1. Some people love tearing things apart.
2. Others like putting things together.
3. And still others like to take things apart and put them together in new arrangements for new uses.

I enjoy number three. If there really is nothing new under the sun, then creativity lies in redoing what others did. In fact, that’s the way that societies develop. We take a little from historical models, and we rearrange to suit our needs and ideals. And if we don’t take from historical models, we merely stumble into repetitions of societies long gone and forgotten. There are only so many ways people can build societies. Only so many ways people can interact.


But there are dangers associated with all three, even and especially with my favorite, number 3.


Tech


You might disagree here: The only difference between societies past and societies present is the level of technology. Yes, older societies had technologies that served them well, but not such advanced tech as that used by today’s engineers and scientists. Modern tech is a heretofore unavailable social influence on human life.


But there’s a fly in the modern soup. We’ve come to rely on technologies as mechanisms for running societies; yet, those who analyze, synthesize, and modify those technologies don’t always act with pure altruism in their hearts.


Are We Just Too Numerous?


Social constructs require some kind of control: Ultimately self-control, but falling short of that, imposed control both spoken and unspoken. Laws exemplify the former. Culture exemplifies the latter. The “state” exerts the pressure of obedience to Law. Tradition and contemporary culture exert the pressure of obedience to propriety. With almost eight billion people, the collective societies today find the exertion of both types of pressure necessary for avoiding chaos. Deep down, most people want order because it assures security. But deep down, most people want freedom, also, so there’s a pushback from both groups and individuals who are motivated by either altruism or evil.


That among eight billion people there are those with evil intent seems undeniable. Crime, abuse, murder, war all attest to an ever-present and ubiquitous tendency of some toward evil. And that evil is enhanced by technology that enables a person or group of persons to inflict evil directly or indirectly, either by overt attack or by subterfuge. Thus, the only protection we have against technology-assisted evil is technology-assisted protection under watchful eyes of the vigilant and informed.


Are there more evil people today than there were in ages past? Probably. And that’s the product of absolute numbers. But is the percentage of evil people greater? Maybe not. It’s impossible to prove the percentage has increased because we have no numbers on past percentages. We just know by axiomatic thinking that every society has its share of evildoers, and the larger the societies, the more numerous the evildoers. (Had any intrusions by hackers recently? Any scammers call to warn you about some Amazon order you can’t remember? Any theft in your checked in baggage at the airport, where a Biden transvestite appointee searches for luggage with new women’s fashions?)


Tech Protection


The number of dangers might be increasing because of technology. Humans have always succumbed to threats both seen and unseen, and in attempting to protect themselves from such dangers they have employed various technologies. Think garlic.
Yes, garlic. During the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, garlic necklaces were the tech of choice. Obviously, we’ve upped our level of technological sophistication: Antibiotics and antivirals are our tech of choice unless we are Jehovah witnesses, Amish, or some other group that shuns medical tech on religious grounds.


Three sketchy anecdotes as examples of a danger unknown in previous societies: Recently, A Fairfax Country, Virginia man was arrested for shining a laser pointer at a police helicopter; a Brevard County, Florida man was arrested for shining a laser at a police helicopter; and, though this next example resulted in no complaint or arrest, as I walked with my wife to a restaurant one night, a member of a group also walking toward the restaurant shined a red laser toward me for a second. I brushed off the brief but potential threat by assuming the bearer was either ignorant of the potential consequences or acting without malice. But here’s the point. Although I do not know the intention of the person who from the distance in the dark directed the laser pointer in my vicinity, I do know that the two men recently arrested did have malicious intent. And the tech was so simple to use and so fast to apply that the pilots of those helicopters were lucky to survive the laser attacks.


So, do we all wear mirrored glasses to reflect most of the lasers that evildoers might flash at our faces? But then there are those military lasers, powerful and still in the hands of armies and navies both belligerent and friendly. All military weapons are subject to adaptation by evildoers. Dangerous lasers, which are unseen and unheard in application, are coming to an evildoer near you. Sorry to say, but that’s probably true.


And what of the tech used to convert an already deadly virus into an even more deadly virus, aka SARS-CoV-2, the virus of the recent pandemic? Tech supposedly gave us a protective antiviral vaccine, but it was a catchup process. The disease took many lives before any technical response quashed its spread (assuming, of course, that the virus did not weaken as many viruses do).


No Controls Are Guarantees


In all those historical societies, controls were either low tech or human intervention. But in twenty-first century societies, tech adopted for dangers can inflict harm before any counter-tech can be devised for protection. And the reason is that with so many people acting in so many places with so many new variations of established technologies, those devoted to protecting the society and the individuals within society can’t respond immediately to new forms of attack.


And What of Those Opening Numbered Statements?


1) Some People Like Tearing Things Apart   

Fortunately, some people in the medical profession know how to take things apart. DNA analysis of SARS-CoV-2 is an example. Unfortunately, some people in the military know how to take things apart, so any captured weapon technology is subject to analysis.


2) Some People Like Putting Things Together


Seems to be the case that the Iranians reverse engineered a downed US drone. Seems to be the case that the Chinese researchers in the Wuhan lab synthesized a new form of SARS-CoV-2. Seems to be the case that weapons of mass destruction can be synthesized by unknown actors.


3) Some People Like Taking Things Apart and Putting Them Together in New Arrangements.


And this is where unexpected dangers lie. Somewhere out there in the mass of almost eight billion people there is a tech-savvy evildoer who with state sponsorship, private sponsorship, or no outside sponsorship, is currently at work on a new version of an older technology. We won’t know until it is unleashed on the world.


Scary, but All the More Reason to Heed the Principal Tenet of This Website


This is not your practice life. You live in the midst of risk and danger both natural and artificial. And the very societies that encompass us can exacerbate the risks and dangers because people like to analyze, synthesize, and modify through technologies. The safety in numbers societies profess to offer isn’t a guarantee since those same societies contain individuals and groups that seek to bypass or overturn the controls that people rely on for safety.

