Know thyself (translation “know yourself” or “Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton”).


The dictum written at the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi has engendered discussions since the time of Heraclitus—and probably before. We have our own versions, such as “going off in search of oneself.”


There’s no way to know when we humans began to wonder about identity, but surely any human brain during the history of our species could have sought such self-knowledge, especially in the context of a life lived among others: Others past and present represented by oral and written expressions of what it means to have (or be) an identity.


Lost?


Have we been programmed since the time of Freud to believe we are “lost”? Is there a pervasive enculturation of identity crisis that has, for example, led to addiction on the heavy end and new-age-grasping at pseudo-psych on the light end of the scale of Self? Or is the search for identity driven early on by teenage hormones and the drive to determine one’s destiny through independence that frees a person from known parental and adult controls possibly into a dependence on charismatic leaders?


There are two ways to find identity, one easy and the other hard. The easy way lies in attaching oneself to a group: Political, religious, craft, labor (union), cult, military, philosophical. The hard way involves extensive soul-searching, often in isolation or in some quest. I suppose there’s a third way: Through mind-bending enhanced by drugs of some kind, some so potent they remove the Self during out-of-body experiences.


The Quest


The search for identity has long been a theme in the arts, from Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus to the characters in James Joyce’s and John Updike’s novels. The plethora of self-help books is testimony to this tradition. I confess that I initiated this website as a guide to Self through mental mapping because knowing WHERE we are is often the context of WHO we are.


Such a tie between place and Self is the context in any society for “appropriateness” and “inappropriateness.” Obvious examples? Senator John Fetterman in hoody and shorts in the Capitol; cussing loudly in a library’s reading room; playing loud music on public transportation. In fact, place plays such an important role in the search for identity that some people travel to natural wonders they believe to house mystical gateways to identity, like the Grand Canyon, Kilimanjaro, and to sites like Sonoma and Lhasa, where they believe they can “find themselves.” I suppose that such mystical places have increased by several orders of magnitude with the advent of Zoom calls, FaceTime, and virtual reality.


Can Identity Be Found outside the Context of Place?


An anecdote: I remember being home one morning when a friend FaceTimed me from Siccar Point in Scotland, a geologic feature that inspired a key insight of the “Father of Geology” James Hutton and through his writings, influenced me. I had put Siccar Point on an unrealistic bucket list I could never complete, and yet there I was via FaceTime at a place that had captivated my own thinking and informed my enthusiasm for geology, a key to the way I see the world and my place in it. Through the tech of that call I was and simultaneously wasn’t in a place that had influenced my Weltanschauung and my sense of who I was on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. As Hutton wrote about the geology he had observed, the planet was one formed by processes rooted in the deep past and that continues not just in the present, but will continue to an indefinite future. “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,” Hutton concluded, “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Such a conclusion became part of my perspective on my own finite existence, one that I will live out in places that were and will be different from what I can know in just a short lifetime.


Searches Made Easy


Self-help books, YouTube videos, social media connections, actual travel, and self-examination: Searching for one’s identity is easy nowadays—if it weren’t so difficult. The difficulty lies in the myriad options and the pressures to define oneself or to wear the appropriate mask. A number of TikTok shorts reveals a wide swath of humans desperate to define their identities as unique through body piercings, tattoos,“gender identifiers” like plural pronouns, and behavior deemed to deviate from traditional cultural standards or stretch them into hyperbole.


Identity Shapes World View; World View Shapes Identity


I know that my own identity fits into the mold of western civilization with some faint echoes of eastern thought. The West is largely the product of ancient Greek thought and Christian philosophy and theology. That Weltanschauung is a basis of my identity that I probably can’t shake. If I seek myself, I will inevitably do so in that context. I might adopt some characteristics of Orientals, but they will be addenda to a life already lived as an Occidental.


Find oneself? Are we as lost as contemporary society wants us to think we are? Maybe we need merely to understand our world views sufficiently to articulate them to achieve a sense of identity. Know oneself? Does the quest for such self knowledge lead to unnecessary doubt and anxiety? Do modern searches for identity occur under predetermined archetypes framed by culture? If so, then in finding ourselves, we are really finding others, and knowing ourselves means knowing others or stereotypes.

In Episode 4, Season 3 of The Orville, Gordon takes a version of the Rorschach test. His interpretations add up to good comedy as he sees in each image, we assume from his responses, “dirty pictures”—as in porn dirty. It’s a good example of how we carry our emotional baggage, biases, and personal interests with us wherever we go. In the case of Gordon, sexual innuendo lies in the eye of the beholder.


Rorschach tests come in many forms. Images in the news outlets and online also serve to reveal underlying baggage, the most recent example coming to my mind is imagery associated with Donald Trump’s visit to the Bronx. The “Gordon” responding in this instance was no less than the governor of New York. Upon being asked to comment on what she saw in the Bronx gathering, she responded “clowns.” Really. Kathy? “Clowns”? You looked at political opponents and saw “clowns”? Well, I guess if you had used Hilary Clinton’s eyes, you might have seen “deplorables.”


“Rorschaching”


Reducing what we see in others to “what first comes to mind” reveals little about others and much about ourselves. Surely, neither Hochul nor Clinton would want to be summed in a single word, especially a derogatory term chosen by a political opponent.


