HI –
This the month it started, OctOgre. As many of my readers know, I was accused of being an ogre at fan conventions, when I had never even been to one then, typical of the accuracy of charges against me, so I made an ogre the hero of my next book. Ogre, Ogre, was the first of my novels to make the national bestseller lists, possibly the first original fantasy (that is, not a reprint of a prior hardcover) by anyone to make it, so I honored the month by enshrining it with the ogres. The Oct is to show it’s the eighth month of the year, but ogres have trouble counting beyond the fingers of one foot, and may have missed it by one or two. Why the mundanes also missed it I’m not sure; maybe they got ogre-whelmed by a number beyond their toes, or maybe they were determined to prove they can be just as stupid as ogres, especially when tossing around accusations.
I am wa-aa-ay late getting this HiPiers column done, despite starting early. Left field pitched constant interferences. Things got lost, necessary papers entangled, and there was a lot to cover here. My email has expanded to take more of my attention, sometimes hours a day. Back in the day, my wife Carol handled it, but she is gone. I’m still learning how to use my new smartphone, one ogre step at a time. I also play the card solitaire game Free Cell to settle my dull mind, and get caught in seemingly unwinnable games but lack the smarts to give them up as bad jobs. So I win, but more time is gone. Grocery shopping and other excursions soak up hours. Many days it is afternoon before I even crank up my working computer. Next time I’ll start earlier yet, hoping to be back on schedule. I’m essentially okay, no bad events, just my time getting constantly chewed up, often by my own ogreish perversity. One rule of mine is that if I do something, I want to do it right, and this column is an example. It never wanted to end, as the days sneaked by. If you get bored by magazine science notes, beware. I make my living via fantasy, but science fascinates me.
As reported here, I got covid-19, and spent a few days with high fever, but then it was gone and I’ve been fine. It was a mystery why MaryLee didn’t catch it, as she was thoroughly exposed. Now we think she got a symptomless case, followed by long covid, suffering fatigue, brain fog, or as she puts it, bain frog, and olfactory hallucinations. That is, things smell funny, like cigarette smoke – neither of us has ever smoked, apart from one afternoon as a child, under parental supervision, I tried it, had a ball, then vomited out my guts, and never had any interest again – and sewage. Not good for the appetite when food smells like that. She is frustrated by being on occasion, as she puts it, a CovIdiot. We are tiding through, and things should improve in due course. Meanwhile my prior reference to MaryLee’s blog site, Dreams of the Purple Koala: ( murimccage.wordpress.com ), resulted in over 700 hits, cheering her immensely. Thank you, fans. Why that blog title? She loves koalas and the color purple, and our household reflects it. The beauty berries around the house are purple, and even our laundry lint is purple.
MaryLee and I watched the animated movie Hotel Transylvania, which celebrates the 118nd birthday of the head vampire Dracula’s daughter, Mavis. She’s hardly out of childhood, in vampire terms, about 18 in human terms, but is the prettiest vampire girl I’ve seen. Daddy wants her to be happy, and all the monsters are cooperating. Then a live human accidentally crashes the party. Drac tries to get him out, but somehow he stays in and meets the girl, and they kiss and fall in love. Drac doesn’t like that, maybe considering it miscegenation, and works to break them up, but when it is apparent that this is torturing Mavis, he relents and works to get them back together. It’s a fun show, and yes, suitable for children, even the dull non-vampire type. Next night the sequel, where Dracula’s grandchild Dennis is born, and shows no signs of being a vampire or a monster. Mavis loves him anyway, but Drac is determined to prove that the child is a monster, which would be good, because then he could stay with them, his own kind. When he is five, and left in Drac’s care while the couple is away, Drac drops him off a high cliff, to teach him to fly. You know, sink or swim. It doesn’t work, and Drac barely catches him in time. But Mavis catches on to the dangerous ploy, and Drac shrivels under her glare. You know how women can be, especially when their children are endangered. Then a monster hurts the cute little girlfriend of Dennis, and he blows his top almost literally, explodes into a mini monster, zooms through the air and punches out the culprit. He’s a monster after all! So the situation is resolved, and they will stay. The movie was filled with the antics of the monsters, but seemed ordinary, until catching on for the climax. Overall, a nice set, fun to watch in the manner of a date, as we did.
Something about hurricanes: they all orient on me and head for the central Florida backwoods where I skulk, but their eyes aren’t very good so usually they get lost and miss. But Hurricane Ian, profiting from the mistakes of his predecessors, got it right, and we were dead center of the cone of probability as he forged north past Cuba, building into a Category 4 storm, winds of up to 150 miles per hour. A smart storm can be deadly; this one caused over a hundred Florida deaths and millions of dollars destruction of property. But I have magic wards out, and in 34 years hurricane force winds have never hit my tree farm. Would they hold this time? As the outer fringe arrived, bringing us two and a half inches of rain, we sought to get an extra tank of Propane gas for our generator, anticipating a power failure. But they were sold out; others had thought of that first. Sigh; what to do? We had no reasonable alternative, so we canceled the hurricane. Well, at least the wards diverted it to the east, so it just missed us and headed across the state, out to the Atlantic Ocean, and on to smash the Carolinas and parts north. We were safe again. It would have been so much better for everyone, including the storm, if Ian had had some common sense and stayed out to sea. But hurricanes’ brains are even foggier than their eyes. They’re just big blowhards.
