varlet had never forgotten it, and when he had carried his men to his house, he ordered his head to be cut off, placed upon a pike, and carried through the streets of London. Thus did these wicked people act, and on this Thursday, they did much damage to the city of London.” (59) [Any analog here with regard to Hamas’s October 7 attack?]


November 1576. George Gascoigne was an eyewitness to the sack of Antwerp by a Spanish Army. “In this conflict there were slain 600 Spaniards or thereabouts. And on the Thursday next following (Nov. 8) a view of the dead bodies in the town being taken, it was esteemed at 17,000 men, women, and children. A pitiful massacre though God gave victory to the Spaniards…The Rich was soiled because he had; and the Poor were hanged because they had nothing,,,And this was not only done when the chase was hot; but, as I erst said, when the blood was cold…I refrain to rehearse the heaps of dead carcasses which lay at every trench …the thickness whereof did in many places exceed the height of a man.” (116-121) [Any analog to the genocide in Rwanda, Germany in WWII, and other actual and proposed genocidal acts?]


You get the idea, don’t you? The examples are too numerous to mention. In fact, they are so numerous that they seem to be the only repeated tales to tell about our species.


Molded Depravity


We are easily molded in our youth. Look, for example, at the “Manson family.” One person, some “Hitler” molds a group of hangers-on, lost souls eager to idolize and please, some taking their cues from the leader and carrying out those atrocities to win approval, others just going along with a program in which they are mere pawns serving the whims and perversions of their idols.


If neurologists are correct in telling us that the human brain doesn’t reach maturity until we enter our twenties, then the grey-matter clay is easy to shape by those with an agenda of self-aggrandizement through control. When a propagandized belief settles into immature minds, self-control never matures as the molded brain serves the wishes of others.


Compassion is more lost cause than achievement. As those devoted to the elevation of the human spirit work in isolated pockets of society, others instill depravity. And in a world of weapons, from drugs, to poisons, to knives and guns, those trained in depravity can wreak more havoc than those trained in compassion can prevent.


There’s little consolation for the surviving victims in the conversions and deaths of the depraved because every generation produces its share of those who live and act without compunction, without compassion. Peace and harmony seem to be less a human trait than depravity because individual acts, such as those I read about all those years ago when I read Shirer’s book, indicate that neither peace nor harmony provides a permanent compassionate fail-safe system of human behavior. Both require constant renewal.


Who is currently renewing peace and harmony? Who is currently renewing compassion? Am I writing to that person here?



*https://www.breitbart.com/border/2023/11/03/report-juarez-drug-gangs-planned-halloween-day-killing-spree/


**Carey, John. ED. 1987. Eyewitness to History. New York. Avon Books.

Space Alien confronts Human over Earth’s Roiling Turmoil.


Alien: Hrumpf. You humans. Can’t live without one another; can’t live with one another.


Human: Don’t judge us by the present turmoil. We have had and still have our moments. We have peace talks and reconciliations, and we even implement preventative strategies to address potential conflict. Sure, conflict exists, has always existed, but we’re also always making concerted efforts to thwart it. And maybe you haven’t noticed: We have our commonality. We can be empathetic, sympathetic, and compassionate, and not just individually, but rather and also as groups both small and large, the latter sometimes encompassing an entire nation. You’re just a passing visitor here, so you have only this snapshot of human interactions. Maybe you haven’t seen the times when we humans have “pulled together,” so to speak, what we call the “brotherhood of Man.”


