Everyone wants to know the future. This interminable discovery that is the present requires constant vigilance and adaptation. How easy life would be with reliable foreshadowing! But, hmmnnn, in whom do we place our trust?


The best job—ever. Weather forecaster. You can be consistently wrong, and no one will hold you accountable. The reason? You put out another forecast while someone evaluates the veracity of your last forecast. And the disgruntled who have to put up umbrellas at picnics and Little League games have their immediate weather to consider. No one can keep up because everyone is immersed in the next forecast or the current weather. Everyone rides the promise of the forecast into a future of surprise that stimulates elation or resignation. Everyone wants to know the future.


An Admission


Prestigious institutes like the one that bears the name of 1918 Nobel Laureate Max Planck, to whom we owe thanks for quantum theory, house brilliant and respected researchers. Over the years, the Planck Institute has branched into sciences other than theoretical physics. Count “climate science” among them. Yes, the Institute’s researchers have joined Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry in tackling the “existential threat” of global warming. And why not? Haven’t they entered the ranks of the unaccountable, the protected realm of TV weather forecasters?


But these guys are scientists; and these guys seem to have some integrity cemented in the tradition of scientific doubt. Science is not science if it is not constantly questioned. And that doubt appears online at Max Planck-Gesellschaft. * In an admission you would likely never hear from Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology admit:


    “To date, all climate models still suffer from one thing: they are not good at taking into account how global warming affects clouds and, conversely, how changes in different types of clouds inhibit or contribute to the observed warming.” *


Yep, those puffy white aggregations of water droplets and ice crystals that harbor shifting shapes our mind’s eye imagines as we look up from our blanket on the grass have an unknown effect like a feedback loop on climate parameters. Add to the effect of clouds other unknowns, such as the change in albedo that comes with reforestation— a popular geo-engineering proposal—and you get a complexity that exceeds the potential of models to predict anything beyond a probable scenario for a region.


Give Them an “A” for Effort


Participation trophies aren’t just limited to American children’s sports teams. The climate guys get them, also, as all those annual COP meetings show. Anyway, here’s one of those forecasts that earns a participation trophy:

'Scientists have calculated how the water balance in Germany will change as the temperature rises. According to their predictions, it will rain more in winter, and there will be more droughts in summer.” **


Question: But will the winter rains offset the summer droughts? What will the evapotranspiration ledger reveal if this predicted scenario prevails for a few decades?


Partial answer: “Hamburg climate researchers [are motivated] to make the threat of global warming more tangible for people today. They are working on models that provide reliable predictions for the coming decades. Such medium-term forecasts are hindered by the fact that the climate is generally subject to relatively large statistical fluctuations. It is therefore difficult to reliably identify clear trends in the near future.” ***


Spend $Trillions


So, what are climate alarmists going to do? Well, Joe Biden and company plan to spend billions to trillions of dollars on every conceivable plan to geo-engineer the planet with little more predictability than your local weather forecaster’s warning that there’s a 50% chance rain will fall on your picnic.


*https://www.mpg.de/11863295/climate-and-transformation
**Ibid.
***Ibid.

What to do, what to do, what to…


So, now, MIT is abolishing the requirement for a DEI statement from applicants. Have the woke awakened? Are they acknowledging that knowledge, skills, and accomplishments are more important in candidates than commitments to political correctness?


But then there’s all that antisemitism raging on campus. “Hey, keep the noise down out there. How’s a researcher supposed to think about Commonwealth Fusion Systems ramping up a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth? You guys think Hamas is interested in furthering research in anything other than death and destruction?”


Come to Jesus Moment


MIT released this statement: “…the threat of outside interference and potential violence is not theoretical, it is real: We have all seen circumstances around encampments at some peer institutions degenerate into chaos. As recently as this weekend, we were presented with firm evidence of outside interference on US campuses, including widely disseminated literature that advocates escalation, with very clear instructions and suggested means, including vandalism.”—Sally Kornbluth, President


Who would have thunk it? Duh!


Why do academics fear taking a stand against anarchy? Can they not distinguish between free speech and hate speech or between peaceful protests with reasoned arguments and shouting epithets, defacing statues, breaking stuff, and threatening Jewish students by the obviously uninformed young pawns of foreign adversaries?


President Sally released her statement on May 6, well into a budding campus crisis. Contrast her delayed statement with Father Hesburgh’s “15-minute rule” at Notre Dame in the late 1960s (see my “Delusions of Wisdom in Ivy League Schools” 5/7/24). Hesburgh was a firm believer in accountability and consequences who also had the insight to anticipate brewing trouble.


Reeling Them in on a Line with Only a Hook


Is there something in the background that makes university administrators feckless? Is it their “feel good” liberalism? Is it their ivory tower isolationism? Maybe their protective aegis of tenure?


University managers come largely from the ranks of university professors. Sure, there are some people with business and finance backgrounds in the mix; they run the business side of universities. But academia proper lies mostly in former or current academics’ hands, many of who spent their careers without the pressure that, say, an industry leader faces to produce or leave: Industry and business thrive in an unforgiving world of strict accountability. Not so in academia, where the privilege of unaccountability provides a context for ineffective and often wasteful decisions; a context recently controlled by wokeness. Vacillating former professors, secure in their employment, have enabled the loudest voices to control campuses. I believe that today’s campuses are the product of a trend of trends.


