Are you satisfied with society and current culture? No? Maybe you occasionally think about moving to some idyllic spot to start life over free from turmoil. Well, stop wishing and take action. Utah has that place, more specifically a commune called Riverbed Ranch is that place. Pack your things.


New York City resident (NYC) meets Amish Mormon (AM).*


NYC: Where did you say you were going?


AM: Utah, a bit southwest of Salt Lake City.


NYC: Why? Why are you leaving your quaint community in the lush, fertile Great Valley for a semiarid wasteland? I thought you people lived an ideal life in harmony and abundance, what with the community barn-raising, common values, and freedom from cell phone calls and tractors. Thought you were happy in that Norman Rockwell-like life behind plow horses and in little black buggies.


AM: Life is changing for us. Some of us have even been featured on television, and tourists have invaded obtrusively. I’m taking my family farther away from encroaching local culture. Going to help start a commune in Utah, going to the OCR co-op in Riverbed Ranch in Juab County, plan to live off-grid there like here, just to maintain a life of Self-Reliance based on faith and family and away from the deafening sounds of I-81 and burgeoning Lancaster.


NYC: Hmmnnn. I just read about that. It’s a commune established by Philip Gleason, 74. Everyone is supposed to be self-reliant, Emerson-style. But how will the commune avoid the pitfalls that destroyed Brooke Farm or Janesville or Heaven’s Gate. From what I remember Brooke Farm failed as people relied on the few to do the work for the many. Some just didn’t do their share of the work. Others, doing more than their share, became disgruntled. And don’t you have a pretty secure commune in good old PA? A commune of shared values and work?


AM: We do and we don’t. We’re losing more of our young to modern society.


NYC: But what will the effect be on your youth in a commune not held together by the bonds of a common faith? Heck!—Excuse my foul NY language—the new residents of Riverbed Ranch, though currently mostly Mormon, have secular motives. What drives then together is a negative motivation: The desire to ‘get away’ from the 'craziness' of the modern world and the current political climate under the Biden administration.” At least that’s what I understand from an article in the Daily Mail. **


Plus, it’s estimated that each family will need to invest $35,000 for a buy-in and spend a couple hundred thousand to build a home there. The commune will have its own government, as the report reads, “OCR residents vote and assume roles on its own Board of Directors, and have a court-like system to solve arguments through the Committee of Disputes.” What could go wrong, right? Get the key word there? It’s disputes. In other words, people take the foibles of humanity with them wherever they go. That’s what has happened to every Utopia ever established, even the Franciscans, a group that has fractured into orders and suborders because of disputes about what St, Francis had in mind when he founded his first commune in the 13th century. “Even before the death of Francis in 1226, conflicts developed within the order.” ***  What makes you think that Riverbed Ranch will not succumb to a similar fate? Besides, most of the commune’s residents are Mormons, a sect whose faith differs from yours. I see conflict in your future.


AM: But modern society is becoming far too intrusive. The government keeps imposing more regulations on our farms.


NYC: I think you ought to read the Benefits, Features, Costs, Obligations and Bylaws of Riverbed Ranch before you load up the buggy to head west. If you can find a computer in your local library, go to OCR's website. Look at my laptop. See if you still want to move there after reading about this utopia. Here it is: ****


A share in the Utah OSR Land Cooperative gives you these benefits:


A cooperative’s equivalent of a title to 2 acres at the Riverbed Ranch modern homesteading community
Two acre-feet of water rights (that’s 651,702 gallons a year)
One vote for electing members of the co-op board of directors.
Opportunity to participate in group purchases of products and services needed to build your homestead
Opportunity to sell your products and services through the co-op, and
The opportunity to spearhead the creation of sub-cooperatives to provide jobs and goods and services to the co-op and/or outside customers.
Features


The Utah OSR Land Co-op’s Riverbed Ranch homesteading community will feature:


An RV and camping park. This way, shareholders who choose to do so can live in the RV park while building out their homestead
A greenbelt area running up the middle of the community, including a hiking trail, honeybee-friendly trees and bushes, a road, and future plans of a creek
High-speed fiber optic Internet provided by Elon Musk’s Starlink system.
Co-op store for importing and exporting goods
A future BMX bicycle course for kids to enjoy


