Monitors can breathe while they run. Other lizards can’t. You can see the benefits of the former and the disadvantages of the latter, can’t you? The lizards run and stop, run and stop, run and stop. Fast, true, but only for a short distance. The monitors keep running. They’re the wolves and dogs of the reptilian world.


Political parties and their agenda are lizards. When they get into power, they run full speed, but they do so anaerobically. They run fast and abruptly stop when the other party comes to power. Then the process repeats with the new lizards, that is, the new people in power.


Problems, both political and social, are monitors. They run aerobically. The result is that regardless of a party’s desire to solve problems, it runs out of air, giving the problems a chance to overrun an agenda. And even when one party or one person takes total control, as for example, a Caligula, aTamerlane, a Stalin, Hitler—many others—the finite nature of life robs them of oxygen. The Roman Empire lasted a millennium; the Eastern Roman Empire lasted a millennium; the Holy Roman Empire lasted a millennium. Only the Shang and Qing dynasties among many other Chinese dynasties persisted into their fourth century.


All those in power, even the most confident, are anaerobic. They run out of air, if not by political process, then by death. And the problems they perceive they can solve? Well, they’re the monitors.


All analogies limp, as they say, and this one is no exception. While political parties are in power trying to solve perceived and actual problems, they give birth to monitors. Yes, strange evolution: One species giving birth to another. Lizards beget monitors—too many monitors to monitor. Lizards engender a new generation of aerobic problems that outrun and outlast them.


So-called solutions engender new problems. Remember Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society? The effort reduced the percentage of people living in poverty, but it created programs requiring mandatory government spending that now exceeds 60% of the federal budget. The debt born in previous “dynasties” now exceeds $80,000 per person. That per person includes you. Now you and any newly installed political power are the lizards being chased by the indefatigable monitors created in previous administrations.


Every solution appears to create another monitor, and every monitor seems to run with ample air. It appears to be our nature to demonstrate in politics our ancient evolutionary heritage, our reptilian limitations of running fast for a short distance.

Prologue
​
Have you traveled much lately? By “lately,” I mean in the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. I confess to not having ventured far between the springs of COVID, what with all the restrictions and requirements that began in March, 2020. But fully “Pfizered” and packin’ a mask in case I encounter a mandate of some sort, I now venture about almost as freely as I did in those blissful pre-pandemic years.

The pandemic shut down our primitive nomadic heritage. We were from the start wanderers driven by wondering: What else is there? Where else is there? Traveling, we left Africa and spread around the planet and now spread, also, off the planet, soon, maybe even to wander around Mars and definitely to re-wander the moon.

Oh! Sure, we could do our wandering via technology. We’re on Mars that way as I write, roving about and even helicoptering over the Red Planet. And we’ve even traveled to the ocean depths in semi-autonomous robots, our wired avatars. But as various writers, beginning with Thomas à Kempis in the nineteenth century and in sundry renditions by others in the twentieth century, have said, “Wherever you go, there you are” From place to place, we find ourselves: “find” in the sense of self-discovery and in the sense of “a continuum of Self.” We can change the place and still find the one constant: Who we are.

Plus, there’s nothing like being there. Nothing like being everywhere or having been almost everywhere. To label someone “well-traveled” is to acknowledge his or her “cosmopolitanism.” And now with excess wealth and multiple conveyances, we have transformed travel from need into a manifestation of will. We don’t need to move about in search of food and shelter as our ancient nomadic ancestors did. We travel for the sake of travel.

Travelogue

I-77 is a north-south river of cement that in West Virginia overlies the Appalachian Plateau before cutting through the Valley and Ridge’s folded mountains and running over the ancient and metamorphosed rocks of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. On the southeastern side of that billion-year-old mountain ridge in Virginia, the highway cascades toward North Carolina and affords a scenic eastward view of the adjacent Piedmont and distant Upper Coastal Plain.

Seemingly fixed immovably in place, the rocks that make up the Blue Ridge were themselves once ancient travelers whose origins lay in a long-gone Iapetus Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. As they moved on the conveyor belt of a spreading seafloor, they eventually collided with juvenile North America, today’s East Coast a South Coast at the time, the baby continent lying on its side. Both juvenile North America and the Blue Ridge met as travelers, once strangers to each other, but since their meeting, long-term traveling companions now riding on the North American Plate.

The Blue Ridge is an allochthonous terrane, or allochthon, a section of Earth’s crust displaced and subsequently emplaced by the planet’s active tectonics. Crustal collisions during emplacement generated both heat and pressure sufficient to change its rocks, just as our meeting strangers changes us, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes radically, but always crystallizing something from the encounter. Thus, in melding with the young continent, those much older original rocks of the Blue Ridge underwent metamorphosis. That cascade of I-77 falls over such metamorphic rocks, crystalline enough to offer morning travelers a second visual treat opposite the eastward view. The morning sun reflects off dewey crystals in the road cut on the northwestern side of the highway—that is, when upslope fogs do not shroud the mountain.

As a traveler, I have both driven along and crossed the ridge many times, often stopping to sample rocks and local culture. On my latest “pandemic” trip on I-77, my spouse and l did what many, if not all travelers do: stopped at rest stops along the way to stretch legs and use public facilities. Resuming our journey after one stop, she mentioned a conversation she heard in the women’s restroom between a mother and her young daughter.

Dialogue

Mother: “When we get home, we’re going to schedule that hair appointment. What style do you want to get?” Was the comment made so that others could hear the level of sophistication the child had attained?

The little girl, maybe five, responded by holding some of her hair at her shoulder, saying: “I want this,” presumably meaning the length she wanted. Precocious child, indeed, already aware of fashion and already taking charge of her life. Except…

And then my wife said: “The little girl was in bare feet. Bare feet in a public restroom at any time isn’t a good idea, but in a time of pandemic, in a time when most people in the American South are running a bit scared of the Delta variant the government says is spreading rapidly, that’s about as far from prudent parenting as one can get. Why wasn’t that part of the girl’s intellectual development? If we teach invisible tooth fairies and haute couture, can’t we also teach invisible bacteria and viruses?”