Academics seem to love trends. It’s this penchant for trends that has been a contributor to today’s campus problems. Once a trend is popularized in colleges, few academics have the temerity to speak against it. The trend typically runs its course toward failure before a replacement trend takes over. This permeates all of academia, even the sciences. Take physics, for example. The job market was open during recent years, as Peter Wolt points out, almost exclusively to “string theorists.” *


String theory was trending—and still is. It has been vogue to hire string theorists even though string theory has no experimental support. Academics love trends. They make them feel secure. The product of the trend? An America with fewer physicists dedicated to practicality and more with their heads in clouds.


Remember one-room schoolhouses? I witnessed the construction of a new elementary school that had no interior walls. The cacophony of different classes simultaneously occupying the same space almost immediately made effective teaching untenable as teachers of different classes struggled to “get control and keep attention.” Lacking the insight of commonsense, those responsible for designing the school wasted a million dollars on open spaces had to spend more tax dollars on installing walls. Duh!


My experiences with academics through a four-decade career taught me that people managing education are suckers for anything “new” or popular, especially that promulgated through neologisms.  This is evident in just about every curriculum’s development. Managers, eager to demonstrate they serve some purpose, latch onto methodologies and “philosophies” that promise a revamping of the current system. These “new” programs come and go in a blink and are usually based on subjective principles or very limited studies.  Today’s most recent example with a neologism? Gamification. **


Glad you asked.


According to the Stanford Report, “Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.”


Games, you say?


“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said [Dan] Schwartz, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”


And as in all such trends, from one-room schoolhouses through wokeism majors to gamification, academics “jump on the bandwagon.” In most instances trends grow out of hypotheses that have never been rigorously tested.


A Far Stretch?


For me, the relationship between academic trends and campus unrest requires little stretching of the imagination. Like string theory, and the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, campus antisemitism, the most recent trend, arrived already packaged or, in the words of Obama for his 800 billion-dollar stimulus, shovel ready. Little development required. Open and use.


Tell me. Could not even Jewish faculty members detect the growing hate? Didn’t they see any evidence of a trend, such as the persecution of German Jews prior to Kristallnacht? Did the recent Kristallnacht on campuses catch everyone by surprise? Did the trend of feckless wokeism blind administrators and faculty to the antisemitic takeovers? Did no one anticipate? Was everyone hoping that ignoring was the best tactic?


Recently, I faulted university administrators and faculty for their lack of wisdom. I now fault them for their cowardice and/or indifference. Their willingness to jump on popular social trends coupled with their inability or unwillingness to buck or thwart those trends meant exacerbating a seething hatred or instilling one in young minds unfamiliar with true evil. They further coddled an already soft coddled youth of privilege and affluence, youth who would not survive life under Hamas in Gaza.


*Wolt, Peter. 2007. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law


**https://news.stanford.edu/report/2024/02/14/technology-in-education/

How Did We Survive This Long?


Fossil evidence is good, but not perfect. Radiometric dating has some limitations, also. Those two sources of information on the history of our species make our origin in both time and space arguable. Roughly, however, we can trace humanity back more than 200,000 years, farther if we want to include related species and precursors.


If, as David M. Raup argues in his book Extinction: Bad genes, or Bad Luck? Earth has housed as many as 50 billion species over the past 3.8 billion years and that as many as 40 million species exist today, then humans evolved on a rather risky planet. The risk reveals itself not in the surviving species, but rather in those that have gone extinct. Raup estimates that only one in 1000 species that ever existed is now alive. He also estimates that the average lifespan of a species, from horseshoe crabs to fruit flies, is about 4 million years, the origin of the former going back to a time before the dinosaurs with the species undergoing little change, whereas the origin of the latter might date to only 40 million years ago with many species variations. In short, species don’t survive long on average. Horseshoe crabs are unaware of their good fortune. How aware of that 200+millennia-history are humans? We’ve survived as a species some harrowing events, losing many species members in each.


Causes of extinction vary. Destruction of habitat probably heads the list of causes, but over-predation, disease, and competition for resources also play extinction roles in Nature. Our ability to adapt and our geographical distribution afforded some protection from natural extinction, but neither of those is a guarantee against extinction by our own hands.


Why Bring This to Your Attention? Suicides, Murders, Wars, etc.


As I skimmed through headlines the other day, I paused on two stories, one about a murder, and the other about a suicide. The juicy details? Not really important here. Daily papers are replete with such tales. You can substitute any names you want in the stories of the recently deceased. With the exception of loved ones, few will think about them a month from now—even when the details are “noteworthy,” as in the deaths of the “famous,” say, Hollywood stars and political leaders.