You Pick


Which do you prefer, a society evolving randomly toward some future condition or a society evolving purposefully toward some goal?


Celebration, Disney’s Utopian Community


You might think “utopia” with regard to the latter. Think Walt Disney’s EPCOT and the community called Celebration designed by Disney. Both were planned concepts for humanity though EPCOT doesn’t have residents. That it is just a “visitor” community is probably good. I can’t imagine living full-time in EPCOT even if it had homes. And the City of Celebration? Well, it’s developed into a “regular community” with a fire department, neighborhoods (villages), and schools. It has businesses and all the problems associated with pre-planned communities, including a downtown homeowners’ association filing a 2016 lawsuit because their homes were deteriorating. Shoddy workmanship? Corner-cutting at the get-go? Or just the withering heat and humidity of Florida where mold thrives? Anyway, the Disney-planned paradise isn’t paradise, is mostly white (nearly 90%), and has more than 11,000 people with all the ordinary problems that 11,000 people have just about everywhere. All evolving utopias devolve. What begins as a planned community gradually changes with randomness through succeeding generations. The buildings, even the deteriorating ones, remain, but the occupants change, and random growth occurs, adding to the initial optimistic population.


Celebration is relatively safe, but it does have crime: 11.29 crimes per 1,000 residents. According to CrimeGrade.Org, Celebration’s north neighborhoods are slightly more dangerous than its east neighborhoods (1 in 78 vs. 1 in 89). * Celebration has not yet devolved into a mini-Chicago. It’s safe, but it does have a record of some violent crimes. Maybe one reason for the low crime rate stems from character of the initial population, people enthused about moving into a Disney utopia. But all utopias devolve—randomly. Call each new member of the group a “particle.”


Brownian Motion and Osmotic Pressure


If you have ever observed dust particles moving in a stream of sunlight, you’ve seen an analog of Brownian movement that even the ancient Lucretius (60 BC) noticed. He ascribed the random motion to the action of “atoms,” foreshadowing the observation of Robert Brown (1827) who observed pollen moving in a fluid, and the mathematics of Thiele (1880), Einstein (1905), Smoluchowski (1906), and Perrin (1908) who tried to describe their probabilistic movements.. The dust particles you observe are driven more by air currents than by the random motions of atoms of the gas in which they move, but since atoms are too small to be seen and tiny particles like pollen require some magnification, those dancing dust particles are a good approximation of Brownian motion, the random movement of colloids.


Brownian motion, as it is called, is probabilistic for any particle so moved. All those randomly moving atoms in a fluid or gas just don’t get together to run like cars on one side of a four-lane. They aren’t like Celebration’s first optimistic residents all seeking a common ideal communal life. The direction of each particle’s movement occurs by chance in Brownian movement. In contrast, the motion of cars and those first residents is purposeful.


The randomness of a utopian society’s devolution stands in contrast with its initial evolution, which is a purposeful process. At its commencement, a utopian city reflects not only planning, but also social commonality. Randomness does play a role in its development. Take the political nature of Celebration. It appears to be almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, with Biden edging out Trump in the 2020 election. As the city ages, its makeup will change as it no longer remains a closed system. There will be pressure from “outside particles.” Eventually, the balance between the political affinities will change the way concentrations of atoms change across an osmotic membrane. The membrane around Celebration was an initial barrier between the higher crime outside and the lower crime inside. But there’s an inherent pressure for the particles to move from higher concentrations to lower concentrations just as there is a pressure exerted by the chaotic movements of atoms in Brownian motion, atoms that only get into sync by chance.


I suspect that as the initial Celebration occupants tire of deteriorating housing and an increase in crime or they die off, that the next generation of Celebration’s citizens will live in a non-utopian society, one that isn’t planned, rather one that is the product of the random bumping of “particles.” That might already have occurred because various neighborhoods in the city’s boundaries have differing levels of safety.


Any Interest in This?


I suppose all this amounts to nothing of interest unless you either live in Celebration or in some other planned neighborhood or unless you want to consider how your local community evolved.


PA (Two letters pronounced separately. Is this the only state commonly referred to by its postal designation?)


For example, I reside in western Pennsylvania, an area that grew with immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arriving to work in coal mines, coke oven fields, steel mills, and limestone quarries. From those basic industries all those other supporting purposes arose: Retail sales, transportation networks, construction, schools, police forces, and fire departments. At the beginning of the process, many moved into the planned patch neighborhoods owned by the coal companies. My own countryside location sits in the midst of many such communities, each built under the auspices of a specific coal company. The more urban steel mill towns developed rather randomly as steel workers bought or rented in walking distance to the mills, most located along the four major rivers, the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio.


And then the devolution occurred: Steel mills rusted into disuse during the 1970s and 1980s, coal mines closed under stringent restrictions by environmental agencies and an anti-coal government, and with all the industrial closings, the deterioration of the patch-housing and urban river cities led to a new migration. Malls then killed the once prosperous downtowns (and uptowns) until they, too, succumbed to the randomness of particle movements that included new ways of commerce like Amazon online purchasing that spread out the original close particles to a worldwide community. Most of western Pennsylvania’s small town centers died, the osmotic pressure crossing the membranes from densely populated towns and cities to suburbia. A number of towns tried to revitalize themselves, but revitalization requires a new population. Pennsylvanians make up the ninth oldest state population, and the one-time second most populous state has declined in rank to the fifth largest population with only about a million more residents than it had in the 1950s. Suffice it to say that during the time of steel mill demise, the young particles randomly left, pushing past the membranes of other state boundaries to enter growing communities.


Do Brownian and Osmotic Motion Serve as Analogs?


Mandelbrot pointed out that any attempt to apply the math of Brownian motion to human activities like movements in a  stock market fails because of the dissimilarity between continuous and discontinuous processes. The atoms in a fluid are different from human-controlled events like bull and bear markets. I suppose his criticism of attempts to associate such movements with human affairs also applies to similar attempts to associate those physical movements with the evolution and devolution of human communities.