My mind wanders as I do chores like exercising, making meals, washing dishes, etc, and obscure thoughts occur to me. For example, I remembered the word “cunette,” pronounced kiu-NET, a trench within a trench. In World War One there were a lot of trenches, and they had to keep them drained, and this was how. So I looked it up, to verify my memory, as I have the dictionary habit, with four big dictionaries laid out for regular use. Yes I know I could use my smartphone to look it up, but I haven’t yet caught up to that feature. Did I mention how justifiably proud ogres are of their stupidity? I got the first dictionary for my tenth birthday in 1944, Funk & Wagnalls dating from 1913. The second in 1973 was the Oxford English Dictionary, called the OED, the compacted edition so a magnifying glass is needed to read it, considered the premier reference of its kind. The third was the Random House Dictionary, in 1987. The fourth was the Webster’s New International Dictionary, which I inherited in 1988 from the late Ernest T Marble, my late wife Carol’s father. I love them all, but the main one I use now is Random House, because it is more recent and fairly comprehensive. To my surprise I discovered that “cunette” was not in Random House. Instead it had what has to be a derivative, “c*nt,” vulgar slang for the vagina. Trench within a trench. The other three dictionaries had cunette but not c*nt, make of that what you will. For the record, I believe that a good dictionary should list all the words available, regardless whether some folk are uptight about some. So I fault Random House for not knowing cunette, but applaud it for refusing to pretend the other word doesn’t exist. Today I presume that the internet dictionaries have both words. I will learn to use my smartphone to verify that, I promise. Eventually.
Which reminds me in turn about that Smartphone, as mentioned in the SapTimber column. I think I now know how to receive a call or a text message on it, but the buttons don’t work for me the way they do for MaryLee. For example one day we sat side by side with our two phones in our hands. They are of the same make and date and type, but mine said it was on 5G while hers was on 4G. I was able to show her that the same buttons really didn’t necessarily do the same things, even when she pushed my buttons. Stop snickering; I’m talking about the phone. Maybe as I become more familiar with this weird 21st century technology they will begin to conform.
The Equedia letter keeps coming. I distrust its rightist bias, and recent issues are strengthening that distrust. The June 19, 2022 issue, which got lost in my papers before, says that the federal debt is just shy of thirty trillion dollars, more if Social Security and Medicare are factored in, more like a hundred trillion. Are those dollars really trickling down to the economy? When the corporations got more money, they used it to buy up more of their own stock than anyone else. That’s to keep the price high. It says the bailout of jobless Americans enabled them to refuse to return to work despite employers being desperate for workers. Um, I see it otherwise. Workers refused because for a change they didn’t have to work for wages inadequate to maintain their families or drive them deeper into poverty. You know, load sixteen tons, get another day older and deeper in debt. Folk are happy to work when the terms are fair. I remember back in 1950 I worked for a restaurant, but quit when I learned that the pay came to 45 cents per hour. So was I considered a loafer? I understand that Republicans oppose minimum wage laws, which seems to have been the only way to limit the exploitation of powerless workers. Mentioned is the global effort to raise taxes, get rid of fossil fuels, and share intellectual property. It seems there are those who don’t like that agenda. “Just look at Big Pharma’s profits from the COVID vaccines alone – free to you now, paid for by debt and your future tax dollars.” And those who don’t like saving lives in the pandemic, because it is expensive. “The same goes for green energy.” Yes, the profiteers really don’t like green energy, which threatens to be more egalitarian and way less polluting than fossil fuel energy. Yes, it may be expensive to develop it, but that’s the price of saving the world. Do we really want to save money today so that our grandchildren can be faster wiped out by the consequences of a global inferno?
The issue for July 3, 2022, suggests that digital money represents a way for the Fed to better control the economy. I am far from expert in the ways of digital money, but their case is persuasive.
The issue for 9/4/22 thinks that environmentalism is a cover for money. As an environmentalist I object. But let’s see what case they make. They don’t like the Inflation Reduction Act. Now it is true that the names of bills don’t necessarily reflect their nature so much as the effort to get the bills passed in a divided congress. Every Republican opposed this bill, and they are the party of money, so it appears that they don’t want inflation stopped, but this is surely deceptive. Money is likely the root of their opposition. Equedia says that a billionaire lobbied fiercely to get the bill passed: Bill Gates of Microsoft. Lobbying, understand, isn’t just a matter of speaking your piece; it can involve hidden payoffs so that key opposition figures get paid off to change their minds. That’s politics, down in the trenches without cunettes. So the Democrats pulled out the stops and got the bill passed by a squeaky margin. Equedia focuses on Gates; I suspect that they really don’t like to see a billionaire go against the Republican’s interest, a traitor to their cause. “From vaccine activist to now a fierce climate activist, Gates is running the biggest ‘public-private’ fund targeted at green energy called Breakthrough Energy Catalyst. In short it’s a coalition of billionaires that hands out private and public capital to green energy companies.” “What a perfect setup to take trillions of dollars from governments worldwide to fight the climate change ’emergency.’ An emergency that over 1100 scientists and professionals have now signed up to deny.” Note the quote marks around “emergency,” implying that this is a hoax. They don’t say how many scientists and professionals do consider climate change to be an emergency, but I suspect that the number dwarfs that of the deniers. So I think this is the essence of the case: there is huge money to be made from continued use of fossil fuels, and they don’t want genuine alternatives to become viable. Even to save the world. This is of course a considerable oversimplification; I may be confusing the case, but I do believe it is the essence. They are correct, however, in saying it is ultimately about money, at least for the rightists. Almost everything seems to be about money, for them.