“Rorschaching” opponents because their opinions or perspectives differ is a mark of a simple mind either too lazy or too wrapped in bias to give a reasoned and detailed perspective. Unfortunately, most of us at some time “Rorschach” others.


Both sides of the political aisle have “Rorschached” members of the other side, but I believe there is a subtle difference in their motivations. Members on the Left “Rorschach” from an unwarranted hubris and elitism steeped in actual ignorance but hidden behind a veil of pseudo-omniscience. Members on the Right do so from a frustration born from observing not only the hubris and elitism, but also from the repetition of failed and wasteful policies that, regardless of both the waste and failures, the Left clings to rather than admitting the realities of their policies, such as “sanctuary cities and states” that give away citizens’ resources to noncitizens.


Maybe, Kathy, just maybe, those “clowns” in the Bronx look at the images of illegal aliens with “free stuff” provided by the state and the City of New York and see them through a lens of practicality and realism.

In The Expectation Effect, David Robson writes of the brain’s predictive function:


    “According to an increasing number of neuroscientists, the brain is a ‘prediction machine’ that constructs an elaborate simulation of the world, based as much on its expectations and previous experiences as on the raw data hitting the senses. For most people, most of the time these simulations coincide with objective reality, but they can sometimes stray far from what is actually in the physical world” (12). *


To predict accurately, the brain has to start with precise memories. They are the foundation of expectation; they prime the brain for what is to come. When memory is faulty, the prediction machine fails us. Robson quotes neuroscientist Moshe Bar of Bar-Ilan University in Israel: “‘We see what we predict, rather than what’s out there’” (13).


Joe Biden. Need I elaborate? Okay, then… During his “It’s-mostly-about-me” commencement address at West Point, Biden said he was accepted but turned down an appointment to the Naval Academy. There’s no record of such an appointment, just as there is no record of his having, as he said, three degrees or of graduating at or near the top of his class, of driving a “big rig,” or of some other personal stories like conversations that could never have occurred, like one with French President Mitterrand dead 25 years before the conversation supposedly took place or with the Amtrak train conductor, also deceased before their talk. With regard to his claim about his ranking high among students at Syracuse, fact-checkers have revealed his standing at #76 out of 85 classmates. False memories? Outright lies?


Biden’s numerous falsehoods are rather well documented, so there’s little to be gained by enumerating all of them here. Instead, the focus here is on his brain’s predictive ability and its alignment with realities.


The role of memory in assessing the present is a topic I have mentioned with regard to the eyes’ blindspot. We see with a brain that fills in details not visible to us as we scan a scene. We don’t need all the actual currently available visible details to recognize faces and places we have previously encountered. Does the brain make mistakes in this? Of course: “Oh! Sorry. I thought you were someone else.” But the brain usually serves us well in this regard. We can distinguish among similar people, such as relatives and even between twins. But the key lies in accurate or nearly accurate memories.


Biden’s numerous falsehoods are rather well documented, so there’s little to be gained by enumerating them here. Instead, the focus here is on his brain’s predictive ability and its alignment with realities.


Why Keep Appeasing Iran?


Apparently, Biden’s—like Obama’s—releasing billions of dollars to the Iranian theocracy committed to “death to America” is based on a prediction not founded on experience, that is, on accurate memory. No previous appeasement strategy has worked to mitigate Iran’s disruptive terrorism. The recent release of six billion dollars to the regime shows an alignment out of touch with reality. Just as the Obama/Biden Administration’s nuclear deal met with subterfuge and obfuscation and attacks through Iranian intermediaries, so any prediction that favors a positive expectation is doomed to failure from the start. Yet, Biden will continue to hold expectations not in alignment with reality. Thus, the recent condolences sent to Iran on the death of its president, the “butcher of Tehran,” Raisi.


Why Keep Insisting on EVs?


There is no evidence that America’s switching to carbon neutralism by 2050 will do anything whatsoever to offset the rate of temperature change (supposedly upward) across the planet. No one can quantify the percent of change effected by green tech. In the interim and because of his predictions, America’s energy, the most fundamental reason for the country’s rise to world dominance over the past two centuries, will fail to keep abreast of needs, America’s dependence on outside sources of rare earths and strategic metals will increase, and pollutants associated with “green energy tech” will become a growing environmental threat. Additionally, his expectations that countries like Russia and China will act in world interests and not their own interests, are similarly rooted in faulty memory or in the fog of false and fictional memories.


Will the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars do what Biden predicts? What if, as meteorologist John Shewchuk argues, any current or future rise in temperature is part of an ongoing two-millennia Bray/Hallstatt Cycle ** or 976-year Eddy Cycle related to the ending of the Little Ice Age? Will Biden’s commitment to de-carbonizing America generate the expectations he predicts? And what if, upon looking back in 2050, America finds that extrapolated data—NOAA’s estimates on temperatures derived from U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations that do not exist—provided a biased record over decades? What if Biden’s “existential threat is no more real than his numerous fabrications?


Predictions based on falsehoods are as useful as wings on an ostrich.


Here’s My Prediction


Experience informs my prediction. Biden will continue to expect a world unsupported by past realities.



*Robson, David. (2022)The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World. New York. Holt.
**BRAY, J. Glaciation and Solar Activity since the Fifth Century BC and the Solar Cycle. Nature 220, 672–674 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/220672a0

That so many college age students have taken up the sword of antisemitism is a good argument for the reality of social contagion and the need for mental vaccines to protect against epidemic social infections like the recent insidious viral socialism.