Anyway, in recent years in the USA alone nearly 50,000 people committed suicide annually. The country adds about 15,000 to 20,000 murders to the annual list of deaths. The total numbers of such deaths—both self-inflicted and other-inflicted—pale in comparison with total deaths from all causes, but they are significant enough to keep suicides and murders in daily headlines, overwhelming our brains with too many to remember. Think about it: About 65,000 deaths reported over the publication of 365 daily papers, or 178 deaths per day. Who can keep individuals in mind?


And these numbers derive from a single year in a single country. Worldwide suicide rates vary from under 5 per 100,000 (mostly Third World countries) to more than 15 per 100,000 (developed countries). That sums to a big absolute number of self-inflicted extinctions in a global population of eight billion humans.


Add wars, usually dozens of them every year. Lots of deaths annually. Seems we humans truly have an extinction-wish. The only saving property is our proclivity for procreation—and even that is marred by elective abortions and biological weapons like COVID. Add fanatics’ desire for various genocides to the extinction drive. Gosh! How have we survived?


A hundred billion humans over the past 200,000+ years; only 8% of them are alive, and they are destined for increasing risks of annihilation as more killers (self and others) arrive on the planet. Some kid under control of a terrorist group is at this very moment being trained in extinction protocols, such as murdering others—even at the expense of his own life.


Scared?


Frightened or depressed by all this? Realistically, you should be. But so far you—and by extension your species—have survived. Earth still has a human population. Hold on, no matter what it takes. The species is counting on you to prevent the same kinds of oblivion that eradicated between five and fifty billion previous denizens of Earth.


Humans are the universe conscious of itself. When we’re gone, we take that awareness with us. Without that consciousness, the Cosmos is meaningless. So, your survival and the survival of the other members of your species are potentially the only ways that meaning itself survives.


Alive today? The universe thanks you, which is equivalent to your thanking yourself.

As a Professor Emeritus, I can attest to a certain contradiction or irony in academia. My four decades of experiences with colleagues from many universities have convinced me  that Isaac Asimov was correct when he said, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science [read “academia” here] gathers knowledge faster than society [read “it”] gathers wisdom.” This seems especially true in today’s Ivy League schools, all populated by highly erudite professors, some of who have recently demonstrated a lack of wisdom.


Wisdom is elusive. We can strive for it, strive to be “a Solomon,” but proof of achievement only comes in retrospect. Achieved wisdom appears in that rear view to be sibling of common sense. In the recent campus protests supported by some faculty, common sense played no significant role. In fact, it was absent, its place taken by agenda-blindness.


Campus Riots for Hamas, 2024


The news cycle in April and May 2024, months after massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023 has been filled with reports on campus unrest as supporters of Palestinians seem to have conflated the people of Gaza with a terrorist organization called Hamas, those perpetrators of the massacre and subsequent rocket attacks on Israel. The American protests morphed into property damage, intimidation, and actual violence in an evolution guided by outside instigators.


Failing to anticipate the inevitable lawlessness of an anarchic mob repeatedly shouting antisemitic and anti-American threats, the administrators of universities took no firm stand. There was no “15-minute rule” in place at Columbia. Instituted by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, Notre Dame’s president during the Vietnam War, the “rule” gave protestors just a quarter hour to clear the office hallway—or any other place—they chose to block. Noncompliance meant suspension or expulsion, consequences the “Notre Dame Ten” suffered for their protest.


Columbia, in contrast, has made a sweeping cancellation of all graduation ceremonies, essentially punishing the majority of seniors who did not participate in the encampment or harassment. Wise, truly wise. Right? Solomon-like: No offer to cut the graduation “in half”; instead, just kill “the baby.” [I write this in the assumption that even antisemites know the story of “Solomon and the baby” though in the parochialism of the college student mind stories from various cultures like Judaism are probably unknown]


The Vietnam War that motivated the Notre Dame Ten to protest was simultaneously similar and different from the Israeli military action motivated the Columbia protest of 2024. It was similar in that collateral damage and injury occurred to innocent people. In the instance of the Vietnam war, there were many Vietnamese villagers who suffered, most notably, those in the village of My Lai, the site of a massacre perpetrated by American troops. It was different in that the Vietnam War was not a response to a Pearl Harbor-like attack the Israelis suffered during the October 7 massacre. Instead, the Vietnam War was a geopolitical action aimed at an encroaching Communism during the Cold War, sparked by the alleged Gulf of Tonkin incident. In contrast, the Israeli incursion into Gaza was a response to an Israeli analog of Pearl Harbor and 9-11.


The Missing Piece


Interviews with Columbia's protesters indicate that many, if not all of them, cannot acknowledge the October 7 massacre. They cannot acknowledge the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli citizens, and they cannot acknowledge that Hamas is a brutal enslaver of Gaza’s citizens. It is an organization that has redirected humanitarian aid to buying weapons and building fortifications. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid have gone not to building schools and hospitals in Gaza, but rather to buying rockets from Iran. Hamas, hiding among the people of Gaza, has a single intention: Genocide of Jews. The Israelis, in defending themselves, have no genocidal intention. Rather, they seek to free themselves of an imminent threat whose embodiment occurred on October 7. They seek to destroy a sworn enemy with whom no previous negotiations have worked.


