In his book Walking through Anger, Dr. Christian Conte enumerates what he calls “the five errors of communication.” The current political scene provides numerous examples of one of these errors, the error of inaccurate language.


Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of the error that includes generalizations and extreme descriptions. (akin to someone's saying to a loved one, “You never listen to me.”) Both Biden and Trump are guilty of this error. Biden’s inaccurate language centers on what he calls MAGA extremists. Trump’s inaccurate language focuses on elections past, present, and future. The danger in using such inaccurate language on a national stage lies in the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies motivated by fear and hate.


Hook, Line, and Sinker


Inaccurate language would not be a problem if listeners had a logic filter. However, most people appear to listen not through a logic filter, but rather through an ideological one. Extreme language isn’t different from any form of language in that it is subject to misinterpretation. Yet, there is a difference: Extreme language often results in extreme action. Two examples: The January 6 mob action at the U.S. Capitol and the attempted murder of a Supreme Court Justice.


When the brain filter or lens is ideology, alternative actions receive little attention. The ideologue acts on emotion while justifying actions as perfectly reasonable.Thus, ideologues accept as truths extreme language that supports their perspectives.


Fish That Don’t Bite


Mental laziness and impatience drive us toward any lure. Specificity in any human endeavor requires work. It also requires patience. Accustomed as we are to rapidity in every phase of life (e.g., Amazon deliveries, fast food, microwaves), we just can’t wait for anything complex or nuanced. So, whenever someone drops the ear worm of extreme language into the pool of life, we bite.


This use of extreme language is a worldwide phenomenon. Moscow pundits serve as example.Taking their lead from Putin’s flippant remarks about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they spoke with a smirk about nuking the UK and the US, senselessly disregarding their own vulnerability to nuclear annihilation. And, of course, some in the threatened countries responded in kind.


Begetting


Extreme language engenders more extreme language in a feed-back loop that reminds me of a passage in Matthew. Chapter 1, versus 2-17 (King James) reads


2 Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren; 3 And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; 4 And Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon; 5 And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse; 6 And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias; 7 And Solomon begat Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa; 8 And Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias; 9 And Ozias begat Joatham; and Joatham begat Achaz; and Achaz begat Ezekias; 10 And Ezekias begat Manasses; and Manasses begat Amon; and Amon begat Josias; 11 And Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about the time they were carried away to Babylon: 12 And after they were brought to Babylon, Jechonias begat Salathiel; and Salathiel begat Zorobabel; 13 And Zorobabel begat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim; and Eliakim begat Azor; 14 And Azor begat Sadoc; and Sadoc begat Achim; and Achim begat Eliud; 15 And Eliud begat Eleazar; and Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; 16 And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.


That’s the analog for the heredity of extreme language. Like the biblical characters, today’s extreme language stands like Abraham as the father of extreme language yet to be born, different but members of the same family.

Bias. Outright hatred. Dehumanization. These are not just the ills of our times; they have been the ills and bane of every time. And because of their endurance, every generation has attempted, if only briefly and by only a few individuals, to wipe them off the face of the Earth and to replace them with tolerance, love, and respect.


Without success.


The lack of success can be traced to the origins of the ills. Sometimes the ills seem to derive from motiveless malignity, the best examples of which lie in the characters Iago in Shakespeare's Othello and John Claggart in Melville's Billy Budd. In both characters an underlying hate appears to emerge from deep within their personalities. They do not hate in reaction to offenses perpetrated upon them. At other times, the ills appear as reactions to both intentional and unintentional treatment by others, the latter manifesting itself in many instances of road rage. When bias, hatred and dehumanization derive from reactions, they can lead to revenge that in turn can initiate a cycle that runs through generations. Such is the circumstance we see today in the Middle East, where the three ills have been a constant for at least three thousand years.


The Perennial Approaches


We humans have tried it all: Religion, secular organizations, art, didactic literature and poetry, communes, and drugs, each ostensibly purposed to bring peace and harmony. Sad to say, nothing has worked beyond short term, and even then in places and people separated by culture, history, and belief.


We are as steeped in bias, hatred, and dehumanization as ever. And in our times, social  media, which held a promise of uniting us as one large family, have become Instruments of those ills, exacerbating rather than quashing them. Driven in part by anonymity, the cyber world has intensified the three ills and made them largely invulnerable to widespread diminution.


The most promising approach through the ages has been some form of education, as well as it should be. The word education derives from Latin for to lead out. Because ignorance is one root of the three ills, specific knowledge can mitigate feelings; cognitive approaches can reduce the effects of generalizations that lump people into categories. Specific knowledge can lead to understanding that leads to tolerance. Education "leads one out" of ignorance through familiarization with the previously unknown.