Additional Community Features


Similar to an industrial park, the Utah OSR Land Co-operative has set aside 45 acres for the following privately owned and operated services:
Academy of Self-Reliance higher-learning campus
OSR K-12 campus
Assisted Living / Retirement Home
Whole Health / Life Coach clinic
Child Rescue Home
Young Mothers Home
Equine / Canine Therapy Barn
Ropes course


Obligations


Each shareholder agrees to build the following:
A passive solar home, of at least 600 square feet, that requires little or no energy to heat or cool. But, we recommend at least 800 square feet of living space.
Barn for animals and/or storage (no minimum size)
Greenhouse, minimum of 600 square feet, 1,200 recommended.
Garden/orchard
6” well with 2-horse power pump with 400′ of lift.
Approved sanitation system (ie. septic).
Each prospective shareholder is asked to submit a one-page “Transition Plan” with timelines and budgets for funding the above build-out before the shareholder agreement is approved.
The Utah OSR Land Cooperative is an agricultural co-op organized under Title 3 of the Utah Code. That means that your 2 acre slice of heaven has to be agriculturally productive every year. There are two ways to accomplish that:
Owner/operator makes the land productive, or
You own, but someone else operates.
You don’t have to live on your land, it just needs to be agriculturally productive.


Costs


Initial – A share in the Utah OSR Land Co-operative costs $35,000, more if you want a lot larger than 2.0 to 2.4 acres.
Anticipated – The costs vary widely depending on how large of a home, barn/shop, and greenhouse you plan on building.  The COVID insanity has driven the cost of building materials up significantly. Since none of our shareholders have completely finished building their homes, we don’t have hard figures yet on estimated costs for various sized homes.  Our best guestimate for the bare minimum amount of money you need to finish out your farmstead (small house, small barn/shop, small greenhouse, and a well) is $235,000.
A safe figure for planning your home is $120 to $150 per square foot for material and labor.  Currently, the wells are costing around  $30,000, which included the pressure tank and spigot setups.
For those with limited resources, if you can do your current job online, and have at least $100,000 in available funds, you could put in a well, water tank, solar, septic and a greenhouse. Then you could live utility-free in an RV inside the greenhouse during the Winter, and work your online job to earn the rest of the funds to build out your home.


NYC: Still want to go?






* Disclaimer: Whereas it is possible there is an Amish Mormon out there somewhere, his or her existence is less than probable, maybe something on the order of an anarchist parliamentarian.


**WILL POTTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 02:00 EDT, 16 June 2024 | UPDATED: 04:53 EDT, 16 June 2024.  Americans sick of the 'cultural revolution' under Joe Biden are setting up incredible off-grid city in the DESERT hundreds of miles away from civilization with their own government and courts... and offer chilling prediction for the future of the country


***Britannica online.


**** Link in Potter’s article

\The U.S Department of Energy, which did little since its inception under Jimmy Carter to make the country energy independent, claims to be driven by Americans’ and foreign allies’ best interests. That, I hope, is true, but intentions pave many roads to nowhere, and the government is notorious for such paving with Solyndra standing out as the main example: half a billion bucks down the drain in just two years, and today no one rides on that road to nowhere (bankruptcy). Good intentions have built such highways.


So, when the DOE announces an alteration in liquid natural gas production and shipment, shouldn’t we be concerned? LNG is a handy way to get natural gas to European allies cut from Russia’s supply lines. Not to worry, DOE tells us. It’s all good.


And maybe it is. LNG production and shipments have increased in recent years. DOE writes, “We need to know what these expanded exports mean for available domestic consumption, for American industries, and household energy prices. By updating the analyses now, we’ll be better positioned to avoid export authorizations that diminish energy availability here at home, undermine our economy, and worsen the consequences of climate change." Sounds good. But note how that statement ends with “the consequences of climate change.”


It seems undeniable that DOE’s demands for changes in home appliances, driven by its commitment to climate change initiatives, will further strain the financial resources of middle and lower class Americans. Yes, appliances will be more energy efficient, but their initial costs will be higher, and coupled with the increases in energy costs suffered by American families over the past three years—increases caused by Biden’s policies that will continue—the effect on families will likely be more negative than positive.


And that goal of independence and low energy costs that motivated Jimmy Carter and not fulfilled until the brief four years of the Trump Administration is once again just a goal. The emphasis on green energy and climate change will ensure that the goal will remain as distant and unreachable as it was from the Carter years  to the Trump years.