Somehow the actual and verifiable situation in Israel and Gaza has not been taught at Columbia. It is a missing piece in a geopolitical picture puzzle that prevents Columbia’s protestors from seeing the big picture. And Columbia’s faculty bear some blame for not providing that missing piece, but the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are readily available to anyone who can read. No expensive degree required.                                                                     


In his Fragments, Heraclitus wrote that one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, nor knowledge without wisdom. The two are codependent. Strangely, some of the erudite professors and managers of Columbia seem to have neither if their students are to be taken as representative of their teaching.


Knowledge Is Easy; Wisdom Is Hard


Columbia’s administrators did not have the insight to see what many outside the institution saw prior to the escalation in obstruction, violence, and destruction that would unfold in a confrontation between protestors and the NYPD. The trajectory of the protest was plain to see among all but the school’s leaders. Obviously, Colombia’s President is no Father Hesburgh. Columbia’s erudite failed to anticipate the obvious and have now given, as a result, the impetus for a generation of neo-Nazis, 18 to 22 year-olds who will perpetrate hate as much as it is perpetuated by Hamas’s propaganda machine. Thus, by lacking the wisdom to act decisively and promptly, the Columbia administration has created an analog of the Middle East on the campus.


Albert Einstein said, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Are the president, deans, and staff of Columbia erudite fools?




                                

How certain are you?


In a CBS interview with Norah O’Donnell, a seated Pope Francis spoke with certainty about “the climate crisis,” but he was not “speaking from THE chair.” No, instead, the pontiff sat in an ordinary chair, much like the chairs you and I use when we discuss matters on which we often find ourselves fallible. “Speaking from THE chair,” or Ex Cathedra, also known as the Chair of St. Peter (Cathedra Petri), has a special meaning in the Church. In matters of faith and morality, the Church holds a pope’s words as infallible. Keep that in mind.


Popes have addressed topics outside the realm of faith and morality. They have even spoken about scientific matters, such as evolution. Pope Pius XII, for example, wrote in his Encyclical Humani Generis:


    “It remains for Us now to speak about those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith. In fact, not a few insistently demand that the Catholic religion take these sciences into account as much as possible. This certainly would be praiseworthy in the case of clearly proved facts; but caution must be used when there is rather question of hypotheses, having some sort of scientific foundation…


    “For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God….” *


Yep, just a mere 91 years—fast on the ecclesial time scale— after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a pope recognized a science as complementing and not competing with Church doctrine. The days of Pope Urban VIII and il processo a Galileo Galilei before an Inquisition tribunal faded into the modern world of the twentieth century.


And the late and saintly, erudite polymath John Paul II followed Pius’ lead in a mid-nineties’ speech called “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” in which he said “new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” ** 


But Now Francis


Does climate science fit into the same mold as evolution? Is it a science that in its current state can support predictions in the manner of physicists’ Standard Model? Or is it one that relies on paleontological stepping stones (fossils) to reveal a progression of changes leading to endgame species? Do past climates “evolve” into future climates?


Climate science, like evolution science can look with relative certainty on the past. There’s no doubt—but a few lingering details— about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Pleistocene glaciation, about the Younger Dryas, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. But biological evolution differs from climate change. Biological evolution makes no predictions because of its chaotic nature. I cannot predict with even a modicum of certainty a future species based on current variations, though I might note probable trends, such as “pygmyfying” of species in isolated places (pygmy hippo, elephant, Sumatran rhino, and other species). It could not have predicted the ramifications for life after a random bolide strike 65 million years ago, or after a disease or cosmic ray hitting a genome. It could not have predicted any consequences for new life-forms after any of the five mass extinctions, save that some trophic niches would be emptied, making way for new occupiers, such as , for example, the grass-eaters.


Infallibly predictive as Ex Cathedra speaking? I think not.


Past climate, definitely. Future climate? Not one scary prediction by the IPCC in 2000 has proven true with the obvious exception of an increase in anthropogenic emissions—but that isn’t “climate.” And as I noted recently, Earth has a number of climates from arid to humid and a number of climate controls from latitude to land-water distribution to semi-permanent highs and lows to elevation. The planet’s climates (30 according to the Köppen climate classification) have undergone changes because of precession, orbital change, massive volcanism, tectonics, orographic lifting, ocean currents, evolution of plants like grasses, and feedback loops of organics like methane: All working together or working separately either to enhance or cancel one another.


Complex, right?


Well, not so complex for the infallible pope. He believes “the science” and no doubt is further convinced by recent heat waves. What would his predecessors have said if an IPCC existed and was backed by a sycophantic press in their times? What did the tenth century’s 24 popes say at the onset of the Medieval Warm Period that began about 950? *** You think they proclaimed “The End”? Or did they say, “Give me a mild winter anytime.” Or what of the popes that reigned during the apex of the warming?


The Pope, however, now a spokesman for the IPCC, has labeled those seeking more scientific details on climate as “foolish.”


“There are people who are foolish, and foolish even if you show them research, they don’t believe it,” he said. “Why, because they don’t understand the situation, or because of their interest, but climate change exists.” ****


And since he believes climate change is a moral matter, he speaks with the same certainty as he would in speaking ex cathedra.