The analogy here, like all analogies, probably “limps.” But I thought it might give you a point of departure to examine your own community and maybe to see whether it is evolving or devolving.


*https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-celebration-fl/

We love patterns. We think in them; we act in them. We feel lost when we can’t recognize them. We impose them on a seemingly chaotic world. And by hard work and good luck we discover those patterns that make up the fabric of the universe.


Take your driving or walking home. You’ve mentally mapped the directions. You know where to go, but you do so by following a pattern of streets and sidewalks, all of them marked by something familiar, a tree, a building, an ever-present porch occupant. You even associate time with your homing pattern: Go this way, ten minutes; that way,13 minutes. And you go home, or to the store or work, in a temporal pattern, going and leaving during or not during “rush hour,” that citywide pattern of humans pouring into or out of offices, many of them having a pattern of eating when you eat, and judging by the lines at Starbucks, of drinking coffee when you drink. We are a predictable lot because we live patterned lives. So many hours asleep; so many awake—unless the rhythm, the pattern of our biological clock, is syncopated.


Patterns Discovered and Patterns Imposed


At the end of my previous blog, I wrote about discovered and imposed patterns. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a good example of the former, and constellations are a good example of the latter. We seem to have an affinity for patterns of all kinds, both tangible, like tiles, and intangible, like syllogisms. Throw chess strategy and counter-strategy into the intangibles.


Patterns of thought enable us to communicate and anticipate the thoughts and actions of others; patterns of streets enable us to navigate. And, as I wrote in that last blog, patterns emerge in political and social systems. Equity and socialism demand adherence to patterns imposed by some select group.


Want to avoid patterned life? Go “off the grid.” Grids are patterns. But then if you do go “off the grid,” you’ll discover Nature’s patterns. No more artificial daytime; no more strawberries out of season: Dark nights and fruitless days, my friend, dark nights and fruitless days. If you don’t want that alternative, then welcome to the world of patterns imposed. The street lights turn on every night, across the city, across the world.


And now ritualistic patterns are also in the news. Ritual, the patterned actions in religion, sports, and even your daily life, has been usurped by robots in Southeast Asia. According to StudyFinds online, now a robotic arm performs “Aarti,” replacing a human in offering an oil lamp to the deity “to symbolize the removal of darkness.” *  Robots also replace humans in other rituals: “Robotic rituals even now include an animatronic temple elephant in Kerala on India’s southern coast.”


What’s this world coming to when something as ancient as religious ritual, the culmination of human patternizing, is in the artificial arms of AI? Take the ritual of the Mass, for example. As priest shortages occur, does the Pope authorize not women, but robots wearing chasubles? Does Communion become an unleavened version of a Kura Revolving Sushi Bar? Will choirs of synthesizers replace organs and human voices singing praises?


That Equity Pattern


Happy with your patterns? Some you have because of inculcation, and some you established as a product of your individual makeup. Some are beneficial; some, not so much. Among the latter are vices and addictions. Among the former…well, you’re the only one who knows that. Patterns might even be neutral, causing neither gain nor pain.


But when equity is finally imposed on all, you can kiss most of those personal patterns—good, bad, and neutral— goodbye. You will be thrown into the governmental cafeteria,  a version of a Kura Rotating Sushi Bar, precise amounts appearing at a given rate in a pattern decided by…who knows? No one gets more; no one gets less. And what if in the name of a perfect pattern of permissions and restrictions that safeguard equity, an AI eventually decides? Will some former Twitter censor, now out of a job, decide which algorithm to run at the Sushi Bar?


These Are Dangerous Times, My Friend


If you accept the premise that patterns lie behind most human actions, you might understand why I consider the current movement to impose social and political patterns a danger to all individuals. Most people live a life of layered patterns, one superimposed on another, or several patterns related by superpositions. What happens to individuality when patterns are imposed? Not that that is anything new: Think the courtiers and courtesans of Versailles.


Like Sediments, Regulations Pile Up


Among principles of sedimentology is the Principle of Superposition, the truth that older layers lie beneath younger layers of sediments unless the beds (layers) are disturbed by tectonic activity. It makes sense, given the logic that the first particles of rock debris to arrive on a scene by water or wind settle out of the fluid first. Subsequently arriving sediments lie on those that got there before them. Geologists use this principle to read the history of an area. Among the greatest exposures of this principle at work is the Grand Canyon, where hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation and burial have produced rock layers thousands of feet thick, the top 538.8 million years’ worth containing fossils, and those beneath them revealing the desolation and, except for bacteria and other soft-bodied critters, a lifeless Pre-Cambrian world.


I suppose we could argue that the first layer of imposed patterns or regulations adopted by the United States was the document we call the Articles of Confederation that was superseded eventually by The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In 1887 the government decided to regulate the railroads. The “sediments” then began to pile up. Tens of thousands of pages later, the regulations of the United States seem to dwarf the layers of the Grand Canyon.


According to BallotPedia online, ** “From November 2 to November 6, the Federal Register grew by 2,104 pages for a year-to-date total of 71,222 pages.” The sediments of regulation keep building up, layer upon layer, sometimes adding some thin details, sometimes massive accumulations. And all of these regulations determine the patterns of our lives, patterns with which you must comply under federal penalties that can include both fines and imprisonment. Remember Andy Johnson? Under the authority of their regulations, the EPA fined Andy $20 million for having a stock pond on his private Wyoming farm. *** I suppose the EPA wanted Andy to run city water into drinking fountains for the livestock. Who knows? The point is that in the rational pattern of farming and raising livestock, farmers and ranchers have for millennia impounded water for their animals and irrigation. Maybe the EPA is attempting to have Andy sell dehydrated beef.