As you drive your expensive EV to the next charging station, you might want to consider the consequences of an administration obsessed with climate change. Energy costs have risen by as much as 25% under the current administration and your ability to buy gasoline powered cars and less expensive appliances is fading under increasing numbers of mandates and regulations. Certainly, the increases in energy costs have affected many. According to a CNN report by Tami Luhby, “nearly 20 million households are behind on their utility bills.”*


Maybe you’re all in on the “existential threat” Biden says climate change poses, so increases in energy costs do not concern you. But 20 million families feel an existential threat from a government that makes an enemy of modern life that rose from an abundance of cheap energy.


*https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/utility-bills-arrears-summer/index.html

Math teacher (MT): Okay, kids, today’s lesson is functions.


Kids: Aw, Mr. Trump, do we have to?


MT: Well, if you want to know why the school is overcrowded, why, there are not enough desks for all of you, why your classmates, speak 25 different languages, and why there are illegal aliens sleeping in the gym, then learning about functions is essential to your education and to your daily life as a kid in this jam-packed school.


Kids all at once: ¿Tenemos que aprender esto?
            هل علينا أن نتعلم هذا
            Eske nou dwe aprann sa?
            我們有必要學這個嗎？
            Je, tunapaswa kujifunza hili?
            Anyị ga-amụta nke a?
            Naha urang kedah diajar ieu?
            Bunu öğrenmek zorunda mıyız?
            Ngaba kufuneka sikufunde oku?
            Do we have to learn this?


MT:  Honestly, just one Administration ago when I was in office, kids didn’t need this lesson, but the current Administration and NYC’s sanctuary status make it a de facto assignment. Think of it as another Democrat mandate. Anyway, we can begin by asking, “What is a function?”


It’s a math machine into which we input something and that produces an output. Often people describe it as a vending machine: Put money in. Get something out. Think of it as a ballot box into which we put in our votes and that spits out a Leftist President, or as a Democrat House into which we put false claims of Russian Collusion and that produces an impeachment, or further as a media that hears one story about a laptop and fabricates another story about Russian disinformation…


So, anyway, a function can be graphed. We say, for example, that “Eff” of “x” equals something, which we write as “f(x) = 2x+3” or maybe “f(x) = 2x^2.” Now that first example produces a line on a graph that runs upward to the right, like this:  /; but the second example produces a somewhat U-shaped line, or parabola—not really U-shaped, since the upward stems flare out wider on the Y-axis. However, there is a graph line that is U-shaped when f(x) = x^4. And it’s this f(x) = x^4 that tells us why this classroom is overcrowded and the gym houses illegal Immigrants.


You see, kids, I had taken illegal border crossings down to the bottom of the “U” (on the left side of the “U”) until my successor decided to open the border. Immediately, the line became virtually vertical, as on the right side of the letter ”U.” In my term, the line plummeted virtually to zero on the Y-axis and flattened at the bottom of the Y-axis like the bottom of the “U.” In a single day, Joe Biden reversed that trend and sent the right side of the “U” skyward like a rocket as tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of unvetted illegal aliens crossed the border.



So, the Biden math ought to be labeled as the “Biden function,” as B(x), or “b of x.” produces a runaway output headed toward 8 billion (the entire population of the planet) illegals in the country as everyone races across the border to get unlimited free stuff. If the human population were infinite, the Biden function would be infinite.




    


    

Once More into the Breach


Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with …[the] dead! —Henry V, Act III, Scene I


What was that tactic Lieutenant Colonel, a mining engineer, employed in the Union cause at Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1864 “Battle of the Crater”? Oh, yeah. He dug a tunnel under Confederate ramparts and placed barrels of gunpowder in a chamber below the unsuspecting Rebels. The scheme, which in short order backfired, killed more than 300 Confederate soldiers and opened a hole in the Rebel defensive position.


“Backfired?” You say?


Yes, the crater became a death trap for Union soldiers as Rebel reinforcements rushed to replace their wounded and killed. Standing on higher ground, the Confederates had an advantage over Union soldiers trying to run through the crater.