Alien: Really? I read through your local library collection before I made my presence known. What I read doesn’t support your claim of a brotherhood, or sisterhood, or peoplehood. Your species really doesn’t have any worldwide positive “moments.” Even when billions of you focus on a single event, like the moon landing or a tsunami that kills 250,000 of you, there are others who are unconcerned or negative. I don’t see those moments of peaceful and encompassing unity. I don’t see a universal “spiritual togetherness” and brotherhood. Is there a positive connection among your disparate minds? I don’t think you can prove there is a pervasive “good.” There seems to be just the opposite, a pervasive bad. At best evidence for your “good moments” is anecdotal. Any attempt to demonstrate a worldwide spiritual connection in humanity fails the Popper test. Maybe you just want to think your species exhibits moments of good, but you have short lives and even shorter attention spans. You easily forget the turmoil and focus on any ostensibly shared happiness. Those “moments,” as you call them are, however, just snippets of connection that are highly transitory. Saying “We have our moments” means little to an outsider who has studied your history.


Human: I meant good moments lke people helping people in a crisis.


Alien: I get it, but what does that mean for your species as a whole. If an earthquake devastates a region, you gather up goods to give to the stricken, but you also loot the area, and the danger of the latter is such that your policing authorities have to issue warnings, cordon off areas, and police for looters, in some locales, even ascribing to shooting looters on sight. So, yes, some of you for a limited time can join in a “good moment” that you say represents humanity’s best, but that moment is offset by the actions of looters and the thinking of rivals. Someone dies, and some say, “He was a gem; we will miss him.” Others say, “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope he suffered.”


Human: That’s true, but it still doesn’t negate the many good deeds we do for one another, the charitable acts, the expressions of sympathy, and the empathy.


Alien: Well, look at your current turmoil. It doesn’t appear to have an end in the Middle East or in any other place on the planet. That turmoil between the Israelis and Hamas is merely a spike among historical spikes in violence. This spike in violence will drop to a background hum, but like micro tremors beneath an active volcano, the hum will simply mark a period of quiescent but persistent buildup of tensions. Dormant volcanoes always pose a threat. The magma of your “bad moments” is dormant for a period, but the eruption is inevitable as long as the magma chamber is filled with hot, though repressed or contained, emotion.


Human: Certainly you have read about stellar good people, Mother Teresa comes to mind. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?


Alien: A tiny spike in the hum of repressed violent emotion. Afib, to use a heart reference. And like that arrhythmia, it’s unpredictable; it’s irregular.


Human: Well, what’s it like elsewhere in the universe? You’ve traveled. What have you seen?


Alien: Pretty much the same. The hum is always in the background, and since you mention universe, I’ll give you another analogy. The hum of discord is much like the Cosmic Microwave Radiation. It’s everywhere. It fills the Cosmos.


Human: Are you saying the universe is inherently evil, ineluctably bad?


Alien: it definitely has more spikes of “bad” on the graph of Time than spikes of good, and the bad spikes do more damage than the good spikes can undo or prevent. Maybe they all work toward entropy. Someone will drop an egg while you successfully cook one. Humpty Dumpty can’t sit without the potential to fall and break. Your “good moments” emerge only briefly and have no lasting effects because the generations that follow stumble over the spikes of bad that emerge from the background hum. It’s a dissonant hum, by the way, just like the static on an AM radio, the static caused by the Microwave Background Radiation, the static you hear when your AM radio dial is just off the precise channel frequency of a radio station. The static is all around; the magma lies beneath. Both reveal themselves. And they work in conjunction to make no place on your planet free from bad moments. You can flee a volcano, but you can’t flee the static. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson demonstrated its ubiquity back in the fifties.


Human: So, what you’re saying is that we humans are destined to encounter bad moments more often and to a greater degree than we encounter good moments.


Alien: Pretty much. That’s my observation. Look at the current hum which has erupted into the surface of relations between Muslims and Jews. October seventh’s massacres are now praised by marchers in Washington, D.C. and other countries’ capitals. The praise has run through the young on college campuses, the next generation to hum the tune of background violence and hate. They are testimony to the ubiquity of the hum, the dissonant hum, the madding hum.


Human: That’s a pessimistic view of humanity.


Alien: Hey, I’m not the one humming dissonant sounds. I’m not the one breaking out in a combo of heavy metal, punk, and reverberating dissonance. Maybe that music is an analog of the background hum’s emergence or the volcano’s eruption. For generations, your species endeavored to make harmonious, melodic music, but you ended in gravel-throated screaming at a mosh pit of true violence.