Monologue

I’m wondering whether our concerns were unnecessary. Maybe she and I were over-reacting. It is possible that the little girl suffered no ill effects from walking barefoot in a women’s restroom. Of course, it is also possible that she carried millions of bacteria back to her car, where she might have touched her feet as she rode and then stuck her fingers in her mouth or nostril or handled some food. Yuck. My thinking, however, is probably influenced by a year-plus barrage of messages about sanitizing everything and standing six feet from other feet—especially bare feet that have traipsed across a public bathroom floor. It is also possible that any bacteria the girl might have put on her body made her sick temporarily and allowed her to build up immunity that is lost in mandated isolation. If so, then maybe a walk barefoot through a public bathroom might be good for everyone. But I don’t think so.


Nevertheless, when I think of what I have seen in other countries, I recognize that although I would almost certainly succumb to Montezuma’s revenge or to any other water-borne microorganism currently alien to my body, I would likely develop some level of immunity through exposure as long as that organism wasn’t inescapably lethal. Truly deadly organisms and viruses do, in fact, pose a threat if they latch onto a little girl whose body might not have the time to develop defenses.

When we travel, even on our home planet, we risk running into organisms both large and small that can jeopardize our safety. No doubt in peopling the planet, millions of our forebears—or “fore-bares”— died by “walking barefoot,” that is, unprotected in strange places where we were ill-prepared alien intruders, succumbing like H. G. Wells’s Martians to invisible native organisms.
Gosh, living and traveling is a risky business, really risky. Wear your shoes, and watch where you step.

Analog(ue)

At times, all of us step in “it.” As evidenced by our having this little chat, however, you and I have survived by avoiding or protecting ourselves from ostensible and invisible threats. Our survival is remarkable in the context of the latter. All those unseen critters make living very much like walking barefoot through an unlighted public restroom.

One wonders, then, why anyone would purposefully make a microorganism, even an “inert” one, that might wander the planet on the bodies of human travelers to infect humans everywhere. What possible gain is there in biological warfare, since the inventors are themselves human and thus susceptible to an infection of their own making? Can you imagine being one of those early humans set to leave Africa saying, “You know, we don’t really know what’s out there, maybe unknown beings that can harm us. ‘There be dragons,’ I’ve heard. But, hey, here’s an idea, in case the world isn’t dangerous enough, why don’t we make a new dangerous critter to increase our risk? I think that’s a good idea. What do you think? It isn’t inevitable that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ We can avoid our self-made risks.”

Didn’t some of the World War I German soldiers say that about poison gas right before the wind shifted? Did the people of Wuhan utter the same confidence about their lab and their “gain-of-function” research on bat viruses?
Even traveling rocks are subject to change and destruction. The Blue Ridge survived, however, by hardship, by being tested during ineluctable convergence as it was welded onto nascent North America in a process that involved earthquakes, faulting, crushing, warping, overthrusting, and superheating that baked them into crystalline stone; other terranes weren’t so lucky, undergoing not just deformation, but destructive subduction. They, like our ancient traveling ancestors and our 2020-2021 traveling companions, now lie buried.

Being a stranger in a strange land comes with no guarantees. Every journey comes with risks.

Epilogue

Who am I to judge a mother who lets her five-year-old walk barefoot in a restroom? But the juxtaposition of a traveling young girl walking barefoot in a crowded public restroom along I-77 and the enduring ancient traveling rocks of the Blue Ridge hardened against the onslaught of destructive natural forces over a billion years seems to beg a comment of some sort, if not in judgment, then in philosophical musing.

There’s as much risk in staying put as there is in wandering because we share a planet with accidental and purposeful travelers inimical to our health whose paths cross ours. That we choose to add moveable new risks like COVID to those already in the inventory of dangers indicates that regardless of our claims on wisdom, we’re not really wise. Risk comes our way whether we’re stationary or mobile.

​And so, again I mention that this is not our practice life. Now, if I could just convince that mother that her little girl requires guidance and protection, knowledge and understanding, and prudence, her daughter might live a long life regardless of the strangers and strange organisms she might encounter. Or if I could just convince those who devote their lives to inventing new dangers for the sake of some government’s military leaders that all future little girls depend on those in charge to oversee their safety by protecting them from unnecessary risks, then only the naturally occurring risks would be the focus of our concerns. Like the collision between the ancient Blue Ridge and developing North America, natural risks are ineluctable. And like those melded crustal units, people have and will continue survive collisions with strangers, albeit in altered form. As a species, we have already crystallized our defenses against many threats, but crystals take time to grow. The Blue Ridge’s rocks had tens of millions of years to crystallize through metamorphosis. How much time does a little girl have? How much time do you have?

Back to that climate debate, two people sit down to argue.
 
Alex: “You carnivores are ruining the planet. Do you realize how much methane a cow produces?”
 
Zander: “Don’t care.”
 
Alex: “But if we changed our diets to include less meat, we would help change climate and probably even reduce poverty and starvation.”
 
Zander: “How so?”
 
Alex: “Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research…”
 
Zander: “Climate impact research? Here we go. I’m going to preempt here. People who live in the American Southwest have a climate that is often hot and dry, especially on the leeside of the mountains. People who live along the Gulf Coast have a climate that is often warm and moist. People who live in the interior of continents in mid-latitudes have drier air than those living in the equatorial continental interiors. Who needs to study that? It is what it is. Climates affect life. They impact it. Non-human terrestrial life is where it is because of climate controls, climate impacts. Humans have chosen to go into places where climate imposes harshness. Do the Inuit have to live in the Far North? Do the Bushmen have to live in the Namib? Do Americans have to live in Tornado Alley, the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic Seaboard, all places where storms can do millions to billions of dollars in damage potentially every year? Give me a break, climate impact research.”
 
Alex: “Typical carnivore response. Typical reductionism. We’re talking about the impact of climate change.”
 
Zander: “Enlighten me.”
 
Alex: “As I was saying the Potsdam scientists and the German Development Institute scientists collaborated on a study to determine how the world can reach the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, agreed upon by signers of the Paris Agreement in 2015. One of their representatives, Isabelle Weindl, says that changing our dietary habits by consuming less animal protein would achieve the ‘Planetary Health’ diet. * She argues that food production would then require less land and produce fewer greenhouse gases.”
 