Joe Biden’s Crater


So, on his first day in office, Joe Biden “blew a hole” in the border’s defenses. In a reversal of fortune, the Union saw illegal migrants in the millions rush through the Biden Crater, eventually leading to Biden’s recent attempt to close the breach he created. But too little, too late: Many Union citizens lost their lives to illegal criminal activity and fentanyl. Biden’s poll numbers on border security have fallen. The scheme has backfired.


In the contest between the Union and South-of-the-Border rebels, Biden has lost the “Battle of the Crater.” As in Shakespeare’s Henry V, do we close up the breach with the bodies of those who died because of Biden’s scheme?

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” (Hamlet, V.i)


Thus runs Hamlet’s eulogy upon the skull of court jester Yorick uncovered by the gravedigger. With apologies to the Bard, here’s my version.


“Alas, poor New York! I knew the place, Horatio; a place of infinite entertainment and possibility; it hath borne me in its taxis and subway trains many times; and now how abhorred my imagination is! For I will not go back to a place bereft of freedom and merriment, a place of a justice system more corrupt than Yorick’s rotted corpse, a place that is a mere skeleton of its former greatness.”


The Trump Verdict


While the Left gloats over the results of the Trump trial and the Right ponders how America got to this state of domestic turmoil and, more significantly, how to mitigate it, the untended problems of the country continue: Fentanyl deaths numbering in the tens of thousands, illegal immigration, increased year-over-year inflation, creeping socialism with its inevitable stifling of both the economy and individual freedom, increased energy prices and regulations, a Federal bureaucracy acting as de facto legislators, mandates for auto manufacturers to make cars few people want, social justice warriors (DEI), Democratic Party operatives in the state and federal bureaucracies, and a two-tiered justice system that sends FBI and ATF agents in full SWAT gear during nighttime raids to homes of Americans like pro-lifer Mark Houck * and gun-dealer/airport manager Bryan Malinowski (whom they killed).


But the Left, the architects of the “Russian Collusion Hoax,” the “Hunter Biden Laptop Misinformation Claim,” and expenditures of citizens’ resources on illegal immigrants’ free money (debit cards), free transportation, free housing, free food, free education, and free health care, seem oblivious to the consequences of their policies. Because the mainstream press is dominated by either shortsighted or complicit reporters, there’s only the smallest chance that anyone will be held responsible for those policies.


Equal Outcomes?


So, the Left will gloat over the Trump verdict until they are personally affected by the world they have invented for everyone else, a world in which innocents suffer and die through the actions of illegal aliens. Never mind. “We got him!” they’ll say, as they try him on salacious details from years ago, all the while ignoring Ashley Biden’s showering with her dad as recorded in her diary. Ah! What’s a little incestuous activity in the life of a Democratic politician? Didn’t the Democrats say “It’s just sex” after Clinton’s Oval Office fellatio escapades with an intern?


Where’s that equity of outcomes the Left keeps promulgating?

• See online accounts: Mark Houck's Family, Children Relive Harrowing FBI…; Acquitted pro-life activist Mark Houck reveals details of ' …; and other reports. Malinowski’s death, wholly avoidable, was the subject of a congressional hearing with the ATF director. And did you know that in its raid on Trump’s home, the FBI was authorized to use deadly force?
  Really! Were FBI agents prepared to shoot Secret Service agents, Melania, or Barron to satisfy the desires of librarians (the archivists)?

Know thyself (translation “know yourself” or “Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton”).


The dictum written at the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi has engendered discussions since the time of Heraclitus—and probably before. We have our own versions, such as “going off in search of oneself.”


There’s no way to know when we humans began to wonder about identity, but surely any human brain during the history of our species could have sought such self-knowledge, especially in the context of a life lived among others: Others past and present represented by oral and written expressions of what it means to have (or be) an identity.


Lost?


Have we been programmed since the time of Freud to believe we are “lost”? Is there a pervasive enculturation of identity crisis that has, for example, led to addiction on the heavy end and new-age-grasping at pseudo-psych on the light end of the scale of Self? Or is the search for identity driven early on by teenage hormones and the drive to determine one’s destiny through independence that frees a person from known parental and adult controls possibly into a dependence on charismatic leaders?


There are two ways to find identity, one easy and the other hard. The easy way lies in attaching oneself to a group: Political, religious, craft, labor (union), cult, military, philosophical. The hard way involves extensive soul-searching, often in isolation or in some quest. I suppose there’s a third way: Through mind-bending enhanced by drugs of some kind, some so potent they remove the Self during out-of-body experiences.