Human: But…


Alien: I’m waiting. Prove me wrong. Go settle the differences between Israelis and Hamas; go tell the Russians to seek peace with their neighbor Ukraine; go tell all the Sri Lankans, the Kiriwinans, the Houthi and the Saudis, the Hutu and Tutsi, and the…I just realized how long the list would be, and I haven’t gone through your history’s complete list. But I have found evidence of it in your literature, even your ancient and sacred literature. Take the…


Human: But we’ve tried. We have religions.


Alien: I was just about to mention that. And look how many religious wars you’ve fought. Look at the current underlying areas of contention: Sunni vs. Shia, Catholic vs. Protestant, for example, and Muslim against just about everyone not Muslim. Hindus against Muslims, too. Animists in Africa and Australia. Micronesians of differing religions. Where are these “good moments” you spoke of? And your sacred texts record the contention. Look, here’s a passage from Chapter 2 in the Book of Malachi, or Malachias: “Why then does every one of us despise his brother?” And the author even addresses the contention in marriages. Marriages! Aren’t they supposed to result from those “good moments”? Look at your current breakup and divorce rates. Look at the animosity between two who once swore everlasting love. Malachi writes that men divorce the women of their youth, even despise them. If two humans who began in love can’t get along for long, then what does that say about all the rest of you other than you’re destined to quarrel and break any covenant you had. Your allegiances shift over time: Friends become enemies; enemies become friends only to dissolve that friendship in the ensuing generations: Napoleon fighting other Europeans followed by Europeans making covenants of peace that later generations will dissolve. French against English; Germans against French and English; Germans, French, and English against Russians. Americans and Chinese against Japanese, and now Japanese and Americans against Chinese. Moments? As you might dismissively say, “Give me a break!”


Human: But there’s always hope.


Alien: That might be all you humans have in common. Well, that and the underlying hum of a magma only temporarily contained.   

A concerted effort to “norm” you has begun. And you can easily guess the source: Yes, it’s located somewhere within the Ivy-covered Ivory Tower of Academia, where its planners profess a nonpartisanship to disguise their premise.


The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Academy’s Commission 


The folks at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences through their Commission on Accelerating Climate Action have a plan that will draw you into the fold of climate change activism. If that commission has its way, you’re destined to become a climate change warrior whether you want to become one or not. Their plan is simple: On their website they note, “People are susceptible to peer pressure [whoda thunk it?]. When individuals feel that their neighbors expect them to act in a more climate-friendly way, those individuals are more likely to take science-consistent climate action.” On the website they recommend finding “ways to apply social norming to all sectors of our lives and the economy” for the sake of enhancing action on climate change. *


Norming? Normalizing?


So, what’s social norming if not social conforming? Does “normal” mean you will have solar panels atop your house and buy windmill-generated electricity? Does it mean you will drive an EV (but not far), pay more for energy, wear a Jimmy Carter cardigan in winter, and open the windows for air in the summer? And if you do not comply to normalization, will there be “norming officers” calling at your door? Will you learn: 1) to eschew plastic bags because they are made from ethylene, 2) to walk on natural gravels rather than cement sidewalks because cement manufacture releases carbon into the environment, 3) to drive on dirt roads because asphalt is petroleum in disguise, 4) to have an overgrown lawn rather than use your old gasoline powered lawnmower, or 5) to cease flying to the Caribbean islands for vacation? Does it mean that your past life will become a distant memory?


You will be “normed.” And in becoming normal, you will save the planet and all its life now threatened with extinction by a slight warming of the atmosphere. In addition, once socially normed, you’ll put pressure on those around you to conform. You will become a social norming warrior.