Equedia for September 11, 2022, is about TikTok. “Read this carefully – because the biggest threat to our national security isn’t nukes or a third world war. It’s an algorithm on your teen’s phone.” They review TikTok, the Chinese social network where people create and share short videos in which they dance, lip-sync, sing, or have fun. It started in 2014 as a dancing app, which got bought out by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, and became the immensely popular TikTok, used by over a billion people every month and still growing. It’s addictive; nine out of ten users visit it daily, spending on average about six percent of their time on it. What’s wrong with that? TikTok is monitoring and storing your keystrokes, including passwords. China is watching you. So they can target political ads without you necessarily knowing their source. They can subtly incite racism, violence, and divisiveness in America and elsewhere, influencing teen attitudes. Do we see this worsening in America? This makes me nervous. Today’s teens are tomorrow’s movers and shakers.
Equedia for September 18, 2022, addresses Russia’s restriction of gas sales, which is clearly a power play to restrain opposition to their invasion of Ukraine. And national price controls to restrain the rampant inflation that will otherwise occur as fuel runs out in Europe. Ugly situation.
Equedia for September 25, 2022 starts “Imagine being censored for telling the truth.” That got my attention. All my life I have stood by the truth as I understand it, and suffered consequences. I was suspended from college for a week for standing my ground, as I think every student knew but didn’t dare say openly. I was removed as a math and survey instructor and kicked out of the Survey unit in the US Army for standing my ground in opposition when the authorities illicitly coerced soldiers to sign up for savings bonds they didn’t want. I was blacklisted for six years as a writer when I protested getting cheated by a popular publisher; that ended only when a new editor discovered that he had been similarly cheated. I suffered tacit censorship for a fictional scene in my novel Firefly; many stores refused to put copies on their shelves. I understand that there are those who say I protest too much about such things. I suspect that they are ones who have never been in the trenches, never suffered punishment for being right. Never had the guts to do or say what they knew was right, when the going got rough. So I am a goat among sheep, a maverick. By the time the sheep discover where the corral leads it will be too late. So yes, this is one of my buttons. If you are a sheep, why are you even reading this column? It’s not your preferred illusion. Anyway, what is Equedia talking about? It says that censorship is rampant on social media. That in the last quarter leading up to the vote, Facebook banned over 750,000 political ads. That Twitter removed or discredited over 300,000 tweets mostly from conservatives, including President Trump’s. That Google banned over 8,000 Republican channels. Ooops! I hate censorship, but suspect that I approve these cases. As I understand it, the Republicans were pushing the charge that the 2020 election was stolen. The evidence indicates that is a lie, but they wouldn’t quit, constantly repeating it so as to generate more believers, putting the platforms on the spot. Should they tacitly approve the lie, or stop it from being told? They finally decided to abolish the liars. But the issue is fundamental: what is free speech worth, if censorship can be practiced when someone says something you don’t like, whether right or left, true or false? I don’t have a pat answer. My present inclination is to run everything, and refutations of lies with the same urgency as the lies have. Ultimately the truth may emerge from the deadly smog of confusion, just as in the past the gospel of Earth being the center of the universe gave way to reality, much to the Church’s grief.
Equedia for October 2, 2022, addresses inflation. Originally, as I understand it, the word meant printing money without backing, in effect pumping up the economy, but it inevitably meant rising prices, and that’s the way it is used today. This remarks on how gold was always the same real value, regardless of the gyrations of prices, but today the price is dropping. What’s going on? “First, contrary to what Biden claims, this inflation isn’t just a result of the Ukraine war and the food/energy disruptions it brought. It’s an inevitable by-product of a decade-long monetary stimulus and $13 trillion printed out of thin air during Covid.” “What gold really pays attention to is real interest rates. That’s the interest on ‘risk-free’ debt minus the inflation rate. The higher the real rate, the more you earn in interest after inflation.” Gold, Equedia says, will be extremely volatile; diversify your holdings to include gold, but also commodities, energy stocks, and high-return money market funds.
So as you can see, I take Equedia with a pound of salt, but they are addressing fundamental issues in a way I don’t see elsewhere. More power to them for that. I differ with them on aspects, but I read and comment on their points. They are, in a dubious fashion, my kind of folk. Sometimes the other party in an argument turns out, rarely, to be correct, and condemning it on the basis of ignorance is wrong. Bigotry, rather than perspective, is the true evil.
Remember my one minute reads as I wait for the email to connect? Now for the second half of Whispers from the Stone Age, by David M. Gardner. “For me, it’s not enough to know that I am a certain way, I want to know why I am that way.” “Women and men, in many ways, have become caricatures that we embrace and strengthen, to give us a better sense of self.” As with the women who must wear lipstick in public or men who suck in their gut and throw out their chests. “Mars is the ancient God of War, while Venus is the Goddess of Love – enter Stone Age Man and Woman upon the stage of life.” Man is the strong silent hunter, evolving to be bigger and stronger. Woman is the gatherer, and child raiser, speaking up to three times as many words per day as man. Our brains changed to make us more efficient in our roles. But not completely. “And our little ladies, our petite delicate flowers of love from the planet Venus, why, they can be vicious little carnivorous Venus Fly Traps when they want to be.” Females came first. “Males evolved from the female form, it’s true. His large male penis is just an overblown extension of the female clitoris…which has over twice the number of sensitive sexual nerve endings as does your ‘helmet of love’ – and this volume of sensitivity is packed into a much smaller surface area too. You may have an orgasm, she has multiple orgasms.” Yet in my observation, it’s the males who have all the urgency. Porn is mostly for men lusting for women, not the other way around. Why do men have nipples? Because the fetal transition of male from female kicks in AFTER the feminine nipples have formed. We’re more similar than we may choose to think. For men, much of their personal mental worth comes from ‘what they do’ … “But for women, it is so much more external. It’s how you look that determines self-worth so many times in society, both in the Stone Age and modern eras.” I think of the saying “Man does; woman is.” “Men used to call the shots in the mating game, but not anymore.” In the stone age, might made right, but today we have laws and societal standards and women are protected. They can do the choosing. Today more men get raped than women. Not by women; by other men, in prison. An estimated 60,000 men a day are sexually assaulted, over twice as many as women in the external world. In the dating game, “It appears that a woman’s physical attractiveness level had no limiting factors concerning her ability to attract male partners. In the woman’s world – everyone gets laid. The men were not so lucky.” “Psychologically, men don’t want to grow old, they don’t want to die.” The author doesn’t say so, but I do: that goes double for women. There’s an enormous industry dedicated to making women look younger. I am 88 and am happy to have the world know it, but my wife urges me to try to make myself look younger. It seems that the semblance of youth is socially imperative.
