Consider the following admonitions:
Beware historians and social architects. 
Beware experts and pundits.
Beware hypothesizers.
Beware doomsayers.
 
Consider the following advice: 
Think.
 
Consider before continuing: 
In this longer blog, you get to choose an ending, or, if you desire, to write your own. 
 
Consider this background: 
I’ve never been to Rapa Nui, but I’ve been influenced by explanations of what happened on that remote island famous for its seaward-looking Mo’ai. I accepted the so-called “collapse” of Easter Island culture that expert hypothesizers attributed to isolation, exploitation of limited resources like palm forests and soils, tribal war, and failure to manage water sustainably under changing climate and the vicissitudes of the Southern Oscillation/El Niño/La Niña events. Having heard all the “reasonable” hypotheses, I was convinced that Easter Island served as a model for twentieth- and twenty-first century practices and that what happened there hinted at the eventual demise of modern civilization. What happened on Easter Island, I thought, begs the question of whether or not we can sustain our lives on island Earth as we compete for its resources.
 
Not to worry, I learned. A new study seems to indicate that the island people survived natural and artificial environmental change. * The people were resilient. That they cut down their trees, a process linked by experts to the demise of their society, does not figure into the Easter Island equation of population collapse because there was no collapse, or, at least, there was no collapse as portrayed by the standard modelers. The equation can’t balance. Gardens kept the soils in place. In times of lake-draining drought, the islanders found springs. Life went on there as life has gone on for humans everywhere under risk and hardship, tough but for the general population, endurable.  
 
Our species is quite resilient because many individual members are quite hardy and resilient—even in times like these when some humans require “safe spaces” lest they suffer some existential verbal or ideological offense too unbearable for survival. Yes, even in today’s world of wimps, there are resilient people capable of surviving hardships like environmental change and war. You might be one of them—by reading this you prove by your presence in a time of pandemic my point. If you are resilient, thanks. Thanks? Yes, thanks for being the kind of human who will keep the species alive, at least for the immediate future and hopefully for as many millennia into the future as humans have endured so far. Sure, collapses have occurred, but they have happened in the context of an enduring species.   
 
So, why was I so easily convinced to adopt the standard explanations of a societal collapse that now, apparently, didn’t happen or that didn’t happen on the scale ascribed to it? And why did I let those explanations instill in me a doubt about the future? I was thinking without thinking. I accepted the standard model because in light of my having never been to Rapa Nui, those who had been there, the archaeological authorities, had accepted that “collapse.” Those experts seemed to make sense, at least, they made sense to me, a casual thinker on the subject. My thinking was their thinking.  
 
But no one who accepted the societal collapse actually took into account the size of the population on the island during the course of those centuries from initial settlement to European intrusion until Robert J. DiNapoli and others used approximate Bayesian computation of the radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record that revealed the resilience manifested in a steady or even increasing population on Rapa Nui at the very time when the standard model suggested otherwise. I realize now that I didn’t look at any data; I didn’t question any conclusions. Heck, I even mentioned the supposed collapse and its standard causes to college environmental studies students for whom I stressed the role of environmental degradation by overexploitation. What was I thinking? Now, years later, how can I go back to correct the misinformation—and maybe the negative attitude—I might have instilled in them (assuming, of course, than any of them were listening).    
 
Nevertheless, I still can’t discount that those islanders did cause themselves problems in the context of droughts and exploitation on an island not part of any archipelago. And I can’t discount that the same kind of backyard squabbles we see today were also part of Rapa Nui culture. People on the island were still people like people everywhere and everywhen. Apparently, over the decades ensuing their arrival, they separated into clans or tribes, and, as you probably know if not from your own family, then from others, that rivalries develop, estrangements occur. Cultures might differ, but the same human desires lie at the center of human problems as the Buddha taught, and individual needs frequently run counter to societal demands, even among a homogeneous people like the Rapa Nui. 
 
And if the homogeneous Rapa Nui had internal problems common to all humanity, does it not seem reasonable to assume that, as has occurred elsewhere, an introduced heterogeneity invariably increased any cultural tensions and environmental stresses? So, if, as DiNapoli and colleagues argue, the Rapa Nui survived internal and environmental stresses prior to an invasion by Europeans, should I not entertain the idea that they suffered increased over-the-edge turmoil after that invasion? The Dutch, finding the island first, and then the English, seemed to have introduced rats, plague, smallpox, and STDs into a biologically and culturally stable society that had actually survived previous hardships. Later, slave traders raided the island.
 
Do you, like me, too readily accept causes that are simple, and, as a corollary, also accept effects that appear to be anomaly-free? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by experts makes accepting effects easy, even when both causes and effects might be incorrect or mischaracterized. That collapse of the Rapa Nui seems to have been mischaracterized in both cause and effect, the latter demonstrated by the steady to increasing population size of Rapa Nui into the early 18th century. As a homogeneous population on an island, the Rapa Nui seemed to have survived both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes prior to contact with foreigners, but apparently, they suffered diminished numbers after contact with Europeans. 
 
 
Ending #1: Is Manhattan Just a Larger Rapa Nui?
Now I’m wondering whether or not I am an independent thinker or a mere parrot. If I was misled by a faulty account of Rapa Nui culture, am I also misled by a faulty account of current culture? Do I accept without thinking explanations of modern cultural problems? Accepting causes identified and enumerated by trusted experts makes accepting effects easy. And today experts abound, so many of them, I’m guessing, that at their rate of proliferation, just about everyone on the planet will be an expert before the end of this century (they’re multiplying faster than rabbits and lawyers). 
 
Are you stuck on explanations for American and European societies’ 21st-century problems that are based on hypotheses about environmental damage and rapid population diversification? Can homogeneous societies, such as Scandinavian countries before the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century surges in immigration survive untouched by social turmoil, disease, and environmental change after the recently introduced heterogeneity during this century’s mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa? 
 
Do cultural problems invariably arise from a contest between Homogeneity and Diversity? Is one better than the other? The Rapa Nui civilization was as homogeneous as a civilization can get. Any mixing of cultures and genetic backgrounds that made the Rapa Nui what they were until the Dutch and English seamen arrived had taken place before the islanders’ voyage across the Pacific to Easter Island. And then a new round of social and genetic mixing took place after the Europeans arrived in the 18th century. Oh-oh. Trouble was a-brewing after those encounters.  
 
It’s difficult to compare coconuts and apples. Easter Island is small and isolated. North America and Europe are large, with the former supporting an “indigenous” population for at least 16 millennia during which mixing probably occurred to engender the American peoples that the Europeans encountered starting in the fifteenth century. Over the long pre-Columbian centuries, those original migrants eventually mixed and then, as humans have always done, separated for the very same kinds of reasons that families separate today. Eventually, the separated “families” coalesced into units of relatively homogenous tribes and “nations,” such as the Natchez, Shawnee, Iroquois, Huron, Choctaw, and Mohicans. Then Europeans and Asians entered the mix of North American “indigenous peoples.” That mixing was sometimes biological and always cultural. 
 
In contrast with North America, Europe, with its longer human presence, experienced mixing over 30 to 60 millennia with notable pulses like the invasion by the Huns moving westward and the Vikings moving eastward. Geography made cultural mixing easier than it was over the vast Pacific. Movements of Vandals, Goths, Visigoths, Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and others introduced heterogeneity throughout Europe and, in the process, diluted their own homogeneity. Interspersed with many cultural and genetic mixing episodes came the periods of homogenizing that led to our present-day concepts of Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, etc., all inheritors of mixing and all now seeing themselves identifiable by either culture or biology—or both.  
 
Humans will be humans, so similarities can be found to link people from all places and all times. The Rapa Nui, American, and European societies all exploited the environment. On continents populations decimated wildlife on which they depended for food, and they cleared forests, actions that mirrored those of the Rapa Nui. Migrations and conquest beginning with Columbus introduced heterogeneity rather rapidly in North, Central, and South America with settlements by the Dutch, French, English, and Spanish. 
 
Today, one of the best examples of heterogeneity lies in the Borough of Queens in NYC. Queens is one of the most genetically diverse places on the planet, and next door, Manhattan Island is far from being a homogeneous Rapa Nui. About 3.5 million people of diverse genetic and cultural backgrounds live together in just those two New York City boroughs, and they flourish with limited natural resources. No farms on their radically altered landscapes provide ample food to support those millions of people. And like Rapa Nui, both boroughs are largely denuded of trees that once covered the area they occupy. Yet, the people of both heterogeneous boroughs have not only survived, but have also increased their numbers in spite of environmental changes and cultural mixing. 
 
 Of course, I shouldn’t compare coconuts and apples. Am I wrong in thinking I can compare pre- and post-industrial societies or island and continental cultures as though they were the same? Am I also thinking without thinking by comparing a globalized world with isolated pockets of humanity like that on Rapa Nui in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries? Could I be wrong in thinking that what happened on Rapa Nui in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doesn’t seem to differ from what happened in Europe and North America over millennia. Nevertheless, with regard to an island borough of New York City only half the size of Easter Island, globalization of resources has made the survival of millions easier than survival of a few thousands on the larger and largely resource-less Rapa Nui. 
 
Ending #2: Homogeneity Begets Hegemony
Here’s what I think: Homogeneity begets hegemony.
 