An unquestioning warrior, I suppose, a dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-IPCC-mori warrior. You won’t question widely broadcast claims that forest fires are a “weather event” regardless of their often being the malicious acts of arsonists and the unthinking acts of cigarette smokers tossing butts onto the roadside, or poor forest management, or faulty wiring of aging power transmission lines like those that burned Maui while the water authority hesitated. You will feel secure in the belief that every local weather event, such as a snowstorm, cold spell, heat wave, tornado, or hurricane has a connection to worldwide climate change in an undeniable “butterfly effect” rather than as a result of large-scale cycles and characteristics typical of a region within the Prevailing Westerlies or Equatorial Easterlies. You will come to believe that the hurricanes that sank Spanish galleons carrying gold were somehow anomalous past weather events and that today’s hurricanes that strike highly urbanized centers on a continent with hundreds of millions of residents are exclusively driven by climate change.


Overt and Subliminal Messaging


The Commission on Accelerating Climate Action has laid out all the necessary steps to achieve social norming with regard to climate change. I invite you to click the link https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Climate-Communication-Principles_Brief.pdf  to see how there are those out there in the elite world of “those who know” who intend to bend your will to theirs, to tell you that the fate of all life on the planet depends on your cooperation. They will recruit people close to you and use all media to drumbeat their message into your head to normalize you. And they will be relentless in their efforts.


Can you say, “Holy cow! Not another example of Orwellian manipulation and control”?Can you say “elitism of the omniscient”? Can you ask, “Is there no one to question the underlying premises?”


Where Would We Be without Our Forecasters?


Richard Littlejohn recently (2 Nov 23) published an essay in the DailyMail.com ** that takes weather reporters and climate change alarmists to task for their exaggerating the impact of weather events and making false comparisons and their linking all weather to climate change. “What has changed over the years is the explosion of hyberbole from weather forecasters who appear to believe they are starring in their own Hollywood disaster movie, and reporters on rolling news channels desperate to portray themselves in the most dramatic light possible.” He makes a valid point, doesn’t he? Does a weather reporter standing under an umbrella on a rainy day add anything of importance to our understanding weather? Couldn’t the reporter just say, “If you look outside, you’ll see rain.” Almost all TV weather forecasters play the role that the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action wants them to play. Almost every severe weather event foreshadows the Apocalypse. Weather events are now “bombs” and “rain-“ or “snow-“ armageddons, such is the competition to be ever more sensational. Littlejohn begins his article with reference to the devastating storm of 1703—before the Industrial Age began spewing the now dreaded carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it enhances plant growth. *** That storm coincided with the birth of modern journalism. ****


From that 1703 storm to the present day, weather has become a “news” item. Today, almost all, if not all, local TV stations begin their local news with a preview of the weather forecast, and weather forecasting has become an avenue to a steady job, regardless of its many erroneous predictions and exaggerated threats. I suppose weather forecasting is much like hitting in baseball. Pitcher Bob Humphreys once told Ted Williams, the last person to hit over .400, “I would say, I’d like to have a job where I could fail six times out of 10 and be a star. You hitters make outs seven out of 10 times and think you’re good.” What’s the success rate for TV’s weather forecasters when they predict snowfall amounts or hurricane landfall strengths? Is it above the .400 average of Ted Williams? And now, those forecasters are part of the “norming” of European and American culture as they tie weather to climate change, becoming climate-change warriors for organizations like the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.


But There Is an Upside


Climate change activism does have an upside. The civilized world has grown lazy on energy consumption. It’s easy to be a couch potato when a battery-powered remote eliminates the need to walk across the room to change a channel. It’s easy to drive to the local whatever rather than walk, and it’s easy to leave the light on in unoccupied rooms. The cheap power provided by abundant fossil fuels has made us energy gluttons. The ability to transport goods has extended into home deliveries of food or products. We live in a world of power and stuff unimagined at the beginning of the Industrial Age. We live, on the whole, in the midst of more luxury than that of medieval and ancient kings. And at the same time we live in the squalor of our own waste, the refuse of our affluence, from junkyards to landfills, from polluted air to polluted streams and soils. We build a Mount Trashmore in coastal areas like Norfolk and northern New Jersey, piling when we can’t bury our garbage, and we have a history of ocean dumping. Yes, there is a need for conservation of resources; common sense tells us that we’re on a path to degrade environments once favorable to human life. Common sense tells us that we’ve added to our Earth tens of thousands of chemical compounds of our own making, many of them harmful to life. I’ll say it again: There is a need for conservation. And I’ll add: There is a need for sustainability in a burgeoning human population all intent on acquiring material wealth.


