The Great Human Mystery

Reciprosity Inverted

Every religion (as far I know) has incorporated some version of the golden rule. If taken seriously we would be a family, caring for each other. Yet a strange state-of-mind posses certain people. But the essencce is that at some point in their lives, certain people become hoarders. A good example is Mark Zukerberg who while at Harvard developed the idea of Facebook and thought it should be free and did not expect to make money from it until the cash started rolling in a billion dollars was no longer enough and in testimy to Concress he lied to protect his ability to expand his fortune. What happened is the question that affects all of humanity.

So...You Want To Save The Earth

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So you want to save the earth my friend,

so you want to save the earth.

But there is so much to know, before you can know.

So much to think about before you can think.

You can begin at the beginning or at the end

but you must think about both in either case.

So what is so remarkable that we must do?

What is so remarkable that it has ruined my life

is the knowledge that those that knew and what did they know.

They knew, from the beginning of their business that

the carbon they made would act just like the glass

that in the greenhouse lets no heat pass and so warms

and warms and warms and catastrophes form all

over the land, and fires swallow, and drought slays

and scientists act surprised as they so often did before,

for their computers failed them.

So what must we do?

WE MUST CLEAN THE SKY.

I have had a good long life and I remember dreaming when war was cold,

when all we had to fear was nukes, and one or two brains put on hold.

I was probably eleven or twelve and would imagine how we would progress

over the years of my life and eventually would grow

to live in peace for there is no human reason to war.

But, despite some interludes, we have warred as much as ever

and my heart sinks for there is a religion here we do not recognize as such

for it hides from view as “free market capitalism.”

And so we have of, by and for the rich.

Ah! and Ah! again. The great divide, perhaps the greatest divide.

Perhaps from hunter-gatherer days, to accumulate beyond need

and so to covet no matter the cost, be it poor or rich, dead or alive

and so to live without Life.

CLEAN THE SKY?

of course you are NUTS.

Just 60 BILLION tons of carbon has to go.

I am fortunate beyond my comprehension

for every day I look up and out and see...infinity

laid out for me to enjoy I think, but the sadness is infinite too

for death is everywhere not by chance

but by those who know not of...beauty and joy

unaware of the mortal price paid

by those who cannot bring themselves to stop killing the earth,

when it may already be....dead.

But there was a difference with nukes, something we do not have now,

we had seen the pictures, we had seen the cause that made

two cities disappear, almost, for at the edges there were

survivors, who regretted they were chosen, for the pain was more

than their minds and souls could bear.

For me, I did not dream there could be such a surprise in

two thousand plus perhaps another five.

It is so strangely odd, so incredibly strange to have the nukes

reappear scattered in our back yards, all but invisible

except for my own mind that reads of CO2

and the ferocious thunder replaced by something silent,

a photo of tundra, yes my friend of tundra melting and burning

and quietly giving back, giving back what, you say and it is too much

for the joke, if one would call it that, is completely upon us.

The flame, it is so small, just a flicker, much less than a campfire

yet portentous, such an uppity word is so completely

not enough to wake the few among us, who could recognize the flicker

for oddly it was called positive, a joke, a joke a joke of, I know of no other word, a joke

not just on us but the flicker was of something burning

that would make whatever created us cry.

And if you should not know your chemistry (which is so infinitely likely)

that flicker was of the gaseous methane, so ironically tiny,

but in the play it was assigned a part, oh my god, a part of one

off stage, in the shadows, no light shining on the star that would do

infinitely more, yes infinitely more that those nukes

once feared, it would be just like your morning toaster seemingly

without consequence but only because we had not learned from that narrow escape,

to watch our backs for the flicker could take

every thing that mattered, all matter of a punishment,

that I am sorry to say, fits the crime.

SO, MY FRIEND, WHAT WILL IT TAKE?

EVERYTHING WE HAVE

FOR WE HAVE BEEN SO DAMN BLIND

we have stones for eyes, logs for ears, and selfish slime between our ears.

We cannot face the fact that we are an insult to all that Einstein found,

we may have in our care the miracles that bring us joy,

at least if we care for more than money.

I watched in 1959 when it was told to the men of oil

that their smoke was of a house that trapped

that which has destroyed already most all the earth

and still they brag

that they pursuaded that the great green deal

be eviserated...

My god, my god I never in my 80 years thought

humans of miracle minds, miracles that are so made

that the greatest students of the brain cannot

explain the miracle that can

create from nothing—

infinite

beauty and joy.

So yes, my friend it is filthy lucre

that men of oil collect far beyond their needs.

But they are not alone for humanity divides itself

into those who give and those who take

and are blind to it.

But there is even more infinite sadness

for I cannot bring myself to believe that living men are so dead

they cannot hear or see the great creations of humanity,

who even know of Michaelangelo or Chopin.

So you have a hint of what I mean, we are going to travel and see and hear.

I had the stunning luck to be in the Sistine Chapel as it was being restored.

It was as if I were watching Michaelangelo paint

and you can see my experience HERE.

Or you can click on the performance of Chopin below,

and listen until it penetrates your soul and

these are but waves in an ocean

we rarely visit.

Their lives have given whatever god created us to be but now it is

a reason to weep, perhaps to fill our oceans with

waters so sad

that those blind and deaf in spirit will find

no home for their bodies or their souls.

Is there a chance?

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not to return it to what it was.

So what is needed and what could be? Ha! Face this my friends, for never has it been imagined, but just this week they rubbled a part of Miami and they would have to rubble All of it and move inland. No point leaving a ratty skyline.

New York? Perhaps a trillion or multi-trillion dike. Or more rubble.

But before that max 20 years emissions zero then trillions to sequester carbon and methane to the equivalent of 350 ppm carbon. Then rubble, move, wait, die, cry, sob, weep. And regret.

If all this is done, in a time I could not guess, we might recreate the spirit that saves and shares and creates and enjoys. A spirit now in only a few, but eventually, possibly in many, taught by those few.

TRUTH

hyprocacy

All the religions of the world have reciprocity or some form of the Golden Rule at the core of their mission. But for all intents and purposes, none practice it.
We evoled from hunter-gatherer tribes that kept the peace in order to survive. Then it has been said often the worst happened and agriculture was discovered which lead to two things: a far worse diet (corn, wheat, rice) and men with hunter’s genes now footloose, so of course they formed tribes that did not have to raise their own food, nor did they have any idea of the nature of existance, so they each invented their own. Ostensably the land of the free and the home of the brave committed genocide and slavery and it has not yet shed those sins, but it may be forced to.

There is no way the earth can support a tenth of its current population, so there is hell ahead.

Of course some will glory in the “end times” but will be just one of the major cycles in human education. Even the destruction of the earth will leave the universe intact.

There is the famous quote from John Greenleaf Whittier about the sadest words being it might have been. But that was and is not in the nature of humanity. What may be in the nature of humanity is the ability to grow.

How hellish the hell remains to be seen. It all depends on what comes up Trumps.

Spring Morning After Storm

And as the storm clears perhaps we will recognize a few of the infinite miracles the creation of consciousness gave us and which we so seldom embraced. It is symbolic of how life can change and the new Epoch Of Earth will have begun.

Perhaps a new spring.

IT IS LONESOME

The big bang will be lonesome without us.

The two most remarkable things in the universe are the big bang (or the Grand Singularity, as I prefer to call it) and the collection of living matter between our ears.

The big bang began as the smallest thing there could be, billions of times smaller than an atom, only to become the Universe.

And the universe took its own sweet time to make a solar system and an earth suitable for life.

Suitable, you say? I suggest The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies, for “just right” means not one atom, not one elementary particle could be different, or there would be no you or me, and so no joy, or beauty or...anything alive. And Professor Wilchick makes one think: suppose there were no one to see, no one with sentience, the universe. You cannot imagine not existing. But he contends that it is consciousness that creates the universe and the universe that creates consciousness. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And if it is something distant we don’t understand, try to comprehend what happens because of what is between your ears. An infinity of thinking, and we do not have a clue how. An infinity of the experience of seeing and hearing and we don’t have a clue how.

I think it is good to think how collossal are our gifts, for how we use them is beyond words both for good and evil.

Why?

Existance

The Three Miracles

1. The birth of the Universe (commonly called the big bang) occured 10.78 billion years ago. Why? No one knows. God is the name of a cause, not a cause. I suggest watching Jim Holt’s TED Talk “Why is there something rather than nothing.” Or read The Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies. From the smallest thing that can exist, vastly smaller than a proton, emerged the entire universe. If this doesn’t make your brain spin you are not thinking. It is collosal to the nth power.

2. Follow the time-line of the universe in the wonderful NASA ilustration below.

The fact is that humanity as a whole is not aware of how miraculous is its existance and so is killing its own existance and planet.

3. The evolution of us from the dust of space.

There is considerable discussion these days that we are not alone, that there are millions of other planets. Perhaps. But I don’t think so. A simple argument that there are 14 or so requirements for higher forms of life and each has a 1% probability leads to a probability of 10^-28 for existance of another planet like ours.

But it doesn’t matter because we have been given the third miracle: the human mind. I swear no one thinks about how ultra collosal it is and this is the same mind (with minor variations) for all humans. So we war on each other rather than learning about the universe and creating beauty that gives us joy.

So where do we go from here? If we don’t get our act together within days, and devote everything we have to take CO2 OUT of the atmosphere you can kiss the earth goodby.

Whoever or whatever is behind this must be weeping.

The history of the Universe: the birth of the earth, the evolution of homo sapiens (all of us); the biological nature of human-kind, the history of human-kind, and how we act toward each other and toward the earth is a disaster. Nations, religions, politics form tribes and war and kill for nothing.

It is up to you. I am nearing 80 so this is my best.

One more thing, and it may be the biggest one.

4. No one understands how two little images on our retinas and two little flaps of tissue at the end of our ear canals give us the experience of all of life.

Whoops! Still one more.

5. You white supremisists are from Africa just like everyone else. You just moved further north and your skin bleached out to give you more vitamin D with less sun.

The green egg is the leftover radiation of the big bang.

What Is Left Of The Big Bang

Its Called ”The Cosmic Background Radiation

The best education about the CBR is here: Cosmic Backbround Radiation.

Below: The earth from space taken a few decades ago. Would you believe that the human quest for money has chanced how it looks from SPACE. And below that one of the commentaries about carbon sequestration.

CaringForTheEarth.com

The Atlantic Council, May 14, 2021

“While moving to new energy sources and capturing carbon emissions at the source will play a major part of this, much of the solution will still need to rely on removing carbon directly from the atmosphere. Time is of the essence and getting there will require bold, radical technology innovation and scale up, beyond just limiting emissions or capturing at the source, but also removing CO2 already in the air and oceans.”

“THE WORLD DOES NOT “GET IT.”

We are in a vehicle moving at 90 miles per hour and just over the horizon is a four foot thick 400 foot high concrete barrier. Everyone knows about it.

And everyone expects we will fly right over it.

GET THIS: If we do not realize the crash is real we will insult the Creation by making this planet almost totally or totally unlivable. Someone or something must get this to penetrate the minds of the people of this planet.

The graph below shows my predictions based simply on the past temperature rise. We are following it. It predicts the death of the planet.

Rembert’s “All Me II” (2005). The chain gang was ruthless, he observed: “I had to take on all these personalities. I only wanted to be one of them, but the one I wanted to be I couldn’t be. ”Art works © Winfred Rembert / ARS

The picture above is from the New Yorker. It was made by a “nigger” who spent years in a chain gang.
Here is the link:

An Artist and How He Survived the Chain Gang.

On March 31st, the artist Winfred Rembert died, at the age of seventy-five. He was born in 1945 and grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, where he picked cotton as a child. As a teen-ager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs. Following his release, in 1974, he married Patsy Gammage, and they eventually settled in New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of fifty-one, with Patsy’s encouragement, he began carving and painting memories from his youth onto leather, using leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison. I met Rembert in 2015, while I was working on a book about criminal justice. He told me he wanted to share his life story in his own words but needed help writing it. From 2018 to 2020, I visited his home every two weeks or so to interview him. I transcribed and arranged his reflections and then read the pages back to him. Each time we met, we dug deeper into Rembert’s thoughts about what he had lived through. —Erin I. Kelly ©New Yorker

The Climate: A Real Catastrophe

Making the pandemic seem like a minor inconvenience

This is really hard to write about. Actually, it may be impossible.

Above I talked about curiositers. If we applied that idea say 60 years (give or take) ago and knew the kind of problems we would face, we might have a chance.

Now, we are on the edge of a cliff. Do you believe me? No. I know you don’t. How do I know? Because if you did the following would be happening:

1. A thousand people marching on Washington every week.

2. The New York Times would get off its ass and stop burying climate news (Hmm. Maybe burrying is appropriate.)

3. The nation would be mobilizing as if it were World War III.

BUT. ...The climate is the hardest thing to understand since....12,000 BCE (or Donald Trump; take your pick).

Do you know what amorphous means? Well just in case....

ADJECTIVE

Without a clearly defined shape or form.

‘an amorphous, characterless conurbation’

More example sentences ‘amorphous blue forms and straight black lines’ ‘Stretched along the umbrella's base, a large, pale gray, amorphous shape could be a shadow, a sack or a lifeless body.’

Got it? Makes no sense whatever. Right? That is just what it is like. The scientists have 80 computermodels to work with. How in bloody helldo you make sense of it. Here is how.

You ask this question? How bad COULD it get. Stop the damn arguing of how we will learn to live with it.

I was quoted in Tie Magazine that what we are doing is an insult to the universe. Why? We are crushing a rare precious jewell, but it is too amorphous an idea for us to get. So we are failing.

Nations Must Drop Fossil Fuels, Fast,
World Energy Body Warns

May 19, 2021

I said I was finished with this, then I read this in the NY Times which still burries it.

THE EARTH IS GOING DOWN. IF AFTER ALL THIS TIME THE Chinese are still building coal fired plants, WE ARE SCREWED.

This is from today’s NY Times. I said this 20 years ago but did not know how to get it out. And I still don’t.

A landmark report from the International Energy Agency says countries need to move faster and more aggressively to cut planet-warming pollution. 

A coal-fired power plant near Bergheim, Germany. The magnitude of changes needed is “still not fully understood by many governments and investors,” the head of the International Energy Agency said. ……

To reach that goal of net zero worldwide by 2050, every nation would need to move much faster and more aggressively away from fossil fuels than they are currently doing, the report found. ……

“But there’s still a huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality.” ………..

To reach that goal of net zero worldwide by 2050, every nation would need to move much faster and more aggressively away from fossil fuels than they are currently doing, the report found. to steeper cuts but China, India and Russia did not. China still has plans for dozens of new coal-fired power plants….

Enough.

Humanity doesn’t know how.

The Question of Questions

What Should Life Be?

If one cares about humanity. If one realizes what impossible gifts that make our lives possible. If one realizes that the human mind is the greatest thing in the universe?

Let me repeat that. Raise the curtain. Step out onto the stage, the stage of all of humanity and scream with every ounce of energy you can put into your voice:

IN ALL THE COLLOSAL UNIVERSE—

THE HUMAN MIND IS THE CREATEST THING THERE IS.

FROM WHOMEVER OR WHATEVER CREATED US, WE ARE THE PURPOSE FOR THE EXISTANCE OF THE UNIVERSE.

And we don’t believe this. We act as if Life were cheap. In all the discussions about democracy, liberalism, conservatism, racism, I have heard one, I repeat, one discussion about the nature of human experience.

He is 92 years old. He is a professor emeritis at MIT. His name is Noam Chomsky. And he knows the soul of human kind. You can read the interview in the New York Times but I will give you the essence in my own words.