The Quest


The search for identity has long been a theme in the arts, from Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus to the characters in James Joyce’s and John Updike’s novels. The plethora of self-help books is testimony to this tradition. I confess that I initiated this website as a guide to Self through mental mapping because knowing WHERE we are is often the context of WHO we are.


Such a tie between place and Self is the context in any society for “appropriateness” and “inappropriateness.” Obvious examples? Senator John Fetterman in hoody and shorts in the Capitol; cussing loudly in a library’s reading room; playing loud music on public transportation. In fact, place plays such an important role in the search for identity that some people travel to natural wonders they believe to house mystical gateways to identity, like the Grand Canyon, Kilimanjaro, and to sites like Sonoma and Lhasa, where they believe they can “find themselves.” I suppose that such mystical places have increased by several orders of magnitude with the advent of Zoom calls, FaceTime, and virtual reality.


Can Identity Be Found outside the Context of Place?


An anecdote: I remember being home one morning when a friend FaceTimed me from Siccar Point in Scotland, a geologic feature that inspired a key insight of the “Father of Geology” James Hutton and through his writings, influenced me. I had put Siccar Point on an unrealistic bucket list I could never complete, and yet there I was via FaceTime at a place that had captivated my own thinking and informed my enthusiasm for geology, a key to the way I see the world and my place in it. Through the tech of that call I was and simultaneously wasn’t in a place that had influenced my Weltanschauung and my sense of who I was on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. As Hutton wrote about the geology he had observed, the planet was one formed by processes rooted in the deep past and that continues not just in the present, but will continue to an indefinite future. “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,” Hutton concluded, “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Such a conclusion became part of my perspective on my own finite existence, one that I will live out in places that were and will be different from what I can know in just a short lifetime.


Searches Made Easy


Self-help books, YouTube videos, social media connections, actual travel, and self-examination: Searching for one’s identity is easy nowadays—if it weren’t so difficult. The difficulty lies in the myriad options and the pressures to define oneself or to wear the appropriate mask. A number of TikTok shorts reveals a wide swath of humans desperate to define their identities as unique through body piercings, tattoos,“gender identifiers” like plural pronouns, and behavior deemed to deviate from traditional cultural standards or stretch them into hyperbole.


Identity Shapes World View; World View Shapes Identity


I know that my own identity fits into the mold of western civilization with some faint echoes of eastern thought. The West is largely the product of ancient Greek thought and Christian philosophy and theology. That Weltanschauung is a basis of my identity that I probably can’t shake. If I seek myself, I will inevitably do so in that context. I might adopt some characteristics of Orientals, but they will be addenda to a life already lived as an Occidental.


Find oneself? Are we as lost as contemporary society wants us to think we are? Maybe we need merely to understand our world views sufficiently to articulate them to achieve a sense of identity. Know oneself? Does the quest for such self knowledge lead to unnecessary doubt and anxiety? Do modern searches for identity occur under predetermined archetypes framed by culture? If so, then in finding ourselves, we are really finding others, and knowing ourselves means knowing others or stereotypes.

In Episode 4, Season 3 of The Orville, Gordon takes a version of the Rorschach test. His interpretations add up to good comedy as he sees in each image, we assume from his responses, “dirty pictures”—as in porn dirty. It’s a good example of how we carry our emotional baggage, biases, and personal interests with us wherever we go. In the case of Gordon, sexual innuendo lies in the eye of the beholder.


Rorschach tests come in many forms. Images in the news outlets and online also serve to reveal underlying baggage, the most recent example coming to my mind is imagery associated with Donald Trump’s visit to the Bronx. The “Gordon” responding in this instance was no less than the governor of New York. Upon being asked to comment on what she saw in the Bronx gathering, she responded “clowns.” Really. Kathy? “Clowns”? You looked at political opponents and saw “clowns”? Well, I guess if you had used Hilary Clinton’s eyes, you might have seen “deplorables.”


“Rorschaching”


Reducing what we see in others to “what first comes to mind” reveals little about others and much about ourselves. Surely, neither Hochul nor Clinton would want to be summed in a single word, especially a derogatory term chosen by a political opponent.


