After a week of dominating the Pole, Ralph is starting to fade away towards Siberia, as Byoof finally starts to rebuild over the Beaufort Sea. Models suggest we are likely to see the low pressure on the Siberian side, with Byoof building on the Canadian side, which should suck some mild air north through Bering Strait. However a Pacific-to-Atlantic cross-polar-flow may be blocked by an extension of Byoof across the north Atlantic. This block will be an interesting complication, but is off in the fog of the future. Uncertainty is involved.
We can be a little less uncertain regarding the present. Of course, there are various glitches involved in our instrumentalizations, but it does seem Ralph cooled the air at the Pole.
You may note that over Greenland there are temperatures below zero (-17°C), but that is because Greenland’s icecap is well over 10,000 feet up. (Icecap is 12,119 feet high and rising, at last report, at the center, but lowering at the edges.) In fact temperatures rarely get above freezing at that altitude, so far north, and there was quite a fuss a few years back when a brief thaw barely softened the icecap’s snow. The media made it sound like the entire icecap was melting, when in fact the softened snow refroze, and formed a crust. Study of the yearly layers of snow beneath suggest such thaws occur roughly once every fifty years, at that high altitude and high latitude.
The situation is entirely different when you drop down 10,000 feet to sea-level. There thaw is the norm, and freezes are the rarity. Here too the media has done a very bad job of stating what the norm of an arctic summer is. They tend to act as if a thaw is something to be alarmed about. Nope. It is quite normal.
In fact, though Ralph did manage to create some areas of sub-freezing temperatures, they were outweighed by the areas above freezing, and the mean of the entire area north of 80° north latitude never quite dipped below freezing.
Ralph’s main fascination, to me at least, is that he suggests a change in patterns we are used to, and not that he can “stop” the thaw. There is always a thaw. Here is the DMI graph from 1958 (the earliest we have.)
This 1958 graph is actually warmer than anything we have seen in recent summers, for the red line of actual temperatures gets above the green line of “average”. Recent summers have seen the red line below normal. But never, in the height of summer, does the red line sink below the blue line which represents freezing. There is always a thaw.
I actually found this surprising, when I first began to look at the history of the arctic. I thought for sure we could find at least one summer where it was especially cold, and there was no thaw, but I have yet to see a record of such a summer. I am starting to think it may have thawed during the summer even back during the height of the last ice age. The sun is simply too powerful to ignore, when it shines 24 hours a day, day after day after day.
Once you accept the thaw as a yearly event it is hard to get all bent out of shape by signs of melting sea-ice. In fact I feel like a person “in the know”, who can chuckle at the rubes who get excited by signs of slush. But the truth of the matter is that I was once just such a rube.
Now that I’m wiser my appreciation of men who crossed the sea-ice during the summer, back before rescue was possible with helicopters sent from massive icebreakers, has greatly increased. The more comfortable air temperatures get, the more treacherous the ice gets. The scientists Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo were lost in 2015 because the air temperatures were so warm they apparently were skiing in their long underware, and fell through thin ice into water that can kill you in five minutes.
Back in the days of the Cold War, to avoid the thinner and more treacherous sea-ice, both Americans and Russians used to seek out the thicker bergs that calved off the north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. These flat bergs were over 100 feet thick, but, because 9/10 of an iceberg is under water, they hardly stuck up at all above the other ice, and were hard to locate. Once discovered they were invaluable, because airplanes could be landed on them, and bases built upon them, and the Americans and Russians could busily spy on each other while pretending to only be interested in scientific experiments. However, at the height of summer, even these high points on the arctic seascape could be afflicted by the problems of slush. I suppose that, because they were so flat, the water didn’t run off to the lower ice ten feet below these “highlands”. In any case, while reading about life on T-3 (also called “Fletcher’s Ice Island”) I recall raising an eyebrow when one one man casually mentioned he wore hip waders, to get through the slush.
Thaw is the norm in the north. We are lucky to have a camera, O-buoy 14, which drifted into Parry Channel last autumn.
Parry Channel has great significance in Climate Science, because it is in the shape of a hockey stick, and we all know how hockey sticks cause climate scientists to tingle and spout adithering verbosity. However the channel is annoying to those who want to say current melting is “unprecedented”, for it is named after William Parry, who back in 1819 sailed a wooden, non-motorized ship along the entire “shaft” and into the “blade” of the above hockey stick, and, after spending a winter stuck in the ice, sailed back east the following summer. In comparison, when the “Northabout” sailed the Northwest Passage last summer, it sneaked through a southern route and never got as far north as Parry Channel.
It is amazing to consider the guts of the fellows who sailed the arctic back then, for they seemed to always get stuck and spend winters in the ice. The next spring they had to wait and wait and wait for the ice to melt. O-buoy 14 is giving us a glimpse of what they saw, as the sun shone all day, day after day. The three pictures below are from June 23, 25, and 29, and show us softening snow, slush (with polar bear tracks), and melt-water pools.
Now, before you get too excited by melt-water pools, please remember the lesson we were taught by “Lake North Pole” back in 2013. A melt-water pool does not mean the ice is breaking up; it can drain away in 48 hours, and the ice will remain. (Left July 26; right July 28.)
Hopefully we will see the ice break up. The long-ago sailors hoped to see the same thing. The danger was, it didn’t always happen. The most tragic case involved the Franklin Expedition of 1845-1846. The waters that had been more open in the time of Parry were less open, and likely the expedition’s provisions were also tainted by lead-poisoning. It was crucial they escape after the first winter, but seemingly the ice didn’t melt enough the second summer, though the survivors apparently attempted to escape to the south.
It seems to me that the ships of that time, though better equipped than Parry’s, were to some degree tricked by dreaded “Climate Change”. In the period 1816-1817 there were reports of whalers sailing up through Fram Strait along the east coast of Greenland, and over the top, and down through Nares Strait and into Baffin Bay on the west coast of Greenland. This was no longer possible in 1845, and Parry’s route was increasingly difficult. The expedition of HMS Investigator, entering the same area Parry explored but from the west, became trapped in the ice in 1850, and waited through two winters on increasingly shrunken rations, hoping the ice would melt, but it didn’t. They faced the same doom as Franklin’s crew.
In 1853 an expedition was sent to look for both Franklin’s ships and HSM Investigator. Four of five ships were trapped in the ice and abandoned. Three of the abandoned ships were lost. The fourth ship was abandoned but not lost, and makes for a very cool story. This ship was HSM Resolute.
The Resolute managed to copy Parry’s route, entering Parry Channel from the east in 1852, and wintering to the west and north of where O-buoy 14 now sits, not far from where Parry wintered, but the next summer they couldn’t escape as Parry escaped, though they did find and rescue the crew of HSM Investigator. Then the entire bunch was trapped by the September refreeze of 1853, and the captain prepared to endure another winter, which they successfully did. However as the sun rose the following spring they received orders to abandon their ship, and travel over the ice to other ships. Under protest, the captain obeyed, taking great care to prepare the ship before he left. They sailed back to England in 1854.
Then, unmanned, the Resolute traveled east through Parry Channel during the summers of 1854 and 1855, and was boarded by American whalers up at the top of Baffin Bay in September, 1855. Because we Americans are such gosh-darn nice people, we gave the ship back to the English, and it was back in England in 1856.
Apparently America’s sweetness and light didn’t impress the British much, for they put textile mills and cotton before freedom for slaves, and supported the wrong side during our Civil War. But later, after the relatively-good guys won our Civil War, the British got over it. When the Resolute was decommissioned in 1876 they took some of the less rotted timbers and made a desk, which was given to our President, Rutherford Hayes, in 1880.
Consequently no American president could sit at such a desk, in his right mind, and say the melt of arctic sea-ice was “unprecedented”, unless they were amazingly ignorant, and were created as a sort of divine pay-back to England, for abolishing slavery throughout their empire in 1833, but supporting America’s slave-states in 1861. (Karma’s pay-backs can be bizarre.) (Such an impossible person would send back to Britain, if not the actual desk, a bronze bust of Winston Churchill given to the USA by the English. Could any man sit at a desk made of timbers of the Resolute and be so crass?)
I suppose this may show I just don’t understand politics. Politicians like to think they are ahead of the facts, but to me it seems they are always behind. Just as the British Navy was losing ships left and right, because they were basing their intelligence on an outdated idea that suggested sea-ice in 1845 was like it was in Parry’s time, the intelligence of American leaders who misled and mislead the American voters was and is sadly outdated. However I don’t think the English admiralty promoted arctic exploration knowing their intelligence was wrong. Some American leaders are well aware Global Warming is based on faulty intelligence.
It takes an extraordinary American buffoon to think it is intelligent, to be unintelligent on purpose.
The simple fact of the matter is that the current thaw in the arctic is neither greater nor less than thaws of the historical past, and anyone who says otherwise either hasn’t researched the past, or thinks it is intelligent to be unintelligent.
Parry Channel is the proof.
*******
If I have time I’ll stick the DMI maps of Ralph’s recent rise and current fall, as a footnote and update to this post.
Here is a picture of children not being obedient. I told them to wait. They are vanishing into the distance. (Actually this is a zoomed-in part of a larger picture; you can barely see them in the larger picture.)
In a sense children are a lot like life. They refuse to follow the plan, and this can cause all sorts of different sorts of dourness to afflict us. One thing I’ve recently been noticing is the cure often isn’t words.
This is bad news for people like myself, who have invested a lot into the study of words. It is also bad news for people who don’t think talk is cheap, and make it expensive, such as psychiatrists. But again and again I’ve recently seen members of my staff, and the young parents who are my customers, not only say a lot with a wordless gesture, but seem to solve a problem as well.
Solve a problem? Yes, because everything is stressed, and then, just by the way they roll their eyes, or give themselves a face-palm, they cause laughter to come to relieve the stress. This is bad news for the pharmaceutical industry.
I’ve been noticing this phenomenon so much that I’ve started to study it. As it is beyond words, I don’t suppose I can find the words to describe it, but sometimes poetry is within a glance. We say a person “beams” at us. It makes me think we should observe silence from time to time, for otherwise words, whether spoken or written, can become mere yammering. Silence is golden.
Most recently I saw this wonder within a wink. Not a word was spoken. A person just winked, and my heart was eased by a good laugh. It got me thinking, and looking backwards across the years…
…Musing backwards to days I spent drifting, When shaving and showers were luxuries; When shopkeepers thought I’d likely be lifting; When hunger made appetite easy to please And downwind of kitchens was Oh so delicious, I couldn’t help look unworthy of trust. One look at me made policemen suspicious. I practiced innocent looks, or got cussed, But one day I decided to risk arrest. I saw a bored girl in a black limousine And as I slouched by I gave her my best Roguish wink. I wish you could have seen Her sour face dawn a recalcitrant smile. It made being a drifter completely worthwhile.
Sometimes we so-called adults take our problems too seriously. We forget the story has a happy ending, as we climb the stairs to our personal gallows.