The human mind has infinite capacity for learning and creating beauty and joy. It consists of billions of neurons, countless interconnections, synapsis, between the neurons and no one has a clue how it can think. As far as I can tell from my own experience no one even thinks about what it does and is doing for you and me this minute.

From two small images on your retinas it is creating the experience you are having. It is called sentience. And no one knows how it happens.

And from two small pieces of tissue at the ends of your ear canals vibrating you can hear a symphony, know every sound around you, decipher languages. And no one knows how this experience happens.

Study the examples below: my grandaughter, a fabulous pianist, a picture of trees. And I will give you one more. The image above was created from a photograph of one, I repeate one, saxophone. Look for a minute and you will find them.

So what does this mean for politics, government, society, liberalaism, conservatism? Do we argue for the ideology of low taxes and small government. Do we do so much advertising of commercial products that we create an alternate reality.

Ideology is the straightjacket of the mind, a way to get what you want and to avoid having to think. It solves problems without knowing what the problem is. It has moved trillions of dollars from the middle class to the very rich.

What do we do? We think. We use this fabulous gift to figure out what we should do to make a life FOR the people, not for the rich. So we must abandon the tribalism that forces upon us a compressed life. Conservatives argue that social programs are redistributing wealth. What the hell have they been doing since Ronald Regan, but moving money into the pockets of the already wealthy. The give us trickle down economics, which means licking crumbs off their boots. They give us Sam Brown destroying Kansas. The give us dead coal miners. They give us the free unregulated market where all that matters is shareholder wealth. And if jobs disappear, tough shit. Figure it out yourself.

And they elect a total asshole as president who would sacrifice the earth for his own benefit. Who comprehended nothing but the flow of money into his pocket and who sacrificed aat least 200,000 American lives by not telling the truth about the virus or dealing with it with a bit or intelligence. He is guilty of genocide and treason.

We were first warned about global warming in 1959 by Edward Teller speaking to an oil association dinner. I think we are going to loose the planet. We will never do what needs to be done for the task is collosal and there is no one to teach what global warming really is. To teach the science.

I could create that picure above and many more like it because my basic needs were taken care of. And I worked hard. Please read on, and I hope you catch my drift.

Oh! One more thing. The picture below is also made from one straight shot of one saxophone.

Look

But do you see.

There are three lessons below. They are about issues I think important for they will determine our future.

The first comes from my experience as a photographer and is about learning to see. There is a counterpart about hearing and for that I have put my favorite Chopin below. If it doesn’t move you a good lesson in hearing is to listen to it as if it were a lesson for how to get into heaven.

The second is about the color of our skin. Not knowing that it is a trivial result of the latitude of our early migrations gives us so many reasons to look down on others.

Thirdly, I have been reading Karen Armstrong’s book about the Bible, and I realize that we have never thought about ourselves as one family and whether or not we are depends on your outlook. However, our genes tell us that we are and not thinking so makes life a horror for much of the planet.

We also fail to think of our planet as a gift of a home, and even more importantly, we haven’t a clue about the miracle between our ears and so do not use it as we should.

Finally, just saying the words is just repeating things already heard that have not registered. So instead of preaching, I am trying out poetry for the first time in my life. The poems feel like songs to me and the melodies keep ringing, so consider it as if it were my homework for Poetry 1.01.

However all this strikes you, for me it is a bit of help in retaining my sanity as I become more and more aware of the insanity that surrounds me.

Beyond this short introduction are the leftovers of earlier versions of this website. If I can I will try to make use of some of them.

End of Volume 1 Number 2

VOLUME 1 PAGE 3

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So Try To See The Trees

From the Pike: Weston, Massachuseetts

So try to hear the cries my friend, so try to hear the cries—

and wonder why they come so much, they come in with the tide,

they come with codes of color, of black, of white or brown.

I scream that we do not ask—

Why?

With minds miraculous we always need

a triumph of our banner

over some other be it green or blue or red

and although the dead lay dying on the cold

and bloody ground we do not think to ask—

Why?

Our minds, oh our minds, to any scientist of pride,

he and she will testify there is no greater miracle

in all the universe, than that which sits

on our shoulders, but cannot answer—

Why?

For those awake enough to ask from where the color came,

they learn it’s from our travels as we all left Africa

with about the same shade

but mom nature prescribes:

you must move into the sun and the vitamins it provides

less ye die.

Still, we learn or are taught to crush, any color other than ours

knowing and still not knowing—

Why?

As I try to gather my wits after another night of screaming

I know the tide is rising of water and fool’s pride

for I know, I know, I know that none is better than thy

or those that laugh or sob or cry but I still do not know—but then

I read the twisted tales the scriptures tell of gods and souls in years BCE

no wiser than thee or thy or I, still my god oh my god still

millenia go by and scientists exhault of quanta and with blossoming pride

yet new tribes still war and war and war...

only to invent new kinds it now feels silly to ask again—

Why?

We have between our ears, the greatest of all creations but

it is blindly hidden from us, for it is too nearby, nay,

it is the most nearby that any thing of any kind could be.

Why?

Hah! You have got to be carefully taught the sailor said, you’ve got to be

carefully tought to ignore beauty and learning and joy just look down, look down,

so those below know the weight of crushing, laughing, exhaulting

Pride.

Spring Sunrise, I-90, Millbury, Masschusetts

So You Really Want To Know My Friend

You really want to know

I am reading a book (or rather was reading) by Karen Armstrong about the Bible, and suddenly everything becomes clear. The machinations of 500 to 1000 BCE fortell the circumstances we live with. Of coarse it was much worse then but the tribal warfare, the championing of this god or that god, the idolizing of kings, the wars give me the same feelings as our politics and relations between nations today. I am tempted to say it was much worse then but that is an impossible comparison. We likely have much more stability, but have multiplied our population without concern for the earth and developed armaments capable of infinite destruction.

We like to think our technology and study of history give us an advantage, but in our own way we have created a risk far greater than anything in the Old Testaament.

For decades I have followed global warming and we have blown it. What is happening today will not save us, for the programs have no teeth, the risks are not widely enough understood and from the lessons of the past 40 years tell us we simply do not have our act together for that would mean a broad and deep understanding of science. Instead we have anti-vaccine elements, right wingers who want to start a war, and conservatives who say we are taking away their rights by making them wear masks. I don’t know of a way to say it, but how bloody stupid can you get. I hear a five year old “you can’t make me to it.” And of course our former president abdicated his responsibility to the tune of at least 200,000 deaths.

There is much more, but the futility has gotten to me. And that’s the way it is. —April 26, 2021

Below are various parts of my images of life.

There are two poles and neither can be explained by science. The first pole is what life should be, which to me is learning, creating and joy. Joy has many components but the most important is that it is profound. It is NOT getting your jollies from firing a gun, it is getting deep pleasure from the most joy-full parts of life. Following are two examples.

The first is a series of about 180 pictures, in sequence with none edited out, of our grandaughter on one of here visits here playing with her grandmother and my taking of a series of rapid stills.

The second is a performance of the Chopin Ballade No. 1, Op. 23 by the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman. It is perfect to me and I have played Chopin for 67 years or so.

In my mind I have slowly formed the concept that is essential, that this all began with an inexplicible event, The Grand Singularity (my name for the big bang), the smallest thing that can exist, progragressed through evolution of the universe and then to the evolution of humanity. It resulted in the most astonishing thing in the universe, the human mind. Life consistists of appreciating this and then the decisions we make of how to use our minds.

Below, two of my most joyful experiences.

History

The Short and the Long of It. And the proof.

It seems to me that all of human history for which we have written records (beginning about 1000 BCE) has been affected by the absence of knowledge of how we came to exist combined with a lack of understanding an apprecition of what we are. That in turn leaves us ignorant of what we should expect of ourselves. Sufficiently far back, prior to the inventure of agriculture, we lived as tribes of hunter-gatherers. In my readings this was a stable, successful culter for about 500,000 years. Tribes were constrained by the need to hunt and gather and evolved a culture that worked comparatively well, at least as far as we can know.

Some of our knowledge comes from studying and living with the last of these tribes that had not been assimulated and in a few cases apparently not significantly influenced by modern life. Incorporated in the tribal culture were rules intended to preserve a stable, mutually supportive lifestyle. It all changed between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE by the introduction of agriculture. In my view, the hunters needed new roles and their genes prepared as least some of them to be leaders of new kinds of tribes, eventually influenced greatly by the invention and evolution of religion.

I have not read of wars between huntert-gatherer tribes, likely because they did not have either the technology nor the time, being occupied with feeding themselves or with uprooting as necessary to maintain sources of food.

However, with farming being so much more productive and the human mind fully developed, war, power, domination, usually in some connection with religion began the evolution of new kinds of society.

When I read the history of the Bible, it ominously rings bells of modern life with constant warring in an effort to achieve supremicacy, and so reveals the consequences of concepts of god: a unifier around which tribes were formed and a source of conflict (think evangelicals supporting Donald Trump).

What seems to me to be the great failing is an inability to use the creativity of our minds on a large enough scale and the knowedge of science to embrace the joys of life which minimizing the need for one society (or tribe) to dominate others. A fundamental need to hoard (think Bill Gates worth 100 billion dollars); to dominate (America‘s invasion of Iraq) and multiply these over and over again and you have terrorism slaughter interrupting and destroying better ways of life.

Noam Chomsky, in his interview by Ezra Klein for the New York Times asserts the infinite creativity of the human mind and the need to provide a kind of anarchic socity in which it can thrieve. On the other side are conservatives who, it seems to me, withdraw into a ridgid rule-based shell agressively asserting that the rest of society join or be subjugated. The flip side is artists and scientists that are free to create and exault in it. At this moment (April 2021) we are sitting on a knife edge about how things will go complicated enormously by a pandemic and the earth pushed to be edge of destruction.

Above: The cosmic background radation proving the existance of the big bang.

Utterly Unacceptable Truth.

Pristine, Supreme, Whitness Began as Black or Brown.
And the genome is still there. In you, me and everyone else.

Nielsen, R., Akey, J., Jakobsson, M. et al.

Tracing the peopling of the world through genomics. Nature 541, 302–310 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21347

Abstract

“Advances in the sequencing and the analysis of the genomes of both modern and ancient peoples have facilitated a number of breakthroughs in our understanding of human evolutionary history. These include the discovery of interbreeding between anatomically modern humans and extinct hominins; the development of an increasingly detailed description of the complex dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and their population expansion worldwide; and the characterization of many of the genetic adaptions of humans to local environmental conditions. Our interpretation of the evolutionary history and adaptation of humans is being transformed by analyses of these new genomic data.”

How do we know?

You want to know what science is? Well here is one (my) EXPLANATION. Try it. You might get it. It’s pretty much seat of the pants (you’ll see).

One of the best things about scientists is that they do our work for us. The LOVE to prove each other wrong, especially if someone has come up with an idea they disagree with. And so we get a kind of scrubbing of information and data and evidence. Then the layman: “Well, prove it to me.” And I can’t. The only kind of “proof” that means anything is logic, like you may have done in geometry class, when at the end you wrote Q. E. D., the latin "quo erat demonstrandum,” or "that which we sought to demonstrate." Sience is evidence. Evidence piled on top of evidence until doubt slowly disappears and it becomes beyond even unreasonable doubt.

Why am I making this fuss. Because the whole world is going down right know because we never taught this at all, or thoroughly enough even to PhD lawyers, or economdists. And so civilization is on the brink.

At this moment in 2020 the race is tearing us apart but we don’t understand it. We don’t understand a white mans’s urge to kill a black man. Or why there is a caste system in India, or why my tribe is better than your tribe.

I suggest you click on EXPLANATION and then ponder. Man, is that a great word because it means you have to open your mind, and in a sense that is what this is all about. Most of humanity walks around with brains behind closed doors. Solid core, heavyweight, steel plated doors. Once you believe it you own it. If scientists did that you wouldn’t be here.

Well, what do you know?

To the right is a “time map” or a time line. It shows the evolution of primates from 60 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago by which time we had our full-size brains (1.4 lieters) and for reasons not clear started to migrate north. ALL OF US are descendents of these dark skinned (coal black to brown) homo sapiens (the “wise ones”.)

The map above shows where we went: from deep in Africa to the tip of South America. The evidence is there: archeological and genetic. If you are white like me, it is only because as we went north we needed more sun to get more vitamin D. That is it. Plain, pure and simple. Vitamin D and sunligt is white superiority. Except there is more to the story, which is why we made it into superiority. I suggest reading: THE CASTE SYSTEM.

The Situation

This young man has lost his island to global warming.

Within this catastrophe are mysteries and miracles that are fundamental to understanding human tragedy and triumph, and yet are rarely if ever discussed.

Fifteen years of thinking about guns, shootings, pollution that destroys, politicians and a public that does not try to understand, and above all an education systme that does not teach. And what teaching is done is not to the people that need it most.

The causes of global warming, racism, gun proliferation have been known, in some cases for hundreds of years, but mainly by a few scientists.

The greatest mystery to me is that human beings seem to be programmed to harm other human beings, as well as the earth that gave birth to them.

The outcome has come to a precipice, or rather as begun a terrifying descent.

One of the greatest of the mysteries is that macro America is often American. But America itself has been a myth and a lie from day one.

America is not alone, but it is a terrifying disappointment to those of us who think about it and have loved it from the time we began to read. In combination with the covirus, it is terrifying, disappointing and depressing.

In this website I try to share what I think is important to know and understand. But I cannot answer the ultimate question: Why?, with one exception. How a president could cause so much harm, be so reluctant to learn and yet have the support of more than a third of Americans is a collosal: How is this possible?

Humanity Was Born Black

Could it really be?

So I have three engineering degrees from MIT. Does that make me a scientistc Yes. You had to have been there.

Heck, I learned science at home as a kid, watching my projects go up in smoke. Science and engineering intertwine like croheting. It goes both ways. You can’t have one without the other. But science is the concrte under everything and I rely on it. In fact, everything we have is because of science (and some engineering).

There are many things in this world that I try to explain to people, and they just don’t “get it.” This is one of them.

Donald Trump 1: I need to look like I know something. 2. Trump has only smiled once in his life. For his portrait. Genuine? I don’t think so.
3. In Putin's pocket. 4. Portrait of a politician as an empty man.

Learning, Creating, Sharing

Is what life should be

Why do politicans never debate what life should be?

Because living by ideology is easier.

Why is there not a consortium of scientists to save the planet?

Because they can hide behind their tenure.

Why is there no consortium of the rich to save the planet?

Because more is never enough.

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1. Why do we not have a president of the United States?

Because we cannot recognize a king or a fool.

2. Why is our eduction so shallow?

Because scientist are afraid of politicians.

Our politiians debate and never mention Joy and Sharing.

3. In his pocket. Scientists hide in their bastions instead of joining and teaching as one.

4. The President of MIT, my alma mater, wrote me of another climate program. The last accomplished nothing. I asked "what took you so long?"

5. There should have been a Consortium for the Planet 50 years ago.

6. There should have been a Consortium For The People 50 years ago.

7. Universities, lawyers, politicians, think tanks are all isolations within which egos flourish instead of reaching out.

8. Tenured scientists can agree on nothing. There is no passion to their words.

Tenure is a wall 5 feet thick. Behind it, faculty can hide forever.

9. Gravity waves are more important than saving the planet.

10. Exploring Mars is more important than teaching people on earth.

11. Instead of teaching the meaning of life, we put a few men in orbit.

12. Our wealthly people want more.

They carry hundreds of billions in their pockets, while children die for lack of care.