If climate-change activism makes us all aware that there’s an upside to conservation tactics in populations numbering in the 100s of millions, then it has my approval. But I have my doubts, enough so that as in the song “House of the Rising Sun,” I’ll go no farther than to have “one foot on the platform/The other foot on the train.” If it is just another way for a group of elitists to exert control and redistribute wealth, then I’ll keep both feet on the platform; I ain’t goin’ nowhere when I don’t know where that where is.


Are We Living in an Age of Hyperbole?   


Will Earth warm, and will any warming have deleterious effects? Probably. But not necessarily. We might be in a period akin to the decades before the Medieval Warm Period or we might be living at the beginning of the next Little Ice Age. We cannot deny that longterm droughts and rainy periods have checkered the past millennium; we cannot say that the next millennium will have its share of droughty warm or rainy cool periods that dwarf the same phenomena of the past 1,000 years. Did drought undo the Maya? Did it undo the Pueblo? Was a longterm drought a factor in the Raleigh’s “lost colony” when Europeans began to compete for food and land with locals of the American Southeast?


What Is “Climate-friendly” Action?


Pray tell, members of the Commission, just what is “climate-friendly action.” Does it mean that people living in an arid land should do whatever they can to maintain its aridity? Same for occupants in semiarid lands? Monsoonal and boreal lands? What exactly do you mean?


It seems that “climate-friendly” means keeping Earth exactly as it is, or at least was before the industrial era in some mythical past place. Hmmnnn. When? Little Ice Age before? Medieval Warm Period before? Younger Dryas before? Wisconsin ice Age before? Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum before? Does it mean going back to the times when carbon dioxide was more abundant in the atmosphere than it currently is? No, of course, not. Was pre-Industrial Age carbon dioxide at 250 parts per million the “age” when no severe storms occurred?…oops! There was that 1703 event that Littlejohn mentions. And then there were those hurricanes that sank those Spanish treasure ships.


The Ultimate Goal


What exactly do you want, Commissioners? Wait! It just occurred to me. You want something akin to a scene from the TV series Community, the one in which John Goodman, head of the HVAC department at a community college, takes one of the students into a room with the ideal room temperature. “Ever hear of the expression ‘room temperature’? This is the room-temperature room.”***** You want Earth at consistent shopping mall temperature. You want your ideal weather; you want Hawaii without the occasional typhoon. What else could “climate friendly” mean if it doesn’t mean keeping the harshest climates, like those undifferentiated high altitude above-the-tree-line climates or those tundra climates, just as they are. You want Siberians to shiver in severe cold and the citizens of Burkina Faso to sweat in severe heat. You want a dynamic planet that houses a species intent on changing it for their own purposes to conform to your ideal, to somehow alter a dynamism that is 4.56 billion years old.

• https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Climate-Communication-Principles_Brief.pdf

**https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12704129/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-dont-need-weatherman-tell-not-end-world-know-it.html


***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1703


****Just a thought here. If a storm occurs in the absence of humans, will it make the news? Did the Arawaks (Taíno) lose beach properties worth tens of millions? They surely suffered hurricanes without leaving a written record of the damage to their huts  and storm deaths in their tribes.


*****See YouTube under the title “Community: This is The Room Temperature Room” posted by Roland. The phrase “room temperature” occurs after 1:16, but the whole 3:05 clip is worth watching for the recruitment strategy.