Earth Sciences


I have long argued for certain topics in school curricula: Economics and finances; Speaking and writing; History devoid of agenda-driven re-writes; Energy; Mathematics; Biology; and Earth sciences (geology meteorology, climatology, resources, oceanography). Had Francis taken a course in climate science, he might understand the reasons behind some climate change skepticism: 30 climate categories, for example, historical data on actual climate changes, the weight of individual controls that act in unison, in cancelling, or in sequence to exacerbate change or regulate stability, and the ineffectiveness of human influences that occur in economic competition—Chinese, American, and Indian emissions.


But, Oh! How Far Have We Come? The Irony


During the days of Inquisitions, the Church was an enemy of science, thus the trials of Galileo over the heliocentric Solar System and Giordano Bruno over extra-solar planets and an eccentric and physically unbounded universe. With Francis the Church has not only become a defender of science but also a disciple. Are we now to accept the words of climate change scientists as infallible? Is the Chair of Infallibility located not in the Vatican, but rather in Geneva?


Clearing House


Does the pope get junk mail from Publishers’ Clearing House? You know, I assume, that that is what the IPCC is, a clearing house for reports deemed relevant to climate change. The IPCC doesn’t do research; it collates and reports on research. So, numerous “scientists” eager to rake in what now seems to be unlimited funding are pursuing topics they can tie to climate, including migration, recent trends in sea temps, and spreading tropical diseases. In short, everything that can be inferred as a climate effect is fair game, and fudged data are manipulated and skewed toward only one side. Thus, everyone has heard of dying coral reefs, but few have hear of thriving reefs—such reports are quashed and their researchers mocked or even, as in the case of dismissed Australian scientist Dr. Peter Ridd, subject to censure.


Your Horoscope, an Analog


Ever read your horoscope? Here’s mine for yesterday, May 4, 2024:


The Pisces moon makes a series of dreamy aspects with Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune throughout the first half of the day, sweeping you away into a world of softness and fantasy. Lean into these vibes by going within, exploring your creative mind and deep subconscious. Your popularity increases mid-afternoon when Luna enters your sign, snapping you back into the present. Use this energy to consider how the goals you dream about can become a reality. Instant bonds could form when you explore your community this evening when Pluto stirs. A bust of motivation finds you tonight when the moon and Mars unite to stir passions.


Lots of specificity, right? Not! No one could sue an astrologer if such a prediction failed to materialize. “Your Honor, he must not have ‘leaned into the vibes.’”


Here’s Everyone’s summer weather horoscope from researchers at one of the Max Planck institutes: Expect a hot summer though it might be more an effect of an El Niño than of carbon. Like my personal horoscope, Everyone’s summer prediction contains a caveat.


Consider this from Max Planck Gesellschaft: “But even the physical formulae used by climate researchers to calculate their forecasts still contain uncertainties. For example, IPCC predictions for global warming indicate a range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of the CO2 content compared with the pre-industrial age, when the atmosphere contained 285 parts per million of CO2. The relatively large interval results from numerous imponderables in the climate system. This is because global warming can result in a feedback effect, which can either further aggravate climate change or mitigate it.” ******


Imponderables! But not for Pope Francis!


*Online at https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html


**Online at https://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_jp02tc.htm


***Pope Agapetus II
Pope Anastasius III
Pope Benedict IV
Pope Benedict V
Pope Benedict VI
Pope Benedict VII
Pope Gregory V
Pope John IX
Pope John X
Pope John XI
Pope John XII
Pope John XIII
Pope John XIV
Pope John XV
Pope Lando
Pope Leo V
Pope Leo VI
Pope Leo VII
Pope Leo VIII
Pope Marinus II
Pope Sergius III
Pope Stephen VII
Pope Stephen VIII
Pope Sylvester II


****https://angelusnews.com/voices/pope-cbs-interview-america/


*****https://www.mpg.de/11863295/climate-and-transformation


*****https://www.mpg.de/en




   

Simple solution. The Ivy League and NYU antisemitic protesting students shouting, “We are Hamas,” should spend a semester living under the rule of Hamas, or maybe under the rule of Iran’s theocracy.


But That Won’t Happen


Too bad the protesting Ivy League coeds fail to understand the difference between living in a democracy and living in a theocratic and tyrannical land where civilians are used not only as shields without regard to their safety, but also abused of their freedoms. Too bad that they won’t know that as women they would be deprived not only of an $80,000/year Ivy-League education, but  also of an elementary-school education.


Should the Victims Bear Some Blame?


Like the lingering horrors of American slavery etched into the minds of African Americans generations removed from pre-Lincoln America, so the horrors of the Holocaust lingered in families of Jews who survived and migrated to the U.S. after 1945.
Becoming successful in their new land and eager to assimilate and fit into a free society, the Jews carrying that lingering horror sent their children to Ivy League schools, donated indiscriminately to endowments worth billions, and ignored the warning signs of liberalism’s growing elitism and Marxist-socialist/Nazi thinking.


