CALIFORNIA MEGA-DROUGHT UPDATE

Pacific storms have been crashing into the west coast, and another his drenching them this evening (February 4, 2024.)

This will likely cause some mudslides, but is nothing like the terrible floods of 1862 which shut down Sacramento.

Amazing floods struck California back then,

The people in charge of maintaining California’s infrastructure have to take the possibility of such a storm into account, when planning, at the same time as tax-payers don’t want to pay for the levees and dams and culverts and spillways necessary to handle what was, after all, a “once every 1,000 year event.” The attitude seems to be, “We still have 838 years to go before it happens again. Let those future taxpayers deal with it.” However the people in charge know weather doesn’t obey man’s logic. In 1969 I saw two “once every hundred year” storms hit New England in February, and in 1978 it happened again. In any case, the people in charge (who will bear the blame if things go wrong) in California call the worst-case scenario of a repeat of 1862, “The ARcStorm”, and confess that, despite all the technical advancements of modern science, they can not prevent major flooding from occurring.

I suspect that there are some who hope to profit from increasing the public’s awareness of the possibility of an ARcStorm. For example, the man who sells really big culverts.

However this is nothing, compared to the people who hope to profit from the fantasy of Global Warming. When trillions of dollars are involved, some people behave in a very foolish manner. These people seemingly like to misinform the public, behaving as if a perfectly ordinary rainstorm was the ARcStorm, and that furthermore the disaster is all your fault for not buying an electric car.

We need to remind these foolish people that only a year ago they were predicting a mega-drought, and stating it was all our fault for not purchasing an electric car. Where is that drought now?

There is almost no drought to be seen in California. What happened?Did the entire population rush out and buy electric cars?

No. California weather just did what California weather is notorious for doing, which is to fluctuate between floods and droughts. No big deal. It is something people learn to live with. It is something described by Steinbeck in “Grapes of Wrath” and “To a God Unknown”. It is old news. Yet, if you bring up this old news, the politically correct get offended that you are daring to defy their new news. But their new news is balderdash.

Where is this mega-drought they were so crazed with worry about, a year ago?

According to the Old Testament, once a prophet is proven to be false, they are to be taken to the edge of town and stoned to death. This seems a bit extreme to me. However, as I have faced the outrage of the politically correct, and been “shadow banned” and have experienced other unpleasant aspects of “cancel culture”, I do think “turnabout is fair play”. Maybe it is their turn to feel what it is like to be “cancelled”.

This is not to say California doesn’t need to think hard about how it uses water. Roughly a billion gallons of water each day is slurped from the Colorado River to feed the thirst of San Diego and Los Angeles. If the population of California is roughly 40 million, that means each person guzzles 25 gallons each day. Something to think about. How much goes to stupid lawns which people never even use? How much goes to growing food that feeds 49 other states?

P.S. The level of Lake Mead is rising.

What is interesting is how little is being sucked out of Lake Mead (“outflow”) to water Southern California’s crops, because the rains are blessing California’s fields.

It is important to count our blessings. I remember to thank California (and our Creator) every time I enjoy an almond.

DRIED UP ALL WET

Things have gotten very weird in a hurry. People insist upon being confused. Basic, fundamental, scientific realities are now open to debate. For example, are you a man or a woman?

Forgive me, but this seems like an amazingly stupid thing to argue about. As a “child care professional” I see very small children are very aware if they are born into a male or female body. Their “science” is simple. As they gain coordination, their hands become able to feel between their legs, and they understand, “This birth I am born into a male (or female) body.” If a two-year-old can arrive at such a simple conclusion, how amazingly stupid are those who can’t?

This stupidity has been a sort of blindness which has ripened like a cataract over the years, (and hopefully now can be operated upon and removed.) It is due to a simple mathematical equation: Science + Politics = Politics – Science. (Also: Science + Politics = Politics.)

A true scientist in some senses is like a poet, in that his thirst for Truth tends to cause him to neglect fashion and proper grooming, and he tends to walk about in a disheveled state with a wild gleam in his eye. Also, he tends to be broke, and unattractive to women, or at least women who desire money, and consequently he tends to feel lonely and sorry for himself, which leaves him open to temptation. He (or she) may be susceptible to a bribe. Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.

That is where politics steps in, for politicians often deal in short, sound-bite solutions that sound good but are not deeply thought out. This is not a problem when the politician surrounds himself with people who do think deeply, and also is a politician willing to stand corrected. One of Winston Churchill’s aides once said something along the lines of, “Winnie has a hundred ideas a day, and three are good ones.” Churchill’s genius (in part) lay in being able to stand being corrected ninety-seven times a day without any loss of confidence (which some mistook as arrogance). Unfortunately, many politicians lack such genius.

Sadly, there are all too many politicians who so treasure their shallow sound-bite solutions that they become ruled by a dogma which is not feasible. Their focus is power, and they seek to overpower all who seek to correct them. Some scientists they bribe, and some scientists they bully, and some scientists they ostracize, but, in the end, they don’t stand corrected but instead they fall uncorrected; in which case they fall prey to stupidity.

