One of the consequences of a wholesale handover of Afghanistan to the Taliban has been the recent banning of women from gyms, fun fairs, and fun parks. “No fun for you,” one can hear in imitation of the oft-repeated line of Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi.” But the restrictions on entertainment are just a scratch on the surface of women’s degradation in Afghanistan. If you are a teenage girl there, you can forget about attending middle school and high school. It seems that the Taliban prefer to deny advanced education to more than half the brains in their country. But as foolish and harsh as Westerners might think these restrictions are, their own rearview mirrors reveal the same kinds of restrictions imposed on women prior to the twentieth century. The imposition of restrictions on half the human population equates to more than 50 billion brains in the 200,000-300,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens. And the irony of the restrictions is that the men who impose restrictions on them will never know what they will never know. What might have been engineered or discovered by a female brain never given the chance to explore will forever mark our collective ignorance. 


This recent “setback” along the path of freedom is the result of one man’s unnecessary decision and the process by which that decision unfolded: The catastrophic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan without safeguards for the abandoned population of females. I won’t mention any names here. But I will point out the hypocrisy of western politicians claiming to be champions of women’s rights while turning millions of women away from entertainment centers and schools.


We’ll never know what current and future Afghani women might invent or discover. That door has been shut; its opening is now sealed. All those brains will lie idle in daily chores and obeisance. All those brains have been denied their potential creativity. And all those brains have been restricted because of an unnecessary and ill-thought decision.


One man; millions of women. “No fun for you, and no education, too.” **


*Chris Matthews for MailOnline and AFP. 11 Nov 2022. Taliban bans women from funfairs, parks and gyms in latest crackdown on female freedoms. Online at dailymail.co.uk


**Afghanistan has 41 million people and a current birthrate of 4.56 births per woman. With military restrictions imposed on emigration, the country’s population will likely rise. There’s little chance of escape from the Taliban’s restrictions.

Would I sit to scribble a blog if I had won the $2 billion-Powerball? Would I have a grip on reality? Become a different person? Run and hide from the incessant beggars I might attract—iron filings gathering football shape in a magnetic field generated by my newfound wealth?


Did I even have a grip on reality in buying a ticket for the recent big prize on November 7, 2022? I think the odds of winning were something like 262 million to one. What about the ensuing jackpot for Saturday, November 12, 2022? I understand the odds of winning something—even two bucks, but maybe not the $40+ mil—are one in 24.9? Should I spend the $2 on a line? Could I use an extra $40 million? Do I want to spend my time anticipating, dreaming, planning? All my plans for the $2 billion went for naught. What if I spend brain energy on another set of hypothetical plans—markedly reduced plans, of course—only to find disappointment? Anyway, what can one do with a mere $40 million? Buy a plasma TV the size of a football stadium? Empty the shelves at both Costco and Walmart? Fund a food bank out of guilt?


And in a week when so many thought they might be the winner of the $2 billion jackpot, did other people with other concerns also wake up to disappointment? To shattered dreams? It was, after all, election week in America.


When hypotheticals carry us like self-driving cars, we put our lives in the control of others—even in the control of machines. Don’t get me wrong. Hypotheticals drive discovery. That’s how physicists motivate themselves to work at CERN; that’s how vaccines based on mRNA get made; and that’s how you looked for a job and a place to live. “If I work here…” and “If I live here….” What we find, however, is that the pursuit of hypotheses often leads to null hypotheses. But that’s okay for scientists, if not for the rest of us in our daily lives. When our personal hypotheses fail to become theories, we can become stuck in the past centered on “wasted emotional and intellectual efforts,” not to mention the perception or reality that we wasted time, space, and material.


Hypotheticals. Was not the winning the $2 billion the product of an unreal condition? Well, someone won. So it wasn’t entirely “unreal.” And now the rest of the millions of Powerball ticket-buyers have to decide on whether to spend money on a new set of hypotheticals.


