Two old astrobiologists talk in an abandoned observatory. Gladys, an optimist, talks to Mark.


Gladys: Well, Mark, it’s time to acknowledge that in spite of our experiments and observations, we haven’t found that alien life we’ve spent our careers looking for.


Mark: I was sure we would find it on Mars. But I’m not done looking. Can’t wait to explore Europa, especially with the AI driven drones we’re sure to launch. But, Gladys, I’m surprised at you, an optimist, saying something negative. Surely, you don’t want to give up the search. With two trillion galaxies out there, we’ve just started to explore.


Gladys: Giving up the search hasn’t made me a pessimist. It has made me more optimistic about my own life. I have gained a new respect for what I… what we are. It’s been centuries since Copernicus said we don’t have a special position in the universe, Galileo and Kepler proved it, and Bruno said there are other worlds. In all those centuries we have looked and looked, waited and waited for some intelligent life beyond Earth. And you know what, Mark?


Mark: No. What?


Gladys: We’ve come back to a pre-Copernican Cosmos, where we are, in fact, special, because we have no evidence that another kind of conscious being exists, and I don’t care how many galaxies there are, how many nebulae have organic molecules, or how many carbonaceous chondrites land on Earth, demonstrating the presence of carbon in space. Yeah, there might be the stuff of life out there, but not, as far as we know…and we’ve searched pretty far…


Mark: But the presence of water is one key substance we’ve looked for, and we know that Europa has some. Mars has some, also.


Gladys: Mark, Mark, Mark. Let’s say you find a microbe. Then what? Conscious microbe?Intelligent microbe? Communicative microbe? We would still be alone as the only conscious form the universe possesses. So, isolated still? Yes, but that only enhances our special status as the universe aware of itself. We are, to go back to those pre-Renaissance times, the center. Not the physical center, of course because we think that in a pre-Big Bang singularity, everything was “the center.” Think, Mark, sure it’s possible that another part of that singularity acquired consciousness, self-consciousness, but we have little chance of finding it. We’re the center because we’re unique. I might still look for a distant microbe, but intelligent life? If it’s out there, as Fermi asked, where is it? Why haven’t we run into it? If it shows up, fine, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I’m relishing my role as the pinnacle of the universe, the unmatched pinnacle. And to go back to “Where is it?” I know that in a universe at least 13.8 billion years old, intelligent life could have arisen and gone out of existence before human ancestors looked up. So, the time element added to the distance element makes me think that all our recent looking has gone for naught.


Mark: So, your optimism derives from your isolation?


Gladys: Pretty much. I understand the reason for SETI enthusiasm, for the giant dish at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and for other radio astronomy sites. We’ve learned much about the universe from all the expensive terrestrial and space telescopes, but not once have we said, with the exception of that brief “Wow!” signal, that there’s evidence of intelligence beyond Earth. And even that signal might have been just a natural phenomenon. Face it, Mark, you’re special because you are alone. This search for extraterrestrial life is essentially an endeavor of the idle affluent, of a civilization in which astronomers can look up because they don’t have to look down, that is, to look at the soil to see if the vegetables and grains have grown. Civilization includes people who see to the necessities. You and I build observatories because we don’t have to grow corn. Searching for extraterrestrials is the occupation of the coddled.


Mark: But finding that life will be a great discovery.


Gladys: Actually, I would say that discovering the methods for discovering life is greater. We use radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays, infrared rays, cosmic rays, and experiments with organic molecules, all unknown to our ancestors. We have new ways of expanding our awareness, new ways to observe and measure. The observations don’t justify the deductions, however.


Mark: What do you mean?


Gladys: I’ve relied on this joke before, but I’ll say it again because it once chosen as the “best” joke. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson went camping in a remote place, say the to the moors.
They set up their little camp, lighted the fire, then tired from the hiking, decided to go to sleep. In the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson, saying, “Watson, Watson, wake up. Look up and tell me what you observe and deduce.” Watson, knowing he was in the presence of the world’s greatest detective, a man known for his deductive abilities, said, “Holmes, I see stars, thousands of stars. I surmise that around some of those stars there are planets, and on some of those there is life. And further…” he said as he cleared his throat, “I surmise that some of that life possesses complex brains and that some of those brains have achieved consciousness. From this, I deduce that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” he finished pleased with his logic. To which Holmes, the great deducer said, “No, Watson, you idiot, someone stole our tent.”


Mark: Ha! Perfect joke, false premise followed by misdirection followed by an unexpected twist. Reminds me of the guy who became interested in astronomy, so he put in a skylight in his ceiling and bought a telescope. His neighbors upstairs weren’t pleased.


Gladys: But I had a point in telling the joke though I do like yours. We’ve been surmising on the basis of possibility. We astrobiologists, science fiction writers, film makers have all been Watsons. We have wanted to find meaning elsewhere. We wanted the universe to be like the world we know. But so far, evidence points to it’s being a universe of stuff, just unthinking stuff with the one exception. If we find microbes floating in the depths of Europa, or methanogens on Titan, it will only prove that primitive life exists elsewhere, but none of our deducing—saying, for example, that if Earth’s early unicellular life led to us, then it could lead to beings like us with time—none of that deducing is proof of life, and certainly not proof of intelligent life.
    And you know, Mark, if our first communications, those radio waves sent out 105 years ago when KDKA Pittsburgh started broadcasting, would be 105 light years away. Assuming that intelligent life intercepts them anywhere along their path, derives meaning from them, say understanding a commercial for Mother’s Oats, then it would take any of those civilizations the equivalent number of years to respond. Would we be listening to the right frequency? Could we even know we heard any organized message if their return broadcast was at 1020 on our AM dials? Remember, also, that Earth and the Solar System have moved since those signals were broadcast. So, how do the aliens target Earth to ask, “What are Mother’s Oats?”


Mark: Nevertheless, your statements still make me wonder about your optimism. Sounds to me that you’re like Voltaire’s Pangloss in Candide. No matter what happened he said or implied, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” It was a parody of eighteenth century optimism because of all the tragedies Pangloss and Candide observe.


Gladys: No, I’m an optimist because I know that until proven incorrect by an alien encounter, that I’m special in having observable intelligence, in being self aware. The moon isn’t self aware. I’m retiring from astrobiology. It was fun while it lasted, but my optimism is rooted in realism. I ask with Fermi, “Where is it?” I can’t deduce there is intelligent life elsewhere and know I can prove my deduction. Yes, I’ll acknowledge that in so many years—a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand—someone will surprise everyone with a discovery of alien life, but I find meaning in the world around me. Unlike Watson, I know the tent is missing. That’s the commonsense deduction Watson should have made when he saw the night sky above him. My deduction is that we have reason to be optimistic because we have little choice in the matter. Life is here. Life here is significant because it its unique. That uniqueness is the root of my optimism and my self esteem. Want to study life in the Cosmos? Look in a mirror, Mark.

I’ve asked this before: Are you happy?


Tough question. Sometime and somewhere in my youth I heard the line attributed to Tolstoy in the context of his novel Anna Karenina: "The surest way to make someone unhappy is to ask if they [sic.] are happy.”


See, right there I’ve probably made some people unhappy.


“What?” you ask. “How?”


As some would see it, the nitpicking. Someone, the antecedent, is singular; they is plural. “For gosh’s sake, Donald, those years of correcting papers are long behind you. Let them go. Get on with your life. What’s next, correcting the text I sent you?”


Sorry, I had to insert that “[sic.]” to avoid being accused of faulty grammatical number agreement. I realize this is a time when people are “identifying” as plural entities (i.e., “they”), but the logic of the language, if not the practice, is ingrained, has been ingrained since elementary school. Heck, my mother, an avid crossword, puzzle solver, and newspaper reader with only a ninth grade education (dropped out to help support the large family of siblings during the Depression), as I was saying, my mother constantly corrected my teenage grammar. Habit, then, to add “sic.” (“thus”) in deference to a career of correcting thousands of student papers and proofreading numerous graduate theses, dissertations, and reports. And, yes, I have corrected text messages, but I fear I’m losing the fight to emoji language. LOL. But I’ll admit that before my recent cataract surgery, I made numerous typographical errors in blogs and, by pressing "send" let Siri send off words I never chose—She’s more exasperating  than I believe I am.


Have I just made you unhappy by the distraction? You were just thinking about happiness when I seemed to have changed the subject, but there’s s method here.


Distraction


With all our electronic media, we live in the Era of Ultimate Distraction. The obsession we have with news 24/7, podcasts, YouTube videos, and, well, everything else that intrudes our lives, all add to billions of people living either consciously or unconsciously by comparison and in distraction. Keeping up with the neighborhood Jones family, once a bit more compressed by localism, has been expanded to the world of Jones families. You might not care about the fashion that Kim Kardashian sports on some red carpet or the fashion that Bianca Censori did NOT wear, but it’s in your head, forced there as a distraction on your daily life. “And why don’t you care?” some gossip columnist or blogger might ask. “What else is worth knowing, save the goings on of the rich and famous, the stupid and reckless, the evil and political? Do any of these distractions and comparisons add to your happiness? Are you happy, for example, that Taylor Swift is happy, or rich, or dating? But even if you are indifferent, doesn’t the knowledge forced upon you by various media affect you? Just a little? Come on, now, be honest. It’s non-natural concupiscence to do a double take.