The Mind like the Body Needs Immunity


As we know, physical immunity requires the body to “learn” how to protect itself.
Thus, isolating ourselves from ordinary sicknesses does us no good when we encounter them. To simplify: Kids exposed to other kids in school develop immunities. I suspect a number of kids, after a year of homeschooling during COVID, upon their return to classrooms had lost their herd immunity to the sniffles. The simplification is, of course, a generalization, but it also seems to be applicable to the general population. With so many people infected with COVID, I believe that saying most of the population was exposed to the pandemic is a legitimate claim. Did such exposure engender immunity? No way to prove that qualitatively because of the arguable effect of vaccinations, but I could entertain the hypothesis that most of us have some herd immunity protection.


Are 21st Century people Immune to the Plague or the Spanish Flu of 1918?


Like the underground part of a 3,000-year-old Mediterranean olive tree, the roots of antisemitism don’t die. If the above ground trunk dies, the roots grow a new one. The surface expression comes and goes, but it appears to resurface indefinitely.  So, what’s with college students going on antisemitic rampages? How did antisemitism resurface?


On occasion, a fright runs through the population that some old disease like smallpox,  the Black Death, or the Spanish flu will resurface. We fear our long isolation from the disease will make us vulnerable. Look for example, at spring 2024’s return of the Bird Flu.


Are today’s college-age antisemites vulnerable because of their intellectual isolationism? I wonder how many of them have been exposed to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Granted, at 1,049 pages it can be a bit of a slog for Cliff Notes-readers, but for YouTube-savvy young people, numerous videos about the atrocities committed by Nazis are available with a click. And then there’s that relatively short Anne Frank story…


Isolation


Isolation. They just haven’t been exposed to the realities of the Holocaust or the Alhambra Decree of March, 1492, the Spanish Expulsion. And they have similarly not been exposed to antisemites’ unreasoned hate that has resurfaced in groups like the KKK and Neo Nazis. When such “germs” are released into their communities, they have no immunity. The sickness of antisemitism spread rapidly.


And like bacteria and viruses, that sickness mutated into anti-Americanism. Now that campuses have closed, effectively quarantining those with the disease, the sickness once spread through on-campus “carriers” has largely vanished. But there are still carriers, some purposefully infected and lying in wait for a chance to reinfect, probably at political gatherings. No one can count out the potential for flareups in the fall as students return to school, ready to waste more of their parents’ money as their disease returns (or, given the $162 billion Biden “loan forgiveness,” waste YOUR money).


Act Preemptively


Summer affords college administrators the opportunity to quash the sickness before it returns to campuses. But I believe few administrations will act because many believe that acting will only incite more students to return to campus “on a mission.” Unable to infuse the campuses with the anti-antisemitism prophylactics of cosmopolitanism and history, the feckless administrators will probably do little to protect the herd. The isolated will continue their parochial lives while claiming a social justice Anschauung that is irrelevant to those they support from a safe distance, that is, the Hamas terrorists of murderous intent. The American youth will be re-infected. The disease will resurface.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Here we go, reinventing the wheel.


Press Release: “The National Science Foundation has awarded $15.5 million to researchers at the University of Chicago over six years to establish a new field of physics to understand adaptation in living matter.” *


You’re about to fork over $7,078 your our taxes per day during the course of a half dozen years so that people at the U. of Chicago can apply physics to what we already know from paleontology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, neurology, and biochemistry. I just can’t wait for the cascade of papers, no doubt all of them peer-reviewed that the grant winners will produce. Ignore that some of the money will fall into the abyss of administrators’ expenses and travel (to conferences)—the researchers probably never heard of conference calls, Zoom meetings, and email.


I could save the NSF—and you—money.The answer the grantees are looking for is called a brain, with its branching nerves, synapses, neurotransmitters, and all. It’s called stimulus-response and survival. It’s called random adaptations and DNA inheritance. There, now you have it on the cheap. Just saved you 15.5 mil. You’re welcome.


Lest you call me a closed-minded ignoramus, I will provide a short discussion.


Do sponges Dream when They Sleep?


Brains, Donald? Surely, you jest in an Occam’s type of humor.


In 1980 I attended conference on sponges, just about, if not, the simplest multicellular animals composed of cells with different functions working to support survival. Simultaneously. I was neighbor to a visiting medical researcher from Israel who was studying sponges in a search for their means of intercellular communication.


But there’s more to the story.   


Seems that brainless sponges can go to sleep. Somehow the cells in a sponge cooperate in a rest period. The cells shut down through some communication system—maybe biochemical activity.  That they can communicate and cooperate in the absence of a central nervous system might be a key to understanding cancer cells. Strange behavior in an animal without interconnected neurons.These cooperating cells also seem to recognize enemies, as clear boundaries separate encrusting sponges and living coral polyps, another group of simple animals.


Is it all biochemistry? Or are there physical forces involved, Newtonian or quantum mechanical forces? If the latter two, will our 15.5 million dollars provide proof? I’m not confident. As in most NSF funded projects, like the shrimp on a treadmill, there will probably be no accountability. And since this particular expenditure  will fund a ”Center,” I suspect the funding will be renewed six years from now, 12 years from now, and ad infinitum. Justification will lie in the published research papers and government inertia.