Occasionally, faith in hypotheticals pays off, but all hypothesizers need to temper that faith with some probability reasoning. It seems unlikely at this time, for example, that physicists will be able to run an experiment that proves String Theory though many are strung along like Powerball ticket-buyers. The “prestigious” research institutions want to hire string theorists over other theoretical physicists and practical physicists. The hypothesis drives like an autonomous vehicle; the hypothesis about strings is all they have, like the hopes of a ticket-buyer. Oh! Sure. It all works out theoretically, but in practice? The odds of running that final experiment are far larger than 262 million to one.


And the hypothesis that people will get along as Rodney King hypothesized—yes, that famous question after the riots centered on his arrest—or that “unity” that naive politicians seem to have when they are candidates only to discover that “people will be people” and “hypotheses” are often unfulfillable wishes.


But we can’t relinquish our adherence to hypothetical living. It’s in our nature. Call it “hope,” “desire,” or “wishful thinking,” it’s what we do as humans. It’s a bane. But, hey, no one is stopping you from buying that next Powerball ticket. Someone has to win sometime.

“Fence-sitter,” “Line-walker,” lots of choices to make these days, and many of them are nuanced, or complex, or multifaceted. No one escapes the see-saw of life except those who—my my gosh! Here comes another cliche—those who see only in terms of black and white, Either/Or, and right and wrong. Gray isn’t a color; it’s a washout; and then, as we are “metaphored” into movie talk, even gray comes in fifty shades.


Poor Pope Francis I. Fresh off his trip to an Arab country that condemns homosexuality as a disease of the mind, he had to answer why he put pro-choice economist Mariana Mazzucato on the Pontifical Academy for Life. * His obfuscation? She’s pro-choice, but not pro-abortion. Duh? How are the two not related? His argument? “Women know how to find the right path and move forward…She is a great economist from the United States, and I put her there to give a little humanity to it…[and, Wait for it—one can’t say anything nowadays without offending someone] Women…shouldn’t become like men [sorry, Trans]. No, they are women; we need them…Equality to move forward because otherwise we are impoverished.” This comes from the same pope who declares that abortion is murder. What did Johnny Cash sing? “I walk the line.” Francis I appears to teeter on a narrow fence. Tell us, Francis, just where do you really stand on the issue? Or should we ask, just where do you stand on the practice centered on the issue? Is this a matter of theology? Of philosophy? Or of psychology?


But lest I find myself on the slide under someone else’s microscope, I should note that in some way each of us is a fence-sitter because absolutes are difficult to justify. Sure, there are some absolutes for some, but no absolutes for all—Did I just write an absolute? Murder, for example, seems to be acceptable in war and self defense, seems to be acceptable against a perceived enemy, but not so much against friends and family or against random innocents.


Go ahead. Name your “absolute” and then wend your way along the path of its practice. There aren’t just fifty shades of gray; there are shades too numerous to mention. And what is that “right path” the Pope mentions that “women know how to find”?


One might think that someone in a position to issue complex Papal Bulls might clarify with details and irrefutable logic. But then, Francis I is a human, and in my experience, humans tend to fail intellectually when they argue from atop a fence. And I include myself in that category of “humans.” As a result of our difficulty in resolving nuanced absolutes (obviously, an oxymoron), we usually switch our argument from philosophy to psychology. “He’s a good person who just got into the wrong crowd”; “We can’t judge him from a single act in a lifetime of good deeds”;“She separates her personal life from her professional life”; “He’s a practicing Catholic except for his public statements that conflict with the tenets of his faith”; or “He’s a peacemaker who out of necessity starts a war to prevent the potential advance of a perceived enemy. Peace through war was his only option.”   


Run the logic on any absolute you hold near and dear.


*https://www.breitbart.com/faith/2022/11/07/pope-francis-defends-choice-pro-abortion-woman-academy-life/

Remember the wisdom spoken by character Mike Brady in the film The Brady Bunch? Mike says, “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” And so, the advice to find one’s “happy place” mentally during times of stress, according to Mike, is difficult at best.