Whispers goes on to address other aspects, such as food. “Humans will eat almost anything; it’s one of our great advantages. (Insects, anyone? 65 million years ago this was our preferred dinner.)” “The oxygen in the air, the water you drink – both of these are needed to help break food down … Food is energy, and you need energy, you need a lot of it.” “Energy is the true name of the game, the end-all get-out mover and shaker of your personal world.” “Perhaps you’ve heard of a bizarre little part of nature called entropy. What is it? Well, it’s not a physical thing so much as it is a quality of nature. Entropy is about energy and systems, it’s about how things run down. But in a nutshell, it states that the natural way of the universe is to go from order to disorder, from things being organized to things being randomly distributed.” But with energy you are able to fight off entropy and maintain yourself. “With food, you get it all, everything your body needs. It’s all right there in one compact awesome little package of molecular happiness.” “Energy is the genie in the bottle, the ghost in the machine.” “The oxygen we breathe is actually the waste product coming from green plants.” “Old Faithful’s geyser-hiss happens because Yellowstone National Park is actually part of a VERY large sleeping volcano. It erupts violently every 600,000 years on average. By the way, the last time it flared up was about 640,000 years ago, so it’s a little overdue to make some noise of its own.” Yes, that could be worse for us than Toba, that wiped out ninety nine percent of our species. “A lightning bolt heats up the surrounding air molecules to a temperature greater than the surface of the sun – the air molecules vibrate with this extreme energy, that’s the thunder, and when it gets to your ear it vibrates this too, and how.” “’some people, especially people in power, don’t want to hear the truth, it frightens them. It’s more comfortable to promote and believe in the lie. Change is bad for people in power, they fight change.” “Atoms are almost entirely empty space.” But they make up what we sense as physical reality. “No, the atom is really all energy that masquerades as solid matter. Nothing is the way we think it is.” “No one knows why gravity exists. Yes, you wouldn’t be here without this strange Big Bang, but you also would not exist without the helping hand of gravity.” And the way our elements were formed in the hearts of stars. “Massive stars have to live and die so that you can be born.” “What is reality then? Reality is what you make it. You have more control than you know.” “Your duality has hit the extremes. You are nothing, you are empty space. But you are also something, a great organized something, a thinking being made of mostly nothing that can ponder it all. … We are surrounded by illusion and embrace its comforting cloak. See past the shadows. It’s time for you to leave the cave and walk toward the well-house, follow the heat of the sun and the scent of honeysuckle blossoms…” There is more, but I think this shows what a potent book this is. We really are creatures of the stone age, now with quite fancy stones, like computers and the internet, but the same old reflexes and emotions. Google it, buy it, read it for yourself and expand your perspective.
The past month I have been getting suggestive emails from dating services and individual girls. I might be interested, were I not the age of the girls’ great grandfathers, and married, and wary of dangerous click bait. It started with Clockwork, with pictures of sexy girls showing long hair, cleavage, and a shapely butt behind chained wrists. Sado-maso, anyone? All I needed to do was click links for Contacts, Photos, or More. Another day was Cybister: “I’m open to a romantic or a non-romantic encounter as long as there is chemistry. Looking to meet today, so if you want to get to know me, leave a message! You’ll sure make this girl happy if you do! :)” Oh? With an old married man lost in backwoods Florida? One from Catcat says “Hey there. Would you like us to get a date together, coffee or dinner? Check me out & if you’re keen attach a photo or 2 and briefly describe yourself and the things you are looking for. The rest will follow.” The header on that one is “I’ll make u fall madly in love with me!” One from a nameless woman, age 24, says “I wanna show you my pussy!” and goes on into more graphic detail. So she has a pretty cat she wants to show off; that’s nice, especially for those who want to stroke that nice kitty. That’s my humor. There are twenty more, and counting, but this should give you the idea. If I were a horny teen or twenties man I’d be buried in eager bare girls, or so they would have me believe before cleaning out my bank account and disappearing back into the imaginary realm of foolish desire.