However, in the context of public education, a particular problem arises, the problem of the teacher. The word teacher derives from Anglo-Saxon tacn, which means “sign” or “guide post.” Because every teacher is a human, every teacher has a potential to guide students subtly or overtly toward a personal bias. Nothing illustrates this more than the recent  campus protests led by some professors for the terror group called Hamas and against Jews who were the victims of a 2023 massacre and World War II's Holocaust. Educators have so far failed to eliminate the three ills and have often infused them with new energy. Thus the current wave of antisemitism pervading college campuses.


Religion, too, has failed in its mission to quash the three ills. Yes, it has motivated individuals to become peaceful and tolerant, but past and ongoing conflicts between Sunni and Shia, Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and non-Muslims, orthodox and reformed in several religions offer little hope that religion is a viable approach to eliminating the three hills. What of New Age movements? At best, these are temporary and usually dissolve into distant memories even within the generation that produced them.


The Stoic Solution


Self deprecation might be the only solution to the problem of the three ills. This ancient Greek and Roman philosophical approach to the three ills, associated with, for example, the Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, would have us all take ourselves “less seriously.” It encourages humility that fosters tolerance. It preaches moderation that reduces extreme responses to “environmental”—including social—stresses. In terms of our own times, it accepts realties over political correctness and group-thinking. Finally, in supporting individualism, it elevates others to equal levels of respect without the burden of imposed equity that so many in the political and media worlds keep promulgating ironically to the detriment of individuality and individual responsibility.

But self deprecation runs up against the barrier of pride, one of the most difficult to penetrate.


But What of Humanism and Liberal Ideals?


Am I the most depressing pessimist and misanthropist in suggesting that humans are destined to live in generational loops of the three ills? What of liberal ideals manifest in entities like sanctuary cities and government agencies devoted to uplifting the destitute through generous handouts supported by taxes. Surely, the liberal world will free humanity from the three ills. Surely, when everyone is equal, there will be no reason for bias, hatred, and dehumanization.


Not so, of course. In fact, attempts to impose liberal ideals to eliminate those ills have exacerbated them. Liberal hypocrisy reveals itself in the common attitude associated with the practice of “ideals” and the implied “Do as I say, and not as I do.” How many liberals have opened their homes to further peace, love and harmony among migrants  or between migrants and citizens they claim to welcome with open arms and  for whom they seek public accommodations? How many liberals have made personal sacrifices, refrained from personal attacks via social and mainstream media, and joined hands with ideological opponents in the name of peace and harmony? No. Liberals are fond of talking, fond of philosophizing.


Just as Voltaire argues through the ending of Candide, such endless philosophizing amounts to little moral progress regardless that it’s being done by Progressives.


All Solutions Are Local
​
Voltaire leaves his readers with a rather simple thought, basically, “Tend your garden.” Cultivate what is in front of you in the moment. If everyone adopted this approach to life, bias, hatred, and dehumanization might one day dissipate into the fog of human history, that amorphous past of harm and neglect, power struggles and war, and petty rivalries.

When I hear the secretary of homeland security, the President, or other democrats and their minions in the media speak about the border without acknowledging the bad policies emplaced by Biden in 2021, I wonder whether or not I have left the macro world of everyday existence and entered the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be waves, and waves can be particles, where cats are alive and simultaneously dead, and light traveling to any place in the universe takes all possible paths to get there—much like the many paths taken by migrants from all over the world to reach America's southern border.


Superposition


In his famous thought experiment, Erwin Schrödinger imagines a cat in superposition, that is, both dead and alive. The cat in both states sits in a box with a radioactive substance that upon randomly decaying, releases a poisonous gas. Is the cat dead? Is it alive? There’s no way of knowing the cat’s status short of opening the box to look. No one knows the fate of the cat until someone makes that observation. Erwin’s Gedankenexperiment  calls to mind the duality of light demonstrated in the two-slit experiment: Light is an electromagnetic wave when you want to observe it as a wave and a particle called a photon when you want to observe it as a particle. In other words, the observer plays a fundamentally important role in determining the quantum reality of cat and light.


The Box


For the past 3 1/2 years, the secretary of homeland security has gone before Congress to claim that the border is secure. Essentially, he has said repeatedly that there was no crisis, but mostly he obfuscated or skirted the direct questions that only
Republicans seemed to ask. He has not led a bipartisan group to observe the border, especially at key crossing points for migrants. Few, if any Biden supporters, have looked into "the box.”


The Observation


In the case of quantum physics, the observer does not have to be human. It can be a detector of some sort affixed to a recording device, just like the detector you call a radio which detects or “observes” radio waves that you cannot see and reports the “observation” to you through amplified sound. If you leave the radio on in your absence, it will still detect the radio waves. If the radio is attached to a recording device, you can find out later what had been broadcast.