Sure, we all have ways of dealing with stressful situations: Anger, drinking, drugging, eating, withdrawing…,each method a different mechanism for avoiding reality. But in most circumstances for most people, “finding one’s happy place” mentally is like those other methods of avoidance, a temporary distraction. As A. E. Housman wrote in “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”:


    Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
    And left my necktie God knows where,
    And carried half way home, or near,
    Pints of quarts of Ludlow beet;
    Then the world seemed none so bad,
    And I myself a sterling lad;
    And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
    Happy till I woke again.
    Then I saw the morning sky;
    Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
    The world, it was the old world yet,
    I was I, my things were wet,
    And nothing now remained to do
    But begin the game anew.


As “the world” continuously bombards you with stressful situations, remember Mr. Brady’s line. You are where you are at any moment. That’s the reality of life. Dealing with whatever causes the stress is a more effective way of relieving that stress than, say, drinking quarts of Ludlow beer and awakening to the same reality that drove you to escapist anger, drinking, eating, or withdrawing. If you lie down in a stressed-caused stupor, you will eventually awake muddy and wet, and the “world” will be “the old world yet.”


Churchill, England’s PM during WWII, said upon learning of the Allied victory in Africa, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Overcoming the “beginning” of any stressful circumstance by seeing it as a reality is better than trying to find one’s “happy place” outside that reality. We are where we are. This is the place; now is the time.


Too often we choose to lie in “lovely muck.” Too many of us choose Ludlow fair as a better place than where we are. That “happy place” some advise you to find during times of stress is a muddy ditch. You will awake.

First, consider that politics and religion have long been joined at the hip. Socrates was condemned by the Athenian aristocracy for turning the youth away from traditional Greek gods—though he argued he did no such thing. It was a Pope who officiated at the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. In modern Iran, women find themselves caught between their sense of decency and desire for freedom and the theocracy’s sense of morality, with the death of a woman in the custody of “morality police” highlighting their predicament. And in India, numerous Dalits have just abandoned their Hinduism to convert to Buddhism to free themselves from the caste system that they know enslaves them and keeps them from succeeding in most Indian venues.


Second, consider that all religions have a political component. Think choosing a Pope, for example. The College of Cardinals play the same kinds of political games that the U.S. Congress plays in choosing a leader. Think the Anglican Church, founded by a king who named himself its Head. Think shamans who are also high priests with the power to judge and rule.


Third, think blind loyalty. Think of Republicans who would never under any circumstances vote for a Democrat and Democrats who mirror that voting pattern. It isn’t the individual politician who captures such loyalty and, dare I add, reverence or belief, but the Party Itself, the Ideal raised to some ethereal level of overriding existence. Thus, the most flawed and incompetent among us can become elected leaders who retain their posts regardless of their policies.


Each of us might profit from a self-examination of our stands on these three tenets: 1) Politicians reveal their inextricable bond to religions through their policies on moral matters, such as capital punishment, imprisonment, justice, and restrictions on freedom; 2) Religions are political entities; and 3) Political entities can be religions bound together by a group of the Faithful.


Of course, you’ll want me to qualify, right? But before I offer three examples, consider this anecdote: A cousin once asked me how I could vote for So-n-So because “my father would never have voted that way.” And she was correct. He adhered to his voting allegiances in spite of disagreeing with the political stances of individual politicians for which he voted. They were to him, after all, members of his party, and he had long held that members of the other party were somehow responsible for all the ills of society. Thus, consider also, that many coal miners and union officials now out of work voted for the very politicians who promised they would shut down coal mining and coal-fired power plants. Or consider Catholic politicians who vote to support abortion while claiming to adhere to the principles of a religion that condemns the practice as immoral. In other words, people will vote against their self interests or beliefs because faith in Party overrides faith in a Faith. One more example, please: A local western Pennsylvanian newspaper, long a supporter of the Democratic Party, argued during the primaries that Barack Obama had no discernible accomplishments or experience to warrant the Party's choosing him as their candidate over Hillary Clinton; yet, when Obama became the candidate, that same newspaper endorsed him--a person they had specifically rejected as unqualified--for President. Go figure.