So, if the early standard model of Rapa Nui cultural demise was only partially correct, it might indicate that no homogeneous society that uses up its local resources is ultimately sustainable, particularly in the context of our planet’s unequal distribution of resources. In the US, for example, there is only one mine, the Molycorp mine, that produces rare earths necessary for modern tech. If Molycorp closes that California mine, then American tech companies will depend solely on foreign sources like China, the leading producer of rare earths, for metals like terbium, yttrium, dysprosium, neodymium, and europium. Will such a monopoly lead to conflict? Coconuts and apples? True, the Rapa Nui did not incorporate rare earths in their rather primitive technology, and they apparently did not explore once they established a life on Easter Island. But they did leave Polynesia for a better life, possibly in the face of war back home or possibly in a desire to conquer a new land—otherwise, why did they leave? But what kept a once seafaring people from further seafaring and exploring? Well, in that standard model of island collapse, the Rapa Nui, having cut down their forests, had no materials to make boats for further exploration even if they had wished to explore. 
 
Their survival on the island indicates they did not, under the circumstances of diminishing resources, simply resign themselves to a slow and inevitable decline. The common effort of groups under stress everywhere to find relief by invention, migration, and hegemony. For the Rapa Nui, invention, not migration or hegemony, appears to have solved some problems. The story of the Rapa Nui begins with their voyage to Easter Island. That drought occurred over the ensuing centuries seems proven, but they were inventive, finding water in the island’s coastal springs when lake water dried up. 
 
Add hubris to the equation for survival. In searches for resources, homogeneous societies on both islands and continents have sought relief beyond their borders. The Romans conquered Cyprus, where they mined the Troodos Massif for copper. Or think of Japan before World War II. The Land of the Rising Sun relied on outside resources to sustain its modern civilization. Unfortunately for the nearby Asian and Southeast Asian populations, Japan’s leaders determined that the only way to sustain their homogeneous population’s growing need for resources was by conquest. In pursuit of that path to sustainability, the Japanese started wars of conquest that ended in their own societal collapse and decimated population. Between 3.5 and 4.3 % of the Japanese populations were directly or indirectly killed by its wars of hegemony.
 
What if the Rapa Nui had in fifteenth century the capabilities for hegemony that Japan had in the twentieth century? Would they have left the island and conquered the Incas like Conquistadors? One last example, if you please. Wasn’t Hitler’s hegemony driven by his belief in a homogeneity of Germanic peoples, whom he referred to, strangely, as Aryans, a genetic group originating in India? It seems that even the perception of homogeneity is enough to drive hegemony. 
 
Ending #3: Hypothesizing Experts Model a Future That Might Not Happen as Predicted
Greenland’s socialist-leaning government recently decided to end all oil exploration because of global warming. The politicians have listened to the “experts” and have based their carbon-free future on a model that predicts an inevitable melting of the island’s glaciers. If that melting occurs, Greenland will be just like the Greenland of the Eemian Interglacial Stage of 124,000 to 119,000 years ago. *** I guess the government officials believe a warmer Greenland would be less hospitable, even though Greenland’s initial settlement began during the Medieval Warm Period when Vikings sailed to its shores and found the place hospitable.
 
Should we consider Greenland to be an analog of Rapa Nui?  
 
Seemingly isolated, Greenlanders are actually connected to a global economy and trade system that provides them with resources that now lie buried under the island’s glaciers. A warmer Greenland would probably provide a climate conducive to more agriculture. An ice-free Greenland would be easier to explore for natural resources. And a warmer island might even foster more tourism, not less. Would global warming be bad for Greenland? Would dependence on foreign sources of energy be good for Greenland?
 
Could those experts who hypothesize grave peril because of “global warming” be wrong? Recall that 2012 was supposed to be a bad year. Remember about all those “we have only 10 years left” slogans? Remember “save the polar bears”? Could the experts be wrong if not about the world in general then at least wrong about Greenland? Is it possible that global warming might, in fact, benefit many populations by extending growing regions and seasons? Might it benefit Greenlanders?  
 
Assume that the Rapa Nui had no way of predicting the climate change that changes in the Southern Oscillation brought to their small island. Had they climate experts, would they have altered their use of resources? Would they have done everything in their power to abandon the island? Note that even after the appearance of the Europeans, the Rapa Nui continued to carve their Mo’ai, indicating that the work went on regardless of climate-caused hardships. And if, like Greenlanders, the Rapa Nui had oil resources, would they have refused to drill for them because doomsayers hypothesized climate change droughts? 
 
Prediction is a gamble. So far, the prediction is that climates will change because of global warming. And the corollary of that prediction is that humans will suffer an existential threat. But will they? 
 
Ending #4
This is where you start writing. Consider what experts in various categories have told you over the past year. Consider what you accepted as true, but found out to be false. Consider how your acceptance of experts' opinions has shaped your attitude. And consider how you will protect yourself from using others' thoughts as your own. Now think and write. 
 
Notes: 
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-resilience-collapse-easter-island-myth.html
 
**https://phys.org/news/2021-07-greenland-scraps-future-oil-exploration.html
 
***Gramling, Carolyn. 15 Dec. 2015. Greenland was once ice free. Science. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/greenland-was-once-ice-free  

I’ve been told that the best way to stay in the game of communicating is to dance around controversial subjects. That is probably true. Making any definitive comment has always drawn opposition that has throughout history (and probably prehistory) led to ad hominem responses. I have not found a segment of human society that is free from people who attack the messenger rather than the message, and that includes academia, a segment one might think extols reasonable discussion. Nevertheless, in the context of a species that takes pride in its self-proclaimed classification as “sapiens” but that responds to adverse ideas emotionally, I intend here to make a few comments on matters that engender ad hominems.  
 
CLIMATE
It really isn’t a matter of climate anymore, is it? It’s become rabid politics. And the two sides on the subject are as divided as can be: Those on one side of the matter say there is no controversy because everyone agrees, that is, everyone save those goofy naysayers, those climate-change deniers, those unscientific dolts. And those dolts on the other side of the issue? Well, from their perspective the science is neither finally determined nor indicative of really bad consequences to come. Humanity, say the “deniers,” isn’t on the brink of extinction because the climates might be changing. They say, “Climates have always changed, sometimes even rapidly, as at the end of the Younger Dryas glacial epoch when climate changed radically in the course of little more than a single millennium (12,800-11,550 years ago), and sometimes in the course of little more than a few decades, as at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and as at the end of the Little Ice Age.” 
 
A BIT OF A PRIMER for Those Who Slept through That Science Lecture
Cimate is the “average weather” over a multidecadal period—usually three decades for a region. The first among meteorologists to classify climates, Wladimer Köppen, used monthly temperatures and precipitation amounts to delineate climates. His system, modified several times by Köppen himself and also by Rudolf Geiger, recognizes subclasses of tropical, dry, temperate, continental, polar, and alpine climates, all designated by letters or combinations of letters (E.g., Dfa and Dfb, two humid continental climates identified by differences in temperatures in certain seasons). Other climatologists like C. W. Thornthwaite added types of vegetation into the classification scheme, and in 1966 Glenn Thomas Trewartha modified the system further. If you look at any climate map, you’ll note that the borders between climates are somewhat debatable. Should climatologists place the boundary between Dfa and Dfb in southern NY or northern PA?  
 
The classification scheme includes not only temperatures and precipitation amounts, but it also includes when those temperatures reach their average highs and when the precipitation occurs. We know, for example, that the best time to vacation in Guatemala, the “Land of Eternal Spring,” lies between November and April, the country’s driest months. More frequent and heavier rains occur in the other months. This climate data is based on only a few centuries worth of observation, but no doubt the ancient Mayans knew when they didn’t need to wear their Wellingtons and carry an umbrella. 
 
Unfortunately, except for proxy information, we have relatively reliable data on weather patterns going back only into the Industrial Age and only for isolated places until the nineteenth century. Even now, it is erroneous to think we have long-term data for every part of the planet, but meteorologists have ever more sophisticated means of acquiring weather information, including data from satellite-based instruments. But to determine past climates, paleoclimatologists have had to rely on proxy data, such as the ratio of O-18 to O-16 in the tests (shells) of foraminifera, the types and locations of fossilized terrestrial plants and animals, and types and compositions of sediments. 
 
Chief among public environmental concerns since the 1970s, climate change has become an ever-more-popular raison d'etre for politicians and public figures. Back then, during the first Earth Days, Chicken Little cried, “The glaciers are coming; the glaciers are coming.” By the 1990s, the cry became “The glaciers are melting; the glaciers are melting.” Climate science entered the world of news media, film, public discussion, and doomsaying. Everyone, it seemed was getting involved. William K. Stevens wrote The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate in 1999. * If there is a book on the subject, it must be important, right? Stevens, by the way, was a science reporter for The New York Times. Could there be a more scientific document? What had been science for Wladimer Köppen became a business, a political matter, and an ideology both for people running scared that, as the stereotypical guy holding the sign warns, the end is near, and for people cashing in on government-funded research and science popularization leading to fame. The future, “warmists” declare, looks bleak, baked bleak. Wasn’t the catastrophic moment supposed to occur in 2012? And we’re past that, so, everybody, look out. 
 