Quantum Evolutionary Biology?


A perusal of books on biology and physics might give a hint about what our 15.5 million bucks might buy. Adrian Bejan’s 2016 book The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything and his prior (2013) co-authored (with J. Peder Zane) book Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organizations might foreshadow the U. Of Chicago’s potential output. You are free to see if there is potential for advancing our understanding of adaptation in living matter and information storage.


Unless physicists can pinpoint the subatomic nature of cell communication, tying for example, superposition and entanglement to evolutionary change, I can’t see justification for the expenditure of $15,5 million over six years. Unless they can show that pressure, and not biochemistry or electrochemistry, is how nerves send signals, I have grave doubts about studies focused on “how living matter can store, retrieve, and process information.”


Is physics related to biochemistry? Short answer: Yes. But skeptic that I am, I can’t imagine that this expenditure will produce anything beyond neologisms and new “fields” of study that will perpetuate for decades among the “privileged in-the-know researchers” with little concrete results—much like string theorists who have as yet to run an experiment on a “string,” but who keep getting NSF grants.


Maybe Brains Aren’t All We Hype Them To Be


One could argue that models of matter storing information already exist in crystal formation that is the process of joining molecules in repeated patterns that create minerals abiotically. But I would ascribe those patterns more to chemistry than to physics. Minerals can be thought of as manifestations of chemical properties like valences and the electromagnetic rules of bonding. Sure, some researchers have hypothesized that clay minerals provided a pattern for early life to piggy back, but that remains hypothetical.


Information?


Info? That’s the goto topic among astrophysicists when they write about black holes nowadays. Any component of the Cosmos, from a rock to a person, can be thought of as a carrier of information. Black holes are where such information goes into the eternal trash basket. In the context of astrophysics, I suppose all that trashed information arose from the Big Bang. Will the folks at the new Center for Living Systems resolve the as yet unsolved problems centered in the evolution of this “information”? Will they find the answers in six years? With 15,5 million dollars?


Let’s set a date, say May 18,, 2030, to reassess. See you then. Starbucks? Okay. Maybe one of the Center’s researchers flush with grant money will buy us coffee and explain.


*https://news.uchicago.edu/story/nsf-establish-155m-center-living-systems-university-chicago

Everyone wants to know the future. This interminable discovery that is the present requires constant vigilance and adaptation. How easy life would be with reliable foreshadowing! But, hmmnnn, in whom do we place our trust?


The best job—ever. Weather forecaster. You can be consistently wrong, and no one will hold you accountable. The reason? You put out another forecast while someone evaluates the veracity of your last forecast. And the disgruntled who have to put up umbrellas at picnics and Little League games have their immediate weather to consider. No one can keep up because everyone is immersed in the next forecast or the current weather. Everyone rides the promise of the forecast into a future of surprise that stimulates elation or resignation. Everyone wants to know the future.


An Admission


Prestigious institutes like the one that bears the name of 1918 Nobel Laureate Max Planck, to whom we owe thanks for quantum theory, house brilliant and respected researchers. Over the years, the Planck Institute has branched into sciences other than theoretical physics. Count “climate science” among them. Yes, the Institute’s researchers have joined Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry in tackling the “existential threat” of global warming. And why not? Haven’t they entered the ranks of the unaccountable, the protected realm of TV weather forecasters?


But these guys are scientists; and these guys seem to have some integrity cemented in the tradition of scientific doubt. Science is not science if it is not constantly questioned. And that doubt appears online at Max Planck-Gesellschaft. * In an admission you would likely never hear from Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology admit:


    “To date, all climate models still suffer from one thing: they are not good at taking into account how global warming affects clouds and, conversely, how changes in different types of clouds inhibit or contribute to the observed warming.” *


Yep, those puffy white aggregations of water droplets and ice crystals that harbor shifting shapes our mind’s eye imagines as we look up from our blanket on the grass have an unknown effect like a feedback loop on climate parameters. Add to the effect of clouds other unknowns, such as the change in albedo that comes with reforestation— a popular geo-engineering proposal—and you get a complexity that exceeds the potential of models to predict anything beyond a probable scenario for a region.


Give Them an “A” for Effort


Participation trophies aren’t just limited to American children’s sports teams. The climate guys get them, also, as all those annual COP meetings show. Anyway, here’s one of those forecasts that earns a participation trophy:

'Scientists have calculated how the water balance in Germany will change as the temperature rises. According to their predictions, it will rain more in winter, and there will be more droughts in summer.” **


Question: But will the winter rains offset the summer droughts? What will the evapotranspiration ledger reveal if this predicted scenario prevails for a few decades?


Partial answer: “Hamburg climate researchers [are motivated] to make the threat of global warming more tangible for people today. They are working on models that provide reliable predictions for the coming decades. Such medium-term forecasts are hindered by the fact that the climate is generally subject to relatively large statistical fluctuations. It is therefore difficult to reliably identify clear trends in the near future.” ***


Spend $Trillions


So, what are climate alarmists going to do? Well, Joe Biden and company plan to spend billions to trillions of dollars on every conceivable plan to geo-engineer the planet with little more predictability than your local weather forecaster’s warning that there’s a 50% chance rain will fall on your picnic.


*https://www.mpg.de/11863295/climate-and-transformation
**Ibid.
***Ibid.