Even as a humorist I am guilty of bringing up so many things to laugh about that I forget joy. My sense of humor is based on the pathos of human bungling: The way we attempt to be gods, and wind up forgetting where we put our car keys. It is better to laugh about such things than to spit, but if you focus on such things too much you can forget that laughter can be quite different, and not founded upon stooges bungling, but rather upon joy.
As I care for children at my Childcare I see them laugh at all sorts of things adults have forgotten to laugh about. Sometimes it is for sheer joy: A bird lands on a fence-post and sings, and the child just laughs.
One time in the 1950’s Winston Churchill, despite his amazing efforts to save Britain from destruction, was plunged to despair by the writing he could see on the wall, which suggested the the British Empire was crumbling. An American preacher was visiting, and Churchill inquired how the man could have hope. The answer was, “I read the end of the Book.”
In other words, our Creator was not so ill informed that he created a creation where everything blew up in His face, as if our Creator was a mad scientist with test tubes. We mortals might achieve such an end, but the Creator has a slight advantage because He stands outside of time. (Even time is His creation.) We may be bound by time, like characters in a single frame of a comic strip, but the Creator, as “the Alpha and Omega”, stands outside the comic strip, and sees all the frames from beginning to end simultaneously. Considering He knew the ending before the beginning, he would have to have had a very odd sense of humor if He created a comic strip that made Him look like an ignorant buffoon, and a chump.
This is especially true if it is true that a fundamental and intangible quality of the Creator is: The only thing more spiritual than a sense of humor. Which is? It’s a thing called “Love.”
Science has yet to measure Love, but science also has yet to measure humor. But Love, I think, is what differentiates laughter over human bungling, from laughter for sheer joy.
One reason we mortals like to “get back to nature” when we are in a bad mood is because out in the landscapes of nature we see how amazing our Creator is. Even though I aggravate some of my fellow Christians by including “evolution” in the many examples of the Creator’s creative genius, to me evolution is a reason to laugh in delight.
For example, consider the hoof of a horse. We have ancient skeletons to study, and can see that ancient horses had five digits like we do. Then they had three digits. Now they are running around on their middle fingers. When a horse rears around and attempts to kick my chin past my ears, it is “giving me the finger.” Is that not a reason to at least chuckle?
Evolution has a harder time explaining other examples of our Creator’s genius. For example, there is an orchid in the Amazon that is dependent on a certain species of wasp. Without these certain wasps it cannot be pollinated, and can’t produce seed, and would swiftly die out. Therefore, to make sure that wasp comes to its flower, the orchid tricks the wasp into thinking it is a wasp. It achieves this by making a flower that not merely looks like the wasp, but smells like the wasp, so the male wasps literally attempt to mate with a vegetable, fooled into thinking orchids are female wasps.
It is hard to figure out, step by step, how evolution came up with such an arrangement. It is not as simple as five digits gradually becoming a hoof. But I’m working on it. It may help explain to me how Madison Avenue convinces some men they can successfully copulate by buying a Cadillac.
In any case, when you “get back to nature” you enter a world of wonder. I’m not talking about a city park, where everything grows because humans planted them there. I’m not even talking about well kept farmland, where the weeds are under control. I’m talking about lands where man has little to do with where things sprout, and things are sometimes more beautiful than man could ever devise.
It is there we perhaps find a hope beyond our own efforts, and a sign we are under the wings of a compassionate Creator. I have seen nature “cure” children psychiatrists can’t “help”. Children deemed “uncontrollable” and “in need of medication” become downright serene, if you allow them to throw rocks and smash the crystal surface of a pond, and pluck dandelions and puff the seeds to the winds. Furthermore, nature is not harmed by the young hooligan’s destructive behavior, and in fact nature seems to like it, and to incorporate it into a grander plan.
Pharmaceutical companies and psychologists will despise me for saying this, but the Creator kicks their butts. A walk in the woods and by a pond simply benefits boys more, and costs zero. (Financiers won’t like that either.)
In like manner, the entire “Global Warming” scam is people thinking the Creator cannot manage things, and they themselves are the almighty savior.
In some ways it is difficult to see the scam, for the con-artists pretend to be on the side of “nature,” like snake oil salesmen pretending to be “doctors”. However, just as snake oil salesmen are in a hurry to leave town before customers discover that their claims had no basis in fact, Global Warming Alarmists seek to muddy waters, oppress critics, hide their emails, avoid full disclosure, and, if need be, leave town.
This is typical human behavior and is laughable, but sometimes it reaches a degree where laughter is inappropriate. The people who claim they “help children” may become fat and rich, as the children themselves become increasingly skinny and afflicted by suffering. My humor then becomes increasingly bitter and sardonic, and drifts away from joy. In a sense I am drifting away from the very thing I stand for.
I am in need of rescue, but who can I turn to.? A psychiatrist? Forget it. A pharmaceutical company? Forget it. And so on and so forth. Forget it.
The so-called “helpers” of this world are so corrupted that I think I can see sanity in youth losing hope and preferring heroin and death. In fact a lot of other so-called “adult” behavior isn’t all that different. Maybe death is deferred a little longer, but no rescue is hoped for. Life loses its appeal.
Fortunately, if you are keeping your eyes open, a rare rescue will come to pass. It is called, “a day in June.” It is the single day each year wherein the Creator hints just how good things could be, “if only.” It knocks ordinary logic back on its ass.
Robert Frost pointed out this phenomenon when, (tongue in cheek), he created an amazingly long title for a relatively short poem. The long title was, “Happiness Makes Up For In Height What It Lacks In Length.”
“O stormy, stormy world, The days you were not swirled Around with mist and cloud, Or wrapped as in a shroud, And the sun’s brilliant ball Was not in part or all Obscured from mortal view– Were days so very few I can but wonder whence I get the lasting sense Of so much warmth and light. If my mistrust is right It may be altogether From one day’s perfect weather…
(You will have to research the end of his art yourself, because I stop at this point because he has made my point: One day a year has a huge influence.)
One such day defies science, for it is not replicated. It denies democracy, because it is out-voted by 364 other days. It is a single beam of love from the eye of One who can bring you to your knees.
And don’t tell me you have never experienced that. You may have called yourself a fool for becoming gushy, but we’ve all been there and done that. One glance, and everything changed.
When you are young the one-day-a-year-better-than-all-others may result in disappointment, for it often involves the glance of a potential lover. When you get to be an old grouch like myself you have not so great a hope for carnal gratification. The only gratification you want is one day the weather doesn’t suck. One fricking day that isn’t too hot or too cold, too snowy or too rainy, or too like a frying pan.
Guess what? I just passed through that one day a year.
It happened in all areas of my life. For example, my study of arctic sea-ice involves the potential extinction of polar bears, but O-buoy showed, between June 23 and 25, a couple of bears ambled by unconcerned about the summer thaw:
The bears are alive and well, with populations increasing.
I’m well as well, after a perfect day, not to hot, not too humid, and, just when I was thinking that maybe I should water the garden, a benign evening shower watering the garden for me, with only a few contented grumbles of thunder, which then made a spectacular double rainbow.
I include the power-lines because I am a humorist, and wise to how even this evening’s gorgeous sunset can be lessened, if your focus is a sardonic joke:
But that is not truly my focus. (To focus on a bully misses something nicer.) All one needs to do is walk fifty yards and there are no wires in the picture.
I took a lot of pictures, and all failed to communicate how vivid the rainbow was.
Nor can anything communicate what my 3-year-old granddaughter was communicating to me, as she rode my shoulders, as I snapped the shots.
You are just going to have to trust me, when I state it was my one-day-a-year, wherein the Creator trumps all other cards dealt out.
Pay attention to this lone card, when it is dealt out to you. Do not be seduced by the 364 other cards you are dealt. They only spoil the view.
Sometimes it takes a perfect day in June To remind me that defeat is not the end. Oh, it may end me, and it could come soon, But today’s rare beauty was such a friend It made morbid thoughts piffle. An old tune Found its way to my lips, and I walked With summer in my step. It could end soon But life was no longer a thing I stalked Like elusive prey, but was what I was.
How blue was the sky! How green were the trees! The sun’s touch was perfect, as was the breeze, And I felt free of desire’s cruel claws.
How can defeat ever torment and sting When you see, owning nothing, you have Everything?
Ralph hasn’t become the gale some models were foreseeing, but is a persistent feature at the Pole, and a wrench in the works of the summer thaw. In essence Ralph creates clouds where I expect sun. This slows the creation of melt-water pools, which are a creation that quickly changes the albedo equation, for the brilliant white of the snows (which reflects light in a highly efficient manner) is changed to the battleship gray of slush (which absorbs more sunlight and accelerates the surface melt.) Once the slush turns into an actual pool particles of soot, volcano ash, and arctic algae often create a black bottom to the pool, which hastens the melt further, and on occasion melt down and create a hole to the sea beneath, weakening the ice and contributing to the break up of floes.
This is a time I sorely miss the floating cameras, for they gave you a visual proof of what otherwise is merely modeled guess-work. The only camera we have is lodged in the ice of Parry Channel, and can’t give us a clear idea of the conditions out in the open sea. However it is better than nothing, and does show the crispness of the drifted snow softening in the thaw.
O-buoy 14 is down around 74° north latitude, and away from the center of Ralph near the Pole. I have an insatiable curiosity about higher latitudes. The DMI graph shows the mean, north of 80°, as being below normal but above freezing.
To look at Dr. Ryan Maue’s maps of modeled temperatures (free week trial available at Weatherbell site) isn’t exactly helpful, because the GFS tends to average it all out to a blandness, while the Canadian differentiates to a degree where it seems to make storms more intense. Which is a curious George to trust? (GFS to left; JEM to right)
The reason this matters is because in the polar summer snow can change to rain, and this makes an enormous difference. Snow (usually a dusting to an inch, as the arctic is a desert), slows the melt by adding more brilliant white to reflect heat, while rain immediately creates slushy, gray spots and speeds the melt. As is often the case in the arctic, a half degree can make a big difference.
One of my favorite examples was the case of “Lake North Pole”, in 2013. The melt-water pool directly in front of the camera, expanded by summer rains in mid July, generated no end of media hype, complete with stories of Santa drowning and so on.
However no sooner had the media gotten everyone looking that way, when the water drained away down through a crack in the ice (as is often the case.)
The ice was still gray and capable of absorbing more heat than snow, but, rather than summer rains, summer snows followed.
And by August 5 all talk of “Lake North Pole” was muted. It had gone from being an Alarmist talking point on July 26 to being a Skeptic’s talking point.
The camera allowed the curious to compare the August 5 view of 2012 (left) with 2013 (right).
To the dispassionate it simply looked like perhaps 2013 was a colder summer than 2012, but, in terms of getting a political message across, I fear cameras had gone from seeming like an excellent idea on July 26 to seeming like a very bad idea on August 5. This may be one reason funding dried up, and we are without their wonderful visual evidence this summer.