Zander: “Really? I suppose she has run the numbers. But let’s take this to the end. So, I guess that cows wandering over the landscape munching on grasses do take up lots of land. And they consume the plants so that we get the nutrition by eating the eaters, one step more removed from chewing on sunlight. But don’t we have to consume lots of veggies and grains to make up for the concentrated proteins in the animals? Wouldn’t that entail using up more arable land and by changing the native species, making the albedo different? And what about the nutrients the plants need to grow? Are we going to throw more phosphates onto the land so that they can wash into streams and lakes and oceans?" 
 
Alex: “You’re just seeing what you want to see so you can continue your meat-eating. And yet you know that eating too much red meat has bad consequences, heart attacks, cancer, and maybe even dementia. Maybe that’s why you can’t see my side of the argument. You’re already on the path to mental debilitation. Besides, you’re probably unaware that there’s such a thing as a ‘Planetary Health’ diet that allows, as Weindl says, ‘modest amounts of animal-source food.’ You just can’t have a diet heavy in meat or dairy. Weindl’s group wants everyone to couple carbon policies with sustainable diets that reduce energy demand.”
 
Zander: “Carbon policies? Let me guess. You want to tax my carbon footprint.”
 
Alex: “That’s part of the plan.”
 
Zander: “Okay. But who taxes the taxers?”
 
Alex: “What?”
 
Zander: “Every time I hear this carbon tax argument, I hear it from the rich and famous, the ones who can afford to fly around in private jets, drive expensive cars, have save-the-planet parties that put to shame anything the Great Gatsby could throw, and hypocritically eat whatever they want as long as it’s accompanied by some ‘sustainable organic food,’ prepared, by the way, under the supervision of a chef flown in for the occasion. Give me a break. As soon as you save-the-planet, preserve-the-climate people are out of sight, you go on doing what you preach the rest of us shouldn’t do.”
 
Alex: “That’s no argument against changing world habits. That’s just an indictment of hypocritical individuals.”
 
Zander: “You’re right. My argument isn’t germane to your point, but it isn’t far off the periphery of what you are saying. But my argument has its basis in human nature. Given the chance to have a fine wine and Wagyu beef or some tofu beef substitute, which do you think most people would choose? Which do the very rich choose? It’s the problem every society faces: Give someone authority, and you give someone a mentality of superiority, of being above the law. You see it in politicians all the time. You think that turning over your wealth via carbon taxes is going to engender that climate utopia you seek. In reality, you’re going to fund more corruption and make a segment of humanity richer with a more luxurious lifestyle that they will enjoy while you eat tofu and corn.
 
“And as for those farms that will replace grasslands used to feed the cows, will they have to be extended into the rainforests and the rest of the temperate forests? Who will control—since there’s little evidence that anyone has to this point controlled effectively—the slash-and-burn practice that changes the amount of carbon thrown into the atmosphere and that alters soils both in nutrients and albedo?”
 
Alex: “We’ll establish policies.”
 
Zander: “Who is the ‘we’ you seem to trust so unconditionally?”
 
Alex: “That’s why we need to follow the advice of people like those who did the recent study.”
 
Zander: “Wait a minute. Let me pull this up. Is this it?”
 
Alex: “Yes, ‘A sustainable development pathway for climate action within the UN 2030 Agenda.’ That’s the report.”
 
Zander: “Okay. Here’s what Elmar Kriegler, the co-author of the study says, ‘Our analysis presents a possible pathway towards a more sustainable future and shows that human well-being can be reconciled with planetary integrity. It is up to policymakers and society at large to turn this vision into tangible action.’ Pay attention, Alex, to that second sentence. Policymakers. Those are the very hypocritical I’m-better-than-you people we’ve had to contend with since people first entrusted others to govern them. Those are the same people who are known for the do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do governing that infuriates so many and makes individuals act like individuals with self-interest. You ascribe to them wisdom and integrity. Oh! Reminds me. What in the world is ‘climate integrity’? Is climate integrity the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period? Is it the two-century long droughts that have hit the American Southwest during the past couple of millennia? And ‘tangible action? Does Kriegler mean ‘effective action’? 
 
“Just a side thought here, but do you trust the people who directed others during the 2020-21 pandemic to make wise decisions regarding your lifestyle? Let’s say they ban meat. Is that good? Aren’t we on the verge of a few controlling the masses? Isn’t this just going to result in more failed socialist policies? Look at this statement by a participant in the study: ‘Another intervention area includes global equity and poverty alleviation in the form of international climate finance and a pro-poor redistribution of carbon pricing revenues.’ ** Every time I read this stuff, I see the makings of wealth redistribution, and every time I see someone put it into action, I see the poor made poorer and the oligarchs made richer.”
 
Alex: “You just don’t have faith in humanity.”
 
Zander: “I can only say that my faith in humanity is under constant test. I’m going out for a burger. Care to join me? Look, as a concession, I’ll order a plant-based burger, though I don’t know what chemicals they add to make beans taste like meat.”
 
Notes:
 
*Soergel, Bjoern, et al. 2 August 2021. A sustainable development pathway for climate change action within the UN 2030 Agenda. Nature Climate Change 11, 656-664. (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01098-3    Accessed August 3, 2021.
 
**Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 2 August 2021. New pathway to mitigate climate change and boost progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-08-pathway-mitigate-climate-boost-sustainable.html  Accessed August 3, 2021.

Education is a strange business. It’s been so since and maybe even before the Lyceum. It’s a very strange business today, especially in the realm of distance learning foisted upon schools by fear of a virus, that fear, by the way, embedded in the minds of “educators.” Most of the world’s children appear to have recently gone through a non-contact school year with the threat as of August, 2021, of their repeating the impersonal learning environment. It’s been a year that introduced every student to a new kind of math. 
 
Now, you might ask, “What choice do we have in closing schools?” In answering that, some suggest that no valid evidence exists that COVID variants negatively affect children the way the initial outbreak affected the elderly. As of this writing, CDC data indicate that 343,631 elderly over the age of 75 succumbed to the deadly pandemic, whereas 406 children up to age 18 succumbed. * The data also show that COVID appears to have killed 124,868 working-age adults (ages 19-64), a group that would encompass most, if not all, teachers’ ages. Obviously, the numbers favor caution and instill fear, as we have seen anecdotally by impassioned pleas for distance learning made by representatives of teachers’ unions.
 