What to do, what to do, what to…


So, now, MIT is abolishing the requirement for a DEI statement from applicants. Have the woke awakened? Are they acknowledging that knowledge, skills, and accomplishments are more important in candidates than commitments to political correctness?


But then there’s all that antisemitism raging on campus. “Hey, keep the noise down out there. How’s a researcher supposed to think about Commonwealth Fusion Systems ramping up a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth? You guys think Hamas is interested in furthering research in anything other than death and destruction?”


Come to Jesus Moment


MIT released this statement: “…the threat of outside interference and potential violence is not theoretical, it is real: We have all seen circumstances around encampments at some peer institutions degenerate into chaos. As recently as this weekend, we were presented with firm evidence of outside interference on US campuses, including widely disseminated literature that advocates escalation, with very clear instructions and suggested means, including vandalism.”—Sally Kornbluth, President


Who would have thunk it? Duh!


Why do academics fear taking a stand against anarchy? Can they not distinguish between free speech and hate speech or between peaceful protests with reasoned arguments and shouting epithets, defacing statues, breaking stuff, and threatening Jewish students by the obviously uninformed young pawns of foreign adversaries?


President Sally released her statement on May 6, well into a budding campus crisis. Contrast her delayed statement with Father Hesburgh’s “15-minute rule” at Notre Dame in the late 1960s (see my “Delusions of Wisdom in Ivy League Schools” 5/7/24). Hesburgh was a firm believer in accountability and consequences who also had the insight to anticipate brewing trouble.


Reeling Them in on a Line with Only a Hook


Is there something in the background that makes university administrators feckless? Is it their “feel good” liberalism? Is it their ivory tower isolationism? Maybe their protective aegis of tenure?


University managers come largely from the ranks of university professors. Sure, there are some people with business and finance backgrounds in the mix; they run the business side of universities. But academia proper lies mostly in former or current academics’ hands, many of who spent their careers without the pressure that, say, an industry leader faces to produce or leave: Industry and business thrive in an unforgiving world of strict accountability. Not so in academia, where the privilege of unaccountability provides a context for ineffective and often wasteful decisions; a context recently controlled by wokeness. Vacillating former professors, secure in their employment, have enabled the loudest voices to control campuses. I believe that today’s campuses are the product of a trend of trends.


Academics seem to love trends. It’s this penchant for trends that has been a contributor to today’s campus problems. Once a trend is popularized in colleges, few academics have the temerity to speak against it. The trend typically runs its course toward failure before a replacement trend takes over. This permeates all of academia, even the sciences. Take physics, for example. The job market was open during recent years, as Peter Wolt points out, almost exclusively to “string theorists.” *


String theory was trending—and still is. It has been vogue to hire string theorists even though string theory has no experimental support. Academics love trends. They make them feel secure. The product of the trend? An America with fewer physicists dedicated to practicality and more with their heads in clouds.


Remember one-room schoolhouses? I witnessed the construction of a new elementary school that had no interior walls. The cacophony of different classes simultaneously occupying the same space almost immediately made effective teaching untenable as teachers of different classes struggled to “get control and keep attention.” Lacking the insight of commonsense, those responsible for designing the school wasted a million dollars on open spaces had to spend more tax dollars on installing walls. Duh!


My experiences with academics through a four-decade career taught me that people managing education are suckers for anything “new” or popular, especially that promulgated through neologisms.  This is evident in just about every curriculum’s development. Managers, eager to demonstrate they serve some purpose, latch onto methodologies and “philosophies” that promise a revamping of the current system. These “new” programs come and go in a blink and are usually based on subjective principles or very limited studies.  Today’s most recent example with a neologism? Gamification. **


Glad you asked.


According to the Stanford Report, “Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.”


Games, you say?


“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said [Dan] Schwartz, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”


And as in all such trends, from one-room schoolhouses through wokeism majors to gamification, academics “jump on the bandwagon.” In most instances trends grow out of hypotheses that have never been rigorously tested.


A Far Stretch?


For me, the relationship between academic trends and campus unrest requires little stretching of the imagination. Like string theory, and the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, campus antisemitism, the most recent trend, arrived already packaged or, in the words of Obama for his 800 billion-dollar stimulus, shovel ready. Little development required. Open and use.


Tell me. Could not even Jewish faculty members detect the growing hate? Didn’t they see any evidence of a trend, such as the persecution of German Jews prior to Kristallnacht? Did the recent Kristallnacht on campuses catch everyone by surprise? Did the trend of feckless wokeism blind administrators and faculty to the antisemitic takeovers? Did no one anticipate? Was everyone hoping that ignoring was the best tactic?


Recently, I faulted university administrators and faculty for their lack of wisdom. I now fault them for their cowardice and/or indifference. Their willingness to jump on popular social trends coupled with their inability or unwillingness to buck or thwart those trends meant exacerbating a seething hatred or instilling one in young minds unfamiliar with true evil. They further coddled an already soft coddled youth of privilege and affluence, youth who would not survive life under Hamas in Gaza.


*Wolt, Peter. 2007. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law


**https://news.stanford.edu/report/2024/02/14/technology-in-education/

How Did We Survive This Long?


Fossil evidence is good, but not perfect. Radiometric dating has some limitations, also. Those two sources of information on the history of our species make our origin in both time and space arguable. Roughly, however, we can trace humanity back more than 200,000 years, farther if we want to include related species and precursors.


