In a short verse, Bertolt Brecht writes,


I need no gravestone, but
If you need one for me
I wish the inscription would read:
He made suggestions. We
Have acted on them.
Such an epitaph would
Honor us all.


To alter that for this website, I write modestly:


I wish the inscription would read:
"He pondered life. We
Pondered what he pondered."
Such an epitaph would
Honor all who ponder.

Unfortunately, thinking doesn't necessarily lead to efficacious acting as I infer from Brecht's "suggestions"; in fact, it doesn't necessarily lead to any action. It can, in numerous instances, lead to inimical acting, as in the denial of rights and freedoms and even life perpetrated under the "thinking" of Marxists and socialists in the last 150 years and in the enslavement of millions of others under pre-nineteenth-century ideas about human value. But motivating others to think is the first step in getting them to act in ways that can be self-efficacious. There's no promise, of course, and no guarantee of benefits. People do what they do with or without forethought. Nevertheless, if I cannot be known for inspiring action as Bertolt Brecht desired for his legacy, then I desire to be be known for inspiring others to seek insights in the hope that their thoughts will be both self-efficacious and beneficial to others. 

​What would you want to see on your gravestone?    

Are you a middleman? Middlewoman? Politically correct “Middleperson”? Are you concerned about what such “middle-people” think? Here’s why I ask.


In his1969 book The Truth of Poetry, Michael Hamburger makes this point: “The vast body of critical and biographical literature about Baudelaire points to another development that is very much part of the situation of poets later than he; I mean the disproportion between the demand for poetry itself and the demand for literature about poetry. Very few, if any, serious poets since Baudelaire have been able to make a living out of their work; but thousands of people, including poets themselves, have made a living by writing or talking about poetry”( 2) [Bear with me a moment longer, because here’s the conclusion] “This anomaly--paralleled in many ways, as it is, by economic developments conducive to a proliferation of middle-men in all trades and industries—has not only produced conscious or unconscious reactions apparent in the political commitments of several outstanding modern poets, but has also affected the very substrate of their work.” *


Say what? It’s simple. We have more middlemen than we have doers. Take the annual State of the Union Address every President gives to Congress. The President speaks, and then afterward a host of others chime in about what he said, interpreting his words for the rest of us as though we were incapable of listening, understanding, and reacting. Or take a football game. Do you really need a commentator to tell you that So-n-So just threw a pass to a teammate? Or that a long run for a touchdown was a long run for a touchdown? Do you really need the incessant chatter of interpreters?


There was a brief experiment by one of the networks years ago. The televised game had no commentators. There were football players playing the game and a crowd making noise in the background. No comments. None. Zilch. The viewer was on his own, his eyes and ears his only guide to what was happening. I saw that game. At first it was a bit unnerving. I had grown accustomed to the voices of “expert” analysts telling me what I had been watching, explaining to me what I already knew. I had become used to the voices of middlemen.


And that’s what our society largely is. As Hamburger argues, more people—like professors of literature—have made a living off commenting about the works of others than the writers themselves, poets, that is. Of course, famous novelists can make a fortune, but consider the status of poets relegated to giving readings in small groups gathered in the back room of some library on a Tuesday night. Consider the limited sales of poetry books. Yet, there are critics galore who have made their living talking and writing about those few successful poets.


And on the nightly prime-time pundit shows? Well, it’s the same. People interpret others’ words and actions for the audience. It’s as though we are always watching a show like The Voice or America’s Got Talent, all of us constantly awaiting the opinion and judgment of others, the “middlemen” who interpret life for us.


And so, in a society of few doers but more interpreters, do we find that the doers eventually do as the interpreters influence? In short, do those who begin as creative voices end up as self-parodies and as puppets manipulated by those who analyze them? Are all doers awaiting the accolades of winning some “academy award”? Is everyone who becomes well known for a special talent eventually going to succumb to the analyses of “experts” who make their living off that talent?


Make an assessment here: How bound are you to the voices of middlemen? How dependent are you on the analyses of others? Watch the game with the volume turned off. Make your own analysis. Draw your own conclusions. Do your own judging. For your own sake, stop listening to middlemen.


*Hamburger. Michael. 1969. The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s. New York. A Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

The current US President, often apparently at a loss for words (or thoughts), uses “You know the thing” to escape his own mental entrapment. Once said, the thought becomes his communication to all because, well, everyone knows to what he must have been referring. In fact, faulting him for his brain freeze is slightly unfair though largely worrisome. Just about every human being suffers a momentary brain glitch. There’s so much to know and much to communicate, and we might properly assume that the head of the most powerful country has much on his mind. Nevertheless…


That the person called the “most powerful in the world” has brain freezes isn’t as worrisome to me as is his recapitulatory thinking. Mentally the product of an increasingly more Left-leaning Party, the President appears to foster growth on a tree of thought that finds its roots in socialist and special interest soils. His first acts in office demonstrated his philosophical bond to a generation born in fear: Fear of climate change, fear of social rejection, fear of financial insecurity, fear of political incorrectness, fear of labeling, and fear of just about anything that might be described as the successes of others who have forged fortunes from chaos. Or should I say “fear compounded by envy and ignorance”?