THE CAUSE AND ITS EFFECTS
 
First, Climate Controls
Here’s a list of climate controls: 

1. Solar activity
2. Orbital shape and cycles
3. Latitude
4. Altitude
5. Albedo of surfaces
6. Continentality 
7. Marine air masses 
8. Ocean currents 
9. Greenhouse gas ratios
10. Volcanic activity 

 
Second, Anthropogenic Activity as a Control
The determined cause of the predicted imminent demise by climate of just about everyone, as you know, is the burning of fossil fuels that releases carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are, in fact, undeniable. Hey, I measured them for Pennsylvania and the USEPA back in the 1990s. Have those emissions not increased since then? Measurements on top of isolated Mauna Loa confirm a relatively steady increase over the recent past, with quantities of carbon dioxide now reaching over 400 parts per million in our mostly nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
 
Human activities other than burning fossil fuels activities can influence temperatures and precipitation. Stripping forests, paving square miles of cities, altering types of plants from endemic to invasive all change the albedo of Earth’s surface. Creating urban heat islands adds energy to local and regional air masses. Emitting small (2.5 microns) industrially produced particulate matter into the atmosphere can block sunlight. Impounding water in reservoirs, such as Lake Mead, and destroying natural water bodies, such as the five-million year-old Aral Sea, also play a role in climate.  
 
Effects, Panic, and Hasty Conclusions
Now it has become common for people to support their claims that “the end is near” by pointing to droughts and floods, cold spells and heat waves, and hurricanes and tornadoes. Since most people live in the present with little regard to history, and since much of the history of droughts, floods, cold spells, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes is locked in an unrecorded past, any current weather phenomena deemed severe are taken as signs that “things are bad and getting worse.” In August, 2021, at the time of this writing a fire is ravaging the woods of Oregon, and shortly before I put fingers to keyboard, floods killed people in Europe. What more evidence could the common citizen want? 
 
Read this CNN headline: “Germany’s worst rainfall in a century leaves dozens dead and hundreds missing, authorities say.” ** Certainly, there are those who attribute the flooding to climate change. Why, even Germany’s Environment Minister Svenja Schulze tweeted “Climate change has arrived in Germany.” Am I missing something here? I assume that “worst rainfall in a century” implies that Germany had such flooding prior to this event. Indeed, 100-year, 500-year, and 1,000-year floods are called by those names because such floods can occur on average by the designated number. In fact, a location could be hit by two 500-year floods in consecutive years and then not hit again for 1,000 years on the same order of magnitude. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. In 1900 the Galveston Hurricane killed 8,000. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was a Category V storm. Don’t forget 1969’s Hurricane Camille, the second Cat 5 hurricane to hit the US in the twentieth century. Bangladesh lost 300,000 in the Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970. Floods? Well, consider that in 1932 the Yangtze River Flood killed more than three million people, at least a million more than the number killed by the 1887 Yellow River Flood. That recent flooding in Europe that killed dozens? Consider that in 1530 the St. Felix’s Flood killed 100,000 in Flanders and Zeeland, and forty years later about 20,000 died during the All Saints’ Flood in the Netherlands.
 
MOVERS, SHAKERS, AND SOLUTIONS
So, back to mobilized politicians and movers and shakers. They have determined that you, yes YOU, are at fault, you with your insatiable desire for energy. And since you are an addict without self-control, politicians, led by soothsayers from academia and the United Nations, have decided to impose a different way of life, to get you in energy rehab, so to speak. Ignoring that those who do the imposing find it necessary to burn fossil fuels to live comfortably. And ignoring their need to travel to pat-on-the-back friendly conferences, where good food and good times are as much a part of the conferences as policy-making that has yet to be universally turned into results, I’ll simply say that hypocrisy is a common human failing. If the future is really dire, shouldn’t the leaders lead by example? 
 
The consequence of movers and shakers meeting to decide how to get you into rehab, are real. They have convinced prime ministers and presidents, parliaments and congresses, CEOs and boards to take actions that directly affect your life. You, yes YOU, need to switch to renewable energy systems to save the planet from more climate changes, even though you probably owe your existence to climate change in eastern Africa a few millions of years ago when your ancestral hominins first stood upright, and even though climate change might be as good for some people as it is bad for others. 
 
Is there something to this climate change obsession? Probably, but what are YOU going to do about it? Are you going to be happy with low albedo solar panels covering a former high albedo landscape and serving as a heat island? With bird-killing windmills that have fiberglass fan blades that can’t be recycled? With electric batteries galore whose heavy metals will infiltrate soils upon disposal, making ground and surface waters carcinogenic? With energy shortages that bring not only discomfort, but also higher prices for transported goods and services? 
 
Are you listening to Greta, world-renowned teen who scolded the world for stealing her childhood? How, by the way, does the supposed theft of her childhood compare to the conditions imposed by a Syrian dictator, a brutal Caliphate, and an inner-city gang? Oh! Yeah. She got to ply the seas on a sailboat, something I didn’t get to do until I was an adult. Poor kid. And like Greta other kids have been told that the world’s future, their future, is bleak, baking bleak.  
 
And all because you, yes YOU, won’t act to Spartanize your life, the movers and shakers—exempt from their own dictates—now have to impose restrictions that will force you into energy rehab. And not just you. They will attempt to force everyone on the planet into rehab, even those who just want to reach your current level of convenient and abundant energy supply. In the meantime, you will hear all the necessary admonitions for change, such as the mantra about the fictional 97% of scientists that agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and dangerous.
 
THE CONSENSUS
If you ask for a list of names, will you see that those scientists aren’t universally climate scientists or paleoclimatologists? Will you see that the list doesn’t reveal the science of the scientists? Will you accept, then, that a medical researcher who is clearly a scientist has an opinion on climate? How about a chemical engineer who works in plastics? A theoretical physicist? Or maybe even a guy who plays a scientist on TV? What does it mean to say “97% of scientists”? I know some scientists—even pretended to be one myself by doing environmental research for the Commonwealth of PA and the Feds—but I don’t know of any survey they ever took. Are you one of the scientists that make up the 97%? If you are, have you examined the data supposedly available to all 97% of scientists, and if you have, do you conclude that the future is dire? That you live in a modern Ur that underwent, among political change, environmental change? Have you sold your house on the Florida coast in anticipation of rising seas, powerful storms, and unbearably hot weather? 
  
And if you wish to logically examine the evidence for a dangerous set of climate changes, what will you, yes YOU, do with temperature data that might have been manipulated or misconstrued to shape public opinion? Changes? You know you have changed the very spot where you live. A thousand years ago there was no house or apartment there. Humans have always altered the planet, and the planet has always altered the way humans live. If you live in a city, you contribute to an urban heat island. What are you going to do about it? Express an opinion? 
 
In 2021 the United States, Greenland, and countries too numerous to mention have leaders who are intent on quashing the use of fossil fuels. They see an urgency that many people agree with but refuse to act on. The U.S. President in 2021 wants to put charging stations across America so that everyone can drive an electric car. Are you going to buy one? Sorry, I didn’t realize you already drive one in your personal effort to save the planet. I’m sarcastic because I can’t envision where the charging stations will get the power for a highly mobile population that is used to being in a hurry, a population that has, by the way, 276 million vehicles.  
 
Slow down, people. Have a conversation at a charging station for the twenty minutes to a half hour it will take to get you another 100 or so miles, at the end of which you’ll need to take the next charging station break. You’ll have the time to talk, time you don’t have in the five minutes it now takes you to fill a gas tank. I can see it now: 50,000 new charging stations and relaxing coffee shops lining the roadways of America; people taking time to meet new people; no one in a hurry; life as slow as it was during the horse-and-buggy days but with fields of solar panels accumulating heat on their dark surfaces. By the way, it will take between 6 to 15 solar panels to charge an electric vehicle. Along I-95 in eastern USA, as many as 300,000 drivers use the highway. Go low here: Six panels times 300,000 vehicles equal 1.8 million solar panels. A 20-square-foot solar panel produces about 250 to 300 Watts. That field of solar panels for just one highway will be huge. Ah! The dream conditions of a carbon-free world. But what if an occluded or stationary front beclouds the sky? 
 
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Should we be concerned about climate change? I’m up in the air, so to speak. A warmer world has existed before; a colder one, too. And both warmer and colder worlds have bookended the existence of all the various human species. What if, however, we, the last of the hominin species, pave the sunny Sahara with solar panels to supply North Africans with abundant energy? Almost every environmental solution generates its own set of problems. Square miles of solar panels will, as I noted above, absorb heat, make their own heat islands, and cause convection currents that will enhance sun-blocking cloud formation. That’s okay, you say. The result will be increased precipitation that returns the Sahara into its once green state—yes, the Sahara was once a land of greenery. The greenery will then alter the former albedo of the sands.
 
And what happens if the warming doesn’t happen as predicted? What happens if the warming occurs, but instead of dire consequences generates benefits for humanity that equal the losses? And what happens if regardless of temperature patterns, the politicians decide that cheap energy is bad for all? 
 
DILEMMA
Protecting the environment is everyone’s ethical obligation, and that means using electricity prudently. But life is complex. Should we turn off city lights that help to prevent crime? Should we force people to accept the dictates of others? How do we get everyone to cooperate when abundant energy begets abundant wealth, comfort, and freedom? 
 