If, as David M. Raup argues in his book Extinction: Bad genes, or Bad Luck? Earth has housed as many as 50 billion species over the past 3.8 billion years and that as many as 40 million species exist today, then humans evolved on a rather risky planet. The risk reveals itself not in the surviving species, but rather in those that have gone extinct. Raup estimates that only one in 1000 species that ever existed is now alive. He also estimates that the average lifespan of a species, from horseshoe crabs to fruit flies, is about 4 million years, the origin of the former going back to a time before the dinosaurs with the species undergoing little change, whereas the origin of the latter might date to only 40 million years ago with many species variations. In short, species don’t survive long on average. Horseshoe crabs are unaware of their good fortune. How aware of that 200+millennia-history are humans? We’ve survived as a species some harrowing events, losing many species members in each.


Causes of extinction vary. Destruction of habitat probably heads the list of causes, but over-predation, disease, and competition for resources also play extinction roles in Nature. Our ability to adapt and our geographical distribution afforded some protection from natural extinction, but neither of those is a guarantee against extinction by our own hands.


Why Bring This to Your Attention? Suicides, Murders, Wars, etc.


As I skimmed through headlines the other day, I paused on two stories, one about a murder, and the other about a suicide. The juicy details? Not really important here. Daily papers are replete with such tales. You can substitute any names you want in the stories of the recently deceased. With the exception of loved ones, few will think about them a month from now—even when the details are “noteworthy,” as in the deaths of the “famous,” say, Hollywood stars and political leaders.


Anyway, in recent years in the USA alone nearly 50,000 people committed suicide annually. The country adds about 15,000 to 20,000 murders to the annual list of deaths. The total numbers of such deaths—both self-inflicted and other-inflicted—pale in comparison with total deaths from all causes, but they are significant enough to keep suicides and murders in daily headlines, overwhelming our brains with too many to remember. Think about it: About 65,000 deaths reported over the publication of 365 daily papers, or 178 deaths per day. Who can keep individuals in mind?


And these numbers derive from a single year in a single country. Worldwide suicide rates vary from under 5 per 100,000 (mostly Third World countries) to more than 15 per 100,000 (developed countries). That sums to a big absolute number of self-inflicted extinctions in a global population of eight billion humans.


Add wars, usually dozens of them every year. Lots of deaths annually. Seems we humans truly have an extinction-wish. The only saving property is our proclivity for procreation—and even that is marred by elective abortions and biological weapons like COVID. Add fanatics’ desire for various genocides to the extinction drive. Gosh! How have we survived?


A hundred billion humans over the past 200,000+ years; only 8% of them are alive, and they are destined for increasing risks of annihilation as more killers (self and others) arrive on the planet. Some kid under control of a terrorist group is at this very moment being trained in extinction protocols, such as murdering others—even at the expense of his own life.


Scared?


Frightened or depressed by all this? Realistically, you should be. But so far you—and by extension your species—have survived. Earth still has a human population. Hold on, no matter what it takes. The species is counting on you to prevent the same kinds of oblivion that eradicated between five and fifty billion previous denizens of Earth.


Humans are the universe conscious of itself. When we’re gone, we take that awareness with us. Without that consciousness, the Cosmos is meaningless. So, your survival and the survival of the other members of your species are potentially the only ways that meaning itself survives.


Alive today? The universe thanks you, which is equivalent to your thanking yourself.

As a Professor Emeritus, I can attest to a certain contradiction or irony in academia. My four decades of experiences with colleagues from many universities have convinced me  that Isaac Asimov was correct when he said, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science [read “academia” here] gathers knowledge faster than society [read “it”] gathers wisdom.” This seems especially true in today’s Ivy League schools, all populated by highly erudite professors, some of who have recently demonstrated a lack of wisdom.


Wisdom is elusive. We can strive for it, strive to be “a Solomon,” but proof of achievement only comes in retrospect. Achieved wisdom appears in that rear view to be sibling of common sense. In the recent campus protests supported by some faculty, common sense played no significant role. In fact, it was absent, its place taken by agenda-blindness.


Campus Riots for Hamas, 2024


The news cycle in April and May 2024, months after massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023 has been filled with reports on campus unrest as supporters of Palestinians seem to have conflated the people of Gaza with a terrorist organization called Hamas, those perpetrators of the massacre and subsequent rocket attacks on Israel. The American protests morphed into property damage, intimidation, and actual violence in an evolution guided by outside instigators.


Failing to anticipate the inevitable lawlessness of an anarchic mob repeatedly shouting antisemitic and anti-American threats, the administrators of universities took no firm stand. There was no “15-minute rule” in place at Columbia. Instituted by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, Notre Dame’s president during the Vietnam War, the “rule” gave protestors just a quarter hour to clear the office hallway—or any other place—they chose to block. Noncompliance meant suspension or expulsion, consequences the “Notre Dame Ten” suffered for their protest.