I saw the stupidity a long, long time ago, when watching very intelligent minds burn out on drugs around Harvard Square in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Back then Harvard and MIT looked for merit in applicants, and the brains being burned out were brilliant. They were different from the brains of a good-hearted but very average lout. Where a lout on drugs merely commented, “Wow, man. Wow,” these youths with IQ’s of 160 flashed like setting suns, and articulated all sorts of amazing ideas, with around three out of every hundred ideas good ones.

Back in those pre-stupidity days there were time-tested ways of debating, and “peer-reviewing”, a brilliant-sounding idea to see if it was a good one. This was done formally in carefully written papers, but also occurred informally among students over drinks. The informal debates could get wonderfully rowdy at times, but the general assumption at that time was that everyone was interested in the same thing: IE: the Truth. It may sound prudish in our age of fraud and corruption, but the idea of intentionally lying was beyond the conception of many. Lying was simply not how the game was played.

I was privileged to be a younger person, eavesdropping on many of these debates. Initially I was a little pitcher with big ears listening to my parent’s generation. Later I became a little squirt listening to the societies of three older siblings. I basically shut up, and just listened. In general I learned far more from such situations than from any class in school.

Besides the topics at hand, I learned there were two sides to any debate. On one hand there was the person who dreamed up a new idea. On the other hand there was the person who tried to shoot it down in flames.

I tended to side with the dreamer. Some ideas were sound, such as the idea continents drifted, while others were not so sound, such as the idea you could invent a “dark light” which would direct a beam of darkness in the manner a flashlight directs a beam of light. But soundness didn’t matter to me. I liked the inspiration, the “high” of dreaming.

I didn’t like the “down” of skeptics, disbelievers who used cold facts to turn happy, buoyant balloons into blazing Hindenburgs crashing in disaster. To be a “down” seemed rude to me; it was far more polite to be a “high”. I did not like disagreeable people and preferred agreeable people.

Of course, Truth doesn’t care if you agree or disagree with It. Truth remains true even if the entire world denies it. And here’s the most mysterious thing: While people say, “Truth hurts”, in actual fact Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things. (However, you’ll have to trust me on this, for now.)

People say, “Truth hurts”, predominantly because their pride is wounded when their “high” is shot from the sky and becomes a “Hindenburg.” One moment they feel like a genius, and the next they feel like a fool and a laughingstock, “in error.” When egos are wounded in this manner, especially among young college students who are drinking or drugged, the subject can be dragged down from the pinnacles of Truth to the swamps of ill will and vengeance, all because of “hurt feelings”. Vanity leads people astray.

One knew they were completely astray when “hurt feelings” became the focus. Debates forgot the Truth, and instead became about who could make the other guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of being a fool and a laughingstock. “In error.”

That happened to be what I usually was, as the youngest person in the room, more often than not. `Even the most stupid-seeming laughingstock in a debate could wheel upon me, should I laugh at their discomfiture, and snarl, “What are you laughing at, pea-brain?” And what could I say? The Truth was I was likely five to ten years younger than they, (for example aged fifteen when they were twenty-five), and in Truth I was a pea-brain, compared to them.

It was in some ways an unenviable position to be in, but in another it was a great blessing. It was a curse because “my feelings were hurt” and I could waste a lot of time licking the wounds of self-pity, but it was a blessing because being at the very bottom of the pecking order, a scapegoat even scapegoats could scape, made me aware how stupid the whole process was. It was a sort of blame game that wasted time and made no sense.

It would have been nice if, at that point, some wise adult had stepped in and stated, “It is wrong for them to treat you as an object of ridicule. They should treat you as a young mind, eager to learn, and as a potential protégé.” But of course, that didn’t happen. Instead I was repelled from the college-minded, into the travail of what I suppose you could call The School Of Hard Knocks, but what also might be called The School Of The Most Blessed, for in some ways I skipped a lot of the bother of the blame game.

How it happened is hard to say. I really can’t explain it, except to say Truth is the most agreeable of all agreeable things.

Someone told me, around thirty-seven years ago, something like, “When you point at others, three of your fingers are pointing back at you.” Someone else ruthlessly stated, around thirty-six years ago, “You are just blaming the world for being about to suffer an environmental collapse, because, if the world ends, it excuses you from having to get a Real Job”. Lastly, someone I respected greatly said, for the tenth time, around thirty-six years ago, simply, but with impressive authority and strength, “Don’t blame.”

I’m not sure why, but shifting away from blame brought a greater clarity to my thought. Rather than squealing about whether “my side” or “the other side” was “to blame”, I felt more able to focus on what the problem actually was.

I then noticed something odd. Often it is the people “to blame” who come up with solutions to problems, rather than the people who do all the blaming.

It seemed, for example, that the people who built power plants were more familiar with how power plants work, and therefore were better equipped to engineer improvements. Meanwhile, the people who merely blamed, squawking, “Your smoke is pollution!” never really lifted a finger. Blaming was not what created smoke-stack-scrubbers; the solution came through focusing on what the problem actually was.

Ask yourself, “Do I focus on what the problem actually is, or politics?”

When I was especially young, more than fifty years ago, to focus-on-what-a-problem-actually-was turned out to be difficult for me, as I was prone to running away from problems.