But let's stick with a human observer, one that is unbiased and logical who goes to the border, sees hundreds to thousands of illegal migrants entering the country, and videotapes what he sees. Can he demonstrate that superposition exists, that is, a circumstance in which there is both runaway migration and simultaneously no migration? Remember that the act of observation essentially seals the reality.


To determine whether or not, the cat was alive or dead, an observer has to look into the box. Now consider Joe Biden to be the observer. What did he see when he went to Brownsville Texas, where the Lone Star state through the efforts of its Governor had reduced the number of illegal migrants crossing into the country? Joe thought he was looking into the box with a cat, but in fact, he was looking into a different box, a box without a cat—live or dead. That same box, which is the elongate border of the United States, was observed about the same time by Donald Trump. What Trump saw when he looked into ‘the box” was a different state of existence. He saw the migrant situation very much alive, whereas Joe Biden saw the migrant situation very much dead.


The quantum world is radically different from the macro world in which we live our daily lives; Superposition and entanglement make that fact clear. By comparison with our macro world, the quantum world is bizarre. But is it so different? Has the Biden administration emplaced superposition and entanglement in the macro world? The members of that administration look into the box and see one thing, whereas the rest of us look into the same box and see something entirely different. Most of us see thousands of immigrants rushing the border, invading sanctuary, cities, and using resources that would otherwise be devoted to citizens.


What if there's a flaw in our powers of observation. Certainly, most Americans do not see what the Biden administration's officials see. Most see live migrants; the Biden administration believes the issue is dead unless it can use it for political purposes to fault Republicans for Joe Biden's actions.


Bizarre World


Quantum mechanics has led to the “many worlds” interpretation of existence. You have probably seen the concept portrayed in movies. The Biden administration has made the “many worlds” interpretation a reality for Americans. As in those movies, the beings in one “dimension” or “world” have little or no contact with beings in another dimension. The world Joe Biden observes might be contemporaneous with the world that you observe, but it is different by an unknown number of orders of magnitude from your world.


Bizarre, isn't it?

Call it a snarky smugness. Call it a manifestation of an ideology so embedded in their minds that they have lost any claim to realism and compassion.


During a panel discussion on MSNBC that included Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow, the ladies downplayed the importance of illegal immigration in this year's election. * Did I just say downplayed? I mean mocked Republicans in Virginia for their concerns over illegal immigration.


Apparently, for these women illegal immigration is largely a myth foisted upon the American public by networks like Fox, not a reality that has led to rapes, sex slavery, fentanyl deaths, and murders. It does not in the minds of those pundits rise to the level of concern. The millions of dollars being spent to transport, house, and feed hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens in so called sanctuary cities does not touch MSNBC’s pundits personally. They seem to have no empathy for the families that have lost children like Laken Riley to illegal immigrants with criminal records. They laughed as others mourned.


Their obvious hatred for all things conservative, and especially for Donald Trump, makes them blind to the suffering of both illegal immigrants and victims of illegal immigrant criminals. Their indifference to the problems associated with illegal immigration reminds me of a thought I  have posted numerous times on this website: “That which is not personal is meaningless.”


What will it take for these ladies to recognize that Illegal immigration poses a grave problem? My guess is that short of their experiencing a crime, they will continue to snarkly dismiss the concerns about criminals and terrorists sneaking into the country with the intention to do harm to American citizens.

*NY Post  Anchors away MSNBC anchors mock Va. voters over immigration concerns: 'Does have a border with West Virginia'

The Left’s Anti-intellectualism: A Neanderthal Tries to Respond


Back to the cave, Donald. The “big guy” thinks you are a Neanderthal. Yes, the paragon of intellectualism and storehouse of experience, Joe Biden, has called “climate deniers” and skeptics “Neanderthals.” It’s a great argument isn’t? It bespeaks the nature of the modern leftist mind:  Counter detailed questions and counter arguments with name-calling and ad hominem attacks.


But who is the Neanderthal in this? And why should we call those with a different view on supposed irreversible global trends Neanderthals, especially when it comes to matters of climate? The Neanderthals, the group of hominins that lived through more actual and demonstrably more pronounced climate swings for all of their existence, adapted to both warm and cold periods. If any group of humans knew about climate change, it was definitely the Neanderthals. During their 165,000-year reign they saw the extremes of Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods. But, of course, no individual Neanderthal would have noticed the change through which its subspecies lived. It would take a biblical Methuselah to notice climate change as it has occurred over the past 2 1/2 million years. I know Joe Biden is old, but he isn't that old.