Then there’s the recent and ongoing tale of the poor Dutch farmers. The stikstofcrisis — or nitrogen crisis — has incited a rebellion. Dutch farms have been the most productive in Europe, but because of their excess “nitrogen production,” they have come under regulatory attack. Seems the Dutch authorities would rather starve than produce too much nitrogen—along with food the country needs to survive—and they are willing to close down farms through regulation; that’s how concerned they are about the world. They are willing to close down farms and create a food shortage while depriving farmers of their livelihood.


Dutch farmers had spent centuries developing the processes and patterns that made them productive. Now, a few who owe their adulthood to the plenty produced by those farmers have imposed a regulation that threatens the economic health and the food supply. And for what purpose? Surely, there is some concern over pollutants in a land that lies at and even below sea level, but can those pollutants be handled in a way that doesn’t force farmers out of businesses run by generations of families? ****


Those who obtain the power of regulation cannot abstain from regulating, even from regulating the food-producers out of food-production. Some patterns are worth keeping; productive farming is one of them.


Think You’re Exempt?


The massive stack of federal regulations are mirrored by massive stacks of state and local regulations, all aimed to make us live according to, in most instances, arbitrary patterns. The government isn’t free from the whims of individuals. And as we all know in this Age of Wokeness, the loudest individuals control the narrative, and in many instances, the regulations that dictate the kinds of actions we are allowed. Are you happy peeing next to a stranger of the opposite sex? Remember that old pattern of restrooms marked “Women” and “Men”?


Regulation and Deregulation: Will the Pendulum Ever Stop Swinging?


The special agendists (my word) and career bureaucrats have one thing in common: Regulating in ever more tightly defined details. They have given us among other rules, the Clean Water Act, the very act used to threaten Andy Johnson for simply putting an environmentally friendly pond on his spacious property. The Clean Water Act did not originally apply to stock ponds on ranches and farms. It had a wider purpose: To protect the nation’s water resources from overuse and pollution. But with time and bureaucratic busybodies eager to prove their power to redefine legislation, Andy became a victim of over-regulation that carried an unreasonable penalty while ignoring that his pond actually created a little wetland, which that Clean Water Act seeks to protect.


As the history of America reveals, since those early days of regulating railroads in the nineteenth century, presidents have directed their appointees in the now 438 agencies and sub-agencies to “take care of things” by regulating. 438. All those agencies regulate. All those agencies add to their regulations through detailed refinements not voted into law by Congress. But the pendulum does swing. As control of the government shifts between parties, some presidents have ordered agencies to perform some deregulating.


The back-and-forth also applies to state agencies. I recall being in a meeting during the
Ridge Administration in which Pennsylvania’s head of the Department of Environmental Protection said something akin to “If I ripped out every other page of Pennsylvania’s environmental regulations, I don’t think anyone would notice.” The same could probably be said of the other states’ regulations and especially of California, the nation’s most heavily regulated state.


So, we bounce between over-patternizing and limiting the imposition of patterns. But the process is one of two steps forward and one back. The regulations pile up faster than the deregulation efforts can reduce them. Once regulators regulate, deregulators have difficulty eliminating. We march on toward an Age of Superregulation. Your life becomes ever more planned by entities and persons over which you have no control.


But Aren’t Some Patterns Bad and Deserving of Regulation?


In a world of almost eight billion humans, patterns bump into patterns. People do whatever in foolish, detrimental, and even evil ways. Not everyone is altruistic, thoughtful, or wise. Take the process of farming. Regulating water supplies for the general good has led to circular and drip irrigation, saving water while providing what is necessary to crop growth. The farming practices of the period before the Dust Bowl years were detrimental to the long-term retention of soils. The pattern of cut-and-burn in the Amazon rainforest and on Madagascar has decimated forests, exposed soils to erosion, and degraded crop production, even eliminating it. Fly over an area undergoing deforestation: See the pattern of devastation.


Some regulation makes sense, and I believe you have some ideas on which patterns of living you would like to regulate. Just know that where you wish to impose a regulation that alters someone else’s patterned lifestyle, you will run into opposition.


Ask yourself how the patterns of your inherited culture have been interrupted or changed by regulation. Ask how your personal patterns have been affected.




*https://studyfinds.org/robots-hindu-rituals/


**https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_Register_tops_70,000_pages_(2020)


***https://legalnewsline.com/stories/510643529-epa-threatens-20-million-fine-on-wyoming-man-who-built-a-pond-on-his-farm


****https://www.politico.eu/article/johan-vollenbroek-netherlands-nitrogen-pollution-climate-change-farming/

United States is diverse. Everyone knows that as a diverse nation, it houses  extremes of thought and action. A largely capitalist country, the US has over the course of more than the second half its history trended away from its laissez-faire origin and toward a creeping socialism with all those entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and possibly coming soon to  a bottomless entitlement pit near you, college-loan forgiveness. Did I miss anything? Welfare payments? Let me research for a moment…


Eighty entitlement programs! 80! This is not your great-grandmother’s America of hardscrabble life lived in the soot and dust of history. This is $31 trillion-in-debt-America. You name it; we’ve bought it, and if the expenditure was made by a government agency, chances are that the cost was more than double market value. Our capitalist background also provided the rest of the world with aid and gifts from our considerable largesse. Thank you, General Marshall and all subsequent American givers, including, if you pay taxes, YOU. The hopeless have faith in your charity.


Capitalistic Socialists or Socialistic Capitalists?


In the midst of all this socialism, many Americans still cherish the capitalist lifestyle, including some politicians who preach socialism while capitalizing on the capitalism. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) come to mind. Bernie out there selling his latest “bash capitalism” book and selling tickets to the duped who want to hear him avoid defining “democratic socialism.” Ah! Bernie. Reminds me of the words to “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits. Capitalize on capitalism by condemning it; that’s the gig. If he were a younger man, no doubt the chicks…


And speaking about…


That young NY Congresswoman (may we call her that? “Congresshuman?) wore a $30,000 dress with something about taxing the rich emblazoned on it. Her makeup was expensive, also. How cute! What a wonderful example of socialists in action. And she recently boasted about her keeping thousands of jobs out of her district. Is there no end to the hubris and folly? No end to elites fawning over themselves in front of sycophants who pay to see them play?