This escapism actually is a bit humorous to look back upon. In my youth a rock group called “The Jefferson Airplane” changed its name to “Jefferson Starship”, because they also wanted to run away. They planned to hijack NASA’s first interplanetary spacecraft, and head off into the void with poets and musicians and….um….mechanics and engineers. (I think they added “mechanics and engineers” because, even in their LSD-addled ambitions, someone understood the spacecraft they hijacked might develop engine problems, and at that point a poet would be of little use. You might need someone who could focus on what the problem actually was, and who could fix it.)

I think some of those Baby-boomers either took too much LSD, or never grew up, but they never got the memo about the importance of mechanics and engineers. And now they are old fossils in the “Swamp”, utterly engrossed in hijacking a different starship, (namely the United States), even though they haven’t got a clue how to run the thing, should they ever gain complete control. They are lost in some strange dream where, should they gain control, “mechanics and engineers” will magically appear and be servants who will do whatever they command, even if what they command is physically impossible.

You should notice I was careful to add the word “physically”. Some amazing things are spiritually possible, which are not taught at institutes of technology. For example, Jesus demonstrated it is possible to walk on water, and Saint Peter demonstrated he could follow, (albeit somewhat clumsily). Does this mean we should sink all our shipping, because such a physical dependence on ships is holding us back, spiritually?

I think not, for thousands of ships have sunk over the centuries, and you hardly ever hear of even a single passenger being freed from their dependence on lifeboats to such a degree that they could stroll blithely across the waves to safety on shore. In fact people usually drown.

In like manner, perhaps we ought not sink the “ship” of fossil fuels, so smugly certain freedom from such dependence will allow us to “walk on water” and create a life free of pollution. What the actual result may be is: Many people will drown.

Unfortunately, the smugly-certain lack such pragmatism. They tend to see in political terms, and envision Caesar crossing the Rubicon and burning all the bridges behind him. (As soon as Caesar crossed that river he was under the death penalty, as were all his troops. The Rubicon truly was “a point of no return”. There was no going back.) It was a daring step from safety to danger, and won Julius the crown.

All the stuff modern Rubicon-crossers are smugly-certain about is myopically focused upon power; they want to be “dictators for life” like Caesar became, forgetful of how Caesar died, daggered to death in the very hallways of power he lusted to abide in.

The people lusting for power now are ignoring fundamental realities, in their eagerness to control. In their desire to forbid fossil fuels (which allow liberty) they instead lust to make all electric (which controls all with the leashes of power lines and cords). To achieve this end they ask for the impossible from the “mechanics and engineers” whom they deem mere servants, mere peons who must do what they command. (But who can’t.)

The powerful are asking for the impossible, and, when reality hits home, the powerful are likely to face the wrath of a starved and frozen populace whom they, as powerful leaders, failed to serve and to protect. Then they, who were so swift to blame fossil fuels, (and to also blame any who said fossil fuels might have advantages), are liable to see an avalanche of blame come crashing back upon them. Some call this “rebounding Karma”. I call it the blame game.

The saddest example of such “rebounding Karma” I’ve learned of is the Christmas present the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu received in 1989. The poor fellow was so clueless about the rage he had created that rather than Christmas carols he sung communist anthems as he was marched to the wall and turned to face the firing squad.

To be honest, what the Swamp has set out to accomplish looks to me like it is worse than a detour. If it was a detour it would eventually get back to the right route, but the Swamp’s plots look like what the self-described “genius” Wile E. Coyote is known for: Inevitable Disaster.

Such cartoons get tiresome after too many episodes; one wearies of anvils always falling upon Wile’s genius. One yearns to just get down to earth, and down to business, and face what the problems actually are.

In the American Southwest one major problem is drought, for the area is basically a desert. Therefore the primary solution (get it?) for watering crops is not rain, but is irrigation, practiced even by the ancient, indigenous populations. The first hints of agricultural habitation exist 2000 years BCE, and the importance of digging canals to irrigate crops was apparent to inhabitants even before the culture described as the Hohokan appeared around 200 BE.

The Hohokan deserve an encyclopedia, as a people, and a remnant may still exist today as modern tribes, but they suffered a crash around the year 1350 for reasons that likely involve climate change, but likely also involved some failure of their leadership.

Such ups and downs are inevitable when a civilization such as theirs exists five times as long as the United States has existed.

Just as we had our Great Depression, the Hohokan had their mysterious equivalents, more than once. For example: A sort of capital city archeologists dub “Snaketown” was abandoned (with some buildings burned), even as the rest of the land prospered, around 1100 CE, and we know next to nothing of why. (I like to think some leaders got too smugly certain.) Over two centuries later a more recent downturn of their fortunes likely involved not drought, but flooding rains, which dug deep gullies which put the water levels of their rivers below the inlets to their vast system of irrigation. Faced with a massive engineering challenge, it seems likely that most of the people instead chose to migrate elsewhere.

Far more could be said; I only broach the topic of these past people to stress two things. First, the ups and downs of these people had nothing to do with white Europeans (at least before 1500), and second, floods, as well as droughts, were a reality that challenged them.

The situation in Phoenix today is not really all that different from what the Hohokan culture faced at its peak. A so-called “overpopulation” thrived/thrives in a desert that seemed incapable of feeding so many, but the genius of the society allowed/allows the people to live good lives. Just as the Hohokan households held shells from distant seashores and jewels from distant mountains, modern Pheonix holds much that isn’t created locally, but is brought in by trade from places far away. Likewise, just as Hohokan culture suffered a downfall when its irrigation systems were not adequately maintained, the millions of people now happy in Phoenix could suffer, if our modern systems are not adequately maintained.