Take his closure of that famous Keystone Pipeline as an example of recapitulating the thought of his supposed political base. The pipeline had jumped every environmental hurdle and leapt through every environmental safety hoop. Its opponents had run out of options to halt its completion. It was deemed a safe option for transporting oil, as pipelines all over the world have demonstrated in the absence of sabotage. The pipeline industry had a history of complying with rules for the restoration of land disturbed by pipeline emplacement. The industry is safe and protective. I know this personally because I was part of 18-month study (1987) on right-of-way reclamation run by Argonne National Laboratory for the Gas Research Institute.*


Pipelines can be emplaced without much environmental damage, though as in all right-of-ways, where trees cover the surface, they must be cut. Any flight over eastern United States reveals straight swaths of bared ground through forests, where power lines carry their electricity from power station to homes. The right-of-ways are a necessary part of modern life and AC power transmission. And they are a necessary part of gas and oil transmission. Would the alternatives of DC power from localized power plants required by Edison’s grid in New York in the nineteenth century or trains from the North Slope in Alaska be as efficient for America’s large urban populations? Would using gas only locally be of any use to the nation at large? No, power and fuel distribution is essential to a large society with a third of a billion people.


But the “you know the thing President” decided that efficiently moving oil through a tried and true system was bad for world climate. Although I cannot say for certain, I’m guessing Biden has never been to a pipeline construction site or read research data on pipeline construction. I’m guessing also, that he seems to think that burning oil imported from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and even Russia has no effect on climate and that by shutting down American energy supplies he has done his job to save the planet. Go figure. Or, should I say, “You know the thing.”


A brain-freeze President isn’t a model of intelligent decision-making. He is rather a puppet of those in that generation fearful of risks, ignorant of physical processes, and manipulated by special interest groups with socialist leanings. A brain-freeze President is not capable of seeing options, as the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrated. A brain-freeze President cannot anticipate the consequences of his actions except in how they fulfill the wishes of those he believes he must please.


And a brain-freeze President cannot recognize where policy has failed and decisions have weakened a nation both domestically and internationally. Don’t look for rational explanations for policies emplaced by a brain-freeze President because, well, “you know the thing.”


   

*Zellmer, S.D., Taylor, J.D., Conte, D.J., and Gaynor, A.J. 1987. Erosion Control on Steep Slopes Following Pipeline Construction.
The optimum means of inhibiting soil erosion by water on steeply sloped pipeline rights-of-way is a dense vegetative cover. A field study, funded by the Gas Research Institute and conducted by Argonne National Laboratory, compared the environmental effectiveness of eight erosion control methods representing a wide range of economic cost on a 23% slope in southeastern Pennsylvania. Replicated plots were established over the pipeline and on the working side of the ROW after cleanup operations. Precipitation, runoff volume, and sediment yield were measured after major storms for 18 months. Vegetative cover and species composition were determined by the point intercept method at various time intervals during two growing seasons. These data indicate significant differences in sediment yield for some storms due to control method and ROW location. Total plant cover was not significantly influenced by control method. 
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5661684  (Zellmer, S D, Taylor, J D, Conte, D J, and Gaynor, A J. Erosion control on steep slopes following pipeline construction. United States: N. p., 1987. Web.) 


There are about 2,000 research articles on pipeline construction and gas and oil transmission. How many do you think the opponents to the Keystone Pipeline have read?

A conversation between two people, a climate-change alarmist, Mr. A, who attended COP27, and a climate-change doubter, Miss B.


Mr. A.: Wonderful turnout. That 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) was a great step forward. There were 50,000 attendees at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. And the Ocean Pavilion hosted some 15,000 of those attendees.


Miss B.: Whoa, you’re telling me that some 50,000 people traveled to Egypt to discuss climate change? On whose dime? Various governments? Some private benefactors? Fifty thousand! Could you calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the travel?


Mr. A,: Look, it was important to meet to discuss climate change. And we made great progress. For example, the ocean was included in a separate section (XIII) of the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. And paragraph 26 declares the need to address systematic observation and information gaps in our knowledge of the ocean and its role in climate change. The COP people agreed that the ocean plays a role in mitigating a climate disaster.


Miss B.: Sorry, I wasn’t listening. Did you say there were 50,000 attendees? Fifty thousand?…Oh! And I assume they all left feeling enthusiastic about their universal agreement that the oceans are important to the climate systems.


Mr. A.: Well, of course. And people agreed that the oceans should be studied more systematically.


Miss B.: You are aware, aren’t you, that since 70% of the planet is covered by water, the oceans play an integral role in climate? Take ocean currents, for example. Have you noticed that where there are cold currents on the western sides of continents, there are deserts on the continents? Have you noticed that where maritime air enters a continent, it spreads moisture over the continent, making a region like the American Gulf Coast a bit humid by comparison with the American Southwest? Have you noticed that the Gulf Stream affects the climate of Ireland? That the Labrador Current affects the climate of New England? Fifty thousand COP attendees. What are they going to do about ENSO to change the world? What did they accomplish beyond adding carbon to the atmosphere and walking away saying, “See, we care”? You’re telling me that they decided the ocean is important? I’m impressed. Who’d a thunk it? 


Mr. A.: It was important to get everybody in agreement. Everyone there said that we should be doing something.


Miss B.: Yeah. Stop flying around the planet unnecessarily. So, COP28 will be the next big conference. COP29 the one after that; COPAdInfinitum after that. And at each conference people will agree that “something must be done,” probably even if the so called climate crisis doesn’t occur. But then, I guess every weather phenomenon will be labeled a climate issue. You will get on a plane next year and go to another conference where you will have drinks and hors d’oeuvres, maybe some caviar, and definitely some steak—when no one is looking because, as you know, cows add methane to the atmosphere.


