Ever call a government agency for an inquiry? Wonderful experience, right? “NO, I said, ‘New Mexico.’ NEW MEXICO. I don’t need the Mexican embassy’s number. New Mexico is a state!”


I’ve had experiences like that.  Exempli gratia: I once received a letter from the IRS saying “We are trying to contact you, but cannot find your address.” Duh! How does someone get into a position with that level of incompetence?


It’s the Peter Principle at work, and it is pervasive. The LA fires. The broken border. The national debt. The NY ban on fracking and the NYC congestion toll. DEI. Every new public school educational methodology. Journalists repeating “Joe’s as sharp as a tack.” Men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms—and in sports. No face masks, er, face masks, er, two face masks. We’re living in a Gary Larson world, maybe best represented by his drawing of cows busily munching on grass as one cow standing says, “Hey! This is grass; we’re eating grass.”


Hey! We’ve put incompetent people in charge of our lives.


The Principle Reviewed


In 1969 Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull published The Peter Principle, a book detailing the mechanism by which hierarchical systems are topped by incompetent leaders. * I’ve mentioned it before: Someone relatively good at a job gets promoted to a position for which he or she has no skills. Think many high school principals who rise to their positions—not all of them, mind you—from within the teaching ranks. Leaving a classroom where they might have been highly successful, they now have to become administrators and problem solvers on a grander scale, enforcing rules for both staff and students, troubleshooting, overseeing events like football games, cooperating with police on drug enforcement, seeing to the overall safety of the school, managing relationships with school boards, labor unions, and parent groups…Tasks for which their admittedly competent classroom prowess might be irrelevant or too small scale. Basically, bureaucrats rise to the level of their incompetence. Elected officials, also.


Elected Officials


Nowhere in our society does the principle manifest itself better than in elected officials. Most elected officials encounter problems and situations that exceed their expertise (if they have any beyond garnering votes or towing the party line). They find themselves inundated by problems arising from a breakdown of infrastructure, union demands, special interest group agendas, social problems, and even disasters both manmade and natural.


Take the latter, for example. Remember Hurricane Katrina and the failure of Mayor Nagin to mobilize school buses to transport people from the danger zone? Here’s how Wikipedia frames it: “In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico. Early on Friday, August 26, Mayor Nagin advised New Orleanians to keep a close eye on the storm and prepare for evacuation. He then made several public statements encouraging people to leave but promising that if they did not evacuate, "[w]e will take care of you.” By 10:00 a.m. Saturday, a mandatory evacuation was called for low-lying areas in the surrounding parishes. Nagin had, however, ignored federal and state offers of help and a recommendation to evacuate the entire city. He had ordered an evacuation as he should have, but did so only a short time before the hurricane hit the city. NOLA’s mayor was also criticized for failing to implement his flood plan and for ordering residents to a shelter of last resort without any provisions for food, water, security, or sanitary conditions. Perhaps the most important criticism of Nagin is that he delayed his emergency evacuation order until less than a day before landfall, which led to hundreds of deaths of people who (by that time) could not find any way out of the city. Hundreds of people died while buses remained in parking lots, supposedly because there was no liability insurance (NOLA Choice: worry about liability or save hundreds from drowning with no obvious attempt to resolve that problem with FEMA) and a shortage of drivers. Surely, there were some drivers in a city that uses the buses daily to transport thousands of kids. In addition, little to no preparation was made for people told to shelter in places like the New Orleans Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome sans survival provisions or security.


Take Karen Bass during the January, 2025, fires destroying homes and business in Los Angeles as another example of an incompetent mayor. This is how the NY Post puts it; “Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been ripped as the most ‘incompetent politician in America’ after she managed to botch a fire emergency information website address by pointlessly telling locals to just visit ‘URL’ — even while admitting the deadly firestorm is ‘the big one.’” *** Well, let’s see. What Los Angeles mayor was it who was in Africa as the fires were expanding? Oh! Yes, it was Mayor Karen Bass, the same major who had just cut $17.6 million from the city’s fire department’s budget, but who found the funds to go to Ghana. Insightful leadership. Competence on display—not!


And then there’s Kamala Harris, border tzar, AI tzar (in case you’re wondering, AI is, as she explained, two letters), space tzar, and… who knows what she was? Whatever, she might have been the perfect manifestation of the Peter Principle during her four years as cackling, word-salad VP—unless Joe Biden deserves that appellation.


Am I being too harsh? Surely there are competent people among both bureaucracies and elected positions.


*Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. 1969. The Peter Principle. William Morrow & Co Inc. (Pan Books ed., 1970).
**Wikipedia
***https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-blunders-way-through-warnings-on-the-big-one/

I have my doubts that H.R. 29, the Laken Riley Act, will achieve its supposed goal, preventing grievous crimes by illegal aliens. The tragedy of Laken Riley, murdered by illegal alien José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan, caught the country’s attention and motivated Congress to pass the bill.


But the bill centers on illegal offenders who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting. Yes, those are crimes, but they don’t rise to the level of kidnapping, rape and murder.


I think the new law misses the mark.


Okay, I know that people guilty of burglary might hurt or kill someone in the process of stealing. But shoplifting? It deserves punishment, maybe even expulsion from the country; however, I don’t see it as a gateway for the perpetrator to become a rapist or murderer. Why not include among the categories those illegal aliens who are members of a known criminal gang? The bill also authorizes state governments to sue for injunctive relief over certain immigration-related decisions or alleged failures by the federal government if the decision or failure caused the state or its residents harm, including financial harm of more than $100. Why $100? Why not $1? $0.50? Two bits? A penny?