Numbers are easy to manipulate, but those 406 pediatric deaths are hard to dismiss—if they are accurate. The numbers do not indicate those children who had co-morbidities. And the numbers do not put the deaths in the context of annual deaths by the flu. During the flu season in 2018-2019, for example, 179 children died from the flu according to the CDC. ** Here’s a CDC count for some twenty-first century years:
 
Number of Pediatric Flu Deaths in the U.S. from 2003 to 2016:
 
2003                152
2004                39
2005                61
2006                68
2007                88
2008                132
2009                282
2010                123
2011                37
2012                171
2013                111
2014                148
2015                85
2016                110
 
What should I say here? That a single death is tragic and that parents, relatives, and friends who lost those children suffered a great personal tragedy? Of course, they suffered. But we need to put COVID in the context of the flu to see whether or not educators are acting more in their own interest than in the interests of children and doing so with a new math. Among children ages 0-4, COVID has been blamed for 124 deaths. For school-age children (up to 18), the CDC says the disease has claimed 282 lives. 
 
Let’s assume that the data have not been fudged for political and economic purposes though there have been reports that hospitals might have in some instances reported any death in which the person had COVID as a COVID death. But that anecdotal information could be misinformation. Regardless, mistaken diagnoses are not beyond possibility, especially during the peak infections that overwhelmed hospital facilities and staff. But the focus here is on the educational system, supposedly run by the wisest of the wise, the highly educated, the people whom Aristotle would have been proud to teach.
 
At what number of deaths does one determine a school shut-down is necessary? Obviously, education officials didn’t believe that 282 pediatric flu deaths in 2009 warranted a shut-down. I’ll go redundant here and point out that COVID caused 282 pediatric deaths among school-age children, the same number of deaths caused by the flu in 2009. And if you look at the table above, you’ll note that other flu-fatality numbers over 100 did not cause educators to shut their schools for their concerns over children’s health. So, the question then arises about the purpose of all the shut-downs.
 
I suppose that the teachers had legitimate concerns about their own susceptibility to the virus. If so, then one has to ask a question begged by the flu data. If the data are correct and 124,868 working-age adults succumbed to COVID, what are we to do with the number of flu deaths estimated by the CDC for the pre-COVID years? For example, the CDC estimates that 51,000 flu-caused deaths occurred in 2014-2015 and 61,000 died in 2017-2018. And as for those flu-driven hospitalizations, 2017-2018 saw 810,000. *** Were these not numbers of concern?
 
Again, if any death is tragic, then 282 deaths of school-age children regardless of the name of the disease should be a significant cause of shut-down. And 61,000 adult deaths by flu should warrant a serious shut-down consideration. Is there a difference between “Miss So-n-So, the third-grade teacher, died of the flu today” and “Miss So-n-So, the third-grade teacher, died of COVID today”? Weren’t those flu deaths in 2017-2018 a matter of concern to the point of fear? Where were the education spokespeople? Where were the government officials? Where, oh where, were the media?
 
As I have said repeatedly, this is not a practice life. That fact should elicit in us an elimination of unnecessary risk on the negative side and an adoption of a goal-oriented life on the positive side. But this life occurs on a risky planet with organisms doing what they can to survive, organisms like bacteria and viruses. Life makes both conscious and unconscious efforts to continue as long as possible in a finite world even though the inevitability of its end comes for all the living. And in the world of conscious beings like us, balancing acceptable risks against goals is a task of reasoning in the absence of emotion. 
 
Education is a strange business indeed. Its underlying premise in the non-theocratic societies is the fulfillment of Homo sapiens sapiens self-designated description. Education purports to impart both knowledge that enhances wisdom, to exult the status of the individual and, thus, by extension, the populace. But so much of what educators do is merely arbitrary and emotional. So much is driven by ideology in the absence of fact or deductive reasoning. 
 
I guess I would simply ask educators to do the math—you know, the old fashioned math in which 282 equals 282.
 
Notes:
 
*CDC. Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18 Years. Online at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3  Accessed August 2, 2021.
 
**Iannelli, Vincent. 5 February 2020. Annual Flu Deaths Among Adults and Children. Verywell online. Based on CDC.  https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaths-from-flu-2633829  Accessed August 2, 2021. 

At a party Art talks to Sam.
 
Art: “I almost clicked on a news outlet this morning.”
 
Sam: “So? I check the news daily. What’s the big deal.”

Art: “But is it news or just people talking about people talking about the news? What people responsible for reporting do is to…hmmn, how should I say it?—they look to irritate nerve endings, to rouse feelings, and to influence thinking.”
 
Sam: “Huh?”
 
Art: “Remember the old principles of journalism? The opening of a story should present the “who, what, when, where, and if possible, the why” of the incident. The ensuing part of the story is an elaboration of those details. We get some of that, true, but then we get the seemingly interminable comments that devolve into nothing about the original story. The devolution becomes a story about the story-tellers. Heck, I saw that one cable network even has a Sunday program devoted to how the news was handled by the media. The premise of that show is that the actual news is just a springboard that launches opinion into the pool of viewers and readers.”
 
Sam: “So, where should I go for news? I want to stay informed. I don’t want to be unaware. Ignorance might be bliss, but it is also dangerous. I’m not going to South Africa to rent a car where carjacking is common. I know that only because I watched the news.”
 
Art: “I have no advice. I can’t tell you where to click. I can only suggest that when you begin to read, you might consider clicking out if you don’t see those five Ws. Otherwise, you’ll get dragged into the quagmire of opinion, usually unsubstantiated opinion. And it’s not that this is a new problem. It was even one in the nineteenth century.”
 
Sam: “Go on.”
 
Art: “Ever hear the line ‘Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’?”
 
Sam: “Yeah, so?”

Art: “It was made by Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner, a nineteenth-century guy who actually, by the way, once collaborated with Twain to write The Gilded Age. Anyway, Warner, who made that remark about weather, wrote The American Newspaper, which I found online among the Gutenberg Project’s postings. * Warner wrote—here, let me get his exact words; hold on. Here they are: ‘Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.’ That was in the nineteenth century. 
 
“He also says something that applies to our stressful times in general and to online media and our addiction to our electronic gadgets that connect us to everyone everywhere instantaneously. Let me read a paragraph of his:
 
‘To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness.’
 