Mr. A.: Go ahead, mock. We’re getting the world to recognize a problem and find ways to prevent a disaster.


Miss B.: Really? Find ways? Or are you finding ways to set civilization back centuries? You don’t want fossil fuels? I guess you don’t want the advantages they bring to raising lifespans, supplying hospitals with reliable power, heating and air conditioning the very buildings where the COP conferences are held, and providing the most convenient means of travel the world has ever seen. I guess you’ll ride a horse to the next conference.


Mr. A.: You climate deniers…


Miss B.: “Deniers!” Why, because I see the product of your claiming there’s a climate crisis just because the world might have warmed a degree Celsius over the past 150 years though there also seems to be a “pause” in that warming over the last twenty years? Is more carbon dioxide bad for the crops? Is it really possible to associate weather events, even droughts, with overall climate change? Did the Mayans and Anasazi civilizations suffer long-term droughts because they burned fossil fuels? Is there proof that a warming world will not reverse its own warming as it has many times? Warmer oceans? More evaporation. More evaporation more clouds. More clouds, more sunlight reflected to space and cooler temperatures. More sunspots? Fewer sunspots? 


Mr. A.: But we scientists agree that…


Miss B.: Who agrees. Look at the contradictions in the IPCC reports. Look at the IPCC’s own statements. Hold on; wait, I have one here. Here it is. This is your so called “crisis.” One IPCC executive summary says: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers…Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”


Mr. A.: But 97%…


Miss B.: Come on, we all know that figure of “scientists” or scientific consensus has been debunked, that it is based on a flawed and limited survey and that it even includes “nonscientists” who have been convinced that there’s a crisis. And all the while that you COP attendees worry that something must be done and sign away your potential for individual wealth in the grand redistribution scheme, the Chinese and Indians keep burning fossil fuels in an attempt to achieve economic dominance.


Mr. A.: Look at all the good we have done…


​Miss B.: What? What good? Yes, we now have some alternate energy sources. That’s good, but you haven’t changed any world climate by one iota. Twenty-seven conferences and all I have heard is talk, talk, talk. And it’s always the same “We must act now.” Want to act now? Stop going to conferences all over the planet. Follow Jimmy Carter’s advice. In the depth of winter keep your thermostat at 55. Wear a sweater. You’ll be immensely uncomfortable, but you’ll save energy in the short term. You'll "save" the planet. 


Mr. A.: You just don’t understand. We’re in a crisis.


Miss B.: I think I do understand. We have crisis-level hypocrisy and ineptitude. We have a crisis of money spent on unreliable energy systems. We have a crisis born of belief over skepticism. We have a crisis of the wealthy flying everywhere to tell people not to use the cheap, abundant energy that electrified the civilized world and that all the Third World countries desire. Keep those remote villagers in the dark! Keep them hot in summer and cold in winter. Decrease their growing longevity to pre-Industrial times. Limit their carbon footprint to some small cooking fires. In the meantime, you fly to exotic locations and reap all the benefits of a fossil fueled economy. But, hey, you're saving the planet, right? 


Mr. A.: You’re just impossible…


Miss B.: And that’s your scientific assessment? Hey. Enjoy yourself at COP28 in Dubai. I hear there might be as many as 80,000 delegates. Nothing like holding the event in a cheap Motel 6 along an American Interstate! Eventually, at some distant COP as the population of delegates grows exponentially, just about every other person on the planet will be an attendee. Dubai? Give me a break.

When my youngest child was just three years old, we traveled south for a vacation. Packed into our station wagon, the five of us stopped on a Saturday night in North Carolina, where someone asked where we “were from.” The three-year-old said confidently, “We’re from America.” Today, when that three-year-old, who travels widely as a consultant and speaker, is asked to identify “where he is from,” he typically says, “Pittsburgh.” But he’s not; that is, neither he nor we ever lived within the boundaries of Pittsburgh. Yet, what he says is not a lie; we are, as southwestern Pennsylvanians, as much “from Pittsburgh” as are those who live in the urban center. And for various reasons.


First, like so many others who live near, but not in cities, we identify with an economic center. Second, as in much of the country, we identify with sports teams, specifically with the Steelers and Pirates, and also with a major university football team, the Pitt Panthers. Third, many in the area identify by companies located within or on the periphery of the city. At one time, those companies were the massive steel mills that employed tens of thousands. And at the heart of the downtown district in the pre-and post-WWII, lay a central shopping district with three very large department stores that anchored hundreds of other businesses—all, for the most part, now long gone. Fourth, the city houses the local TV stations and major theaters, as well as museums, major hospitals, research universities, revitalized neighborhoods, and traditional bar and restaurant agglomerations: The South Side, the Strip District, and a number of other popular spots from Shadyside to the North Side. Pittsburgh draws the allegiance of western Pennsylvanians. In that sense, my three-year-old now grown up is “from Pittsburgh.”


Anyway, isn’t it just easier to say “I’m from Pittsburgh” instead of saying, “I’m from some town you never heard of that lies in a region generally known as southwestern Pennsylvania”? Dotted by villages and townships plus some actual “towns” and “boroughs,” the region has one overriding identity: Pittsburgh. And the same, I dare say, can be said for other regions: Chicago, Atlanta, Savannah, etc. When the place where one lives has no national significance, then the closest place with such significance becomes the center.