I might suggest that the politicization of climate science demonstrates the first tenet. A whole segment of the political class condemns those who rely on fossil fuels and insists that renewable energy sources are the only moral choice. Pope Benedict VI’s resignation and the election of Pope Francis, a Left-leaning semi-socialist from Argentina seem to demonstrate the second tenet, as does the effort among Anglicans and Episcopalians to alter traditional forms of their respective faiths. And the refusal of legislatures to impose term limits ensures the continuation of the third tenet.

Cornhole? Cheating at cornhole? Is nothing sacred?


Professional (Yes, “professional”) cornholers can earn six figures on the American Cornhole League circuit. A quarter million bucks for tossing a bean bag into a hole from a distance of  twenty-seven feet. A quarter million bucks.


And when money’s on the line, so is cheating on the inclined table. It is apparently part of human nature to bypass rules to win. “BagGate,” as the scandal is known, required the cheaters to cut, empty, and re-sew bags that did not conform to the official size of one-pound, six-inch squares. Supposedly, an investigation revealed that the bags were not “intentionally altered,” but that some form of cheating might have occurred. *


We had a rather big Latin test to prepare for in high school in an age before digital watches replaced the old spring-wound time pieces. Taking an old watch, a classmate of mine devised a tiny paper scroll with Latin conjugations to roll past the glass face of his ingenious “cheat sheet.” He spent a great deal of time making and perfecting his cheating device, probably more time than would have been required to learn the material for the test. Nevertheless, he made the device rather than study.


As often happens, cheaters fail to win, particularly when the cheating gets discovered. And often that cheating requires the expenditure of more energy than might be needed to succeed. Such is the human way. Rather than conform to rules, we tend to bypass, if not outright break, them on the chance that no one will notice.


And on scales of human activity larger than games are the efforts of political parties to win elections and governments to bypass the dictates of treaties. Do we just not like rules? Do we not like to follow procedures? Is a “little sin” acceptable? That paperclip pocketed in the office is just one of thousands, isn’t it? That tax dollar with no tight audit won’t be missed. That dollar accepted from a foreign political donor becomes part of a pot so large that no one will notice. If cornhole bags, major league spitballs, NFL offensive linemen holding, and other forms of cheating can occur under watchful officials, what bureaucratic cheating, boardroom manipulation, and business scams must be occurring all over the planet? Can anyone say Bernie Madoff? Fishermen Chase Cominsky and Jake Runyan putting weights in their fish in the Lake Erie Walleye Trail championships? Deflategate and Spygate on behalf of the New England Patriots? The sign-stealing Houston Astros? Russia's coordinated Olympic doping? Rosie Ruiz on the subway winning a marathon? 


Cornhole? Is nothing sacred? I guess not.

*https://www.foxnews.com/sports/baggate-creates-worldwind-cornhole-cheating-scandal 

Writing about the evolution of alphabets and languages, Frederick Bodmer argues, “In the ancient world and in medieval times, mankind had not got used to rapid change. Great innovations were possible only when circumstances conspired to force people to face new problems without the handicap of old habits” ( 54).*