So, now there’s some question about Ocasio-Cortez’s renting that dress, having a $500 limo, and putting on expensive makeup for that gala. I believe it might be a small matter of not paying the bill or of receiving gifts in contradiction to the rules of her political office. Probably is a small matter, but it puts into the limelight the hypocrisy of those  who reap the benefits of capitalism while decrying its evils. Think the ordinary Russian citizen went dressed so during the Soviet Union days? Heck, think the people in this country got to go to an expensive gala dressed so—with free tickets? And the limo?



American Idols


Yet, Bernie and AOC have their followers, adoring fans who listen and pretend that what they say makes sense. Eliminate thousands of potential jobs in your district as AOC brags she did? No problem; the constituents will pull the lever on Election Day.


Here’s Bernie: “We are rapidly moving toward a nation of the super-rich, by the super-rich and for the super-rich.” So, I looked up Bernie’s net worth: Three million bucks in the report I saw online. Duh! Not Jeff Bezos, but pretty comfortable, I’d say, especially since he has three homes, one purchased for over $600,000. But let’s not forget the dedication of the democratic socialist: Sanders appeared in a cameo role in the 1988 comedy-drama film Sweet Hearts Dance, playing a man who distributes candy to young trick-or-treaters. Appropriate, right? He is, supposedly, dedicated to redistribution, a process that involves free stuff, fictional candy or real tax revenue. By the way, in one report on the source of his wealth, the article says it comes from “politics.” I assume that his money-making books can be attributed to the fame associated with his political candidacies and offices. Three million bucks. That’s the kind of socialism many of us would like. Hey, Bernie, I was thinking of buying the lakeside home next to yours; think you can spare some money? No? No redistribution for you!


But lest you think I am envious, I’ll tell you outright that I am not. I hope Bernie can make as much money as he wants to make, and I hope he gets to keep it until “he can’t take it with him.” More power to those who earn, even to those who made their money by virtue of elections. Just, please, don’t preach to me about the glories of a political system under which more than 160 million people lost their lives in the last century. Don’t tell me that socialism will be different under your aegis.


Why the Following?


If socialist country after socialist country fails to provide “as advertised,” how is it that so many young people say they favor socialism?


Are educators to blame for the blinders that socialist sycophants wear? Probably a little. Apparently teachers, who are often underpaid for the tasks they do, lean toward increasing entitlement programs and the endless taxes that fund their jobs. That’s somewhat understandable given their salaries (I exclude professors because Senator Warren made more than $400,000 for two years’ work at Harvard). I suppose the value of teaching, even Warren’s, is difficult to assess because teachers produce no tangible product, no gizmo. Their contribution to society is qualitative, not quantitative. Given that every class they teach is an entity in itself with diverse talents and intelligence, teachers, even the best of them, are limited in what they can prove about their jobs. Even “bright students” can fail, become addicts, become criminals, or grow into grifting politicians. Merit based on student performance is highly subjective even under the circumstances of standardized tests. Who can measure the teacher’s efforts when the child is uncooperative or belligerent.
[ASIDE: As a young teacher I encountered an uncooperative and belligerent junior high student whom I tried “to reach.” When nothing seemed to work, I asked him to write a paragraph on what he would do if he won a million dollars. He said he would buy a used Chevy. I asked what he would do with the rest of the money. He said, “Use it for repairs.”]


Good Intentions, Bad Results


Whatever the source of affinity for socialism, be it educational system or media propaganda, those who ascribe to its principles—even when they can’t define them—seem to have little historical knowledge of socialism. They probably lack awareness of current socialist governments, also.


Bernie spent time at the University of Chicago, a school known for its Left-leaning faculty—going back to before the McCarthy era. His motives seem noble. He has stood up for the little guy. But latching onto socialism as a solution doesn’t favor the little guy as more than a century of socialist experiments have shown. Little guys stay little under socialism. The system almost certainly guarantees that a few big guys will dominate; an oligarchy will form; the elites of the system will seek to consolidate their power through propaganda and censorship on the one hand and through imprisonment and democide on the other hand. Democide, killing of the people. Stalin is infamous for it.


But Bernie and his protege will argue that his form of socialism is different, is more humane. This time it will work.


It won’t, sorry to say. It will suppress the rise of many individuals in favor of a few. It was only a gala, only an elite ball to which AOC went dressed in a dress that cost more than the little guy makes in a year. She thought it was a clever idea. But then, the nature of the socialist elite is to proclaim equity but not practice it. Would AOC have been happy in Mao’s China? Would she be happy in a public fashion that was uniform? Would she be happy with less than her fame and position have afforded her under capitalism?


Is It All about Security through Pattern-making?


One last comment by way of introducing a future blog. We are creatures that love patterns. Some patterns we discover; others, we impose. The arrangement of molecules in a substance is an example of a discovered pattern. The arrangement of stars in a constellation is an example of an imposed pattern. In actuality, there is no Ursa Major, no Orion.


Socialism is an imposed pattern. Like constellations that group unrelated stars (Gemini, for example: “The Twins” Castor and Pollux, are two stars 33 and 51 light years away), the goal of socialism is to fit everyone into a pattern “for the sake of equity.” Such an imposition ignores the true and often chaotic relationships among individuals. We force in our minds a connection between Castor and Pollux, a connection that doesn’t exist. In socialism we force into a pattern individuals who don’t belong to a pattern. We relate what isn’t related.


The forcing might be a deep seated psychological need to have our world make sense. Internally insecure, we make the world around us “make sense” by putting its diverse pieces into a recognizable and stable pattern. The consequence of imposing patterns is that they govern the individual “units” (stars and people), and make them “fit” regardless of their obvious differences. Given the eventual and predictable rise of an oligarchy and dictator, socialism’s consequences are devastating to the individuals in the system. They are required to fit the pattern.