“Rorschaching” opponents because their opinions or perspectives differ is a mark of a simple mind either too lazy or too wrapped in bias to give a reasoned and detailed perspective. Unfortunately, most of us at some time “Rorschach” others.


Both sides of the political aisle have “Rorschached” members of the other side, but I believe there is a subtle difference in their motivations. Members on the Left “Rorschach” from an unwarranted hubris and elitism steeped in actual ignorance but hidden behind a veil of pseudo-omniscience. Members on the Right do so from a frustration born from observing not only the hubris and elitism, but also from the repetition of failed and wasteful policies that, regardless of both the waste and failures, the Left clings to rather than admitting the realities of their policies, such as “sanctuary cities and states” that give away citizens’ resources to noncitizens.


Maybe, Kathy, just maybe, those “clowns” in the Bronx look at the images of illegal aliens with “free stuff” provided by the state and the City of New York and see them through a lens of practicality and realism.

In The Expectation Effect, David Robson writes of the brain’s predictive function:


    “According to an increasing number of neuroscientists, the brain is a ‘prediction machine’ that constructs an elaborate simulation of the world, based as much on its expectations and previous experiences as on the raw data hitting the senses. For most people, most of the time these simulations coincide with objective reality, but they can sometimes stray far from what is actually in the physical world” (12). *


To predict accurately, the brain has to start with precise memories. They are the foundation of expectation; they prime the brain for what is to come. When memory is faulty, the prediction machine fails us. Robson quotes neuroscientist Moshe Bar of Bar-Ilan University in Israel: “‘We see what we predict, rather than what’s out there’” (13).


Joe Biden. Need I elaborate? Okay, then… During his “It’s-mostly-about-me” commencement address at West Point, Biden said he was accepted but turned down an appointment to the Naval Academy. There’s no record of such an appointment, just as there is no record of his having, as he said, three degrees or of graduating at or near the top of his class, of driving a “big rig,” or of some other personal stories like conversations that could never have occurred, like one with French President Mitterrand dead 25 years before the conversation supposedly took place or with the Amtrak train conductor, also deceased before their talk. With regard to his claim about his ranking high among students at Syracuse, fact-checkers have revealed his standing at #76 out of 85 classmates. False memories? Outright lies?


Biden’s numerous falsehoods are rather well documented, so there’s little to be gained by enumerating all of them here. Instead, the focus here is on his brain’s predictive ability and its alignment with realities.


The role of memory in assessing the present is a topic I have mentioned with regard to the eyes’ blindspot. We see with a brain that fills in details not visible to us as we scan a scene. We don’t need all the actual currently available visible details to recognize faces and places we have previously encountered. Does the brain make mistakes in this? Of course: “Oh! Sorry. I thought you were someone else.” But the brain usually serves us well in this regard. We can distinguish among similar people, such as relatives and even between twins. But the key lies in accurate or nearly accurate memories.


Biden’s numerous falsehoods are rather well documented, so there’s little to be gained by enumerating them here. Instead, the focus here is on his brain’s predictive ability and its alignment with realities.


Why Keep Appeasing Iran?


Apparently, Biden’s—like Obama’s—releasing billions of dollars to the Iranian theocracy committed to “death to America” is based on a prediction not founded on experience, that is, on accurate memory. No previous appeasement strategy has worked to mitigate Iran’s disruptive terrorism. The recent release of six billion dollars to the regime shows an alignment out of touch with reality. Just as the Obama/Biden Administration’s nuclear deal met with subterfuge and obfuscation and attacks through Iranian intermediaries, so any prediction that favors a positive expectation is doomed to failure from the start. Yet, Biden will continue to hold expectations not in alignment with reality. Thus, the recent condolences sent to Iran on the death of its president, the “butcher of Tehran,” Raisi.


Why Keep Insisting on EVs?


There is no evidence that America’s switching to carbon neutralism by 2050 will do anything whatsoever to offset the rate of temperature change (supposedly upward) across the planet. No one can quantify the percent of change effected by green tech. In the interim and because of his predictions, America’s energy, the most fundamental reason for the country’s rise to world dominance over the past two centuries, will fail to keep abreast of needs, America’s dependence on outside sources of rare earths and strategic metals will increase, and pollutants associated with “green energy tech” will become a growing environmental threat. Additionally, his expectations that countries like Russia and China will act in world interests and not their own interests, are similarly rooted in faulty memory or in the fog of false and fictional memories.