I hope you can see where I am going with this. What is important is to-focus-on-what-the-problem-actually-is, and not on some irrelevant topic. The problem is not whether one race owes another race because of “blame”, or whether driving a car that runs on fossil fuel is to “blame” for both droughts and floods. That stuff is just the blame game. The real problems are more down to earth: How are we handling the gift we are given, called water.

I am no expert on water management, but I do feel I should try to be an educated voter. In pursuit of such education I should be able to turn to the media to be fed the news, but we all shake our heads over what has become of our media. The media has basically become screaming meemies. Like an alcoholic in need of a drink, they see worms crawling from the woodwork and are reduced to hysteria by the slightest drought or slightest flood. Not helpful. So I have to do research on my own.

The irrigation systems devised by modern engineers are amazing, and contain more variables than most consider. Irrigation doesn’t merely involve impounding water behind dams, which can be allowed to flow downhill by turning a faucet. Such a simple system would be a win-win, for it would involve both irrigating crops (and people), and also generating electricity. However in fact the system also involves pumping water uphill, before it flows downhill in the aqueducts, and all the pumping uses amazing amounts of electricity. In fact the water pumps of Arizona’s aqueducts use more electricity than any other consumer. In other words, the flow of water both produces, and consumes, electricity. Therefore, the people managing the flow of water need to be knowledgeable about how much money turning on the faucet is making, compared to how much it is costing. The situation is not so simple as it initially may seem.

Another variable is how dry or rainy it has been. When it is dry, the demand for water grows, even if it is costly to pump water uphill. But if it rains the water is not needed, and there is not such a need for the expense. The supply and demand go through amazing swings.

A totally unforeseen variable, when the dams were first built, were that the lakes of impounded water would become a significant tourism industry involving people who like to boat, fish, swim, water-ski or simply sit in the sun on a small houseboat. Such people have their own economic power, and have their say about whether their marinas will have enough water to float boats or not.

Lastly, there is only so much water to go around during dry times, and this causes states and nations to quibble about who gets how much, and cooler heads must avoid war by writing treaties that decree who gets how much. Even if your state needs water, you must sometimes begrudgingly release a certain amount to flow from your dams downstream to other states, if the treaty says so.

But this diplomacy gets stood on its head when there is too much water. Then you can get in trouble if you are “generous” and allow too much to flow downstream, for you are then to “blame” for downstream flooding. Again, supply and demand has swung about dramatically.

In the past two years we have seen the wailing of Alarmists shift from freaking-out about a mega-drought to the recent concerns about a mega-flood which might have occurred due to Hurricane Hilary. What I want to stress is that such hysteria accomplishes nothing if it blames “Global Warming”, (which gets the blame regardless of whether it rains or shines, or whether we manage or mismanage).

I think that, in the end, what matters most is what accomplishes something, which is the current system of dams and aqueducts, turbines and pumps, which has allowed the desert to bloom in the American Southwest. That practical scheme should be the focus. We want the desert to continue to bloom, for the alternative would involve hardship for many millions of people.

Los Angeles is much like Phoenix, in that it is a so-called overpopulation thriving in a desert that seemingly should not be able to support so many. In terms of local rainfall and snow-melt, Los Angeles should only be able to support 300,000 people, and the fact that, including its suburbs, it now supports 13,000,000 suggests two things. 1.) Some amazing engineering was done, and 2.) if that engineering is not maintained, 12,700,000 people will swiftly find themselves in dire circumstances. It is therefore important to be pragmatic, and not off in some dream-world where the fact walking-on-water is a spiritual possibility becomes an accepted physical reality.

Los Angeles’ growth involved, as often is the case with big cities, water being imported from distant farmlands, which often angers the distant farmers. Even in the suburbs of Boston, as a boy, I heard grumblings from old-timers about how the Boston Big-shots “stole” water-rights from small towns, and that grumbling was occurring in the far greener and rainier landscape of New England.

In California the way water was removed from Owen Valley involved some brutal power politics, and destroyed a landscape once described as “America’s Switzerland.” Owen Lake, once fifty feet deep after heavy rains, became an arid flatland with choking dust-storms of alkaline poisons. Were it not for some artesian springs that fed a few remaining marshes, an important flyway for many species of migratory birds would have been completely wiped out. When Los Angeles began to pump out even Owen Valley’s ground water, and even the artesian wells began drying up, the howl of conservationists finally created enough push-back to halt the myopia of a civic Los Angeles leadership which was fundamentally selfish and greedy, more interested in making money through growth than in facing the problems inherent in growth.

Some of the problems should have been obvious early on, when the conflict erupted in “water wars”, with angry farmers actually dynamiting aqueducts. There were also angry businesses that made money extracting alkaline chemicals from Lake Owen’s water, who sued Los Angeles as the lake dried up. The fact water vanished drove one small business to build a new plant (using a new process) right onto the dried lake-bed, but then that business needed to sue Los Angeles yet again because, in a period of heavy rains in the late 1930’s, the balance of supply and demand swung so violently from drought to flood that those in charge of the aqueducts abruptly had to dump water down into the bone dry lake, flooding the new factory.