You live, by contrast in an age of rapid change—in some ways. Ironically, in midst of such vicissitudes, habits often remain unchanged, especially habits of attitude and mind. Elections bring this unwavering adherence to the “old” to the forefront of most pundit programs and editorial pages. Regardless of circumstances apparently forcing Americans to face new problems without the encumbrance of old thinking, pundits, editors, and many Americans refuse to relinquish their long-held beliefs and allegiances.
In 2022, after two years of the Biden Administration’s failed policies that led to 1) the loss of 11,000 union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline (a pipeline that passed every environmental test thrown at it), 2) a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the loss of a vital airbase and billions of dollars in military equipment to a confirmed enemy of the United States and the loss of freedoms for Afghanis and especially for Afghani women plus the needless deaths of Americans and their Afghani allies, 3) the loss of oil independence achieved under the previous administration, 4) the refusal by the Federal government to secure the southern border, leading to a rise in drug cartel and human trafficking activity that led to rapes and abandonments of children and the deaths of smuggled illegal aliens plus the crossing in the States of dozens of terrorists and the fentanyl deaths of at least 100,000 Americans, 5) an inflation rate that soared to more than 8%, 6) a perception of weakness that emboldened Xi to threaten Taiwan, Putin to invade Ukraine, and Kim to threaten S. Korea and Japan, 7) the coverup of the President’s son’s illegal activities and the Biden family’s selling influence, 8) the Biden Justice Department’s nonexistent or slow response to real crimes in favor of pursuing investigations at the urging of school boards of parents who protested school board policies, 9) false claims against border agents, and 10) spending binges of trillions of dollars with billions lost to scammers—after two years of such governing and other detrimental dealings, many Democrats will continue to support Democrat candidates because they will not relinquish their long-held beliefs in an ever-widening socialist grip on what was once the world’s prime model of a democratic republic. In short, when democratic voters go to the polls next week, many of them will pull the levers for their party’s candidates, including an inarticulate stroke victim running for senate in Pennsylvania. Onto these charges of incompetence in the current administration, I’ll add the charge that the President, a proven inveterate liar and gaffe machine coupled with a Vice President who apparently can only laugh when asked a question and can only repeat phrases when giving a speech, make this administration one of the most incompetent governing bodies on the planet. But I will not throw all Democrats into the same barrel. Some understand the dangers of America’s current path, but I have yet to hear dissenting voices. Apparently, for most representatives and senators, voicing dissent rings a death knell for a political career and a relentless attack by the Leftist Press and social media trolls.

But, hey, what do I know? It just seems to me that—to borrow Bodmer’s words—when circumstances conspire to force people to face new problems without the handicap of old habits, modern minds are not much different from ancient minds. No political party is without its flaws and mistakes because all parties are composed of fallible—and sometimes corrupt—humans Nevertheless, what I enumerated above seems to be more than enough to warrant a change.


*The Loom Of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. (1944). New York. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1985.

Lamarck argued that giraffes had long necks because they stretched them for generations in an attempt to eat leaves that grew where shorter-necked giraffes could not munch. In short, Lamarck believed that habits were inheritable. But that famous experiment of cutting off the tails of mice demonstrated that he was wrong. Mice generations later still grew tails though their ancestors had theirs severed. Purposeful evolution is on the grandest scale of speciation an oxymoronic idea though variations in domesticated animals and plants are the product of human engineering. Randomness still plays a role though many like the Nazi eugenics practitioners who sought to form some perfect Aryan race were as misguided as the Soviet-Ukrainian botanist Lysenko who thought he could change how seeds responded to colder climatic conditions by exposing them to cold conditions--resulting, by the way, in failed wheat crops. *


Regardless of biological demonstrations to the contrary, Larmarckism and its followup Lysenkoism haven’t gone the way of phrenology. The idea that what you do today can be passed on to your descendants is alive and well. You can see this in Nobel prize-winner sperm banks, the progeny of which have never been shown to have any specially heritable genius characteristics. **


Yes, taller people tend to produce taller children and shorter people tend to produce shorter children. Pygmies and Watutsi (plural of Tutsi) are respectively shorter than average and taller than average. But a mix of humans, such as we have after millennia of migrations and conquests, has led to an “average” and a limited range of physical characteristics. In families composed of heritable tallness and shortness, some children are tall and some short, with the mix tending to average-out to a “norm.” And in a coupling of “geniuses” there can be a child with limited intellectual abilities—that old problem of nurture vs. nature arising.