Swings in weather? Yes. Swings in climate? No. Droughty decades? Yes. Droughty centuries? Sometimes. Ask the Pueblo. Ask “We’Are-the-World” 20th-century Ethiopians about a switch from seasonally slightly humid to very arid. Sure—definitely noticeable by individuals.. But that drought of 1989-1990, exacerbated by conflict is long gone, now replaced by a new El Niño-driven drought.


Look at the climate global controls, Joe. Latitude plays a role because of Earth’s tilt to the plane of the ecliptic. Semi-permanent Highs and Lows under Hadley cells that shift with changing sun angle control precipitation, and the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) plays a role. Cold currents off the western sides of continents and orographic barriers also exert influences on weather and “climate.” Think Sierra Nevada, Mt. Whitney, rain shadow, and Mojave.


Nit-picking


So let's examine what Joe has experienced over his eight decades of careful weather observations. The mean temperature in Scranton, Pennsylvania on February 27, 2024, was 30.7°F. By comparison, the mean temperature for Scranton on February 27, 1945, was 35.4°F. What's up with that, Joe?


Joe


Let me guess, Joe. You would say that one can't judge climate change by a single day or comparison between two days. And you would be correct, but hear this Neanderthal out. I could easily argue that one storm also does not make the climate, or indicate a climate change; yet, you and yours have used individual incidents as arguments for climate change. In my mind that's “Neanderthal thinking”; it's not scientific. Joe, you are simply echoing the vogue ideas spread by people like Greta Thunberg, whose knowledge of Earth history is  suspect.


What's that, Joe? You say the Arctic ice is melting, the Antarctic ice is melting. Also, the seas are rising at an unprecedented rate, and droughts, floods, heat waves, and cold spells all indicate changing climate. But what climate? The tropical rainforest climate? The tropical savanna? The subtropical climate? The tropical, monsoonal climate? The cold desert climate? The hot desert climate? T’he steppe? The tundra? The temperate warm summer, cold, winter climate? All of them? No, Joe, please don't tell me you mean all of them. But if you do mean all of them, are they changing at a uniform rate? What's that you say, Joe? Something about existential? Do you mean existential as in the demise of the Neanderthals 24,000-35,000 years ago? As in the demise of the australopithecines? Homo naledi? Habilis?You realize, don't you, that every human species survived thousands of years under changing climatic conditions?


Pros and Cons


You probably think you're saving the future, Joe. I believe you're destroying the present in favor of an unknown future. That’s suicidal thinking. People who commit suicide probably don’t envision the potential for a “change for the better.” You’re making America into a Jonesville, with despair the only option. Every climate prediction by so-called authorities over the past 30 years has failed to materialize. Yet, you intend to destroy a modern economy on the basis of similar predictions by people decidedly hyperbolic. You cannot say definitively that a warmer world is any more hazardous to human life than the current world or the pre-industrial world, or the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, or the Younger Dryas. You cannot say that no populations might benefit greatly by warmer temperatures. Do the tens of thousands Canadians who travel to Florida each year prefer bitter winter over warm summer? Wouldn’t Canadian farmers benefit from a longer growing season? In short, not all effects of Earth’s vicissitudes are deleterious.


Name-Calling


Give me a real debate, Joe. Give me one with Earth history, Earth features, and Earth processes as the context for a discussion on climate. Give me one that includes the physics and chemistry of planetary atmospheres and excludes anecdotal “symptoms” of change that are dubious at best, such as dying coral reefs and human diseases that might be spreading through migrations as much as through pervasive heat.


Frankly, Joe, if I'm a Neanderthal, you're an idiot. Sorry, uneducated, idiot. You have told us how brilliant you are, so I recommend that, instead of lying on the Delaware beach with your ball cap over your eyes, you pick up an historical geology textbook and read through it. Short of doing that, you demonstrate to me that you and not I, are the “Neanderthal.” My apologies to the Neanderthals for including you, Joe, in their group.

The Model


History provides us with many models of great leaders. One of the greatest was Alexander the Macedonian, who conquered the ancient world. Through charisma and action, Alexander amassed not only a following in his own time, but also a following through history. Few leaders could be called Homeric, but Alexander conjures up images of characters like Achilles, who faced his enemies unafraid.


If you go to the website called goodreads.com, you'll find a list of more than 120 books about Alexander. And of course, there have been movies and television series about him. From Alexandria in Egypt, a city that he founded to Alexandria, Virginia, places honor his name. Parents still name their children after him. His legacy endures more than 2000 years after his death.


The Image


What's your image of Alexander the Great? I think of him spear in hand riding on Bucephalus, his famous horse, leading his men in a charge against the Persians of Darius III. What, you might ask, is the reason I thought of Alexander the Great today?