“Insightful, isn’t it? Almost Nostradamus-like though he could not have foreseen the Internet.”
 
Sam: “I’m beginning to see what you’re saying. Now I’m thinking that if a nineteenth-century guy can point out the psychological consequences of electrified news, we should be able to see similar consequences for our psyches because of our round-the-clock opinionated news coverage. I suppose you could also add that our twenty-first sensitiveness is nineteenth-century sensitiveness on steroids, all our nerve ends irritated far beyond what a primitive telegraph technology could inflame.”
 
Art: “You should read all of Warner’s little essay on the press. It’s free to read online at Project Gutenberg. When I read it, I asked myself an odd question.”
 
Sam: “What?”
 
Art: “How would Aristotle see the modern news media?”
 
Sam: “Yeah, that is odd. So, how would he?”
 
Art: “I don’t think he would favor it because of his philosophy of causes. He said we can understand something if we know why it is what it is and how it came to be what it is.” 
 
Sam: “Here we go, one of your deep dives into metaphysics.”
 
Art: “Not deep, but right on the surface of the Aristotle’s philosophical ocean. Anyway, Aristotle says there are four explanations for everything. He called the explanations ‘causes.’ The first is the stuff of the thing; he would have said the thing’s matter is like building materials. In the case of the news media, I think he would say the matter is composed of an incident as evident in the who, what, when, where, and why. Aristotle would have reporters use those parts to build the form. His second cause is that form, in the case of the news media might be the hard copy paper rendition of the five Ws, the TV news program, or the online news outlet’s website. His third cause was what he called the ‘efficient’ cause, but not in the sense of doing something well, but rather in the sense of the primary or immediate cause, say the editor, reporter or the anchor. The media has a plan to present the incident and presents it in the shape we see. That leads us to his fourth cause, which is the goal. And that’s where Aristotle would probably put down the paper and stop reading.”
 
Sam: “And why would he do that?”
 
Art: “Because he would see that the fourth cause in the media twists the first three causes to do the will of the media which is not to present the incident as a thing in itself but rather as an interpreted thing. They take the five Ws to build the form all right, but then in building the form they add their own purpose which is not a simple rendition of news, but an elaboration based on their interpretation. I’m fumbling here for an analogy, but if the news media were building a house, they would add much that has nothing to do with the structure and function of a house. At the very least their house would be the epitome of rococo architecture, you know, that late Baroque style that has so much ornamentation that it appears to be a style for the sake of the style, some elaborate ars gratia artis, with the original matter shaped and reshaped and overelaborated according to the ‘school’ of news, the news ‘artists’ and ‘architects’ who share a point of view and who have become the story instead of the actual story. Yeah, I think I’m onto something here. I think the modern presentation of the news is definitely a rebirth of the rococo.”
 
Sam: “Your mind never fails to wander around in the strangest ways. Talking to you is like reading a stream-of-consciousness novel by Joyce or listening to Don McClean’s “American Pie” and trying to figure out the meaning of his elliptic lyrics without some intensive background about him and Buddy Holly. But I think I get the point about the modern news.”
 
Art: “And…”
 
Sam: “Sorry, I have an appointment.”
 
*Warner, Charles Dudley. The American Newspaper. Online free at the Project Gutenberg EBook website at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3110/pg3110.html   I highly recommend this insightful little pamphlet. Warner addresses just about every concern that you might have about the way news is handled and about its effect on the American psyche. Already a nervous people fraught with concerns over how others view incidents and individuals, your contemporaries are daily subject to more emphasis on story tellers than on stories. 

Have you ever said sentences like the following to a baby?
 
            “Here’s Uncle Joe. You might be unaware of this, but he developed a software to enhance machine aided cognition. He developed a program called ELIZA that he named after Shaw’s lead character in Pygmalion, the street vendor Eliza Doolittle. Essentially, in writing his AI, Uncle Joe addressed the problem of knowledge representation, particularly as it might apply to psychology.” *
 
You haven’t? But why not?
 
Of course, you know that the baby would not understand. However, you might argue that your using such sentences actually prepares the baby for a future vocabulary, English phonetics, and complex concepts. You might also argue that eventually, the baby will come to know the words and possibly later understand them in the context of artificial intelligence, psychology, and epistemology. 
 
So, how do you talk to the baby? Well, you sometimes reduce yourself to babbling, to looking directly into the baby’s eyes to entertain it with expressions that accompany sounds. Basically, you condescend because you don’t believe the baby has attained your level of intelligence, of accumulated knowledge, of understanding, and of language. 
 
You have spoken to people from all walks of life and from various cultures. Do you use the same level of speech, the same level of complexity, or the same level of colloquialism with all, regardless of their social status? In short, when you walk into a convenience store or a tire dealer, do you speak as you speak to a medical doctor, a biomedical engineer, or a tech CEO? You don’t? Why not? Is it because you have stereotyped your audience? 
 
In Pygmalion or its Broadway version My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza to speak “properly” enough to pass for a duchess. The question, of course, is whether or not just using words “properly” entails understanding of complex ideas. Think SIRI. Or, think typing that text and sending it only to realize a split second after you hit “send” that your smart phone changed a word you intended to send, causing you to send another text with the corrected word. Because smart phones are used everywhere, the question of which language they use is important, but that’s not the only question. Which dialect and which vocabulary should the AI be programmed to hear and understand?
 
I remember hearing some politicians addressing southern Baptist congregations during campaign stops. During their speeches, the politicians used a dialect and a vocabulary they believed “fit” the audiences, a dialect and vocabulary that differed from what they used in addressing groups of “Northerners,” or “West Coasters,” or “the Rich and Powerful.” What caused the change? I also remember my first trip to the American South as a youth and saying to an elderly woman, “Yes, ma’am” in a dialect easily distinguished from my usual western Pennsylvanian speech. As I said it, I thought, “Where did that come from? I have never talked with a southern dialect.” Was I young and stupid, young and unsure of my identity, or young and politely deferential as I believed the woman wanted me to be?
 
Was I stereotyping? 
 