We should discuss this sometime at a coffee shop by one of those charging stations as we wait our turn to plug in our electric vehicles for another hundred miles of travel. 
 
            
Notes:
 
*Delacorte Press.
**July 16, 2021 at https://www.cbs58.com/news/germanys-worst-rainfall-in-a-century-leaves-dozens-dead-and-hundreds-missing-authorities-say             

Apparently, we humans can’t live without contradiction. And when I say “we humans,” I include myself, for surely, I am as guilty of contradicting myself as any other and certainly as guilty of hypocrisy in some way as any other human I critique. But I find a particularly puzzling contradiction and possible hypocrisy in the current push by some on the American Left to require vaccinations against COVID-19. 
 
I’ll note here that I have been vaccinated, have been “Pfizered,” so to speak. But I would not force anyone else to receive any COVID-19 vaccine out of respect for an individual’s wishes and on the grounds that those who already contracted the disease probably have antibodies, have immunity, that, if enhanced by a vaccine, might make the body over-immunized, leading to something akin to that talked about cytokine storm, that is, to some auto-immune response. Yet, I see teachers’ unions and Left-leaning pundits and politicians pushing for that universal vaccination, regardless of one’s having natural antibodies. What happened to that argument about “it’s my body” so repeatedly expressed with regard to abortion? I guess that’s my simple question. What about that “it’s my body” argument?
 
Therein lies the contradiction and hypocrisy of one segment of American society. Of course, that segment will argue that I’m mixing fruit here, comparing my apples to my oranges. Regardless of that counterargument, I would suggest that if “it’s my body” applies to one issue, it also applies to the other. The Left advances causes like physician-assisted suicide. That’s a version of “it’s my body,” isn’t it? So, if someone chooses not to get “Pfizered” and then by chance dies, isn’t it that person’s right to choose non-physician-assisted death? 
 
Am I missing the point here? Isn’t the universal vaccination supposed to protect others? Isn’t that the justification for the vaccine? I suppose, but consider that the vaccine is designed to protect those who have the vaccine the way a castle wall once protected medieval populations. If the wall doesn’t work to protect those who chose to build and hide behind it, why did they bother? 
 
Sure, I might get some variant of COVID-19. There is that possibility. But life’s a risky business. I’ve taken what I’ve been told is a reasonable precaution; I’ve hidden behind the wall. Was I duped? Should I walk in anxiety that the wall of protection behind which I seek security will fall to the cannonball of COVID-19? Has the virus developed the trebuchet that destroys the castle wall? If it has, then what do the people do? Do they run to this vaccine, then to that one, all sought out in a panic derived from the threat of attack? Someone might call me out for hypocrisy: “Hey, don’t you get an annual flu shot?”
 
In fact, when I think about the flu season, I do get the shot, but I miss some years. And in some of those years without the flu shot, I get the flu; in some of those years, I have remained healthy. And if I should get the flu as some have gotten COVID-19, should I still get the flu shot during or after my sickness? Haven’t I developed through sickness a natural immunity? Haven’t those who already had the pandemic’s virus developed immunity? Yet, I recently read that universities are considering for the 2021-2022 school year a requirement for vaccinations, and that NCAA sports teams might be required to get the vaccination—even for players with antibodies.
 
Seems to me that those who keep hounding us about diversity want little more than uniformity. 

What, I ask, shaped your life? You might say, for example, that common human necessities, such as the need for food, have driven you to a pattern of eating, once, twice, three times a day, or of continuous snacking. Eating: Now that’s an inescapable necessity for all humans. You might also say that what you have become was contingent on all those little events that differ among individuals, from being born into a certain economic condition or faith system to being in the right place at the right time to get a job. I think, for example of the latter, a contingency that placed me in a job I held for four decades and of all the subsequent related contingencies that I see in retrospect. A serendipitous event that produced a career also produced governmental research projects that came my way, the very first one by accident, I believe, and then the others by personal motivation to seek more of the same.
 
Before I continue, let me speak about that personal serendipity of decades ago by running the video of my career. Hit “Play.” Seeking a job as a college instructor, I went to visit campuses one summer day. On a sidewalk of the first campus on my itinerary, I chanced upon the chairman of the English Department who was walking across the campus. Before I left that sidewalk, I heard, “You’re hired. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.” It was a serendipitous meeting that was enhanced by synchronicity. Fast forward now.... Stop. Hit “Play.” Eventually, another serendipitous event resulted in my switching departments to teach the earth sciences, specifically, oceanography. Fast forward again…. Stop. Hit “Play.” Just about everyone had gone home for the day, leaving me in my office and the departmental secretary at her desk to mind the store. A state government agent appeared at her desk and asked for a colleague, the most senior member of the department. Because he had already left, she sent the fellow to me, and he explained that the federal government had asked the state to perform such-n-such research. The agency, he said, was at a loss on how to proceed, so he was traveling to state universities in search of someone to do the work, “chancing” upon me that day. We hit a point of synchronicity in that meeting. Keep watching this video. I did the research for the state, and all my subsequent government research stemmed from that meeting. I suppose I could say that all of it was contingent upon that meeting which was contingent upon a series of serendipitous events. I might also add that all those graduate assistants and colleagues I hired on grant money over the ensuing years also owed something to those chance meetings with a chairman and a state agent. Serendipity for sure for them, their earning some much needed money coming at just the opportune time for them, all as a consequence of my personal serendipitous events derived, as my video shows, from contingent necessities: 1) Filling the need for an instructor in the English Department, 2) Filling the English Department’s need a few years later for someone to teach a new course in scientific and technical writing, 3) Filling a personal need to acquire more scientific knowledge by enrolling in science courses that motivated the chairman of a science department to ask me to teach for them, 4) Filling the Department of Earth Sciences’ need for someone to teach oceanography by acquiring even more knowledge and switching departments, and eventually 5) Filling the need of a wandering puzzled state agent to perform some research mandated by the federal government. Yes, the video shows that my career evolved because I filled contingent needs.   
 
Now, I wonder about you. What serendipitous event or events altered your life’s course? And I also wonder whether or not your serendipitous event or events might just as easily have occurred in someone else’s life. Had that senior colleague not left for the day, would he have conjoined the state agent synchronistically and then seized the opportunity to perform that research? Could the serendipity you have experienced just as easily have been the catalyst for someone else to walk in your shoes, to star in your autobiographical video. In other words, were you necessary? Were you “chosen” in all of Earth history to be where you are? Were your personal serendipitous synchronicities possible only with you as the actor? Did all the Cosmos conspire to place you in your current state of affairs through the accumulation of such events that filled contingent necessities? Was there an encompassing cause that produced you, the effect? Lots of questions, I realize, but I have another question.
 
Has your life been the result of synchronicity? There are many who believe their lives are contingent on a “special” occurrence. I just read a short autobiography of such a person. Gregg Levoy posted in Psychology Today online (2017) the story of his being in one job but thinking of possible others, listening to “Desperado” by the Eagles on the way home from work one day, hearing the line about the Queen of Hearts, stepping out of his car, and finding a Queen of Hearts beneath his foot, an event he believes was serendipitous synchronicity enhanced by other instances of running into the isolated Queen of Hearts cards in various places. He writes that such synchronicity is “A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path.” * 
 
Synchronicity? Here’s an example of synchronicity:
 
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.” 
 
Ralph: “Funny thing, Vera, I was just thinking you would.”
 
Now another question: What brought Vera and Ralph together for a life-long relationship that one day would have them thinking simultaneously about taking out the trash? Mere serendipity? Cosmic determinism? Forget the fictional couple. What about you?
 
With seven billion of us interacting, coincidence and synchronicity are likely. But when either occurs, we are usually astonished by our apparent inexplicable connection to others and to the universe. What are we to argue, that coincidences occur coincidentally? That synchronicity in any form is a matter of accident in a finite life? That we don’t have the connection with others we believe we have? Or, finally, that most “meetings of minds” and spiritual connections with nature ignore differences in favor of a single recognizable, and possibly imagined, common detail that a suffusion of neurotransmitters enhances in our brains? Do we impose connections where no connections by any objective standard exist?
 
That we ascribe meaning to synchronous and coincidental events is a normal reaction, but no one, I believe, has established that such events actually have objective meaning. Things happen. We happen to be where they happen. As Porky Pig says at the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon, “That’s all, folks.” But, darn, don’t you get that feeling that there’s something more to synchronicity and coincidence than chance? Do you believe that synchronous phenomena suggest life isn’t “looney,” but that “There’s more, folks”?
 
Take dating, for example. How did you meet? The universe is 13.8 billion years old—give or take a week—the planet is 4.5 billion years old; it’s been more than three billion years since life first appeared and more than a half billion years since unicellular life evolved into multicellular life that proliferated; and your type of life, hominins, has been around for millions of years with the rise of your species maybe 300,000 years ago—that’s about 150,000 generations and 100 billion people. And now there are those contemporaneous billions of humans, and you met one of them, found a meeting of minds and hearts, and, as they say, the two of you became one. What are the chances? What are the chances of finding that “soulmate”? Was your meeting serendipitous? Well, maybe you should consider that, though unprovable, you could easily have met hundreds or thousands of soulmates among seven billion members of your species. “But there was that moment,” you argue. “There was that immediate connection.” 
 