I’m not sure why many Democrats oppose the bill. Is it just a matter of contrarianism? Is it shame for the blame of letting millions of illegals into the country in hopes they will become an overwhelming voting cadre? Is it because Democrats—even Nancy Pelosi whose husband was hit in the head by a hammer-wielding illegal from Canada— can’t  comprehend both the personal cost of many crimes committed by illegal aliens against American citizens and the costs in taxes associated with transporting, housing, educating, caring for, and feeding illegal aliens?


Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s Legacy of a Broken Border and Out-of-Control Spending


It seems that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer judge the Biden Administration on its success in pushing spending in spite of untold millions going into fraud and waste. * They think little about the significance of criminal gangs from Central and South America that will take years to decades to ferret out by local and federal policing agencies. They seem to care little about the legacy of endangerment left by Biden. Nancy even wants him on Mt. Rushmore! Chuck is still saying Biden’s mental acuity is great—even after Joe couldn’t get through “Happy Birthday” without forgetting the name of Eliseo Jimenez, a 17-year-old he specifically brought onto stage for the song.


Even when it does act, Congress is especially slow to act at all to reverse bad law. It might enact the Laken Riley Act now and pat itself on the back and then take months to years to ensure that the border—recently crossed by Iranians and Egyptians—is truly secure. But the damage is done. Laken Riley is dead as are other American victims. The Mexican cartels are stronger than ever—and richer—and more than a million gotaways are hiding somewhere in our midst. We don’t know who or where they are. And the numerous wasteful programs instituted during the past four years will continue just as inertial objects travel unimpeded like Voyager I and II through the the void of outer space.


*https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/drag-shows-arabic-sesame-street-lonely-rats-gop-senator-details-how-biden-spent-1t-on-government-waste/ar-AA1wo5kc?ocid=BingNewsVerp

You might think as I do, that America-bashing in universities is both unwarranted and misplaced. The country isn’t as bad as so many liberal elites wish it to be. Yes, “wish it.” The reality of America stands in contrast to the illusion of “some better place,” typically unnamed, but on occasion some European country like Sweden. The university liberals who denigrate the country never seem to acknowledge that their lives are better here than they would be “there”—wherever “there” might be. If they really thought the country is as bad as they say it is, there would be a mass exodus of university liberals—and other Leftists— for “better theres.”


Two Anecdotes


1) At an event at Youngstown State some quarter century ago, I sat at a luncheon with sundry professors. For whatever reason, my ears picked up a sentence from a Canadian professor at the next table speaking disdainfully of America, the country he chose for his job as a professor. Although I heard only a bit of the rather loud conversation, I did hear him ask, “When was America ever fair?”


Ah! Fairness, the liberal virtue-signaling go-to in many conversations. That comment coincided more or less with liberal pundits’ criticism of the Bush Administration for sending an aircraft carrier to the countries devastated by the Christmas tsunami. I mention this because Bush was ridiculed for the move by people who, thinking they were “elite,” had no knowledge that an aircraft carrier has the ability to turn salt water into fresh water and to aid injured people with its doctors and hospital rooms.


Want to talk about fairness? Ask any self-proclaimed “elite” to name a country that has provided more aid to other countries than America. And on the domestic scene, that same penchant for charitable aid has made the poorest of Americans vastly richer and better cared for than more than several billions of people living in other countries. Poverty in America doesn’t even come close to the destitute poverty elsewhere. Go visit India, Guatemala, and other countries where people struggle to feed their kids, where women carry sticks for firewood on their heads, where water is polluted and infrastructure is in disrepair if it exists at all. Go see the hovels composed of a palisade of sticks and branches topped by a rusting sheet of tin that make a structure people call homes outside Antigua Guatemala.


2) I took a Guatemalan family to a mall in Guatemala City, where I bought a pair of shoes for the little girl my wife and I sponsored. After buying her a pair of shoes, I offered to buy a second pair and socks. The socks came in a bundle of three. I didn’t bother to look at the price—they were cheap—but the social worker/translator who accompanied us said in astonishment, “Three pairs!” The exclamation caught me by surprise. My American penchant for excess was startling, I discovered.


Back home in America I think nothing of buying a bundle of socks or of replacing worn out running shoes, of buying shoes and clothes for grandchildren, of buying gift cards for friends and family. I realized in Guatemala City that when I’m home in America, I’m often unaware of the relative affluence in which I’m immersed. This is the America in which elite professors—even emigres—find themselves affluent and protected, free and coddled, and living in homes with garages for not one, but two cars as a third car sits in a driveway.       


That comment by the Canadian-turned-US-professor, struck me as indicative of liberal dissociation from reality. And I mention it in the context of the many democratic countries’ dependence on America for their continued freedoms and safety, a context outlined in an editorial by William Hague in The Times (of London). Hague notes the dependence of the UK on America and writes about the reason for America’s superiority.


Hague’s Main Points


I don’t know whether that professor at the next table was a potential Nobel laureate or just a lecturer with little research in his vita. I do know that he left Canada to teach at Youngstown State. The question is “Why?” What was wrong with socialist Canada’s fine universities?


That foreign “intellectuals” have flocked to America is undeniable and Hague points this out as both a reason for America’s greatness and an indication that that greatness will likely continue. He writes, “That a large share of the world’s brilliant minds congregate in America is a critical and massive advantage. It is why, ultimately, China is unlikely ever to surpass the US: it can rely on the most ingenious members of a huge population, but few migrants will go to China to fulfill their dreams. The US recruits from a global talent pool that is nearly five times bigger.” *


So, chalk one up for America: It is a magnet for talent, skill, and innovation. “The most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley is how many of the pioneers of new technologies and creators of the world’s most valuable companies that you meet were not born in the US. Many started their careers in India, and quite a few in Britain. That a large share of the world’s brilliant minds congregate in America is a critical and massive advantage.”