Fast Forward 2000 Years


Yesterday, I saw a photo of Joe Biden, arguably the most powerful man in world history, given that he is backed by the United States military. Joe had his frozen smile on his face as he ate an ice cream cone while a sycophantic press seemed too timid to ask any difficult questions. It was that image of Joe Biden holding the ice cream cone that made me think of Alexander the Great.


Two thousand years from now, no one is going to know the name of Joe Biden. No one is going to immortalize him in marble or bronze. No one is going to make a movie or write a book or an epic poem about Joe Biden unless it is satirical. What could a sculptor sculpt as an enduring Image of Joe Biden? Would it be a bust of Biden with half closed eyes as he tries to frame a thought? Would it be a statue of Joe driving his little convertible sports car while holding an ice cream cone like a lance set for a joust?


The Hero’s Companion


If you read through epic stories, or even see movies about heroes, you will note that many of them have faithful companions. The metaphor of a hero and a faithful companion extends to characters like Batman and Robin and derives from an extensive body of ancient literature peopled by men like Achilles and Patroclus. The hero and companion metaphor has been parodied from Don Quixote to radio, TV and movies that depict characters like Cisco and Pancho.


Joe Biden's companion, Vice President Kamala Harris seems like a self-parody. How would a sculptor depict the vice president? Would she be sitting backwards on the Democrat donkey, cackling or braying, as she often does in public appearances? In a literary work, would she be represented by a character spewing word salads, and tautologies? Would she be shown to be the bumbling, incompetent character she has proven herself to be over the past three years?




What will be the legacy of modern American leadership? Will it be the decline of the country in a fall to rival the fall of Rome? Will it be the beginning of a new Dark Ages, truly dark as a green energy grid cannot supply a high-tech society with the power it needs to maintain itself and grow?


Much of the country is praying for an American Alexander the Great, but apparently not all the country wishes for such a leader. The Democrat faithful appear to be braying for an inarticulate and sleepy ice cream eater and a female version of Shakespeare's Nick Bottom, who, if you remember, was turned into an ass.

ME: Wow! I guess what they say is true, having a stroke really does put a crimp in one’s style.


You: Wait! What? Who…?


Me: Yeah. I didnt realize …well, I suspected…


YOU: Are you saying you had a stroke?


Me:  Yes, that”s what the MRI shows.


YOU: HOLY COW! YOU ALL RIGHT? How…


ME: Remember, I recently said I injured my wrist and hand?


YOU: Vaguely…


Me: I thjought it was the consequence of a recent bout of exercise…Turns out I had some minor bleed on the right side of my brain.


You: Oh…any …


ME: Effects? A little numbness in my left arm and hand. No problems walking, talking, or brushing my teeth.


You: Let me guess. You have some thought to share.


ME: Nothing too profound. Upon realizing I had a stroke, I rememberd two lines from Andrew Marvel”s “To His Coy Mistress”:


    “But at my back I always hear
    Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”


Time has been following closely behind since my birth, but I have largely ignored the sounds of those hoofs as I believed it was I doing the chasing or believed a finite being like me was winning the race against time. Ah! The folly of hubris. The folly of a finite being in a race with an ineluctable outcome.


YOU: Are you confessing to hypocrisy? Aren’t you the one always declaring, “This is not your practice life”?


ME: As I’ve said elsewhere, There’s hypocrisy or contradiction in every life. There’s always the problem of hubris, the “root” of “sin.” That’s that tale in Genesis about the fruit: pride prevents the obedience; pride encourages an artificial independence and convinces the Ego to self-apotheosize. I believe there”s a god-drive in many of us. It drives the young to take risks because of an assumption of invulnerability.


YOU: Consequences?


ME: Personally? Yes. I ignored the first signs of the stroke, such as my ring finger on my left hand not hitting its assigned keys as I typed. It was also sluggish to respond. Then, still believing in my invulnerability, I drove a 20-hour round trip to see an ailing relative in a 3-day period. Hubris, folly, and a risk to my lovely wife and those I passed on two-lane roads. Fortunately, nothing happened. The minor stroke stayed minor; no loss of any speech, awareness, right hand, legs, or desire to yap out another blog.
YOU: BRIEF LESSON?


ME: Self awareness. Humility. We reduce ourselves to fools without both.






  

So, now the plan is to brighten cloud cover to reflect sunlight—all done in the name of saving you from global warming.


But what if you want the warmth? What if you favor summer over winter? Hot over cold?


Too bad, “scientists” are already planning to brighten the clouds, cool the ocean with Tums, and save the planet. Now what could possibly go wrong? They’re “scientists,” aren’t they. They know stuff. They want to do what every massive volcanic eruption does, that is, lower world temperatures, the examples par excellence being the ancient (74,000 years ago) eruption of Toba and the more recent (1815) eruption of Mount Tambora, that latter volcanic blast responsible for “The Year without a Summer” and accompanying famine.