13. Ideology is more important than Life. Where has our species gone wrong.

14. Hunter gatherer tribles care more for their own than our leaders care for their own.

15. We follow the devel into his den and come out devils.

16. Choosing the right god is more important than caring.

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Here is one from when Amelia, our grandaughter, was 2 1/2 and playing soccer with her father, our son Greg. My wife Susan took the videos. Watch carefully. It’s the little things that matter.

This is Life.

What’s happening? The ball obeys the laws of physics. They are engaging each other. They are both learning without realizeing it, about themselves and each other and about the psysics of kicking the ball around. Susan showed me the videos and, very uncharacterically said “this is the meaning of life.” There is really no explanation. If you watch and listen and stop your own thinking, just “be” for a few minutes, you will know. Unless you see and hear only what you want to see and hear. That is a kind of mental death.

If there is one thing that is important about having meaning in your life it is learning, with an open mind.

And then there is Amelia. I photograph her a lot. Here is one visit. (click on the two arrows for full screen)

Evolution

Mysteries. This little chart actually begins a few billion years ago, but I am interested in primates and that started about 60 million years ago. You can follow the diagram. It the real highway from Australopithecus about 3 million years ago because that is when our branch happened. Homo habilis, homo erectus an homo sapiens 160 thousand years ago. Seems like a long time but as cosmology goes, its a second. But that second was important, for we went up the ladder and our brains became like the ones we have today and we started to move.

Migrations In Black and White

If there is one thing I would like to be taught in every school in the world is that we are all Africans, we are all genetically pretty much the same and our color came from too much or too little sun. That is what being black or white means.

Homo sapients who went north didn't get enough sun so evolution started to take mellin out of their skin and we became white, only beause humans with lighter skin got more Vitamin D, and their survival was a bit better. That's what being white means. Being white is just like taking your vitamins at breakfast.

What’s Right, What’s Wrong

I learned something a long time ago in raising Greg. He pulled something that was not o.k.

What do I do? First I tell him how great he is. Slowly, I remind him of different things about him. It’s the only way. To be better you have to start from how good you are.

That, in my book, is one of the secrets of life.

How do I know that it could “really be.”

Scientists put there lives on the line to gather “evidence,” yet most be don’t have a clue what that means. Science committee chairman in congress say they don’t believe in science. I have tried to expain it:

Above. The migrations from Africa that populated the world.

In The Other’s Shoes

Reciprocity

Tell me what you love about life?

Tell me what is hard for you.

Tell me what brings you joy.

Tell me what makes you afraid.

Tell me what makes you want to dance.

Tell me what makes you want to run away.

Tell me what you want me to know.

Now, it is your turn to ask me.

We will be wearing each others shoes. And be friends.

And more understanding.

How Could This Have Happened

Hunting and Gathering to Chopin in a Cosmological Second

I don’t want a movie. I want to be able to dwell, and I often come close to crying. How did we get so lucky. She was like this from the day she was born.

And here is the ticket take time and really see her.

Intermission

There are times when you want something to sink in. Go get a cup of coffee, I’m going to change keys. I would like to discuss the important truths not mentioned. Some have surfaced recently. Others are just mysteries.

I play the piano and mine is a great instrument. How well? Medium amateur. Almost every day I play the Chopin B-flat minor scherzo. It is medium hard and I wanted to hear and see how the pros play it. So I got on You-Tube of course and tried all the big names. Great! And then I got to Krystian. He is Polish like me. He won the Chopin International Competiton at age 23. So I watched and listened and could not believe what I was hearing and seeing. I had never heard every single exactly right. Within milliseconds. I will give you another exanple below. Then since I was studying evolution I started wondering. How did we make the leap from hunter-gatherers. Same brain as far as we know. What did hunter-gatherers do that gave their hands this kind of control. But we now know if we work really hard at something our brains change, and our fingers develop skills they never had before.

How much practice. Perhaps 5 hours per day from the age of 5 or 6. But look and listen to what happens.

What is so great about this. Homo sapiens could move from hunter-gathering to incredable and beautiful skills. And Zimerman is one of the very best. Listen to the ballade. It’s 9 minutes. Watch his hands and fingers. Could you imagine this was possible? Not me.

I think of this as one of the gifts to humanity. Just one. There are more. Another one is your ears so you can hear this and your mind givees you the experience. I emphasize the gift part, because few of us know what we have been given and this is just the beginning and how many of us make use of these gifts.

We prefer getting rich and powerful and playing dirty politics and poisening the earth. Evolution and the big bang were incredibly generous to us. Why don’t we appreciate what we have. I don’t know why.

Zimermane tunes his piano himself. And Chopin who invented several new kinds of music. It almost makes me cry and I have heard it many times. Of course, besides our brains our ears have an amazing design. Altogether it is one of the marvels of life.

I think of all of this as gifts. It did not have to happen this way. It is also a mystery why more people do not listen to classical music. One reason is that just as Krystian’s brain changed, so does ours. We must listen enough so that we hear the music and not just the soud.

One more thing.

Frankly, there are so many things that make up human life, enjoyment and creativity I don”t when to start and stop. This comes to mind because I recently visited my otolaryengologist a the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. I sat in somthing like a dentist’s chair and saw this illustration about two feet from me. Being an engineer I get a sense of how well things are designned and having studied hearing and psychoacoustics I know roughly how hear works. And yet this illustration, which I have seen many times, bowled me over. O.K. so it took a few million years and lots of false starts, but what resulted is a marvel, pure and simple.

Sound comes into ther ear canal and vibrates the ear drum which in turn moves first the malleus, the the incus and finally the stapes. Then the real work begins. TYhe cochlea is an analog to digital converter that sends nerve impulses to the audio section of the cerebral core tex. So I can hear. Someone or something has gone to a lot of trouble, at least that is how it seems to me.

The Children of the Universe Movement

I don’t think you can figure out the meaning of life without knowing where we came from, what goes on around us. Its the bigger and then the biggest picture.

Why? It’s collosal like knowing you are descended from royality, on both sides. It might change how you think about yourself.

To the left is a galaxy like ours. We can’t take a picture of ours, so we are using a substitute. It will surely change what you think is possible. Its a very rough guess, but it contains 250 billion stars.

The universe contains about 100 billion galexies or 2.5 x 10 ²² stars.

A 17,000 Singer Virtual Choir

Why sure! Piece of Cake

Well, not exactly, but here it is. Just Click.

The Grand 17,517

Religion And The Big Bang

We are searching for the meaning of life and I think this may be the hardest issue. Science gives us some profound evidence from some astonishing space telescope observations. Most people have heard of the “big bang” but do not have a sense of what it was.

Describing it is difficult because in effect it is saying that everything all 10 to the 22nd stars were created from nothing, and that statement would raise some eyebrows. The best answer I am aware of is that the unverse was created from a “singularity” and a singularity is the smallest thing that can exist, far smaller than an atom or ever a proton and that leads to two reactions: Impossible or unbelievable. It did happen. The is plenty of evidence (see below).

Religion? The is no science in the Bible.

What to make of all this plus a few other things.

1. How we got here plus what we are is plainly stupifying.

2. Once the big bang happened everything seems to follow in logical order. Physics has taken over and the result to date is a very,very big universe full of unblieveable astronomical objects and events.

3. The bodies we got with the capabilities we have: seeing, hearing, thinking, experiencing, feeling, touching are also off the charts.

What is the point? I think we should have a reverence and astonishment of the gifts we have receive. But the big point is what we can experience and how much control we have over that.

The Biggest Leap

We make the bigggest leap there is. From the big bang, though 10.78 billion years to this performance.

About 5 billion years ago the earth began forming.

The combation of conditions for making the earth I have estimated as 10 to the -14 (7 conditions each with 1% probability). A similar estimate has been made for making evolution possible which gives a total probability of 10^-24 for human life. It turns out that with enough practice the brain changes: it specializes in piano playing. Chopin specialized in writing. Steinway specialized in pianos and so we get this performance with 7.1 million views on U-Tube.

Where Did It All Come From

What were Hunter-Gatherers Like

There is more inforation than I ever imagined. There are dozens of primitive hunter-gatherer tribes to study, but I would like to provide a long quote from Psychology Today, because it surprised me so much.From Psychology Today“

“During the 20th century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences. Wherever they were found—in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles—these societies had many characteristics in common. The people lived in small bands, of about 20 to 50 persons (including children) per band, who moved from camp to camp within a relatively circumscribed area to follow the available game and edible vegetation. The people had friends and relatives in neighboring bands and maintained peaceful relationships with neighboring bands. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals.

“We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close to that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn't have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, "big man," or chief.

The earth was ravaged and global warming upset a million years of stability. It is in the New York Times of August 2, 2020.

The cause: one fertility vs impotence. The fertility and food supply meant more children, but the impotence was mental. Hunter gatherers had a conception of time and space that was limited and no intellectual experience with large scale planning. Modern humans have failed dismillay.

Food and shelter came easily for a long time beginning just aafter the middle ages. The result was a popopulation that outran the moral and intellectual capacity of humanity. The best things in life went unappreciated, money

Tribalism in Animals ~ Tribalism in Humans ~ Political Tribalism Under Trump ~ Human Behavior

Challenging Evolution

When I began studying global warming some 20 years ago it was clear that the earth was heading toward the greatest disaster in human history: an environmental disaster that could concievably case, leave the earth uninhabitable. Yet efforts to address the problem, while substantial, have fallen far short, to the point that, by most scientific evalutaions, we act now in a way inconcieveable to most people and leaders, or we invite catastrophe. Yet that has become only a portion of the problem. Ignorance of science, globalizaation, nationalism, racism, and now the corvid virus and the American President, Donald Trump have brought us to a pivotal point in human history, a point that even 50 years ago, we would have considered impossible.

Yet it has happened and divisions among nations, races, political movements, ignorance of science, and the actions of American politicians and hostitlies or buttering up with dictatorships leave us at terrible risk with no plan in place and no guessing what the outcome might be.

On July 23, 2020 the president of MIT addressed a letter to the MIT community from which I quote:

“With this letter, we invite all principal investigators (PIs) from across MIT to help us define a new agenda of transformative research. The threat of climate change demands a host of interlocking solutions; to shape a research program worthy of MIT, we seek bold faculty proposals that address the most difficult problems in the field, problems whose solutions would make the most decisive difference.”

I responded with a not very cordial: “What took you so long?”

This is, despite the virus, the greatest problem facing humanity. It has been known since the mid-1800s that this was likely, and in the mid-1900s that disaster was almost certain. Yet America is in a stranglehold that is a reflection the totality of its history. Its present problems that leave it in no position to answer the call. So many failures and so much greed, such collosal ignorance of the science, and, with Donald Trump, putting politics ahead of everything, it is impossiblre to get one’s arms around the problem. The New Yorker in Tribalism Under Trum[ characterized the situation:

”We live in a time of tribes. Not of ideologies, parties, groups, or beliefs—these don’t convey the same impregnability of political fortifications, or the yawning chasms between them. American politics today requires a word as primal as “tribe” to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They’re badges of identity, not of thought. In a way, they make thinking unnecessary, because they do it for you, and may punish you if you try to do it for yourself. To get along without a tribe makes you a fool. To give an inch to the other tribe makes you a sucker.”

Scientists from across the nation should have occupied the capital 20 years ago, but there is an impotence that may be terminal.

It is the nature of tribalism, of groups whose necessity is in our genes, to be powerless to change no matter the evidence. Collective beliefs effectively constitute a religion to the point that disagreement is not concievable.

Conservsatives have coopted parts of the electorate and are challenging the very foundations of the democraccy. The president has plan to pack the Supreme Court. Nothing I can do here can summarize the confluence of disasterous breaks in the functioning of our lives, local, political, world-wide, that could do justice to this time.

We are left with just the one question: is there hope. Even if Trump is not relected, the jumbled mess left over still terrifies. So what do we do?

I’ve Got a Little List

What seems to me to be true:

1. Science, that discipline that confims knowledge, is beyond the comprehension of most people in all nations. Comprehension means to understand deeply.

2. The consequence is that religions and ideologies determine what people believe. Essentially, our belief system is, in practice, mideval. the enlightment and modern science not withstanding.

3. Explaining what has happened and will happen is nearly imposible.

4. Our politicians understand even less than the general public.

5. The gifts of creation: the earth, consciousness, sentience, intelligence are not appreciated. 6. Beliefs such as creationism and the supernatural bias most people.

6. The most educated people do not get a grounding in science yet

But if you don’t, or your nuturing gives you the short end of the stick, something truly dreadful may happen, and I have to answer what and why.

The what that comes immediately to mind is, of course, Donald Trump. His father gave him the most consciously limited nurturing that I had ever known about and to me the President is an empty, profoundy unhappy man. I feel monumental anger, but I also feel pity. What has this man missed, and what have so many other humans missed and why. It is the question of all time, and the question that goes along with it, is it too late to answer ituh

I feel sorry for Donald Trump. All of us are dependent on nurture in addition to nature, and apparently he got the short end of the nurture stick. He does what he does and says what he says because he doesn’t know any better. He really is today, at least, the equivalent of a five year old, without self-awareness.

The irony of this situaton is that humanity as a whole, has not done much better and that is the (new) topic of this introeduction.

I have felt for a long time that in his sub-conscious he is terrified of being found out. But now, he has an inkling of it and so goes to the only thing he knows, which is self-praise, which is also a begging for praise.

Where is our leadership?

The question before us is “what is life.” The problem is that it seems so obvious we do not try to answer it and we have not had to for the past 10,000 or so years.

With the advent of agriculture for the most part food was plentiful and the population of the earth exploded. Then, with the invention of the calculus in 1665 by Issac Newton, science was put on a foundation that has never stopped growing. Its effect was to make war still more terrifying and food still more plentiful, as well as building the industries and made modern life possible and began the destruction of the earth. Then came the perfect storm: A population ignornant of the most basic science, an industry that valued profits more than the destrruction of the earth, but the perfect storm was made by Donald Trump and the coronovirus. And one more thing.

American, the nation that had saved the world in two world wars, that had jump started modern technology revealed itself as a moral catastrophe: the last of the slave-holding nations, with the ravages of slavery continuing. America to people like my self who grew up saluting the flag, reciting the prelude to the constitution, singing God Bless Ameria, The Start Spangled Banner, and America the beautiful, found a tyranny of slavery in the form of white supremism and racism, and a government coopted by an ideology: low taxes and small government, all in parallel with a desperately shallow educational system with textbooks bleached white by being written in the south.

The America I believed in never existed. The meaning of life I thought I knew I could not articulate, and neither could anyone else I knew. But read on, I have changed my opinion about Life.

Civilization began someplace around 5000 to 1000 BCE with the beginning of agriculture, the invention of writing and the end of humanity liveing in huter-gatherer tribes. Scientific knowledge was non-existant and so knowledge depended on beliefs. Beliefs are a form of faith. They cannot be proven jsust as the existance of god cannot be proven. God is the name we assign to what we thinkks is a cause. But if you open the book of this bible, the pages arte blank.

They are not open to learning. Most commonly they are prisoners of ideologies, that vicious idea that quells the need to think but satisfies the need to feel special.

Reciprocity

How many know the meaning of “reciprocity? It must be the foundation of civilization and yet I never hear the word. I have read arguments that this is a failure of evolution and that is a possibility but there is a trail from hunter-gatherers where what we know about humanity is not taught and so 3/4 of the world (or more) is ignorant of who we and they are.

I think the essence of the problem is that technology has made feeding and housing us too easy. Hunter-gatherers had to find a balance with nature to survive. And as the author of Sapienshas said, agriculture was the worst thing that happened to humanity. A healthy diet of great variety was replaced by two or three grains and a few animals all chosen because they could be raised in capativity and so a few of us are saddled with farming and the rest turned loose. The agressive ones went to war and have never stopped. Tribes wage war on tribes and that includes Americans. America is not exceptional and never was for it was built on the backs of blacks and we are not taught this. Worse, blacks are still slaves. Where do we go from here?