There is a large body of literature that centers on urban centers. The sociology of cities is replete in hypotheses and theories, some of them purely numerical analyses of why cities use the space they confine and house the people they house. Much of that literature is at best esoteric, using statistical models that do not seem to capture the life of those who live in cities or associate their identities with them.


And that makes me think of an argument I once had with a sociologist. He said, following a model of cities he favored, that medieval European cities were walled with a central large structure, the cathedral. It was that wall and that dominant structure that defined the personality of the people: It’s how they identified as being “from” somewhere. He then argued that the modern city was amorphous, the product of suburban development enhanced by commuting that decentralized life that was once limited to the walkable city neighborhoods. No longer, he argued, could one identify with a city center, a major plaza, or a majestic cathedral.


To which I responded with a single word: Steelers. Not that I might put professional football and a stadium at the heart of a city—though the stadium in Pittsburgh is, in fact, a “heart”—but symbolically, the football stadium and the baseball stadium are both “in the heart” of the city. In other words, whereas my friend saw suburban development as a dissolution of the centripetal forces that make a city a “center,” I saw a cathedral replacement in the symbolic center. That one can easily find as many if not more people focused on a Sunday on the Steelers as are focused on a local cathedral, is indicative that a city is more than a walled space with only those contained within labeled as “from Pittsburgh.” And the “cathedral” of sports casts a shadow over communities far and wide: One can find a “Steeler bar” in Reno, Nevada, and fans of the city’s team in other communities both in and outside the country. Pittsburgh isn’t a walled city. It’s a symbolic center. The stadium is, as St. Peters in Rome is for Catholics, a center that holds.


As the steel mills failed in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods also failed. Where pride in the community declined with a declining population, disrepair became the signature feature punctuated by occasional attempts to revitalize. But a bit too late, I might add. The suburbanization of the region had begun. Yes, the region became physically amorphous by comparison to the city of the pre-and-post-war years, but it had retained a loyalty among the suburbanites so much so that they still identify as being, in the eyes of outsiders, “from Pittsburgh.”


And now, especially after a pandemic and the development of cyberspace, the center is changing again for those once located within city boundaries. Is the concept of a “city” undergoing another change? Remember the emigration of New Yorkers during the pandemic? Will they return physically, or will they reconnect to the city via Zoom or some other cyber mechanism? Do those who leave carry their city-identity with them forever? Is a "brand new Floridian" just an "ex-New Yorker"? 


Pittsburgh still attracts suburbanites because it has retained theaters and restaurants, sports teams and universities, museums and boutique shops. It still runs festivals that attract “outsiders.” But it isn’t the city it was of a half century ago. Yet, in its difference, it somehow still centers identities of western Pennsylvanians and emigrants to other parts of the nation. It is a center that “holds.”


This leads me to ask you, “Where are you from?”

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes, “The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” One might think he was foreshadowing problems we experience with our complex technology, but his focus was government. The same notion that “simple is best” lies at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s thought that “that government that governs least, governs best.”


Of course, a twenty-first century political philosopher might easily argue that the America of Paine and Jefferson differed greatly from America today, so neither expression is applicable to the country—or to any current society. America just has “too many people” for an eighteenth-century ideal. Add globalization, and the notion of a “more simple government” fades to a distant social and political memory as some quaint, but old(e) thought.


Simplicity breeds its own problems, anyway, so its efficacy in the body politic is largely mythical. Thus, the relatively simple American Constitution has undergone tweaking since its inception. And it will continue to undergo nuanced interpretations. I suppose we could also argue that the Ten Commandments also beg reinterpretation in every age and circumstance. Or, take those two Commandments of Christ: Love God; love your neighbor as you love yourself. One need only look at the many Christian denominations, social barriers, and wars to see where those seemingly simple commandments led because of the way they have been interpreted. Neighbor? Yes, but not So-n-So.    


Each of us encounters a struggle between simplicity and complexity in a cycle that makes explaining core values difficult. We might start with a simple ideal only to realize that its manifestation requires a complex of actions based on the realities of daily life. The recent pandemic laid the context for one version of the dilemma that might play out again as wintertime sicknesses spread a shadow over society in 2022 and 2023. Government “officials” are toying again with mandatory masks, for example, and with mandatory isolation and vaccinations. Those solutions bring, as everyone discovered over the past two years, complex responses without guaranteed results and generate their own problems. In a complex world of billions, someone somewhere has to interact with others. Simple rules? Many applications!   


Apparently, though everyone can see a value in simplicity, no one wants to have others impose it. Simplicity is a personal matter, and it lies embedded in our sense of freedom. We can choose to live hermit-like, but we balk at any attempt to impose the hermetic life on us. And whenever we see those “in charge” imposing on others restrictions they do not impose on themselves in blatant hypocrisy, we rebel or we become angry: Why should, for example, a Gavin Newsom have an unmasked dinner at an expensive winery while restaurant patrons around the state have no similar freedom? Why should those who proclaim the evils of fossil fuels and impose restrictions on them be able to jet around the world so proclaiming? Their “simple” solutions apply to you, but not to them. They perceive your life as simple, whereas they perceive their own as complex.


Simplicity is a social ideal whose practice generates contradictions and hypocrisy. When a complex government attempts to impose simplicity on its citizenry, inevitable bad consequences follow. One need only look at the test scores of American students to see how a “simple solution” of widespread “public” homeschooling engendered other problems, complex problems, for individuals.


The threat to individual freedom arises whenever government officials seek simple solutions to complex problems. Their only recourse is reductionism that bespeaks control of the masses—and, with the exceptions of a self-proclaimed “elite class,” the individuals that make up those masses.