Consider recent studies by Yale social psychologists Cydney Dupree and S. T. Fiske on the language used by conservatives and liberals. According to Dupree and Fiske (2019), “Most Whites, particularly sociopolitical liberals, now encores racial equality. Archival and experimental research reveals a subtle but persistent ironic consequence: white liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites—that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent” (Abstract). ** In a second study, Dupree (2021) found in a follow-up study the opposite of the “downshift” as Blacks and Latinos used a decidedly “upshifted” language to self-present as competent and knowledgeable and to separate themselves from stereotypes based on their racial or social backgrounds. ***
 
I suppose Dupree and Fiske could just as easily do another study on upshifting and downshifting within any racial, social, or professional group of people: Students, for example, relative to professors; professors, relative to grant providers; salesmen relative to clients. Across the human spectrum stereotypes often dictate how we self-present as either competent or incompetent. And much of it is based on a personal utility: The white northern politician seeking the votes of the deep southern Baptists adopts the “crowd-appropriate” language, even raising the voice at the end of a thought as if to say a loud “amen.” Comedians, of course, do the same, and in some sense there’s nothing wrong in downshifting or upshifting, especially when one seeks approval or laughs. But there is harm in pretending to be an advocate for equality while either subtly or blatantly expressing a belief in inequality through vocabulary or dialect. **** That makes the speaker a mere pettifogger, charlatan, deceiver, or pretender no different from a scam artist.  
 
And I could suggest another study for Dupree and Fiske. “Do audiences detect overt condescension or flattering deference?” Do those to whom speakers self-present as incompetent understand that the self-presentation is a ruse based on the speaker’s stereotyping the audience as incompetent or inferior? 
 
Further, I could suggest that you consider my own writing as an upshift, my effort to impress you with competence I don’t actually possess (as indicated by my use of the contraction). Am I a charlatan? Maybe. Just a thought.
 
But unlike a politician seeking votes or a salesman seeking sales, I want nothing from you other than what I post in the frontispiece to this website: My goal is for you to use what I write as a point of departure for your own insights. Regardless of any faulty thinking, unwarranted pretension, or genuine or false humility on my part, if I can inspire you to think, I’ve done more than just babble. 
 
 
Notes: 
 
*From its inception, artificial intelligence required a technology that tied either or both sounds and symbols to understanding. See J. Weizenbaum, “ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” Communications of the ACM 1 (19656): 36-45, and by the same author, “Contextual Understanding by Computers,” in ACM 8 (1967) 474-480. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168
 
**Dupree, C. H., and Fiske, S. T. (2019) Self-presentation in interracial settings: The competence downshift by White liberals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(3), 579-604. https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000166  Accessed July 30. 2021.
 
***Dupree, Cydney H.,  22 July 2021. Black and Latinx conservatives upshift competence relative to liberals in mostly white settings. Nature Human Behaviour (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01167-9   Accessed July 30, 2021.
 
****I offer the following as examples.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCyvyyo6dtQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCyvyyo6dtQ  Both accessed July 30, 2021.

Picture this: It’s the future; you are driving your electric vehicle in Indiana. Golly, your batteries are low, and there’s no charging station for miles. No problemo; as you drive, your vehicle gets a recharge from the magment, a magnetized road pavement recently developed and now being tested in Indiana. * Sounds pretty amazing. No worries about the location of a charging station. Just get on the road and drive.  
 
Magnetized cement? What could go wrong? It’s not as though a group of tap dancers will be in the crosswalk unable to get out of the way of oncoming traffic. Certainly, workers in steel-toed boots won’t find themselves stuck, abandoning their footwear in the middle of the highway, and walking home in their socks. Lightning? No one seems to have asked that question yet. Will a magnetized road surface attract lightning? There, I asked it. 
 
Now I can imagine the complaints and the law suits. I can see special insurance rates. I can envision that old rusted tail pipe requiring two to pry it from the road. What of the wrecks, those scattered pieces of steel that are not so easy to pick up? And the pranks! Oh! The pranks. Inventive Purdue University engineering students trying to outdo another engineering school: Can we try levitating something, maybe a metal effigy of a Michigan quarterback? What about the power source for the magnetism? “Sorry I’m late for supper, dear, I was driving home when the road went out; some car hit the generator beside the road in South Bend.” “How many times have I told you to charge the car before you leave for home? Anyway, I told you to avoid that section of the highway. The tolls are excessive. You’re paying for everyone else’s charge. By the way, who’s paying for the electrification of the road?”
 
Maybe “magment” is the future of pavement. I only facetiously suggested that pedestrians with metal in their shoes would be stuck, but pranks by engineering students don’t seem out of the question. So little of what we do is simple. So much of what we do generates unintended and unexpected consequences. Making life simple in a complex technological world is a difficult task, and as you have experienced, the greater the complexity, the greater the chance of surprises. 
 
Remember the famous lines Robert Burns wrote in the second last stanza of “To a Mouse”
 
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
 
 
A magnetic roadway. Great technological scheme. What could go wrong? 
 
*Yirka, Bob. 28 July 2021. Indiana to test ‘magment’: a magnetized concrete to charge electric vehicles. TechXplore. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-indiana-magment-magnetized-concrete-electric.html

Who knows the truth about Lucrezia Borgia? Did she poison people with toxins hidden in a hollow ring, leading them to food that would kill them? Did victims or friends trust her as she offered them food or drink during the Banquet of the Chestnuts in the Vatican Palace? Is the whole story of the ring a fiction? Who could tell? Maybe Fido.
 
Let’s make this succinct. The title of an article by Lucrezia Lonardo and others is “Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief.” * Lucrezia—the twenty-first-century Lucrezia, not the Renaissance Lucrezia—ran an experiment that involved dogs following the instructions of a person with a false belief or the instructions by a person with a true belief. The belief centered on whether or not food was available in one of two buckets that had been switched in the presence of the dog by a third person in either the absence or the presence of the persons with true or false beliefs. Go back. Look at that title again. 
 
Here are buckets publicly offered. Bucket A: Newscaster #1 believes falsely the claims of a politician who is lying. Bucket B: Newscaster #2 believes claims by a truthful politician. 
 
Here’s your test: Determine which informant has a false belief in the truth of a claim. 
 
Are you as insightful as a dog? Would you have known whether or not the Renaissance Lucrezia was offering you edible or toxic food and drink? On what grounds do you decide to follow the instructions of an informant? See whether or not you can sniff out the truth in tonight’s news. Choose your bucket wisely; otherwise, you’ll look for truth in an empty bucket. Read well the intentions of those who invite you to dine at their tables. Both truthful and untruthful Lucrezias throw banquets. Look out for the one wearing the hollow ring.
 