I don’t care if AOC went to a gala outfitted in a $30,000 dress. I do care that she got the dress through a “special favor” not afforded to those she says she represents. I do care that she wears it as part of an oligarchy’s message to force us all into a pattern of equity  while she enjoys the freedom that capitalism affords.


I’m not happy being forced into a pattern. Are you?

The precedent will be, to me, a dangerous one, akin to government censorship of opinion. But I can understand the motivation behind wanting bloggers in Florida to register. * Blogging can get a bit out of hand when the subject is political; it can even directly or indirectly inspire hate and hateful acts. But given that each is ultimately responsible for his own actions, anyone so moved to violence by another as to act on words, bears the responsibility of his actions.


We saw in the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich the detrimental effects on humanity in acts of horror perpetrated by “ordinary citizens” who “simply went along” with the government’s propaganda. We see those effects in eastern Ukraine today. Proclaiming someone as evil makes in others’ minds that person evil regardless of the veracity of the proclamation. Do today’s bloggers have the same power to motivate as the German and Russian propaganda machines? One might argue that they do.


A blog written in a basement can via the web travel the world in seconds. It can reach many minds both sympathetic and antithetic to the “cause du jour.” Bloggers can reach millions—though this one seems to reach less by several orders of magnitude. Yet, even the relatively short reach of “thisisnotyourpracticelife.com" might be classified as a “threat” under a Florida bill introduced by Senator Brodeur.


As in all our intentions, the idea always seems good at the outset, maybe even noble. I don’t really know the whole story behind the senator’s motivation. He might have suggested the bill to protect those in government from the “crazies out there,” people who like those German citizens simply went along with the holocaust, not even noting the immorality of their actions. As every year demonstrates across almost every society, such among us still exist: Think gang youth who do what they’re told or act in a manner consistent with the leadership. Maybe some bloggers have rabid followers. I think the possibility is a probability. There are, even from my perspective “crazies out there,” and I hope I have never unintentionally inspired any of them to act against others.


So, I do understand that blogging can have consequences—especially in the context of the rise of artificial intelligence (see previous blog https://thisisnotyourpracticelife.com/blog/heres-your-guarantee ). Given that any unscrupulous person with lots of money can fund a wide-reaching blog and given that such money can make use of AI, I, too, fear the effect of opinion on the “crazies out there.” But I also know the dangers of good intentions gone bad like some spring breaker falling off a balcony in Tijuana, a smile on his face turned into a frown on the way down: “This wasn’t such a good idea, but it seemed so at the moment.” Just a little imbalance can be dangerous. And political blogs are typically imbalanced. Senator Brodeur is probably right to be concerned, but the consequence of the bill has ramifications that might not be foreseeable.


The geographic spread, for example. Start in Florida, move to all southern states, creep into the Norttheast, and, walla!: “Professor Conte, register your blog in Pennsylvania, or pay a heavy fine (all proceeds, of course, to aid PA’s senior citizens like the lottery).”Then it becomes a national thing run by the Feds and controlled by deep-state agenda-driven people like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page who did their best to destroy the Trump presidency. “Look out, Professor, you’ve written against socialism and Bernie Sanders is President. Pay to blog. If’s for the good of the country.”


And that’s why I entitled this blog as I did. I can’t respect censorship of those who merely want to express an alternative, but I do understand censoring those who have an agenda to manipulate the minds of the very young by exploiting their confusion and naiveté. Of course, the comeback is “Who are you to decide?” Should we therefore censor those who want to address gender by posting cute cartoons about body transitions?


Actually, long ago and before I taught earth sciences, I started my university career as a member of the English Department, teaching, among the usual courses, one I entitled “Censorship, Pornography, and the Law.” I saw a need in the context of then current censorship law to address a contemporary problem during the late sixties and early seventies to provide my students with an understanding of the controversy. Mind you, I did not propose a resolution, but rather an understanding, particularly in regard to the humanities and the First Amendment.


One reality seems to be the almost universal acceptance of some kind of censorship, and I’m just not referring to the “Don’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Foisting on young children attention they don’t have about adult notions of sexuality is, I believe, “crossing the line,” particularly when it’s done by people whose motives a reasonable person might suspect lie more in proving a point than in “educating.” Should an educator in an elementary school classroom also be allowed to praise the glories of the state and the virtue of subsuming all individuality to the will of the few, the chosen, and the elite? The answer is “yes” if one wants Communism, socialism, and a “nation of sheep.” In a state-run society, difference dies. Individuality perishes.


I see two current attacks on freedoms that might be motivating Florida politicians to propose restrictions on bloggers and on entertainers in schools. First is the perceived attack on the freedom to mature under ethical supervision and second is the freedom to provide children protection against adult agendas that serve adult egos while confusing young minds. And this kind of censorship has nothing to do with elevating one lifestyle over another. Call my past self naive, but I remember not knowing or caring much about either politics or sex when I was six. Was I unusual, some weird kid too involved in play to not think of sex when I was trying to learn how to catch a ball or stay on a swing without falling off? Why wasn’t I concerned about transgenderism or cross-dressing? No doubt I found Some Like It Hot an entertaining movie when I was older than six but still quite naive.


“But in that movie, men dress like women,” you say. Yes, but I don’t believe, even in reflection, that the intent of the movie was to persuade me that that in itself is a goal. And I don’t remember the pundits during the Johnson Administration trying to shut down Walter Cronkite after he spoke out (meekly) about the Vietnam War. Of course, at the time individuals outside the mainstream media had no avenue to blog their dissent. They were silenced by default: Their only verbal avenue was “letters to the editor” if they were not public TV commentators.


Thus, the evolution of the Internet has brought us to the point of both complete freedom of expression and freedom to threaten subtly or overtly. And once again we’re faced with the problem of “How far is too far?” I’ll return to those Florida representatives who see blogging as something that needs to be controlled or at least threatened with control. Are we on that slippery slope, the slope that leads to an FBI, a CDC, or an IRS to withhold information or censor “on pain of punishment?


