“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

At Starbucks, a conservative (C) and a liberal (L) talk.


C: See The Times today?


L: No, why do you ask?


C: Seems it’s really good at reporting history, better at it, in fact, than in reporting “news,” as the word newspaper implies. Got a story about Hunter Biden. Says he was colluding with the State Department to get the Tuscany Region to facilitate Burisma’s business dealings. *


L: And?


C: You libs take the cake! “And?” You ask? First off, The Times is reporting on a story anyone with an ear had heard years ago, the story the Biden Administration quashed in every liberal newspaper and network. Second, if Trump’s son had colluded with the State Department to get a business deal, it would have been front page immediately and would have generated an impeachment. Unbelievable hypocrisy. Unbelievable collusion between the Gray Lady and a political party. Unbelievable gullibility on your part.


L: Trump’s a convicted felon.


C: That’s it. That’s all you got?


L: Now Trump is destroying democracy.


C: Is there a broken connection in your array of synapses? How is this story not important to you? How can you dismiss Biden’s years of corruption? And how can the “esteemed Gray Lady” be so thoroughly manipulated? It was in times past seen as a diligent seeker of truth though it has had liberal leanings for years and a few shocking scandals involving reporters making up stories.


L: Water under the bridge.


C: Nothing more? Not surprised.


*https://nypost.com/2025/04/04/opinion/nyt-is-finally-covering-the-bidens-scandals-years-too-late/

Happy? Why or why not? Could the answer be rooted in your acceptance or rejection of purpose, either cosmic purpose or personal? Allow me another route. Could an atheist or nihilist find happiness in a meaningless world? 


You know, if you ask either, you might get a “Yes,” but would that affirmation be the product of pride? “I’m not a happy person” might be tough to admit in public. Your response could be, “Geez, there’e no pleasing some people,” “Don’t be a stick in the mud,” or “Who cares? That’s your problem, and I don’t need to waste my time on your pessimism and self pity.”


Now, if you’re a happy nihilist, don’t take offense that I suggest happiness does not lie in your life path. And if you believe in unbelief or disbelief, likewise (Oxymoronic, I know).


Atheists, and nihilists—and some existentialists and one or two agnostics, too—aside, most people probably see a role for cause and purpose in their lives. Surely you know, if you have not done so yourself, people who frequently both “discover” meaning in events and actively seek meaning in their lives. Others just willy nilly ascribe it on assumption. The questions “Why did this have to happen?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” stem from this attachment to meaning and to a penchant to see the future’s impact on the present. As a corollary in recent decades, politicians have talked about their legacies, not historical legacies, but distant future legacies (“Generations will look back on what I’ve done for them”). The ultimate forms of this teleological approach to life lie in statements you have heard others make: “It was meant to be,” “It was a match made in heaven,”“If my time is up, well, my time is up,” and the cosmological “The universe is fine-tuned for life.” To go back to those I put aside at the beginning, I believe irony lies in nihilists making plans of any kind. Why bother if all will come to naught? Oh! I get it; there’s that comfort and pleasure fixed to the eternal present, or, “Hey, if this is all there is, I intend to make the most of it.”  


With both cause and purpose in mind, we make plans. We envision our futures and set up Great Expectations that only rarely become the realities we initially envisioned because intervening accidents and the cross purposes imposed by others thwart the perfect fulfillment of just about all we plan. In the circumstances when cross purposes others impose intervene, we might argue that they occur during accidental conjunctions of people on a planet with eight billion people. Someone sometime will buck heads with another and alter the course of a man with a plan.  


Guess Whom I Bumped into Today?


I think those chance meetings people have that changed their lives. “We dated briefly in high school and hadn’t seen each other in years, but c'est la vie, even though we both thought we were happily married…Well, here we are years later living in Florida, our first marriages distant memories.” Did chance bring them together? After all, in a time of great mobility that breeds the expression “small world,” chance meetings are not uncommon. Maybe you, like me, have walked through an airport and encountered a friend you haven’t seen for years. But was some Cosmic Destiny at work? One might think that for those who believe in a universe imbued with purpose, that such an accidental meetup isn’t as accidental as it might seem. 


Randomness bugs the most teleologically minded among us though all of us are driven to accept its inevitable, if infrequent, occurrence. For example, that fender bender that cost you your deductible seems to have been “accidental,” a misfortune that befell you through the physics of the Pauli Exclusion Principle that forbids two objects occupying the same space at the same time. Although Earth’s 148.3 million square kilometers of land surface seem to be space enough to accommodate all of us, it is still finite enough that a car accident is not particularly odd. You aren’t the only one misfortune befell in an  accident.