There you are, ready to watch a football game when abruptly the camera swings to the box where Taylor Swift sits or stands or claps  and high fives her new friends. Geez. It is a game you want to see, not a display of a player’s girlfriend. Distraction.


But that’s just one small distraction in a life of distractions. How can any of us be truly happy in such a life? *

You Don’t Need Research for the Obvious, as Stanislav Said


Did you know that there are people out there whose energies have gone into discovering what makes people happy? Yep. Guess what they found out. Yep. Stuff you already know. Stuff like being generous and helping others, paying compliments in a pay-it-forward interaction, giving solace, and all that other “stuff.”


A gregarious species finds happiness in its gregariousness. The COVID period taught many that lesson. Isolation is the most devastating psychological condition for most people regardless of what they might say, such as, “I hate people.” Withdrawing is a symptom of depression, the antithesis of happiness. Well, then, if we are gregarious, can the social scientists tell us about happiness?


In his 1972 Social Sciences as Sorcery, * Stanislav Andreski challenged his colleagues by noting how they failed in their attempts to turn common knowledge into “science.” He noted that after wading through pages of formulae and esoteric language, we find that people are gregarious, a fact Stanislav says he can believe because his grandmother told him so. In Andreski’s words, “Pretentious and nebulous verbosity, interminable repetition of platitudes and disguised propaganda are the order of the day, while at least 95 per cent of research is indeed re-search for things that have been found long ago and many times since” (p. 11).


If the answer to the happiness question doesn’t come from the social scientists, does it lie in the work of psychologists? They’ve given it considerable attention. And again, the answer to that happiness question seems to lie in our obvious gregariousness, in charity, aid, and gratitude.


Nothing Profound Here


Sufficient numbers of wealthy people have committed suicide to indicate that riches are not a guarantee of happiness. Neither are fame and drugs. Certainly, we know that admiration for others can simply lead to our asking, “But what about me?”


“Have you considered philosophy, Donald?”


Great suggestion. I had a philosopher colleague who was Heideggerian existentialist. He focused on play as a fundamental human need. Or maybe it was play as a fundamental characteristic. Definitely, play plays a role in happiness. We’ve seen colts and calves frolicking, puppies and kitties tumbling, and full-grown dogs fetching sticks and balls (just part of their hunting instinct?). We played as children. We have grown into adults whose play can be as frivolous as a weekend softball game to serious gambling in Vegas. Is investing a form of play?


Then, of course, there’s that nasty withdrawal that results from bad knees that prevent one from running the bases, bad shoulders and elbows that prevent us from the courts of tennis and basketball, and insufficient funds that prevent us from sitting at a card table in Vegas. Such withdrawals are inevitable. So, as my late Heidegger expert might argue, there appears to be a type of positive play that contrasts with a type of negative play. The positive one uplifts. But as with all philosophies, the problem lies in practicality. If all we do is temporary, can the happiness derived from the sundry forms of play ever last a lifetime? And how, I might ask, does happiness square with the existential world of dread and anxiety. Is it a distraction from a lifetime of trauma, tragedy, losses, and failures. Is it a distraction from death? WAIT! Wait. Yes, I just had a thought. Is happiness the ultimate distraction?  


Which, my dear reader, brings us back to our gregarious nature. People people are generally happier than Bah-Humbug Dickensian grouches. And that’s not a profound discovery. No one needs to tell you that. Fulfill your destiny to be a people person. Apparently, making others happy is the best way to become happy.
  

*https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/magazine/happiness-research-studies-relationships.html


**Get the book in the library because it’s outrageously expensive to buy ($95 on eBay to $695 elsewhere) Oh! Library? That’s a building that stores thousands of books you can borrow for the price of a library card. 

In the coffee cafe, an old guy (OG) and young guy (YG) talk.


OG: I see the Press is all over the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, some favoring and some criticizing the period.


YG: Sure, he said he would end the war in Ukraine, bring down prices, et cetera.


OG: Well, ending the war in Ukraine was probably a bridge too far, given the nature of Putin, the involvement of NATO, and Zelensky’s reluctance to concede by losing Crimea and eastern Ukraine. With regard to prices, I’d say that they will come down or wages will go up to the same effect, but that the crying about prices that were coming from the Democrats was plain hypocrisy because they had no problem with 9% inflation and high prices for four years under Biden. Now inflation is back down almost to Trumpian years, those of his previous term. Nevertheless, I suspect GDP will suffer at least until new trade deals are finalized.


YG: Yeah, about those tariffs.


OG: Let me guess. You’re concerned that the stuff China sells you at Walmart will be more expensive.


YG: No doubt.


OG: Could you give me change? I want to leave Josh the waiter a tip, but I have only a hundred.


YG: Sure, Twenties and fives okay? I don’t have any ones.


OG: Yep. I’ll take five twenties and eight fives.


YG: A hundred equals five twenties. What’s with the extra $40 in fives? Hundred forty doesn’t equal a hundred.


OG: Yet, you have no problem with the trade imbalance.


YG: I don’t understand.


OG: So, you object to giving me $140 for my hundred, but you don’t object to giving China more money than China gives the US. You see the unevenness when it’s your money, your very personal up-close money, but you can’t understand that you have been giving away the country’s, and therefore your, money to China in the trade imbalance.


YG: I hadn’t thought of it that way.


OG: I understand the dissociation of personal finances and national finances, but you should understand why a little bit of economic pain in the short term can undo decades of economic pain you accepted without thinking. America can always generate more wealth, but it’s folly to continue massive trade imbalances with countries that see the US as little more than a big fat cash cow.
    Now, about that change for the hundred…


En la cafetería, un señor mayor (SM) y un joven (J) conversan.
SM: Veo que la prensa está encima de los primeros 100 días del gobierno de Trump, algunos lo apoyan y otros lo critican.
J: Claro, él prometió terminar la guerra en Ucrania, bajar los precios, y todo eso.
SM: Bueno, acabar con la guerra en Ucrania era pedirle peras al olmo, considerando cómo es Putin, el involucramiento de la OTAN, y que Zelensky no quiere ceder Crimea ni el este de Ucrania. En cuanto a los precios, yo diría que o bajan solos o suben los sueldos y da lo mismo. Pero que los demócratas se quejaran tanto de los precios fue pura hipocresía, porque no dijeron nada cuando hubo 9% de inflación y precios por las nubes durante cuatro años con Biden. Ahora la inflación casi está de vuelta a los niveles de la era Trump, de su mandato anterior. Aun así, sospecho que el PIB va a resentirse hasta que se cierren nuevos acuerdos comerciales.
J: Sí, sobre esos aranceles...
SM: A ver, déjame adivinar. Te preocupa que lo que compras en Walmart hecho en China te salga más caro.
J: Sin duda.
SM: ¿Me podés dar cambio? Quiero dejarle propina a Josh, el mesero, pero solo tengo un billete de cien.
J: Claro, ¿te sirven billetes de veinte y de cinco? No tengo de uno.
SM: Sí, está bien. Dame cinco de veinte y ocho de cinco.
J: Pero cien son cinco veintes. ¿Qué onda con los $40 extra en fives? Ciento cuarenta no es cien.
SM: Y sin embargo, no te molesta el desequilibrio comercial.
J: No te sigo.
SM: O sea, te molesta darme $140 por mi billete de cien, pero no te molesta que China reciba más dinero de EE.UU. del que nos da. Ves lo desigual cuando se trata de TU plata, de la que tenés en el bolsillo, pero no te das cuenta que llevás años regalándole al país asiático la plata de tu país, y por lo tanto, la tuya.
J: Nunca lo había pensado así.
SM: Entiendo que uno separe la economía personal de la nacional, pero hay que entender que un poco de dolor económico ahora puede corregir décadas de pérdida que aceptaste sin cuestionar. Estados Unidos puede generar más riqueza, claro, pero seguir manteniendo un déficit comercial enorme con países que nos ven como una vaca lechera gigante es un disparate.
Ahora sí… ¿me das el cambio del billete de cien?

If you skim through YouTube, you’ll find videos on the nature of reality. Some are very good. Among the good, I count those like the discussion at Dartmouth between physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist authority Alan Wallace. Good? Because it recalls a topic that underlies most previous human discussions on reality and hints at the concept Descartes held, i.e., the mind-body duality.
    Is the world “real,” or do we just “think” it’s real? Framed another way, the question centers on whether or not either mind or body exists independently. If neither does, then which one is dependent.