Sorry, Senator, with little due respect, I disagree.


* You can read the bill online at: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1316/BillText/Filed/PDF

A news report I read this morning suggests that artificial intelligence is “going after reporters’ jobs.” Well, more or less, that’s the story. So, I assume that AI is also after bloggers’ jobs, though if it is after this one’s, it should note there’s no remuneration. Yep. I write for nothing other than to stimulate others’ thinking. Noble, huh?


But how do you know that I wrote this? Could I be an AI in disguise. Could AI be my ghost writer. Having written a number of research papers for others, I can guarantee that ghost writing is a real thing. And I can also guarantee that I’m human and not machine. How?


Yesterday, I posted a little essay entitled “How Long Did the Universe Take to Establish Order” and another called “Anti-Conspiracy Conspirators and the Depths of Inquisitivenss” [sic.]. Yes, there’s your clue the blog was written by a human. When I first posted the latter, I left out the “e” in inquisitiveness. But that wasn’t my only mistake. Published in the morning, that essay was online for a number of hours before I realized the typo had blatantly lain across the top of the article like a theater’s electric marquee. Embarrassing, for sure. But human. I could fault the need for cataract surgery I’ve been putting off or an old prescription lens, but the truth is in haste to do something other than write, I was careless. And not only was I careless with the title, but with several other nagging errors, such as ending a question with a period. Human, all too human. Similarly, last night’s essay also contained some typos when I first posted it. I think I’ve since corrected them.


AI would not have made such errors. AI would probably not use contractions as I do. AI would probably not begin sentences with coordinating conjunctions. It would not use fragments as often as I do. But if AI does do all I’ve just listed, then I guess I can’t guarantee that I’m not a writing machine, not a thinking machine.


But my logic is also human. It reflects some perspectives that are laden with feelings. I have strong feelings about socialism, for example. I therefore write about its potential evils. If you’ve read the almost 2,000 articles I’ve posted on this site or those I have anthologized in the first volume (others to follow soon) of This Is NOT Your Practice Life, you certainly sense those strong feelings, often not subtly veiled in a bit of sarcasm. The rabidity I have attributed to climate change alarmists stands as an example.


So, yes, I’m human. And I believe in a human exchange of ideas, but don’t think I can’t see the value of some roles played by artificial intelligence: My Jeep has both backup and forward sensors; it warns me when a car is in my blind spot; it turns on the high beams; and it sends me messages about tire pressure, oil life, low gas, and service needs. However, I’m not inclined to get behind the wheel of a self-driving vehicle. And on my next flight, I hope there are pilots in the cockpit.


I believe I can guarantee that I am human because of my failings, not because of my perfections (not that I have any). Would a perfect world be perfect? Utopian writers have run the process through. In the main, most, if not all, such stories run into the war between choice and mandate. And you know how upset we humans become when the world is mandated. It really doesn’t matter out age, most of us balk at “being mandated,” as the recent politically charged and mostly useless mandates have shown. Perfect worlds aren’t, in reality, perfect.


Of course, many humans believe that perfection is attainable. Facelifts, breast implants, liposuction, and spas stand as proof that humans desire the ever elusive perfection. Many humans are happy with mandates, also. Heck, some Hollywood types went so far as to condemn people who didn’t want kindergarten children wearing masks during a pandemic that rarely affects children. And then the question they refused to ask is the one about the actual demonstrable efficacy of face masks in preventing the passage of a particle so small that it requires electron-microscope magnification to see. Sure, wear those cloth masks. But the need for some to be told how to be perfect is strong, and it is exacerbated by subtle and not-so-subtle images on the front covers of fashion magazines or entertainment tabloids that depict “perfect” bodies. That need for perfection is also one that seemed to drive the super-obedient during the past pandemic. They did not question; they condemned those who did question. No doubt the same population will seek perfect stability during the next frightful event and run to the waiting and often hypocritical arms of politicians who “act in the best interests.” One needs only look at the recent past to see the hubris and proclaimed perfection. Is my memory faulty or did Anthony Fauci claim, “I am science”? Didn’t the masked and vaccinated Fauci come down with the disease? Oh! But wait! Didn’t he also proffer the unprovable tenet that had he not been vaccinated, his Covid would have been worse? And isn’t that the same kind of claim of those who predict a “climate catastrophe”? How many times do we hear, “The science is settled”? And how many dire predictions have come and gone during the twenty-year hysteria driven by imperfect computer models?


Seems that some people desire the perfection they associate with artificial intelligence and science. Their mistake is in failing to realize that artificial intelligence runs on algorithms and science runs on imperfect humans. Algorithms can be both beneficial and detrimental, as the history of pre-Musk Twitter reveals in the quashing of conservatives and propagation of wokeness. As for scientists, as humans, they have the same kinds of failings that you and I have (sorry about including you in that, but someone had to say it).


Anyway, my typos are a guarantee that I am human. That doesn’t seem to be much to offer you, I know. “Wait, did I just read another essay by a brain that says it’s imperfect? I could have written this essay for him.”


But that’s my announced purpose, isn’t it? To get you to take what I offer and in your own imperfect way derive whatever thoughts your brain can produce on a topic or on peripheral matters is my goal. Neither you nor I will achieve perfection of thought, but both of us will reveal the uniquely human characteristic of combining reason and emotion. True, one will dominate the other in a given circumstance or on a given topic, but the play of both in how we see the world is an essence of being human and not artificial. Embrace the mistake; nevertheless, try to catch it before someone sees you made an error. *


*Here’s my warranty. I ain’t lookin’ at this again, so if it has typos, you’ll know Donald did it.

We don’t know much about the first 200 to 350 thousand years of the Universe. It’s a bit shrouded except for the WMAP and COBE satellite data that show in a collage of colors the minute variations of temperatures that led to the current lumpiness. That lumpiness, by the way, includes you. Yes, you’re a matter-energy lump.