The country that American liberals—including immigrant liberals from Canada— denigrate is, in fact, superior to other countries for many reasons. Hague notes, “The result is clear, starkly laid out for EU leaders in the recent Draghi report. Incomes have grown twice as fast in the US as in Europe since 2000. None of Europe’s giant companies has been established in the past 50 years, but all of America’s six companies worth more than a trillion dollars were created in that period. The US spends more on research and innovation than its transatlantic allies and is far ahead on developing AI and building supercomputers.”


Yep. America isn’t really a bad place. And as far as fairness goes, it seems to me to be a bit fairer than most other countries. I wonder how many Guatemalans sponsor needy American kids, and I wonder how many migrant Canadian professors continue to live in Youngstown and other American cities rather than repatriate themselves.


*https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/like-it-or-not-us-is-more-powerful-than-ever-x8ln7qwd0    

Every new technology begins in a promise whose fulfillment includes unintended consequences.


Many Yesterdays Ago


OOH: Ugg, whacha doin’?

UGG: I’m making something that will help us get food.


OOH: How?


UGG: See how I sharpened this stick? Now look at how I bent this one. That’s some vine and sinew connecting the two ends. Now watch.


OOH: Wow! You just made that sharpened stick fly. Your concept and invention amaze me.  Are there any drawbacks?


UGG: You mean other than the sinew and vine? Sorry, a little bow humor there. Well, I can’t think of any. The whole tribe can use this invention to get food, to kill a mammoth, for example, without being trampled in the process. We’re going to be eating a lot of meat from now on, no more tubers and berries for supper. This invention will make the tribe prosper.


A Week Later


OOH: Ugg, you know that invention of yours? Goon used it to kill Maug.


Thousands of Years Later during a Conference at Dartmouth


Unknown Conference Attendee: Wouldn’t life be easy if a computer could handle daily affairs the way humans handle them? If a computer were intelligent enough, it could re-route cars to avoid traffic jams. Heck, it could even drive cars. It could solve complex problems after learning how people solve problems, how they make reliable predictions, and how they use the neural networks in their heads.


Another Attendee: You mean some kind of artificial intelligence?


Unknown Conference Attendee: Hadn’t thought of  a name for it, but yes, “artificial intelligence” is a great name. We can use AI…


Another Attendee: “AI”? We haven’t even invented it yet, and you already have a nickname or acronym for it?


Unknown Conference Attendee: Yes. AI will improve life in so many ways: No more traffic accidents, no more food shortages, and no more doctors making faulty diagnoses, and no lengthy periods to develop new chemical substances and materials designed for specific purposes.


2024


Casual Observer: Hey, you know that artificial intelligence thing you guys at Dartmouth talked about in the 60s? The Ukrainian military just used an AI controlled drone to kill Russians and North Koreans and to down a Russian helicopter.


Aging Conference Attendee: When I first suggested AI, I thought I was onto something that would help humanity. At the outset those of us at Dartmouth considered only what good it would do. I knew of robots used for evil from science fiction writers I had read in the fifties, but I didn’t make the connection between what I had dreamed of and what other humans might do with it.


Casual Observer: You mean the way ancient humans probably designed the bow and arrow as a hunting device only to find other, more harmful, uses for it like killing enemies from a distance? The Ukrainian drone operators never had to get close to their enemies at the outset of the war, and now they don’t even have to put their fingers on a joystick. They can just send off a drone in the air, on the land, or in the sea and let it do the work.


Aging Conference Attendee: It seems we humans can turn any technology into factotums of evil. Our initial intentions might be good, but once our inventions are available, some person or group will pervert and subvert them in the service of destruction and death. Nevertheless, I’m eager to see the development of generative AI.

The Green New Deal is a sorcerer’s contrivance. How long will society be duped into believing it? My guess: Decades, if COP 29 is any indication. People are locked in.


What were you thinking when you read the title of this blog? Gawain and the Green Knight, the Arthurian legend about the Green Knight who arrives one New Year’s Eve at Camelot with a challenge? Sitting on a green horse and carrying an axe, he says anyone can take a whack at him with the axe and then may keep the axe but must a year later seek out the Green Knight to receive a similar blow. Gawain accepts for the king and a reluctant Round Table, takes the axe, and beheads the knight, who miraculously picks up his head and rides off. A year later Gawain goes in search of the Green Knight to receive the promised return strike. At a castle on the way, Gawain encounters a king and his seductive queen whose advances Gawain refuses. Gawain remains pure and chivalric. The king turns out to be the Green Knight, snd Gawain survives the ordeal though he does suffer a nick on his neck. Now there’s a green story that has a happy ending.The Green New Deal is different. We won’t suffer a nick that will heal. The wound will be economic and lasting.


The Green Knight, it turns out, was basically just foolin’ with the guys at Camelot. It was all done with sorcery.