From personal experiences, I tend to believe that we do have inexplicable connections; yet, my belief is tempered by my knowing that biochemistry, emotions, assumptions, culture, and learning control what I think and feel when I experience synchronicity and coincidence. Take the “love at first sight” experience as an example of synchronicity. Maybe you experienced it; maybe you saw it in a movie when two characters embarrassingly exchange that “knowing” flirtatious glance “across a crowded room,” as Emile sings in South Pacific.
 
            “Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger
            You may see a stranger across a crowded room
            And somehow you know, you know even then
            That somewhere you’ll see her again and again…
 
            “Who can explain it, who can tell you why
            Fools give you reasons, wise men never try”
 
I suppose that in giving you an explanation of love at first sight, of coincidence and of synchronicity, I might prove myself a fool. I also suspect that regardless of any insight embodied in the lyrics Oscar Hammerstein wrote for that song, neuroscientists do have an explanation. So, with some preconceived reservations, I checked some findings. 
 
With regard to “love at first sight,” I am a little skeptical of any findings that embrace a mingling of pheromones as a chief cause of synchronicity between supposed star-crossed lovers. Hammerstein’s lyric phrase “across a crowded room” provides me an image of too many intervening volatiles and too much volume to make such a mingling by pedesis anything other than the rarest of chances; so, forget Brownian movements. (Being in the same room as someone infected by COVID-19 isn’t a guarantee you’ll get the disease) But then, since I don’t know how many molecules are required for pheromones to work or how often “love at first sight” occurs, I should be skeptical of my skepticism. And yet, “across a crowded room”? I can’t prove that mingling molecules aren’t the cause of “love at first sight,” but that chance mingling seems rarer “across a crowded room” than finding the winning slot machine among all the slots in Vegas and Reno combined.
 
I suppose everyone has had a share of sitting at the right “slot machine” of life and found, in this mixed metaphor, a meeting of minds. So, I have to ask whether or not there aren’t visual or audio clues that work like pheromones, making that “across the room” connection just as likely as standing next to a pheromone-emitter. Yet, according to Dr. Trisha Stratford, a neuropsychotherapist, speaking in an interview with Emily Blatchford for the Huffpost, a woman can smell a man at ten feet. ** I suppose that’s the pedesis I mentioned above, and I also suppose that there’s a limitation by position upwind or downwind. Nevertheless, I met my wife, for example, in a crowd, but we weren’t separated, weren’t “across a crowded room.” Rather, we were standing next to each other in a crowded room. Could those pheromones have been wafting? We were only a couple of feet apart,maybe only 18 inches. In the context of billions of years of life and untold numbers of recirculated compounds, did those pheromone atoms and molecules intermix synchronistically just at “the right moment and place in the history of the Cosmos” to make us fall in love? What are the chances? ***
 
Although I would not place some Jungian paranormal meaning on a first meeting of “star-crossed soul mates,” I must still admit that I cannot explain my—or your—meeting the “right” person at the right time to form a lifelong happy relationship. Was Providence involved? Would that mean, then, that in 13.7 billion years of Cosmic History, a meeting that took a couple of minutes was predestined, that my life or your life was determined at the Big Bang in a string of causality?   
 
In fact, we’re all very complex. Those who seem to find several or even many soul mates might differ from me and my life experiences. Second, third, and more marriages are common. Look, for example, at the life of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who seemed to fall in love twice with Richard Burton whom she married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. And that brings me back to the inexplicable. 
 
We can never fully know how the other person might experience any event regardless of our supposed mutual feelings. We can analyze the brain to find serotonin and dopamine coursing through networks of neurons in the brain’s adaptive oscillators; yet, we can’t dismiss the holistic mind, the whole person that seems to be in perfect sync with us “across a crowded room.” Let’s get existential-like here: I am my brain that fell in love. I am my brain that experienced synchronicity. I am my brain that experiences a meeting of minds and hearts. But I am not, it seems to me, relegated to just a brain operating on sensory data. 
 
There appears to be a meeting of minds, a synchronicity that is real. And that synchronicity seems to take place outside the skull. I know of other stories like that of Gregg Levoy, stories about some object appearing by chance to symbolize a desire or a destiny and stories about meetings of minds that have brought people together. Of course, we can’t impose a meaning on any of them until after their occurrence, making serendipity and synchronicity both matter for retrospect. 
 
Now, I feel a need to tell you and Gregg Levoy that his chance of running into that odd and isolated Queen of Hearts card isn’t necessarily a sign of anything. The United States Playing Card Company was founded in 1867. It sells 100 million decks of playing cards annually. So, do the numbers for yourself. That’s 100 million Queen of Hearts cards every year. Go back ten years. That’s a billion Queen of Hearts cards. Now count up all the cards produced from 1867 to 2000. Queen of Hearts cards? There is just one in a deck of cards, but they are not so rare. Right? Chances of running into one are good, even in the wilderness, where campers might have played poker in their tents. Gregg says he stumbled upon one off the beaten path of a hiking trail. 
 
What of those current seven billion human beings? That’s a big number, more humans are alive each year than the number of Queen of Hearts cards produced in a half century. Chances of running into any of your potential soulmates are pretty good, it seems to me. If there is only a sole soulmate, however, your odds of finding each other are slim.
 
Vera: “Ralph, take out the garbage.”
 
Ralph: “Funny, Vera, I was just thinking that you would.”
 
So, I have to ask you, “Are serendipity and synchronicity fortuitous only in retrospect?” Do you think everything has worked out well simply because everything worked out well? Think about that as you take out (or don’t take out) the garbage. 
 
Notes:   
 
*Levoy, Gregg. 19 Dec 2017. Synchronicities: A Sure Sign You’re on the Right Path. Psychology Today, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/201712/synchronicities-sure-sign-youre-the-right-path   Accessed July 11, 2021. 
 
**Blatchford, Emily. 7 July 2016. We Talk To A  Neuroscientists About Love At First Sight. Huffpost online at  https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/20/we-talk-to-a-neuroscientist-about-love-at-first-sight_a_21435275/  Accessed July 11, 2021.
 
***I remember reading as a kid that someone had calculated the chance of a modern human breathing some of the same molecules that the Buddha, Caesar, or Jesus breathed.

In brief, time is important.
 
I know, I know. This website’s entry page declares that place is primary and time is secondary, and to prove that statement asks you to think of ten minutes ago without any spatial or material reference. The proposition of the priority of space or place suggests that in the context of our current understanding, time did not exist before there was a universe, which is the place for its unfolding--progressing and passing if those are more appropriate terms. (Let’s discount for the sake of this argument that only the present exists; thus negating through an “eternal present” any unfolding, passing, or progressing. But, I’ll finish with that thought. So, time’s “arrow,” as physicists like to say, is a one-way flight for us, and it always occurs in our realm of daily living among things that occupy space, that is, in a place)   
 
Space-time seems to belie my claim about space, of course; Einstein’s understanding implies that space AND time had a conjoined birth, making my argument weak in the minds of scientists that accept the Big Bang explanation of the Big How of existence. But since time could not pass BEFORE THE UNIVERSE, then WHERE THE UNIVERSE originated takes precedence, and not only do I know the place where the universe originated, but I can also point it out to you. Rather, you can point it out to yourself just by looking in the mirror. Yes, you are the center of the universe and the site of the Big Bang because all that is was together in the singularity. Not to burst your significance bubble, but I am also that site as is everyone and everything else. 
 
It’s also significant for my argument that time varies under the influence of velocity and matter (gravity), both of which occur in “place,” a fact that weakens the argument that time and space are “equals,” the latter serving as the context or matrix for the former. By any measure, we know time by material existence, by the movement of objects in space—everything, after all, is moving relative to something else, even a binge-watching couch potato sits on a couch on a spinning planet orbiting a sun that orbits the galaxy that moves through the universe. Because that couch potato still ostensibly moves more through time than through space from his and our perspective, he ages, we say, without movement. 
 
I’ll continue to hold space’s priority on the basis that we cannot think of a personal “when” without a personal “where.” Place is, if not the cause, certainly the circumstance or the environment under or in which we pass time, and it is a significant control on us: I’ll whisper in a sanctuary but shout in a mosh pit regardless of time. I’ll use extreme caution in a minefield and practically no caution in a La-Z-Boy recliner, save that of not spilling my drink on my torso. Yes, place determines much for me regardless of, for example, my age, my time, and the clock hands turning, the quartz crystals vibrating in a watch, or that atomic clock that “keeps precise time.” 
 
I cannot, in spite of my assumption about the priority of place—and thus, space—over time, escape that time is what I often use to locate myself. True, I know location by dividing space, using, for example, those grid lines we know as longitude and latitude or those segments of Earth’s orbit we call the seasons. In an era of navigation systems, Einstein’s spacetime dictates a consideration of Relativity for accuracy, those satellites operating in a different gravitational frame at a different speed from the earthbound person seeking a previously unvisited address. Clocks onboard those satellites must be adjusted for the difference in time’s passing; otherwise, navigation systems in our cars would be useless, or at least, misleading because of accumulating inaccuracies, so strong is the effect of Einstein’s Relativity.
 