Incoming Old Man’s Anecdote Alert: Dive, dive, dive


I didn’t have the typical high school life. I chose to enter a Catholic boarding school that encouraged meditation before the crush of daily study, lectures, and recreational activities clouded students’ minds. Up and meditating at 5:30 AM for about a half hour daily in my teen years was a process that convinced me that we are not, as Sean Carroll seems to argue in the video, merely physical entities composed of interworking subatomic particles and quantum fields driven to act under the influence of the four fundamental forces in Nature—and maybe some forces or fields we have yet to discover. Although I do agree that those physical entities are at work, I have long suspected that mind is more than brain and more than the gut bacteria that seem to exert some control over who we are.
    Mind exists separately in my view and in spite of experiments on “readiness potential” that show our awareness of acting proceeds only after the brain works to initiate an action. And, “No,” before you ask, I do not think my mind preceded my having a brain or those gut bacteria. Additionally, “No,” I do not believe in a Star Wars Force that in a tradition similar to Buddhist thought permeates the physical universe and allows telekinesis. Finally, “No,” I also don’t think the ancient Greeks’ nous (νοῦς) warrants a belief in anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις). Whatever I share with others is neither a matter of deja vu nor a matter of a priori. But I will admit to humans having inner and reptilian brain segments that drive some behavior like the instinctual reflex to ducking one’s head after a sudden unexpected loud sound. However, I do think that minds can intertwine themselves even when brains are separated though I have no proof other than…


The Experiment


    With classmates similarly trained (practiced) in meditation, I sometimes found myself practicing mind games, such as staring at the back of someone’s head in an assembly and suggesting merely by thinking that he should turn around. To our collective and to my individual surprise, the process seemed to work as efficiently as getting others to yawn by yawning but unlike the latter, accomplished without direct observation. In running the experiment we had to ask whether we were giving away our intention by some physical activity like breathing heavily or twitching in our seats as we stared or that one of us was caught ij the subject’s peripheral vision. Possibly we were giving some physical sign, but we made an effort not to do anything physically save staring and thinking. And at times, I performed the experiment alone with equal success. With no way save repeated attempts to verify the effect of one mind on another outside sensory experience, I have to admit my conclusion is possibly faulty, very faulty. Yet, the experience seems virtually universal as script writers have revealed when they give a character the line, “I think someone is watching us.”


Telepathy or Experience?
  
    And then there’s that reading someone’s intention or even completing someone’s sentence that you might have done. I acquired that latter ability through those hours of quiet contemplation to the annoyance of numerous speakers whom I rudely interrupted mid-sentence. How could I know the exact words they were about to say? Was it, as I believe anyone could reasonably argue, simply a matter of knowing the language and the common-speak? Anyone familiar with idiomatic expressions knows standard combinations of words, phrases, and clauses. Everyone shares a basic 20-40,000 word vocabulary. Let me illustrate: “She’s the apple of….” You completed that, of course, with “my eye.” That one goes all the way back to the biblical story of Eve and loose interpretations of the famous Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden as an apple tree. (Leave it to parochial westerners to think “apple” and not “fig” or “date”)
    All well and good for idioms and common English similes and metaphors, but I found myself capable of completing even those expressions less frequently used, those I might call unique to the circumstance of the moment, before—I’ll emphasize BEFORE—a person expressed a thought in words. Sometimes, I said the sentence as a person began to speak. Strange, but again, explicable as a simple response to the context of a conversation in the limited idiom of a single, familiar language.
    Experience is a great teacher as we know, and as the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (New American version). How do we learn language, idiom, and culture? Immersion in the sea of repetitive examples is one answer. The brain records the thousands of leagues we spent under that sea and makes the seamounts, reefs, and life we passed available on Nemo’s demand or on the surprise blurting of a lowly seaman named Broca, “Cap’n, sir, we saw this last year. Remember?”
    So, maybe I had no ability to read a mind in a non-physical sense. Maybe I had no ability to link my mind to another’s. Instead, I was simply recalling how I had heard words used to describe or explain something analogous, something very familiar. That is a legitimate thought given that we compose songs, write lyrics and poems, pen lengthy stories all on the bases of patterns like the six or seven basic literary plots, the frequencies on the standard music scale and 12 notes in an octave, common chords, and the rhythms like iambic pentameter and rhymes like “fish” and “wish” we have learned. If you need some anecdotal evidence on this, then I suggest you watch the YouTube video entitled “Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles).” Is there an alternate interpretation of my completing another’s thought? Maybe I was improvising with words as musicians do with notes in a Bourbon Street bar.
    Certainly, I don’t use all English words. Definitely, a search of my last 2,000 blogs reveals I’m not the Bard whose plays contain 25,000 unique words. Willy would be the ultimate challenger in the game Scrabble, definitely one I could not beat unless I had by chance picked the “Q,” “U,” “X,” “J,” “C,” “H,” and “V” while he had only letters valued 1, like the vowels.
    I know at least the average number of words, so anticipating what another average speaker might say could be attributed to mere guesswork and not telepathy.
    
    Separating all we have experienced from all we might do is quite possibly impossible. A statement like “This reminds me…” is the most superficial of examples revealing the connections our brains make effortlessly. Nevertheless, I tend to believe I’m onto something legitimate in saying minds are nonlocal. I believe I have communicated with others in the sense of influencing their behavior as in the staring experiment.


What, then, Are We to Make of Empathy?


    Was it Clinton who said, “I feel your pain”? Could he have been lying? He did, after all say, “I did not have sex with that woman, opening the linguistic door to all sorts of meanings for the word sex. Sorry, got distracted. “Feel the pain of another”? Is the validity of that statement as questionable as “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
    And since I mentioned Shakespeare above, I should also bring up acting, the ultimate joining of one mind with another, even an imaginary other. Actors do this on two levels, one in their portrayal within a fictional world and the other in their connection to the audience’s world. Hey, I’ll admit, I got teary eyed when Spock died in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and during the scene in Interstellar when Coop visited an elderly Murphy who said her dad promised he’d return. I “felt” for other characters who experienced tragic moments. How was I connected? I especially ask, “How was I connected to fictional characters?” They weren’t “real” like a brick except in the minds of the writers, actors, and audience. Is the empathy simply an expression of an overwrought narcissism? “The world is nothing if not about me. That death could be mine as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
        
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


So, no connection to others save in their modeling what might happen to me? Spock’s death is my eventual death; Coop’s separation is mine. The empathy isn’t outward. It’s intensely inward. The inner brain simply reacts to a personal danger. And nothing is more personal than death, especially the first death we encounter, as Dylan Thomas writes, “After the first death there is no other.” And as the early existentialists obsessed, the dread or anxiety we experience lies in knowing that we, our friends, and family are all destined to die, our mortality binding our emotions to our reasoning, our minds linked in a common knowledge.


Mind Control


Those who argue the world is meaningless because it acts without mind rely on those fundamental forces, fields, and particles acting randomly. And then to confuse us, they throw in a puzzling fact. The fate of “particles” and wave phenomena seem somehow dependent on observation as though mind is interlocked with “body.” The analog is Schrödinger's cat whose life and death are in superposition and unknown until someone or some recording instrument opens the box. Just because phenomena occur doesn’t mean we conscious beings cause them to occur. What if we’re merely late to the party? The DJ had already announced the next song before we took off our coats and threw them on the bed.


In anticipating and then saying the sentence another person was about to speak was I in control or being controlled? It is possible that the other’s mind influenced me to utter words that after uttering, I attributed the process to my telepathy. Was I merely taking visual or audible clues to their logical end? Maybe I merely anticipated that the road was either a cul-de-sac or an Interstate.


The Big Nous


Not a Force as in Star Wars, but an omnipresent Deity? I think of statements like Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I am.” Or of Yahweh’s “I Am Who Am.” Both statements hint at an overriding and suffusing Mind, timeless. Existence Itself aware of Itself. This is, of course, a root western thought that personalizes Nous and sits at the heart of Creation. The Cosmos is the product of Omniscient Mind, not of the quantum vacuum and unconscious Nothingness. The delicately balanced forces that enable life and consciousness could not have been random unless an untold number of universes exist, most unfavorable to life; most unfavorable to Mind, but one—this One—uniquely primed to foster its potential.This one imbued with mind by Mind.


The physicists reject this. But isn’t rejecting an act of mind? The mind can’t, as Augustine of Hippo pointed out in De Trinitate, deny its existence. What would do the denying? Any denial is itself a confirmation.


Out of Body Experience
 
In the YouTube video of Carroll and Wallace’s discussion, Wallace calls for a science of mind, postulating that a number of people devoted to meditation and examining mind gathered over an uncertain number of years could arrive at a science of mind. But “science” entails quantification though there are many who now argue the validity of qualitative research, especially those in the social “sciences.” The problem for those who would establish a science of mind as distinguished from, say, the “science”of psychologists and neuroscientists, is that both of those document behavior and electro-biochemical reactions clearly observable in some manner (e.g., direct observation or fMRI) whereas there is no current indisputable way to measure, for example, out-of-body episodes (OBE) other than through reports on psychedelic drug use or chance fMRI imaging during an unpredictable OBE driven by some Shirley McClain trip to the Andes.