Yeah, sorcery like the Green New Deal. Remember Solyndra. A “green” solar panel company shows up at Camelot (AKA Obama’s White House) with a challenge to make America the dominant panel producer within a year. One of Arthur’s (read “Obama’s”) knights at the Round Table of mostly people who have never taken risks as entrepreneurs, takes the challenge. Sir Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy and Nobel laureate with little business experience, picks up the axe and with one fell swoop, takes a swing at a half-billion dollar loan for the company—using federal money that like other tax money would be lost without risk to the lender. Sir Chu doesn’t suffer so much as a nick. (That’s the magic invulnerability of government bureaucrats)  A little over a year later, Solyndra folds. No one at Camelot even got to keep the axe—or got the axe, so to speak. Such is the way of government agencies whose agents are never personally accountable.


Lessons Never Learned


Looks like other countries have their Solyndras as they have taken up the challenge of a mysterious Green Agenda. Sweden is one. It built a battery factory in Skellefteå that has cut back production jobs. Based on a politically motivated promise instead of sound business research into public demand, Northvolt is about to Solyndra itself into oblivion. “Once hailed as a key player in Europe’s green energy transition, Northvolt has reported a staggering deficit of 40 billion Swedish kronor (approximately $3.8 billion) for 2024.” * It seems that people don’t want EVs as much as they were forced to want them by government mandates. Volvo said it is pulling back from its pledge to go all EV by 2030. BMW has pulled out of a two billion Euro deal to produce EVs.


It seems that the seductive advances of a “Green World” have driven a lustful (greedy) set of government knights and misinformed bank executives to risk other people’s money. But people who sit around a Round Table where others’ money is spent on risky ventures never seem to bear personal responsibility. They usually receive only a tiny nick. In this latest instance with Northvolt, real people got more than just a nick in the neck. More than a thousand lost their jobs. Hundreds had to move elsewhere to live.


A once prosperous car industry took up the challenge of politicians riding the green energy horse. Now brutal reality has swung its axe. Customers don’t want EVs to the extent projected by climate gurus. It was all sorcery based on a myth.


The Myth


During this long (in human terms) interglacial period of warming that began after the Younger Dryas cool down (11,700 years ago), the seas have risen first dramatically and then more slowly and the temperatures on average have increased. Interrupted by the heating enhancement of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and the Dryas-like cooling of the Little Ice Age, the fluctuations of  climate parameters have been largely natural and mostly independent of the atmospheric carbon content. Evidence reveals that Earth has been in a carbon dioxide decline that stretches back millions of years.


But during the 1990s self-promoted green knights like Al Gore have ridden into Democrat Camelots to throw down the gauntlet on climate action, setting off a worldwide search that has had a further impetus of seductive loans and academic grant money now amounting to billions of dollars. Yet, the lead organization in the search for “climate stability,” the IPCC, has never actually declared that carbon is a cause of the warming beyond natural variability.


Most of the hype has come from politicians and media personalities who have jumped on Al Gore’s green horse. Unlike Joe Biden who has been willing to spend billions on the Green New Deal after calling it dangerous, the IPCC has not declared climate change to be “an existential threat.” And unlike Biden and company, the IPCC has not connected severe weather events and climate change. That connection is the hyperbole of reporters now infused with a secular religion of climate change. Maybe you have heard as I have heard local TV station reporters mouthing the idea that climate change is responsible for just about every natural disaster the way CNN’s Deborah Feyeric did in 2013 when she asked Bill Nye if an asteroid was caused by global warming. **


Retractions Rarely Get the Same Attention as the Original Error


We all know well that when newspapers print stories with errors on page one that retractions never have the same effect, usually because they are buried in later pages with smaller headlines. And that’s where we are today. The front page story of global warming that has now morphed into “climate change” has become part of the world psyche, driving governments to waste billions of dollars on a myth of “existential danger.” Trust me on this: We’re in no more danger of losing our heads than Gawain was. It has largely been sorcery from the outset.


Although there are “retractions” out there (that is, credible refutations by credible scientists) they have no effect on the common belief that drives people to search for a remedy for a condition that is a natural consequence of the current interglacial period. It might take decades and many Northvolt/Solyndra failures to reverse the tendencies of governments to make the foolish expenditures for projects like those two failed business ventures.


The irony is that those who advocate for such expenditures and who flock to events like the annual COP meetings in exotic locations don’t realize that they will eventually pay a price in an economic downturn spawned by their wasteful and useless spending that will engender huge debts and throw the world into an energy deficit.


Those who continue to attend conferences like COP29, COP30, COP…50 might be alive to see the planet naturally swing toward a drop in temperatures, but many of them will really not know what is happening because they will rely on models instead of real time data. And because humans don’t live long with respect to Earth’s grand vicissitudes, they will not be able to see long term trends. As long as the money rides that green horse, however, there will be alarmists eager to spend that money on projects like Northvolt and Solyndra as they take up challenges no more real than the Green Knight.


I’ll End with This


The universe is composed of two components: Matter and Energy. The significance of the latter for all forms of the former can never be understated. For about 2,000 years people used coal as an energy source, but only in the last 500 years has its production been increased by better mining methods. The invention of the steam engine boosted the need for coal, and the discovery of oil at Titusville in 1859 meant another fossil fuel could increase energy supply—and lubricate the machinery of production. The modern world owes its existence to coal and oil—and also natural gas. Abundant and cheap, these sources of energy freed people from the cycles of light and darkness and cold and heat. They added materials never known in humans’ 250,000 year history, and made international trade possible and prolific. The greenies and alarmists want the world to shut down energy abundance in favor of expensive, just-as-polluting, and inefficient energy sources. The future dearth of energy will cost lives, make living under excessive heat and cold more hazardous, and reduce materials that make modern life both convenient and enjoyable.


Don’t take up the axe and challenge posed by the Green Knight. It’s a ruse dreamed up by sorcerers who will use whatever they can to seduce you.       