NASA uses earthbound atomic clocks to know the whereabouts of distant spacecraft. And now it is developing a deep space atomic clock that would eliminate the delay in navigation caused by increasing distance and acceleration. After all, radio/light waves have a finite speed. To know about a spacecraft’s location, NASA currently sends a signal from Earth, awaits its return, and then sends another signal to the spacecraft. Timing the trips to and from yield a location. Trips like that in our big Solar System take minutes to hours at the speed of light. An onboard atomic clock synchronized with an earthbound twin would cut some of the time by eliminating at least one leg of the message’s journey. 
 
So, what’s all this have to do with you, especially if you’re not involved in spacecraft location during space travel? On the simplest level, we might think of a wristwatch as a personal portable atomic clock. All those smart watches give us that kind of accuracy. So, your friend and you want to meet in a certain space simultaneously. Although you don’t need atomic-clock accuracy, you meet as you said you would thanks to those watches you carry. On a more complex level, we might think of a “distance” in time from an important event, like leaving the home of your youth to live on your own. Do you think of time’s passage in spatial terms? “That was in the distant past.” History books’ timelines give us the same kind of metaphor. Do you think of your life’s events as being either closer to or farther from your present? Think, now, of time’s passing. Do you see a clock, a pendulum, the rising and setting sun, or the progressively downward movement of eye bags and wrinkled skin? All matter and space, right? You frame time in spatial metaphors. You locate in place by time and vice versa. You even carry your own biological clock.
 
But there is one version of the clock we carry that doesn’t record any change regardless of our movement through space, that is, from place to place. That’s the Grudge Clock. Many people carry such clocks with them, making the interaction that precipitated the “grudge” occur always in an eternal present. They locate themselves on the basis of that grudge clock. Everywhere they go, regardless of time, they can hear the ticking of the grudge that locates them in a specific place at a specific time, and makes everything relative to that event, much like a spacecraft’s leaving Earth and being located by those homebound atomic clocks that send out and receive signals. Grudge clocks, unlike regular clocks of any kind, are unaffected by movements in and away from neighborhoods, cities, states, or even countries. I suppose even astronauts might identify where they are in life or space by a grudge clock. 
 
So, yes, time is important, and yes, it apparently stops in an eternal present, an eternal grudge. Are you locating yourself on the basis of a Grudge Clock? If you are, you might consider that the person or group against which you hold the grudge isn’t wearing the same watch, isn’t locating on the basis of the same time, and isn’t necessarily even aware of the beginning of the time you use for locating yourself, of identifying your whereabouts in the Cosmos. And as for place? Well the place where your significant grudge-time began might not even be the same as it once was. Einstein’s Relativity explains one kind of relationship between space or place and time; your personal relativity explains the human analog. 

Social experiments often engender controversy. And the reason is simple: No matter how many data on human behavior one collects in support of a behavioral hypothesis, someone somewhere sometime will express an individuality, either because of creativity or because of defiance for the sake of defiance, producing that exception to the rule. No better example exists in fiction than that portrayed by Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s murderer in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s motives for killing a pawnbroker include his desire to prove he is “the exception,” a motive derived from his poverty-driven despair and pride. When I say “no better example,” I’m hyperbolizing, of course. Yes, there are numerous examples of defiance in every generation of both fictional and real characters. James Dean comes to mind for his portrayal of fictional Jim Stark in the film Rebel without a Cause. * Every generation has its rebellious teens and young adults, all determined to demonstrate their individuality, often by breaking the bonds of propriety. Thus, societal experiments run counter to a drive toward individualism, much like playing “chicken,” as Jim Stark and Buzz do in racing a car toward a cliff in the film. One wonders. Are we going to escape going over the cliff like Jim or go over it like Buzz? 
 
The fashion of any time determines propriety. In 2020 and 2021, for example, wokeism has become an “acceptable behavior,” and as such, it has led to another and become part of yet another societal experiment. But why should I simply declare this in a prose statement? Let’s talk about it, instead. Maybe you disagree.
 
I’ll start: 
 
“You would think that methane comes to the surface from sources like buried decomposing microorganisms and rotting vegetation in anoxic conditions good for anaerobic bacteria. But guess what someone just discovered.”
 
You: “It doesn’t.”
 
“Well, no, it does, but there’s a newly discovered source, also: Aerobic Acidovorax bacteria in Yellowstone Lake water. That means methane producers have been hiding in plain sight. We’ve been thinking rotting vegetation, animal life, and anaerobic bacteria all these years. We’ve been thinking methane escaping from melting permafrost and methane hydrates bursting from the ocean floor. Now we have to monitor a previously unknown source of the greenhouse gas that was always visible but never seen.” **
 
You: “So?”
 
“It’s that fact of hiding in plain sight that interests me.”
 
You: “What about it.”
 
“It’s so apropos to today’s political stuff. We have a bunch of people in places like Portland, New York, and Baltimore running around saying, “Defund the police and replace them with social workers,” and then we have a bunch of people saying crime’s rising in those cities. And the people who backed the people who favored defunding the police supposedly to make their places safer can’t figure out why there’s a rise in crime, especially violent crime. It’s not that one of the causes is out of sight; it’s in plain sight. Same goes for tens of thousands of people illegally crossing the southern border of the US. A wall, which would have been in plain sight and which would have deterred at least some, if not many, from crossing the border has been replaced by a gap that the people can plainly see. It’s like sources of methane hiding in plain sight in surface water.”
 
You: “You might have valid point that applies to people. I guess we often don’t see what’s in plain sight, especially when it comes to contentious politics and social reforms imposed on the general population. We go looking for some deep meaning like some deeply buried bacteria and vegetation, when right on the surface where we can plainly see, we miss the obvious. Same goes for public education policies. People say, ‘The kids aren’t learning enough. They are behind the kids of other countries.’ Then they institute some ineffective and unproven methodology that supposedly addresses the causes of failure, like that once fashionable outcomes-based education that actually lowered standards. Remember that one? Or how about this one: Back in the seventies, people tried the “open classroom,” a wall-less school with different teachers and different grades all gathered in a large room, all the classes carried out simultaneously. Yeah, cacophony everywhere. Great learning environment, that. We know that there’s no substitute for hard work when it comes to personal accomplishments, and we know that multitasking is a myth proved to be so by numerous car crashes by distracted drivers. 
“I think all this looking for deeper causes when causes lie in plain sight stems from the proliferation of popularized psychological and social ‘theories,’ though they’re more like hypotheses than theories. Too much popularizing going around, like the one about police being inherently the cause of the nation’s inner-city woes. Used to be the role of newspapers and magazines to spread popularizations. Now everyone with a smartphone or computer can spread an easily understandable, but often wrong or unsupported or untested hypothesis. And all those accumulating hypotheses create a culture of propriety.”
 
“Yep. And you know where I’m headed with this.”
 
“You: I’m guessing you’re going to say something about those who rebel against today’s propriety.”
 
“Wokeism foisted on the masses. Government agencies, big-box stores, social media platforms, educational institutions—even higher-ed institutions—all attempting to impose a general propriety on everyone over which they believe they have control. And anyone who rebels is Jim Stark. Anyone who can’t understand that societal reforms often produce the opposite of what they are intended to produce, runs to the explanation that ‘there must be a deeper cause,’ and that’s the cause we need to find and address. So, they think, ‘After all, what we hypothesize should work, and we’re going to keep forcing it on people until it does work.’ 
            “That thinking usually ends up producing rebels. The current government, for example, has decided that it can go into the depths of Central American political and economic systems to find a solution to hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. They believe the root causes of immigration are the causes they have identified by ‘digging deep.’ They see the rotting vegetation underground without seeing the aerobic sources of methane clearly visible in a lake on the surface. And it’s not just the matter of immigration. It’s education, it’s retail, it’s social media, it’s justice, it’s…Everything everywhere all the time. And for all those ‘rebels,’ there’s a dire consequence. Act with the propriety of the times, or suffer the consequences of public condemnation, which is that universal reaction to those who differ from the norm. Today it’s called cancelling, but black-balling, ostracizing, shunning, also work.”
 
You: “So, what can you do about it?”
 
“Not much. Most of these social experiments die on the vine. People tire of fertilizing those vines that intertwine through the society. Hybrids will grow in their place as the ensuing generation says the time has come for a new set of hypotheses because the last set didn’t achieve the desired effect. Rebels will arise within the system. Fashion and reform prune the vines of a previous season’s growth. The grapes of wokeism will probably produce a vinegar, and not a fine wine appreciated by the next generation’s social connoisseurs whose tastes will differ. Another social experiment will fail, and so on.”
 
Notes:
*The film was derived from Robert Linder’s Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944).
 
**Montana State University. 2 July 2021. Research team publishes groundbreaking methane synthesis discovery. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-team-publishes-groundbreaking-methane-synthesis.html   Accessed July 5, 2021. Accessed July 6, 2021. 

Let’s start with an old joke, the source and exact details of which I cannot remember.
 