In any case, we now are stuck with what a satellite can see from afar. Ralph’s clouds can then present one with a bit of a problem, though there are usually plenty of interesting views further south, if you are in the mood to ruin your schedule with a wonderful form of procrastination. Here’s a nice, current view of Petermann Glacier and Nares Strait.
The problem is we are too far away to get the intimate feel for conditions the cameras gave us. We can’t see if it snowed or rained, last night. And, in cases where radar attempts to see through clouds, we are not even sure if we are looking at open water or a melt-water pool.
I sure do miss those cameras.
The best I can do is look at Ryan Maue’s “precipitation type” maps, keeping in mind they are models. The GFS seems to suggest Ralph will not rain. Ralph will continue to dust the north with snow (blue). The only rain (green) is towards the Alaska coast.
The maps below represent the GFS forecasts for 6, 72, 120 and 168 hours. Recognizing these are forecasts and not reality, Ralph looks like he will peak in 72 hours, down at 977 mb, but persist for a week. Only then are there signs Byoof (the Beaufort High) will come back.
To me it seems Ralph is being a real spoil sport to the melt-season. Right when the sun is at its highest he is murking up the sky and dusting everything with snow. Of course, most of the melt comes from below, but we won’t be setting any records unless Ralph takes a hike.
I should confess I blew a forecast, for I did not expect Ralph to show up much this summer. My assumption was that the lagged effects of the weak La Nina would reduce the difference in temperatures between the tropics and the arctic, and that it was that difference that fueled the anomaly I call “Ralph”.
This is merely my wondering, and likely should not be dignified with the word “hypothesis”, but the persistence of “Ralph” intrigues me and calls for an explanation, and what I wonder is this:
If the “Quiet Sun” does deliver less energy to the earth in various ways, could it be that less energy warms the Equator while cooling the Pole? At the Equator less energy would produce less wind, indirectly leading to warming, by stirring up less cold water, and therefore intensifying El Ninos while weakening La Ninas. Meanwhile, up at the Pole, less energy has a more direct effect during the summer, making it colder. During the winter there is no sun so no effect, but the import of warm surges makes the winter’s milder. All year long the tropics are generally warmer (so far) and this fuels a more meridional jet, which is what creates the “feeder bands” that fuel Ralph.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Before Ralph reappeared Byoof did manage to push the ice away from the western entrance to the Northwest Passage, (lower right) but the ice is still fast against the shore at Barrow (top right).
Daytime sea-breeze shifted to a light land-breeze during Barrow’s “night”, and warm inland temperatures wafted over them, lifting them to a balmy 41°F.
Here’s the Navy thickness map. (Ice-out starting in Hudson Bay):
And here’s the “extent” graph everyone likes to watch:
Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, and for some reason extraordinary stuff always seems to happen on her birthday, no matter how much we try to keep it quiet. One year we chose to have a quiet take-out dinner on a beach on the shore of a lake, and as we ate there was not only a spectacular sunset with a thunderhead shooting forks of amazing lightning, but the obligatory double rainbow to boot, vivid against deep purple clouds.
Another year we were just about to leave for the beach, when a pipe burst in the cellar. (Not a usual thing in June). The miracle was that we found a plumber who showed up within minutes and had the pipe fixed so fast we still left for the beach before noon.
This year the problem was again in the cellar, and began the night before my wife’s birthday. The hot and humid weather had condensed water on cold pipes, which drizzled down into the pressure switch of the water pump, causing a shorting that filled the cellar with smoke, and melted the switch into the “on” position. Usually the switch clicks off when the pressure reaches 40 psi. Now it was increasing past 40 psi, past 45 psi, past 50 psi, past 55 psi…
I was oblivious, typing at this word processor. I have developed this ability, because I have a granddaughter in the house, and if I don’t develop extraordinary powers of concentration I’ll never get a word written on this blog. This is especially true because any time my granddaughter demands attention my dog Elsie gets jealous, and Elsie has this weird response where she barks frantically and chases her tail. I can’t tell you how often this stuff is going on in the background, as I write the words you read.
Night before last my wife and daughter were attempting to convince my granddaughter to get into the bathtub, which my granddaughter was vehemently objecting to. The dog was chasing its tail and barking. The water was shooting into the bathtub with extraordinary power from the faucet, and a strange smell was arising from somewhere. And I was completely oblivious, concentrated as I was on details on a computer screen pertaining to sea-ice, and a critical comment made by a troll on my website.
My wife sweetly managed to get my attention by evacuating the house, including a naked three-year-old. As she departed she noticed I was looking down a cellar staircase filled with smoke, and inquired “Should I call 911?” I said, “No,” and headed down into the smoke, whereupon her advice was, “Hold your breath.”
In the cellar I could find nothing burning, and in fact after I opened the windows the smoke seemed to be dispersing. My daughter came down and helped me look for something burned, but we could find nothing. Then she mentioned the water coming out of the faucett more vigorously than usual, as she was filling the bath, which seemed odd, so I went upstairs and turned on the water in the kitchen sink. It shot out with amazing ferocity. So I went back down and looked at the water-pressure gauge, and saw it going from 110 psi to 115 psi to 120 psi…
It then occurred to me that maybe I should check the pressure switch, but it was in a dark area and I couldn’t see very well. so, with the cover removed, I gave it a nudge with the plastic handle of a tool. This produced a vivid blue ball of electrical arcing about the size of a turnip, followed by a smaller tongue of orange flame, at which point it occurred to me I should turn off the circuit breaker labeled “pump.”
Problem solved. I could get back to what I was writing. I mention this only because some young writers say they cannot write without a grant. And they are not even married, and run no business, and have no problems worth mentioning, (except maybe a bad choice for a girlfriend). I doubt they could stand five minutes in my shoes, dealing with the distractions I deal with, yet I do write, (and sometimes write too much, according to my wife).
Let this be a lesson to you young poets. You have no excuse for not writing. If you are going to whine, make a music of your blues. You can do it if you really want to write. If you want money, well, that is a different matter, and you probably should seek some other occupation.
Less artistic and more pragmatic readers will have noticed that, while I solved the problem of smoke in the basement, a new problem, involving no water in the house, had raised its head. This was no way to be beginning my wife’s birthday.
I planned to head off for a new pressure switch as soon as the closest hardware store, twenty miles away, opened in the morning. However company arrived early, to wish my wife happy birthday, and I had to smile and nod. As soon as I could enact a diplomatic escape I drove twenty miles, bought a $16.00 pressure switch, drove twenty miles back, and went down into the cellar and replaced the fried switch myself. A plumber would have charged $300.00.
There was a lurid red warning on the pressure switch instructions that stated the switch should be rewired by a qualified electrician. Pish tush! What plumber heeds that warning? And if they don’t, why should I?
Not that either an electrician or plumber could figure out the wiring of a 250-year-old house, where electricity was an afterthought. In a modern house the wiring for the pump is right next to the pressure switch, and four wires are involved, but in my house the wiring for the pump is far across the room, and only two wires are involved at the pressure switch. It’s no big deal; just a different way of achieving the same end. But small-minded people and government regulators likely would freak out, because they insist there is only one way to skin a cat. They would likely tear the whole house down and rebuild it to “specs.” Me? I just put the switch in, adjusting for only two wires.
The pump worked and my wife got to shower before noon on her birthday. We saved $270.00, and I figured we could go out to some semi-classy joint and buy ourselves a fine meal with expensive drinks for $270.00, but instead we were invited to a special birthday late-lunch by friends who don’t drink. So we saved $270.00 twice.
I was slightly annoyed, because the way things were turning out I had no time for my art. I’m not referring to this blog, for I did sneak in a few replies to comments here, but rather to another form of self-expression, which is my wood carving. You see, I am a small-town version of Michelangelo. Much smaller. More like a Mike. And I did want to find the time to finish a birthday present for my wife. I didn’t.
Now here is another lesson for young poets. You don’t need to despair when you don’t have time to finish a poem, and you don’t need to whine for a government grant that might allow you to finish. Just call your unfinished work “a fragment.” People who really love you will see where you were aiming. They will give you the leeway to fulfill your promise.
For example, one year my wife gave me a scarf she was knitting me, though she had only the time to knit a third of it. The next year she gave me the same scarf, only two thirds completed. And the following year I got the finished scarf, and it means more than any other scarf to me. I still have it to this day, and still use it though it is tattered. In like manner, my wife was surprisingly pleased by the carving I hadn’t completed.
I will admit it bugs me to have a carving uncompleted. (Not that Michelangelo didn’t leave some amazingly cool stuff only partly carved.) However the reason it bugs me is a reason that may scare the socks off some young poets. And the reason is this: The only way a carving can get better is to lose more.
In any case, we headed off to our late lunch, and lingered long, and just as we were leaving that lunch at sunset we received a text from a neighbor stating our smoke detector had gone off. We texted back we were on our way home, and that the smoke detector could go off in humid weather, and they shouldn’t worry. But then my wife remembered the pressure switch I had put in, and we decided we’d drive a bit faster.
As we passed the fire station we noticed all the trucks were gone, but the place was lit up and around thirty people were happily milling about. When we arrived home we couldn’t see the house, because three firetrucks were in the way. There was also a police cruiser, adding blue lights to all the red lights.
I have to admit I was thinking about the pressure switch I’d replaced. Had I crossed wires? Was my home, beyond the looming firetrucks obstructing the view, a pile of ashes?
Nope. That morning my daughter had set off the kitchen alarm, burning the toast, so she removed the alarm from the ceiling and put it on the window-sill, whereupon it went quiet. Why it chose a later time to blare out, I don’t know, but it was basically a false alarm.
The odd thing was, no one was annoyed. Life must get boring in my little town, for all these volunteer firemen had showed up, dressed in sixty pounds of fireman clothing, and they all seemed positively delighted they’d found an excuse to get out of the house on a warm summer night. Rather than anyone angry about a false alarm, it was a happy social event. We all laughed about smoke alarms, (apparently they’d been called out the night before because someone threw a smoke alarm away, and it went off in a dumpster,) It was the typically unusual event that always seems to happen, on my wife’s birthday.
Eventually everyone went home, and I entered the house, to meet a very guilty dog. Apparently Elsie felt she was to blame. Usually she barks her fool head off when anyone knocks at the door, (and I’d wondered why she was so silent with three firetrucks outside).
When I first entered I couldn’t even find her. The poor cur was cowering in the bathroom. She barely poked her nose out when I walked in the neighboring room, and when I said, “Hey there, old dog, come here”, she didn’t rush out for reassurance, but rather slowly backed from sight. Why? You figure it out. Apparently dogs take responsibility for things we cannot comprehend.
The same is true for young poets, but I haven’t time to elaborate much on this idea.
Instead I chose to point out that I, at long last, without any government grants to free me from worldly distractions, did sit down here at my computer to blog. The first thing I did was to check the WordPress “stats” page, which shows me how many people have visited, and what nations they have visited from. Also I can see how many “views” I’ve had since I started this blog in December, 2012. It said I’d been “viewed” 200,006 times.