That elitism has now played out in a general trend of censorship of ideas and anthropological/social truths that evolved in a vacuum of isolation. Freed from the experiences of living in a restrictive theocracy or tyrannical culture, some members of the Ivy League faculties either unconsciously or purposefully adopted a pervasive antisemitism and chose to encourage through active influence or passive acceptance ideas that we now see on the campuses.


That wealthy Jews have eagerly funded Ivy League schools is no surprise, given the nature of our species’ need for social acceptance. The membership rolls of country clubs, yachts clubs and gated communities record the post war efforts of Jews—and African Americans—to find acceptance in mainline society, including acceptance among graduates of the Ivy League schools.


Similarly, Jews have sought inclusion in liberalism’s bastion of contradiction, the Democratic Party, which undeniably was a partner to the antisemitic KKK yet professes a compassion for all. Yes, American Jews—and African Americans—joined a party that at one time held them in disdain,; such is the gregarious drive in our species.


Do the victims bear any blame for their plight during these antisemitic movements? Not directly, of course. No one can be cited for encouraging hatred and persecution against himself. But many are guilty of seeing something and saying nothing, of going along with a moral decline fostered in a climate of ignorance or indifference born out of an elitist isolationism.


Will the Social Pendulum Swing?


Direct social contact between protesting antisemites and those they praise for murdering Jews is probably not going to happen short of an exchange program.

The Ivy League and other students praising Hamas need to spend just one semester living among members of Hamas or living under the restrictions imposed by theocracies like Afghanistan and Iran. Only direct knowledge will provide the force that makes the social pendulum swing enough to change a cultural movement among the young.

Want to live in a whirlpool of complexity? Read through the U.S. Department of Education’s “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance.” The online “unofficial version” runs 1,561 pages (34 CFR Part 106 [Docket ID ED-2021-OCR-0166] RIN 1870-AA16). It centers on Title IX, and is the work of Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Department of Education. *


Big government is nothing if not BIG. Those 1,561 pages aren’t the work of a few people. The OCR has more than 550 attorneys and other staff. The Department of Education employs in total 4,400 employees with an annual budget of $68 billion, not one dollar of which, as I understand the department’s mission is directly spent on educating a single child. What do they do? Well, we know they write big reports—1,561-page-long reports. And they regulate, prescribe, and proscribe to the nth power of detail in their mission to impose not equality as much as equity.


So, Title IX


Any educational institution that receives federal funds is bound by the provisions and dictates in Title IX. Originally enacted in good faith to support women, Title IX will now support athletes on women’s teams who have to wear supporters, i.e., jock straps. It will also ensure that biological males will be able to share restrooms, dorm rooms, and lorckerrooms with biological women. What could go wrong? Surely, 550 attorneys wouldn’t write a document that jeopardizes a demographic of women 15-24 years old!
Surely, some of those lawyers know they have created a Möbius strip of paragraphs so convoluted they turn back on themselves to rob women of equality.


But maybe not. The proof of the convolution lies in the many attempts in the document to clarify previous clarifications. Title IX forbids discrimination on the basis of gender and is supported in this restriction by a 2021 Executive Order from Biden but it allows separate teams for the sexes. So, a school can have a girls’ basketball team, but cannot prohibit a male from participating on the team if that male identifies as female. Seems the lawyers can’t resolve the issue of sex versus gender when gender is the arbitrary issue at hand.


Now, imagine a junior high school girl on a girls’ basketball team, a college coed on a university team, or a coach of a women’s team. Do I have to make a comment here? Want to frustrate your brain? Read through the sections on menstruation and lactation.




*https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2024-07915.pdf

That no U,S. Democratic Senator chose to hear the articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Homeland Security that the House sent to the Senate bespeaks cowardice, ignorance, and disdain. 1) Fear of opposing the Party’s open border policy over political blowback, 2) Ignorance of the Americans injured, raped, and killed by illegal aliens, and 3) Disdain for Americans who pay with their tax dollars for preloaded debit cards, free transportation, free housing, free health care, and free education for illegal aliens.


The next travesty associated with illegal immigration rests squarely on the shoulders of those Democratic senators. God forbid that any one of them suffers a personal loss at the hand of an illegal immigrant, but it seems that only such a loss would convince them that the policy of open borders and the incompetence on the part of the Secretary of Homeland Security do not serve the best interests of the American people.


As I have said many times, that which is not personal is meaningless. Within the bubble of party loyalty and protected by chance, the Democratic senators, who chose not to hear the evidence have committed themselves to continuing an open border and have become complicit in the child abuse, rapes, human trafficking, drug deaths, and crimes generated by illegal aliens. But, hey, it’s not personal; none of their family members have suffered; none of their daughters or wives have been raped; none of their grandchildren have been abused or dropped off in a foreign land to fend for themselves.


If any of those senators’ family members were to experience a crime, injury, or death at the hands of illegal aliens, surely that senator would have a perspective other than the one provided by the Democratic Party. But that which is not personal is meaningless. Protected by chance, they see no meaning in addressing the issue that which by chance and bad fortune has weighed so heavily on the American families that have lost loved ones.


“Party of the People”? I think not. 

 Ever get stuck beginning something?