California is interesting, for diverse interests sought water, and all the quibbling actually did result in some serious thinking by smarter people, who sought to balance the thirst of migrating birds with the thirst of farmers and thirst of small businesses, and also with the thirst of those who wanted to see Los Angeles grow.

An important factor is that, without water, much of the land is worthless. Some land may support orange and almond groves, but beyond 300,000 people, there could be no suburbs. However, with water, that same land, bought very cheaply, could be sold at a huge profit. And once profits become huge, an insanity called “greed” appears.

California is even more fascinating when one stands back, and watches the mania of greed operate through its history.

Greed was there in the first gold rush, when men flocked into the hills to such a degree that boats docking in San Francisco lost their entire crews and could not depart. Greed was there in the Water Wars, that allowed Los Angeles’ population to explode and made real estate sellers into moguls. It was there when small-town men and women abruptly became idolized Hollywood stars. And it was there when intellectual geeks fooling about with computer hardware and software abruptly became the world’s richest men. Very few of these rags-to-riches stories involved slow and patient growth, nor the careful balancing of multifarious interests. Instead it tended to be a great, big, all-American, “Yippie!”

Now you are probably going to ask me to define “Yippie.” Sigh.

I sigh because, when you get all spiritual about things, greed is not usually a good thing. Occasionally love can cause greed to be greedy about others experiencing mercy and kindness, but more often greed is all about me, or “my side”, (which plays into the blame game.) Greed wants to skim the cream and leave others the milk, or even to steal the water and leave others the dust.

Greed tends to start small and then grow like a cancer. The simple grift of a carnival barker becomes the majestic graft of a state senator. It grows because greed can never satisfy the human heart, which wants to give and forgive. In fact the greater greed grows the greater the hunger of the heart gets, which makes greed want even more. (This is why you so often see crooked people, who could have gotten away with their petty crimes, instead overdo their robberies until they are so flagrant not even the most indulgent authorities can overlook them.) Greed is a sort of vicious cycle and becomes the author of its own demise. Eventually one can own the whole world but is reduced to a King Midas, weeping because he has transformed his favorite daughter into heavy metal.

Yet in a strange way this ugly, dog-like habit of greed is part of the American “Yippie”. It is a confession that part of being free is to be human, and part of being human is to be greedy. Liberty allows us to want what we want. We crave what we crave. We desire what we desire. However, (and this is very important), we also know such greediness can be rebuked. Part of the American “Yippee” is the knowledge we can be smacked on the nose like a bad dog by a rolled-up newspaper. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be King George of England. The American “Yippee” will smack you. Even newspapers get smacked by a newspaper.

Europeans, who seem by and large more obedient than “Yippee” Americans, have every right to criticize Americans for being both greedy and rebellious, (which is likely why their souls were born in Europe). If you are born in America your soul is wild and free and yet fully expects to get smacked in the nose by a newspaper. And the reason is stamped into the very coins our greed likes to finger, as the motto, “In God we trust.”

What this suggests is that, hand in hand with deplorable selfishness, the American “Yippee” believes in Something higher and better, which will not leave a hole in the heart like greed does, but rather warms and fills the heart with giving and forgiveness. It may seem like an impossible contradiction, but it is what it is.

It may also seem ambiguous, but few people are more generous than greedy Americans are. If our prosperity is due to greed, why did we give so much of it away? If we were truly greedy we would just keep it for ourselves. Instead we have given not merely money, but our lives, to help others.

Of course, greedy grifters do tend to skim the cream from a charity. The graft starts out small, as a line-item called “administrative expenses”, and grows to the unholy insult to charity the Clintons enacted, when millions in donations to help out after the Haitian earthquake built an absurd, single, lone house in Haiti, as the Clintons kept all the rest of the money for themselves, (uttering the amazing hypocrisy that they, the Clintons, could be trusted with the money more than Haitian leaders, because the Haitians were corrupt.)

Outsiders wonder why Americans don’t rise in wrath. The simple fact of the matter is that Americans did; Americans have an intuitive understanding of greed, and how it grows grotesque, and of how it is healed by giving and forgiving. In any case, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, the election was “rigged” so she would win, but the overwhelming disgust Americans felt towards her greed outnumbered the fraudulent ballots, and, against all odds, Trump appeared.

At this point we can return to what actually matters, for Trump was a hard-nosed businessman who knew the ropes. He dealt with what actually matters. In terms of the American Southwest, what actually matters is dams that hold waters for droughts, canals that move waters from supplies to demands, and contingency plans involving what to do when times of drought give way to times of flood. The proper management of this infrastructure is crucial to the comfort and perhaps survival of around 75 million people. We are not in the moccasins of the Hohokan, who could just migrate somewhere else (likely down to Mexico) when their infrastructure crashed. We are in a situation we should take very seriously. And blaming light bulbs for Global Warming is not a very serious thing to do.

One thing I liked about Trump, in those long ago days when he ruled, was that he simply stated Global Warming was not worth our attention. He was correct. The infrastructure is worth out attention, and, in the case of California, the irrigation system is a hundred years old in places. Cement gets crumbly after that long; the wiring of pumps and turbines ages and metal fatigues, maintenance is a requirement which millions of people are dependent upon.