Altering the Longshore Transport: When Humans Play God


Would you stand in front of a moving car, put your hands up, brace yourself, and attempt to stop its movement?


If you stand on the shore of the East Coast (USA) for a year, some 250,000 to 300,000 cubic yards of sand will wend their way past you in the longshore currents. This longshore transport system has been active for thousands of years from New York to Florida. It makes beaches moving collections of rock and mineral fragments (and, in our modern world, fragments of artificial substances). At some coastal locations, humans have altered this flow of sands by constructing rigid concrete and rock groynes and jetties that collect the sands on the upstream side of the longshore currents and also redirect the longshore transport of those sands. The construction effects two changes: It temporarily halts the flow of sands until those sands reach the seaward end of the structures, and it robs the down current areas of sands they would naturally receive in the more or less continuous transport system. In other words, when humans attempt to control nature to solve one problem, they often cause a different problem. In making a beach up current, humans destroy another beach down current. **


What’s the story here? Certainly it’s not about beach sands. No, This centers on atmospheric temperature. Awhile back, I mentioned the Biden Administration’s toying with the idea of injecting dust into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. I noted that if such a process could be carried out  efficiently, it might coincide with a random eruption, exacerbating the effect of cooling by volcanic ash and sulfur compounds, possibly even causing a “manmade” Year without a Summer, such as the one that caused famine in the early nineteenth century.


Now, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal online a startup firm called Stardust Solutions has been testing a process of “solar radiation management it intends to use off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution intends to spill 6,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the ocean south of Martha’s Vineyard, essentially, dropping a bunch of Tums into the sea. *


What could possibly go wrong?  They’re scientists, aren’t they? Surely, they’ll fix the problem they intend to fix without causing any other problem. Haven’t such scientists redirected beach sands with predictable outcomes beneficial to all? Surely, one can’t cite the beach control problems as an analog of atmospheric tampering.


Actually, one can.


You Don’t Get a Say


Just as you had no say in the spending of American money at the Wuhan Laboratory, the suspected development site of the SARS-COVID pandemic,  so you have no say in what individuals sold on “climate change" are doing “in your name” or “for your benefit,” as the money for such projects comes from wealthy climate alarmists and government officials who use taxes as they please on any project they please without accountability and because “they know better than you.” And now, it’s cloud brightening.


But what if you want a slightly warmer world? What if you want slightly longer growing seasons? What if you know that droughts and floods and atmospheric rivers and Arctic bombs occur for both known and unknown reasons and at times often unpredictable? What if you reason that natural climate controls might cycle as they have always cycled and that tampering will only create an unpredictable new problem?


Late Winter Flowers


Recently, I visited family in North Carolina. That meant leaving in February my relatively cold Pennsylvania home, where my spouse and I won’t plant flowers until late May. Upon our arrival in North Carolina, we noticed blooming flowers. Would a little warmth hurt us back in Pennsylvania? Would some extra growing season be bad? Would I shun some warmth and relish the cold spring that often extends into June? I’ve shivered watching spring baseball games. I’d rather sweat.


$64.55 Million


If I had known how lucrative climate research would become, I might not have retired. Sure, I made money off global warming research for the US EPA and PA’s similar agency, but my largest grant supported by the Feds and the Commonwealth of PA was a pittance compared to the $64.55 million from which the cloud brighteners will fund their experiment. That money comes from the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program funded by the partnership between the Australian government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and by conservation organizations and several academic institutions. There’s big money behind “climate science.” Climate change is big business. Academicians fly to conferences like COP28 on someone else’s dime to “discuss their findings,” not one of which is a “solution: to the problem of global change—if such a change is, in fact, a problem in search of a solution and not a solution in search of a problem.


The money, I suggest, is more important than the science it supports. Academics the world over are thriving off the global warming teat. Each year the udder gets larger, and more milkmaids go to work. The nourishment flows profusely.


Think about $64.55 Million


Given carte blanche to run experiments on Earth’s systems with little to no accountability, the “scientists” will do what they want; they’ll run experiments on the planet “in hopes that” their work will lead to predictable results or in hopes that another grant, and another, and another will become available in “the system.”


But Earth is a complex planet; it’s changing and cycling as I write this. It reacts to orbital changes, to tectonic changes, to precessional tilt, and to volcanism at varying rates and in varying durations. Epochs butt up against epochs; ages against ages, periods against periods, and eras against eras. Changes often occur over periods that cover many human generations; some changes will occur over periods that exceed the rise and extinction of species. “Scientists” know this. But grant money is more transitory—as are research careers. So, “Heck, let’s try this. It might work. Besides, we have the grant.”