Anthropologist (Anthro): The human-model lies in the human-Hatfield and human-McCoy warfare. The model reminds me of two human-tribal conflicts separated by about a year, the October clash between Israelis and Hamas of 2023 and the fighting between the human-Kulumata and human-Kuboma people on Kiriwina Island in October 2022. *


2023 College Student (23CS): Model? Human-model? Hu-…


Anthro: Sorry, I was speaking English as though I was translating Kiriwina into our language.


23CS: Kir…


Anthro: Sorry, again. I should have known that a college student today might never have heard of Kiriwina. It’s an island in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.


23CS: Is that in South America?


Anthro: No, western Pacific. It’s part of the Trobriand Islands.


23CS: Geography isn’t a strength of mine. But I’m curious. Why did you prefix “human” when you started this topic?


Anthro: I’m taking my cue from something I read in Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language. Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-British anthropologist who worked in the Trobriands. Malinowski, writing about translating Kiriwinian or Kilivila into English, wrote:


    Let us transpose this peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype very closely, and imagine no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature of the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer, ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull!’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’. (206)**


23CS: Well, that’s strange. My composition professor would call that either redundant or wordy.


Anthro: That’s another conversation in light of all this gender stuff. Maybe, the Kiriwinians would say ‘human-trans-female-‘ whatever. Anyway, I bring this up to make another point.
23CS: What’s that?


Anthro: That the human-people living on Kiriwina ascribe human-tribal affiliations to human-one-another. And in October, 2022, two of those tribes, human-Kulumata and human-Kuboma fought human one-another over a football game. The initial human-death, for want of a better word in tropical Kiriwina, snowballed to human-32 deaths and human-15 missing. Ironically, all this human-death occurred on a place called “the island of love,” so known for its rather uninhibited sexual practices that begin as early as  seven or eight years old. So, on an island of only human-12,000 female-male-people, all closely human-related genetically, conflict occurs, human-deadly conflict.


23CS: This is like listening to Pig Latin.


Anthro: Okay, I’ll drop the Kiriwina mode of expression. In plain English, I’ll say that regardless of place we humans can’t get along for long. And our ability to maintain peaceful relationships declines rapidly as we mix more diverse groups. But why should we expect differently? If the closely genetically related Palestinians and Israelis have fought an almost constant war, should we expect some different kind of relationship among countries? Look at Putin’s war on Ukraine; it’s Slav against Slav for the most part. It’s people with a common genetic background killing one another.


23CS: Yeah, but with regard to this year’s Hamas-Israeli war, we have to think about external forces at work and how all this modern contention began with a UN fiat creation of Israel. And we have to think of the role western nations have played in their gluttonous need for more and more oil.


Anthro: Apparently, if the Kulumata and Kubota could kill one another on the island of love, those outside forces at work in the current Israeli-Palestinian struggle really only exacerbate an already volatile relationship among these Middle East “tribes.”


23CS: So, what are you saying? That nobody can get along? The blame falls on every shoulder? There are no righteous sides to pick? But look at the plight of the Palestinians. Aren’t they oppressed?


Anthro: By whom? Israelis? The West that provides them with money that Hamas has used to construct tunnels and build and acquire weapons? Or are the Palestinians subject to demeaned lives because of Hamas? Aren’t they members of the same tribe?


23CS: Certainly, you can see that right now the Israelis are bombing Palestinians.


Anthro: That’s a simplification. Hamas has fired weapons at Israelis from within Palestinian neighborhoods. What that essentially means is that Hamas, claiming to be Palestinians by birth have no qualms about perpetrating actions that would lead to retaliatory strikes by Israelis and to the deaths of the very people—that is, the same tribal people—that Hamas says it fights for. It doesn’t matter to members of Hamas that their own will be killed. And those Palestinians living in Gaza have no refugium, no place to find peace as they live within a brutal governing tribe. But there’s another point I want to make, and it’s related to my use of what Malinowski said about translating the islanders’ native tongue into English.


23CS: What’s that?