Columbia, in contrast, has made a sweeping cancellation of all graduation ceremonies, essentially punishing the majority of seniors who did not participate in the encampment or harassment. Wise, truly wise. Right? Solomon-like: No offer to cut the graduation “in half”; instead, just kill “the baby.” [I write this in the assumption that even antisemites know the story of “Solomon and the baby” though in the parochialism of the college student mind stories from various cultures like Judaism are probably unknown]


The Vietnam War that motivated the Notre Dame Ten to protest was simultaneously similar and different from the Israeli military action motivated the Columbia protest of 2024. It was similar in that collateral damage and injury occurred to innocent people. In the instance of the Vietnam war, there were many Vietnamese villagers who suffered, most notably, those in the village of My Lai, the site of a massacre perpetrated by American troops. It was different in that the Vietnam War was not a response to a Pearl Harbor-like attack the Israelis suffered during the October 7 massacre. Instead, the Vietnam War was a geopolitical action aimed at an encroaching Communism during the Cold War, sparked by the alleged Gulf of Tonkin incident. In contrast, the Israeli incursion into Gaza was a response to an Israeli analog of Pearl Harbor and 9-11.


The Missing Piece


Interviews with Columbia's protesters indicate that many, if not all of them, cannot acknowledge the October 7 massacre. They cannot acknowledge the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli citizens, and they cannot acknowledge that Hamas is a brutal enslaver of Gaza’s citizens. It is an organization that has redirected humanitarian aid to buying weapons and building fortifications. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid have gone not to building schools and hospitals in Gaza, but rather to buying rockets from Iran. Hamas, hiding among the people of Gaza, has a single intention: Genocide of Jews. The Israelis, in defending themselves, have no genocidal intention. Rather, they seek to free themselves of an imminent threat whose embodiment occurred on October 7. They seek to destroy a sworn enemy with whom no previous negotiations have worked.


Somehow the actual and verifiable situation in Israel and Gaza has not been taught at Columbia. It is a missing piece in a geopolitical picture puzzle that prevents Columbia’s protestors from seeing the big picture. And Columbia’s faculty bear some blame for not providing that missing piece, but the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are readily available to anyone who can read. No expensive degree required.                                                                     


In his Fragments, Heraclitus wrote that one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, nor knowledge without wisdom. The two are codependent. Strangely, some of the erudite professors and managers of Columbia seem to have neither if their students are to be taken as representative of their teaching.


Knowledge Is Easy; Wisdom Is Hard


Columbia’s administrators did not have the insight to see what many outside the institution saw prior to the escalation in obstruction, violence, and destruction that would unfold in a confrontation between protestors and the NYPD. The trajectory of the protest was plain to see among all but the school’s leaders. Obviously, Colombia’s President is no Father Hesburgh. Columbia’s erudite failed to anticipate the obvious and have now given, as a result, the impetus for a generation of neo-Nazis, 18 to 22 year-olds who will perpetrate hate as much as it is perpetuated by Hamas’s propaganda machine. Thus, by lacking the wisdom to act decisively and promptly, the Columbia administration has created an analog of the Middle East on the campus.


Albert Einstein said, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Are the president, deans, and staff of Columbia erudite fools?




                                

How certain are you?


In a CBS interview with Norah O’Donnell, a seated Pope Francis spoke with certainty about “the climate crisis,” but he was not “speaking from THE chair.” No, instead, the pontiff sat in an ordinary chair, much like the chairs you and I use when we discuss matters on which we often find ourselves fallible. “Speaking from THE chair,” or Ex Cathedra, also known as the Chair of St. Peter (Cathedra Petri), has a special meaning in the Church. In matters of faith and morality, the Church holds a pope’s words as infallible. Keep that in mind.


Popes have addressed topics outside the realm of faith and morality. They have even spoken about scientific matters, such as evolution. Pope Pius XII, for example, wrote in his Encyclical Humani Generis:


    “It remains for Us now to speak about those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith. In fact, not a few insistently demand that the Catholic religion take these sciences into account as much as possible. This certainly would be praiseworthy in the case of clearly proved facts; but caution must be used when there is rather question of hypotheses, having some sort of scientific foundation…


    “For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God….” *


Yep, just a mere 91 years—fast on the ecclesial time scale— after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a pope recognized a science as complementing and not competing with Church doctrine. The days of Pope Urban VIII and il processo a Galileo Galilei before an Inquisition tribunal faded into the modern world of the twentieth century.


And the late and saintly, erudite polymath John Paul II followed Pius’ lead in a mid-nineties’ speech called “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” in which he said “new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” ** 


But Now Francis


Does climate science fit into the same mold as evolution? Is it a science that in its current state can support predictions in the manner of physicists’ Standard Model? Or is it one that relies on paleontological stepping stones (fossils) to reveal a progression of changes leading to endgame species? Do past climates “evolve” into future climates?


Climate science, like evolution science can look with relative certainty on the past. There’s no doubt—but a few lingering details— about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, Pleistocene glaciation, about the Younger Dryas, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. But biological evolution differs from climate change. Biological evolution makes no predictions because of its chaotic nature. I cannot predict with even a modicum of certainty a future species based on current variations, though I might note probable trends, such as “pygmyfying” of species in isolated places (pygmy hippo, elephant, Sumatran rhino, and other species). It could not have predicted the ramifications for life after a random bolide strike 65 million years ago, or after a disease or cosmic ray hitting a genome. It could not have predicted any consequences for new life-forms after any of the five mass extinctions, save that some trophic niches would be emptied, making way for new occupiers, such as , for example, the grass-eaters.


Infallibly predictive as Ex Cathedra speaking? I think not.