The bells of a church were stuck. The bell ringer, who plied his trade rather anonymously in the dim light of the bell tower, was befuddled. The townspeople didn’t know when to attend Vespers. The village vicar was getting angry. Nothing the bell ringer tried seemed to work. He tried using WD-40; he yanked hard on the ropes; he even threw a hammer at the headstock to loosen the full-circle wheel. Finally, he got as far away from the carillon as he could in the narrow bell tower’s bell room and ran full force at the bell, jumping onto the bells. Unfortunately for him, he slipped just as he jumped, hitting his head on the bell. He fell to his death as the bell rang. Finding his body at the bottom of the tower, one of the parishioners asked another, “Who is that?” The other parishioner responded, “I don’t know his name, but his face sure rings a bell.”
 
I’m tempted to relate other recognition jokes, so easy to do in an age of AI, smartphones that recognize their users, and the ubiquitous CCTVs. Okay, I’ll cite one other: At a meeting of vegans, a woman approaches two men, engages in conversation with one of them, and then walks over to the buffet of vegetables. One of the men says, “Who was that woman who talked to you? She seemed to know you.” The other says, “I don’t know; I never met herbivore.” 
 
Enough. 
 
Some neuroscientists recently reported finding the part of the brain that recognizes familiar faces. * It’s a group of neurons in the Temporal Pole. They make up a collective “grandmother neuron,” a hypothetical, but never found, face-recognition neuron. If their finding is correct, they might have discovered a region of the brain responsible for prosopagnosia—face blindness.
 
Not many people suffer from the problem, but some do. According to the neuroscientists who did the study, the TP region is one that appears to link sensory and memory domains. Obviously, lacking the connection is something we associate with Alzheimer’s, and that condition is heartbreaking for family members who lose their long-term relationships with loved ones. 
 
Being recognized by our faces isn’t restricted to our species, of course. The study conducted by Sofia Landi, Pooja Viswanathan, Stephen Serene, and Winrich A. Freiwald, involved macaques. We can reasonably assume that the human TP plays a similar role, possibly leading the way to studies that might effect a cure for prosopagnosia someday. But, of course, the brain is complex, so much is left unknown about perceiving and remembering.
 
You might consider that you have tied your memory to people you have never seen, and consider all those you recognize not by their faces, but rather by their accomplishments, the authors whose works you might have read, the composers whose music you have heard, and the philosophers whose thoughts you have adopted. Their works, and not their faces, are what you recognize. Our memories are filled with such “faceless” people whom we know because we recognize their contributions to the formation of our own identities. Next time you look in the mirror and recognize your own face, take a moment to see how those many others, those people you never saw but who indirectly and directly influenced who you are, have shaped what everyone you know now recognizes in you or as you. In “Ulysses” Tennyson writes, “I am a part of all that I have met.” It is equally true that “All that I have met are part of me,” and that “Many I have not met are also part of me.” 
 
*Landi, Sofia M., et al. 1 Jul 2021. A fast link between face perception and memory in the temporal pole. Science. DOI:10.1126/science.abi6671. Reported online in MedicalXpress by Rockefeller University 1 Jul 2021 at    search.anysearchmanager.com/?_pg=40AD8F32-8C74-50EB-B3F5-5719CEABBE8A&affid=A172R_set_bcr_H&type=h  

Ah! Ringo. Wisdom pounded out by a drummer of considerable fame, maybe as much fame as that of percussionists Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, and, to include a female, Sheila E. Anyway, Ringo sings “It Don’t Come Easy,” in a kitschy video that has him playing a piano in a snowfield, learning to ski (badly), and driving a snowmobile about five mph. * And what doesn’t—sorry, Ringo, “don’t”—come easy? Why it’s trust. 
 
And now we have a study about trust we had for leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic. But first a word from yours truly. I remember the current (2021) Vice President saying that if “Trump developed” a vaccine, she wouldn’t take it, and then I remember her getting that injection before cameras. Hmmmnnnnn. Seems that trust is dependent upon a utilitarian philosophy, at least a philosophy of utilitarian self-interest. And now, what’s the message? Well, as Ringo sings in that song, 
 
            I don’t want much, I only want your trust,
            And you know it don’t come easy.
 
First, the obvious, politics somehow got mixed into healthcare. That, as you know, happened quite some time ago, arising with nanny states like the UK and before that Socialist/Communist countries. Oh! Yeah, Canada and the US. Talk about drumbeats, about drummers! Is there an election cycle in the twentieth- or twenty-first century without at least some politicians pounding that healthcare drum? Drum? Maybe tympani, Ō-daiko, or The Purdue Big Bass Drum would be more appropriate references here. Boom!
 
Second, because politics became intertwined with medicine, a number of nations have placed their healthcare in the hands of political leaders and bureaucrats. We’re talking about our lives here, folks. So, the question comes to this: Do we trust political leaders, most with medical expertise limited to applying a Band-Aid strip to an accidental scratch by a paring knife, with our health? The paradox of 20-21 was that a candidate politician said no until she became the politician in charge. Again, hmmmmmnnnn.
 
Third, now we have a study on trust based on public policies set by “leaders.” In “Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis,” Jim A. C. Everett and others surveyed people in 22 countries to discover which of two utilitarian approaches instilled more trust in populations. ** One utilitarian approach adopts the philosophy of instrumental harm, whereas another adopts one of impartial beneficence. The former allows for choosing to save those most likely to be saved while sacrificing others; the latter, saving across a demographic regardless of the potential of individuals or special groups to be helped. Take ventilators, for example. They were the device of choice during the early days of the pandemic, and shortages were rampant. So, the question became one of using the ventilators on a population less prone to survival regardless of treatment, that is, the elderly, in favor of a population more prone to survival with the aid of ventilators, that is, the young. Instrumental harm would support saving the young and sacrificing the elderly. Impartial beneficence would support a shotgun scattering of resources—ventilators—to people regardless of their potential outcome. Throw into that mix of two choices the question about whether or not an affluent country should give away ventilators to noncitizens, that is, to people in developing countries. What do you think, Ringo?
 
Ordinarily, I would note the results of a study, but here, I believe your own thinking is important. Are you a utilitarian? If you are, which kind of utilitarian? An “instrumental harm” or an “impartial beneficence” kind of utilitarian? And in which kind of leader do you place your trust, in the one who says the country needs to share its resources with the world or the one who says the country must first tend to its own? The kind who proposes a policy of helping those most likely to be helped or one who proposes a policy that throws help into the general human wind even though that wind blows over those least likely to be helped? The one who says saving young people whose lives lie mostly before them or the one who says that saving old people whose lives lie mostly behind them? Here are some ventilators. You decide. ***
 
            It don’t come easy.
 
Notes: 
 
*Starr, Ringo. “It Don’t Come Easy.” Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvEexTomE1I  Ringo, the drummer for the Beatles strangely plays the piano (with gloves on) and not the drum in the video. George Harrison reportedly helped Ringo in composing the song, but Ringo gets the credit.
 
** Everett, J.A.C., Colombatto, C., Awad, E. et al. Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01156-y  
 
***Trying not to make this political, but I have to ask whether or not the same issue of instrumental harm vs. impartial beneficence isn’t the crux of border immigration problems (crises?) in Europe and the US, especially in light of the not-so-long-ago emigrations from the Middle East and African developing nations and the ongoing emigrations from Central America.

Wisdom. It’s tough to achieve. We pride ourselves on our self-acclaimed status as Homo sapiens sapiens, “wise-wise Man,” but wisdom has historically been elusive. And today, it might still be out of our reach. Much of what we intend results in its opposite. 
 
Remember Johnson’s War on Poverty and how it was supposed to eliminate poverty? Didn’t do what it was supposed to do, did it? Ditto his Vietnam policy to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. But this isn’t a criticism of the late President. It’s just a note that regardless of his good intentions, those two policies and actions might have done the opposite of what he intended. Lots of people live in relative poverty today, especially in the inner cities. Lots of them are caught in the cycle of getting paid not to succeed personally. Lots of children are still growing up in schools governed by policies based on the social values of the moment rather than on the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of our species. What do you call something that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do? Think big examples: The French Revolution that led to public mass murders by guillotine, the Russian Revolution that led to democide by Stalin and the suppression of free thought, or the German and Cuban Revolutions that led to doctors like Mengele and Che becoming torturers. Your mind is wandering now, isn’t it? You just thought of other examples of “something that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do.”
 
So, let’s swing to the CDC and organizations that back vaccinations for children and for people who have already had and survived the disease called COVID-19. Given that cytokine storms have undone so many during the pandemic, does it really make sense in the absence of firm data to vaccinate people who might already be carrying antibodies? Is there such a thing as too much immunity? Does anyone know how getting “more immune” affects, for example, the lungs and heart? Are those scanty data on incidents of myocarditis sufficient for decision-making? Now, lest you think I’m an anti-vaxxer, I should tell you that I have been vaccinated against COVID-19. So, obviously, I’m not speaking from some fear of vaccines—I even went for a flu shot last fall and will go for one this fall. 
 
At MedPageToday, you can read an opinion piece by Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH and others on whether or not the CDC’s policy on teen COVID vaccination is prudent. * The article centers on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and its decision “to endorse a two-dose mRNA strategy for all ages.” The authors are concerned about “vaccine-induced myocarditis,” a condition that Israeli medical authorities noted in young people who had received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Fifty-six or of 62 cases of myocarditis in young men occurred after they received the second dose. Although the ACIP was aware of the potential threat of myocarditis in children, it nevertheless issued an emergency use authorization for children ages 12-16. Now, to be fair (as they say), I should note that the Times of Israel “reported that israel’s health ministry would consider just one does in teens to balance getting most of the benefit of viral protection against mitigating much of the risk of myocarditis.” However, there’s no support among medical advisors in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands for the double vaccinations for children under 18. 
 