I remember seeing as a kid This Island Earth, the 1955 science fiction film in which actor Jeff Morrow had a very large forehead, supposedly indicative of a greater frontal lobe and greater intelligence that evolved on his planet. And I recall an article in some magazine with a picture of “future humans” with large skulls much like so many fictional depictions of extraterrestrials. I suppose all such depictions and predictions are continuations of popular perceptions that from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, heads have gotten larger in a neat progression of ever higher foreheads, though human species with bigger brains than ours have existed.***


Anyway, now comes an article by Chris Melore entitled “Humans may evolve to have deformed bodies, second eyelid from overusing technology.” **** The gist? Your offspring will have deformed “claw hands,” permanently bent elbows, and hunched backs because you use computers and cell phones. In short, like Lamarck’s giraffes, you, according to the hypothesis, will pass on your practices as physical manifestations. Lamarck and Lysenko are saying from their graves, “See, we were right.”


But again, evolution is random. Adaptations are random. It is only in retrospect that we can see a pattern. Yes, foreheads have gotten larger, but we do not know exactly why or how. But intelligence seems to be little different from what it was thousands of years ago if we judge by human behavior. We still war. We still gather in similar groups. We still make the mistakes our ancestors made. And we still look pretty much the way they looked.


The subtle changes evolution makes are not individuals. Species evolve, not individuals. All reproducing humans have the potential to alter our future appearance, but not one among them knows a foolproof way of making alterations. Note that for any genetic characteristic to be passed onto to future generations, it must survive premature death by disease, accident, or malicious intention. One persistent obstacle stands in the way of any intentional evolution: the penchant for humans to destroy that which is different. Thus, genocide persists as a motivation among many cultures and subcultures. Think Holocaust. Think today’s Uyghurs.


Regardless of the failures of intentional evolutionists, every generation will produce its followers of Lamarck and Lysenko. Every generation will produce a Margaret Sanger, an Adolf Hitler, or a Hutu determined to kill a Tutsi. Probably our only defense against such genetic purists is a continued homogenization of our species and a recognition of that homogenization.


*Lysenkoism, supported by Stalin, led to multiple crop failures.


**Many have the idea that Nobel peace prize winners are elite geniuses because they instituted understanding or previously unknown phenomena or made discoveries, but some of those discoveries were partly accidental, such as the discovery of the Microwave Background Radiation by Penzias and Wilson, and some discoveries were further developments of predecessor scientists and engineers, such as Cormack and Hounsfield’s tying computers to tomography. Although they have to my knowledge never participated in stocking a sperm bank, Teddy Roosevelt, Yassar Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barack Obama, all receiving the award, don’t seem to me as men possessed of either “genius” or—with the exception of Carter who arranged for a Middle East peace deal between Egypt and Israel and Roosevelt who arranged a peace between Japan and Russia—evidence of actually furthering peace. Arafat was a terrorist, Gore was and still is a wealthy manipulator of climate “science” who made predictions that failed to materialize, and Obama just gave a few talks like one to a concert crowd in Paris, but continued the Afghan war while in office and allowed ISIS to destroy, rape, torture, and kill thousands, dismissing their Caliphate as the “JV team.”


***Read Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 2008).


****”Humans may evolve to have deformed bodies, second eyelid from overusing technology.” StudyFinds. November 2, 2022. https://studyfinds.org/humans-deformed-bodies-technology/  Accessed November 3, 2022.

In trying to reach goals, each of us operates on a foundation of causes that we accept as just, important, and noble. If the goal places us in contention with others, the intensity of our belief in the cause determines the intensity of our efforts to reach the goal. Of course, determining what is just, important, and noble is largely a subjective matter. I’ll go out on the proverbial limb to say that some causes, however, meet one or more of those qualifiers in the minds of many people. Liberty was a just, important, and noble foundational cause behind the eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France. But what of today’s motivations? What are the causes at the center of actions? Well, they seem to range from legalizing drugs to prohibiting the use of fossil fuels, from maintaining or gaining political power to advancing “gender agendas” in elementary schools, and from unrestricted opening of borders to unrestricted opening of prisons. Within these causes lie sub-causes too numerous to mention save one: The quashing of conservative voices.


While the brouhaha over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter ruffles the feathers of the Hollywood and Journalistic Elites and generates in their most vociferous representatives wrathful proclamations derived from fear they might suffer loss of control over conservative voices, more damaging ideological causes are affecting lives in places far remote from the generally affluent lives of those elite. I find two of these causes to be ignoble.