What it means to be white

Chapter 1, July 16, 2020

An Overview

America was the last developed nation to permit slavery and it continues to practice a form of it today. America is the wealthest nation on earth and the most selfish to its citizens. It escaped the life under an unjust king only to create a nation no more caring than that under the king.

Americans do not understand the processes in their minds (intellect, sentience, consciousness, introspection and self awareness) that make life possible, satisfying and potentially full of joy. They do not understand that their minds are incredible gifts from the universe with a stunning capacity for thinking and experience.

Americans act as if they do not know what living a joyful life could mean.

Americans prey on each other through ideologies that steal wealth and power.

The result is the wealthest, most poweful and most backward nation on earth. Its cruelity to its people and the peoples's cruelity to each other is incomprehensible.

The consequence, a failure of attention, awareness and comprehension, will be a succumbing to the ravages of the warming of the climate. A result of having only a desire for wealth and power ignorant of the meaning of life is a tragedy that is an insult to the powers that created us.

The Context

The creation of the universe 10.88 billion years ago from nothing was a feat of all that the universe holds. Cosmologists and astronomers have discovered the essence of what happend nearly eight billion years ago.

The intellectual power that should have excited all of humankind never happened. Other than a Nobel Prize it passed unnoticed.

The discovery of the calculus, a foundation for understanding the physical earth is unknown except to scientists and mathamaticians. The disovery, by thinking alone, by Albert Einstein of relativity is the domain of a sacred few.

Instead, the world is still divided into tribes that continually war on each other and kill millions of human beings for no justifable reason. Yet within this ignorance groups small and large make miracles of care. Selfless groups care for the sick, homeless, and hungry.

These are just a few of the gifts, joys and illnesses of the soul. I describe some of the others elsewhere in this website.

Now I wish to begin exploring some of the accomplishments, the beauties and joys of our creation, while searching for the reasons we are attempting to destroy it.

Below this young man is puzzled and distraught because the sea rose and took the island that was his home. He did not need to know this context to continue life nor will he need to know it when the sea begins to swallow his kin, companions, and finally itself. Only the universe needs to know its own creation is a failure, at least to this day in the year 2020 AD.

This young man’s island is gone. The ocean has risen and washed it away.

CO₂ continues to rise. More land will become uninhabitable.

This is a look I have seen often. It says
“I don’t have a clue what is going on but I have to look as if I do.”

It Is Time To Open Our Minds And Think.

It is our last chance.

If it were only one perfect storm instead of three. If there were a rock bottom.

I grew up in Polish America. Everything in my life was Polish until I went off to grammar school. We were oddballs. The Polish National Catholic Church had no allegience to Rome. Its leader, Bishop Francis Hodur got into an argument with Rome over cemetary funds, got excommunicated and so started a new church. In his 80s he presided over my Confirmation on the church’s front steps. But what comes to mind is confession and the phrase ”examination of conscience.”

When have you heard aanyone ask us to all look inside, and then explain what we have missed.

I was ready to blame this mess on evolution. But it’s not a mess everywhere. There is something called intllectual honesty. And if we taught it, things might be very different. And they are in countries with good leaders. Why not here?

We have a president who won’t read his briefing papers. He might as well be illeterate. Like a big chunk of America he sees what he wants to see, hears what he wants to hear and does whatever he wants to do. He would not comprehend ”examination of conscience.”

America has never lived up to its billing. Slaves arrived in 1619. “All men are created equal,” but Thomas Jefferson owned 600 of them. Our economy was based on slavery. Our industrial might was built on the profits of slavery.

Tribal politics is destroying us. It’s great to be better than someone else, so we kill George Floyds by the thousands.

Ideology of our kind is a scam. Low taxes and small government sounds good to Trump’s base, but it is a scam. It makes billionaires. It takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

Where the hell was American education. It was based on an ideology. Low taxes and small government as it reads today. Ideology is a license to do whatever you wish. Set the strategy before you know what the problem is. Ah! But you know the goal. Keep slavery going. Separate but equal. Red lining. Gerrymandering. And Newt Gingrich telling us all the best words to demonize Democrats. Where the hell did this come from. Conservatives have stolen America. Billionaires by the bushell. 5.4 million Americans loosing medical care.

To be human you have to think. To be joyfull you must connect will all people, and not just white superiors.

I have wondered for a long time why no one discusses what made whites white. Genetics proves it. We migrated further north where there was less sun. And evolution took care of us. It took the darkness from our skin. We live in the shade, so to peak, and didn’t get enough vitamin D. That is it. Completely. Except that poor white supremists, like so many in America are neglecteed more than the poor in any other developed country. Abe, Franklin where are you when we need you the most

Let’s begin with The Donald and a former Republicin, George Will, who resigned from the party with the election of Trump. He recently wrote the following for the Washington Post.

Sizing up where there is no rock bottom.

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It is time to see and to hear, but we are we prepared for it?

Revelations in the age of Trump, the virus and global warming.

"This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.

Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.

Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm.

The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.

A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:

We are the hollow men . . . Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow."

“TRUMP MUST BE REMOVED. SO MUST HIS CONGRESSIONAL ENABLERS”

II. It is so close we forget it is there.

It is time to see and to hear, but we are we prepared for it. Evolution has blown it.

Revelations in the age of Trump, the virus and global warming.

In his popular book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari gives a long harangue about the word “equal” as it is used in the American Declaration of Independence, that there is no such thing. We are obviously not equal and the idea of equality only exists in our imaginations.

It is not unusual to dodge this issue, as physicists do it all the time in leaving emotion, intellect and sentience out of their “theories of everything.” The impliction of Harari’s harangue is that the Declaration of Independence is meaningless and he is clear that that will leave many very uncomfortable. I don’t agree with him.

He seems not to have realized what “equal” means. But he lost the argument a million or so years ago for we are all of the same species. We breed and our offspring are not sterile and that is all the Declaration can mean despite what the slave holder Thomas Jefferson had in mind.

What put us here? We may attribute it to god, that god is just a name. There are many gods and no eplanation.

There was a time when a singularity (or something like it) happened. Our science is good and we can calculate with fair certanity that it was 10.78 billion years ago. After that the universe seems to roll on through stage after stage one inexorably following another, or so it seems to me. We can even take a peek. The green egg is a masterful feat of science as it is a picture of the after glow of the big bang.

This sudden event created everything including this earth and the earth as best as I can tell was unlikely, and we even more so.

Psysicissts have determined at least seven unlikely conditions for the earth to exist. At a chance of 1% for each we arrive at a probability of 0.01 to the seventh power or a millionenth billioneth chance. Evolution was about the same which gives us 10^-28 as a rough guess as the probabality of our existence. And that was just the beginning.

Click for the collosal story of this collosal piccture.

What We Give For What We Got

The hidden world of the nearby.

Have you ever thought about what LIFE is? What it is that goes on inside your head that gives you intellect, sentience (the experience of the world), joy, emotion and a few thousand other things.

Stop. I preseume you are sitting down. Now close your eyes, say for 10 seconds. Oblivion. A faint glow and nothing else. Now open your eyes. What is happening is that your eyes form two tiny upside down image on your retinas. From these two images your brain builds the most realistic, three dimensional, motion picture of the world. Look out the window. Look at your wife. Look at the piano across the room. Not only do you know where they are but they stay put when you move. When they move, even rapidly your brain keeps track of everything.

Science has only the vagest clues how this happens. And, lest we forget the ears do this too.

We get to hear and listen to an infinite array of experiences. What do we do in return. Well that depends on who you are, but few people think about it. But a large number hate and kill and an even larger number are destroying the planet we are sitting on. Some of that rain falling may be god’s tears. (if there is one; something else may have caused this)

In America the Declaration has never applied equally to everyone. This inequality is enshrined in the Constitution and even with the Bill of Rights the inequality continues to exist. At the beginning it was male landowners who ruled and, of course, slaves had no rights whatsoever. Women were excluded from voting. Yet Chopin was reincarnated in black music, the only American art form. We need to hear and see it now.P.P But the real problems rested with the ability for “freedom” to take a toll on ”freedom” and by concepts, such as States Rights, to leave all sorts of injustices in place. At this time, July 2020 we are in the clutch of what has been a defacto coup by consertavies to own the country and its government, and this has happened, Democratic presidents not withstanding. With minimal opposition by Deocracts tax laws have shifted wealth to a startling few in just a few decades. Accompanying this has been an assault of voting rights that has set the stage for a takeover, even if Trump is not relected. The conservative courts, the rules of the senate, the accumulation of wealth in conservatibe hands, the anti-labor laws, the low minimum wage, the ability to run stunningly profitable businesses with virtually slave labor and you have the most socially backward country among ths so-called industrialized nations.

The big question is why were some people driven to make it happen while others were lax in allowing it to happen. It may just be evolution that has created mankind in its image. How could that be.

Harari declares that the invention of agriculture was the worst thing thaat ever hhappened to humanity. It broke up the hunter-gatherer tribes in which we evolved to our present selves. When these tribes were brokend up there were (and this is my opinion) two kinds of people left to deal with the consequences of relying on wheat cultivation as the primary food source. Thus some, because they had no choice but to grow their own food found themseles at the mercy of the more agressive former hunters who simply taxed by taking food and using their free tie to (jumping over a few things) build empires and human nature was that empires, no matter how large, feared each other. Or perhaps justr wanted to be bigger and wealthier.

Some of this has moderated in Europe, at least for the time being. It has not moderated in America as witnessed by two wars it has started and by the concentration of wealth.

A country that had slavery written into its constitution cannot be a great country. A country that permits the after effects of slavery to corrupt racial relations is not a great country. A country what was captured by an ideology to make a few people wealthly is not a great country. A country that puts the planet at risk may not have room to exist. And the list goes on and on.

Freedom has a bit of an odd interpretation is some quarters. Being asked to wear masks by the top health agency in the country is an infringement of freedom. Perhaps in a nuclear attack some would imaagine the arrage of neutrons would miss them.

Turning down Abama Care aid and thus denying children medical care is a sin no matter which god you follow.

In smaller countries, Gernmany, South Korea for example the virus was brought under contro.

Our president’s leadership is to encourage white supremacy and to praise himself for what a beautiful job he has done. Killing tens of thousands of people by untter and total ineptness. Genocide. Crimes against humanity. The people should try him in a symbolic court and here at one time in one place the crimes committed by the worst human being we have ever known. But now he is not the problem. Saving people and the earth will take a miacle.

IIWe are faced today with several problems that threaten American democracy and the future of the planet. However, the focus is on events rather than probing more deeply into causes. This make finding solutions difficult or impossible. It can also cause solutions to fail over the long term.

Overcoming racism is not just a matter of laws and changing of behavior. Fundamental underpinnings must be corrected even if it takes a long time, otherwise the problems will simply reassert themselves.

Some of the issues are broard and apply to nearly every situation. Others are more specific and dealing with a problem that affects fewer situations or people, but must be dealt with within

Problems in a society need more than one person lighter colored is known scientificlly and, in my experience, not discussed in society in general.

Being “white” is taken by supremisists as a sign of superiority, yet the reason some of us are lighter is simple and has no significance except genetic history.

Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa and reached the rest of the world by migration north about 70,000 years ago, although there may have been several migrations spread over a period of time.

The knowedge to back this up is from fairly rescent analysis of genes found in ancient bones. In combinztion with archeology it presents what is to me, an earth-shaking revelation.

Our ancestors were all some shade of brown or black, the color coming from a pigment called melinon that protects skin from the sun. However, skin is where vitamin D is made and it requires some amount of sunlight. As our ancestors migrated north the amount of sunlight decreased as did the making of vitamin D. In less sunlight, humans with lighter skin were healthier and survived longer. By the time we reached Sweaden the melinen was gone from our skins, but with considerably less sunlight vitamin D was still made. Hence there is no meaning to whiteness escept for how far north we walked. There is nothing whatever that is “superior” about white skin, except it is a temptation to rally aound when a group of people have a need to feel superior. It is hugely complicated by the history of darker skinned people in Amerca being brought here directly from Africa and sold as slaves.

Our heritage, likely from hunter-gatherer times, is to sizze opportunities to make money. Cotton was in huge demand world wide and growing it was labor intensive. Blacks from Africa werr free labor.

The profits from growing cotton were enormous. Production by individual slaves was monitored closely and poor performance punished. Good performance simply meant the quota was raised. The need to keep track was so important it led to the invention of double entry booking, the core of modern cost accoun .

The profits from growing cotton laid the industrial foundation of America. It took the civil war to end slavery in its original form, but it did not prevent a new form of slavery. Southern states made it virtually impossible for blacks to do anything but work in the cotton fields for very low wages. Segration was endemic, and separate but equal was a fraud. Blacks were kept in their place, a practice that extends to this day and extends to the north. People of color attend schools supported by property taxes. Their low ownship of property condemns them to a lesser education. The tendency to tribalis means cultural differences keep class divisions in place and so the leadership of America stays white and male.

Myths about inferiority are deep and sometimes unconscious. Names on internet resumes are a givaway. and has included murder since the end of the civil war. For a long time it was lynchings. More recently it has been police practice and there is a large motivation to change police practice. But if the perception of people of color as less intelligent (educztion is inferior), less employable, and of a different culture. They are not like us and in the abscence of an overall socital change attitude towards people of color, predicue will continue, and possibly (or likely) make reform difficult and will cause it to erode over timer.In parallel the neglect of working class whites by white liberals will keep white supremacy alive. It is a deeper problem than a reform of police practic.

III. Tribalism: Wealth and Power

American Myths

Since the introduction of slaves to America in 1614 racism has been a fundamental issue that runs counter to the supposedly free society we were building. Blacks were monitized (made into property) and used to build wealth from supplying the world with cotton at very high profits. However, descriminization on the basis of biologicl issues has now come to include LGBTQ, with violence a continuous problem. LGBTQ has even become a problem in the world of commerce when religious beliefs are claimed to give the right to refuse service. This strikes me as insane just as there is an insistance that "freedom" allows one not to wear a mask, to deny medical care because it is supplied by the government.

The religious problem is fundamental because it has shapedd thinking for centuries and does not distinguish belief from knowledge. Although there may be much wisdom in some religious writings, everything must be characterized as a belief rather than knowledge. The wisdom (or dogma) cannot be confirmed. If one chooses to believe it is a belief based on faith.

With thinking based on religions with only a tenuous connection to reality left the rich powerful to control the rest of the population because of a failure to understand and deal with the fundamental equality of all people.

Finally, with the introduction of the steam engine around 1850 and the increased prodution of agriculture able to support a large population, the impact of humanity on the earth began to take on dangerous proportions. Simultaneous major advances in technology requiring much more scientific thinking made a very large population possible without requiring a rethinking of the relationship of the powerful with the poor or of industry with the earth.

Now, because of the ubitiquitous presence of phone cameras, the abuse of people of color has been documented and the George Floyd murder, fully czptured on video, has so arroused people that there appears the possibility of fundamental reform. However, in my opinion, progress is unlikely in any of the problem areas. A scientific view of reality is rare and is difficcult to acquire. Taking a single course is not enough and without the benefit of the reality that doing experients provides, perceptions do not go deeply enough and with the convictions this supplies and especially with a vicious conservatism ready to pounce, anything the appears to be getting firm really is not.

Even more fundamental is an understanding of what life should be. Its purpose and nature is not part of the discussion. On top of all this, racism and especially white supremacy are based on a false understanding of what makes humans have skin of different color with the principle factor being lack of sunlight as populations migrated north. Evolution selected for lighter skin in order to provide sufficient vitamin D for health.