As of the week preceding the article by Prasad et al., the CDC reported more data showing that “more cases [of myocarditis occurred] in young people than older people…and higher incidence after dose two than dose one.” The rate of the side effect seems to be “one in 15,000 to 20,000 for boys ages 12 to 24.” Now remember that we’re talking about intended consequences versus actual consequences, of things that do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do.
 
According to the authors, the ACIP used rates of COVID infection from the past rather than current rates of SARS-CoV-2 spread, that the authors say is “substantially lower…[and the ACIP] did not differentiate between healthy kids…and kids with pre-existing medical conditions….” The result is that the ACIP had adopted a one-size-fits-all policy. Now here’s where things get “Johnson-like, French Revolution-like, Russian Revolution-like, Cuban Revolution-like: “If a 15-year-old recovers from COVID-19 and has high antibody levels, and this 15-year-old then receives one dose of mRNA vaccine causing hospitalization from myocarditis, the CDC would still contemplate proceeding with dose two once the ‘heart has recovered.’” Think of this conclusion in the context that the number of cases of myocarditis has a good chance of being underreported. Add in the authors’ note that “The CDC is not factoring in natural immunity.”
 
Is it not true that if one takes any philosophical, psychological, or social system to its ultimate conclusion, one runs into its opposite? Today’s ubiquitous censors of free speech seem to be an example. Or take the current American rise in crime that somehow just “happened” to coincide with “Defund the Police” policies enacted in cities like Baltimore, New York, Portland, Seattle, and a few others. Someone could argue that those are localized examples of unintended consequences. But with the organization that governs an entire country’s health policies, any unintended opposite consequences can negatively affect more than lives in specific locales. 
 
Homo sapiens sapiens? Not if one considers all those things that were supposed to do one thing but that ended causing their unintended opposites. What do you call something that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do? Certainly, not "wise." but definitely "human." 
 
 
*Prasad, Vinay, Ramin Farzaneh-Far, Wes Pegden, Venk Murthy, and Amy Beck.  29 June 2021. CDC’s All-or-Nothing Approach to Teen COVID Vaccination Is All Wrong. MedPageToday online at.  https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/93340?xid=nl_vanayprasad_2021-06-29&eun=g1239050d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=VinayPrasad_062921&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_Vinay_AYWDRL_Large_ActiveAccessed June 29, 2021.

When you finally sit down to write that autobiography we’ve all been waiting to read, will you include those minor and major conflicts you resolved to ensure your life was peaceful? Will you convey lessons you learned that we might study to make our own lives peaceful?
 
The cosmological argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life and its famous Darwinian analog that life is fine-tuned for conflict make up one of the great paradoxes of the universe. The universe is good for life that is bad for itself. All the delicately balanced force strengths on the one hand are countered by all life-forms out of strength balance on the other hand. The harmony of material existence in general is broken by disharmony among species all vying for resources, for space, and, in the human realm, for prestige. 
 
Even without the assumption of a fine-tuning Conscious Creator, we can make a reasonable guess that the universe is somehow fine-tuned for life because of balanced forces. We can also reasonably argue that the chances for extraterrestrial life are good, especially in a universe so vast that it holds an estimated two trillion galaxies. From what we have observed, we can say that fine-tuning of the fundamental forces isn’t limited to the Milky Way or to our Solar System. 
 
We can also reasonably assume that if extraterrestrial life exists, it is as prone to conflict as it is on Earth. Conflict might be a universal condition of any realm of life; maybe conflict is a universal Law. It is an oxymoronic, maybe even an ironic, universal condition: All life might operate on lawless Law, or a Natural Law of Lawlessness that is a non-numeric constant. Of course, to say the possibility that life everywhere exists in a state of conflict, is to assign a numerical value to it; to say “chances are” about anything is to give it a statistical, and therefore, a numeric value. As you look back to write that future autobiography, can you assess the probability that you “had” to encounter some of those conflicts?  
 
The paradoxical condition that couples an underlying fine-tuning of instruments of forces to an overlying cacophony played on those instruments by life might justify pessimism. Your story could detail how peaceful equilibrium is always temporary. Conflict, not peace, drives life in general, but maybe you are one of the lucky, someone who has lived the anomalous life of peace. For most people, peace requires the effort to alter the natural state of conflict. In every age people have striven for peace either because a peace into which they were born by chance was interrupted or a conflict into which they were born demanded peace for the sake of safety. 
 
The back-and-forth between conflict and peace makes the Biblical accounts of Adam and Eve’s conflict with God and of Cain and Abel’s fraternal conflict the models for almost all stories, even yours. I’m not suggesting that you are responsible for plunging all humankind into a state of Original Sin or for fratricide, but rather that all autobiographies, if honest accounts, will detail either conflicts between authorities and those they control or conflicts among equals. Every tale centers on resolving some conflict great or small that, if not resolved, plays out in sequels.   And the sequels of life’s many real conflicts have been playing out for more than three billion years on this planet and maybe longer on other worlds around distant stars in this physically fine-tuned-for-life Cosmos. But it’s your life that interests us at the moment, it’s your encounters with conflict and your peaceful resolutions that will make your story notable and worth the read.
 
During a series of Seinfeld episodes, George Costanza’s desire to write screenplays about “nothing,” or stories in which “nothing happens” sparks a quizzical look in the faces of the potential producers, with the exchange:
 
George: “I think I can sum up the show for you in one word: Nothing.”
Producer: “Nothing? What does that mean?”
George: “The show is about nothing.”
Jerry (interrupting): “Well, it’s not about nothing.”
George: “No, it’s about nothing.”
Jerry: “Well, maybe in philosophy, but even nothing is something.”
Some banter follows, and then...
George: “No stories.”
More conversation ensues...
Producer: “What kind of stories?” 
George: “No. No stories.”
More conversation, and then…
Producer: “But why am I watching it?”
George: “Because it’s on TV.”
Producer: “Not yet.” *
 
What did you learn about plots in literature class? Yes, a key component is the denouement, that essential resolution of conflict. Life never writes a story—even a search for Self—without conflict of some sort. Would you really sit to read or watch a “story about nothing,” a story in which “nothing happens,” as George proposes? Would someone read your autobiography if it were “about nothing,” “about nothing happening”? Life’s plagiarizers, that is, authors, mimic reality. Even science fiction writers. And in fine-tuned fictional tales, denouement completes the story; without that plot element, all stories are mere episodes strung together, an unending line that frustrates because it lacks a discernible ending or because it demands from the reader or viewer his or her own conclusion. We like line segments, not unending lines. We want to see your life’s segments in that autobiography. We don’t want an uninterrupted line. Ask yourself, has anyone ever resolved the question about the lady or the tiger posed in the “unfinished ending” of Frank Stockton’s famous short story? 
 
In case you forgot, Stockton tells the tale of a king whose method of justice requires the accused to choose between one of two doors, one hiding a tiger and the other, a beautiful woman whom the accused had to marry. A commoner and the king’s daughter fell in love, an unsatisfactory circumstance for the king who subjects the young man to his form of justice. The princess, learning the secret of the doors, discovers that the beautiful woman behind one of the two doors is someone she hates. Exchanging glances with her lover as he approaches the doors, she signals which door to choose. Her choice, of course, lies between having her lover killed by the tiger or married to her rival. And there the story “ends,” giving rise to interminable arguments among middle school readers about which door the princess directed her lover to open. ** 
 
Stockton’s tale frustrates his readers, but it does mimic our world of so many unresolved conflicts. Widespread conflict goes on, and on, and on, the time-line of every life, yours included, the X-axis on the graph, underlying spikes of conflict on the Y-axis.   
 
Although every generation’s plot reaches a denouement in the deaths of those caught up in conflict, sequels are common in our species’ history. Fighting in the Middle East has surpassed the three millennium mark; the story continues with new characters. No denouement has been written into the plot save one that some future generation might write, possibly—no, probably—long after the demise of all the current characters. Each generation appears to face those two doors behind which some new or continuing conflict waits. 
 
That humans continue to seek peace the midst of conflict is reason for optimism. Other species do little other than survive the conflicts at hand and pass on no lessons to the next generations. In spite of millennia of conflict, we renew our search for peace every generation, sometimes achieving it in surprising ways among belligerent groups. In each age many people discover that conflict breeds conflict to their disadvantage and harm. History shows that conflict is the epitome of lose-lose interactions. Even winners suffer loses. Peace, in contrast, is win-win, at least temporarily. 
 
As you fine-tune the story of your life, include denouements for each conflict.  Do not, like George Costanza or Frank Stockton, write a story about nothing or one without resolutions. 
 
“Why should I read your autobiography?”
“Because it’s been published.”
“Not yet.”
 
 
*You can see the episode’s segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwapf5DnUrs   Accessed June 27, 2021.
 
**You can read the story in its entirety at https://www.commackschools.org/Downloads/Lady%20or%20the%20Tiger,%20The%20(easy%20version).pdf   Accessed June 27, 2021.