* ”Global Battery Producer Risks Collapse After $3.8 Billion Shortfall”
https://www.dagens.com/autos/global-battery-producer-risks-collapse-after-3-8-billion-shortfall   
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/swedens-green-industry-hopes-hit-by-northvolt-woes/ar-AA1wSirF?ocid=BingNewsSerp


**Daily Mail. “CNN anchor suggests meteor hurtling toward Earth could be a result of global warming”

I think there’s room for all of us to examine our reactions to realities that do not conform to our self image or deep-seated perspective. Having just read a headline * about Biden’s post-election thought that he should not have dropped from the race, I have looked inward to ask, “Have I on occasion been so detached from reality by my Ego and shortsightedness that I was delusional?”


The short answer is, “Yes.”


In a longer answer I might  argue that everyone on occasion is a Miniver Cheevy. If you are unfamiliar with the E. A. Robinson poem, I reproduce it here as a prelude to my thoughts.


Miniver Cheevy


BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON


Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
   And he had reasons.


Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.


Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam’s neighbors.


Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.


Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.


Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.


Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.


Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
   And kept on drinking. *


Miniver-Cheevy-like, Joe sees the past four years—and, indeed, his past fifty years in government—as a personal Camelot. As a consequence of his delusion of grandeur, Joe Biden said recently that he should not have dropped out. The headline in The Guardian reads “Biden reportedly regrets ending re-election campaign and says he’d have defeated Trump.”**

I don’t think Joe Biden is an alcoholic like Miniver, but he does have a drinking problem: It’s Kool-Aid served by a sycophantic Leftist Press and WH operatives, and yes, that’s a reference to Jonestown’s mass suicide by poisoned Kool-Aid. In this post-election moment, Joe is delusional. Would Joe have survived another debate with Trump to wow the people with his perspicacity and quick wit, his ability to stay focused on the topic at hand, and his reliance on all those years of experience he’s proud to cite? Or would Joe just give further evidence that not only is he not now up to the task of the presidency, but that he was also not up to the task from the get-go in 2020?

What amazes me is the number of people who thought in 2019 that a guy who would not leave his basement to campaign, who showed no real energy, who was obviously corrupt, and who was a known liar, decided to put him in office and that many of those same people, having observed his ineptitude over his term in office, would vote to re-elect him.

Delusional Joe, Delusional Democrats

Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.

Trump voters are in the minds of Biden’s supporters, “garbage,” “deplorable,” “stupid,” “racist," “NeoNazi,” and easily duped. They are as commonplace as a khaki suit to use Robinson's words. So, MSNBC and CNN got millions of Democrats to drink Jonesville Kool-Aid. And during their years of self-proclaimed, but haughty, righteousness they allowed unvetted millions into the country, including murderers. 


But I see there are still Democrats on TV or social media mouthing Biden’s claim he would have won reelection.   

*https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/28/joe-biden-regrets-dropping-out-re-election

**Copyright Credit: Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy" from Collected Poems, with an introduction by John Drinkwater. London: Cecil Palmer, 1922. Public domain. Source: Collected Poems, with an introduction by John Drinkwater (Cecil Palmer, 1922)

This is what i wrote a year ago.  

 
Close your eyes. Sorry. Don’t. I just realized that if you do, you won’t be able to read this. I guess I was “talking in my head,” not realizing that this isn’t a podcast or a lecture, venues that would allow me to say, “Close your ideas, and imagine….” Well, if you could close your eyes while still reading this, then here goes.


New Year?


This was my New Year’s Eve text to my grandchildren: Every day begins a new year. Every day is a first day. Every life constantly renews.


Time as a Dependent Variable; You as the Independent Variable


Science and math classes teach us to place the independent variable on the X-axis and the dependent variable on the Y-axis. In many graphs, time is the independent one. The notion is that its regularity can be used as a marker against which to plot the vicissitudes of the variable. We also learn from those classes that time is itself a variable, dependent upon the unwavering speed of light in a vacuum, gravity, and relative speed: Really fast, near C velocities slow time’s flow in a relative universe; muons, for example, extend their lifetimes as they approach the speed of light in accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. But that’s all relative, just as you wouldn’t age like your relatives if you took a near-light-speed roundtrip to Alpha Centauri to find upon your return that your twin had aged more than you.


And then there are the statements everyone makes to show time’s variability: “I can’t believe it’s been a year since…” “Will this pot of water ever come to a boil?” “It seems like just yesterday when…” “Was that the end of the first quarter (vacation, movie, etc.) already?” Time seems to vary against the background of our memories. desires, and varying attention spans. It appears to vary, also, with our perspectives.


Time as the Arbitrary Independent Variable


Maybe it’s because we are so base-10 oriented that we like to measure our lives in beginnings and endings like December 31 and January 1. Look, for example, at all the big celebrations over the “end of the decade,” the “end of the century,” the “end of the millennium” 24 years ago. Look at the penchant people have to recognize birthdays that end in zero as somehow special: “The Big 4-OHH,” is one, the “Fiftieth Anniversary,” another. We like to round up. And we like to acknowledge some temporal designations as special like that end of the millennium in 2020.