Will the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars do what Biden predicts? What if, as meteorologist John Shewchuk argues, any current or future rise in temperature is part of an ongoing two-millennia Bray/Hallstatt Cycle ** or 976-year Eddy Cycle related to the ending of the Little Ice Age? Will Biden’s commitment to de-carbonizing America generate the expectations he predicts? And what if, upon looking back in 2050, America finds that extrapolated data—NOAA’s estimates on temperatures derived from U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations that do not exist—provided a biased record over decades? What if Biden’s “existential threat is no more real than his numerous fabrications?


Predictions based on falsehoods are as useful as wings on an ostrich.


Here’s My Prediction


Experience informs my prediction. Biden will continue to expect a world unsupported by past realities.



*Robson, David. (2022)The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. New York. Holt.
**BRAY, J. Glaciation and Solar Activity since the Fifth Century BC and the Solar Cycle. Nature 220, 672–674 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/220672a0

That so many college age students have taken up the sword of antisemitism is a good argument for the reality of social contagion and the need for mental vaccines to protect against epidemic social infections like the recent insidious viral socialism.


The Mind like the Body Needs Immunity


As we know, physical immunity requires the body to “learn” how to protect itself.
Thus, isolating ourselves from ordinary sicknesses does us no good when we encounter them. To simplify: Kids exposed to other kids in school develop immunities. I suspect a number of kids, after a year of homeschooling during COVID, upon their return to classrooms had lost their herd immunity to the sniffles. The simplification is, of course, a generalization, but it also seems to be applicable to the general population. With so many people infected with COVID, I believe that saying most of the population was exposed to the pandemic is a legitimate claim. Did such exposure engender immunity? No way to prove that qualitatively because of the arguable effect of vaccinations, but I could entertain the hypothesis that most of us have some herd immunity protection.


Are 21st Century people Immune to the Plague or the Spanish Flu of 1918?


Like the underground part of a 3,000-year-old Mediterranean olive tree, the roots of antisemitism don’t die. If the above ground trunk dies, the roots grow a new one. The surface expression comes and goes, but it appears to resurface indefinitely.  So, what’s with college students going on antisemitic rampages? How did antisemitism resurface?


On occasion, a fright runs through the population that some old disease like smallpox,  the Black Death, or the Spanish flu will resurface. We fear our long isolation from the disease will make us vulnerable. Look for example, at spring 2024’s return of the Bird Flu.


Are today’s college-age antisemites vulnerable because of their intellectual isolationism? I wonder how many of them have been exposed to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Granted, at 1,049 pages it can be a bit of a slog for Cliff Notes-readers, but for YouTube-savvy young people, numerous videos about the atrocities committed by Nazis are available with a click. And then there’s that relatively short Anne Frank story…


Isolation


Isolation. They just haven’t been exposed to the realities of the Holocaust or the Alhambra Decree of March, 1492, the Spanish Expulsion. And they have similarly not been exposed to antisemites’ unreasoned hate that has resurfaced in groups like the KKK and Neo Nazis. When such “germs” are released into their communities, they have no immunity. The sickness of antisemitism spread rapidly.


And like bacteria and viruses, that sickness mutated into anti-Americanism. Now that campuses have closed, effectively quarantining those with the disease, the sickness once spread through on-campus “carriers” has largely vanished. But there are still carriers, some purposefully infected and lying in wait for a chance to reinfect, probably at political gatherings. No one can count out the potential for flareups in the fall as students return to school, ready to waste more of their parents’ money as their disease returns (or, given the $162 billion Biden “loan forgiveness,” waste YOUR money).


Act Preemptively


Summer affords college administrators the opportunity to quash the sickness before it returns to campuses. But I believe few administrations will act because many believe that acting will only incite more students to return to campus “on a mission.” Unable to infuse the campuses with the anti-antisemitism prophylactics of cosmopolitanism and history, the feckless administrators will probably do little to protect the herd. The isolated will continue their parochial lives while claiming a social justice Anschauung that is irrelevant to those they support from a safe distance, that is, the Hamas terrorists of murderous intent. The American youth will be re-infected. The disease will resurface.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Here we go, reinventing the wheel.