“Befell” is the appropriate word here because the word accidental derives from the Latin and before that the PIE root for “fall” (cadere, “to fall” in L. and kad, the PIE root for “fall”). With 298 million vehicles on the roads of the US, accidents occur daily, and though we can ascribe their cause to carelessness, inattention, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and mechanical failure, they all conjure up the “forces” of randomness, chaos, and probability to which everyone is subject. “Had I left home just seconds earlier, I would not have been at that intersection where the person ran the red light.” In a random world, uninterrupted bliss in one’s life is only temporarily attainable as exemplified by 69-year-old Harry H. Bliss himself. The real estate dealer stepped off a trolley at West 74th St. and Central Park West on September 13, 1899—and before you ask, no, it was not Friday the Thirteenth, though that might have added a special meaning to this story—where he was hit and killed by an electric taxicab whose driver was exonerated because he had no malice aforethought. In 1899 the entire complement of vehicles in New York was just 8,000. What are the chances? Well, in the instance of Harry Bliss, pretty good. Was it just “his time to go”? 


Is the Universe Random?


You know the two sides of the argument: The universe either sprung—and still springs—from random fluctuations in “the vacuum” or it was “fine tuned” by intelligent design ascribed to a Creator whose methodology was a simple fiat or the unfolding of a singularity too small and too hot to imagine. If it is the product of a Creator, the universe is destined and you, the “universe conscious of itself,” are destined, hopefully for bliss, not in the same manner as Harry, but definitely to the same exhaustion of personal finite time and possibly the beginning for you of the Unending. 


If you accept life as a purposeless biochemical coalition of cells, bacteria, and viruses, then a personal end is merely a return to nothingness in an uncoupling of all those entities entropy plays havoc with your remains. In contrast, if you see life as teleological, then its ending is a transition to a “beyond” in a future made perfect (perfect in its meaning as “complete,” “accomplished,” “finished”). “My work is done here. Keep my legacy going.”


Are the Teleological also the Foolish?


It’s easy for us to scoff at or dismiss the assumptions and faiths of others. The motivation for doing so probably has something to do with both hubris and insecurity, the former driven by the Ego and the latter by the same Id that provides us with nightmares. Certainly, people have a tendency to hold onto their beliefs, most of which were attained through enculturation. Any contrary belief can appear as a threat to the Ego. With regard to security, each of us can shield the Ego by categorizing conflicting beliefs as nonsense. 


That which we can categorize is that which lends us a sense of personal security. When everything “out there” fits neatly into a framework, the world offers order and not confusion. Relegating others’ beliefs to superstition and anti-intellectualism could also be the product of history as members of any belief have shown themselves to be cruel, corrupt, or just downright evil in perpetrating harm to others. I think of those terrorists who cry out the name of their deity in suicidal attacks. Acts like the massacre of the 120 members of the Baker–Fancher wagon train in Utah by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints do justify for some a condemnation of Mormons and their faith for any hypocrisy overlying a sense of righteousness. But what religion houses perfect practitioners? Certainly, there’s reason to question the faith of clergy who ran tribunals during the Medieval Inquisition period in Europe.


To borrow from comedian Nate Bargatze, I might in paraphrase ask, “Sorry for my smirk, but did you just say you are a Big Foot expert? Have you also spent time looking for the Lock Ness Monster?” Or to put the questions in the context of religion, “What’s that you say? Some guy named Smith found golden tablets buried near Manchester, NY, after which his followers led by Brigham Young gathered a group and traveled to Utah, to found a church that has a great tabernacle choir composed of women living in bigamists’ families, and…Bang! A nineteenth century massacre in Utah.”


In the context of any logic, belief is easy to mock. But strangely, even logic presupposes, or rather, has underlying assumptions just as math can’t prove itself—as that famous Incompleteness Theorem of Kurt Gödel indicates. So, all of us, nihilists, atheists, believers, logicians, and mathematicians all rely on some belief. In the instance of smirking at Brigham Young and his entourage, the naysayer believes in a superior point of view characterized by suspicion and doubt toward other perspectives. All religions are subject to criticism by outsiders, just as by today’s scientific perspectives, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are subject to doubt or at least alternative views because both those ancients incorporated telos in their thought. Telos is the “end” to which an acorn of necessity strives to fulfill its destiny as an oak tree. Telos implies “purpose,” “goal.” It includes the notion of cause. 


So, I suppose anyone could smirk at another who thinks he is acorn-like, destined to fulfill a purpose in a universe of so much order we can look at the Periodic Table of Elements or the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature and say, “So, the universe DOES make sense!” Both believers and nonbelievers can be happy in that knowledge.