This past year has seen the weather of the west go through one of its typical swings from one extreme to another. A very dry time was followed by a very wet time. Massive Pacific gales dug far south of their usual abode up in the Aleutian Islands, directing a stream of moisture directly at California, and filling rivers with flood waters even as mountains all the way to Utah saw especially deep snows.

This should have embarrassed the media, which had been stating “Global Warming” was creating a “Mega-drought”, because rather than a drought there was a flood, and the flood would continue when all the snow melted in the spring.

In actual fact the Alarmist media then did what it accuses everyone else of doing; it went into denial. It insisted the rains were just a brief, upward blip in the downward graph of a terrible drought. Authoritative maps were produced, showing areas experiencing floods were still painted red, indicating drought. This became absurd. By last July twelve maps had been produced by various “authorities” showing all sorts of varying scenarios, with some maps showing drought in the same places other maps showed flood.

Apparently there were differing definitions of “drought”. (To resort to hyperbole, what is not a drought for a farmer growing cactus is a drought for a farmer growing watercress.) But the media chose the maps with the most red, as they had their propaganda to crank out, their narrative to reinforce, and their balderdash to support, to earn their pay. They were bought and paid for, and were handed the news they were to report, investigating nothing while pretending to be “investigative”. Meanwhile mechanics and engineers had to tend to reality; the infrastructure.

The infrastructure was stressed, just as it was in the time of the Hohokan, and in places levees failed and aqueducts crumbled. Owen Lake reappeared, as did Tulare Lake on the far side of the mountains.

The reappearance of Owen Lake had some benefits in terms of settling the clouds of alkaline dust, and watering migratory flyways for birds, but repairs to the aqueduct became more urgent, to supply Los Angeles with water. Meanwhile the reappearance of Tulare Lake had a very different effect, as rather than alkaline dust it’s lake-bed was excellent soil, and had become excellent farmland. When the lake reappeared the farmland was flooded and crops were lost.

California’s farmland is a blessing to the rest of the nation, for in places a 300-day growing season allows California (along with Arizona and Florida) to produce fresh vegetables when the rest of the nation is buried in snow. People who scorn California’s politics and state the rest of the nation would be better off without California are not thinking clearly about their food budgets. To lose vast acreages to floods has consequences. The mechanics and engineers in charge of how much flow is held back in dams wanted to hold as much as possible back to reduce river levels, and thus reduce the regrowth of Lake Tulare, yet at the same time they looked nervously at the deep snow in the mountains. Had nature been mischievous, a single warm rainstorm could have unleashed an amount impossible to contain.

A worst case scenario was possible to visualize because early in its history California was hit by a tremendous, once-every-500-year combination of rain, snow and snow-melt which very nearly ruined the entire state. Nearly the entire Central Valley became an enormous lake. The government had to be moved from Sacramento.

It is possible to map the flooded areas using old reports

And mechanics and engineers dub a repetition of such weather an “ARkStorm” and map how modern engineering might handle a similar fiasco.

So you can see that highly qualified mechanics and engineers are quite aware they can fail, and flood waters can be ten to twenty feet deep in the Central Valley. This is because they are not given enough money to prepare for once-every-500-year events. It’ too expensive. So negotiations tend to pare back the costs, until they are only preparing for once-every-100-year events. But they still are aware of how such preparations may prove inadequate, and think about what their responses should be when the s— hits the fan and the levees are not tall enough and Lake Tulare reappears. They have “contingency plans”, which are basically how to make the pain less when the s— hits the fan. Practical stuff.

Now please compare this with the demented response of the media, last winter, when Lake Tulare reappeared. It was not the slightest bit practical, yet they got paid well to produce pure pulp.

First, the media can never resist using the word “unprecedented”. This is just plain stupid. I have just shown you the precedent. Even if I couldn’t find the precedent on my computer, I could turn to my nine-year-old granddaughter and she’d find it. The California history regarding the terrible floods from November 1861 to March 1862 is right there in plain sight, at your fingertips. They even involve episodes of our national history having little to do with meteorology; IE: How did the Confederate forces escape the superior Union forces in Arizona? (Answer: The rivers were flooding and blocked the advance of armies.) The evidence of a far more severe flood are everywhere you look, and this proves the media does not look, when they use the word “unprecedented”.

When one looks at the flooding of Lake Tulare that actually occurred last winter and spring, and one compares it to 1862, it is obvious last winter and spring were small potatoes, compared to a worst-case scenario. It could have been much, much worse, if the mountain snows had melted faster, but the fact is: It wasn’t worse. So how in the world can the press call the event, “unprecedented”?

Obviously the press does not care if it is accurate. The press does not care about the Truth. So, what does the press care about? Greed. For greed it grovels. It grovels to get its next paycheck, which it can only get if it obeys a master who thinks lying to the public is good policy. Good policy? Apparently. Apparently it is good policy to make the public afraid. It is good policy to whip up anxiety about the weather. It is good policy to state the current weather is a sign that Global Warming is about to end life as we know it. But current weather isn’t going to do that. Far worse has been seen before. And it didn’t end life as we know it.