Press Release: “The National Science Foundation has awarded $15.5 million to researchers at the University of Chicago over six years to establish a new field of physics to understand adaptation in living matter.” *


You’re about to fork over $7,078 your our taxes per day during the course of a half dozen years so that people at the U. of Chicago can apply physics to what we already know from paleontology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, neurology, and biochemistry. I just can’t wait for the cascade of papers, no doubt all of them peer-reviewed that the grant winners will produce. Ignore that some of the money will fall into the abyss of administrators’ expenses and travel (to conferences)—the researchers probably never heard of conference calls, Zoom meetings, and email.


I could save the NSF—and you—money.The answer the grantees are looking for is called a brain, with its branching nerves, synapses, neurotransmitters, and all. It’s called stimulus-response and survival. It’s called random adaptations and DNA inheritance. There, now you have it on the cheap. Just saved you 15.5 mil. You’re welcome.


Lest you call me a closed-minded ignoramus, I will provide a short discussion.


Do sponges Dream when They Sleep?


Brains, Donald? Surely, you jest in an Occam’s type of humor.


In 1980 I attended conference on sponges, just about, if not, the simplest multicellular animals composed of cells with different functions working to support survival. Simultaneously. I was neighbor to a visiting medical researcher from Israel who was studying sponges in a search for their means of intercellular communication.


But there’s more to the story.   


Seems that brainless sponges can go to sleep. Somehow the cells in a sponge cooperate in a rest period. The cells shut down through some communication system—maybe biochemical activity.  That they can communicate and cooperate in the absence of a central nervous system might be a key to understanding cancer cells. Strange behavior in an animal without interconnected neurons.These cooperating cells also seem to recognize enemies, as clear boundaries separate encrusting sponges and living coral polyps, another group of simple animals.


Is it all biochemistry? Or are there physical forces involved, Newtonian or quantum mechanical forces? If the latter two, will our 15.5 million dollars provide proof? I’m not confident. As in most NSF funded projects, like the shrimp on a treadmill, there will probably be no accountability. And since this particular expenditure  will fund a ”Center,” I suspect the funding will be renewed six years from now, 12 years from now, and ad infinitum. Justification will lie in the published research papers and government inertia.


Quantum Evolutionary Biology?


A perusal of books on biology and physics might give a hint about what our 15.5 million bucks might buy. Adrian Bejan’s 2016 book The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything and his prior (2013) co-authored (with J. Peder Zane) book Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organizations might foreshadow the U. Of Chicago’s potential output. You are free to see if there is potential for advancing our understanding of adaptation in living matter and information storage.


Unless physicists can pinpoint the subatomic nature of cell communication, tying for example, superposition and entanglement to evolutionary change, I can’t see justification for the expenditure of $15,5 million over six years. Unless they can show that pressure, and not biochemistry or electrochemistry, is how nerves send signals, I have grave doubts about studies focused on “how living matter can store, retrieve, and process information.”


Is physics related to biochemistry? Short answer: Yes. But skeptic that I am, I can’t imagine that this expenditure will produce anything beyond neologisms and new “fields” of study that will perpetuate for decades among the “privileged in-the-know researchers” with little concrete results—much like string theorists who have as yet to run an experiment on a “string,” but who keep getting NSF grants.


Maybe Brains Aren’t All We Hype Them To Be


One could argue that models of matter storing information already exist in crystal formation that is the process of joining molecules in repeated patterns that create minerals abiotically. But I would ascribe those patterns more to chemistry than to physics. Minerals can be thought of as manifestations of chemical properties like valences and the electromagnetic rules of bonding. Sure, some researchers have hypothesized that clay minerals provided a pattern for early life to piggy back, but that remains hypothetical.


Information?


Info? That’s the goto topic among astrophysicists when they write about black holes nowadays. Any component of the Cosmos, from a rock to a person, can be thought of as a carrier of information. Black holes are where such information goes into the eternal trash basket. In the context of astrophysics, I suppose all that trashed information arose from the Big Bang. Will the folks at the new Center for Living Systems resolve the as yet unsolved problems centered in the evolution of this “information”? Will they find the answers in six years? With 15,5 million dollars?


Let’s set a date, say May 18,, 2030, to reassess. See you then. Starbucks? Okay. Maybe one of the Center’s researchers flush with grant money will buy us coffee and explain.


*https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nsf-establish-155m-center-living-systems-university-chicago