But in truth, there’s really nothing special in New Year’s Eve as the end of something significant that differs from December 17th except that we choose to make it special because of tradition. And the same goes for birthdays that end in zero and the ends of decades, centuries, and millennia. Remember that all centuries that we designate as such “civil” time units are so named in western countries—and by adoption, eastern countries—because they center on the birth of Christ. Thus, we label them either BC, “before Christ,” and AD, “anno domini,” for “in the year of the Lord.” That BC has been by “scientific convention” changed to BCE, for “before the common era,” as a concession to non Christians, and AD changed to CE, for “the common era.” The rebrand supposedly makes time-keeping “objective” and “scientific,” but, in truth, the split between years before Christ’s birth and after that birth still center on Christ’s birth. In essence, it’s a silly change, but it gratifies those who think they have freed themselves from the dictates of religion. In studying the eighteenth century, we label those 100 years as the 1700s. Zeroes, represent units we value, but life outside of human custom recognizes no such beginnings and endings, just as waking up on January 1 isn't really different--save for a hangover--from waking up on the previous day. You were the same person the day before your twentieth--or any other decadal--birthday as you were the day after. 


As you know, the Romans had a different designation for years, one based “on the founding of the city,” or ab urbe condita.  Julius Caesar’s famous death on the Ides of March was not in Roman minds a negative number, not a year “before Christ,” but we label it 44 BC or BCE. The Soviets tried to get everyone onboard for a “beginning” that coincided with 1917 and the Revolution, and other cultures have designations that do not correspond to the Gregorian calendar now commonly used for civil timekeeping. Characters in Rosemary’s Baby raise their glasses to toast the child’s birth as the beginning of “the Year One.”


BCE and CE numbering fails to recognize that we don’t know exactly when Christ was born since Dionysius Exiguus was probably off by four to six years. And the former Julian calendar had to be adjusted in the Gregorian calendar because of imprecision in the measuring of both solar and sidereal years, that is, astronomical measurements used to mark the seasons, specifically Sun angle from the perspective of a revolving tilted planet. Such measurements depend on a variety of definitions and “completions” of cycles, such as the time Earth takes to fully complete a cycle of seasons or a movement between perihelion and aphelion. The math is complex and irrelevant here, but it indicates what I said above, that timekeeping is not the independent variable we pretend it is.


But enough on matters I covered in another blog a few years ago. The focus here is on the significance of a day, every day, a focus on the present and its constantly renewing potential. Today, January 1, 2024, is a first day, for sure. But January 2, tomorrow, will also be a first day. It might seem a trivial matter, but consider that it allows us to break from a past we can never recover to live in a present that is all we really have in the context of an unfulfilled future. Today’s resolutions, typically made in the hope of the long term, are achieved only in constant renewing in the short term.


Now


With that foregoing in mind, I resolve to consider at the beginning of each day one question: What perspective will govern my life in what seems to be an eternal Now which appears to be both variable and invariable?


I recognize that many of my perspectives are hand-me-downs and that others I hold are products of past and contemporary thinkers, from authors and songwriters to psychologists and philosophers, and from cultural icons to gurus of all kinds, including health “authorities” to economists and politicians. In short, I’m my own “melting pot” of others’ thinking and behaving. What I’m challenging myself to do is to consider daily whether or not my perspectives are my own, some other individual’s, or a mix of experience and adoption. And I’m challenging myself to recognize daily how variable time and variable perspective are interdependent in what I consider to be a Self.


The Resolution


I resolve to start each day by asking one question: “What perspectives now govern my thinking and behavior?”

“China’s Xi orders a stop to a spree of mass killings known as ‘revenge on society’ crimes”—AP 12/27/24 *

Now, why didn't our leaders think of that? 

If we haven’t heard it or mouthed it ourselves, we all know “If you kids don’t stop that right now…,” usually an empty threat made to kids horsing around or teasing one another in the backseat on the way to…anywhere. Well, now Papa Xi has voiced it in regard to mass killings or injurious knife attacks and car attacks. “I said stop it. And I mean it. I’m not going to say it again.”


Yeah. Wish someone in the US or Germany had said that before the recent attacks by gun and car (Magione in the US, Taleb A, a Saudi doctor, in Germany) by people disgruntled over grievances they associated with groups or businesses. It seems that China has experienced increasing numbers of such attacks. Thus, Xi’s order. And the grievances have been in response to incidents as diverse as divorce and investment losses.


Really, in these times we’re all  living in a car with a backseat overcrowded by rowdy kids. There’s little self control, little putting things in perspective. Consider the guy who drove his car into a crowd in Zhuhai, China, causing 35 casualties.


Remember the expression “going postal”? Here’s AI’s overview of the phrase’s  etymology: "Going postal" is an American slang phrase meaning to become extremely angry and violent, often in a workplace setting, and it originates from a series of incidents in the late 1980s where United States Postal Service (USPS) employees committed acts of mass murder against coworkers, managers, and even the public, leading to the association of extreme workplace rage with the postal service.


Of course, it wold be silly to say this is only a modern phenomenon. Innocent people have been victims since…


During the Han Dynasty (second century BC) Liu Pengli, a prince with no compunction, killed many people. Was he aggrieved by his insurance agent? Did the palace mailroom not deliver his mail on time? The point is that some people just have no regard for others, and they will use any personal disturbance as a trigger. They are self absorbed and indifferent to the suffering they cause by their ensuing actions.


Was Hitler responding to rejection by an art school?


I believe many of us want to stop needless suffering caused by disgruntled people. We just don’t know how to be more effective than the frustrated parent dealing with rowdy kids in the backseat. Having been worn down by repeated rowdiness, we take the easy way out of the predicament by gesturing “What do you expect me to do? I can’t be everywhere.” Or, “When your father (or mother) gets home tonight…”


The overriding fact of humanity is that we all have emotional responses to stimuli, but some of us just can’t or won’t control those emotions. Put kids in the backseat and they’ll find a way, if not on one trip, then on another, to frustrate the driver, to elicit a “If you kids don’t…” It happened; it happens; it will continue to happen because no generation learns from previous generations.