Where Does This Leave Us?


It’s a personal matter, this mind business. I know by experience that I seemed at times to have connected to other minds, and one of those connections was far more dramatic than any of the others. My spouse and I experienced an intertwining that seems impossible and inexplicable. In the college dining room in the midst of clinking silverware, dishes, and glasses punctuating others’ loud conversations, we had for a moment a joint OBE, an experience that we both describe as being somehow above our physical nature, somehow sparkling and twinkling above us at the apex of a triangle formed with our two heads at the base angles, a kind of pyramid of joining, not some dollar bill eye at the top, but our minds and those proverbial “bells” people mention. It didn’t last long, but while it did, the “outside world”—that “objective one” through which we move the way matter becomes matter by interaction with the Higgs boson—faded away. We were minds interlocked.


Was it chance hormonal activity driven by the proximity of pheromones? It didn’t seem so. It seemed both at the time and in retrospect a real “joining” of minds that we still speak of occasionally.


But nothing in my personal experience with mind can be quantified like matter under the influence of fundamental forces, particles, or fields. Not vector definitely, but scalar possibly? I’ll grant that latter designation because the experience we had in the dining room was certainly “intense.” So, if Wallace’s volunteers of mind-students can develop a science of mind, the measurements will probably be scalar, the measuring devices like thermometers not speedometers.


The acknowledgement that mind exists separately from body, the door is open for mind to exist beyond body, even beyond death. Could its continued existence account for ghost stories, communication with the dead, the efficacy of prayer? The Afterlife?


Personal experience has opened me to accepting a universe of possibilities I cannot quantify. It opens me to accepting a level of or type of existence best described as spiritual. Unlike the physicist, I cannot relegate myself to a dull atheism with regard to the origin of mind, dull because it cannot admit its own contradictory tenets that allow a mind to deny its existence as different from brain activity.


I know I have not resolved all you might have hoped for. I have not reached a definitive answer. I might even have infuriated you. I’ll say it once more: If I have given you a point of departure for your own thoughts, I’ve done my job. We might never have a meeting of the minds. That’s all right—except just saying that hints that we have minds.

“I should have listened.” “I should have known.” “I acted rashly.” “I’m sorry.”


Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) is about to risk your well being just to run an experiment on a hypothesis, on a process in progress, on the popularized notion that climate change is a natural phenomenon within human control. Aria, in an attempt to reduce incoming solar radiation, will fund cloud seeding with reflective aerosols. * If they are successful in their effort to geoengineer the planet and, by happenstance, some Icelandic or Indonesian volcano erupts as Laki did in 1783 and Krakatoa did in 1883, you’ll be wearing a double layer of your winter clothes—or maybe wearing your winter coat in summer as people did during the “Year without a Summer” (1816) that followed the successive eruptions of first Mayon in the Philippines and then Tambora in Indonesia. Volcanoes do their own geoengineering from time to time.


I’ve written about this before. I’ve warned against doing it. But who am I? Don’t the “scientists” know better? Don’t the politicians? Sorry, Am I picking on people like Bernie Sanders, Alexeandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a host of other Democrats who, with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, have declared climate change an “existential threat” and the cause of wildfires that spread through poorly managed forests encompassing residential areas that didn’t exist a century ago? Actually, yes, because I believe Aria’s attempt would most likely hav their approval, as a similar proposal had the Biden Administration’s approval.


That a single volcanic eruption can alter global temperatures by ejecting aerosols into the stratosphere is a lesson learned as far back as the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin’s suspected that Laki’s 1783 eruption affected temperatures. A century later with better world-wide interconnectedness through telegraph and newspaper reports, naturalists realized that Krakatoa altered Northern Hemisphere temperatures. If you were alive in 1992, you experienced a smaller, but similar effect, after the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo lowered average temperatures by 0.5–0.6 °C (0.9–1.1 °F) in the Northern Hemisphere and decreased global temperatures by about 0.4 °C (0.7 °F). Were the people of Aria not paying attention?


But unding has erupted into Aria’s pockets, and with no real oversight by skeptics, the “science” of blocking sunlight will probably proceed. As Dr. Sebastian Eastman puts it, “It’s theoretically possible (to cool the planet) with current day technology but there are many practical questions that would need to be answered before they could be done at scale.”


Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.


You have no say in the matter, of course. In Europe and the USA voters have put in office people who have probably never studied atmospheric physics, the history of glaciation, historical geology, the several climate classification systems, the effects of continentality, land-water distribution, elevation, latitude, cloud dynamics, ocean currents, orography, semi-permanent High and Low pressure systems, atmospheric cycles and prevailing mechanisms for moving heat around the planet, precession, axis tilt, orbit shape, Sun cycles, atmosphere stratification and chemistry, outgassing from forests, natural methane seeps including methane hydrate volatility, volcanic eruptions, and… Well, who am I to say anything that contradicts the wisdom of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the people at Aria ready to spend UK taxpayers’ funds on seeding the sky with aerosols?


*https://www.msn.com/en-gb/science/environmental-science/britain-to-approve-50m-sun-dimming-experiments-in-bid-to-prevent-runaway-climate-change/ar-AA1DrKBz

Catholic (C) talks to Agnostic (Ag) and Atheist (Ath).


Ath: So, Pope Francis has died. He might have been controversial to some because of his focus on social issues like climate change and immigration, but I believe he had a sincere regard for human secular destiny. Seeing the October 7 attacks and the immediate aftermath and knowing about the ongoing conflicts like the one in Ukraine, he said, “War is a defeat, every war is a defeat.” That short statement summarizes every anti-war song, poem, and book written over the last 150 years as composers and authors have voiced their concerns for humanity’s secular fate. In my opinion, all we have is the Here and Now, so I appreciate that focus on humanity.


Ag: But shouldn’t his concern have been humanity’s ultimate destiny in an afterlife? I’m a little up in the air on this. Not sure if it matters one way or another.


C: I think he was a spiritual leader whom the World Press wanted to mold into a social figure by isolating some of his statements like the one about homosexuality, when he said, “Who am I to judge?” Francis was, as we all are, a product of our times.
    We live in an era of decreased moral formality and increased public acceptance of lifestyles previously publicly denounced. That’s not to say that there weren’t many other times of informal morality, times and places when and where situation ethics prevailed. I suppose we Americans are still emerging from the Puritanism associated with previous eras. The problem more conservative Christians, and particularly conservative Catholics, had with him was that he seem to imply an indifference or misunderstanding of what they believed to be a breakdown of faith or of morality. Was Francis suggesting a widespread acceptance of lifestyles once not only rejected but also condemned? Christians might practice situation ethics, but they don’t want their pontiff voicing it. They might sin, but they don’t want ambivalence. They don’t want a “sinful” lifestyle dismissed in a refusal “to judge” that they interpret as permission for pedophilia. Many still think homosexuality is not only “sinful” but also criminal in the context of those abuse scandals that rocked the Church. Remember that during the Victorian era and early twentieth century being gay was a civil crime as well as a “sin.” In 1950s in England the genius Alan Turing was convicted of homosexuality, or“indecency. ”Turing was subsequently ostracized from the government work for which he had received high praise prior to the conviction. Then he died under suspicious circumstances that indicated either suicide driven by mandatory hormone treatment or, even more controversial, murder by the British Secret Service.  In the later twentieth century and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the “situation” has changed, homosexuality has been decriminalized though pedophilia is still a crime. Conservatives balk at the seeming change from an Absolute Morality to a Relative Morality. However, Francis was echoing what Christ said in John 8:7.
    In saying, “Who am I to judge?” Francis was echoing Christ’s “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” So, there was in his statement a tie to the Church’s tradition of forgiveness and mercy. “Let God be the judge,” he implied. For those whose ethics influenced them to associate homosexuality with pedophilia because of the clergy scandals, Francis was opening a long-closed door that the masses wanted to lock. Was Francis okaying pedophilia? He did make other comments that suggested ambivalence.
    He made at least one comment some that many conservatives took as permissive. He said, "Homosexual people have a right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it,” and then he reportedly said in a closed meeting that priesthood colleges were too full of “frociaggine" (excuse my pronunciation), a vulgar Italian term for “faggotness.” Making contradictory comments did not sit well with the faithful who wanted a pope to be consistent in a time when so many priests we’re accused of pedophilia. Yet, he did side with traditional morality when he said, “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you. And I humbly ask forgiveness."
    