I sat back to think about that number. Not that any particular view means more than another, but it was a bit like when your odometer rolls over in a car. It gives you pause.
My mind went back to when I was a young poet, and very much wanted to be noticed, but no one seemed to want to do it. In fact I had the ability to help people remember appointments they were late to, simply by clearing my throat, lifting my index finger, and mentioning I’d written a poem. The only people who would stay and listen required that I listen to their poems in return, and that was a pretty steep price to pay. In the end I became discouraged and decided the world could go to hell. If they refused to be lectured to, about a way to end all wars and make everything nice, they could just go get stuffed. I became a hermit of sorts.
That got old. Not that I didn’t have some mystical experiences born of deep thought, but they were few and far between, and mostly I was lonely and felt like my brains were shriveling up. No man’s an island, and we need the input of others. Also if you never go out you wind up broke. Eventually I hit the road.
A while back I came across a folder of my letters that my mother had saved from my days as a drifter. She had a tendency to worry too much, so the letters were always upbeat, even when written from difficult periods in my life. One letter in particular made me laugh.
My mother was worried I was too isolated and too much a loner. I told her I thought God agreed, and therefore God had arranged for me to make 10,000 people smile, on an individual basis, one after another. It then listed the series of jobs I’d had in the prior six months, pumping gas, serving burgers, serving donuts and running the register at small markets, and explained how I took it upon myself to get customers to smile. (I didn’t mention the failures.) At the bottom of the list was the number 10, 242. I figured this would ease my mother’s worry about me being a loner. Also I added that I’d decided I wasn’t a poet; I was the American sort of writer called a “humorist”, a sort of modern Will Rogers, defying depression with a “I never met a man I didn’t like” attitude.
I then concluded that while some gain acclaim by making a crowd of 10,242 laugh, it is also great to create the same number of smiles by dribs and drabs, unnoticed by the crazy media, but perhaps smiled at by God.
I’m not sure this convinced my mother; she did seem to like to worry; but the important thing is that it convinced myself. Furthermore I became aware I was not alone. As I drifted through the heartland of America I became aware there was a vast body of people making smiles, even when it was raining. It was something I failed to notice when I was a hermit, and down on humanity, and, if I saw anything in society, it was the mentality of a mob. Not that such bad things don’t happen, but it is more than countered by the fact God is in everyone, and shines out from faces if you make the effort to cheer people up.
And this is my final bit of advice to young poets. Don’t be fooled by fame. It isn’t necessary, and judging from people afflicted, is actually a hazard. Also, for every singer who makes the big time, like the Beatles, there are thousands in small places, singing in remote church choirs or to children or with friends, and they make an enormous difference. Without them life would be stark.
Not that it isn’t nice to get 200,006 views. It was especially nice that it happened on my wife’s birthday. She’s the one who has to put up with me when I get a far away look, and don’t notice the cellar is on fire. And when there isn’t a fire, she sometimes has to light a fire under me to get me moving. I wouldn’t blame her for wondering, at times, if I am wasting my time at this computer. 200,006 views is therefore a sort of reassurance.
And you never really see the effects of small and random acts of kindness. It only takes a grain of sand to start an avalanche, and our influences go onward even after we have left the scene.
After a period of relative calm, when Byoof (The Beaufort High) ruled the roost and sun could get to work on the yearly thaw, low pressure has loop-de-looped north from the Siberian coast, and Ralph (anomalous low pressure) has retaken the Pole. (Maps created by Dr. Ryan Maue at the Weatherbell site [week free trial available.])
Ralph will tend to slow the melting, for two reasons. First, the clouds block the sunshine. Second, summer storms at the Pole seem to create cold, perhaps utilizing evaporative cooling in the manner of a summer thunderstorm. Even when the precipitation largely evaporates (or sublimates) before reaching the ground, temperatures can be lowered a degree or two, and at the Pole that is the difference between temperatures just above freezing and temperatures just below.
Ralph will meander weakly about the Pole for the next few days, and then the GFS model sees Ralph reinvigorated by a sort of secondary moving north from east Siberia, and becoming our first gale of the summer. Of course, we will have to wait and see if the computer is correct, but the current forecast is impressive, with pressures dropping to 966 mb in five days.
If such a gale manifests we will not merely be talking about a dusting of snow, but several inches, and also the winds will increase:
Once the winds get over gale force the ice tends to be crunched and broken. This will be our first opportunity to see if the water under the ice holds enough mildness to melt ice, as occurred in the summer gale of 2012, or is so cold it melts little ice, as occurred in the summer gale of 2013.
The Canadian JEM model also shows the gale. As usual it sees a stronger storm, though it takes longer to develop.
The Jem model also sees colder resultant temperatures associated with the the gale, (again as is usually the case.)
Another valuable shared-observation from Ron Clutz. At his site I commented:
My guess is that the “Quiet Sun” is starting to show its effect. I also guess that the cooling effect was not immediate, as less energy from the sun might have slowed the east to west winds at the equator. This in turn would reduce the cold upwelling along equatorial west coasts, resulting in milder SST. In other words, though it may seem counter intuitive, less energy would temporarily result in milder temperatures. However the milder temperatures are indicative of the seas giving up heat due to a “Quiet Sun”, rather than sucking up heat due to a “Noisy Sun”.
The effect of weaker east to west winds would be a stronger than expected El Nino, which we saw in 2015, and a weaker than expected La Nina, which we just saw. Despite these fluctuations the general trend is that the seas are losing the stored heat. Or that is my guess.
May Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are now available, and we can see ocean cooling resuming after a short pause from the downward trajectory during the previous 12 months.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source, the latest version being HadSST3.
The chart below shows the last two years of SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST3 including May 2017.
After an upward bump in April 2017 due to the Tropics and NH, the May SSTs show the average declining slightly. Note the Tropics recorded a rise, but not enough to offset declines in both hemispheres and globally. SH is now two months into a cooling phase. The present readings compare closely with April 2015, but currently with no indication of an El Nino event any time soon.
I’m nearly too incredulous to be disgusted by the insanity occurring in Washington these days. As usual, whatever the Democrats accuse others of is their projection; they are experts on what they themselves do, even if others aren’t. Therefore, if a president is accused of “obstructing justice” (or merely “investigated”, which is the same thing, in an insinuating way), I immediately look to see what sort of justice the Democrats are obstructing. (Forgive me if this seems a bit rash, but it has become habitual, because it so often is justified.) Then, secondly, I postulate what their reasons might be.
My conclusion is that the FBI is part of the “swamp” that President Trump wants to “drain”, but that there are some in that swamp that fear exposure. The process of cleaning up the FBI would expose the mud, the rot, the corruption. This is not desired by those who have sold-out or bought-into the stink. Therefore they will do anything possible to divert attention and obstruct the searchlights of review.
All the clamor about investigating the President is an attempt to investigate the investigator, by those who shrink at the prospect of being investigated.
Or it sure looks that way to me.
But doing this obstructs the President the People elected, and is in fact an obstruction of the American Way. A murmur of discontent is growing.
The Beltway Bunch are seemingly oblivious to the fact that, while they may be a huge majority (roughly 90% voted against Trump) in the District of Columbia, they live in an Ivory Tower in a sea that is rising towards storm. Rather than leading the People they are betraying them, and that is no way to create happiness.
A typically insightful post by Susan Crockford. If this field of icebergs persist it seems likely to chill the SST in that part of the Atlantic. Watch to see if the cold water encourages high pressure of a “Newfoundland Wheel” sort. Joe Bastardi suggests high pressure to the north can lead to stronger hurricanes to the south.
Typically the media reports such a shift to the south of sea-ice as a loss of ice to the north. It seldom reports the chilling of the water to the south. Sea-ice can achieve such chilling where a cold current can’t, because a cold current, being denser than the milder water it moves into, tends to sink. Icebergs bob merrily onward, refusing to sink, and greatly chill the waters they move into. This can allow colder currents to move further south at the surface, because they are no longer moving into milder waters. I sometimes wonder if it is such a shift in a field of ice that causes a “flip” from a warm AMO to a cold one.
Heavy sea ice off Newfoundland and southern Labrador has been an issue for months: it brought record-breaking numbers of polar bear visitors onshore in early March and April and since then has hampered the efforts of fisherman to get out to sea.
Let’s look back in time at how the ice built up, from early January to today, using ice maps and charts I’ve downloaded from the Canadian Ice Service and news reports published over the last few months.
The tour is illuminating because it shows the development of the thick ice over time and shows how strong winds from a May storm combined with an extensive iceberg field contributed to the current situation.
Bottom line: I can only conclude that climate change researcher David Barber was grandstanding today when he told the media that global warming is to blame for Newfoundland’s record thick sea ice conditions this year. …
Perhaps the most annoying thing done by members of Global Warming’s Alarmist community has been to expunge historical data from their graphs, in order to emphasize their points. For example, if recent Global Warming is “An Inconvenient Truth”, it is “An Even More Inconvenient Truth” that it was even warmer in the Medieval Warm Period. Therefore it became convenient to fail to mention the Medieval Warm Period. Why? Because people are less likely to pay attention to an event if that event isn’t “unprecedented”. The warmer past must be somehow diminished, to sensationalize the present.
People react strangely to “unprecedented” things that disturb the status-quo, especially if they imagine they are in a position of privilege and therefore imagine they have a lot to lose. ( I honestly feel it might be better to be flat broke and have nothing to lose, for, in my experience, such people are less threatened by change. When you hit rock bottom, any change is for the better); (even, at times, the change called death.)
I’ve been aware of how weird the wealthy get, when faced with new things, ever since I myself was the new thing. When I was growing up it was normal for a married couple to have five or six children, and the number of children running around was “unprecedented.”
It was the “Baby Boom”, a collective, orgasmic sigh of relief, after the grim poverty of the Great Depression and the unholy slaughter of World War Two. Times were good for America, for the United States had the only modern economy and infrastructure unscathed by war, which gave it a gigantic competitive advantage. In my area there was more than enough money to go around, raises were commonplace at many jobs, and even little people felt freed from the constraints of want. Many chose to use their new freedom to have large families. However some felt no joy about either the new-found freedom of little people, or the masses of laughing children. They felt their world threatened, because one does not have to count on their fingers long to calculate such a huge amount of children will make a huge difference, when they become a huge mass of adults.
I happened to get born into a wealthy situation, because my Dad was a Boston surgeon back before lawyers, politicians and insurance agents decided to get their hands on the gobs of money involved in saving people’s lives. When he first got started after World War Two my Dad hardly had to pay any malpractice insurance, and got to keep the gobs of money he made, though he payed little attention to his bank account (being far more interested in the amazing advances being made by medicine.) In a mere week my Dad made enough to buy a new car, yet he persisted in driving his old, Volkswagen Bug. He actually preferred the crowded, post-war housing development where he and my mother started married life, because he liked the neighbors, but my mother pleaded that we move to a bigger house, so we moved only five miles further away from the hospital, and into what became, for a time, one of the most wealthy suburbs in the world. That is where I got to see, and be repelled by, how very weird wealthy people are, and it likely explains why I have been very downwardly mobile ever since.