An enormously important side effect of race problems, the pandemic, and very shallow understanding of science, and conservative ideology that favors the accumulation puts the fate of the earth at the bottom of list of problems. This may well be catostrophic.

Finally, there is almost no appreciation of the process that created the universe, the evolution of modern humanity and the stunning powers of the human mind for creative lives of satisfaction and enjoyment. We are, I believe, at a tipping point in the history of humanity.

And this is by no means everything. Humans need tribes for compaionship and idendity. Idendity may be based on things innocuous such as a sports team, a shared interest, or it may be fased on a set of beliefs, either true or false. Tribal idendity often invoices a kind of acquired sense of superioity. Religios invoke the approval of god. Political partities provide idendity and support for an ideology. One of the most insidious exaples is "low taxes and small government." This corruption of humanitarian thinking has resulted in a tax structure that sucks money into the pockets of the already rich, creating the stunning disparity where 1% of Americans own 80% of America. The truly insidious side is the superficial appeal to lower income people. It all sounds good but does the opposite of the apparent promise.

Intermingled with this is a people of stunning generousity as can be seen from the response to the current health crises and the free market as allowed for great creativity. However, this creativity has put up to one hundred billion dollars in each of several different pockets while children die from hunger or a result of health car. Simultaneously, the reliance of school funding on property taxes means the rich get smarter and the poor stay poor. My impressions is simply that conservatism is cruel and that ideologies of any kind that tie ones hands before the problems are known is extremely counterproductive.

Along with race, tribalism, religion, and who knows what else causes enormous violent discrimination, the LGBTQ issue being one of them. A compassioate socity would conclude that if a relation causes no harm there is no reason to interfere. Also, sexual oriention is a biologically complex process and virtually unknown among the general population. Righteious indignation, religion and just a reason to lord it over some group or category of people has caused infinite sufferig, with no benefits whatever.

Instances like the murder of George Floyd suggest a mounsterous lack of what it means to be human.

Tribalism, Skin Color And Ideology

The problems rising to the top

Scientific thinking or, separating knowlege from belief, is hardly better that it was hundreds of years ago. Science is not taught widely enough nor thoroughly enough and its importance is not appreciated even by the well educated.

2. Most people do not even know what science really is and so cannot appreciate its importance.

3. The meaning of race and of skin color is not known or understood.

4. We still divide ourselves into tribes and often need to find a tribe we can feel superior to. The less education, the greater this need.

5. Darker skin color is associted with inferiority.

6. Vestiges of slavery polludes towards blacks especially in law enforcement.

7. Our political leadership is the perfect storm of stupidity, prejudice, dishonesty and immoriality.

8. The combination of our lack of science and the devestation of the admisnstration has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It is not possible to imagine a person less suited to lead a country than Donald Trump.

9. Trump is now egging on white supremistists.

10. Virtually no one knows the causes of different skin colors.

1. We are all Africans, descended from tribes of homo sapiens that migrated north about 70,000 years ago. Our ancestors were all some shade of brown.

Those who had lived near the equator had large amounts of melinin in their skin to protect them from the sun. Migration was north eventually reaching Scandanavia. The further north, the less sun, the less vitamin D and resulting poorer health. Hence, lighter skinned people survived.

In other words, white supremeicy means whites stayed out of the sun. Peroid. Light skin confers no benefits except the ability to live further north of the euqltor.

1.

The beliefs of virtually all Americans are based on ideas laid down hundreds of years ago.
Science education is almost non-existant and even professionals with PhD degrees often have not probed the most important issues whether they are scientists or not. That these professionals consider themselves educated is a major impediment to progress.

Moreover, a single science course, unless it is thorough and intense and aimed at problems government officials would face are virually useless. The news today June 27, 2020 is catastrophic, a result of governers opening the economy while infection rates are still rising. Goverment leaders including heads of science committees have stated they do not believe in science and meanwhile the vice president is congratulating himself and the administration on what a great job they are doing.

At some point in the 1600s science began to be recognized as important. Yet in the twentieth century it is not a fundamental requirement of educztion and consequently hobbles intelligent decision making zt every level. It now has and it is so bad that it feels to me like a nuclear stike had been launched against the whole country.

I originally began this website in response to the shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. After reading about global warming I changed course. I was worried at the time that we were not taking warming seriously and that major publications such as the New York Times were doing a poor job of reporting and that Republicians were urging scientists to reduce severity of their predictions.

My assessmenbnt now is that the utter incompetance of the administration and the catastrophic rebound of the virus simply spells doom in America. My hope is close to zero, but I have time to keep writing and so I will.

What can be done? Elect an administration of stunning energy and intelligence and a comparable congress and declare that a state of war exists between America and stupidity.

Marshall every resource and fight.

If policies and actions are not changed to the full extent possible, America will become fully a third-world country with perhaps 25% of its population dead and its confidence shattered.

And as if this were not enough, our ideas of what it means to be human are wrong. Our ideas of race are totally wrong. Our ideologies of wealth and compassion are wrong.

We have divided ourselves into warring tribes that will unequavilically destroy each other.

We are way overdue in applying the learnings of science and the best thinking about the purpose and meaning of life. We have no choice but to get to work. And no one, not one person no matter what education, status or wealth should presume they are not part of the problem.

Our only option is to join our minds, rich and poor, educated or not, any color of skin, any gender preference and think on the basis of the equality of every human spirt.

However, even this, as impossible as it may seem is not enough.

Our abuse of the earth is an unmitigated disaster. Our failure to teach and understand science has led us to collosal neglect. We are already condemned to incredable suffering, but we must avoid what is destined to be far worse.

Perspective

The longest view

The primary cause of our problems, in my opinion all of them, is a failure to understing how and why we were created. Our minds are miracles yet are rarely applied. Our senses are miracles yet the beauty of our existance is rarely recognized.

Whatever god, or force, or mysterious process that created us must be in morning.

Our destiny was not preordaned. It has been left to us too make our lives based on compassion, understanding, beautiful, creative and joyful. The alternative is collosal suffering and injustice. There is infinite work to be done.

The singular cause is our failure to learn what is known, where we came from, our inherited nature, our fundamental equality and our reason for existing. We must learn.

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We do not know why we are here. We do not know why the universe is here.

We do not know why there is something rather than nothing.

We do not appreciate there is a miracle lodged in the space between our ears.

But perhaps above all, we do not appreciate that a miracle happens every time we open our eyes.

It is all a gift to us that we cannot explain, why evolution has made hands that create miracles

and eyes that see joy in a sunset, and that we do not wonder why.

And so we are destroying these miracles.

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My Approach Is A Tour Of Beauty, Destruction, Wonderful Creaations, and False Knowledge, of Failure And Success.

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However, most important is the story of our creation. What I have learned is that the process of our creation is an infinite wonder. And my believe is that we owe our creation a commitment of all we are capable, to save ourselves, for we are the infinite wonder that is the outcome of the creation. So what follows is my attempt to bring to this website examples of everything important that I could find to set the stage, to begin to fill in the gaps, to teach science to PhDs that know no science, to all who have not experienced the greatest art, to everyone the destruction we have cause, to everyone the product of hatreds, misunderstanding and just plain failure and neglect. Fasten your seat belts.

Our government, our educational system, our philosophy of how we treat each other, our knowledge of ourselves, have brought us to a precipice.

Not only is our civilization at stake, but the planet itself may well become possibly totally uninhabitable.

At one time we lived in small tribes in harmony with the earth, but our thinking and our love and our responsibility disappeared. As it became easier to populate the earth we ignored the damage we are causing.

Our thinking is medieval. We may blame it on god, but there are many gods. We do not penetrate the depths of thinking.

Our eyes only look foward today, when looking to the side would show doom.

The Meaning Of Our Existence

The Birth of The Universe

Beginning, Science, "Miracles," Purpose, Life, Joy

Most of what follows is usually attributed to god. However, I view god as not a cause the the name of a cause. There are supposedly many gods each resulting from the experiences of whomever whote the relevant scripture. I don’t claim it is all false, because I don’t know but I will rely on science and leave the unknown as unknown.

Below is an image of the cosmic background radiation. We are looking back as far as we can to the beginning of the universe. The colors are galaxies and are caused by very small temperature differences in the radiation. We are looking back in time some 10 billion years.

This radiation is the afterglow of the big bang which ironically was the smallest thing there could be. Why it happened we do not know, so our existence is a mystery.

Details are best studied on Wikipedia. My point is that it seems to me that that the creation went to a lot of trouble to get us here and we do not appreciate it nor make use of it. In fact we are doing our best to destroy it.

The Greatest Story Never Told

From the Grand Singularity to Us

My education was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I left one dissertation short of a PhD. Yet in all that study, although it was a superb foundation, there was not a hint of what is necessary to think about today.

I give the credit for feeling compelled to think to my two fathers. The first, my biological father Joseph, was much like my MIT father, Amar Bose. They both were, a bit extreme for what they expected of me.

My biological father, my Dad, was a superb engineer although he did not attend college. When I explained what I was studying and told him of the unbreakable laws of physics, such as the conservation of energy, his reaction was “well you should be able to break them.” When I told him my high school report card was all As, he said “What, no A plusses.” Dad, they don’t give A+s. “For you they should.” I just walked away for there was nothing to say. And at MIT I was a good student, surrounded by geniuses. I was doing well, but every exam made me tremble.

Professor Amar Gopal Bose was something else altogether. He really did revolutionize the audio industry. It was luck that my love of music and my hobby as an audiophile led me to his office one day in 1964 and I eventually became the 5th employee of a nascent Bose Corporation.

And when I was working at a growing Bose Corporation and working half time so I could photograph nature he gave me the job of introducing a small, all-in-one music system costing $495 that would usually be called a “boom box” and cost $69.95. It was my job to introduce to the world The Acoustic Wave Music System. And, one more thing. My job was to “Get the best set of reviews ever for any piece of audio equipment.” I had been prepared by that time. I thought for about 5 seconds and said O.K.

This attitude is what made me want to understand what is happening to us and why I am proposing something crazy.

I learned this craziness in many one-on-one conversations with Dr. Bose but in reality I had known him for so long I knew his attitude about breaking fundamental laws. And then another "one more thing." I had the unspoken privilege to spend any amount of money without even my initials on a piece of paper.

And still another thing: I had two geniuses to help me, the two most creative people I have ever known.

But whatever. This is pretty small potatoes compared to a couple of other efforts I could think of.

Apollo 8, the first attempt to fly to the moon and go into orbit was decided on three months notice in order to have a prayer of meeting John Kennedy’s goal of a man on the moon within the decade. Four hundred thousand people worked for the three months and it was a perfect flight.

And then there was one of the greatest experiments ever: the detection of gravity waves. And having read the book and the accounts in the Times, I found myself in a small room at the St. Botolph Club in Boston with perhaps 50 other people listening to Rainer Weiss, the father of the project, give his superb account of the fifty year effort. And then sat next to him at dinner. The account of the first detection, two large black holes spinning around each other at 30,000 rpm and then coalescing a few hours after the detectors were turned on, makes your hair stand on end. (I think they just e-mailed the Nobel Prizes.) This will be a bigger job than all of these put together. It is crazy to think of stopping a pandemic, cooling the earth, and curing racism all at once, but perhaps we can find a way that they reinforce each other.

There are infinite questions about life, but who asks them? Who has the courage to try to answer them? Me. I will answer them. My father told me I could do anything if I tried, including breaking the laws of physics. “Dad. You can’t do that.” “Well you can.” He was wrong, of course, but just possibly not wrong in another way.

I started at the age of 11, thinking I would try to “understand.” I am nearing 79 and think I have something called perspicacity. (You can read more about me in my biography).

Perspicacity is a penetrating discernment —a clarity of vision or intellect which provides a deep understanding and insight. It takes the concept of wisdom deeper in the sense that it denotes a keenness of sense and intelligence applied to insight.

I had a professor at MIT, Amar Bose, who was like my father. He was my advisor and when I said I was leaving without doing a PhD dissertation because seven years was enough, he said “Do you want a job?” and I became the fifth (as in 5) employee of a very nascent Bose Corporation. I was a student, comrad, colleague and friend with Amar Bose for over fourty years. He had perspercasity. I had more in some ways because I ventured in many more directions, becoming an artist among other things, but most of all I think I know what is not knowable but yet essential. So we have to leap chasms to get to places from which we can see. Here is what I am thinking about.

Everything

Scientists discover what seems infinite knowledge, yet know (or forget) there is another infinity waiting. They dream of theories of everything, yet those theories do not ask why is their pain, love, joy, fear, beauty, terror and love, life and death.

Scientists (and I consider myself one of them), know they have discovered so much, but do not understand how much they are leaving out.

And so we go about life blindly. And get into the mess we are in: a real plague and a president plague, trying to solve many monumental problems, while letting the earth go to hell.

Why do we do this? Because we neglect ourselves. We don’t stop to think long enough to realize what is this thing between our ears, so we let it atrophe. It feels like every time we ignore a part of our brain, someone or somethings pays a price. Now in June 2020 we are just beginning to realize some of the greatest costs, and ironically we are being educated by a president who uses less of what is between his ears of any adult I know.

The Slave Trade

“From the middle of the 15th century, Africa entered into a unique relationship with Europe that led to the devastation and depopulation of Africa, but contributed to the wealth and development of Europe. From then until the end of the 19th century, Europeans began to establish a trade for African captives.”

An illustration of the hold of a slave ship.

I. Civilization: When Will It Begin?

Tribes. Dominance. Freedom.

I believe the Bible set the tone a very long time ago in Genesis: “God said ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.’ And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

God could have meant that man should be a creator, but instead he gave humanity a blessing to be powerful, a blessing that turned out to be destructive in many ways, including the worst way possible, by threatening the destruction of the earth.

To be god-like, one must be free to be creative, to make the most of the phenominal minds that give meaning to our lives. Those that yearn to control others, or even to take away life, are those empty of the hope to create. This is the grand division of humanity, and the grand challenge of Life. I believe, with no proof other than my reasoning, that this is how the creation works: it is an ongoing struggle between hope and dominance.

Is There The Possibility of A Different Future?

We call ourselves a civilization. Well, when did it begin? Or rather when will it begin?

Did hunter gatherer tribes not fight? Perhaps. We do not know.

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens calls agriculture the worst thing that ever happened to humanity, for instead of what were stable family-like tribes life was divided in a disasterous way. Nutrition became poorer with a smaller variety of edibals; a few individuals were left to farm: boring, strenuous, dawn to dusk. But worst of all were the most agressive of the tribal leaders now unemployed, what would they do with their time. They were leaders in a world that did not need them, for they were agressive and by necessity insatiable and so began the building of mega-tribes, first cities and them countries and eventually empires. And to build empires meant annexing countries, cities, or even other empires. This behavorior has not stopped yet.

The Role of Religion

The dominant motivtion for humanity has been fear propelled by ignorance. Death was and is a complete mysstery. Thunder, lightening, drought, plagues were disasters with no knowledge of causes so causes were invented.

Gods, of course had been playing a role since time immemorial, but there reach was limited, as was their power. Now human imagination created gods of ever expanding juristiction, threat and blessing.

Gods could do whatever wonderous human imagination imagined. Bless, curse, give live or death, unite, divide, but above all the direction was the melding of gods of limited juristinction into gods of more and more power until they became supreme, and all powerful. Then humanity, in its great imagination and wisdom gave supreme beings the power to annoit, to bless and to choose a people, a people who of course had invented gods for just this purpose, but with one inevitable problem: there were numerous “supreme” beings and fear of not being blessed and chosen led to wars between consituients, adding to the other reasons for wars, territorial being primary.