Ath: Contradiction and hypocrisy are two reasons I’m not a member of any religion. When a priest ventures into social matters, he opens himself up to social influences of his times. He…I’ll come back to this in a moment, but first I want to say that most of the faithful want a “tradition” that doesn’t undergo the vicissitudes of popularism. Why practice what undergoes willy nilly change influenced by the vocal minority? At least on the surface, the faithful don’t want the morality of today to be different from the morality recognized in the religion of their past.
    I expect a pope to make comments on the immorality of war, crime, injustice, and yes, on pedophilia that I find wrong on psychological  and humanistic grounds. But Francis, as they say, veered out of his lane. He made comments on climate and immigration. I found him venturing into matters and views popularized by the media. He wrote in 2023, "The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point. Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.”
    Sorry, but as one who’s looked at all the damage to world economies done by climate activists who have increased the cost of energy, the most fundamental human need because it underlies all activities, I find his comment unwarranted. The “breaking point”? On what grounds? What are those “signs”? I think he bought into the idea that weather events are climate, that droughts in places prone to droughts somehow signify a world “climate system” out of control. It’s always been out of control, thus migrations of the last 60,000 years to more suitable places—though why people moved into the Arctic befuddles me.
    And then there were those comments on immigration that I believe he made without reference to the reality of economic loss and hardship to countries undergoing mass migration. Francis said, “We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories.” Okay, Frankie, ten to twenty million such stories in just four years crossing into the United States? Many of them getting free stuff on the people’s dime while Americans citizens saw their taxes going to those who paid no tax? Violent criminal gangs, deadly fentanyl, and overloaded health care and school resources? Is that how the Vatican treats immigrants, or is the Vatican still sticking to its restrictions on immigrants? Has the Vatican taken down its wall or gotten rid of the Swiss Guard? Charity, sure, Francis; mercy, yeah, I can see it; but more than ten million in four years? Who can listen to individual voices under those circumstances?
    But Francis put the burden of morality on the invaded, not on the invaders. He said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.” Yet, the Vatican still has that wall.
    That brings up another reason I don’t belong to any particular religion: Those in leadership proclaim but don’t always follow their proclamations. It’s the “do as I say” crowd of hypocrites.


Ag: I think the guy was well-meaning in all he said but that he didn’t quite grasp how people can distort comments. Did he approve of Islamic “martyrs” when he said, “Politics is a noble activity. We should revalue it, practise [sic.] it with vocation and a dedication that requires testimony, martyrdom, that is to die for the common good.” Were suicide bombers justified in such a “practice?” Francis probably had no such thing in mind, but in an age of distorted meanings precise and thorough language is necessary. No one can predict the inferences people make, of course, but language interpretation has consequences. I could see, for example, that women could infer their role in the Church makes them second class faithful because they can’t be priests, er, priestesses. Yet, Francis says they are a significant part of the Church: “A church without women would be like the apostolic college without Mary. The Madonna is more important than the apostles, and the Church herself is feminine, the spouse of Christ and a mother.”
    So, if I’m a devout woman, I would want to know why I can become a nun but not a priest. Hey, he also said, “I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.” Lots of pontificating about women, but little practical action, I’d say.


C: Here’s the problem I think many have with regard to religion and religious leaders. It is difficult for us to separate the two. We expect the leaders to be the embodiment of the faith. We don’t want to see the leaders as human like us. We want them to be somehow special, and by that I mean not prone to violating the Church’s tenets. We seek consistency because our lives are enveloped by chaos and inconsistency. The world outside the Church—whatever church it is—is overflowing with contradiction. How many people have looked to religion for a firm foundation? How many have you heard sing, “I was lost, but now am found?”
    In matters of faith, Francis appears to have been consistent. That some of his comments upset his flock isn’t necessarily his fault. Every statement that bred controversy was subject to inference. Some took his statements to mean more than he intended or to be different from what he intended. His statements on immigration, for example, were the product of his own experiences as an immigrant to Argentina.
    In that, I see a shortcoming. We often err when we try to apply the personal to the general. His own experiences were not indicative of the experiences of millions of people in developed countries overwhelmed by millions of Third World immigrants flooding neighborhoods, overtaxing public services, and disrupting the lives of citizens. Mass migration can’t be seen by the “invaded” country as an individual looking for a better life. Sure, mercy and help are ethical, but not necessarily doable, not necessarily practical on the scale of millions of migrants in just four years. And the criminal element among the innocent migrants has been composed of well organized drug dealers and killers. Would Francis see practicality in letting MS-13 into the Vatican? Theoretically, he could forgive, counsel, and provide, but in dealing with the incorrigible, he would be ultimately frustrated as they pushed drugs, assaulted, and stole artworks. He no doubt would forgive and counsel individuals, but gangs mean dealing with mob mentalities infused with loyalty so powerful that it can influence members to kill just for the sake of killing.
    Nevertheless, in spite of the controversies, Pope Francis was a good guy, maybe a bit of a socialist, but definitely well-meaning, as you said, Ag. That he stepped out of his lane on matters like climate change I can blame on the influence of a Press obsessed with the topic and maybe on his never having time to study climate science. He was correct, however, in tying morality to care for the environment. At the heart of Catholicism is the fact that we are all finite and that there will be other generations who will want to occupy our temporary homes.
    As to your concerns, Ath, Francis thought in terms of stewardship. So, given the hype by alarmists, he was inclined to tie morality to care for the planet because its care is inextricably tied to care for the poor who suffer the most under natural disasters.
    And I can see that you might be upset by any inkling of hypocrisy. It probably bothers most people that those at the top of any social order or organization might see themselves “above the law” or might act in contradiction to tenets everyone else must follow.


Ag: So, what’s next? I guess we’ll see whether the next pope is more like Benedict or Francis, more like Pius XII whose Vatican didn’t outright condemn the Holocaust or St. John Paul II who independently helped Reagan dismantle Communism in the Soviet Union. Will the next pope be a man of the people like John XXIII? Will he call a new Vatican Council to reexamine the Church? One thing is certain, in spite of the Church being in the words of Francis “feminine,”“mother,” and “bride,” the next pope won’t be a woman, probably not even a trans woman.


C: Time will tell. Anyway, goodbye, Francis. As the proverbial “they” say, “The good you did will live on.”

Ag: I doubt that, but then, I doubt everything.

I’ve never seen olo, the "teal-like" color that, according to researchers led by James Fong, appears to those who have had a population of cones stimulated by a laser. The title of their article published in Science Advances is “Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale.” * But I have just seen colors in brightness and intensities I appear to have missed for decades.


Cataract surgery, the painless minutes-long process of improving vision robbed by years of exposure to ultraviolet light, gave me a more colorful—check that, intensely more colorful— world. The gradual loss of that intensity went unnoticed. Then my twilight world turned into daytime in minutes.


But why tell you this?


Seeing Is a Function of the Brain


We humans compensate for our eyes’ blind spots by mentally filling in the gaps in our field of view. Similarly, we recognize faces we see only partially, the world of recognition largely a function of experience or memory and an ability to turn parts into wholes. This process applies to what we think and believe as well as to what we actually see. Definitely it applies to how we interpret the spaces around us.


The Clouded Brain


There is an argument to be made that just as cataracts becloud vision over many years of exposure, so constant exposure to a single ideology also clouds the brain and darkens understanding. Thus, media pundits steeped in their views (Left or Right) fail to see what others see clearly. The obstructed view of those “liberal” pundits over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency is an example. Steeped like a teabag in Leftist propaganda and fear mongering, many Democrats thought nothing wrong with a president who could not form unified coherent thoughts and who was not fully in charge of his administration. Myopic party loyalty shaded the eyes of many who voted for and continued to support Biden until that “operation” called the debate opened their eyes. Similarly, the Russian Patriarch’s distorted view of Ukrainians who were prior to the invasion affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church demonstrates that humans do not see what is plainly visible to others, that Ukrainians were not Nazis who intended to invade Russia and were not prior to the war intent on conquering Russia. Nor were LGBTQ Ukrainians seeking to undo the moral fiber of Slavs first in their own country and then in Russia. Further, the Patriarch could not see that many young Russian men would lose their lives as they were in the process of taking Ukrainian lives and perpetrating war crimes like rape and torture in an action that the Patriarch saw justified.


Olo


That there is a color only a few humans have seen is a lesson for all of us. Just as prior to the cataract surgery I could not see colors  as you see them, so I might also fail to see what others see in human affairs. The gradual diminution of my eyes reversed by cataract surgery is an analog of opening up one’s perspective on all things human. You, for example, might see “olo,” and I might not even know that “olo” exists, such is the nature of “seeing.” Because all of us have eyes with blind spots that necessitate our filling in gaps with prior knowledge to complete a scene, we have, I believe a tendency to fill in perspectives similarly. If something in the practice of an ideology doesn’t make sense, we make it make sense by “filling in” excuses, rationalization, projection, and blame.
*
SCIENCE ADVANCES VOL. 11, NO. 16  Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale

 I would like to think that most efforts by government derive from some good will, that is, from a motive to help better lives and a motive to achieve noble goals. In truth, I know that many government agencies and expenditures center on control, or on maintaining control: The aim is political power and job preservation. Regardless of an ostensible altruism in government programs, what happens is that pooling common wealth often leads to waste, to quashing dissent, and to fraud perpetrated on the citizenry. * But, lest you accuse me of being an avid DOGER driven by some narrow political view, let me explain.