If Xi can stop by fiat the deaths and injuries suffered by victims of outraged narcissists, he’ll accomplish what humans have been trying to accomplish since the species arose. I won’t say “more power to him” because that’s precisely how dictators gain more dominance over their people. His message to his people has a dark shroud that might result in further societal disruptions. Like so many dictators, his solution lies in people spying on one another to preemptively thwart such tragic incidents.


It has never worked to prevent individuals from hurting others both known and unknown. It won’t work.


But its ineffectiveness doesn’t prevent us from saying it: “If you kids don’t stop…”




*https://nypost.com/2024/12/27/world-news/chinas-xi-orders-a-stop-to-a-spree-of-mass-killings-known-as-revenge-on-society-crimes/

It’s easy to be cynical,
Dismiss the Christmas miracle,
And claim to be empirical.


It’s easy to dismiss belief
That others cling to in their grief
Because they find it brings relief.


It’s easy to dismiss a faith
To claim that it can only scathe
A healthy psyche with a wraith.


It’s easy to explain away
The life within the Milky Way
And label faith “naivete.”


It’s easy to reject the claim
That Satan’s hubris is to blame
For all the human grief and shame.


It’s easier to say the brain
Prefers to know what is arcane.
“The cosmos is legerdemain.”


Some think that every atheist
Could teach old John Evangelist
To be a worldly analyst.


John had no doctoral degree
In physics or biology
His expertise? Theology.


We know he wrote what he had heard
About the Christ he calls the Word.
Was what he wrote by God conferred?


He seems quite sure of what he writes
As though it’s God Himself he cites,
The One who spoke to Israelites.


Would John be able to converse
With Einstein ‘bout the universe?
Recall that Al was very terse.


Could John argue with anyone
About the nature of the Son?
To scientists about the Sun?


Most scientists seem very sure.
They see no need to be demure.
In what they know they are secure.


But what if scientists delude
With info that they misconstrued?
Does science mask incertitude?


And when we ask them what they think,
“The Big Bang happened in a blink,
“And suns made argon and then zinc.”


It seems so easy just to say,
“Creation happened in a day;
“Inflation made what we survey.”


But then they argue who is right:
Eternal Cosmos and branes that fight?
A singularity? Who’s right?


And mysteries yet will abound
Just like the matter all around
They cannot see in vis’ble light…


They say Dark Matter’s everywhere.
Invisible, it has no glare.
Dark Energy is also there!


They can’t see either, but perceive
That neither is a make-believe.
And physicists do not deceive.


“But can they be deceived?” you ask
While citing Morley’s daunting task:
Take that belief and it unmask.


The aether they once said was there
An unseen substance like the air
They now reject and do forswear.


Yet unseen matter makes much sense?
And so they rise to its defense.
“It’s out there and it is immense.”


Pervading all the galaxies
In us and both our families;
“These dark things are not fantasies.”


“Is there a chance that this is faith?”
I asked before if it’s a wraith.
That all we see is just one-eighth?


“Dark things are there,” they do insist.
“But how?” we ask, but are dismissed.
“Just trust us that they coexist.”


“But is there little room for doubt?”
“We’ve looked both here and thereabout.”
“We see the Cosmos fast spread out.”


“Our evidence is indirect;
“The way stars move makes us suspect;
“That doppler shift is one effect.”


Some think neutrinos are the cause.
They can escape just like Danaus;
They move through us and never pause.


But thinking isn’t proving so.
Do Dark neutrinos on the go,
Make galaxies turn fast or slow?


“So, you have never touched or seen
“Dark Energy that lies between
“The galaxies; and yet you’re keen.”


And then there’s all that quantum stuff
The quarks of which you’re sure enough
To speak of them, but faith rebuff.


Are you so sure of what you know
The Vacuum makes a world outflow
Right now and also long ago?


So Something comes from Nothing now
Like milk exuded from gold cow?
“We simply want to know just how.


“But, hey, that is your current thought
“It was a vacuum, not God that wrought
“The world we know: The world from nought.”


The math is there for all to see
But too complex for some and me
The math that uses π and φ.


The Gospel tells a different tale
The son born of that meek female
Was there before both stars and whale.


And that’s the tale that John has told;
In his gospel, Christ's the mold
For all that’s young and all that’s old.


Whatever came to be, he wrote,
From dirt to low prokaryote,
Could not exist without his vote.


Is science more believable
Than virgin’s child conceivable?
Is truth in both achievable?


It’s simple just to say a child
Was born to woman undefiled
The young girl who was meek and mild.


It’s easy to dismiss events
That John Evangelist presents.
But think to what you give assents.


And as for me, I do lean toward
Creation by omniscient Lord,
The child that many have adored.


But that in no way limits me.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Both lie as possibility.


Because in making all that is
God made me want to catechise.
To ask if matter dark is His.


POSTSCRIPT: Sorry for any obscure references. Danaus comes from Greek mythology; he fled from Egypt. Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up most of the universe according to estimates. In quantum mechanics and string theory the vacuum produces virtual particles that come into and go out of existence. Up and Down Quarks, never seen, make protons and neutrons. Neutrinos don't readily react with matter; trillions of them went through you and the entire planet today. Galaxies don't seem to rotate according to Newtonian mechanics, leading some to suspect the existence of Dark Matter that exerts a gravitational influence. Think of Branes as bedsheet-universes that might collide like those sheets hung out to dry on a windy day. One interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background image (COBE's and WMAP's) is that a blotch on the lower right might be where a brane or other universe smacked into ours. John the Evangelist (not to be confused with John the Baptist) begins his Gospel with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God, and nothing was made that was not made through the Word." Essentially, that’s the root of being made in the image of God. All creation bears the stamp of God’s existence. Creation, according to St. Augustine was through Christ. Augustine, a Neoplatonist deep down, also argued that what God created was the possibility for forms to exist, thus laying the groundwork for an easy way to include evolution in creation.