And the magazines, as I continue to struggle to catch up. I can’t just ignore them; they are food for my mind, and I value my mind intensely. I will try to be brief, but such attempts have failed before. At least you who read this column have the option of skipping the parts that bore you. FREE INQUIRY for August/September 2022 has an article titled “Discovering the Real Mary Magdalene,” by Joe Nickell. No, not a sexy email from her; you overshot that paragraph. She is the one of seven women named Mary in the New Testament, who has evolved into a figure of great mystery. “Once assumed to be a repentant prostitute, she was otherwise cast as a probable madwoman then invented in turn as Jesus’s favorite disciple, his wife, and even the mother of his child – portrayals so fascinating they have apparently inspired multiple forgers.” So who was she, really? Mary may have come from the Hellenistic city of Magdala on the northwestern coast of the Sea of Galilee. The name means “tower,” so maybe she was like a tower, a tall stately woman, self possessed. She is mentioned fourteen times in the Bible. One tells of Jesus driving out seven devils from her. Then she accompanied him during his mission in Galilee. She attended his crucifixion, watched to see where he was buried, and was the first to witness his resurrection. She was not the one who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears of repentance and wiped them with her long hair. The author suggests that she was fantasy-prone, in the manner that many psychics, faith healers, and mystics, believing what they imagined, such as being possessed by devils or in the resurrection of Jesus. That makes her believable.
NEW SCIENTIST July 23-29, 2022, says that astronomers are already using the images from the James Webb Space Telescope – JWST – to gain a new understanding of the objects they depict. Coincidentally, the Ask Marilyn column addresses the question of whether those images represent the way the universe would look from that particular viewpoint if someone was standing there? The answer is, not at all. JWST operates in infrared wavelengths, which human eyes can’t see. So the images are colorized to represent the the relevant frequencies, converting them to the spectacular pictures we see. That doesn’t mean they are fakes, just that they have to be translated for our benefit. Now we can “see” more of the universe than before. There is surely fabulous discovery coming soon. A skull found in China is helping to piece together the human migration into America. Covid-19 infections can lower sperm counts in men. What a way to reduce the human population! Older men can lose their Y chromosomes; 40% of 70 year old men have lost some. Here I am age 88. Maybe I should be exclaiming “Y Y Y?!”
NEW SCIENTIST July 30 to August 5, 2022 reviews two books on the origin of the universe and the hunt for dark matter. Before the Big Bang by Laura Mersini-Houghton and The Elephant in the Universe by Govert Schilling. It may be that our universe is just one among a myriad, all of which arise from quantum fluctuations, filled with stuff that resists every attempt to probe its character. Our universe “arose from a bizarre quantum probability game and …is but a humble member in an intricate, vast and breathtakingly beautiful cosmic family.” Yes, I can think of a truly vast canvas, where our universe is just one spot on one thread, one that happened to be suitable for life to develop. Dark matter theoretically makes up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe, if it really exists.”But it could be that we don’t fully understand how gravity works.” Amen. I am skeptical about its existence. I suspect that gravity is about five times as strong, on the scale of the universe, as it appears. Or there may be a kind of magnetism that holds galaxies together. Another book mentioned is The Uses of Delusion, by Stuart Vyse, exploring the possible benefits of irrational thinking. Yes, what about the benefits of religion and politics?
THE PROGRESSIVE August / September 2022. Comment by David Boddiger addresses the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shirleen Abu Akleh as she covered an Israeli army operation in the West Bank town of Jenin, for Al Jazeera, which I gather is a Palestinian news outfit. She was wearing clothing clearly identifying her and her companions as press, and they had alerted Israeli officials of their presence, yet got gunned down. In general I support Israel’s effort to survive among hostile neighbors, but that does not give it moral license to act as they do. Similar has happened to journalists who investigate encroachment into Indigenous lands by illegal mining, logging, and fishing enterprises. “In the past thirty years, more than 1,500 journalists have been killed around the world.” Few of the killers have been held accountable. Column by Phyllis Bennes tells how America helped Ukraine assassinate Russian generals and attack a Russian warship. “This has already become a war between the United States and Russia.” Yes, and that makes me gut-wrenchingly nervous. We don’t want to set off WW III with nuclear destruction that could end civilization as we know it. Yet do we just let Russia attack its neighbors with impunity? Russia started this, apparently just out of greed for wealth and power. And a page titled “No Comment.” Republican Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado says that Jesus didn’t have enough AR-15s to keep his government from killing him. I don’t think she quite understands Jesus’s philosophy of peace and forgiveness. Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, complains about the unfairness of the justice system. “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.” In my day we would have said “My nose bleeds for him.” Texas Republicans voted to approve the platform that included calls to-reject the 2020 election results, repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and declare that Joe Biden is not actually the President. Neither do they like abortion or LGBTQ+ folk. A high school in Longwood, Florida refused to distribute copies of the school yearbook until pictures of students holding rainbow pride flags and a “love is love” sign were covered up. It’s sad to see schools practicing bigotry. “Police officers responding to the active shooter who killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, not only waited outside a door for ninety minutes while the massacre continued, but also cuffed, pepper-sprayed, and tasered the distraught parents who were urging them to take action.” Is Texas actually part of America? There are other savage matters covered in this issue, notably about the Right’s campaign to eliminate Democracy and take over, but I think this indicates the general nature. I agree that Democracy is in trouble in America, and I hope the voters recognize this in the next two elections and act to safeguard our country from the forces of darkness. As a naturalized citizen I hate to see American values corrupted. I want it to be the egalitarian country I thought it was.