Anthro: We can’t get past de-humanizing humans. It wouldn’t make a difference if we prefix “human” to every mention of someone. The fighting, even in-fighting, continues. Closely related neighbors dehumanize one another even on a small island of love where 12,000 people are genetically very close. We can see New Yorkers today who are ripping down posters of hostages held by Hamas or of dead Israelis. They don’t see the “human” in the picture and wouldn’t see it even if it had a title like “Human-hostage taken by brutal terrorists.” And your generation—of course not all of you—can’t see that their efforts to involve themselves from a distance of personal safety only exacerbate the conflict, spreading it beyond the Middle East to our own country, dehumanizing one group in favor of another who savagely dehumanized by killing 1,400 or so Israelis and treating their bodies as objects in a manner reminiscent of past savage actions by “human-people” throughout the world from ancient to modern times: Not just Nazis, for example, but brutal Mexican cartels turning Mexicans against Mexicans. I can’t list the examples so numerous they are. Man’s inhumanity to man, as the…


23CS: Okay, I think I get the point.


*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/25/more-than-30-dead-in-tribal-fighting-on-papua-new-guineas-kiriwina-island


**Bodmer, Frederick, 1944 (original). Lancelot Hogben ED. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. 1985 paperback.

It’s difficult to frame an entire argument in a short essay. What I leave out is greater than what I include, but you aren’t limited by these points of departure. As always, I offer them knowing that you might go in a different direction backed by greater detail, more anecdotal parallels, and less refutable logic.


The National Debt Continues to Grow


How is it that two people my age are among those who have driven the national debt to more than 33 trillion bucks? Is it because they suffer no personal consequences of socialism’s degradation of a populace? Because they are steeped in the ideal and not the real? Because they believe that “giving a man a fish” is better than “teaching a man to fish”? Because they are driven by self-aggrandizement and political power that rests on a spoon-fed population?


Those two people are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both with tens of millions of followers, people who said, “Yeah, go ahead, spend as you will. No skin off my back and money in my pocket. Just make sure I get my cut.” And that’s what socialism does, doesn’t it? It gives those in the present their “cut” while taking a cut from those whose lives lie in some indefinite future, a future in which the interest on that debt will exceed the defense budget.


What Did They Learn in School?


I can’t fault the followers too much, however. They grew up in an American educational program that shifted between an unforgiving system of “learning by rote” and its antitheses, Montessori-like systems of “learning what you want when you want at the pace you want as long as it enhances your self esteem.” Sanders and Biden would have grown up under the former and not the latter educational system, however. They were babies during WWII; they grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties. From the time of their births they were both alive during the twentieth century’s atrocities against and immiseration of people in Nazi Germany, Cuba, South and Central America, China, North Korea and the Soviet Union under socialist/communist systems. They saw the exponential rise of wealth in capitalist West in contrast. So, how do two guys my age not know the dangers of socialism/communism? How do they not know that money has to be backed up by goods and services and not by whims and government fiat? How do they not remember the tyranny that arose in socialist/communist governments?


But they keep spending and spending… This time “it” will be different. "We will make as equitable redistribution of wealth as we showed we could make when we chose to spend half a billion dollars on Solyndra, on green tech, and various stimulus bills from which as yet un-tallied millions were stolen."


The Deep Past of Socialism


Socialism in some form isn’t new. It’s not even an exclusive product of nineteenth thinkers like Marx and Engels, social movements, or the rise of unions after the fall of European feudal societies and monarchs. Sure, those relatively recent times are roots of modern socialism and communism but they are shallow roots. No, go back further to ancient Greece and Rome to see oak tree tap roots running deeply into the soil of western civilization.


In the sixth century B.C. in Athens, Solon (born c. 630—died c. 560), named as one of the “Seven Wise Men of Greece” and a nobleman by birth, thought he’d become a man of the people by reforming the “draconian” laws of eponymous codifier Draco. Solon freed citizens who were enslaved by their debt and restored their land to them. (Can anyone say, “College debt reduction”). It worked for awhile. But then, as now, all political reforms swing on a pendulum between opposite positions and results.