So fear drives the incredible human imagination, lust for power creates warriers, and it goes on. America, land of the free and home of the brave, finishes wars but is lost without them and starts others.

Europe has achieved some stability, but deep thinking has not yet reached America, and it only recently reached Europe. Without wars, nations like America begin to feel a pent up energy, a need to be “great” or perhaps great again.

Why should it be like this? It is possible that it is the only kind of life that has meaning. Take away the challenges, the fear of death, the tribes that threaten and we would lay down our pens and pencils, lie in the sun and wait for another time which will never come. Stasis would become the norm.

II. Scatterings of Civilization

Chorusus, Keys, and Harmonies

In my life of thinking about life and searching for its meaning, the creativity that humans invented gods seems extraordinarily inventive, powerful and beautiful. One has only to walk through the cathedrals of Europe or listen to Christmas from the chiors of England. It is as if all the energy, imagination, and coaalesing of spirits of quarreling individuals transcends all. It sends shivers down my spine and through my mind. And when it reaches beyond the church to express the deepest spirit that it brings tears to my eyes.

What is this that has suddenly risen, it seems, from the ashes of tribes, wars, hatred, lust to become something beyond all these and beyond all words. Now a hundred musicians, instead of a warring tribe conspire with composers, instrument makers, and artists of dexterity that we could not have imagined coming from the evolution of hunter-gathers. Could humans have acquired the impossible skill to articulate Chopin or Beethoven from the skills needed to survive in the savannah hunting and gathering. It is a leap of a chasm of seemingly infinite breadth and depth to have hundreds of individuals devote their lives to making their fingers engage an instrument that also took a lifetime of skill, with an almost god-like creator, an individual that composes and repose, enchantement, an excitement of spirit that makes one want to do nothing but make music. A miricle? Yes but one of many, for the mind needed to accomplish all this manifestided itself a million years ago. But there is a catch, a need for recognition of the miracle and a life devoted to the miracle.

It is not the only sign of civilization. The arts and sciences have given birth to many. But there is also a tragedy waiting in the wings. On the same stage of performance the tribes still wait to fight and destroy.

It is freedom removes the shackles, be they police, poverty, poor education or a freezing culture or above all, fear that makes civilization possible along with a depth of understing of the nature of humanity. Yet our teaching, learning, in the year 2020 might just as well for the most part be the year 202. Drop one zero and the essence of what we teach and believe has not changed. Just read the news, watch the tribes in a battle without weapons, except an insidious corruption of the mind and a blindness and deafness to the sproutings of beauty and joy that scatterings of civilization make possible.

Where will we go from here. There are reasons for optimism, but the fears that bring pessisism are almost overwhelming for we cannot even agree that joy and beauty make it worthwhile to avoid destroying the very planet that gave everyone possibilitieis.

We have been given minds of incredible power, imagination and creativity, minds to build relationsips, raise children and compose symphonies. To let these minds work there must be the freedome to hope that efforts will not be stymied by oppression.

Some time ago, in trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life, I stopped studying the creation of the universe and rather asked what were the best experiences I had had. An image of my granddaughter came to mind, or conversations with my wife over breakfast, or a late Beethoven string quartet that Susan and I would listen to together.

This is to start with, the day to day wonders of joy. But there is more.

The sign that we do not know very much is how and why the earth was created.
I think that needs to be in our minds, but it is too soon to tell the story.

III. The Hope Of Things Unseen. The Sound Of Things Unheard.

To hope for reality, for that which is just imagined.

It is a very sad story to live in fear, whether it is of hunger, shelter or lack of medical care when there is an abundance of resources. To have a state governor turn down free Obamacare for an ideology is a crime, for people will then die, if not physically, then it is hope that will die. This is a crime not just against humanity, but against the Creation itself. If you believe in god, it is a crime against god and if you study history, it has been almost always the norm until the beginning of a most ironic adventure.

In the New World an extraordinary group of men, chosen it seems almost randomly, conspired to write two documents: a declaration of hope, and the rules of an organization that would see the hope realized. The first was the Declaration of Independence. The second was the constitution.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, while not perfect was the best yet conceived.

Free elections and a separation of powers, fought over, agonized over and ultimately compromised with the hope that it might be realized, and in many ways it has been. But the irony was that it was for some men and not for others, and the only difference was sunshine.

At the time, in the 16 and 17 hundreds, there was no way of knowing that we all originated in Africa, and those whose ancestors migrated north lost the color of their skin so they might have enough vitamin D to live. And that is the grandest irony of history. The grandest experiment in a new way of life, was compromised by too little (or too much) sunshine.

In different societies dark skin means different things, but in Europen cultures in became to mean inferiority and became the excuse to enslave. Tje irony is that the slavery and the Constitution and a commody called cotton perpetuated slavery in different forms and crushed hope for millions whose skin had remained dark.

Whenever you might be reading this, the time, June, 2020. when I am writing this seems to be a historic divide. A people who want hope, a president without hope who is trying to become dictator, and all visited by a plague, as if god had said “a pox on both your houses.”

However, rather than leave it to see what the future brings, I think we should think with all our minds, what we would like, and what the creation has ordained as best, for the future to bring.

believed this for a long time. And now I read the words rather than just having “in his image” floating in my memory.”

I do not think of the Bible as having been inspired by god but certainly inspired by life and by a belief in an unseen power. So the fears of belief without knowledge lead to creating a view of civilization by power.

These words may be the origin of the most fundamental problems of our civilization. Whoever wrote them was reflecting the fears of early man, for early man had no knowledge of the cause of most of the things he feared: violent wind and rain; thunder and lightening; drought and deluge; plaguesof locusts and of death. At some early time I wonder if there were even words to have a conversation, but any conversation had to lead to images of frightful things that threatened.

If I think of the dictators of our time, I see the goose step, thousands of soldiers marching in perfect unison and catapaults able to sling collosal death to the opposite side of the world.

I see the dictator creating his dominion, something perfectly controlled and powerful, ready to subdue unruly mobs and any other threats, and to establish rules that no one dare break. Mobs, such as those demonstrating today, even if perfectly disciplined, were on the road to the gulag.

America 1719: escaping the dominion of kings.

Being the king.

I expect that finding tribes of blacks in the jungle was part of or contributed to cololnialism. Whichever, dominion was the outcome. Countries were enslaved and slaves were monitized. It was known as the “slave trade.” Blacks were assigned a value partly just for being black and partly for their value as machinery. Project 1619 beginning in the New York Times Magazine of December 2019 brought me a stunning new perspective on slavery.

A slave is a comonidity, a machine whos output, the amount of cotton picked, that provided the wealth to industrialize America. Precise quotas and double-entry bookkeeping.

Dominion goes on.

Hope

Hope is the motivation for creativity. Hope was the motivation for concieving of a different kind of nation: free from the dominion not just of the King, but of all limitations. Freedom to be.

It is difficult to understand how fundamental this was. The first formal organization of humanity that recognized the fundamental equality of all human beings. Except blacks, but this does not take away from the good side, but makes the downside all the worse.

Freedom to be, and freedom from fear. It was against the law of the land to make others afraid and that is very different from feeling more or less sure there is not a hostile tribe about to come over the hill. This is civilization, as long as you are white.

Creating a nation that is founded on the idea that fundamental to the concept of being human is the protected right to be free to create, a life or an institution or a machine or whatever. Thre freedom to create is an explosion of hope, an explosion that built a nation from sea to shining sea and joined the seas with a railroad. And on an on. With funding by Cotton, Inc.

IV. Hope is the beginning of everything.

Hope is why the universe and humanity were created.

Hope is being able to imagine, to see something that does not yet exist, to use the power of the mind to (as engineers like to say) integrate, to sum up all of life’s experience and thinking to take the next step, be it recovery from tragedy to the building of that first coast to coast railroad. And ironically, it is what those who want to build more railroads want to extinguish, for hope is also dangerous, for hope will fight to the last man, for hope.

However, hope is, ironically, as dangerous as no hope for it dependss on how it is used. It is often if not always threatening to lead in the work direction.

Hope realized must benefit others, and then another generation of others. For hope can just as well lead to lust and that makes seeing swivil to places that should never be seen. And so perpercasity becomes necessary. What, ultimately, are we hoping for. And what can lead us to the precipice.

Caution to the winds.

When a composer composes, a painter paints, a writer writes the completion of one work may lead to an excited optimisism, or to a look over the abiss. Can I do it again? The answer is simple, you won’t know until you try.

It is not like sitting at the right hand of god. And a condition of stasis. An artist (or businessman or scientist, etc.) commits to a kind of strange joy: freight, uncertainty, what’s next. Or is rewarded with another sun on the horizon and another and another. To my mind there this is number one among many such uncertainities that constitute Life. Go for it Girl. Or Boy. Or Woman. Or Man. Assuming there is not a conservative, a zealot, an unfulfilled ego, or even a mad-man in the way.

If you are empty, if what is between your ears atrophied or never developed, you may choose acquisition over letting freedom ring.

The Roman Emperors who went all the way to England, could not stop just as the tycoon todaay worth $100 billion dollars cannot stop, nor can he feel for others sitting on a different precipice, those with nothing. Or those with something like a road paver that the tycoon needs for his business, but forgets the operator.

American has suffered the tragedy of a nation of the rich by the rich and for the rich. And death comes stalking the soul and the spirit of everyone.

The fundamental question of living is to answer what Life (yes a capital L) is.

I assert (for there is no proof) that the greatest part of life is joy, which comes from relathipships with earh other or with the universe, from learning about the universe and from creating beauty and joy.

“Conservatives,” by which I mean essentially all Republicians, are preoccupied with accumulating and controlling. China is a good example. What is wrong with this is that it denys the value of what the Universe has given us, and consequently puts conservatives at war with the Universe.

We were created in order to create which requires learning. Conservatives do not study the Universe and so know nothing of its grandeur and beauty. By not studying the universe they are using only the animal portion of their minds. They do not create beauty and joy.

To create beauty and joy requires the mind, in all its incredible complexity and creative abilities, to be free to explore the infinite possibilites of sharing with other creators. This is a catastrophe of infinite sadness, ruthlessness, pain and crueiity. It also takes a far greater intellect.

The only reason I can think of for the creation of conservatism is to provide a contrast to a free life. The more we read of Trump and his cohorts, the more we appreiate what we have. It is an ongoing struggle and it will never end until the conservatives, with their cruel ruthlessness, destroy the earth. It may well be that the reason no radio signals from other civilations have never been detected is that conservatives have destroyed all life on other planets.

Conservatives will take pride in their ability to control, loot, lie, destroy and laugh at the poor people yearning to be free. We can only pity them for what they are missing.

Donald Trump: A Man Without Hope.

George Floyd: An Infinite Tragedy Of Infinite Hope.

Donald Trump is a man without hope, for he cannot create anything. His joy is to find a thousand dollar bill just waiting to be pocketed, or a headline praising him for the good he has not done.

Deep down he knows he is without hope for he had to draw on his uncle to enable him to claim knowledge.

I believe that any man with an intact brain at some level wishes to be a man with the hope to create. So I believe that life for Donald Trump is unconsciously a crushing experience, but that makes it all the more dangerous for there are no limits, just as Hitler and Stalin had no limits. However, in this tragedy of tragedies, it still remains to be seen if Donald Trumps view of George Floyd can bring hope to humanity.

Perhaps a new understanding of hope.

Every human begins being human with hope, a vision of something better: a friendship, a family, a child, a business, a work of art, or just a sunny day.

I have wondered how this feels. I am imaging hearing my mentor praising me for something I did not dolar

It is probably too late.

On this day, May 9, 2020, my peace of mind is destroyed by four people: Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell.

All these men want unlimited power or they want to destroy. Together they could destroy the earth and neither care nor realize what they are doing. They present the greatest mystery of the human race: why are some humans impervious to understanding who they are and how they relate to the rest of humanity.

The manner of relationship between two humans must be governed by the rule of reciprocity (a more formal word for the Golden Rule). Its meaning is presented in this way in Wikipedia, I quote a large section since a want to make its meaning clear and easily accessble:

”In social psychology, to a positive action with another positive action, rewarding kind actions. As a social construct, reciprocity means that in response to friendly actions, people are frequently much nicer and much more cooperative than predicted by the self-interest model; conversely, in response to hostile actions they are frequently much more nasty and even brutal....”

Reciprocity makes it possible to build continuing relationships and exchanges. Fukuyama states that “If the institutions of democracy and capitalism are to work properly, they must coexist within certain premodern cultural habits that ensure their proper functioning.” ... He goes on to say “Law, contract, and economic rationality and prosperity... must as well be leavened with reciprocity, moral obligation, duty toward community, and trust…. The latter are not anachronisms in a modern society but rather the sine qua non (latin: "without which not") of the latter’s success.” .... According to the sociologist Alvin Gouldner (1960), this norm is nearly universal, and only a few members of society—the very young, the sick, or the old—are exempt from it.

Reciprocal actions differ from altruistic actions in that reciprocal actions only follow from others' initial actions, while altruism is the unconditional act of social gift-giving without any hope or expectation of future positive responses.[4][5] Some distinguish between ideal altruism (giving with no expectation of future reward) and reciprocal altruism (giving with limited expectation or the potential for expectation of future reward). For more information on this idea, see altruism or altruism (ethics).”

The great mystery of humanity is why some people love and others hate or destroy.

I have looked at hundreds of pictures of Donald Trump and never seen him smile except for this his formal portrait. It is a smile for the camera, not for an expression of pleasure or joy.

The full stories of these four people are plainly incredible. They represent the bottom where we would never think to look.

The best summary I can think of is this list of words by Newt Gingrich from an article inThe Atlantic Monthly, “How Newt Gingrich Destroyed American Politics.” These are the most important words to use against Democrats:

decay, failure (fail) collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, "compassion" is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocricy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor...) bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage

Truth stands for nothing. Dirtying language will accomplish anything.

Tom Cotton wants the military to shoot protestors.

Mitch Mconnel wants to stop anything good.

Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. That’s my four. Together they can destroy humanity and the earth.

V. Why Is There An Is?

How engineers think.

I have spend 2 1/2 years on this web site. Most is hidden. What is on the home page is what is left after I deleted more material to make way for something new. I start on guns: in anothershoes.com; then global warming: caringfortheear.com; and now Donald when what is crawling out from under the mouldy carpet.

It used to. be terror. It is now terror to the nth power. I am going back to try to make up flost time in photography for I have decided that is a way of comunicating something different. The following is not proof read or spell checked. As it goies on it is left overs from somehting much longer. Might make good put to sleep reading or there might be a kernal here and there. It has been fascinating but not enjoyable. I am too disappointed in humanity, or at least a big part of it.

But I have been elated by another part. And you wil bump into that if you go further. I am taking the off ramp here.

Why Is There A Universe Like This One?

I have spent a lifetime thinking about this.

About the age of 11, I was reading Funk an Wagnells Enclyclapaedia likely looking up something electronic, when I ran into a Russian name I couldn’t handle. I have always remember my reaction: ”well the name doesn’t matter, as long as I understand." That is what some 70 years later I am still trying to do. Only the now the problems are much harder.

Electronics has slipped into the background, and Life (with the capital L) has jumped to the front and it will not leave me alone.

This site, with several false starts, is my attempt to anyswer that question. Perhaps there is a contribution and perhaps not. I turn 80 (hopefully) next year and this is my last and best shot. This particular shot, after 2 1/2 years of a kind of satisfying torture, is a beginning from scratch. The more things get confusing, the less editing does any good.

An engineer having something intelligent to say about the universe?

You get whomped into shape at The Institute.