Much of the universe appears to run on irony, and that seems especially true of human societies. As governments grew from more simple to more complex, they have sought simple solutions to complex problems. Big government ironically seeks to simplify and in the process makes life more complicated. Look at the number of pages of regulations in any government agency to see how, for example, a simple principle like “clean water” or “clean air” has become encyclopedic in practice, so complex that agencies have multiple “specialists” because no one person or group can handle all in their purview.


And the irony extends to millions who prefer by their vote a more complex government over a more simple one—again in the ironic belief that the Big Government will offer simple solutions. They freely exchange their individual complexity and its freedoms for imposed simplicity that results in an unwanted complexity. In every instance, government-imposed simplicity lies on a path to totalitarianism and greater personal debt with only the “elite” enjoying the freedoms denied the masses. That path is paved with future earnings, as the recently passed “Inflation Reduction Act” will reveal in the payroll of 87,000 new IRS agents that will grow over the next decades and beyond, especially as their eventual pensions mount astronomically. If over the next two decades those agents achieve the current $62,000 average IRS salary, the bill will be at least $100 billion. The complexity of tax collection now includes at least nine categories of government employees whose ranks will swell with the new additions. *


Jefferson and Paine envisioned a government Aeolus, the god of the winds who gave Odysseus a bag that contained unfavorable breezes. With all but a favorable wind bound up, Odysseus could continue his journey home. His crew, thinking that the bag held some treasure they could share, opened it and released the unfavorable winds that blew the ship off course. Big government is out of the bag and blowing the ship of state in whatever direction the many agencies desire, many of them at cross purposes or in redundancies. It’s too late to put the winds back in the bag. What Jefferson and Paine proposed cannot be achieved.


*The Office of Personnel Management lists the following IRS positions:

1. Tax Examining
2. Internal Revenue Agent
3. Information Technology Management
4. Miscellaneous Clerk And Assistant
5. Financial Administration And Program
6. Management And Program Analysis
7. Internal Revenue Officer
8. Criminal Investigation
9. Financial Clerical And Assistance

   

Bill: If I had been in charge of the B-21 rollout today, I would have done the whole event differently.


Sam: You’re talking about America’s sixth-generation bomber, right? 


Bill: Yep. It’s supposed to be the most stealthy plane ever. If I wanted to frighten America’s enemies, I would have shown an empty hangar. And I would have had a crowd of actors oohing and ahhing as they looked on an empty space. Imagine the enemy military generals saying, “It’s impossible to see!”

Old theme: Choose your wishes wisely.


VERSION ONE


Characters:     Comrade Mephistovsky
        Contract soldiers
        Conscripts


ACT ONE
Scene: RUSSIA—All of it, that is, plus some allied places


Comrade Mephistovsky: Sign this temporary contract to fight in Ukraine, and you will receive…
Contract Soldier 1: Where do we sign? Can we keep what we take from the dead? Will we be home in time to plant the potatoes?
C M: Sign here. And Yes, and Yes. And there will be women to rape and houses to plunder. The Ukrainians will run from our military thunder.


ACT TWO
Scene: Ukraine—eastern


Contract Soldier 1: Where is Comrade Mephistovsky?
Contract Soldier 2: He said he was going back for more supplies, but that was a month ago. I want to go home, but the Wagner Group has guns trained on us if we turn to flee.
Contract Soldier 1: My wife says we have never received a payment on my contract.
Contract Soldier 2: Look, here come some conscripts. Finally! Some help…Where are your weapons? You can’t fight without weapons!
Conscripts: They said we would get them from the dead.


ACT THREE;
Scene: Hell


Contract Soldier 1: I’m hit. Take me to the medics.
Contract Soldier 2: Sorry, Comrade, but like me, you signed up voluntarily. We can’t turn to go back, or we’ll be shot. Blyat!
Contract Soldier 1: Hello! Aunt. Tell my family to get me out. What? No, I can’t bring you something from Ukraine. It’s Hell here.
Contract Soldier 2: Look! It’s Mephistovsky. What’s he doing?
Contract Soldier 1: He’s robbing our own dead.




VERSION TWO


Characters:     Adam
                       Eve


IN ONE ACT
Scene: The West—meaning western culture, most of it, from Europe through the Americas to the western-thinking land called Australia
        
Adam: There’s really not much one can do to change things. Big Money, Big Press, and Big Government make decisions that affect large portions of the planet. What can the little people do?


Eve:  You can stand up like the Chinese who are rebelling over oppressive shutdowns, like the Russians who are rebelling over conscription into a senseless war, or like the Iranians who are rebelling against a brutal theocracy.


Adam: You know how all that will turn out. Xi will send in the military, and the Russians and Iranians will use their secret police and regular police to suppress the rebels. The protesters are as doomed to fail as were the Hungarians in 1956, the Chinese in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and the Tibetans in 2008. Those in power will not relinquish their power. Their brutality knows no bounds because they do not personally carry out their orders. They remain indifferent to the plight of those they rule.


Eve: I know that most people don’t have the bravery to protest against powerful governments. I also know that once the Press is a controlled agent of a political party, there is little one can do to defend against relentless attacks unless…unless one is Big Money. Big Money can provide itself an immunity. But the little guy is pretty much helpless, especially when Big Money supports Big Government that controls Big Press.