Say it slowly: s-i-x-t-y-f-o-u-r m-i-l-l-i-o-n dollars, dollars that might or might not make a desired change and that potentially might make an undesirable change like robbing the sands of one beach to make another. We have allocated the funds. “Go run the experiment.” No questions asked because we are locked into a self-perpetuating system. In the meantime, Earth, totally indifferent to the whims of special interest groups like climate alarmists, will continue to warm or to cool, to cast ash and sulfur into the stratosphere, and to go into disequilibrium and then into temporary equilibrium.


$64.55 million. $64,550,000. And they don’t care what you want.










  

• Found under the headline: Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planet

**https://coastalcare.org/2009/02/the-negative-impacts-of-groins/

I…uh…uh…uhhh…uh...Getting impatient? Want to say, “Spit it out, man. Geez, how long do we have to wait for you to remember what you wanted to say?”


Ever provide a word or finish a sentence for someone who had a temporary lapse? A broken chain of thought? It can happen to anyone, right? But… infrequently for most until we fog out in complete dementia.


That’s what happened recently when a reporter had to interject “Hamas” into the President’s press conference. He seemed to have forgotten the name, substituting the generic “opposition” for Hamas. It was a week of forgetfulness for Old Joey. Or should I say a week of false and inaccurate memories, such as meeting with François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand long after the Frenchman had died? * But then accurate memories aren’t demonstrably the forte of Joe Biden, the “top of the class student with three degrees,” and “big rig driver.” Joe’s world has strange colored clouds.


I recently saw this ostensibly feeble old man shuffle up to the mic to address the American people on the issue of the border. Essentially what he said is that any border crisis is Trump's fault. He completely ignored his own involvement in opening the border through executive orders. He completely ignored the lure of Democratic-run “sanctuary cities” and offers of free stuff, from phones to education to healthcare to transportation to housing….and now in New York, to cash handouts. ** Although I am not an expert in the executive powers of the president, I assume, I think reasonably, that a president can rescind his own executive orders. Like so many others, I also wonder why he seems to put more emphasis on the borders of other countries than he puts on American borders, but maybe I have an idea (see below). And for the first time that I have heard, he mentioned fentanyl in his talk, seeming to arrive a little late to the party, I’d say by more than 100,000 Americans who died during his watch.


Counting


Why mention the border now? Is it because it’s a leap year? That looming election? The 300,000 encounters at the border in a single month? Democrat mayors—complicit in the surge—complaining?


I have mentioned elsewhere, quantities and numbers seem to carry little importance in the modern liberal mind unless they result in inordinate spending, that is, in giveaways; thus, the 34 trillion-dollar debt we’ve accrued, much of it under Obama and Biden—and under feckless Republicans. Numbers are only relevant in “context,” largely the context of special interest groups. *** Right now, for example, the  inflation rate is decreasing, a “fact” the Administration is happy to mention without saying, “Yes, everything we did in the first year of the Biden Administration accelerated inflation, and no high prices will fall to their former low level, but inflation isn’t nine to eleven percent anymore. You’re welcome.”


Quemoy and Matsu


I assume that Joe, who is just a pinch older than I, remembers the Nixon-Kennedy debate that centered on defending the islands Quemoy and Matsu that had come under Communist attack. I also assume that deep in his brain lies the mantra “If we don’t stop Communism there, it will take over the Free World.” It might be that argument that underlies his desire to protect the borders of other countries. But as he implements that Cold War policy, he simultaneously has allowed an insidious Marxism to fester in this country, has opened the cyber and real borders to Chinese and Russian operatives, and has shown evident weakness in his withdrawal from Afghanistan, where he left an air base and military equipment for the Taliban to use.


Jill’s Upset


I can understand the First Lady’s anger at any news detrimental to her husband’s reputation. **** Robert Hur’s recent report that Biden is a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” was a direct attack on her husband. But we’re looking at the “leader of the Free World,” the commander of the most powerful military, and the guy with the pen that writes the executive orders.


Sorry, Jill. We’ve seen you lead the guy around as he wanders confused on stage. We’ve seen him slap-walk, and we’ve seen him stumble. We’ve heard him utter gibberish. We've heard him say, "I better not say, or I might get in trouble." Consider, Jill, that many of us are upset by the thought of a guy with diminished faculties leading a nation of 330 million people--if he is, in fact, the actual leader.












*Or, maybe, he communes with the dead like Mrs. Clinton, who channelled Mrs. Roosevelt. You know the truly comedic circumstance encompassing comics like those late night guys Colbert and Kimmel? It’s that they can’t see the treasure chest of humor in Democrat politicians, particularly in a guy who falls off a bike, makes up a false past, plagiarizes, and trails off into uh-ness when he addresses reporters.