America has been in the grasp of a neo-Lysenkoism reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s policies initiated by Trofim Lysenko under Stalin’s rule. Lysenko, in case you slept through history class, was an agronomist who melded Lamarckism with Marxism to fashion an alternative to Darwinian and Mendelian evolution. In short, Lysenko said one could take a plant that grew in a warmer clime and force it to grow in a colder clime with properties obtained through hybridization. He thought he could hybridize plants without dealing with their genetic makeup. Stalin loved the idea and essentially forced all Soviet geneticists into recanting their science in favor of Lysenkoism. The result was crop failure and imprisonment or death for scientists who didn’t agree. Imprisonment meant spending time in Sharashkas in the Gulag just as airplane engineers were forced into laboring for the state in those remote prisons.


The Lysenkoism the American government instituted under the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations comes in the form of monistic climate alarmism. Those who disagree have been relegated to virtual Sharashkas, or mental Sharashkas, virtually exiled from mainline academia, journals, and society by vociferous colleagues and an unrelenting media that has taken the climate scare like a fish swallowing hook, line, and sinker. There’s are just two points of view: See the world through the alarmists’ eyes, or else find yourself relegated to the status akin to that of a proponent of a flat Earth. Since the 1990s, American and European society have been propagandized into two blocks: Lysenkoist-like climate alarmists, many of who lie on the periphery of science or within the boundary of laity, and “unscientific” deniers, the latter including scientists who have data that conflicts with the alarmists’ dire pronouncements.     


You Know That Expression That Money Is the Source of Evil?


An abundance of money that comes as a gift from taxing the anonymous masses provides temptation too great for some to resist. And that includes not only bureaucrats but also those to whom government agents distribute the money in grants of all kinds and for all purposes. The inefficient and sometimes criminal misuse of money is one reason science has lost its aura of respect. Too many “researchers” have latched onto the wagon of gold that the donkeys pull. Although I know that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party, I also know that Republican elephants have also pulled that wagonload of public money with few safeguards to prevent people along the road from helping themselves to riches they have not earned.


Among the people reaching into the wagon are many academics and scientists who see opportunities to attain both wealth and fame, wealth from those grants that support studies like the infamous shrimp on a treadmill and fame in the hallowed halls of academia’s treasured journals. One needs only to convince some bureaucrat that a study is worth supporting to receive funding that fosters personal aggrandizement through publications and grant money that the hosting academic institution “taxes,” meaning of course garnering “override money” just for hosting. And then, one needs only suggest “further research” of a culturally embedded idea to acquire ongoing funding, like studying ways to keep Earth from looking like burned toast. How many years has it been since Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made studying climate an expensive (for the taxpayer) priority? Thirty? To what measurable effect? We are still spending tax dollars on followup studies and programs that will end up costing  from billions to hundreds of billions with no one yet able to give an unequivocal answer about the measurable effects of those studies.


Climate Lysenkoism


Just as Lysenko made claims that his research would result in measurable benefits to the Soviet Union, so the alarmists make a similar claim of measurable benefits to all of humanity. And just as Lysenko’s empty promises devastated an economy, so the alarmists’ have harmed the economies of the West’s developed nations.


I find ironic that those who claim “science” seem to have little understanding of scientific legitimacy as they rely on faulty models and forecasts, link unrelated events to nonexistent trends, and make dissent and inquiry taboo. That many of them wear the mantle of liberalism and humanism while shutting down dissent, ignoring historic data, and simplifying a complex of interrelated physical processes makes the irony more pronounced.


Escaping the Mental Sharashkas


Escaping the mental sharashka is risky. Compliance is easy.


Let’s say that the alarmists are correct: Civilization is doomed because the world will become as warm as it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Maximum. The question of what can be done without prematurely destroying civilization still remains. Is a world population to forego the benefits of fossil fuels for the betterment of a future that might not be as bad as alarmists predict? Is it possible that a carbon free world would be a world sliding back into pre-modern technology and industry? Is it also possible that instead of dire trends toward a warmer world, Earth undergoes a return to a frozen one under control like Milankovich Cycles, super volcano eruptions, collapsing ocean currents, and waxing Sun spots? Is it also possible that since temperature records are absent for large portions of Earth’s surface, are questionable for many regions, and are only a couple of hundred years old for the rest, that any trends are only marginally valid? And if any announced “trends” are dependent on manipulated data, as appears to be the case in extrapolated readings from regional sensors, isn’t the associated alarmism exaggerated or even unwarranted?


In spite of evidence against a claim that hurricanes are more numerous and stronger, that forest fires are more numerous and more extensive, and that droughts follow the same pattern as storms and fires, the alarmists will not concede that their warnings are questionable at best or that they should be scrutinized in the context of Earth’s last 2.5 million years of glacial and interglacial periods, one of the latter ongoing during our lifetimes. Nevertheless thousands will attend the ongoing run of COP, this year marking the thirtieth such conference. The infusion of grant money sufficient to hold yearly conferences attended by tens of thousands of climate change enthusiasts perpetuates the inertia of climate Lysenkoism, ensuring it will continue to control the masses and to ostracize dissenters.

There’s little doubt that migration has changed the world. After the human exit in the “out of Africa” scenario that saw our species populate all but Antarctica in mass migrations, people have settled and intruded upon previous settlers, overlaying culture upon culture. Today, that process takes place in three ways: 1) Physical movements of people like those of the last 60,000 years, 2) virtual migration through electronic media, and 3) temporary invasion, that is, tourism. Modern electronic interconnectedness can be just as effective a cultural influence as actual population movements. Bermuda makes the case for #2 and #3; Positano makes the case for #3. More on that later.


The Concept of Indigenous


Every place makes the case for #1. In fact, physical migration puts the idea of indigenous culture in question. How far back does one go to call a people indigenous? Modern Italians are not Romans just as Romans weren’t Etruscans or Greeks who lived on the “boot”  now called Italy.  But the anthropological concept off indigenous is certainly a favored one because the United States celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Columbus Day—the former originating in Berkeley in 1992, the latter a Federal holiday to mark the European intrusion on “Native Americans,” who had intruded on Clovis territory that the Clovis occupied in displacing peoples like those who inhabited the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Avella, PA, 16,000 years ago.


Nevertheless, the three migratory influences on culture have enriched as much as ditched indigenous lifestyle and values. If history is the guide, then another culture will at some unknown date either influence or replace your culture just as you or your ancestors settled in the family neighborhood. Polish Hill, Chinatown, “Dago” Heaven all replaced or intruded on the the lives of previous inhabitants. Where are the Monongahela villages today? Where are the Mound Builders of the eastern states? Certainly, those “indigenous people” did not give Moundsville, WV, its current name or build the state prison across the street from the impressive earthen mound.


Paradise Lost?


If I were as talented a poet as John Milton, I could pen a work on Culture Lost in a lengthy verse like the poet’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Unseated indigenous populations—if any group of people can be said to be truly indigenous—look back nostalgically on lost paradise, the homeland they and their immediate ancestors knew before it changed. “Lost,” however, would be the only poem I could write because, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” Every generation erases slightly the culture of the past and migrants erase more. Reclamation never restores what was lost or altered. At best a culture can only reminisce in annual fairs like Italian Festival, Polish Festival, Renaissance Festival, St. Patrick’s Day and the like. But in truth, that which is gone is gone. And though its founders thought to right some wrong in founding Indigenous Peoples’ Day, they haven’t united groups of peoples whose ancestry included those who warred with one another and who established their own loosely defined boundaries whose geography has been documented in territories variously named “Apache,” “Shawnee,” “Iroquois,” “Seminole,” “Huron,” and “Cherokee.”


Those festivals and days noted above are attempts to recapture lost culture, to preserve it through ensuing generations. Children, however, can move away, and those left behind inevitably die off. The analog is found in evolution. Species occupy trophic niches left empty by extinct species, wolves, for example, replacing Smilodons and dire wolves as the chief predators in a region. Look at any neighborhood’s history. The original houses remain, but their occupants are different. Polish Hill might not be dominated by people who have a Polish heritage. My own children have a diverse genetic makeup: Italian, Polish, Austrian, and Russian. The kids are as comfortable eating a meal of spaghetti as they are eating one of pirogies. And, of course, because of diverse cultural influences, tacos, shrimp fried rice, and vegetable soup. Very few cultures on an interconnected world are unitary, such is the mix made by #1, #2, and #3.     


Reliving Paradise Lost


Probably few of us born in modern times would be happy with ancient life. No toilet paper, for example. No soap. No ease of transportation. No high tech, no Starbucks. Just sayin’. Would you be happy in the Golden Age of Greece, in the city Pericles made great? Visitors in Athens probably give little thought to the ice cream they eat as they tour. What was Plato’s favorite flavor?