NEW SCIENTIST September 24-30, 2022, suggests that who we are may depend more on chance than on parenting. Yes. When folk ask me how I made it as a bestselling author, I am apt to say “Luck.” They tell me not to sell myself short. I am not; I am being realistic. The successful writer who thinks he is deservedly acclaimed, because he’s the best, is likely fooling himself. It takes savvy, skill, guts, and luck to make it, and luck may be the largest factor. Even so is the genetic makeup of every person, chance encounters of sperm and eggs among millions that perish unfulfilled. We are all lucky even to exist. The pandemic may be linked to early puberty in girls. Apart from that, the age of puberty has been declining by about three months per decade since 1977. One factor I remember is fluoridation of states’ water supplies, which can drop up to ten points in a girl’s IQ while reducing her age of puberty by six months, making her in effect young, buxom, and stupid. The boys surely love that! But the hoax of the benefit of fluoridation is a subject for another day. The closest black hole to Earth could be visible in the skies of nearby planets. It’s only 1,500 light years away, a stone’s throw, as it were; watch your step. An Omicron variant may protect against flu, but don’t hurry to catch covid just for that. Science is closing in on the true cause of aging. As an octogenarian that interests me. But of course if everyone stopped aging, the world would overpopulate that much worse, so my feelings are mixed. Pet food has a massive impact on the environment, so is it safe to feed your cat or dog a vegan diet? Article by Graham Lawton addresses that, concluding that the proper vegan diet is safe. And Atom Shaha describes the simplest electric motor you can make, that children will love.
THE WEEK for September 30, 2022, tells how Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis may face legal blowback over his stunt of flying 50 asylum-seeking Texas migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. It summarizes a NEW REPUBLIC column saying “Without any actual policy ideas to offer before the midterms, they’ve turned to a stunt that ‘ticks every box of modern fascist Republicanism’: it’s built on lies, it trolls the libs, and it victimizes ‘powerless nonwhite people.’ Meanwhile the whole point of DeSantis’ gambit – to call out liberal hypocrisy – backfired when sympathetic islanders mobilized and met a crisis manufactured to embarrass them with decency and civic virtue.’” Did he actually think liberals were as mean as conservatives? Meanwhile Trump is using QAnon to threaten violence. That’s the cult that claims that Democrats are pedophiles and “groomers,” making dehumanizing attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ people, and calling for America to become a conservative Christian theocracy. And a couple of quotes: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Jean-Luc Godard. “Grief is the price we pay for love,” Queen Elizabeth II. And it lists Stephen King’s latest novel Fairy Tale, that will remind you how much fun reading can be. I will keep that one in mind.
NEW SCIENTIST for September 10-16, 2022 – sigh, I must be reading them out of order. No, I see I got the pile reversed. Sigh again. It covers the electrifying promise of quantum batteries. They may charge instantly. I hope they get them on the market soon, at an affordable price, and that they have enough oomph to take a car several hundred miles per charge. And no fire hazard. I drive a hybrid Prius; I’d go electric if the right car appeared. Nuclear fusion – that’s not fission, being the process that heats the sun – is advancing. A reactor fired up for thirty seconds in South Korea. That’s a long time, on the atomic scale. As the hardware improves, so will the time. Now lasers can make tiny diamonds from plastic. The Amazon rainforest is at a crucial tipping point, and special interests are rapidly destroying it. This is vital to the health of our planetary environment. If the destroyers are not stopped, the doom of life as we know it may soon be inevitable. Were I in charge, I’d send troops with orders to kill. A quantum magnet has been built that is only a billionth of a degree warmer than absolute zero. Experiments at that temperature could get interesting. There are plans to build an even larger particle collider, to further explore the ramifications of the Higgs particles and field, but there is concern about the large amount of energy it would use. Illegal mining is causing dangerous mercury pollution of the Amazon River. One way to reduce global warming is to capture and store the carbon that causes it, but the projects to do that are under-performing. They need to improve the technology. They are managing to pull breathable oxygen from Mars air. We are finally beginning to understand why fatigue strikes and how to tackle it.
NEW SCIENTIST September 3-9, 2022. A test to measure a leading candidate for dark energy, a fifth fundamental force called the chameleon force, has found no evidence that it is real. Dark energy, like dark matter, has been conjectured to explain, respectively, why the universalize is accelerating its expansion, and what holds spinning galaxies together. I am skeptical about both, and suggest that magic is as good a prospect as what science is chasing. We’ll see, I hope within my lifetime. I’d yell “I told you so!” from the Afterlife, but I don’t believe in the Afterlife, so it’s a problem. They have found a two legged dinosaur in Africa – no, not a living one, a fossil – that at 230 million years is the oldest found there. This is Mbiresaurus raathti, who actually lived in the super-continent of Pangaea before Africa broke off from it. It weighed about 30 kilograms, which I think would be around 75 pounds. Probably not an ideal house pet, though I suspect it was herbivorous. Mankind’s ancestors may have walked on two legs earlier than we thought, six to seven million years ago. As I see it, our transition to bipedalism was one of the major turning points in our evolution. For one thing it may explain why women are breasted. Full beasts signaled they were nursing children, so were not about to birth more right away, meaning in turn no sex, so men avoided them in favor of more amenable girls. But bipedalism meant the child could take years to learn to walk, so mother had to carry him, and that slowed her when the lion was hunting. She needed protection. Fortunately there were a few oddball men who liked breasts, so these weirdos connected with the women, who thus survived, while the other women and children didn’t. That’s why today breasts are a turn-on instead of a turn-off, and women are sexually available all the time: it keeps their men close. All because they walk on two feet, and every step they take is a turn-on. Now you know. The James Webb Space Telescope has taken an infrared picture of Jupiter, showing the depth of its atmosphere. Before, all we could see was the top of its storms, like the Great Red Spot. There is a parasitic fungus that infects flies, making them move to favorable spots for the fungus, which grows and prospers as it consumes their brains. They’re called zombie fungi. Looks awful, as fungus sprouts from their heads. Just so long as they don’t start infecting humans. They are making progress taming the menopause with hormone replacement therapy. The 25 percent of women with severe symptoms should find this interesting. A new telescope in Chile is about to start the biggest-ever survey of the night sky. There should be marvelously weird discoveries. They are searching for Ancestor X, the species that gave rise to all humanity. X dates from about eight hundred thousand years ago. But it was also ancestral to many parallel forms, so we don’t yet have it nailed. We seem to have better records of other species than of our own.