A Fine-Tuned Universe Fine-Tuned Just for You   


The assumption called the Anthropic Principle underlies a purposeful universe. The Cosmos was fine-tuned for you because the probability, regardless to Hawking’s arguments against it, is mind-bogglingly low.  John Leslie points out in his Universes (1989) that even the slightest change in the strength of the four fundamental forces would make both the stars and life impossible. So, if you take the stars out of the cosmic equation, you also eliminate elements #4 through #92, meaning that with regard to the six elements (H,O,C,N,S,P) essential for life as we know it, the only remaining life element is hydrogen, not bad if you want all life-forms to look like the Hindenburg.


With regard to those fundamental force strengths, Leslie notes that gravity is 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. “Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster” (5). This is how he summarizes:


    “The force strengths and particle masses are distributed across enormous ranges. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn then thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity” (6). *


Mind-boggling, right? All those numbers coincidentally arising either by chance or design just to provide a venue for you as you decide which foot goes in which shoe or whether you really need that cafe mocha with extra whip at a cost increasingly edging toward $6.00 for a Venti. Change those relative force strengths by only a little and you eliminate the universe you know (the one with the Venti). If you accept them as a “perfect balance for life,” do you think the equilibrium is purposeful, or do you believe the balance is accidental and only in retrospect do we from the human necessity of or affinity for finding patterns ascribe the balance to God?  What’s your take? Ask yourself, also, whether the Natural Laws have produced the physics of the cosmos or were simply imposed as our brains sought security in recognizable patterns.**


A Universe without Purpose


Again, one might ask “What’s the counterargument to suggest a mechanism for achieving without an intelligent agent the requisite balance of forces?” Well, an atheist could argue that if any one of those four forces came into existence before the others, its strength would determine the relative strengths of the other forces. And that is a reasonable argument given what we know. Of course, if things were different…They would be different. The argument depends, of course, on how that current balance of forces couldn’t be otherwise in this universe, which, of course, is a bit of a circular argument. And then there’s the “turtles all the way down explanation” I mentioned in a recent blog. After a talk on the universe, Bertrand Russell was approached by a woman who refuted his statements by telling him the world rested on a giant turtle. When Russell asked what the turtle stood on, she replied, “Why it’s turtles all the way down.” In that vein of reasoning, an atheist might argue for an eternal universe, or rather, for an eternal set of universes, each preceding the other in the manner of a Big Bang followed by a Big Crunch followed by a Big Bang followed by…”You get the thing,” as President Biden might say. So regressively, “It’s universes all the way down.” ***


In fact, Leslie’s argument for a universe with a purposeful start derives not on the absolute force strengths but rather on the ranges of those strengths: “Possibilities not straightforwardly countable can still be compared with respect to their ranges…an inexpert dart thrower gets little hope from the reflection that the infinite number of points inside a bulls-eye is no smaller than the infinite number outside…A Cicero who, flinging a great many letters in the air, then actually finds they have fallen so as to form the Annals of Ennius, cannot reasonably exclaim, ‘There’s nothing remarkable here since there were countless slightly different ways in which this could have happened’” (199).


Is it possible for those letters Cicero tossed to fall as a meaningful document, both grammar and syntax incorporated with correctness in paragraphs with unity, coherence, and emphasis sufficient to earn an A in Composition 101?


So, if the atheist says, “Well, if there are 1010^1115 possible universes, then the chances that one—the One we are in—is as it is for us, that is, fine-tuned for life as we know it. There’s also a chance letters tossed by Cicero fall to make a meaningful document in one of those other universes.There’s also a chance that an indefinite number of chimpanzees sitting each in front of a keyboard will in some duration have typed all of Shakespeare’s plays. There’s no need for purpose. No need for Telos, and no need for a teleological perspective. Yes, on Earth acorns do grow into oak trees if they are not by some squirrel interrupted in fulfilling their role, but in an alternative universe acorns might grow into babies or cars. Acorns do what they do on Earth because this universe randomly evolved that way. You do what you do…


And in 1010^1115 universes it is likely that everything about your life could be duplicated, meaning that even what you find meaningful is just a product of a randomness beyond your imagining. Your doppelgänger is out there somewhere right now wondering if you exist and think the same way. Your doppelgänger in another universe envisions a purpose you share. At least two universes in the multi-universe were fine-tuned for both of you.


Happy in a Purposeful World, Happy in a Random World


Back to the top, here: Are you happy? I guess you could reiterate what the Buddha said, “There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.” Obviously, even in this universe, there are many paths, so whether or not you are on a path toward nowhere or somewhere is irrelevant if you want it to be irrelevant. If you contend the universe has order and meaning, then you have another question to answer: Does the order impose predestination. “Sure, you’re happy (or unhappy), but you don’t have a choice.” If you contend the universe is random, you might still hear the same statement because the balance of forces require the universe to be what it is. Your happiness originated in the Big Bang, in the collision of neighboring universes, or in the unfolding of a universe obeying certain laws and constants. Wow! Did I just accidentally make an argument for predestination? Well, if I did, it was for predestination WITHIN this universe, and not beyond this universe. Hakuna matata.