I see that Christopher Nolan will release an IMAX film based on Homer’s Odyssey. Love the epic tale, can’t wait to see it on the big screen. I hope Nolan Does Scylla and Charybdis right. Those two encapsulate much of humanity’s lifestyle and social ecology. We humans often face degrees of dilemma, or Sophie’s Choice, though only rarely, thankfully, with the highest degree akin to the dilemma as portrayed in that eponymous film or the deadly choice posed by Scylla and Charybdis.


But in lesser degrees, we’re always passing through a Messina Strait, a narrow passageway between two bad choices. In its simplest, the choice lies between using a paper towel to dry dishes or a dish towel, the former to be purchased and thrown away, thus threatening a forest, the latter to be washed with detergents that then enter the environment as polluting wastewater and also to be placed in a dryer after washing, necessitating a draw on the power grid and the personal expense of kilowatts listed on the monthly electric bill. Sophie’s Choice? Scylla and Charybdis? To the smallest degree at least.


Our Daily Lives


Strange how the brain/mind works, isn’t it? In its intricate aggregation of 86 billion neuron cells with nearly 100 trillion connections, my brain mixed thoughts of Odysseus’ encounters with Scylla and Charybdis with daily life, a war and a senile President.  Oh! And throw in Odysseus’ exchange with Polyphemus, where he cleverly identified himself as Noman or No-Man or Nobody. So, as I was saying, my brain made a connection to everyday life and to choices between good and bad, good and good, and bad and bad, this last exemplified by Scylla and Charybdis and Sophie’s choice.


Our everyday experience is an ocean of such choices, mostly small with no tragic or long term consequences, but occasionally large and life-changing. Skipping a class on a single day is often inconsequential, but skipping multiple classes in a college semester can result in lower grades and even failure, changing the course of a life, say from being a medical doctor to being a middle school biology teacher. Or, inhaling that first line of cocaine might not mean much, but it might also mean a lifetime of addiction, a simple choice altering a life detrimentally.


And then there are the spur of the moment decisions that increase the degree of risk: Doing something unnecessary that jeopardizes life itself, like attempting to jump off a cruise ship, but landing instead on a lower deck—dead. That seems to be what happened on a Princess Cruise ship recently when woman jumped after an eight-day trip to the Caribbean. What was she thinking when she made the choice? Should I stay on board this giant ship for a last visit to the buffet or jump into Scylla to be swallowed by the ocean? Was it suicide or folly? * Whatever the motive, the consequence was immediate and deadly.


Putin as No-Odysseus


Two years ago Vladimir Putin put his country on a voyage through a narrow strait between the multi-headed Scylla of thousands of Ukrainian drones and missiles and the Charybdis of Ukrainian minefields, cluster bombs, and anti-ship missiles and sea drones. He made a choice that seems to have swallowed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russians sent into battle against the monster of modern warfare. And having made that choice that has decimated his army and war equipment and led to the exodus of more than one million young men as emigres, he continues to pilot his ship—or the ships the Ukrainians haven’t sunk— through that narrow strait of destruction and death.


That’s a between-a-rock-and-hard place decision that is affecting the Russian economy, Russian military prestige, and Russian lives. Odysseus was renowned for his wit and cleverness, both providing him with the skill to extricate himself from dangers. Putin seems to have neither as he continues to pilot his ship through perilous waters where even his borrowed North Korean soldiers are being lost to monsters of Ukrainian drones and Himars.


Nevertheless, Putin does have his Odysseus side. He’s killed off many of his detractors and rivals, though not in personal combat like Odysseus facing Penelope’s suitors, but by poisonings and strange coincidental falls from windows in multi-floor buildings. Putin can cleverly claim that nobody was responsible, but the deaths occurred undeniably.


Biden as No-Odysseus


Nothing in his term contrasts Biden and Odysseus more than the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The clever Odysseus conquered Troy with the ruse of the wooden horse. Biden had no clever plan to extricate America from Afghanistan to end the war, eschewing Trump’s threat to the Taliban—and to the Taliban leader’s very person and family—as a way to a peaceful withdrawal that retained an American presence and control of Bagram Air Base.


As of this writing, Biden is still in ostensible control of the ship of state, where he has allowed a many-headed Scylla to enter as masses of migrants numbering in the millions threatening to capsize local economies like NYC, which has had to spend billions of dollars on migrants devouring, Scylla-like, local resources. It’s a monster Biden chose to sail near, ignoring warnings by any and all Circes. Biden can claim that no one has been responsible--well maybe climate change-- and in fact, he would be right, because no one in his administration claims responsibility for the cartels' expansion, the drug deaths, the sex trafficking, the rapes, and murders by illegals. 


Almost at the end of his voyage, he feels free to jeopardize his remaining crew and passengers with last-minute decisions. Oh! Well. We know that soon he will return home to Delaware fast asleep, transported just like the sleeping Odysseus the Phaeacians returned to Ithaca after a nightmare time away from home.




*https://nypost.com/2024/12/23/us-news/princess-cruises-passenger-dies-after-trying-to-jump-overboard-near-florida/