NEW SCIENTIST August 27 to September 2, 2022. Now they are exploring plant consciousness. This makes me nervous, because as a vegetarian I seek to spare animals, but am I torturing plants? China is having its worst heatwave ever. This, too, makes me nervous, because America’s turn is surely coming. Europe is having its worst drought in 500 years. Bad signals. The James Webb Space Telescope is peering into a strange galaxy. It has one of the highest rates of star formation we have seen. This is the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy. The action seems to be mostly around the center, where the black hole nucleus would be. The bar seems to conduct gas to that heart, where it gets compressed into stars. Maybe it’s smarter than other galaxies, setting up a convener belt to facilitate production. The risk of being diagnosed with some neurological conditions after having covid-19 may be higher than with other respiratory infections. That makes me nervous, again, since I’ve had it. MaryLee is suffering brain fog, as mentioned above. Another risk is dementia. I don’t have that, despite what critics may say, and don’t want it. More than half of those infected with omicron don’t know they have it; that’s what happened to MaryLee. They are spreading it without knowing it. The star Betelgeuse is acting weird, with its surface bouncing like gelatin on a plate, and it has lost its 400 day heartbeat. Do you think it got covid? The creature with a mouth but no anus is not human ancestor after all. Maybe that makes sense, as we obviously have anuses; I hear then sounding off as they scream in rage at those of us who follow the rules of the road, like the speed limit. The picture of the mouthy creature is cute, but it must have very bad breath, as it defecates through its mouth. Now it is being discovered that the proton is more complicated than thought. The picture looks like a ball of assorted spheres. It could make an interesting gemstone, if larger. Green roofs have existed for more than two thousand years; now they are becoming more popular. I wonder if you can go up to the roof and find a lovely garden? Such roofs absorb sunlight heat in summer and limit heat loss in winter. But they do require maintenance. They are trying to explain what happens in the center of a black hole, hoping to come up with a unified theory of everything. In some cases particles seem to be affected by events that happen in their future. I will be interested to see if they can document that. Maybe magic lives in black holes.
NEW SCIENTIST, August 20-26, 2022. They are starting to analyze sewer sludge as an indication of what drugs and viruses are in a community. That could catch the next pandemic before it gets a full hold. But it could impinge on personal privacy. Do you really want to have your bodily emissions explored by strangers who may have a hostile agenda? Nearby galaxies may lack dark matter to hold them together. Indeed, since it may not exist. The alternative theory is MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, which may offer better explanations, but it isn’t perfect. Thinking long and hard can leave you mentally exhausted, as it uses up chemicals like glutamate, which signals between neurons. The risk of breaking a hip is a third higher for vegetarian women than those who eat meat. Maybe that’s because they become deficient in key vitamins and minerals. That’s why I, a lifelong vegetarian, take supplements. No broken hips yet. You don’t have to kill animals to be healthy. The cover story for this issue is “Reality’s hidden depths,” by Michael Brooks. It may be that translating our theories of physics into an eight dimensional number system could help us make sense of the laws of nature. The standard model covers a lot, but can’t handle things like gravity and the question of where the universe came from. Could the Big Bang be like a mirror separating our half of reality from the other? There are symmetries that might be made perfect that way. We don’t know what happened to the antimatter that should have been produced in equal measure. Maybe it’s on the other side of the mirror. It is estimated that between 90 and 99 percent of all living species are yet to be identified. They may never be identified if we continue to promote global warming and encroach on the diminishing wilderness, wiping them out unseen.
NEW SCIENTIST August 13-19, 2022. Long covid struck one in eight adults who got infected. It seems to hit women worse than men. So that’s why MaryLee got it and I didn’t! Digital currencies are designed to be unthackable, but that doesn’t make them safe, as investors’ loss of $ billions shows. I am staying well clear. If you want to shop for eco-friendly food, avoid cheese, quiche, and pie. Damn; we really like those foods. Maybe the vegans will come up with environment friendly alternatives. JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, has spotted a cosmic cartwheel 500 million light years away and 150,000 light years across. Maybe it was a spiral galaxy before a companion galaxy crashed through, ripping out the center. And two galaxies smashing together. It seems that galaxies aren’t well mannered; they barge into each other like cars in a traffic jam. An artificial blood substitute could make more organs available for transplants, and one day might even reverse death. That seems good to me; I hope they perfect it before I need it. Alaska has record breaking fires this year, burning triple the usual. Alaska is big, two and a half times the size of Texas, and mostly forested, so there’s a lot to try to protect, but parts of it have also broken single-day records that have stood for a century. Climate change is making most infectious diseases worse, but technology may be coming to the rescue: millimeter wave beams are similar to the waves used in a microwave oven, but vastly more powerful. Existing tech may be re-purposed to drill miles down to the necessary heat and enable the production of electricity at less than one cent per kilowatt hour, cheaper than anything else. More power to it! The observable universe extends to about 47 billion light years, but it may be at least 250 times as large as what we see.