Adam: Yes, I have seen the scenario play out repeatedly over the past decades, getting worse as the Bigs grow bigger. And the irony is that the little guy keeps the Bigs in power by voting for Big Government, listening to Big Press, and supporting the products of Big Money. Modern people are very much caught in the same kind of endless cycle that trapped coal miners in the early twentieth century. The coal companies owned the land, owned the houses on them, owned the company store, and they kept their workers in a cyclic impoverishment. Workers lived in company houses as long as they worked for the company; they had to buy from the company store that simply gave the profits back to the company; and when a mining accident took the life of a miner, his family had to provide another worker or move out. Miners and their families found escaping the cycle nearly impossible. That seems to be the story of today’s population: Work for Big Money; buy Big Money’s products; pay Big Money’s bills; stay in relative impoverishment through Big Government’s taxes and innumerable regulations; and take in all the propaganda from Big Press that argues things could never be better.
    It just dawned on me that most Americans, Europeans, and Canadians who pay attention to the news, probably think the propaganda behind the Russian media’s support for Putin’s war is obvious, but for some reason cannot see the propaganda to which the Bigs subject them. The exertion of control over the little guy is a relentless process that wears down those who protest. The little guy’s own obeisance to the Bigs occurs in the context of no reciprocation.


Eve: As in Big Government’s control over education?


Adam: Not just Big Gov’s control, but Big Union’s control. Look at the manipulation of young minds by a select few with an indoctrination agenda. I can’t imagine how we’ll get past the last few years of teaching people what to think rather than how to think.


Eve: But look at what the two of us are doing? We’re simply repeating the obvious. Who cannot see how the Bigs control the masses? The question still becomes one about personal action: What are you going to do about it, Adam?


Adam: You’re right. Morning diner talk at best. Your questions are rhetorical. We’re not different from the retirees meeting in the local coffee shop, the barber shop, or the diner making the same complaints daily while taking no measurable action. Those who discover the entrapment by the Bigs usually do so without recourse. They dwell in the company houses, buy at the company store, and renew the cycle of feckless futility.


Eve: I guess we are, that is, many of us are, modern versions of Faust. We’ve sold our soul for the promises of Big Mephistopheles. Big M has bought our individual integrity, or rather, has allowed us to purchase our integrity at his profit. I think of those Russians who were told they could earn some money if they signed a contract to fight in Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine. Then, finding themselves in a Hell they hadn’t envisioned when they signed, the soldiers discover that the promise was empty.


Adam: I like the analogy. If we look around, we see the rotten fruit of our choice to sign. I think of the Mephistophelean educators who have lured hundreds of thousands into academic pursuits that will lead to a life of servitude or impoverishment, or to a life in “the company village.” And tied to a socialist-leaning government that holds up the carrot of loan forgiveness, the young give away their future freedoms so that Big Party can stay in control. They see the loan forgiveness in the context of their present, and not in the context of a bill that will come due in increased taxes. Egged on by a complicit Press comprised of reporters who also have college loans to pay, the young see themselves in an eternal present and believe Mephistopheles will never show up to collect his due. Trust me. We’ve both seen this promise before, back when we lived in The Garden. Damned Snake Mephisto!


Eve: I remember reading William A. Henry III’s In Defense of Elitism. In it he argues that a long-standing battle between striving for excellence and striving for equity was being won by forces of the latter for the purpose of population control. In equity, only those who already have get more. The Bigs stay big. He also writes about Margaret Mead’s speculation that the United States was entering a new Dark Ages of medieval mysticism and mumbo-jumbo, of belief based on self-interest, mob politics, and fear rather than research and open-minded inquiry.” (3)* Like those Russians who will be shot by other Russians if they try to flee, we people in the West will be endlessly harassed by the minions of the Bigs if we attempt to reverse the trend.


Adam: Mead was right. We’re living in that Hell now. Way back in The Garden, we signed a contract with Mephisto for a life of ease, thinking that it was an eternal contract. And now we find the contract is coming to an end. We’ve given up much to gain little.   


*New York. Anchor Books. 1994.

It’s truly wondrous, how sure we are
Whenever we see from afar.
But as we magnify our view,
What we once knew becomes less true.

Sweat the small things: Viruses, bacteria, parasites, and, oh! The 15-micron wavelength—this last one is going to make you sweat. Sure the first three can cause fevers in individuals, but that last one, according to no less authority than the IPCC, Al Gore, and sundry others like Greta Thunberg, can make everyone everywhere sweat. Yes, sweat the small stuff.


To survive on a risky planet, all life-forms need to recognize threats. Thus, evolution suffused biology with a sense of danger supported by fight or flight responses both to seen and to unseen, but still perceived, threats. Some threats are obvious, the snarl of a wolf through bared fangs or the open hood of a cobra are examples. Other threats, like viruses and bacteria remain largely undetected until they begin to wreak havoc on a species, often causing the flight response as seen in the 2020 pandemic when many ran to their respective hideaways to flee from the unseen spikes of a virus.     


An individual coronavirus, such as SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, can’t be seen unless one has a scanning electron microscope, so we become aware of it by its effects. Yersinia pestis, the zoonotic bacterium that killed an estimated 50 million people in the 14th century’s sweeping Black Death, is bigger than a virus, but is still only about three microns long. And another perceived threat, still small by our daily standards of measured waistlines and basketball player heights, is the 15-micron frequency of infrared radiation. That length is about equal to some Plasmodium pathogens that cause malaria—a malady that kills about half a million people every year. That which is little, it seems, can have big consequences. We do, it seems, have to sweat the small things.