I just saw a T shirt: “I’m an engineer. Let’s just assume I’m right and get on with it.” Ask Susan (my wife). No matter what she says my instant rejoinder is “No!” and then I repeat back what she said or some minor revision. A good part of the blame is seven years at MIT. It’s not that you might flunk out. Hardly anyone ever does. If they admitted you, they did it because they thought you could do it.

No. It’s the competition, the oneupsmanship. I hung in for 14 years. Seven at MIT and seven at Bose Corporation, an MIT outpost if there ever was one and then went into marketing. I had one other competitor, Professor Amar Gopal Bose, my former faculty advisor. When I told him seven years was at MIT was enough (and god only knows how many years to do a dissertation to get my PhD) enough he blinked and “Would you like a job?” And I became the 5th employee. Two other engineers whom I knew: Sherwin Greenblatt, future president and Tom Froeschle, present and future genius. It is possible that nuclear subs are driving around with his electronic reactor controls. He one-upped their engineers by designing a whole new system in two weeks so our first review meeting was presenting a whole new, and better way, of doing it, along with a fully operating demo. That was Bose Corporation. And that was and still is MIT.

I often wonder how I got admitted, but being tagged a “stong candidate” during my interview was promising.

Big questions about the universe require physics. I’m an electrical engineer.

1. MIT electrical engineering is almost all physics.

2. My MS is in solid state physics.

3. I have studed astronomy and then cosmology since I was a kid.

4. I have followed the field my whole life.

5. I learned how to think from Dr. Bose. I had the glorious luxery of many one-on-one long wide-ranging meetings. He taught me how to think and to him “outside the box” was conventional thinking.

So that is how I began. And to save time and to make it easier to understand what follows I will tell you why.

Belief Versus Knowledge

What is the difference?

Belief is what you choose to be true .

Knowledge is what has evidence to back it up, which usually means science. And this is a problem because few people learn science at all, and of those that do few realize how fundamental and important it is.

What’s The Point Of It All?

The short version of the story.

I think few people realize how extraordinary the universe is, how it was born, how planets like the earth were created and (I suspect) how rare they are.

Then there is us. People with brains that can do so much and are so little used.

When I got through the last round of reading about the creation (see the diagram below), I looked at the various steps and it struck me how natural and logical was each step. A special example: in the early stages after the big bang the only elements that had been made were helium and hydrogen. This was enough to make stars, but not much else. However, certain kinds of stars burned out their fuel quickly then impoloded and eploded. There were called super novae and were visible in daylight. They lasted about a month and then slowly vanished. However, they were central to the entire future of the universe (including making us) because when they exploded they made all the other elements, 97 of them, and we were on our way to a totaly different kind of universe, one where life-including human life-could be created and live.

There are many things about the universe that should blow your mind and this is one of the most important. Eventually, 10.78 billion years after the big bang, life began and eventually we were the product of evolution.

But is was the beginning that boggles the mind the most. Sciencetists do not know why it happened but out of the energy of an otherwise empty cosmos appeared a singularity. In mathametics (by the way, electrical engineers were using singularities before mathameticians recognized their validity) a singularity lasts for zero time but is infinitely high. In the big bang the singularity was the smallest time there can be and the smallest size there can be, far smaller than a proton, and stored infinite energy. Our laws of physics did not work durin ghis infinitetesimal time, but immediately after began a series of events called the time-line of the universe. A NASA versin is on the right.

Evolution is a controversal subjet and I discuss it elsewhere so not to interrupt this story. However, should you have any doubts, I can assure that the scientific evidence is so good I would bet my life on it. But WHY still remained a complete mystery. Why humans with all the intellectual and emotional qualities. I hadn’t a clue so I asked myself if the universe could be reverse-engineered. That is a technique that is often used when you want to copy someone’s product and you want to know how it is made. So I started thinking, not from the beginning, but from the end, which is now. And to my way of thinking the big question was to identify what are the absolute best things about Life. And quite a few things came to mind and my conclusion was that the best things were so spectacular and that they had to be inherent in the big bang itself. I had not a clue how and no physicist would even try to think why human creativity was in the big bang so I just decided to jumpt to the conclusiong. I can hear the physicists, if anyone of them should read this, having a big laugh. And so I just ask if anyone has a better answer.

So we have to look at the best of Life, but we have to look at the worst of life, but I will start from the best. There are many examples, but the ones I will use for illustration all come from my life, because I can then be confident of them. So I begin with pictures of our grandaughter that I took.

Putin is smiling for he knows he has Trump under his thumb.

The Donald John Trump Virus

Civilization has never faced such a peril.

In the entire history of humanity, such dangers have never come together at one time.

Before Donald Trump and the virus came along, global warming was on the verge of taking over the climate. It is possible that it already has. President Trump has suspeded regulations, fired dozens of people people important to the preservaton of the planet and necessary for the safety of all citizens. The earth might have become uninhabitable without Trump’s help. A second term would seal its fate.

There are few faults as dangerous as not knowing what you do not know. Donald Trump of course knows no science. Worse he does not know what science is. And the frosting on the devil dog cake is that he does not know that he does not know.

Early in the crisis, President Trump spoke of his “natural ability.”

"You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this? ' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."

I attended MIT for seven years and have three engineering diplomas including as much physics and math as a typical physics major. I left one dissertation short of a PhD. Enough was enough. It took me eight years before I was able to walk its halls without feeling anxious. I suspect the air in the foyer at 77 Massachusetts Avenue would have stopped Donald.

What Makes An Empty Man

A human is made by nature and nuture.

My father’s brother earned a PhD. My father was chief engineer making complex machinery almost the day he walked into the door. I learned that learning was the most important thing and that doing at every opportunity was just what you did. It got me into MIT.

Trump was raised without regard for humanity. He was taught to bully, deal, lie and lust. And no more. For those who are knowledgable and creative an empty man is a great sadness for without learning and creating, there is no life. In the picture on the right, it is possible something the President has begun to feel something of his loss. The full truth is beyond his understanding.

In situations such as we are facing, I try to look from the broadest perspective. It is possible that history books will eventually look at civilization as before Trump and after Trump, for I believe we will yet see consequences we cannot imagine.

A long history of shallow education.

A different kind of shallow education plagues mankind.

As technology has made the need for deep knowledge unnecessary by giving us proposperty so freely, we have not learned to see through the fog of mideval thinking.

Two tragedies rule our minds: The remnants of religion and of slavery.

Religion was always the explanation for what we did not understand, and yet was only a name for an explanation. Slavery permeated thinking since its introduction in 1619. Its monitization of humans is the root of the Floyd tragedy. We cannot shake a contempt for dark skin, nor do we know why it is dark.

Raceism and religion both seduce and corrupt. Both provide roads to feelings of superiority, of being chosen and better with no substance for eiather.

As scientific knowledge as advanced its meaning has not been taught or appreciated. We do not understand the world nor each other. Underlying attudes are reminiscent of the dark ages. Donald Trump is a perfect example. We have been fooling ourselves that we are an “advanced” civilization. Most tragically we treat each other as warring tribes. The attitude toward minorities, the lack of concern (safety nets) is the sign of politics out of control. Trump and conservatives play each other for suckers to the detriment of all.

The ownership of American by less than ten people is incomprehensibel and is flat out the consequence of conservative ideology.

Donald Trump is the perfect fool to aid in the destruction of America and its values. Trump cannot say a word that is not a lie and in the face of the virus threat he does not lead, for he doesn't know how. He is the most dangerous person in the history of humanity.

The forces of history.

Thinking is shallow no matter the education. Scientists do not know the meaning of life any more than anyone else. PhDs in any field other that science do not grasp the significance of what science knows. And the average citizen harding knows the meaning of the word.

An astonishing number of people believe in the devil. The principle source of understanding of the universe is religion which is mostly fiction. A major force like Christianity is fragmented so much it might as well be 1000 different religions, and so an all powerful god is doing a poor job of communication. Christianity has some good messages from Jesus about how people should be treated, but we had the inquisition and now we have the prosperity gospel.

The underpinning of thoughts about life are science and the best philosophers. However, the substance of how we treat each other i a leftover from a country that relied on slaves to create its wealth.

The combination of Trump, the virus and global warming has a good chance of civil war, a drastically reduced inhabitable land area, and that will lead to a population less than half of what we have now.

How could this happen.

The original villian was the introduction of agriculture in about 8000 BCE for that freed the most agressive males of hunter gatherer tribes free to do what they pleased. So they began wars to claim land, and more wars to create empires. u

Since the dawn of ciilization perhaps 8000 or so BCE, humanity has, from my perspective, been in constant turmoil. War has often been the norm, rather than the exception. Science, althouth revelatory is usually ignorned. Scientists, even under threats of extreme catastrophe have not mobilized. Non-scientists, despite great education (along with those with lesser education) do not sense the deep urgency that science has revealed.

Under these conditions, the combination of the pandemic and the President seem to me impossible to survive in the long run. Before either, the threat to the planet of rising temperature had in all likelihood passed the point of no return.

Writing an exposition of this situation requires far more knowledge than I can bring to the table and is, infact, the challenge for whatever remains of civilization. Yet my interest in a wide range of fields sounds the most clanging alarm bells I have ever heard. The dissonances, contorted melodies, jumbled keys put all composers I have heard to shame. However, hoping to shed a flashlight with virtually depleated battereries forces me to continue something almost certainly futile.

If I step back it seems that for most of history since the introduction of agriculture at about 8000 years BCE that humanity has found ways to divide itself. Rich vs poor, one religion vs anotherm one political concept vs another. Yet we are created with stunning abilities for learning and creating that bring enormous pleasure and satisfaction. Why do we not as a society recognize this? Scientific theories of the universe (thories of everything) never mentioon emotion or sentience. Liberal arts PhDs miss out on science. And when a monster like Trump comes along we almost lay down as if dead whie he neglects his duties resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Something is fundamentally wrong in the way we look at life. Political systems create governments of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

How is it possible for total idiots (Trump is not alone) to become leaders.

There is a fundamental failure in America’s political processes. Trump should never have gotten to first base and that tells us there is something fundamentally wrong with how we educate.

In my ideal world there would be a set of values that are taught the same everywhere and prospective leaders, in order to run for election should have to take one or two years at a leadership institute. Of course the world could never agree on what should be taught and we will ccontinue to get morons as eeuiuhhh

As the world heads to a precipice there is no massed presence of intellect seeking to occupy Washington. We need a new million man march of the human intellect.

Saving the World, After It’a Too Late

Donald J. Trump has brought us to a modern, long delayed, precipice. His disrupting presence has exposed many old-world dividing traits. The history of humanity will depend on its ability to finally deal with religious, racial and political divisions and the limitations evolution has put into our souls.

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa as a separate species of primate most closely related to chimpanzees, gorrilas, and bonobos monkeys. European homo sapiens interbred slightly with Neanderthals who eventualy died out likely due to the superior organizing intellect of homo sapiens. Asians followed a slightly different path interpreding with slightly different early humans.

Skin color has been a deviceive force almost everywhere that blacks and whites have coexisted, depite the fact that both have the same African ancestors who migrated north into Europe and east into Asia. Skin color is simply the result of how far north our African ancestors migrated. The further north the more harmful was the pigment melonomin in their skin for with less sunlight insuffiient vitamin D was produced. So Scandanavians are pale, mid-latitude settlers brown and Africans who stayed at the equator may be coal black.

We reached our present state of intellectual capability about 200,000 years ago and existed as hunter-gatherer tribes until the introduction of agriculture about 10,000 BCE. HRT, author of Sapiens considers this a great disaster. Evolution had created a species and a format of life that worked. A beautiful picture can be found in The Old way.

It took time, but agriculture like a nuclear weapon.

Argiculture freed hunter-gatherers from the cohension of small groups of humans. The alpha type agressor-hunters were fredd from a well-adapted roll.

They began creating what we now call civilization and, in my opinion, were unsuited to this roll.

They suffered from two debiliting characteristics: an inability to stop expanding empires and acquiring wealth and an inability to form peaceful relationships among political entitives. This has not changed.

Religion became a uniting and disrupting force. A controlling, saving entity that was named god evolved , or rather was created, under the same name, but in many different forms. This continues to this day, an example being the evangelical support of Donald Trump and the corruptive disruptiong of the prosperity gospe.

Tribal fears and the need to acquire power continue to this day in many parts of the world. Religion continues to separate when the idea of a “chosen people” modifies behavoir creating jealosies.

The United States was formed in a noble attempt to esczpe the old world with its remants of empires and divisions of many kinds especially religions ones. However, the curses and blessings of homo sapiens came to the new world.

The great sin of mankind, slavery, came to the new world very early. In 1619 the first slaves arrived. Their capture in Africa by supposedly civilized Europeans tells us that mankind stopped evolving in morarity and intellect and that stagnated vision became pzrt of America.

America is a combination of the idealism of the founding fathers and the dark side suited best to small tribes, except that the dark side owns Americal. One percent of the popultion owns 80% of America. This is a fundmental issue that controls the welfare of the lower, middle and even parts of upper middle classes.

Europe has, to a degree, evolved by forming relatively small states where a cohesive political organization is at least possible and, after much fighting, has somewhat settled in the European Union. However, it will be a long time before this reaches solid stability.

America is too large. Its red and blue state dicotomy and the attitudes that go along make rational government nearly impossible. In the present virus crisis New Zealands leaders were able to get all 5 million of its population on the same page and the virus was tamed. Not only does the American book have countless pages it has an evolving, revolving, dissolving, absolving, and compassionsion group of authors. Chapters, pages, phrases and random blocks of text are rewritten, sometimes in private. A clause can be snuck into a bill and the world turned upside down. And that is not nearly the end of it. Conservative and liberal my joust for power, but minorities of many kinds are at their mercy. Black and browns. Natives and immigerants are whole classes that may be mercelessly subdued or catered to depending on the needs of the reds and the blues.

Overiding and underlying blankets smother or fan flames.

Religion runs by its own rules aligning with one political entity or another or neither. Conservatism has benefited enormously from the Prosperity Gospel. Although it has no basis in scripture it appeals to the dream of financial success. Evangelicism, hanging its loyality on the single issues of abortion also runs conservative and as followed Trump straight into hell. The idiociy of useing the questionalbe doctrine of “grace” to forgive every Trump sin as it happens is beyond understanding, except within the idea of a cults. Cults abandon rationality to reacha promised land. Once the cult is established no behavior is bizarre to break through the promise. The illogic of believing what you want to believe in the face of almost anthing takes over.

The Fate of The Donald.

Post war and depression economics.

Post World War I America become accustomeed to prosperity. The the depressiona and the rescue of World War II.

World War II was a double edged sword on America. High paying jobs, unions, and the Roosevelt safety net set up a complacency that even Joe McCarthy, Korea and the Cold War could not upset for several decades. But technology was changing the rules in a fundamental way and education was not preparing the way, either because the problem was not recognized or if it was, the attitude was to let it be. So education stayed shallow, not dealing with fundamental issues be they race, automation, the widening gap between rich and poor, or the two horrendous wars: Vietnam and the second gulf war that were fought for no reason.

A shallow education leaves a public that cannot reoognize problems up to and including global warming and the potential diestruction of the earth. So the earth decays, the middle and lower classes stagnate, and we are not equipped to pick up on The Donald until it is too late.

I picked up on Trump fairly early although I could not bear to listen to him. But I read “I've been hearing things,” about the birther issue.

A presidential canidate does not spread rumors, hearsay about such a fundamental issue. He assigns an aide to investigate and only with real evidence does he open his mount. So this was a sign of a modus operandi that would come to characterize the administration. Say what you wish to say, deny it, make it a flat out lie, a frabrication, but above all, be sure it has no content. But of course The Donald is empty, so there can be no content.