Yet, those from other cultures seek to experience what they believe was in that culture, usually a stereotype. Stand as a tourist on the Acropolis and dream of talking to Socrates and Plato. Walk among the pillars of Karnak or ride a camel around the pyramids. You’re there, but not really. What was is gone; its essence is no more though the trappings remain like the Old State House in St. George’s in Bermuda.


Bermuda (This Is That “Later” I mentioned Getting to at the End of the First Paragraph)


Ah! Paradise! Bermuda, that British place of men in shirts, ties, and sport jackets worn with Bermuda shorts, knee socks and shined shoes and women in dresses. Kind of quaint, really. And the beauty of the place! Frozen dunes, or should I say “indurated and lithified” dunes resting on a crater’s rim with a maximum elevation at Town Hill of 79 meters (217 feet) above sea level, all the landscape bearing pastel houses with white roofs that capture rainwater in a prudent architectural admission to the island’s isolation in the salty Gulf Stream. And cleanliness. No litter on the streets and roads—at least that’s how I remember Bermuda.


But change is inevitable. As surely as those lithified dunes will eventually resume their unconsolidated form under erosive forces of wind and water, so the culture will inevitably change, subsiding into history like the supporting volcano that will slowly subside on a moving ocean crust unable to support the mountain’s weight. As sure as most old people get shorter under gravity’s inexorable pull, so Bermuda’s base will slowly sink into the sea, a process that a rising sea level can enhance as it did after the end of the last eustatic low stand 105,000 years ago.


Paradise Remembered


It’s been decades since my wife and I visited the island that annually gets about five times more visitors than the native population, a population that was at the time of our visit as literate as any country’s people. Bermuda boasted a 99% literacy rate back then, a fact that I remember after seeing several people reading paperbacks on a bus as they traveled to work in Hamilton. There was those decades ago a formality I did not experience in the neighboring melting pot of cultures called the United States. It did, however, remind me of more formal times of my childhood and even of those years as a young professor whose college president insisted on faculty wearing jackets, dress pants, shirts, and ties. (His death coincided with a creeping informality adopted by my similarly aged colleagues—I was in my mid-twenties)


That rather formal culture on Bermuda also had a low crime rate as I remember the island, a rate marred mostly by domestic incidents. Murders? Few and rare. Violent muggings of tourists? Very rare, also. Don’t misunderstand. Bermudans are human beings and as such have always had the same vices and emotions as the rest of us, including the vices of those landlocked in America’s crime-ridden inner cities. And the island population had various genetic heritages with origins as widespread as the British Isles and African Congo. It’s also long been a port for merchants and smugglers and was significant on the trade route between Europe and America, especially during the Revolutionary and Civil wars. But it became charming enough and safe enough to become a popular gun-free tourist spot in the twentieth century.


But, alas! And double alas! Maybe the island is too close to the United States and too far from its formal tie to Britain and its own isolated past that dates to a time before the Mayflower that carried Stephen Hawkins, a guy who had been shipwrecked on the island in 1609 before returning to England and then making the voyage with the Pilgrims. The Old State House in St. George’s was built in 1620, the year they landed at Plymouth Rock. Other buildings also attest to a cultural history dating to the 17th century.


As my wife and I walked the narrow roads and visited Hamilton, I saw signs that foreshadowed a cultural change.


Catapults Banned!


At the beachside hotel nestled in one of Bermuda’s many coves, there was a dress code for dinner: Reasonable dress: Sport coats and collared shirts, Bermuda shorts or dress pants. and leather shoes for men and whatever the equivalent level of formality for women, maybe dress slacks or skirts and blouses or dresses, though if memory serves me, dresses and not slacks for women. I guess that’s what is called “casual formal” or “semi-formal”—Not for me to say, since, with rare exceptions, during my entire professional career after the death of that president who hired me, I wore running shoes, jeans, and a sport coat over a T-shirt in the lab or classroom and simply swapped the running shoes and sport coat for a sweatshirt and work boots for field trips to the mountains. Yeah, when it comes to fashion, I’m neither a trendsetter nor a business suit guy. But when in Rome…er, Bermuda, I knew to dress according to the code.


Okay, though I wouldn’t want to be characterized as a slob, I can’t deny my American heritage of informality and lower Middle Class attire (thus my use of the contractions in this sentence). I became aware of my normal informality at home in retrospect as the Bermudan dress code surfaced like the island in a sea of tourist slobs. During that trip to Bermuda I saw my slobby compatriots who seemed to favor Myrtle Beach and Ocean City beachwear arrive at restaurants seemingly intent on undermining a formal culture by their dress. The contrast with Bermudans was noticeable.


And I began to think, “As the world becomes more interconnected, local codes of behavior and even local mores undergo entropy.” Fashion smooths out like the Cosmic Microwave Background, now everywhere—and I mean EVERYWHERE—at 2.7K with differences in density measured only in ten to 100 parts per million. The world was not only becoming One, it was becoming an American One in thought, fashion, and behavior. “In a couple of decades,” I told my wife, “Bermuda will be radically different. I’m happy we came to see it before it changes.”     


It wasn’t just the tourists, or even just American tourists, that led me to the conjecture. I noted a youth shouldering a boom box—it was a time even before the storied Walkman and quality Bose headphones. The speakers vibrated American rap music, not obnoxiously loud, mind you, but noticeably intrusive on the scale of the island’s formality. And in the hotel, one of the few TV stations originated in Chicago; another, in Detroit. The nightly reports showed crime after crime after crime after crime in inner cities in the midst of decline. And I thought, “Of all the stations to import, why these? Why not a BBC station to the exclusion of one so different in culture?” But the ubiquitous American culture seems unstoppably intrusive on the planet. My thought intensified, “Bermuda will change.” Migrants, visitors, and electronic connectedness will effect that change.


I think I might have been prescient. Bermuda has, I believe, become more Americanized, and not in the best sense of Americanization (whatever that might be). No, the worst or, in part, the less formal part. We tourists and our culture and this country’s standards of social interaction, like people getting into fights in Disney World, have eroded Bermuda’s culture. And now, as I read online, the UK government issues this warning: “Bermuda has a moderate level of crime. There have been serious incidents, including the use of weapons.”


Weapons in Bermuda? Guns, as I indicated, were banned when I was there. The newspapers reported a few domestic disturbances, none involving firearms. But now other weapons seem to be a problem for Bermuda. I have read the list of banned items. Tourists are advised not to enter the island with air pistols, catapults, ammunition, or empty magazines. Catapults! CATAPULTS! What! Is this a Monty Python movie set? I assume that the restriction includes all forms of catapults, including trebuchets of any dimensions.


“Dear, have you finished packing for our trip to Bermuda? Remember, they don’t allow trebuchets or drugs. So, leave them at home. Possession can lead to prison sentences up to 25 years.”


“But, Gladys, you know I never travel without my trebuchet. It’s not on the TSA agents’ minds when people go through airport security, though they do a double-take when they see the large rock I carry for a counterbalance weight. No, they’re more concerned about my belt buckle and Uncle Tom’s artificial knee than my trebuchet.”


Maybe “catapult” means slingshot. I’m not sure.


Positano


Have you seen Positano? Really picturesque! Nestled—or rammed—against a rugged coast and cliffs, the place attracts tourists by the boatloads, kind of an Italian version of Santorini with narrow streets and little room to accommodate the tourist trade. So, this headline in the NY Post caught my eye: ‘Entitled’ American slammed for trashing ‘overpriced’ seaside Italian town — and ‘loud’ US tourists: ‘Girl, you f–ked up bad’ an article reporting on the brouhaha over a travel “influencer’s criticism of Positano. *


What caused the stir? Keri, the influencer who sat the heart of it, wrote, “There were just so many Americans,” she said. “It was, like, the people that weren’t well traveled, like, just loud and yelling down the tiny streets while repping their favorite football team.”


Yeah. American slobs everywhere, all eager to live for a day or a week in a place where they believe they’ll experience a lifestyle different from their own. But the Hawthorne Effect (the Observer Effect) always comes into play.


You know the effect. If people being observed know they are being observed—as people in touristy areas know—they’ll act as they think they should act. The observer changes the observed. And I assume that after millions have visited Bermuda and the Amalfi coast, they have effected a change, not necessarily for the worst, but that’s not out of the question.


Positano isn’t the quaint town it once was. It doesn’t even have the Amalfi culture it once had. It’s different because of #2 and #3, and I can’t say which is the greater influence. The world’s new found electronic interconnectedness definitely plays a part as it had played the same part the world over. I don’t know, for example, where you are. My site is visited 24/7. I can’t believe that all the wee hours of the morning readership is just East Coast. You could be in California, Hawaii, China, or Madagascar. And though you might think I haven’t had an influence on your life—good or bad—your returning for more than one of these 2,000+ essays tells me that in some small way, I have intruded on your life and, by extension, on those to whom you might have influenced on an issue I covered.