Where to begin? Where to begin? No, I’m not thinking about broaching a delicate subject subtly or brashly.  SUBTLY: “The garlic in that pizza we ate left a lingering taste.”  BRASHLY: “Frank, I’ll be frank; go rinse with mouthwash; your breath stinks. And while I’m ripping the bandaid off, I might as well tell you that you have chronic halitosis.”


Oh! Wait! Think I got it! I’ll rip the bandaid off the way Katie Couric, one-time Today Show hostess, darling of the Left, and hundred millionaire told Bill Maher that Trump supporters were anti-intellectuals. Classic Leftism in the tradition of Hilary Clinton, who proclaimed they were “deplorables.” Now we know they are deplorable AND [here come the synonyms] despicable, pitiable, wretched, grubby, contemptible, uneducated, and stupid.


Trump supporters! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t exterminate them all because someone has to be left to do the manual labor like cleaning the donkey pen at the zoo. Ah! The rich Left. They understand what the rich Right doesn’t. Katie knows more than any of those who supported Trump.


And she will always be smarter, always more intellectual because her ad populum statements are beyond dispute. Her argument lies in declaration and name-calling.   She is another self-apotheosized liberal proclaiming a “truth.” Fall on your knees; hear the angels’ voices.


ANECDOTE: My late ultra-rich friend told me that while he was on his way from visiting one of his business locations to another, he stopped at the foreign car dealer where he had bought cars like Bentley, Rolls-Royce, and Porche, just to see what was in the display room that day. There a Bentley caught his eye. As he was looking at the car, a young car salesman whom he had never met, walked over and asked if he could help him. My friend said in his down-home way, "it's a pretty nice car.”


In his ignorance and condescension the salesman said in a dismissive tone, “Well, that's a pretty expensive vehicle.” As my friend was about to leave the dealership, the owner, who had sold numerous expensive cars to him, walked in and greeted him by first name. He asked what brought him into the show room. My friend responded that he was just in the area and stopped in to see what might be in the show room, and then he said, “But this young fellow doesn’t seem to want to sell me this car.” You can guess the outcome. Yes, the salesman’s employment ended abruptly. He had judged my friend by his down-home language, khaki pants, and shirt with the company's logo on the pocket.


Like Katie Couric, the salesman did not see the character and background of my friend, who not only owned his own jet, but had used it to travel around the world, where he met with dignitaries in many foreign countries. He had also entertained American presidents, English Lords, and famous actors, comedians, and singers at his resort. His business stretched across the country, and he employed thousands. And cars? At his resort he had a building dedicated to housing his collection of expensive antique cars. In short, not only could my friend have bought the car in the show room, but he could also have bought the entire dealership and its inventory of expensive cars. Politicians on both the Left and the Right courted him for support. The salesman saw only a plain speaking older guy in street clothes.

Unlike the salesman, Katie will suffer no ill consequences for her judgement and stereotyping because she speaks in and to a showroom full of the like-minded head-bobbers.


Recently, I addressed this blatant condescension on the Left (3/4/24: ”The Left’s Anti-intellectualism: A Neanderthal Tries to Respond”). It’s tiresome, isn’t it. The Lefties won’t stop, however, because they have a ready venue of like-minded support in major media outlets. They stand together in a Great Hall of Mirrors, a showroom of broadcasters with national and even worldwide reach.


Whoa! Just thought of a title for this little essay: "The Great Hall of Mirrors."  And in that hall, everyone sees his left side as his best side. Of course, that's because the mirrors never reflect the right side.

Do you find it strange that in an age of information overload, so many people favor generalities and ignore details? This is especially true in the politically charged environment of the present. Thus, the Right generalizes the Left and visa versa. The process exudes mental laziness while affirming a sense of security and dismissive superiority. “MAGA fanatic,” “Commie subversive”…Basically, many revert to name-calling when a reasoned argument requires a detailed analysis.


But how detailed?


Ignorance Breeds Haughtiness


Ignorance runs in the human family. The irony is that in our ignorance we pretend genius or at least savvy. We are nothing if not sure in our perspectives.Yet, as Kurt Friedrich Gödel (b. 1906, d. 1978) demonstrated with mathematics, no knowledge system is complete in itself. Logic ultimately rests on axioms and assumptions; math can’t prove itself. Incompleteness is the rule, but you would never know that today if you engage someone in a political argument. When it comes to debating the other side, everyone is sure, positions are certain, and only selected details apply—often manipulated details, many of which were selected by algorithms devised by “those in the know,” that is, by single-minded people either consciously or unconsciously supporting an agenda through words or algorithms that enhance or censor, depending on the views of those who write the algorithms: Thus, the recent shutdown of debate over the causes and cures of COVID led by haughty sycophants in the media [Shoot! Did I just revert to name-calling?] who were little different from those who made Galileo disavow his claim that Earth revolved around the Sun.