*Leslie, John. 1989. Universes.

**As a corollary: Is math derived or imposed? Is the Cosmos a mathematical construct? The “constants,” and numbers like 1/137, the “Planck length,” π, and the speed of light demand an answer to “Did the constants and laws exist before the universe?” “Did those constants and laws cause the universe to be as it is?”  Here's a summary of Nietzsche's take on teleology: "Since Nietzsche denies the presence of divine purpose in nature, he tries to explain the apparent teleology of living organisms and their evolutiono in terms of the will to power. So he writes:
         ...that becoming stronger brings with it arrangements which resemble a teleological design--: that the apparent ends are not intended but, as soon as the supremacy over a smaller power is established and the latter works as a function of the greater, an order of rank, of organization must awaken the semblance of an order of means and end.'" George A. Morgan. 1941. What Nietzsche Means. Boston. Harvard University Press, Harper Torchbook  edition, 1965 Harper & Row Publishers. pp. 81, 82.


***The WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) suggests to some that our universe might have had a Harry H. Bliss-taxicab moment as it collided with another universe or was entangled in the fender of another universe in a wreck called the CMB or WMAP Cold Spot. From Wikipedia: A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it [the Cold Spot] could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[3] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "... the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true, this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously).








  

Here’s the headline: Columbia grads tear up diplomas to protest school, Mahmoud Khalil arrest: ‘I’m not a proud alumni at all’—Chris Nessi. NY Post. March 30, 2025


Notice anything? Yes in this Age of Disnumbred Pronouns and Illogical Antecedents, when He can be They and She can be Them, Columbia graduate Amali Tower, made the statement Nessi quotes. Sometime, one might think, during the course of a four-year university education at a prestigious school, Amali should have come across the feminine version of alumnus, i.e., alumna. Maybe at her graduation in 2009? And maybe Amali Tower heard at sometime that alumni is the plural for men in particular and for all graduates in general and that alumnae is plural for female graduates. Doesn’t matter. Amali has just ripped up the diploma. Duh, dat dat dahhh daaa, daaa, da dat dahh dahhh.(You know the melody)


So, four years and who can add up how much money for room, board, and all those and items like books for an education all gone in a meaningless symbolic act. Why “meaningless” symbolic act? Well, if Amali needs to prove to a future employer that she graduated from a college, she need only pay a small fee for the school to make a duplicate. Heck. Columbia is so flush with endowment, the school might even print one free of charge. And bypassing paper documentation, there’e always email from the school’s office of records.


But show is all. So, a group of Columbia graduates ripped up their diplomas in a public show of support for a noncitizen who stirred up a campus with unrest, building takeover, harassment of Jewish students, disruption of classes, and general turmoil that included writing graffiti on those sacred ivy-covered campus walls.


I suppose that the diploma-rippers have sincere beliefs that their purpose is just and their actions justified. But I question the nature of an act so easily undone by necessity, that is, the necessity of proving that college education to an employer. And if those diploma-rippers have lifetime jobs that they’ll never abandon till retirement, then what’s the significance of the ripping. In a permanent job, one doesn’t have to prove that degree exists. That’s a fait accompli.


But, as I wrote above, the show is all. Which of the probably relatively wealthy Columbia diploma-rippers has pout money behind the act? Who among them has financially. Supported the Palestinians they say are in need?

It’s hard for me to understand
How others join to give a hand
To those protesting Elon’s brand
By vandalizing someone’s car
In protests now both near and far.
“Why he’s a fascist,” so they say,
“And Trump’s a tyrant, by the way.”


It seems they want the status quo
That gives the taxed both grief and woe
And causes them to work for naught
To pay for this or that whatnot.
And so they gather round the globe.
I ask, “Is each a technophobe?
“I thought the Left was for EVs,
“And all that tech they say relieves
“The Earth from warming fossil fuels.
“Alas, they seem to be such fools.”


The count is not complete just yet,
But 80 owners now regret
They bought a car to do their part
To change the world; it seemed quite smart.
But after raging Leftists burned
Some 80 cars because they spurned
What they once praised and did embrace,
The owners wonder where to drive
A Tesla that can just survive
The damage done in random acts
By vandals roaming in wild packs.


“Is burning cars a Liberal trait?”
I ask, “And what can drive destructive hate
“Toward Tesla owners and their cars?
“Is it the man who’s reached the stars?
“The guy who wants to go to Mars?”
“Or are the vandals willing pawns
“Of foreign actors and their cons?
“Or even puppets pulled by wire
“By libs who can’t relinquish ire
“They have because they’re losing cash,
”The taxes that filled up their cache?”

Whatever purpose they hold dear,
Their object seems to me quite clear;
The mob just wants the good to fear.