I contend that Donald Trump, with the exception of an extreme need for approval, is the most abscent human being we know. Not quite: there are some policies, some fights, but they all wash out, except they leave a trail of droppings. A few are picked up and worshipped. The rest are just confusion. And the confusion it a truly monumental tragedy. Donald Trumps hesitation to act on the virus has cost to date (Memorial Day, 2020) likely 80,000 lives. Murder by incomprehension, inaction, lack of any kind of compassion, or knowledge. A a dismissing of experts.

The Hoax that is America

Rotten at the surface. Rotten in government. Value in the heated citizenery.
Future: Unknown.

Tribalism and a failure to develop a deeper sense of civiliation led American into two costly wars (Vietnam and the second Gulf war) and has failed to overcome the attitudes instilled by slavery.

Religion and Ignorance.

Entrenched attitudes and ignorance of reality.

Donald Trump wants to make America great again. America has never been a great country. She and her people have done great deeds and many of them are comming through now in the face of the virus as risk to their lives. Over 100 doctors and nurses have died as a result of exposure. Trumps administration has hindered treatment in a major was primarily as a result of Trumps six week delay in starting active work. This has been a catastrophe and I estimate Has cost 50,000 lives.

Unfortunate that is the tip of the iceberg.

Education and attitutudes that are a holdover from the days of slaery still permeates our culture. The fundamental principle of reciprocity is anathama to conservative ideologues. So the devious ideology of low taxes whioeuipuui..

He is in a category all his own. He is nothing. No knowledge, no plan. But he is capable of doing anything rash and has believers, because his need for admiration is infinite. Zero divided by zero is anything.

I am astounded that we have let him get this far. The constitution, the congress, the supreme court nor the public cannot stop him. I cannot imagine what could happen if he won this fall. I can imagine him declaring the election valid and declaring martial law. We could have civil war no. 2.

Of course this sounds ridiculous, but there has never been anyone else like him. He has already caused more harm than previous American presidents combined. And he has a cult-like following.

1. A man of few words, ”beautiful, hoax, finished......” understands nothing about those he describes other than whether they lick his boots. Then they are beautiful.

2. Donald licks boots too. Check out the picture with Putin below.

3. A vessel containing nothing can be mistaken for anything, so we see what we want to see, or if we fall for his lies, what he wants us to see.

4. Perhaps even worse, an empty vessel has no compassion. He cannot put himself into another’s shoes. He likes the rich and the powerful. Yearns to be like them.

5. He is virtually a dictator now and so he is leading us to a precipice.

6. If we ever get beyond the virus global warming is waiting. It had put us near the precipace, and The Donald may have let us slide over it. He is not only destroying America, but the planet too.

What does civilization do when its putative leader is a man of no knowedge, no self awareness, no compassion, but infinite need.

A man in power who cannot hear, who cannot see is infinitely dangerous.

He has fooled many. His speech is propaganda. If you say it often enough and loudly enough some people will believe you.

An empty man given power is the most dangerous man in all the history of humanity, because he will purge the world of intelligence.

There is terror when a man has nothing to give, but has infinite needs.

Donald Trump dumps on or praises but never explains.

Donald Trump is empty. This is the look of a puzzled man. He fires anyone he does not understand, for he is terrified he will be found out.

Anything he needs he makes up. He is the most dangerous kind of man.

Most people do not know what I mean when I say life with a capital L.

I am talking about what we experience: pain, terror, joy, beauty, happiness, sadness. We don’t even realize that no one knows how ”experience” happens in our brains. Scientists don’t even want to touch it, it’s too hard. They do have a word for it and it is called sentience.

What is happening today is a turning point in human history.

I have been looking to find a trace of Life and and I find it among the sick and dying.

And death has been caused by one man who has no Life in him.

His face is asking a question: ”I wonder what they are talking about. It is not about how great I am, so I must stop it.”

This smile is Putin’s. He looks like the cat who ate the canary for he knows he has Donald by the balls. Donald wants to be like this man who trained with the KGB. Donald is not yet toilet trained. He soils all that he touches.

A formal portrait. A forced grin.

A smile reveals much about the inner man, for a real smile cannot be faked and requires a man to be experiencing joy.

I have never seen Donald smile.

A knowing look. Useful when you don’t understand what is being said.

And it all began with the big bang. No god stepped in. This was the universe doing its thing and there is much much more, a virtual infinity that only a tiny number of humans know.

And our nemesis, Mr. Trump has no clue, so he wants to rip it to pieces.

That’s all. That is my point. From the smallest thing that can exist, almost 11 billion years later we are given this and a mind that can experience it. Tell me why, unless this is the real purpose of our existence.

A Vile Vapor Engulfs A Pitiful Man

Donald Trump is showing us what he is made of. His poisonous brain is dismantling America. An insatiable longing for recognition, a monster who knows he is worthless is eliminating every competent, moral man or woman within his reach. He will violate every legal and moral principle to get what he wants. If the supreme court does not stop him it will be the end of America and possibly the destruction of the earth. Already he is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

He will stop at nothing, to fill the void that is his soul.

Pretty much what has already been said. The singularity that was the big bang lasted (according to the latest theories of which I am aware) the shortest time and the shortest distance possible. It is theorized that time and space are quantized like everything else (with the possible exception of gravity for which no theory exists). A single quanta of time is the Planck time which (from memory) is about 10 to the -45 seconds and for space it is about 10 to the -34 cm. During that time the laws of physics as we know them are unknown. IMMEDIATELY after space and time come into existence and according to known (pretty much) laws of physics the time-line of the universe inexorably plays out. My own reaction to this is that it feels very logical. It leads to super novae that created the heavy elements, our solar system and the earth (which by my calculation is a very unusual creation despite what is often said; too many requirements must be met for the earth to be inhabitable). Then comes evolution and then us. The specialness of humanity is rarely discussed. Our ability to experience (sentience) is unbelievable. When we eventually arrive at us, we have the ability to look back in time and see the green egg, the cosmic background radiation that is the glow left over from the big bang. So, in effect, we have figured out how to see our own birth (at least the energy part of it) and at least back as far as light has reached to be visible to use. The purpose of all this is that I believe it is necessary to start with this picture before going any further. Despite the string theorists, and the multiverse theories, the only part I accept that is on reasonably solid footing is the illustration below (and btw, modified means I Photoshopped a horizontal version of this into a vertical version and made it easier to read). Then I ask WHY? No answer anywhere. God is the name of a presumed cause and the stories around god are easily imagined at a time when no science was known. So we know nothing about why or the relationship to our death, purpose, meaning and so forth. So I asked myself if we could reverse engineer this thing and no, we cannot but it suggested to me to ask what is the greatest part of the place and time that we have come to, which to me is when we experience life and I ask what are the best experiences and there are many. For me they are relationships with other people and great art, especially music (if someone asks I will give a bunch of links). Following is a bit like the questions of why go to MIT which is that you get to do some incredible things (if you are lucky too). I spent 40 years or so with Amar Bose and another 40 years (overlapping) photographing nature (lightsongfineart.com), and adopting a young boy from Russia. Then comes so what does this all mean. Is this the meaning of life. The only option I can think of is it is our job to take the best there is and ASSERT that this is life, grab it and run with it. Yesterday there was a question of why graduates of Harvard, MIT etc. do so well. My answer is that those I have known embrace life and use their whole brains and whatever they are doing if it is beautiful, joyous, or connected with the real parts of other people that is MY definition of LIFE. When tragedies happen it is putting yourself in the other persons shoes. Reciprocity. If you create something that affects others like the picture below (exposing. 20,000 4x5 transparencies over 40 years hauling a view camera around) you are touching the universe through the making of the image and through relating to others who enjoy your work. Etc. it goes on forever. But the universe is full of tragedy, tribes that wish to be blessed (chosen) by god, or refuse relationships with people who are different. A rich man and a poor man. Dr. Fauci who was challenged by the AIDS virus and many were turned off by the wild looks of the gay victims. So he thought he should put himself in their shoes (the golden rule, or reciprocity) and it was a revelation to him and it helped start serious research. Religions cause more trouble than almost anything because we all want to be special, to be chosen. Tribalism (conservative vs liberal) is the same. People either will face reality and see and hear what is in front of them or they will hear and think what they want to, and that is a disaster. Trump is the utter epitome of a closed (locked, walled, etc.) mind and has already killed tens of thousands. This is how I answer questions about god, meaning, etc. Why? Don’t have a clue except that the experience of the creation, discovery, creating, relating is it. Why? I have no idea except it is good when you have it and a tragedy if you do not reciprocate and help everyone have it. My prediction is that thanks to the Donald, we have a good chance of wrecking this place before we get to know each other. Top picture was made a few feet from Walden Pond in 1991. The floating leaves are water-shields. I published a book on Walden. This was my first visit to this vernal pool known as Wyman’s Meadow. I visited every year for the next 11 years until the book was finished. It never looked like this again. Go to lightsongfineart.com (under construction web site) and see much of the rest. As Malcolm Gladwell said, you have to be lucky.  

All my life I have trusted that what I needed to do would cross my path. I often joked that I just did what came next. Then came the shootings that were ravaging our civilization. A pastor in my family had counseled the first responders in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and we talked at length about the violence and the suffering and it shook us both.

I thought that nothing could be worse but I began to read of the destruction of our planet by burning of fossil fuels. A lifetime of study about the earth and its place in the universe gave me no choice but to try to inform a blind world. For two years I worked on my website about caring for the earth, often for 13 or more hours per day counseled against hope that it would make a difference.

Then an unbelievable series of improbable events made a man without a soul or intellect president of the Unite States.

His nurturing was as shallow as a thin sheet of paper. Its purpose was to teach wheeling, dealing and bullying in order to make money. There was no knowledge beyond this. Even trivial comments about science were ridiculously off the mark. He claimed that his uncle attending MIT gave him the intuition to deal with the covid virus. It is too absurd to warrant comment.

Donald Trump has dismissed science and intelligence of every kind and he is purging the government of every watchdog and obstacle in his way. He is destroying every bit of good he finds. He yearns for the recognition that illudes his incompetence.

And then came the pandemic, creating the perfect storm to mate with the Donald for death and destruction.

Donald Trump is a new kind of human being, or perhaps more accurately an imitation human. His danger to us is complete. If not stopped he will destroy humanity and then the planet. He has already eliminated every regulation and institution within his reach.

The founders of America struggled to create a government that would not permit a Donald Trump to infiltrate but they could not imagine an imitation human being, and so we are loosing the battle. The carnage will be beyond what we can imagine.

Stealing Power

A Path to Kingship.

Donald Trump is a whole new kind of villain. He is causing great harm but it is a mystery just how this affects him. Is he totally unaware? Are other needs so important that it doesn’t matter?

We know he has an unlimited need for praise. We also know he cannot deal with complex issues. He will not sit for a briefing. He fires his best people. It seems that his upbringing created expectataions of great success and an accompanying addoration. However, it seems that all he learned was dealing: no competance or intellectual capability and that was accompanied by no limits on lying, deception in getting the adoration. Hence, a man who would be king, with not an iota of what it takes to be a king.

Had this been in virtually any other position than president of the United States, the damage might have been finite. But I believe that his Presidency colliding with possibly the most demanding challenges in history in the virus and, in the background, global warming. It could prove in the long run that a limited nuclear war would be preferable to the destruction of American democracy combined with terminating changes of keeping an inhabitable earth.

It is already clear that tens of thousands of deaths are a result of his irresponsibility. However, should he be relected without a congress to override his vetos, it will be the end of the world. The only possible salvage is a very competent and honest new government. Pray.

It Could Not Happen In America

Loopholes in the greatest document of democracy.

There are no limits on what he will do or say. His smarts are limited to dealing. He is not a scientist nor does he listen to scientists almost certainly because his upbringing was so narrow he knew nothing but dealing, lying, deception, and bullying. In fact I suspect that listening to a scientist terrifies him because he doesn’t have a clue and his ego can’t take it.

So the turnover in the White House has eliminated people of experience and solid knowledge. Donald’s terror led to a six week delay in dealing with the virus and then the plans were disastrous. An intelligent man looks for people more expert than he and follows their advice. Donald virtually eliminated science from the White House, and when he had to turn to it he waffled, spun, and had this trail of ”beautiful; definitely; I am sure of it; it’s pretty likely; we’re hoping,” followed by blaming it on someone else.

Of course he had accomplices, those who were willing to lick his boots got the prizes. Mitch had just had his serving of caneries for the picture below.

I will never forget the round table cabinet meeting. One after another they stuck their tongues out and licked. But for one. This took just a few minutes but was a performance for the ages.

But that is far from the worst of it for Lucifer has accomplices. Evangelicals. Conservatives. And, of course, Mitch. I have it on good account that Lucifer is taking early retirement.

I could not imagine anything affecting me like this. The scientists in Washington State jumped on it from day one. Trump’s emptiness will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And he keeps spreading bullshit about vaccines.

I am wondering what this summer will be like. Exponentials my be a little slower but I think the openings will be faster. There are so many things humanity does not know or appreciate. Read on.

The “Look what I just got away with look."
A striking resemblance to the cat that just ate the canary.

The earth is at risk too.

The ”I don’t have a clue but must look like I do” dlook.

The most dangerous man in human history?

The Worst Decisions by Anyone. Ever.
The destruction of American Democracy.
Killing hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Killing the earth.

If left in power he will destroy the earth.

He understands nothing.
He helps no one but the rich and himself.
All he wants is to feed his ego.

The virus plus the donald plus conservative ideology
is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity.

I. This Way or That Way

To Think, or Not to Think.

Risk comes in many forms. Some are hard to avoid. A one in a million chance that a part breaks.

But other kinds of risk are more complex.

When the Challenger was on the launch pad and it had been unusually cold, well below freezing, the engineers argued that the rubber rings that sealed joints in the solid fuel rocket were not rated for such low temperatures and they already had been giving trouble. But a senior manager asked: ”Can you prove to me that it will fail,” knowing full well that failure meant disaster.

We don’t teach the fact that proofs apply only to mathematics, and we write Q.E.D. at the end. So dwell on that question a bit. You do know that ”Challenger Disaster” is now in our dictionary.

More recently a new CEO at Boeing, faced with an expensive design change getting potentially more and more expensive, brushed off with contempt the opinions of engineers indoctronated that Boeing stood for safety and that had made Boeing a great company. The 737, the most popular plane in the world was getting an upgrade. ”Stay with the plan,” the CEO said and replaced senior engineers with less experienced engineers who would do his bidding. You know the story. That was over a year ago. Two crashes, three hundred and fourty six lives and the MAX is still on the ground.

Virus. The leaders of two great countries did not comprehend “exponential.” It is just 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2...Pick any number you choose. Start with one person and have that person infect two people. And let each of those infect two per day. Not much as gatherings go. How many after 30 days. One month.

1,073,741,824 is equal to two to the 30th power. One billion, 73.4 million. Exponentials are real beasts. A penny doubled every day for 30 days is about five million dollars. And the corona virus is a truly vicious doubler, and dealing with it requires simple, but clear thinking. Chairman Xi Jinping waited six days. Donald Trump waited six weeks. Six days was a catastrophe.

Those six weeks will go down in history as the worst decision by anyone in the history of mankind.

There is a fundamental rule of leadership. Find people smarter than you and listen to them. If Trump finds anyone smarter than he is (which is almost anyone out of high school) he fires them. We are in the most dangerous time in our history and we do not have an administration. Trump won’t let his top people testify. Behavior like this in any other position would merit the death penalty.

Jump to THE WORST DECISION and then return to this HOME page.

Figure 1