THE WEEK September 23” 2022. At midterm elections for House, Senate, or local office such as governor, 60 percent will have an election denier on their ballot. Over a third of Republicans deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. American life expectancy has dropped to age 76.1, the lowest since 1996. that’s a 2.7 year plunge since 2019. Why? Covid caused about half of it, but also guns, drugs, and cars. 40 percent of Americans are obese, which worsens things, and the country’s health-care system spends more but gets less than any other country. One third of Americans believe the pandemic is over, which it isn’t. Quote: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” Groucho Marx. Cartoon: “Washington D.C., is now busing all their useless politicians to Texas.” Notice of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning British monarch in history. She was eight years older than I. Writers are turning to AI, artificial intelligence, to help them write more books. Not me; I like to think I am more original than a machine can match. But we’ll see what the readers think, in due course.
NEW SCIENTIST August 6-12, 2022. The death toll from Monkeypox is rising. The vast majority of cases outside Africa occur in men who have sex with men. I think they should learn to use condoms. The James Webb Space Telescope is finding ever more distant galaxies, some that formed within 300 million years of the big bang. It has also spotted a weird galaxy with almost no heavy elements. We think that bees do most of the pollination of plants, and maybe they do, but moths are doing more of it that we thought. Maybe as much as a third of it, in some locales. Nano-tags on birds are revealing bird migration routes in amazing detail. Covid-19 affects the smell and taste of more women then men. That’s true here; MaryLee suffers more distortion than I do, as mentioned above. Much of the world’s earliest writing, carved into clay tablets, is undeciphered. But we are making progress on Sumerian cuneiform, which begins about 6,000 years ago. At first it was merely record keeping, but in time it became a tool for linguistic expression. One of the first known authors was Enheduanna, a princess, priestess, and poet who lived around 4,300 years ago. She wrote the myth of Inanna and Ebih, about a conflict between a goddess and a mountain. And of course there’s Gilgamesh, a king’s quest for eternal life. The Sumerians also had a hexagonal counting system, with a base of 60, which is why we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle. So yes, it behooves us to learn about ancient writing. Now we have a machine learning system called Deepscribe to analyze the cuneiform records. Speaking of the past, they are learning more about impact craters. The Chicxulub impactor wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 75 percent of all the plant and animal species on the planet, changing the course of evolution on Earth. Chances are we would not be here otherwise. We needed to be rid of the dinosaurs before we could take over the world. But that was only one impact event. There may be 200 others. How did they change our planet?
LOCUS September 2022, a magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has a commentary by Corey Doctorow titled “Moneylike.” It’s about cryptocurrency. ‘Money is a store of value, a unit of account, and a unit of exchange.” That is, a thing you can use to save up for future needs. It is highly convenient for civilized functioning. But with it comes the government’s power to take some of from you, via taxes. In the old days if you didn’t pay your hut tax, imperial soldiers would burn it down. We’re more civilized today, maybe, but the threat remains in the background. When too much money is chasing too little labor, goods, and services, the result is inflation. So some folk try to escape that via electronic currency, cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin, free of government control. Of course criminals value it, for things like ransomware. Stay tuned; this story isn’t over yet.
A few more tee shirts: “What is this word ‘No’ you speak of?” “HO LEE CHIT” “I smile because you’re my sister. I laugh because there’s nothing you can do about it.” “All my passwords are protected by Amnesia.” “There are two types of people & I don’t like them.” “Do me a favor. Stop talking.” “Nobody is perfect. I am nobody.” “Yes I crossfit. I cross my fingers & hope my butt fits in my jeans.” “I can’t keep calm. π I’m irrational.” “Teachers don’t teach for the income. Teachers teach for the outcome.” “My dog won’t bite you. He has good taste.” “Best smartass daughter ever.” “You couldn’t handle me even if I came with instructions.” “I wish more people were fluent in silence.” “Don’t judge me because I’m quiet. No one plans revenge out loud.” “Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?” “I don’t want to brag or anything, but I can still fit into the earrings I wore in high school.” “Reading is my favorite sport.” And a set of five: “I’m the father. I’m just pretending to know the rules.” “I’m the mother. I wish I could keep track of the rules.” “I’m the oldest. I make the rules.” “I’m the middle I’m the reason we have rules.” “I’m the youngest. The rules don’t apply to me.”
And a few clippings. One is a feature on older adults playing the beanbag throwing game of Cornhole. It is evident that while some legitimate words get banned by the purists as racist, sexist, or whatever, others can start bad and become legitimate. In my day cornhole referred to anal sex. Letter in the local newspaper by Nancy Tomaselli describes how politicians are working to negate our rights. In 1935 Social Security came to be. In 1965 it was Medicare and Medicaid. In 2010 it was Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). They have improved the quality of life for all Americans, but have been continually opposed by the conservatives. In the past year multiple rights have been taken from us. Books are being banned. LGBTQ children can’t question their identity or even discuss it with their teachers in the first three grades. Reproduction rights are being taken away. Voting rights are being restricted on the grounds that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They are working to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act in the next few years. Yes; be afraid. Be very afraid. As I see it, Democracy itself is under siege. I don’t want to see America governed exclusively by old white men, even though I am one.
I get constant solicitations. Every cause, political, medical, or social, sees itself as the best place for my money. I am cynical about most, but they make some good points. I had direct experience with the ACLU fifty years ago, and regard it as fundamentally undemocratic, but I agree with their stance that our civil liberties are being attacked and voter suppression is occurring. The Brennan Center for Justice says that our democracy is under siege and our criminal justice system is badly flawed. I agree. The American Humanist Association says we are at a crisis as the conservative majority on the Supreme Court uses its power not to defend our freedoms, but to take them away. I agree. In fact I am a Humanist. So I note these issue here, just in case they are news to any of my readers. A Chinese curse is “May you live in interesting times.” We do live in an interesting time.