Don’t Get Me Wrong


I’m not haughtily saying I have changed the world or changed you—noticeably. But to quote Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: I am a part of all that I have met.”


Every traveler has in concert with other travelers the ability to change a destination whether by permanent relocation or by just visiting. No place has been exempt. No “indigenous” culture has been unaffected.


Think about that the next time you go on vacation. You will to some degree become a part of all you meet.




*Marissa Matozzo, April 11, 2025.

According to the FBI records for the past two years, crimes of hate derived from ethnic and religious differences made up about three-quarters of “hate crimes.” Separating the two categories of ethnicity and religion is a bit difficult in the instance of Judaism, since the ethnicity is intimately tied to the religion, whereas, for example, Christians like Catholics have only a superficial tie to ethnicity. That analysis is somewhat incomplete,  of course, because Muslims are not just Arabs, as the “national” religions of Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and 220 million Indians attest. Yes, there are Turkish and Indonesian Christians, but Jews? That is on the whole a different story. Practicing or not, every Jew is labeled in the eyes of the antisemite as “Jewish” in both “race” and religion.


The recent rise of antisemitism on college campuses has framed all Jews, even American Jews who have never visited the Middle East, as Israelis or Israeli sympathizers and, thus, complicit in the college mobs’ eyes in the fictional genocide of Palestinians. And that “genocide” is demonstrably fictional. The IDF has struggled to eliminate Hamas operatives because they hide among Palestinians and use them as shields, actions that appear to be of no concern to the rioting college students who, for whatever reason, align themselves with torturers, rapists, and murderers, including those guilty of infanticide.


In fact, there are Jews who empathize with the Palestinians and who argue against the continued actions of the IDF in Gaza. That puts Israel between the rock and hard spot. Defend against terrorists or allow terrorists to wreak havoc on Israel? Continue unabated until Hamas is totally eliminated or by ceasing operations try to elicit favor from people already imbued with antisemitism? For centuries Jews have had to sail between Charybdis and Scylla.


For any American college student protesting either side of the issue I simply ask, “What is your solution in light that you have no skin in the game?


And isn’t that really the issue in all American anti-Israeli protests? As I keep saying in these blog entries, what isn’t personal is virtually meaningless. October Seventh is meaningless to the protesting co-ed in a black-and-white head scarf if she hasn’t been tortured, raped, or imprisoned. No protesting American college woman has been subjected indignities by Hamas. No alphabet person has tried to walk as an openly gay person on the streets of a Muslim city. And probably no American Columbia student has seen loved ones slaughtered or lived under the threat of a random rocket exploding nearby.


Roots of Hate    


From what does antisemitism arise? Surely, all those young people on college campuses exhibiting hatred for Jews today have not suffered a personal offense at the hands of a Jew. Surely, the Jews aren’t, as is taught to children in Gaza, the source of the world’s evil and the reason the common Palestinian lives in total dependency on the whims of well-fed Hamas leaders who spend financial aid on weapons and not on infrastructure other than tunnels. In Gaza lies the perfect example of dissimulation not unlike other historic examples, such as in Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain. I’ll add that in mentioning history, I emphasize the influence of the past on today’s antisemitism.


How is it that such a small fraction of the world’s population during any generation should become the scapegoat for so many evils over the course of thousands of years, especially in light (or darkness, depending upon perspective) of all those actual evils perpetrated by gentiles on others during ethnic conflicts or national movements? Does the answer lie in the death of Christ? The Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, and Babylonians might have been precursors of modern antisemites, but none of them could ascribe their hatred to the death of Christ, since all lived in BC time and all were acting on territorial imperatives and hegemony.


But when that one mob in Jerusalem chanted about 2,000 years ago: “Crucify Him, Crucify Him,” they set in motion an enculturation that has lasted till today. From that moment on generations of Christians of different denominations held the Jews accountable for Christ’s death and continue to do so today in spite of the absolution of Jews during the Third Session of the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. The Council proclaimed, “The Jewish people should never be presented as one rejected, cursed or guilty of Deicide. What happened to Christ in His passion cannot be attributed to the whole people then alive, much less to those of today.” (Just wondering: Is there a parallel in blaming 21st-century Caucasian Americans for slavery?)


What of Arabs in the vicinity of Israel and Iranians geographically separated from Israel, all of who have no emotional link to the death of Christ? From whence does their hatred arise? With regard to Iranians’ hate, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, place the roots of Iranian antisemitism in the writings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the guy who took over after the fall of the Shah. * Khomeini wrote in his book Islamic Government, “From the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present.” The thought is now embedded in the minds of Iranians’ current leaders, probably some of them unfamiliar with the exact passage, such is the nature of enculturation and scapegoating.


But what of the affluent, coddled students at Columbia, none, my sound guess is, familiar with Khomeini’s writings and many who probably couldn’t find Gaza on a map? Could one ascribe the students’ actions to unfettered immaturity? College students—young people in general—have often rioted over a school’s basketball or football victory, running through the streets and destroying randomly property in college towns. As I think about the sentence I just wrote, I’m not dismissing that unfettered immaturity that is also evident on beaches during spring break. Apparently, any reason is reason to join a mob, any reason is sufficient to scapegoat.   


About That Mob Yelling, “Crucify Him”


Imagine having one moment in your life that others might use to pigeonhole your entire life, then transpose that to a moment in the history of a people that others have used and still use to label them. The simulation of Jew as evil through history is a dissimulation that has resulted in deaths, exile, and persecution. The twentieth century’s Holocaust was a culmination of historical antisemitism that included the expulsion of Jews from Spain, for example. After a millennium and a half of coexistence with other “Spaniards” (e.g., Visigoths) on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jewish population was forced out by a decree of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. About one thousand five hundred years of off-and-on violence, but essentially a coexistence marred by infrequent but still lethal waves of antisemitism, such as the 1366 and 1391 pogroms, all that Jewish presence in Spain abruptly ended with the Alhambra Decree in 1492. Under Ferdinand and Isabella Jews who did not convert to Christianity had to leave.


Well, that’s one way to eliminate antisemitism, and the same thinking applies to antisemites who want Israelis to leave Israel. That outcome seems to be what students at Columbia want in the Middle East and by extension applicable to Jews in New York through virtual pogroms (i.e., hate crimes) and exiles of fellow students and esteemed faculty members currently on the campus.


Antisemitism as a Form of Anti-intellectualism


If I were asked what defines an intellectual, I would offer that an intellectual is one who can distinguish between the general and the specific. Intellectuals can deal in generalities as long as they know the flaw in inductive reasoning. A slight or offense by one Jew does not translate into a fault of all Jews. The supposedly bright students who have threatened fellow Jewish students don’t seem to be as bright as they pretend. No act of another, not even the act of calling for a Deicide, is the fault of someone else separated not only by space, but also by time.


The Ostriches on the Quad


Apparently, antisemitism has—hopefully, “had”— its practitioners in Columbia’s administration and faculty. These “adults” feigning intellectual superiority and objectivity seem never to have had anyone confront them for their beliefs and biased characterization or generalizing of Jews. Did no one see a problem existed? Maybe those who had subtle or overt inklings of bias on campus buried their heads rather than speak out. Why upset the proverbial apple cart, especially if one had yet to attain tenure? But maybe antisemitism crept stealthily into Columbia’s society over decades so that few noticed its gradual entrenchment.


Anecdotal Analogy Warning: Dive, Dive, Dive


I am in the midst of cataract surgery, the right eye having been through the process earlier this week, the left eye to be dealt with next week. Why do I mention this? After the right eye’s procedure, I saw a different world than I had seen: Colors were brighter, more intense, especially the blues and yellows. Closing the repaired right eye, I saw a different world through the left eye. A duller world. Next week, I’ll see the same through both eyes, I assume. The point is that over the years I had no way of knowing that my world was becoming duller, less vivid. I wasn’t seeing what you probably see if your eyes are healthy. I wasn’t purposefully ignoring the diminished sight because I didn’t know I had diminished sight. The fading was gradual.


Is that what happened at Columbia? Antisemitism gradually pulled the shade over the window of insight. Faculty members, some of them Jews, worked on committees and performed research with antisemites without seeing their prejudice. If that is the case, then they are analogs of my eyes beclouded by cataracts. And if the Jewish faculty members did recognize the insidious nature of antisemitism on campus, were they ostriches out of cowardice?


History tells me that just as Spanish Jews experienced pogroms and exiles, so future Jews will undergo further persecution at the hands of those who have no full understanding of the origin of their hate. But simple acquiescence isn’t really a good option. The Holocaust teaches us that in modern times real genocidal acts are possible. Jews can’t like Christ on the Cross say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” In these modern times, death is easy and victims of hate can be whole populations. Acts of self defense are not only moral, they are justifiable on the most basic level of survival.


*https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-iran-hates-israel-anti-semitism-gaza-4f7ad96e