Fifteen microns—I’ll repeat it because it has become so important in the minds of so many—is the measurement of a threat perceived to be as great as that ten-kilometer-diameter asteroid that killed 75% of life, including the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Fifteen microns measures that ostensible threat not just to humans, but rather, like that bolide of long ago, to all life-forms. Fifteen microns is in the minds of many the measurement of death, the length of a threat so enormous it has been called “existential” by two presidents and a number of world leaders.


So now we know. Carbon dioxide absorbs energy in the wavelength of fifteen microns. That’s about the width of two average bacteria wiggling side-by-side, maybe a little less. The fifteen micron wavelength lies in the thermal infrared band, so carbon dioxide absorbs—and reradiates—heat energy. Those people who worry about “climate change” or global warming believe that the anthropogenic carbon pumped into the atmosphere will absorb so much energy at the fifteen-micron wavelength that Earth will warm catastrophically, thus the term existential threat repeatedly broadcast into our heads by unquestioning media, Hollywood’s elite climate experts, and politicians. And darn if it isn’t one of those invisible threats we know only after we see its effects like melting ice caps, warming and rising seas, dying coral reefs, droughts, floods, Cat V hurricanes, and tornadoes too numerous to mention in this brief essay. Did I mention the spread of tropical diseases? No? Tropical diseases will spread like uncontrollable wildfire—which, by the way, is another effect predicted by global warming alarmists. You are doomed, and you will sweat as you die. Or, so they say.


The current rate of warming, that is, the current demonstrable rate of warming based on data accumulated over several decades, is about 1.5 degrees Celsius per century, a rate that has occurred before--naturally. The measured warming is less than model-projected warming suggests—that is, models of climate unscientifically tell us what warming “should be” occurring, not what IS occurring. Nevertheless, the models have instilled fear of a dire threat in the minds of millions who have succumbed to economic hardships unnecessary in a world of cheap and abundant energy derived from fossil fuels—now seen as sources of that 15-micron wavelength absorption that “forces” the atmosphere to warm. But, as I have previously written, don’t get me wrong. Carbon dioxide, methane, and Earth’s chief greenhouse gas water vapor do, in fact “force” warming of an atmosphere. That’s been a good thing because it prevents Earth from having Martian climates and from returning to a condition called Snowball Earth.     


Panicked by the assumed threat of that 15-micron forcing effect, the UN’s IPCC and some world leaders have declared fossil fuels anathema, and proclaimed the value of green energy sources like wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal, and nuclear energy as workable replacements for some of the energy needs of eight billion people. Unfortunately, those suggested alternatives to carbon for a planet with such a large population fail to meet all the current and projected energy needs. Yet, in the rush to convert, those in control have started humanity down a path to energy impoverishment.


You and definitely your descendants will undergo an energy impoverishment by replacing the cheap abundant stuff with the expensive and often unreliable stuff. Nowhere is this more evident than in California, where the legislature and governor have set a date for banning internal combustion engines. Have they replaced oil with snake oil?


California has no alternative energy plan in place that will supply energy to meet all the electrical needs of a state running on electric vehicles while still using electric lights, washers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers, furnaces, stoves, ovens, coffee makers, escalators, drills, saws, other tools, conveyor belts, cell phones, computers, and entertainment centers. In short, that obsession with the short measurement of fifteen microns will shrink California’s ability to operate at a level it now enjoys—note the recent request by the governor that EV owners restrain from charging their car batteries. Energy—and all that depends on it—will become an economic burden, an unnecessarily harsh one. And for what?


In two centuries the planet will as a whole be a guesstimated three degrees Celsius warmer if the current and actual trend continues. But that 1.5 -degrees-C-per-century is a general, and not a specific geographic trend, and it requires a “doubling” that isn’t guaranteed because temperature and carbon have a logarithmic relationship, not a geometric or exponential one.


The oceans and atmosphere move heat energy around the planet. The atmosphere also radiates it to space. That’s why we don’t have the extreme differences in temperature that the moon or a spacewalker has between areas lighted by the sun and areas in shadow. But that’s the planet as a whole. Every location has climate controls: Latitude, elevation, ocean currents, land-water distribution, continentality, prevailing wind systems, semi-permanent High and Low pressure systems, the position with respect to Hadley cells, days of cloud cover or sunshine, and even transpiring vegetation and soils. California ranges from deserts to redwood forests, from fertile valleys to barren mountains. A general trend over the planet might or might not affect each of these landscapes.        


The politicians in California have committed the state to some imagined panacea of electric vehicles powered by wind and solar—probably not so much by nuclear because of bureaucratic processes and threats to such power plants by potential seismic activity. The current level of civilized luxury will become harder for the commoner to achieve as the state robs itself of abundant and cheap energy—while across the Pacific the massive carbon-emitter China continues to burn coal under the same atmosphere that blankets California.


Let’s analogize here. The Romans invented cement, using it, for example, in the famous dome of the Pantheon. With the fall of the empire came the loss of cement making. Its rediscovery had to wait centuries. In the forgetfulness of populations, ensuing generations don’t even realize what they do not know. Probably very few, if any, people in the Dark Ages said, “Gosh, I wish we knew how to make cement.” Those who will grow up in a California bereft of cheap and abundant energy will not know that life could be different, could be easier—as their ancestors, the current Californians, experienced it. They won’t know about the good ol’ times that with a more measured approach might have extended today’s prosperity far into the future. Two centuries from now, with temperatures in California very little changed from temperatures today, with periodic droughts and floods as have occurred for millennia, there will be unnecessary impoverishment. The cement of cheap abundant energy that currently holds together a prosperous society will be a thing of the long forgotten past. A new medievalism will prevail, all because of a fear of what the fifteen-micron wavelength will do.