But what we do know is the Beginning seems to have been if ever so briefly somewhat chaotic. Briefly? It took some fractions of a second for the stuff of the universe to form. The time frame of formation of subatomic particles and the eventual formation of the baryons that comprise your body is so compressed that it’s measured in femtoseconds, nanoseconds, well, we might as well say, split seconds. In other words, in a very short time the universe began to organize itself, and now, 13.8 billion years later—give or take a week—here we are in the midst of things working rather well, the atoms making molecules, the molecules coming together to make big things, and the universe becoming so well organized that it is conscious of itself. That last thing refers to you because you are the universe conscious of itself.


And you are given to ordering things, and I don’t mean “from GrubHub” or “from Domino’s.” I mean organizing. Putting things together to make sense of them like lining up desks in a classroom, mortaring bricks to make a wall, or pouring cake mix into one of those little separate paper cupcake cups. Yes, you do a bunch of ordering. And that includes organizing a social entity.


It seems that making things line up in order is in our cosmic nature, just as the universe gathered under the force of gravity the stars now collected into galaxies. So, it should surprise you that among your contemporaries there are groups that seem to favor chaos over order, groups that prefer anarchy and defunding the police.


Hot button topic? Touchy subject? Really? I think of the group of young people I saw on a video throwing stones at passing cars and protesting the very existence of the police. When an apparently old guy whose car was hit stopped the vehicle and got out to go toward them, one of the frightened girls said, “Someone call the police.” Ah! Chaos is good until it isn’t. Then order is good.


Regardless of the human failings that make some small percentage of police bad actors, there’s some commonsense in having a group assigned to keeping things in order. Drive around Rome or some other big city where traffic is helter-skelter and ask, “Is this what the universe has become?” Or look at the southern border of the United States, a border that was becoming more secure with the building of a wall and the “remain in Mexico” policy that the Biden Administration abolished, allowing—or should I say, inviting—hundreds of thousands of border crossers, who, by the way, have in many instances gotten “free stuff” at the expense of the American taxpayer.


I suppose a basic question is this: How did the rise of intelligence lead to the current desire for chaos? After 13.8 billion years—again, give or take a week—of organizing, the universe arrived at a pinnacle of consciousness that now rejects organization.


And apparently, the proof lies in those defund-the-police advocates and the anarchists who offer no goal other than to destroy order.


Of course, one might say that there’s third side to the chaos-order coin, and that side is extreme order, that is, the imposition of martial law and the quashing of individual freedom. That’s a legitimate concern. Police states are not happy states. Oppressed people are not happy people. So, there has to be an organizing ethics that pervades social order. But in today’s America the hues are divided like the lines on a spectrograph, there’s little melding of minds and softening of stances. From a perspective of the 13.8 billion years of order leading to consciousness, those who oppose defunding the police seem to be the more reasonable of the two opposing groups.


Thirteen point eight billion years ago—give or take a week— the universe began to organize itself in seconds. All these many billions of years later, we can’t seem to get the conscious universe to agree on order and disorder. Is this entropy at play? Have we cracked the egg of order that we cannot put back into the shell?

Just a short note here, nothing much out of the ordinary in today's American culture. Seems that the major media’s refusal to accept even the possibility that the pandemic started with a lab leak was an example of irresponsible reporting based on politics. The Chinese government’s Wuhan lab, which was devoted in part to genetically altering bat viruses “for study,” was in fact, the source of that pandemic as many once labeled as "conspiracy-theorists" had suggested.


But the narrative didn’t suit the media or the politicians. So, like the sycophants of any political organization, reporters accepted the political story without unwavering inquisitiveness that, I believe, should be the foundation of journalism. Go where the story takes you, and not where the politics point.


But what’s new here in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Didn’t we just spend three or four years and two impeachments on “Russian collusion” in spite of knowing about the fallacious sources of information? And the snide and smirking pundits who pushed the stories about the collusion and the pandemic’s origins happily collected pay checks for advancing what the reporters obediently reported for the sake of politics. Goodness, the media even published and praised a book by the NY Governor they labeled the darling of their cause, regardless of his having sent the elderly into care homes rife with the disease, leading to the deaths of many.


And so on it goes, the increasingly more tiresome coverage by anti-conspiracy conspirators who either recognize what they are perpetrating is false or fail to recognize that what they are perpetrating is false. In the former, they are guilty of intellectual fraud. In the latter, they are guilty of being just plain stupid. Where’s the relentless inquisitiveness in the name of the truth?


Of course, the anti-conspiracy theorists will claim that too many conspiracy theories (actually hypotheses) are “out there” for them to trace and fact-check. But, are there?
How about the biggest of “conspiracy theories,” the ones that determine how much of a population sees reality? Humans have always been subject to rumor, but rumor’s control is exacerbated by a 24/7 media intent on avoiding any truth that runs counter to the media’s left-leaning.


It’s not that the media could not have easily found hints of evidence to pursue in either the collusion or lab leak stories. There were many such hints, many avenues of inquiry to run. But that failure to pursue hints suggests another problem in our contemporary media: Laziness, pure, unadulterated laziness. And that laziness seems to be common in the martinets who write and speak for the mainstream media.


So, we end up with a press whose most in-depth questions amount to “What kind of underwear do you wear, Mr. Clinton, boxers or briefs?” And “What kind of ice cream do you like, Mr. Biden?” The inquisitive press skims the surface, and rarely dives beneath the ripples to experience the depths of a story.


But maybe the pressure exerted by editors and producers is too great for reporters. For every 33 feet of depth in the ocean, the pressure increases by one atmosphere (14.7 pounds per every square inch of surface at sea level). Go deeper, the pressure starts to crush, to squeeze. Does diving deeply into a story frighten reporters that when they try to surface, they will experience the bends?


When everyone remains on the surface, no one knows what lies below. In the instances of at least two recent stories that the media insisted on telling, what lies below is lies.