Take the October 29, 2022 bombing in Mogadishu as an example of ignoble cause. Fanatically worried that western influences might attract Somali youth away from Islam, specifically away from Sunni al-Shabaab, fundamentalist Salafi jihadists’ beliefs, the terrorist group set off bombs in Mogadishu that killed over 100 and injured more than 300 innocents. The cause caused the death of children who, ironically, won’t undergo any Islamic education. The bombing did not use up much ink on American front pages or electrons in mainstream media broadcasts because matters as important as a rich guy’s buying Twitter and the American election cycle’s mid-term high point (though nowadays, every day of every year seems to be the apex of the cycle) used up both the ink and the electrons. So, 100 humans lost their lives to a group devoted more to destruction than to creation, much like the Antifa groupies who destroyed property and caused injury and even death in the American Northwest during “the summer of love.” And in eastern Ukraine, the now well known “meat grinder” born of another ignoble cause has taken both Ukrainian and Russian lives in a conflict that has received coverage mostly because it has interfered with the world’s wheat market and energy supplies. And to what end, for what purpose, for what cause, and for whom? Could any of this information be more important than fighting over a rich guy’s buying a social media company? Not, it seems, if one is among the chosen elites of Left-leaning Americans.


Have we entered the Age of Ignoble Causes? Or, is every age one rife with ignoble causes, reasons for hatred, destruction, injury, and death generated by groups (e.g., American Left or Right extremists, al-Shabaab terrorists, Antifa vandals) or individuals (e.g, Vladimir Putin).


That those whose feathers Musk ruffled are concerned over their loss of censorship of dissenting conservative voices is probably nothing new in American history. Subtle and overt censorship of dissent has always been the modus operandi of the media—dare I say a persistent or continuous cause sliding from one generation to the next. The media’s coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, his dealings with the Communist Chinese, the Ukrainian Burisma company, and Russian oligarchs, and the Biden family’s growing rich through political connections that bespeak of selling influence reminds me of the 1960s that reminds me of the media coverups of the 1960s. With the exception of Ted Kennedy’s involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick in 1969, very few Americans were aware of the Kennedy brothers’ extramarital affairs and shenanigans like the Bay of Pigs fiasco that a complicit Press refused to report negatively because they were motivated to protect the party in power. In the cause of politics, details be damned as Truth, like a wayward chicken, flees the coop. No example of this is a more telling than the Russian censorship of the word war with regard to the “special operation” in Ukraine. Pravda’s cause is Putin’s cause. The chicken of truth is pecking at seeds in the Russian countryside, where the locals “support” the war “against the Ukrainian Nazis who are puppets of the Americans and Nato” attempting to destroy Mother Russia. In the cause of defending the Motherland, the youth should willingly go to the meat grinder along the front. The Press—American and Russian, Brazilian and Burman, Iranian and Arabian—is peopled by reporters and editors with narrow political agendas, each a cause they support with only some exceptions.


So, Elon Musk vows to open Twitter to all causes. But can he do so without chaos? We already know that ignoble causes outnumber noble ones and that the former have relentless energy to destroy individuals and groups. Yes, those with noble causes might Tweet, but they will probably only get in a word “edgewise.” And part of the reason lies in the darkness of ignorance. Americans have been kept in the dark partly by our own lack of cosmopolitanism. From our insular setting, separated as we are from the rest of the world by oceans and paired with a similar country to the north, the causes motivating others around the planet seem unimportant. A bombing in Somalia by a group determined to quash cosmopolitanism among Islamic children is too distant for concern because Americans have to worry about Twitter’s future. Mogadishu’s bombing victims are not cause celeb in the minds of Americans concerned about maintaining political power and censoring dissent on a social media platform.


When we take the historical perspective to review the causes now as dead as the people who pursued them, we should be able to determine which were just, important, and noble. But our ignorance of the world around us is matched by our unwillingness to view any cause from a perspective outside that which motivates us.