And if the absence of cheap and abundant energy sources two centuries hence plays out as its absence now plays in undeveloped nations, then lifespans will shorten. One need only look at those countries where energy shortages can’t meet the needs of the population to see a future of shortened lifespans. And remember, nothing happens without the expenditure of energy. Don’t believe that? Try depriving your body of energy. So, decreased energy means decreased production of tools, machines, and even medicines. Tired of plastics, also? Then eliminating the fossil fuels from which they are made is right for you. Tired of driving on asphalt? Even tired of steel? Not to worry, without carbon, there will be no steel.   


With mandated abandonment of fossil fuels, the promise of a bright future will fade; the lights will dim because no affluent country can cover itself in solar panels and windmills just to meet about half to three-quarters of the energy it now has from fossil fuels. We humans, after centuries of growing urbanization and technology, will become “villagized,” medieval-like. The landscape not covered by solar panels will support windmill towers, both systems revealing their limitations in their own short lifespans, inadequate energy production, and pollutant composition. Graveyards of giant fiberglass propellers and toxic batteries will dot the once arable soils. Ah! The paradise on Earth envisioned by Californians!


Now here’s where any argument against switching from fossil to green energy gets tricky. Should we use electric cars? The easiest answer is “Why not?” They do reduce the carbon dioxide emissions over the projected lifetime of the vehicles, starting about the EV’s 60,000-mile mark. But the argument for the vehicles is offset by an argument against them, that is, the amount of mining, shipping, and manufacturing that such vehicles require can’t be measured simply against the weight of fuel burned by internal combustion engines. The thousand pounds of batteries in an electric vehicle contain toxic materials that require, like gold, mining much—maybe more than 50 tons of rock—to acquire as little as a kilogram of metals. So, the “environmental argument” about EVs being better for the humanity depends on a dismissal of some ugly truths. For one, there’s a rather limited reserve of un-mined lithium, meaning that making an EV with lithium batteries will become more expensive, not less. And at some point, except for recycled lithium, there will be unavoidable shortages—the current world reserve is an estimated 80 million recoverable long tons. At an average of 10 kg (22 lbs) of lithium per electric vehicle, that reserve holds enough for fewer than 10 million new cars—less that amount required by the manufacture of all other lithium-powered objects like cell phones. Add to that potential shortage, the inescapable fact that mining of a kg of lithium in places like the Atacama Desert requires 2.2 million liters (581,178 gal) of water. Plus, the toxic nature of the metal has recently led some Portuguese to file injunctions against lithium mining in and near their communities, even though the mining would create new jobs. * Serbia, also, considering the potential pollution of lithium mining has nixed the proposed mine at Rio Tinto. And another offsetting fact lies in the lithium battery fires. A recent EV fire took 12 hours and 75,000 gallons of water to douse. Imagine the damage if that vehicle had been inside an apartment building parking garage. Of course, sometime down our future, iron batteries might replace lithium batteries, so it would be foolish to rule out a future for EVs just because they now use toxic lithium and cobalt. And we can’t dismiss our history of having successfully dealt with other toxins, radioactive materials included.


But let’s say we go solar, total solar. The USA would need enough solar panels to replace the energy output of its current 7,300 power plants. And if consumers up their consumption, even more. An acre could accommodate 2,450 average-size solar panels, but nothing else. No farming there except for mushrooms growing in the shade beneath the panels. Now, no one I know suggests the US meets its annual need for four trillion kWh exclusively with solar panels. Given the amount of land with adequate sunlight per day to make the panels efficient, some billions of panels would be needed even in areas with abundant sunlight; cloudy areas like Ithaca, NY, would require more panels than Phoenix, AZ.


There’s a downside to every technology, even to the older tech like internal combustion engines and coal-fired power plants. But is a decision to alter the planet’s road to prosperity on the basis of a 1.5-degree C rise in global temperature truly prudent and environmentally sound? Is it not possible that those people in colder climes, after undergoing a rise in temperature, might be able to grow crops previously not tenable agriculture in their present climates?


A word about the Gulf Stream: Because water is denser than air and has a higher specific heat (requiring more energy to heat and holding the heat longer than air), the heated water of the tropics can move heat energy to higher latitudes through warm currents like the Gulf Stream. Should all Arctic ice melt, the cold water might shut down that transfer mechanism (the Gulf Stream, after all, is a “river” flowing in water) because icy water is denser than warm water. No one knows for sure what the effect would be. The tropics might get warmer while the temperate zones might get colder until the current “equilibrium” is restored. Gosh, this climate prediction stuff is really complex, isn’t it? Yet…


Yet, none of the foregoing will influence any climate alarmist to rethink the path he or she is on. Yearly conferences always result in the same eschatological rhetoric: “We have only seven years left (or eight, or nine, or ten—the number keeps changing).” And all the while that affluent countries like those in Europe and North America cut back on their cheap and abundant energy sources, the underdeveloped nations forge ahead to burn more coal, oil, and natural gas in an effort to raise the standard of living and the lifespans of their citizens.


And all of this because of a frequency only 1.5 microns in length.

*https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future