Not that the life of privilege didn’t have its perks. The owner of the Boston Red Sox was very pleased by my Dad, after Dad did an operation on veins in the leg of the team’s much-loved secretary, and helped her avoid an amputation. Due to the owner’s generosity I then got to go visit the Red Sox locker room, and be somewhat stunned by how huge the ballplayers were, when I was only age eight or nine. I got to meet splendid athletes in their underpants, young men few now remember, such as Frank Malzone, Bill Momboquette, Gene Connolly (who also played in the NBA), and Pumpsy Green (the first black to play for Boston.) I met Carl Yastremski before he hit .300. And it meant little to me. They gave me an autographed ball and I ruined it throwing it for the neighbor’s black lab to retrieve. (Man! The money I could get for that ball now!)
What did impress me was how much the massive, muscular players seemed to like my Dad, though he was no athlete. He walked with a limp due to polio. (Maybe they liked him because, in those simpler days, the team secretary was a sort of surrogate Mom for a bunch of young fellows far from their small home towns, and they simply appreciated Dad for saving her leg.) In any case, I was impressed to a degree where I decided to pay more attention to baseball.
I briefly became one of those shrill kids who you want to stifle at a ballgame, with a falsetto voice that can shatter eyeglasses, and which makes the fillings in your teeth wince. I figured this was how fans were suppose to behave: The other team was the “bad guys”, and you were suppose to tell them so as loudly as possible, from a privileged seat directly behind home plate at Fenway Park. Then I learned not to be so shrill, and to stop calling the opposing pitcher every bad name my somewhat limited vocabulary owned.
This change occurred because my Dad was a gregarious dude, and, while Red Sox were striking out, (my grandmother referred to them as the “Red Flops” at that time), he’d be striking up conversations with the fans around him. As he did this I noticed his cheerful face suddenly changed to a sympathetic face. Then he turned to me and told me that the opposing pitcher had injured his arm the year before, but was now attempting something called “a come back.” The owner of the Red Sox, being a gentleman of the Old School, had given the family of that opposing pitcher seats behind home plate, and the pitcher’s daughter was upset by things I was calling her father.
I turned and met the eyes of a small girl about my age. They were eyes that did not accuse me or hate me, but were on the verge of tears. Without a word I shrank down to the size of a termite, and regarded my shoes silently for at least an inning.
I think it was compassionate of God to arrange that coincidence. It gave opposing teams a reality and a face I would have been blind to, if opponants had remained just “the bad guys.” It is odd to think of that little girl now being as old as I am, but I still remember her face. I wonder if she remembers mine. I expect I wore a very funny look, just before I ducked and hid.
Not that I entirely forgave her father for beating the Red Sox. The Red Sox were a seventh-place team, but were not suppose to lose to the Washington Senators, who were a tenth-place team.
The New York Yankees were entirely different. They always won, and nearly always were the first-place-team. It was acceptable, in New England, to despise them. But I found myself drifting from acceptable behavior, even though in many ways I loathed the Yankees. Instead of merely loathing, I found myself wondering about the sanity of New York fans.
I could understand the little girl behind me, because in a boyish way I understood what a “come-back” was, because of my Dad’s recovery from polio. But New York fans were different. They would boo their best players.
Back when I was young Babe Ruth held the record for most home runs (in a 154 game season) with sixty. Few could challenge the record. Few could even hit fifty. In 1956, for the first part of the season, Micky Mantle hit home runs at an amazing rate that might have allowed him to surpass Babe Ruth, but rather than admiring, the New York Media was hostile. It was the strangest thing then, and is strange now, looking at old, yellowing newspapers. What is there to disparage about a superb athlete having a superb season, especially when it is for your home town team? However the New York media did everything possible to make life harder for the young man. They saw him as a rube, an outsider, and not a member of the New York Intelligentsia. How dare he challenge their icon, Babe Ruth? And, when late season injuries slowed the amazing athlete down, the New York sports reporters “breathed a collective sigh of relief.” Eh? What is there to be relieved about? Why shouldn’t you want a young fellow to succeed?
But, if you have such a hero-worship of the past, shouldn’t the New York Media now have a similar worship of the Medieval Warm Period, and scowl at any who dare to say modern times challenge those distant days, days when Vikings could plow soil in Greenland, soil that is now permafrost difficult to dent with a jackhammer?
Sports reporters are the hope of journalism, and even of the English language, because they wield a pen with far more skill, creativity, and joy than dreary modern poets do, but when it comes to decency, and anything resembling kindness, they can descend to bottoms of barrels pigs and rats will not touch. This heartless attribute might be seen as splendid and courageous journalism, if it were aimed at a corrupt politician, but they attacked young athletes wet behind their ears.
In 1961 the New York Media again disgraced itself, as great members of perhaps the greatest Yankee team hit amazing numbers of home runs. This time two were challenging Babe Ruth’s record.
The leader at times was again Micky Mantle (right), who now was five years older, and who had to some degree learned to flatter and placate the New York media, but the other athlete was named Roger Maris, young and naive and deemed a “rube” by the sophisticated New Yorkers, who for the most part were weaklings, and who couldn’t hit a major league fastball if their life depended on it, (unless they were lucky, and even then the hit would be unlikely to travel past second base.)
I was only eight years old when this was occurring, and the worst word I knew was “fink.” However, even at that tender age, when I listened to how the press responded, as Roger Maris hit home run after home run (including four in one game), it seemed so weird and deranged I quietly muttered to myself, “What the fink…”
Does the media understand how idiotic their behavior looks to the common sense of a child? Roger Maris was an old man to me, but in actual fact was only 27 years old. I understood the Yankees were the nemesis of Boston, and therefore you might think I would approve of disparaging Yankee players. However, young as I was, I knew this was Yankee media, putting down a great Yankee. (Roger Maris was as brilliant in the outfield, catching balls, as he was at the plate hitting home runs.)
At age eight I already sensed the press was demented. It was as if they felt Babe Ruth was Jesus Christ, and Roger Maris was some heathen false prophet, and the only way to save the soul of New York City was to grind the young athlete into the dirt. You had to live through that time to really understand how reprehensible the behavior of the media was. In some ways they came close to crucifying a young man who did nothing but play baseball extremely well, and help his team reach World Series after World Series. The amazing thing is that Roger Maris was not beaten down by the Beast. Though he was terribly hurt by how he was treated, he beat the old record, and hit sixty-one home runs. (I cringe admitting the record was broken against a Boston pitcher.)
Roger Maris went right on being exceptional even after he couldn’t play ball any more. Considering how he was treated, you might think he would have been a good candidate for a decent into bitterness and barrooms, especially when he was hit by lymphoma. Instead, when Roger Maris died at the young age of 51, he was spending his time and money supporting research that has since then allowed others to live with lymphoma far longer than he did.
I’m not saying the man was a saint, but he had some exceptional qualities, and the New York media has some explaining to do that they never have done, and show little sign of ever doing. The deranged never explain what they cannot comprehend, any more than your loyal dog explains why he stops wagging his tail when he gets rabies.
I wonder what effect the behavior of that particularly demented media had on my generation. I mean, if you were a small child, would watching how Roger Maris was treated make you want to break a home run record? Be superb in any other way? Speaking for myself, the answer is a simple, “No.”
And Oh sure, in Hollywood movies there was all sorts of tearjerker guff and balderdash about how hard work was rewarded, but little children are not the sheep some think. They see when the emperor has no clothes. I think many in my generation watched how Roger Maris was treated, and thought to themselves, “Hard work will really piss off the people in power.”
Some sort of fork in the road then appeared. Some wanted to become the “new people in power”, while others recoiled from anything to do with power’s derangement. Some strove to become upwardly mobile, thinking they would do better, but many of these people became even more deranged than the deranged people they replaced. Others sought to be downwardly mobile, and to escape the derangement by living under the radar.
Now, before you say that that in America everyone wants to be rich, and no one would actually seek to be downwardly mobile, I would like to remind you that America was not founded to make people wealthy. It was founded on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and, (at least when I was young), that freedom included hobos.
I likely should only speak for myself, but I think I wasn’t alone in my generation in being turned off by what happened to people who were successful, like Roger Maris (or Marilyn Monroe).
Some say Baby Boomers were spoiled, but there can be a hollowness in a childhood even if materialistic parents give you every plastic hula-hoop and Frisbee you clamor for. Also, when one watches parents who are wealthy, and who have it made, go through the unhappiness of divorce, one wonders where Love has hid.
If Gandhi could call his life, “Experiments with the Truth”, perhaps the downwardly mobile could call their lives, “Hide and Seek with Love.” Searching for what wasn’t found in wealthy (but sterile) suburbs can take one down some interesting paths:
But I have already discussed my own search, and in some ways the topic bores me. Rather I confess I have a morbid fascination about the fork I did not take, and the bizarre behavior of people who took that other route.
At this point I’ll return to a dichotomy I noted earlier: Babe Ruth was a sacred cow threatened by any new, “unprecedented” home-run-hitter who threatened his record, and the Medieval Warm Period was a sacred cow threatened by any new “unprecedented” modern temperatures. The dichotomy is in how the past was/is treated. Babe Ruth is raised, (and his love of beer is downplayed). The Medieval Warm Period is diminished, (and its amazing warmth is ignored).
The common theme is a warping of facts. Truth is the Truth, but some feel a need to polish turds and smear gold.
I have heard some argue that a revolution occurred, and the old “upwardly mobile” were replaced by a newer and better “upwardly mobile.” The old were stuck in the past, but the new are freed of such chauvinist habits. (The old made an icon of Babe Ruth, while the new can ignore the Medieval Warm Period.)
I beg to differ. When I consider all the changes I’ve seen, I think the “upwardly mobile” never change. Once they have achieved a certain status, they abhor change. The “dirty word” that is in common to both sides of the dichotomy is “unprecedented.”
When it comes to treating a Truth, whether it be a Roger Maris or a Medieval Warm Period, with the decency and the respect Truth deserves, “unprecedented” is the button to push, if you want to see the status-quo become unhinged.
What causes this derangement? Well, I’d say it boils down to working extremely hard to rise to some level that the upwardly mobile like, (up to that point change is good), and then believing that the “status-quo”, once achieved, is how things should stay. It is a hypocrisy, which in a sense states that building a house on a beach is a good thing, until the day your own house is finished, and then opposes anyone else building a house at the same beach, because it would spoil your view.
This is basically greed, and an unwillingness to share. The gut response is Neanderthal, “Me here first. This my beach. You no come here.” However it is put in flowery terms, “Environmentalism deems the sanctity of this pristine stretch of sand a more holy thing than your desire to enjoy it.” (The people most loud about Global Warming and “rising sea-levels” all seem to own shore-front property, even though shore-front property would represent an insane investment, if they actually believed their own sermons about a rising sea.)