**https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/opinion/hochul-and-adams-never-ending-migrant-money-spigot/


***Great for publicity, of course, unless a transmanwoman like Rose Montoya flashes hisher breasts on the White House lawn shortly after meeting POTUS.


****https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/opinion/jill-biden-can-spare-us-the-fake-outrage-over-the-damning-special-counsel-report/

I didn’t pay much attention as the dome of sky was changing. Yes, occasionally, I looked up and took notice of a darkening night sky, but I did so without assessing how many of the stars I knew during my childhood had faded or altogether disappeared. Looking back, I realize they left the sky one-by-one, hundreds disappearing as I focused my attention on mundane stuff over the decades of my adulthood.


The Past’s Night Sky


I grew up in a small town of about 15 or 16 thousand people, where even in my city neighborhood at night in the 1940s and 1950s, I could look up to see stars, many of them. And then I grew up, married, and my wife and I moved into the countryside outside an even smaller town, one that was half the population of my hometown but that has since dwindled to about an eighth of the population it was upon our arrival.


Rural and countryside: The words conjure images of starry night skies. But not so. Over the decades of our residency and during the local population decline, I took note on occasion that my once wooded property gradually seemed to lie under a hazy glow on the horizon and rather dark dome arcing above. Now, the stars have all but disappeared. Some of the brightest stars occasionally dot the dome, and Orion’s Belt is prominent on cold clear winter nights. Of course, the bright planets are still there; the moon, too. But gone is that starry sky of my childhood and the early years of rural life. Like youth turned to middle and then to old age, the change occurred unnoticed until it was noticeable. One night I looked up and realized what was missing.


And that same kind of insidious and hardly noticed disappearance is at work in fading American freedoms. If the trend continues, we’ll awaken to find ourselves living beneath the dark dome of a socialist government, our freedoms gone like those stars of my childhood, our privacy gone, our individual wealth gone. Ensuing generations of children will know neither the twinkling lights of the universal dome nor the pinpoint brilliance of five freedoms: 1) The freedom to speak one’s mind, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) The freedom to control one’s own destiny, 4) The freedom to question anything and anyone at any time, and 5) The freedom to own.


Germini in Mono Lake


If you’ve never visited Mono Lake at nighttime, I recommend putting it on your bucket list. Clear desert sky, placid alkaline water, both shielded from city lights by mountains to their west. When it’s their turn to occupy the sky, Castor and Pollux shine so brightly that one can see them reflected by the surface of the dark water. It’s the sky on Earth. The twins become quadruplets. The nighttime visitor sees the sky below as well as above.  Lights above and lights below; stars all around.


That’s an analog of how I saw freedoms during my youth, freedoms everywhere one looked,  freedoms that have undergone a gradual disappearance that I, like so many other Americans, failed to notice.


How did we lose the night sky? An obvious answer is that we electrified for convenience and pleasure. We artificially extended day into night, more so than the tilt of our planet does for the Northern Hemisphere between the winter and summer solstices. Ease has been a human goal unattainable by our ancient ancestors. Ease is easily obtained now,  a flick of a switch. And we have extended that goal into dependence, to a life of ease dependent upon others who will care for our needs. And chief among the caretakers are the government bureaucrats and their amorphous agencies grown so large that they envelop us from every angle, much as the stars seem to do for the nighttime visitor to Mono Lake, where the sky appears to lie below as much as it lies above.


My Failure—and Maybe Yours


I have never done anything to save the stars. They kept disappearing; occasionally, I noticed the changing sky, but and in fact, I believe I have contributed to their disappearance. I have security lights. I have a lamppost. I bleed photons skyward from my house and property. My rural neighbors also bleed photons. The small villages in the township bleed photons, the cumulative effect of which, coupled to car headlights, bathes the local heavens in a dull haze and erases stars once visible near the horizon. Some 16,000 years ago, the residents of the rock shelter called Meadowcroft about an hour's drive from my house would have seen about 3000 stars on the inside of the sky dome when they stepped beyond the protective fire at the shelter’s entrance.


Granted, I would not like to have lived 16 millennia ago. Harsh life. Dangerous life. Not a life of ease. Would the glorious night sky have made up for the hardships of sustaining life as  a hunter-gatherer among bears and wolves? Not from my well-lit perspective.That those ancient people probably had a fire at the entrance—their form of security light and convenience that I would have embraced—indicates to me that humans were long destined to erase the stars, choosing ease and security over raw freedom.


So, I ask myself whether or not we humans, upon becoming civilized and soft with ease, were not inevitably headed from our beginning toward socialism and the nanny state.