Skip ahead to 133 B.C. and Rome, where Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (born c. 163), a tribunus plebis, that is, a tribune of the people (plebeians), pushed a reform to effectively limit “the rich” landowners and increase farm production by redistributing land and subsidizing small-farm farmers and grain supplies. You’ll never guess what happened. Hearing of the reforms, people from outside Rome migrated to areas nearer the city in support of Gracchus and in anticipation of getting their share of the redistributed land. Some of the landed gentry and members of the Senate who felt threatened by the reforms instigated a mob to assassinate Gracchus in the same year of his reform movement. After his death, his brother Gaius took up the socialist agenda with the same result.


Socialism is a great idea when one has little. It’s a great motivator for the poor today. But its inevitable problems always surface: Rise of a dictator or an oligarchy, an increase in public debt with its inflationary trends and immiseration of the populace, inefficient production, and control by censorship and intimidation, the latter two inimical to freedom and safety. The pendulum swung in Solon’s time just as it swings in ours. In his old age, Solon warned that General Peisistratus would turn Athens into a dictatorship, but he was ignored and called “mad.” His warning: “A little time will show the citizens my madness, / Yes, will show, when truth comes in our midst.” And, of course, Peisistratus did declare himself dictator.


The Modern Parallel


Yep, the free phones, free hotel stays, free education, and free transportation to a city of one’s choice in our own times under Josephus Robinettus Bidenius, have generated a massive migration toward the free stuff and redistributed wealth that mirrors the circumstances associated with the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus. And those from whom the wealth is taken object today as they objected long ago.


But the times are different, $33 trillion different and snowballing toward indefinite, if not infinite, debt in a massive redistribution of wealth by fiat: Let there be green energy. Let there be no more fossil fuels—at least, no more for Americans.


Admittedly, there  are differences between the ancient and modern worlds. Industrialization and technology have made some of the world’s poor richer in goods than ancient and medieval gentry. TVs and phones, electronics of all kinds, electricity and indoor plumbing, public infrastructure transportation, energy supply, and relative safety—with the exception of some inner cities—all make life easier for the poor today than it was for the poor of ancient Greece and Rome.


Inequalities exist, plenty of them, for sure, especially under free markets that drive capitalism. But things—living conditions—are relative, aren’t they? There are differences between living the luxury life of an ancient or medieval aristocrat and living the poor life of a lower class family today, especially in an affluent country with social programs supported by taxes.


Of course, there are people who go hungry. There are the homeless just as there were homeless people whose plight partially underlay Gracchus’ reforms. But in a society that currently has an estimated eight million unfilled job positions, is there not something to be said for personal initiative? For capitalistic entrepreneurship and energy? Is there not something to be said about the millions who have voluntarily dropped out of the workforce because of government policies?


And as I wrote in the introductory paragraph, I realize that the simple question posed in the last sentence has multiple complex answers.


Where’s the Balance?


Sanders and Biden became adults during a time of burgeoning affluence, and both are steeped in wealth with multiple homes and amenities too numerous to mention. Immiseration isn’t their personal future. They speak of financial equity from a position of financial inequity. They speak from positions of untouchable wealth and financial security (that is, for Biden, as long as the money keeps flowing from foreign sources through his son and brother). The point is that those who are secure pay little or no price for redistributing the wealth of others. Sanders and Biden are multiple homeowners. They have the wherewithal to bask in luxury.


Reforming capitalist America doesn’t entail personal reform for either Biden or Sanders. It doesn’t mean redistributing their land holdings, like Sanders’ lake house or Biden’s beach house. Reformation is easy when no personal reformation is required.


Thirty-three trillion dollars of debt is easy to maintain when no personal pain occurs in its repayment. Two guys my age sitting virtually on top the inequity pile deem redistribution as the way to a better future when, if they only looked back, they would see that that ideal future has always succumbed to the whims of greed, graft, and control.