I confess to being one of those unwilling and ignorant Americans, but I do so with some sense that I cannot determine that any of my causes is perfectly just, important, and noble. Although I find criticizing the causes of others easy, I realize that they can just as easily criticize my favored causes and that no cause is absolute save peace. Yet, even the cause of peace is open to debate as someone like Putin might argue that his goal is ultimately a “peaceful Ukraine” absorbed by the Motherland, returned through his efforts—and the deaths of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians—to the womb of Russia. And those irate Leftist Twitter users probably want to achieve “peace” through an elimination of all conservative thought.

“If you keep going, you become an accomplice to death” is the lead to Pavel Filatyev’s story reported in Der Spiegel. * Filatyev, a recent Russian deserter, left the “special operation” in Ukraine after seeing atrocities by and incompetence in the Russian military. He recorded his thoughts in Zov. Among them is his bewilderment at the Kremlin’s use of “Special Operation” and its exclusion of the word war. I can't believe my ears when I learn that it is forbidden to say the word war. Seriously. War? What the hell else is this supposed to be?” Welcome to Propaganda and Groupthink, Pavel.


Pavel Filatyev was in close proximity to the horror of the fighting. He saw. He felt. The war had meaning on a personal level. That’s why he left. And it’s not as though he didn’t know what war was. He had been a Russian paratrooper and had reenlisted because his economic circumstances had taken a downturn. But…


The Kremlin’s disregard for life, even Russian lives, and its attempt to control the minds of the Russian people is nothing new. One need only go back to the way Russia fought Germany in World War II by throwing millions of soldiers at the Germans to overwhelm them with numbers.


Those of us who have never been in a battle can only imagine the horror of the moment. We might have empathy for the battle’s participants regardless of their affiliation, but that empathy occurs in another place, somewhere that is not in the proximity of suffering, wounding, and killing. Outside the boundary of battle, passing empathy, persistent indifference, and irrational rationalization prevail among those personally unaffected by the conflict. And chief among the indifferent and irrational  rationalizers is Moscow’s Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. The Patriarch sermonized thus:


    “If someone, driven by a sense of duty, the need to fulfill an oath, remains true to his calling and dies in the line of military duty, then he undoubtedly commits an act that is tantamount to a sacrifice. He sacrifices himself for others; and therefore we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”


Ah! The benefit of distance. Think the Patriarch, a Putin ally, has ever been to the front?   Think he has seen dismembered bodies lying on the battlefield? Has he stood over dead civilians like the woman and child Russian soldiers killed by shelling their car? Has he walked the rubble of destroyed cities? Has he watched Russian soldiers shoot retreating Russians sick of being forced into the “meat grinder”? Has he considered that Ukrainians seemed largely settled within boundaries they called their own? Did they attack Mother Russia in February, 2022?


From his distant ecclesiastical throne, Patriarch Kirill compared soldiers’ sacrifices to those of Christ. Somehow he failed to see that there is a difference between a “just” and an “unjust” war and between a person forced to fight or face imprisonment and a willing Christ harming no one. Patriarch Kirill apparently places those Ukrainian soldiers’ sacrifices in a different category: Their defense of their homeland unjustified and the killing of thousands of Ukrainians a religious duty that will earn Russian soldiers their place in Heaven.


But the Patriarch isn’t the first among religious leaders proclaiming the salvation of soldiers. Think of the Islamic leaders who foster terror attacks and threaten entire countries. Think of Popes who sent crusaders to the Holy Land. What, we might ask, is wrong with the moral compass of religious leaders who cannot condemn outright the deaths of innocents?


If I had to guess, I would say that such leaders fail as peacemakers because they are removed from the physical realities of war. From a distance, they see noble acts; they see sacrifices made for their cause. The horror of war is remote. And as I have often written, “That which is not personal is meaningless.” I suppose I could add that when nothing is proximate, nothing is meaningful. Pavel Filatyev saw and understood because he was there.

*Der Spiegel online 5. Oktober 2022, 16.56 Uhr