The pretense to savvy among haughty people “in the know” runs as deep as the subconscious and derives from an unfathomable realm of manipulators hidden from ordinary mortals like me—and maybe you. As Cathie O’Neill argues in her book Weapons of Math Destruction about software systems that manage our finances and our lives, “These mathematical models [are like gods] opaque, they're workings invisible to all but the highest priests in the domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.” (3).*


Look at the ostracism or cancellation of people who chose not to get the mRNA vaccine or who argued against vaccinating little kids and also against closing schools. Look also, at those who extolled the vaccines as unquestionably protective, some of who still contracted and then spread the disease, including multiple-dosed President Biden and the apotheosized Dr. Fauci. And look, too, at the unprovable claim that “Well, the vaccine kept the reinfected from getting sicker.” How does one prove that? Read O’Neill it again: “Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal.”


The aim of social media algorithms is a change in both belief and behavior. The public is reduced to generalities and compliance backed by the threat of ostracism—solitary confinement on a grand scale to use an oxymoron. Detailed explanations and arguments are anathema. Selected details inductively supporting predetermined generalities remain, and no counterarguments are entertained. Speaking of oxymorons…


An Unknown Eminent Scientist


The enlightenment of the 18th century gave rise to the science of the 19th century and some very important discoveries that propelled a number of researchers into a shrine of eminent scientists still visited by 21st century physicists. Among those enshrined is Albert A. Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment that disproved the concept of an enveloping Ether (aether) through which lightwaves were thought to travel like water waves. Debunking the ether came on the heels of James Clerk Maxwell’s formulas that tied electricity to magnetism and that explained fields so essential to today’s understanding of matter and energy, atoms and radio waves, subatomic particles, and the strange world of quantum mechanics with its wave-particle duality. For physicists the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were exciting times. It seemed as though humans had finally broken from mythical explanations of the universe to enter an age of reasoned understanding. Those heady times ballooned the optimism of the previous century of Enlightenment: Humans were on the threshold of knowing all there is to know. Think Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s in the foregoing context of 19th-century science that Michelson wrote,


    “While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance—where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. For Michelson and his contemporary “eminent scientist,” mankind had entered an Age of Refinement.


If those 19th-century experimenters were alive today, they would rejoice that their intellectual descendants at CERN keep adding details like the Higgs boson and the lifespan of an accelerated muon. What’s next? Or rather, what’s the next level of refinement in physics? The nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy? A LIGO refinement of gravitational waves?


The rise of modern physical science and the proliferation of social scientists has yielded another set of details—and a new kind of details, those that can be manipulated to control belief and behavior. The details of The Russian Collusion, now thoroughly debunked and the Hunter Biden laptop, now thoroughly proven, stand as models of blatant manipulation of details in favor of a generalized agenda of quashing political opponents’ thoughts and policies. Social “scientists,” like network pundits with an agenda to push, choose the details that make their case. “Crime is down” is a recent example that is taken out of the context of a shift in how the FBI now categorizes and counts crimes.


Refinement Is All about Details


Democritus and Leucippus gave us the concept of atoms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists like Bohr, another enshrined scientist, refined the concept of a world made of atoms. Over the past hundred years others used increasingly more sophisticated experiments to further refine the refinements of Bohr and his contemporaries. In short, we live in a time of increasing decimal places: Atoms to protons, neutrons, and electrons, to quarks and muons, and neutrinos, and—in the distant future possibly—to strings. Smaller and smaller and smaller, unimaginably more detailed, so detailed that it takes considerable intellectual effort to keep up with the refinements. Who has time to examine all of them? Who can check their veracity? You? I venture to guess that you did not awaken today to ask, “What’s the morning’s news out of CERN?” “What’s the source of details on this new story about food safety, drugs, and political intrigue?”


As in solving problems in Euclidean geometry, refining rests on axiomatic thinking and assumptions. All the proving we seek rests on acceptance of general understandings. We can’t see quarks, but we can detail their appearance in protons and neutrons. Two up quarks and one down quark make a proton; just the opposite makes a neutron. And those seeking further refinements stand apart from humanity in general, those many humans who really don’t care about atomic composition. We don’t all have research jobs at CERN do we? “Just give me the basics, man. I have people to see and places to go. Besides, I pretty much know all I have to know. Stuff is made of atoms. That I’ll grant.” And the axiomatic thinking extends into the realm of everyday politics as exemplified by networks like MSNBC and NPR, both of which seem to wear their bias like a heavy pendant on an even heavier chain around their necks.


We run with familiar systems and perspectives because they provide the bare minimum that is sufficient enough for us “to get by.”  Once we have accepted the general, we find details—even peripheral details—to support it.


Publishers’ Clearing House Day


Even the least “scientific” among us has access to an indefinite number of details if we choose to look. But who has the time or the inclination? The details are like the mail in the words of Seinfeld’s Newman who, when asked by George why postal workers “go postal,” says, “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming; there's never a let-up. It's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more and more! And you gotta get it out but the more you get it out the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks and it's Publishers’ Clearing House day.” **


Thus, we choose generalities as protection against the onslaught of details. So, we yield to O’Neill ’s “weapons of math destruction.” Refinement has become both boon and bane: Boon because it provides an avenue for better understanding, bane because it overwhelms us and prevents our discovering truth.


* 2006. New York. Random House. Crown Publishing.


**Find the scene on YouTube