*Lonardo, Lucrezia, et al. 21 July 2021.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.090  

Live in a green building? That’s great. You use less energy and, because of that alone, you save yourself some money. And, of course, you’re doing your part for the environment. No one can fault you for increasing atmospheric carbon and its consequent radiative forcing of the lower atmosphere. We all want to say thanks.
 
Oh! Wait. You actually live in a green building, meaning the color? It’s what? It’s made of green pigmented concrete? Sorry, I was thinking passive and active green energy systems like south-facing big windows for collecting heat in the winter, deciduous trees on that same side to block the sun in summer, insulated walls, a large overhang to block the high summer sun, solar panels on the roof, and/or geothermal heating and cooling systems. But you’re telling me that the building is green, the color green. I guess that still saves you money. If the concrete is green, no one has to spend money on paint. Again, that’s a win-win for you personally though it probably doesn’t do much for the environment. Of course, much of what we do is just for appearances. There’s an increasing demand for colored concrete, and not just along Collins Avenue in Miami or on the hillsides of Bermuda, where all those pastel—colored concrete buildings and houses provide an art nouveau architecture. Barcelona has such colored buildings in the Ciutat de la Justícia.  
 
But did you see the recent story about green pigments in cement, specifically those with muscovite mica for coloring? Seems that the green concrete is structurally weak because of increased prorosity.* Now, if your green comes from cobaltous aluminate oxide and iron (III) oxide, you don’t have to worry. Those pigments don’t weaken cements. You ought to check with your contractor, nevertheless. He (or she) probably did the math to determine the safety of your concrete and the durability of your building under stresses. 
 
Yes, equations. Mehreen Heerah, Graham Dawson, and Isaac Galobardes improved the equation used to determine the structural integrity of colored concrete. Galobardes says that using the equation “avoids making the destructive tests used to estimate the mechanical properties of concrete.” 
 
Makes me think of Don Quixote. Remember Quixote’s fashioning a helmet and then testing it by striking it with his sword? Destructive testing. The helmet didn’t withstand the impact. So, what did Quixote do? He fashioned another helmet and decided that it would withstand the impact without the destructive testing. Good to know that the same thinking works for green concrete, for pigmented concrete, buildings, and for the current drive toward socialism.  
 
In matters less concrete than concrete, isn’t this what we do? Isn’t this the testing methodology behind educational engineering and social engineering? We don’t really run the tests that tell the tale, or we ignore the tests that show failure. We say that since we have a good idea, let’s live it. Or, we say, “Sure, it didn’t work before, but it’ll work this time.”
 
Sorry to tell those of you who favor socialism and communism, but you aren’t different from Quixote, the dreamer. The helmet you don has been tested and broken. Putting on another that is a duplicate of the first will yield the same results, regardless of your well-meaning intentions. As part of his quest for living the chivalrous and noble life, Don Quixote donned a helmet that did nothing to protect his life or the lives of others. But then, he did tilt at windmills. 
 
 
*Fraass, Robert. 23 July 2021. Fatal flaw uncovered in green pigmented concrete. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-07-fatal-flaw-uncovered-green-pigmented.html   Accessed July 27, 2021.  See also  Mehreen Z. Heerah et al, Characterisation and control of cementitious mixes with colour pigment admixtures, Case Studies in Construction Materials DOI: 10.1016/j.cscm.2021.e00571
 

Two guys talk at a picnic.
 
“Hey, Charles, you’re a scientist. Gotta question for you.”
 
“What’s up, Buddy. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer it, but shoot.”
 
“Whoa! First, Charles, I gotta say, ‘Watch your language.’ Shoot’s been banned you know. It’s on the proscribed list of words that indicate you are either insensitive or dangerous; hope no one at the NSA is at our picnic.”
 
“Okay, just ask the question.”
 
“Well, I was readin’ this morning that 18 elephants were killed by lightning in Assam, India.”
 
“Elephants? I’m not an elephant scientist, and I’m not a lightning scientist. I work for a company that develops chemicals for industrial use. I develop chemicals that enhance enzyme-mediated reactions.”
 
“What?”
 
“Ever drink beer, Buddy?”

“Of course, what am I holding right now?”
 
“Well, I see it’s a light beer. Guess what? You can thank people like me for that. We’re the ones responsible for the amyloglucosidase and pullulanases that save you from drinking those extra calories.”
 
“Okay, okay. Whatever. Anyway, I was readin’ about India’s weather gettin’ worse because of climate change. Floods, lightning, and big storms, you know. Look, here’s the article. It says, that Ma-ha-ba-lesh-war, had about an inch of rain every hour for 24 straight hours.* And one place hit 122 Fahrenheit recently. A heat wave took lives in early July. Glaciers are melting. And, and, give me a sec, here it is, ‘Scientists say climate change may be making lightning more frequent.’ And here it says that that Uttarakhand flood that went viral on YouTube earlier this year was a ‘tell-tale of our future’ according to a glaciologist. So, you’re a scientist. What do you think?”
 
“As much as I’d like to assuage your fears about roasting to death as the heavy rains fall and flood waters rise, nothing in my years of enzyme research gives me any authority to speak about Indian weather. From general knowledge, I know that over the years I have read of numerous poorly constructed and earthen dams breaking during a monsoon season and about catastrophic storms. Without anything more than general knowledge about that particular glacier that broke and caused the YouTube starring flood, I can guess that as a mountain glacier’s mass increases, so does its potential to fall downhill, or as it moves, it hits a no-return point, maybe at the lip of cirque or paternoster step. So, I don’t know whether or not climate change caused a particular glacier to break to cause that flood. What if the glacier had actually increased in mass to make it less stable? What if its inexorable movement downslope reached the point of chaos like stacking too many cards onto a house of cards?”
 
“Uh. Well, what about what the scientists and experts say? There’s a lot in this article. Let me see. Yeah, here’s one. Six thousand people died in a flood in 2013. Here’s another. Cyclone Tauktae killed 155 in May and Cyclone Yaas killed 9 and forced 1.5 million people to evacuate their homes. And a third one. Get this: The Hindustan News reports that 17,000 people died in heat waves since 1971. And a fourth. The article says, ‘India’s average temperature rose around 0.7 degrees Celsius—that’s 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit…
 
“Thanks for the temperature conversion.”
 