I think the prospect of my “Baby Boom” generation all wanting “a place at the beach” deeply worried the affluent, who already had their place. All their talk about “the dangers of overpopulation” was but their unwillingness to share. There was lots of room and much to share, but they were not spiritual. They hated sharing, even to the degree of thinking a reduction in the world population would be a happy event. They sermonized about how there was not enough room and not enough left to share, because they preferred the status-quo, and didn’t want to share what they already had.
This is not to say many hadn’t worked extremely hard and didn’t deserve success. But so did Roger Maris.
The simple fact of the matter is that life involves as much letting-go as it does grasping. Roger Maris grasped the heights, but every athlete knows his days are numbered, and a day will come when he must let go.
When someone cannot let go, we call them an “addict”. They become worthy of our pity, because they achieved some “high”, but then they fall from grace. They become so unwilling to let go of their “high” that they pawn their grandmother’s false teeth for their next fix. In the case of an addict who craves heroin, the cause is obvious; in the case of an aging athlete who craves youth, the cause is hopeless; but in the case of the upwardly mobile, the cause is crafty and sly.
The escape from all this nonsense is Truth, but, before we escape this nonsense, consider, just a bit longer, the foolishness of “fashion”.
Take out a dollar and look at George Washington’s silly white wig. What was that fashion all about? Or think of Abraham Lincoln’s looming top hat, and understand the fashion of such top hats nearly led to the extinction of beavers, and consequently led to soil erosion and amazing floods, which beaver-dams could have naturally halted. What madness possesses humans that causes them to bother with fashion? Even Adam and Eve, in the perfect paradise of the Garden of Eden, abruptly felt they needed fig leaves. (Very cold and uncomfortable, so God conducted His first sacrifice, and dressed them in furs, before sending them out of Eden.)
As an aside, (which reverts to my days as a small boy), I recall my older sister bemoaning the fact she’d soon be a teenager, and have to wear a stupid girdle and dumb nylons and, worst of all, ridiculous garter belts. (Children see through the nonsense, and know the emperor wears no clothes.) I recall privately then thinking to myself that there was no finking way my sister would ever wear such silly stuff. ( And I don’t think she ever did, as liberation became the fashion, and she donned jeans and boots instead.)
Fashion is a strange thing, for it mimics progress and change, attempts to be new and “unprecedented”, but is usually sheep following sheep and lemmings following lemmings. A fashion we deem normal, and even an example of good taste, this week, will be bad taste next week, and seem like hilarious buffoonery to our grandchildren. Truth watches from the sidelines.
I confess I have made a few attempts to be fashionable in my time, but have not been very successful at it. My wife is aware of this shortcoming, and now helps me out by looking me over before I head out the door, but as a boy I lacked such guidance. Just as my attempt to be a baseball fan bruised me, because I became aware my razzing of opponents hurt a little girl seated behind me, most of my early attempts to be fashionable were such mortifying experiences that I decided it was better to skip the bother.
Just as an example, in first grade I learned about “matching” clothing, and decided to wear red pants with a red shirt to school. This greatly amused the sixth graders, who promptly nicknamed me “pajamas.” Though I did not wear that outfit again, the nickname was not so easily shed. This alone made me reluctant to see any good could come out of attempting to be fashionable.
Once I had skipped the bother of fashion I was free to be a grubby little barefoot boy, and my mind could attend to more important things, like bugs and worms and fishing, baseball players and their batting averages, and clouds and dreams and theory. Fashion served no purpose that I could see, and clothing was more of a matter of function. In the winter I wore a lot because I wanted to be warm, and during the summer I spared my mother the bother of doing laundry by running around in a bathing suit (most of the time.)
The one time I became fashionable was by sheer accident, when wearing grubby jeans with patched knees became “hip” in 1969, but I then just as easily drifted out of fashion when “disco” became the rage. In terms of fashion, I had become downwardly mobile, and, under the radar, could go where the fashionable fear to tread. (Some of the best adventures involve mud.)
I had friends who shared my scorn of fashion, both during my boyhood and adolescence, and I wish I had tape-recordings of our conversations. We were so scornful of the latest fad, blared by the media, that we in some ways resembled old men, for there was, amidst all the sensationalist hoop-la, some genuine talent, yet we were prone to scorn the new like crusty conservatives. However it was the fanfare we scorned, and continued to scorn, even when we begrudged that the Beatles had some talent, as did Cassius Clay.
My closest friend of all, who unfortunately died in his early fifties, was in some ways my greatest critic, for he was scornful of any infatuation, and I got infatuated a lot. However he was also my greatest fan, for when I stood my ground, and stated I was not infatuated but enchanted by an actual Truth, and went jaw to jaw and argued long and hard, he might “get what I was saying.” Then the transformation his face went through was a sight to behold. As a light clicked on in his mind he went from scorn to admiration in a way that should have caused him whiplash. But most of the time he did puncture my balloon, and successfully pointed out I was what he called, “brainwashed.”
The opposite of being brainwashed was to think for yourself. This was once called being a “free thinker”, but that term is now connected to a mere fashion, and has bad connotations. (My mother used to joke, in the 1950’s, “I want to be a non-conformist like everyone else”.)
To think for yourself is in some ways lonely, for you are comparing fashion with Truth, which is watching from the sidelines. (I’ll bet you were wondering how I was going to get back to what I called “the escape from nonsense”, twelve paragraphs ago; namely: Truth.)
(Well the fact is, I’m not there yet. The subject of fashion holds some splendid examples of people playing Hide-and-Seek with Truth, so I’m going to run with the ideas in this sidetrack a bit longer, describing nonsense, before I describe “the end to nonsense”)
As a bachelor the fact I had “no taste” was advantageous, because being unfashionable is a great way to save money. I tried to emulate Henry Thoreau’s ideas in the “Economy” chapter of “Walden”. I never got to the point where I only owned two pairs of pants. (You wear the first when you have to wash the second.) But I felt no shame in faded stuff, or accepting hand-me-downs. There are men in Washington DC who spend more on a single suit than I spent on clothing in twenty years. It didn’t bother me when I got odd looks for wearing T-shirts with strange logos on the front. (For example: “University of Texas Woman’s Basketball Team”.)
However when I married I immediately had three small children who were mortified that their mother had married a man without a lick of fashion sense. I said common sense was better, and, as we were poor, we’d better have common sense and not spend a fortune on sneakers. I figured that, as a father, I should teach the kids to have a sane attitude about fashion. The kids figured they should teach me the same thing.
My new, eight-year-old son had a “spike” hair cut, which involved wasting what seemed like forever each morning getting his hair to stand up like he’d touched an electrical outlet. I think some sort of wax was involved. One morning I told him he could skip the bother, for it was zero (-17º Celsius) with the wind gusting to gale force, and he’d have to wear a hat. The small boy looked me in the eye and stated that there was no finking way he’d wear a hat. Our first argument began, and would have gotten out of hand, but my wife intervened and stated that if her son wanted to freeze his ears off, I should let him. I relented, but forced him to bring a woolen cap, stuffed into the pocket of his jacket.
At the same time I’d finally been worn down, and bought my two new daughters the ugly boots they had been wailing they would die for. To me they looked all the world like army boots. The girls had pleaded all through the late-summer and fall, but we simply couldn’t afford hundred-dollar boots. However suddenly they were only 14 dollars at a store I passed through, so I got them. With winter’s snows coming, boots made sense. But fashion made no sense, for just then the style shifted to what looked like ballet slippers. That was why the price of boots had plunged. The store was overstocked with an out-of-style item.
My daughters were not thrilled to get the out-of-style boots, but put them on, as we had gotten our first snow, four inches. To me it seemed fortuitous they had gotten such fine boots so cheaply, but they made it clear the new slipper-like footwear would have been a better buy. Then, as I drove them to school, we had to slow to crawl, due to two girls, the “coolest” girls in the school, being unable to walk at the side of the road. Their slippers were so useless in snow they had to pick their way in the treads made by cars, right out in the road. This meant a long line of cars had to creep along behind them.
I had a good laugh, and did not avoid the opportunity to deliver a lecture to my new daughters, stating that fashion-sense can make a person look foolish, whereas common-sense is based on Truth, which, on this occasion, was four inches of snow. Judging from their expressions, my daughters didn’t appreciate my wisdom one bit.
I found it ironic that I was deemed such an old fuddy duddy, concerning fashion, because when I was a teenager I was part of a mutiny against the authorities at my high-school. While our school didn’t have a uniform, it did have a dress code, and it forbade wearing bluejeans. I stated I had the right to wear comfortable clothing, and, somewhat to my surprise, the authorities backed down. However I figured that, in my case, fashion was not the object; rather the object was comfort. There seemed no comfort, nor sanity, in wearing ballet slippers in snow.
To me it seemed fashion was a way to exploit youth. Thinking back to my own teens, I could recall an exploitation or two. One that sprang to mind, when my girls were clamoring for boots, was the phenomenon of “Beatle Boots.”
Beatle Boots were all the rage, in 1964, but my school promptly banned them as being “against the dress code”, and parents were spared the expense of buying them. I was actually glad, for they looked darned uncomfortable; I preferred canvas sneakers, if I couldn’t go barefoot.
As years passed and I watched the weirdness of fashion, and saw how much money some made exploiting others, it seemed like Walt Disney must be rolling in his grave, for where he sought to entertain children the corporation bearing his name sought to exploit them, and also their parents. I felt children didn’t need the fuss and bother of being fashionable, at an age their minds should be attending to other things. While I didn’t like wearing a school uniform, (the one year I attended a school that required one), I had to admit it freed me from having to think about what to wear, first thing in the morning.
Of course, when you start talking about uniforms the Zhongshan Suit springs to mind.
The designer of this outfit was the great Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen, and his aim was freedom. He wanted a sensible outfit that freed the Chinese people from both the expense and bother of their traditional outfits, and from the foreign influence of Parisian fashions, however under Mao the desire for freedom mutated into a monster, during the Cultural Revolution. At that time anything the slightest bit “western” was seen as “counter-revolutionary”, and a person might be beaten to death if his home was searched by the Red Guard and he was found in the possession of a necktie. People wore the Zhongshan Suit because they were scared to wear anything else.
The Cultural Revolution was a nightmare difficult to imagine. China lost nearly all its school teachers, because the Red Guard saw them as backward, because textbooks used ideas from the past. Teachers were hauled from classrooms and beaten in the streets. Many of the Red Guard’s new, “progressive” ideas were tantamount to madness.
One of my favorite madnesses involves members of the Red Guard scowling at a traffic light, seeing evil in the fact that the color of communism, red, was used to stop traffic. It seemed a capitalist plot. They were in the process of demanding all traffic stop for green lights and go when lights turned red, when (perhaps out of a fear of a massive traffic accident), the Red Guard’s leaders were taken aside by Mao’s second in command, and gently informed traffic lights were not an insult to communism, as the red was on top, and also red benignly prevented collisions among the proletariat.