Past climate, definitely. Future climate? Not one scary prediction by the IPCC in 2000 has proven true with the obvious exception of an increase in anthropogenic emissions—but that isn’t “climate.” And as I noted recently, Earth has a number of climates from arid to humid and a number of climate controls from latitude to land-water distribution to semi-permanent highs and lows to elevation. The planet’s climates (30 according to the Köppen climate classification) have undergone changes because of precession, orbital change, massive volcanism, tectonics, orographic lifting, ocean currents, evolution of plants like grasses, and feedback loops of organics like methane: All working together or working separately either to enhance or cancel one another.


Complex, right?


Well, not so complex for the infallible pope. He believes “the science” and no doubt is further convinced by recent heat waves. What would his predecessors have said if an IPCC existed and was backed by a sycophantic press in their times? What did the tenth century’s 24 popes say at the onset of the Medieval Warm Period that began about 950? *** You think they proclaimed “The End”? Or did they say, “Give me a mild winter anytime.” Or what of the popes that reigned during the apex of the warming?


The Pope, however, now a spokesman for the IPCC, has labeled those seeking more scientific details on climate as “foolish.”


“There are people who are foolish, and foolish even if you show them research, they don’t believe it,” he said. “Why, because they don’t understand the situation, or because of their interest, but climate change exists.” ****


And since he believes climate change is a moral matter, he speaks with the same certainty as he would in speaking ex cathedra.


Earth Sciences


I have long argued for certain topics in school curricula: Economics and finances; Speaking and writing; History devoid of agenda-driven re-writes; Energy; Mathematics; Biology; and Earth sciences (geology meteorology, climatology, resources, oceanography). Had Francis taken a course in climate science, he might understand the reasons behind some climate change skepticism: 30 climate categories, for example, historical data on actual climate changes, the weight of individual controls that act in unison, in cancelling, or in sequence to exacerbate change or regulate stability, and the ineffectiveness of human influences that occur in economic competition—Chinese, American, and Indian emissions.


But, Oh! How Far Have We Come? The Irony


During the days of Inquisitions, the Church was an enemy of science, thus the trials of Galileo over the heliocentric Solar System and Giordano Bruno over extra-solar planets and an eccentric and physically unbounded universe. With Francis the Church has not only become a defender of science but also a disciple. Are we now to accept the words of climate change scientists as infallible? Is the Chair of Infallibility located not in the Vatican, but rather in Geneva?


Clearing House


Does the pope get junk mail from Publishers’ Clearing House? You know, I assume, that that is what the IPCC is, a clearing house for reports deemed relevant to climate change. The IPCC doesn’t do research; it collates and reports on research. So, numerous “scientists” eager to rake in what now seems to be unlimited funding are pursuing topics they can tie to climate, including migration, recent trends in sea temps, and spreading tropical diseases. In short, everything that can be inferred as a climate effect is fair game, and fudged data are manipulated and skewed toward only one side. Thus, everyone has heard of dying coral reefs, but few have hear of thriving reefs—such reports are quashed and their researchers mocked or even, as in the case of dismissed Australian scientist Dr. Peter Ridd, subject to censure.


Your Horoscope, an Analog


Ever read your horoscope? Here’s mine for yesterday, May 4, 2024:


The Pisces moon makes a series of dreamy aspects with Uranus, Jupiter, and Neptune throughout the first half of the day, sweeping you away into a world of softness and fantasy. Lean into these vibes by going within, exploring your creative mind and deep subconscious. Your popularity increases mid-afternoon when Luna enters your sign, snapping you back into the present. Use this energy to consider how the goals you dream about can become a reality. Instant bonds could form when you explore your community this evening when Pluto stirs. A bust of motivation finds you tonight when the moon and Mars unite to stir passions.


Lots of specificity, right? Not! No one could sue an astrologer if such a prediction failed to materialize. “Your Honor, he must not have ‘leaned into the vibes.’”


Here’s Everyone’s summer weather horoscope from researchers at one of the Max Planck institutes: Expect a hot summer though it might be more an effect of an El Niño than of carbon. Like my personal horoscope, Everyone’s summer prediction contains a caveat.


Consider this from Max Planck Gesellschaft: “But even the physical formulae used by climate researchers to calculate their forecasts still contain uncertainties. For example, IPCC predictions for global warming indicate a range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of the CO2 content compared with the pre-industrial age, when the atmosphere contained 285 parts per million of CO2. The relatively large interval results from numerous imponderables in the climate system. This is because global warming can result in a feedback effect, which can either further aggravate climate change or mitigate it.” ******


Imponderables! But not for Pope Francis!


*Online at https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html


**Online at https://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_jp02tc.htm


***Pope Agapetus II
Pope Anastasius III
Pope Benedict IV
Pope Benedict V
Pope Benedict VI
Pope Benedict VII
Pope Gregory V
Pope John IX
Pope John X
Pope John XI
Pope John XII
Pope John XIII
Pope John XIV
Pope John XV
Pope Lando
Pope Leo V
Pope Leo VI
Pope Leo VII
Pope Leo VIII
Pope Marinus II
Pope Sergius III
Pope Stephen VII
Pope Stephen VIII
Pope Sylvester II


****https://angelusnews.com/voices/pope-cbs-interview-america/


*****https://www.mpg.de/11863295/climate-and-transformation


*****https://www.mpg.de/en