Besides ignoring the history which one needs to research, the press ignores the history it itself made. After all, it was the press that stated, in November, that the mega-drought was going to last. It was the press that stated that the mega-drought proved that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather. This wasn’t ancient history. It was recent. But now they abruptly forgot their own history and stated that it was the flooding which was going to last, and to prove that Global Warming resulted in unprecedented weather.

The press seems to think the public is amazingly gullible, and that they can “cry wolf” on and on and on, and the public will never become jaded. They have forgotten the fable. In the fable, the mischievous shepherd boy arrives at a day when a wolf actually appears, and the boy cries, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” but everyone is so jaded that that no one comes to his rescue. In the case of the modern mainstream media, “rescue” is the paychecks reporters receive each week, but such “rescue” can cease. The media have lost so many viewers with their dishonest hyperbole that their parent entities can’t afford them, and the reporters get laid off.

So far, news reporters haven’t learned their lesson. In fact they are doubling down, and are worse than ever. I have the sense they feel their power slipping away, and are desperately trying to bring things to a head, wherein acceptance of Global Warming (AKA Climate Change) is a prerequisite to being listened-to. If you don’t tow the line, thou shalt receive no funding. Thou shalt receive no publicity. Thou shalt be marginalized and ostracized and lonely as heck.

Oddly, this strategy is backfiring. Who receives no publicity? Increasingly it is the press itself. Who receives no funding? Who increasingly is lonely as heck?

What people seem to be interested in is: What is actually happening. To some degree there seems to be a bit of the mechanic and the engineer in the ordinary thought of ordinary people.

Of course, just as ordinary people are ambiguous in terms of greed and the rolled-up newspaper that smacks greed on the snout, the pragmatic side of ordinary thinking, which is like an engineer, must also deal with the “Karen’s”, who are not all that interested in what is actually happening. The “Karen’s” love to murmur and gossip, backbite and belittle, and in some cases badly hurt innocent people. (Likely this is why scriptures startle some people by, when defining certain behavior as “un-spiritual”, listing “gossip” right next to “murder”.) However, perhaps the hook of behaving like a Karen is a desire to learn the Truth, (even as it spreads a lie.) In the end, people seem interested in what is actually happening.

What was actually happening in the American Southwest was that a dry time was shifting to a wet time. But how long would the wet time last? It was obvious rivers would run high, as the tremendous snowpack in the mountains melted, but what to do with those waters as they ran, and what to do if the drought returned?

I think this is what we would be discussing, if we were a sane society with a sane media. And some people were sane, and actually dealing with the issues.

I was very curious about why they decided what they decided, because I am one of those people who ignores what the media blares, because they have violated my trust. Instead I look, when possible, to what reporters would look at, if they were something other than paid parrots.

At this point the general public can still access, to an amazing degree, the water levels of scores of reservoirs, and the flow rates of many rivers, and the level of snowpack in the mountains. (Those-in-charge haven’t yet shut such sources down, the way they closed down most ways an ordinary person could examine arctic sea-ice.) Therefore, without newspapers, one can see the situation in the Southwest for oneself.

The two largest reservoirs along the Colorado River are Lake Mead and, upstream, Lake Powell. Lake Mead was getting all the attention a year ago, as its levels sank so low sunk boats and mob-related corpses were exposed. The generation of electricity was curtailed. However, since then the levels have risen dramatically.

Lake Powell also showed a great recovery, as snowmelt poured into it last spring, but has dipped slightly more recently as some of its waters were released to Lake Mead.

Upstream of Lake Powell the 34 larger “tracked reservoirs” also recovered from low levels to what averaged out to nearly 90 % of capacity. In a few cases reservoirs were over 100% of capacity, which is not a good thing, for it demonstrates the reservoir has become useless in terms of flood control. Most never reached 100%, and the torrents released by spring melting were well handled.

The actual handling of the waters occurs below the radar of the mainstream media, which is only interested in the panic porn of sensationalism. However, there are true public servants working behind the scenes. As an outsider, some of the things they need to consider are puzzling.

For example, when the water had just started to rise in Lake Powell its floodgates were abruptly opened wide, to such an extent that its levels actually dropped. It was a five day event.

It took between two to three days for the torrents to flow down to Lake Mead, and then resulted in a very rapid rise in the levels of Lake Mead, for five days.

What was that all about? Rather than seek the mainstream media, it paid to seek the more local papers. The general public along the Colorado River needed to be warned the river was going to flood for five days. It would not hurt tourism, for it was during the off-season. But, as the flood was man-made, insignificant but curious local reporters asked the questions the mainstream doesn’t, and received an interesting answer.

Apparently, when a river moves around a bend, it erodes and scours deep channels to the outside of the curve, yet builds sandy, shallow beaches on the inside of the curve. These beaches were delightful places to stop, as people floated down the Colorado through the majesty of the Grand Canyon, but drought and low water caused the beaches to be degraded. The theory was that a flood would rebuild them. I never heard how the theory worked out. But it was interesting to read that someone decided a good flushing would do good, and could build as well as erode.

Another interesting disparity involved the treaties which require reservoirs to, in times of drought, release water for people downstream to use. Lake Powell easily achieved its quota, and currently has released more than 112% of the required amount. Yet Lake Mead has failed to meet the requirement, and currently has released just over 83% of the required amount. I assume this demonstrates how wet the year has been, and that rather than drought, flooding has been a concern downstream.