“One point seven degrees Fahrenheit ‘between the beginning of the 20th century and 2018.’ Isn’t that a lot?”
 
“Did you hear what you read?”

“What?”
 
“You said ‘around 0.7 degrees Celsius,’ didn’t’you?”
 
“Yeah. So?”
 
“What if I said to a customer who wanted fewer calories that I could make a chemical that would more or less do the job he wanted? That I could make a beer that had ‘around’ a certain number of calories? I can read the label now. ‘Calories: Maybe between 100 and 250.’ What would you think?”
 
“Uh?”
 
“Did the temperature rise by exactly 0.7 degrees Celsius as measured in the same places in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, say in 1901, as it was as measured in all the places Indians measured temperatures in 2018? I have another question: Did the Hindustan News say how many died in heat waves before 1971? Is it possible that just as many or even more died in unreported heat waves that occurred in the 14th century or in 8th century?” What about in ancient India, say three millennia ago? 
 
“Doesn’t say.”
 
“And isn’t the monsoon season a product of seasonal switches in pressure systems that change with the solar energy available? I mean, look, I learned that high pressure over the continent and north of the Himalayas dominates the weather in western India and over the Deccan Plateau in the winter, making it arid, but in summer low pressure develops over the Arabian Sea and dominates the region, sending massive amounts of water vapor that has to rise over the Deccan Plateau, where the vapor condenses because of orographic lifting, causing the annual rains.”
 
“Uh?”
 
“Point is, even though I’m not a weather scientist, I know that weather fluctuates, sometimes greatly, over seasons and decades. Otherwise, we’d never talk about a Little Ice Age, a Medieval Warm Period, or any glacial advances bookended by interglacial warming periods. And as far as the effect on humans is recorded, I’d have to say that with 1.3 billion people, many Indians living in valleys below the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas and many living along coasts where storms hit and do the most damage, that deaths are inevitable. And as for the heat waves, well I assume that the reason there have been fewer deaths in the developed world than in India is that abundant energy and booming economies have made air conditioning available. I’ve been to Phoenix and Mono Lake in the height of summer, and I didn’t die because I knew to step into an air-conditioned building or car and because I had city water or bottles of water wherever I was. That just isn’t the case with the poor people in India. And as far as flooding goes, well, I live at an elevation of 1004 feet just a half mile from a river that occasionally floods and damages homes people have built right next to the river. The river’s flood gauge in my area is set at 735 feet. Look for an Ark if my house gets flooded.” 
 
“So, you’re sayin’ there’s no global warming involved in what’s going on in India?”
 
“No. I’m saying that the parts don’t necessarily add up to the whole, that inductive reason doesn’t yield flawless scientific results. Since all those extreme weather events occur in a decade or two on average, then to cite them as evidence of a trend isn’t science. And if one is using data from sparsely placed mercury thermometers for temperatures on one end of the century and full coverage digital data on the other end of the time scale, then one is not just comparing apples and oranges, but is, instead, turning apples into oranges.”
 
“What about climate…”
 
“I know you’ve heard the dire news. But you’re not taking the complexity into account. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were many, but not so many Indians. There are over a billion now. Let me give an American analogy. When the New Madrid earthquake occurred in 1811, there were no big cities in the region. Now, there are big cities. So, as big as that earthquake was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it didn’t wreak havoc on people as it would if it were to occur today in the early part of the twenty-first century. Today, well, let’s just say, ‘Look out, cities from Memphis to Cincinnati.’ Maybe even, ‘Look out Chicago.’ See. Things get more complex when you have more people. That is, the effects get more complex—and more noticeable in an age of instantaneous news reports. But is India getting warmer? Probably. I have no access to the India data at this picnic. I guess I could look up the temperatures. I want to assume that the climate people are honest and that they don’t fudge their facts to support their foregone conclusions. I guess I also want to know if they factor in that shift in ocean temperatures called the Indian Ocean Dipole. Didn’t it cause massive floods in eastern Africa recently? Hey, but what do I know? It’s probably wrong of me to suggest that big storms in western India or big storms in Bangladesh are just the product of alternating spots of warm water. Yet…”
 
“Okay. I get it. You’re not a climate scientist. You don’t have the info. You don’t like to jump from particulars to the general, to be inductive. I went to school, too. I know some of that stuff. And I see your point. I’m sorry I brought up those elephants.”
 
“Well, it’s time we all addressed the issue of the elephant in the room. Floods in Germany, droughts in the American Southwest, big storms in western India, and lightning strikes that kill elephants are all matters of concern, but they aren’t necessarily indicative of things to come, and they don’t convince me that there is a trend any more than the flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers was a trend indicator in 1993. But you tell me. According to the records, at the confluence of those two rivers flood stage was reached 16 times between 1970 and 2018. That’s a period of 48 years. Guess how many times that stage was reached between 1898 and 1969.”
 
“Can’t imagine, maybe 5?”
 
“Thirteen times. Are those recent extra three floods significant? Should I worry that upper Midwest America is getting wetter while the Southwest dries out? Maybe. In the region around Cairo—the one in the United States, not the one in Egypt—the area’s annual precipitation averaged 28.49 inches for the first three decades of the twentieth century. If you average the second through the third decade, the average is 27.68 inches. As you play with decadal averages, you see precipitation numbers go up and down, but generally staying within an inch, hovering around 28.5 inches. But then in the last decade of the last century and the first two decades of this century, the decadal average precipitation jumped to 30.06 inches. So, there’s about an inch to an inch and a half difference. Is that significant? I don’t know. Certainly, there have been wide fluctuations before. By the way, except that humans have built where they can be flooded, would flooding be a problem? And if you choose to live on the leeside of a giant mountain system in an area that is naturally semiarid like the American Southwest, should you be surprised when your semiaridity turns into complete aridity for a number of decades?”
 
“I think I see your point. The elephant in the room is inductive reasoning.”
 
“I knew you were no Dumbo.”
 
 
*Kumar, Aishwarya. 25 July 2021. India: On the front line of climate change.  Phys.org. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2021-07-india-frontline-climate.html   Accessed July 25, 2021.