(The fact Mao allowed this insanity to continue for two years, when he could have stopped it with a snap of his fingers, leads me to believe he was fed up with China, and basically wanted to tear it down and start over. His “Great Leap Forward” had been a miserable failure, and in some ways made China more backwards, as Japan and South Korea boomed and became prosperous by using non-communistic approaches. Perhaps Mao even wanted to avoid getting blamed, by wiping out anyone intelligent enough to point a finger his way. What seemed to occur was that he learned an agreeable situation is not achieved by purging all who disagree.)
In the end not even the conformity of the Zhongshan Suit could prevent humanity’s innate lack-of-conformity (also called individuality) from enduring, and at times shining out. Even when women all dress the same, beauty differs like the colors gleaming from a diamond.
The final irony of the Zhongshan suit is that, while it was created to free people from tradition, the current president of China wears it as a sign he is rooted in the past. You will notice, however, his wife is not wearing one.)
Even when an entire nation was forced to wear the same fashion one was able to determine people’s rank. Higher ranking people wore Zhongshan Suits of finer fabric, while the lower ranks bore the courser cloth. This brings up the idea of a “statement” fashion is making, even when it is a uniform. Fashion in some way states what your rank is.
As soon as you bring up the subject of rank, the subject of promotion arises. People want to improve their position. My personal view is that the view of “equality” some socialists advocate comes into conflict with a natural human thirst for self-expression and self-improvement. “Equality” does not mean we should idolize uniformity. We all differ right down to the tips of our fingers. Our individuality means we each have some sort of unique ability or talent, a “gift”, and society as a whole benefits when the gifts of its individuals are promoted.
But two things have a tendency to rise to the top; the cream, but also the crap. When you are smelting gold, the crap is called “dross”, and is skimmed away to make the gold more pure. Therefore, when discussing the subject of ranks and promotions, one needs to take into account the fact some seek to rise as “social climbers”, and could care less about the actual gifts they may own (or the gifts of others whom they step on, on their way up the ladder.) All such a person desires is a gratification of their lust for money, power, and fame, (and obtaining the comforts these big three make available.) One needs to recognize such people exist, but also that this doesn’t make all ambition wrong. Rather such tendencies should be seen as the corruption of something good, for the desire to improve is a good thing. What a society should desire is ways to allow the cream to rise, but not the crap. This is not an easy task, and makes life very interesting.
The United States has had its struggles with various sorts of corruption, but on a whole has done a decent job of being a place that allows people the liberty to develop their God given gifts. One final tale, involving fashion and uniforms, demonstrates the complexity of this struggle.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 the general view of the United States was not that my homeland was a strong nation that could win, but rather was that we were hopelessly disorganized. The USA was not predicted to get our act together to a degree where we could oppose the organized military-mentalities of our foes. Unprecedented challenges involving unprecedented weaponry required unprecedented changes. Things indeed did not go well at first, as there was a mad scramble to turn a people, used to being free to do what they wanted, into soldiers who could follow orders. This involved a huge sacrifice of individual liberties, not only by the soldiers themselves, but by the public as well, as goods were rationed. This included the fabric for clothing. Fashions that used a lot of cloth, such as pleated skirts, were frowned upon, if not actually banned. For the most part fashion designers complied, though people could still wear pleated skirts if they already owned them, though what woman would? Pleated skirts were out of style.
Men’s greatest sacrifice was the company of women. There were ten million goodbyes. It was a good-bye “for the duration”, and no one knew how long the war would last, or how it might end.
Then men were plunged into a womanless world, where fashion didn’t mean much.
Often the good times, few and far between, were womanless and fashionless.
The largest ship promised no safety.
If your ship sank you swam in flaming oil, and rescue was uncertain.
Home, women, and fashion was far away, and the only link was letters.
Notice the African-American in the above picture, eight months from the war’s start. At sea segregation was also a thing left behind, partly because ships at sea historically had to replace lost crewmen in foreign ports. This had occurred for centuries, and racially diverse groups were more common at sea than ashore, (and not only a feature of Melville’s “Moby Dick”). In the U.S. Navy African-Americans usually (but not always) worked in the galley, but were trained to man battle stations when under attack.
Many Hispanics joined the Navy (and other branches of the military) at the start of the war, and an added reason for doing so was that it would establish the fact they were citizens and not “wetbacks”. Many had fled north from a life of being treated like peons on Mexico, wanting a better life, but lived under the cloud of possible deportation. The elders, among those Hispanic refugees, walked on eggs and were careful not to anger their northern hosts, but their children rebelled from their parent’s subservient, peon-like attitudes, and stood tall and proud.
The “fashion-statement” worn in the above picture was called a “Zoot Suit”. It used more cloth than was allowed, after the bureaucrats in charge of rationing determined the limits, but Zoot Suits made before the war were not made illegal, and were worn with pride, in a sense displaying the rank of Americans who were not white, but just as able to flaunt their virility as any other man.
In the frantic scramble at the start of the war the bureaucrats, with their typical intelligence, decide to plop a Navy base right in the heart of a Hispanic section of Los Angeles, with predictable results.
Young, basically sex-starved, sailors were set loose in a residential neighborhood. Bad idea.
(In most ports sailors were directed to a red-light district; in Boston it was called “Scollay Square”, (which was torn down to make room for the equally corrupt place that is now called “Government Center”.) In 1940 church groups in Puritan New England, worried about young sailors being led astray, attempted to save their souls by organizing “church socials” far from Scollay Square that served tea and cookies, and it was at one of those church socials that my mother met a young English sailor who might have been my father, had not the young man died during England’s successful attempt to bring convoys of goods to Russia’s arctic ports, to save Russia after Hitler’s attack. [Incidentally, those convoys cut through arctic waters that had less sea-ice than modern Global Warming Alarmists admit.] The price of that victory was keenly felt by my mother.)
Sailors were less welcome in the Hispanic neighborhood, likely because the sailors were not looking for “church socials”, and also they were predominately of a different race and culture. As a grandfather, I would not be comfortable with such an invasion of aliens in my neighborhood, and back when I was young I didn’t like anyone even smiling at a girl I was attracted to, (even if she wouldn’t go out with me). It is a situation just itching to escalate into fisticuffs.
In Los Angeles, in 1942, a sailor got his jaw broken by a young Hispanic, and fell to the sidewalk unconscious. His crew mates sprang to his aid, carried him to safety, and told the rest of the crew what had happened. 200 sailors returned to that neighborhood the next night, looking for any young man wearing a Zoot Suit. The “Zoot Suit Riots” had begun.
They went on for over a week. It was not a glorious moment in American History, as it was a no-win argument from the start. In terms of fashion, it was an argument between the Navy Uniform and the Zoot Suit, but both made a fashion statement for good things. The Navy uniform expressed a willingness to sacrifice and die for the home, while the Zoot Suit expressed young men’s pride in their home. Reasonable heads did not seem to prevail, as the First Lady accused the Navy of racism, and the Governor of California accused the First Lady of communism. (Hmm…times have changed, as roles reverse.) As is usual, in cases of fashion, Truth stood on the sidelines. The fracas continued evening after evening, with the outnumbered Hispanics obstinately refusing to stop wearing Zoot Suits, even when boys only twelve had them ripped from their bodies.
In the end the only way to stop the riot was segregation. The sailors were confined to their barracks. Large numbers of Hispanics wearing Zoot Suits were arrested, (with charges so flimsy they were later thrown out in court), and incarcerated in cells.
Someone then suggested the entire riot was a plot of Hitler’s, to get America fighting Mexico. This idea, even if an absurd fabrication, did seem to wake people up to a bigger fight they should be attending to. And, even if Hitler had nothing to do with the riot, it did seem to be of his mentality, so perhaps the suggestion did come from Truth, whispering from the sidelines.
One wonderful thing manifested during this riot, which differentiates it from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the difference is this: No one died.
It is remarkable. More than a week of brawling, broken jaws, black eyes, busted noses, shredded clothing, humiliations, hurt feelings, and, in the end, no loss of life. Actually, if you want my opinion, the affair was more of an expression of life, than a negation. And perhaps it was (and hopefully still is) an attribute of America that people can vehemently oppose each other, without actually killing.
For the Truth is this: Truth is vast. It is bigger than any small mind, or the combination of minds we call a “culture.” It is a kaleidoscope that confronts our petty grasp with endless variations that can either crumple us with despair (if we feel we must “figure it out”) or floor us with wonder (if we sit back and watch.)
Therefore, we shouldn’t take fashion too seriously. Whatever “statement” it makes is not The Big Picture. It is often fleeting and will be gone tomorrow. It is as ephemeral as saying, “I have a headache.” Yes, it is true, but it is not an earth-shaking truth.
Nor should people seriously believe being fashionable changes you. If I don a white wig like George Washington and a stove-pipe hat like Abraham Lincoln, does it make me as admirable as both men combined, or does it make me absurd?
I will admit that being fashionable does often indicate a person is of the agreeable kind. You know the sort: Often very nice people. They are quick to nod at whatever you say, and utter things such as, “Exactly!” and “Precisely!” even when you are neither. But there are times being agreeable is not the same thing as being honest. For example, if a person nods when you state, “I should get the promotion, and you should keep doing the job you do so very well,” they may not be entirely in agreement when they nod. Peer deep into their eyes. You may see the truth is not pretty, and that they are plotting to trip you up, though they nod and smile.
It might seem a sort of utopia to have all in agreement, but it simply isn’t spiritual. What such an enforced sameness created in China was a situation where Truth hid behind a smiling mask of nodding agreement. You wore your Zhongshan Suit and held your book of Mao’s sayings high, and kept your aspirations to yourself. It made a man sneaky.
It is far better to live in a land that allows people to be disagreeable. For the fact of the matter is that we humans are individuals, and individuality is bound to result in differences. Big deal. Our eyes don’t even agree. Line up your thumb, looking at an object on the far wall, using your right eye, and then look with your left eye, and you’ll see your thumb is not lined up. Does this disagreement between your eyes cause a quarrel? No, (unless you’ve downed ten pints at the pub). Ordinarily the disagreement between eyes results in something neither eye has alone: Depth perception. And in like manner a society that allows disagreement is blessed.
I myself do believe there are truths that are biggies, and aligned with Truth (with a capital “T”), and therefore there is such a thing as the difference between “right” and “wrong”. But this gives no man the right to be a sanctimonious snot, for there are plenty of imperfections to go around. If you want to be aligned with Truth, a good place to start is at the mirror. In fact the most refreshing fellows are the ones who confess their shortcomings and are able to laugh at themselves.
One of the most horrid shortcomings of modern Christianity is that too many people who go to church are sanctimonious snots. They fail to recognize snottiness isn’t allowed, in their own scriptures. The Christian word for “shortcoming” is “sin”, and sin is not merely forgiven by Christ, nor merely a goof made in youth, but practically a thing you are commanded to have. Saint Paul, despite all his heroic deeds, confesses his failures and concludes “what a wretched man am I” (before moving on to inspiration), and Saint John states, in essence, “If you say you have no sin you call God a liar” (before moving on to inspiration). In other words, we’re human. We screw up. However the escape is Truth, and honesty.
Science is not opposed to Truth. It is the epitome of seeking Truth, (albeit limited by its need-to-replicate), (when some incidents in life only occur once.) It obeys commandments as strict as those saints obey, in terms of speaking the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth.
Most of the arguments I’ve heard that attempt to pit science against religion are uttered by people who, in my frank and not very humble opinion, don’t believe in either. In my younger days I was one of them, and I know all about trying to gratify certain lusts without facing the consequences. It is neither scientific nor religious to believe actions don’t have reactions. Call it Karma if you will, but life involves repercussions: “You’ve had your way; Now you must pay”,
Some other evening I might tell the tale of a time I sat as a drifter in a campground, with a generous fellow I really liked to my right, stating the world was 6000 years old, and a selfish fellow I had to work hard at liking to my left, spouting Darwin. They were the left eye and right eye, and because I was situated between them, I was blessed with a depth perception neither owned. But, as I said, that is the tale for some other evening. For now, you are just going to have to trust me on this: Truth involves both sides.
This is especially true between men and women. Talk about opposites! Having experienced the failure of divorce and the success (so far) of my current marriage, I’d say this is one of the greatest differences challenging mortals. (The idea of “same-sex marriage” seems a bit like “same-race integration”. Sure, you can do it, but what sort of depth perception can you get with two right eyes?)
In the end, what is most vital and important is to be respectful to your own vision of Truth, while striving to hear others. And what is most destructive is to not try to hear others, and especially to be deaf to falsehood you yourself are confronted with within yourself.
If there was a “fashion statement” people of the United States could wear, like the Zhongshan Suit, it would be a fashion that stated you didn’t have to wear a Zhongshan Suit. In actual fact, when my younger sons recently graduated from collage, they could explain to me the philosophies represented by around ten different fashions worn by certain groups of students. I thought it would have been better if there were as many fashions as there were students, to represent their individuality as God created it, but it did seem a decent start at promoting the idea of “diversity.”
Unfortunately a mutation of this concept seems to be afflicting some american schools, wherein “diversity” involves the rejection of some, especially “whites”, (who represent the old fashioned ways of the “bourgeois and petty-bourgeois”, and symbolize the “counter revolution”). This came to a head recently at Evergreen University, when a professor stated it was actually racist to ban whites from an event.
In a sense this incident resembles the start of China’s “Cultural Revolution”. The faculty don’t seem to understand they themselves will be next to face what their fellow professor is facing. Rather they seem swept up in what is apparently fashionable, but could also be called a mob mentality. They accuse their peer of having, “endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.”
I don’t see that he misinformed anyone by stating whites were not allowed on campus, because they weren’t. Nor did he misinform anyone by saying that he felt this was wrong, for that was his honest opinion. Nor did he misinform anyone by stating that he was going to try to teach his class as usual, because that was what he was going to try to do. However I’m trying to see the view of the left eye, even though it is obvious, using the right eye, that the left eye is not very accepting of the right eye, if it typecasts such a teacher as “supremacist”, even as it frowns at typecasting. (When someone calls a clean street dirty, it pays to sit in their driver’s seat, and see their windshield is dirty.) In any case, in the end I hope this is another Zoot Suit Riot, and Truth will whisper from the sidelines.
This finally brings me back towards to the start of this wandering essay, which was, in case you have forgotten, how people can respond to the “unprecedented” differently, with people hero-worshiping Babe Ruth and scorning Roger Maris on one hand, and scorning the Medieval Warm Period and hero-worshiping Current Warming on the other. The hypocrisy involves the dirt on the windshield, which sees one element of the past as “revolution” and another as “counter-revolution”, irrespective if the Truth of the present tense.
My conclusion is a bit grim, for I conclude that certain people are so steeped in dogma that they don’t care about the actual facts. As far as I’m concerned both Babe Ruth and Roger Maris were amazing individuals, and both worthy of our admiration. Why spoil their magnificent achievements with a bunch of bickering? But at least no one denies the actual statistics, in the case of baseball. In baseball the box scores are sacrosanct, (though the fellow in the scoring booth, who determines the difference between a hit and an error, may catch hell.)
In the case of the Global Warming fiasco, actual facts and figures have been, and are being, distorted. This has gone past the point of the left eye denying what the right eye sees. It has reached a point where the left eye denies what the left eye can see.
The left can see there is no so-called “consensus” concerning Global Warming. Patient people have shown them, over and over, that there are many differing views, and that the idea that “97%” agree was falsely obtained. It doesn’t seem to matter, for leftist politicians trot out the authoritarian platitude “97%” as if it was written in Mao’s book. They want the masses to follow their fashion like lemmings. But this is the United States. Only in false elections, in lands where democracy is corrupted, do ideas win elections by 97%, (and in the United States the Global Warming Agenda might not win 50%).
This issue is not merely a matter of bullying the left, and ignoring what the left eye sees. It is a matter of insisting they see what the right eye can see, and what’s more can make visible to the left. It is not a matter that science cannot replicate, which must be a matter of belief, such as Jesus walking on water. It’s not a thing rammed down their throats, but laid gently on the table. It is actual facts.
Let me conclude this long winded essay with a single map of sea-ice, as determined by the Danes, back in the year 1938.
This map was produced largely using information gleaned by ships, because airplanes were still primitive and had no reason to fly north over sea-ice, and few people of that time even imagined satellites could expand our knowledge. The reason the map is from August, and there is no map from September, is because no sane fisherman would hang around up in the margins of the Arctic Sea when the ice began to reform. There was no air-rescue for a ship trapped by the swift regrowth of sea-ice, and even though the sea-ice minimum isn’t until September, few fishermen would press their luck so far. They were after fish, and not after scientific data about the minimum. Therefore we should compare the above map of a long ago August with conditions last August.
It is obvious, comparing the two maps, there was more ice along the coast of Alaska in 1938. But perhaps we should be dubious about Danish records of Alaska, considering no Danish fishermen went that far. Yet surprisingly, the fellows recreating the past do accept Danish records of Alaska, but don’t trust the records of sea-ice where Danish fishermen actually sailed. They apparently think the Danes were stupid, (or very careless), and missed ice that must have been there. So they “adjust”, and when we compare the Dane’s record of “extent” with the “recreated extent”, we see they utterly miss the decrease of sea-ice that helped convoys bringing help to Russia once the war started. (Danish records in blue.) (The gap in the records was caused by the war.)
In like manner, when you compare early satellite data (blue) with “recreated data” you notice another dip missed in 1973.
How could the “recreated” data miss such obvious dips, unless the people doing the recreating cared for some agenda that seemed more important than Truth?
I likely should stop there, for in a sense I have made my point. I have explained why people miss the True beauty of a Roger Maris, a once-in-a-lifetime athlete at his best, because they instead preferred nosing about in the rubbish called “status quo”. Call it “the agenda” or “the fashion” or “political correctness,” it is wrong. Rather than accepting the Truth, such seekers snub it.
However out of pity I will speak more. For I feel for the young students, who accept the adjusted data, the “agenda”, as a sort of gospel. These poor, brainwashed students are loyal to their corrupted professors, professors who deserve a special spot in hell for what they teach, claiming they honor Truth though I think they know very well that what they teach is “adjusted”. (If they don’t know, they have no business calling themselves knowledgeable.)
It is peculiar that students can be so faithful and loyal to professors who basically mock faith and loyalty, and it is awful how students can rampage when they eventually see their elders were not worth the faith and loyalty that was bestowed upon them. Were the teachers in China not leftists, loyal to Mao? They were dragged from their classrooms and beaten in the streets and, if they survived that, banned from classrooms and sent to plant rice in muddy paddies until they collapsed under the weight of disgrace and exhaustion. (I suppose that is what loyalty earns you, when you are loyal to dogma that disdains loyalty.)
I don’t want to see such a backlash in my own homeland. I feel for that lone professor at Evergreen University, though his politics are very different from mine, because the Global Warming Debate taught me what it is like to stand up for Truth, and be singled out as a “Denier.” I wrote this essay simply to state there is an alternative to such hogwash, and it is Truth. Truth is best. Accept no substitutes.
When you stand up for Truth you can find yourself out of fashion, and be what is called “marginalized”. This is actually a good place to be, because when you are relegated to the sidelines you discover Truth is standing at your side, watching the game with you. Then you discover something even greater. Truth isn’t just watching from the sidelines. Truth is the coach.
Some state Truth is a sort of byproduct of studying Creation, and varies depending on where your study’s outlook began from. “What is Truth?” they sigh, “When Vikings said war was good even as Buddhists said war was bad?” But Truth actually created Creation, and is woven into every stitch of the tapestry we witness every day. It cannot be denied without unraveling occurring.
Engineers know one ignores Truth and laws at their own peril. When politicians under-fund a culvert, perhaps pocketing money for “social impact studies” (or some other way of looting the cash-box), the engineers are the ones who point out a skimpy culvert, only designed to handle a once-every-25-year-storm, could wash out tomorrow, if tomorrow is the day a once-every-50-year-storm hits. Truth will not be mocked. But politicians can avoid getting strangled with the adroitness of eels, which is why the engineers get blamed when a brand-new, under-funded culvert gets washed out. However such slithering can only work so long before the public wises up. Excuses get hollow when all the roads are washed out, and the politician owns a Cadillac. Truth will not be mocked.
Roman engineers apparently got plenty of funding, and were able to build roads and aqueducts that still are in use after 2000 years, but even they couldn’t grasp the scope and reach of Truth, for when they built bridges able to handle a once-every-2000-year-flood, they could not imagine how silly their bridges would look when the green lushness of the Roman Climate Optimum ended, and the rivers simply vanished. (Nor did the Romans dream the greatest threat to their bridges would be people needing building blocks.)
Oddly, apparently the best “Climate Scientist” of those ancient days was a poet named Isaiah, who tended to look at Truth in a non-replicatable, unscientific way. He looked over the lush lands of vineyards and olive groves and green pastures, and forecast it would become briers and wasteland, only fit for wild goats. After that, he forecast, it would again be filled with streams of clear waters. (He got the first part right).
Isaiah’s amazing poetry did more the forecast the weather or discuss physical engineering. It forecast what a culture can expect, when it starts to think social engineering can mock the Truth, and is above the Law. To me it seems that what was true for Israel and Judea 2700 years ago still applies today.
The greatest poets tap into truths that echo down through the ages and never become obsolete. Shakespeare described how what goes around comes around in a manner that doesn’t come across as moralistic, and in fact perfectly describes people we meet today, including the person we greet each morning in the mirror. And all the poetry boils down to this: Truth is best. Accept no substitutes.
However no sooner had the media gotten everyone looking that way, when the water drained away down through a crack in the ice (as is often the case.)
Sunrise's Swansong 