Downstream from Lake Mead are two large reservoirs, Mohave Lake and Lake Havasu. Lake Mead’s discharges keeps the level of these reservoirs fairly stable for irrigation purposes, while at the same time these two reservoirs stabilize the flow of the Colorado River, which otherwise would fluctuate wildly, because the demand for electricity varies hugely. If Lake Mead must release a set amount, they would not be prone to do it in a steady way. They would be prone to release lots all at once, when demand is high, and to release little when demand is low, which would make the Colorado flow in erratic pulses, but the downstream reservoirs smooth the flow out.

At Lake Havasu the waters of the Colorado are divvied up between the interested parties. 365 billion gallons a year head off to Los Angeles and San Diego via the Colorado Aqueduct, 488 billion gallons flow to Pheonix and Tuscon via Arizona’s Aqueducts, and the remaining 488 billion gallons flow to Mexican aqueducts, which leave not a drop to flow to the sea. Men have been so efficient that not a drop is squandered. A riverbed which once saw over a trillion gallons of water flow by becomes bone dry.

The same efficiency can have the bed of the Gila River bone dry, where it enters the Colorado at Yuma, south of Lake Havasu. Originally the Gila ran so deep that paddlewheel steamers ran between Yuma and Pheonix, but now all that water is used for crop irrigation and drinking water, golf courses and swimming pools and whatever men desire, upstream.

Before modern people say rude things about the mentality of people of the past, one needs to understand these past people were doing things on a scale never seen before, and were naive concerning consequences. They were simply doing what people had always done, but doing it better. The Hohokan had irrigated their crops for two thousand years; they just never did such a good job that they stopped the Colorado River, and the Gila River as well. Nor were modern consequences immediately obvious: The populations (and therefore thirst) of Los Angeles and Pheonix were much smaller when the projects began, and some projects, such as water for Tuscon, were not even completed until 1970.

Simply planning the construction of Hoover Dam took nine years, beginning in 1922 when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Construction began in 1931 when Hoover was president, and was completed in 1936 when FDR was president, and FDR saw to it Hoover’s name was removed. (A bit ungracious? But an example of the petty politics involved.) Only after FDR was dead was “Boulder Dam” called “Hoover Dam” again. Hoover lived to see his vindication, dying in 1964.)

It would be a glorious sidetrack to plunge deeply into the history of the dam builders, but what is important here is that the project was gigantic and straddled the desperation of the Great Depression. Even before the project began thousands of unemployed workers had shown up, with their families, in a desert where temperatures exceeded 110 degrees, that had no housing. Workers were dying of heat stroke even before the first worker was hired. Thoughts about native species of fish such as the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker” were not on people’s minds. Nor was the nation of Mexico, at first.

However, you cannot just dry up a major system of rivers without suffering environmental consequences. People began to understand there was a price to be paid downstream for efficiency upstream. Plants and wildlife and fish and birds all suffered, as did people depending on them, when the Colorado stopped flowing. When the population of fish in the Sea of Cortez south of the Colorado River Delta crashed, dawn broke on Marblehead. Mexicans began to do calculations on the back of envelopes. They wondered if the protein they gained through irrigation matched the protein they lost through a decreased catch of fish.

It is important to remember our modern environmental awareness came from elders who learned things the hard way. For example, the United State’s EPA was not created until a river was so polluted it caught on fire in 1969. In like manner, the concept of “wetlands” being important simply didn’t enter ordinary thinking, a century ago. People saw a marsh as a stinking place of no value. They had no idea smelly places fed so many baby fish, which fed the bigger fish.

Becoming aware of unforeseen consequences is no reason to glue yourself to a highway, or enact some other overreaction too often seen in the antics of radical environmentalists. More moderate conservationists often propose solutions that don’t involve dynamiting Hoover Dam, and in some ways Mexico has been a better example of such sanity than the United States.

Rather than just blaming the United States for using water upstream, some Mexicans faced the fact that their politicians had fought to get 488 billion gallons of Colorado River water delivered across the border, and, if none of that water reached the delta, Mexico deserved some “blame.”

At this point some Mexicans wondered, “Couldn’t we allow just a little to flow down the parched riverbed to the sea, as an experiment?” The experiment was done, largely using wastewater from irrigation ditches, and, even with such cruddy water, the scientists taking measurements were amazed at the positive results, which allowing even a little water to flow down to the Sea of Cortez, achieved. When paired with tree-planting along the scorched banks of the river, barren stretches of land became verdant. Fish populations rebounded.

What is important about this experiment is that the blame game was avoided. Rather than pitting the desires of farmers against the desires of fishermen, the desires of both were met. It was a case of having your cake and eating it too; (IE: Impossible, in the eyes of some radicals.)

It should be noted that to the north conservationists, concerned about the decreasing populations of fish native to the Colorado River, (especially the “Boney Tailed Chub” and the “Razor Backed Sucker”), discovered they did not need to blow up Hoover Dam. Instead, the level of Lake Mohave began to be dropped and raised ten feet, each autumn, simply to help these obscure fish. We humans can behave sanely, if we work at it.

I bring this up because it demonstrates how, quietly and behind the scenes, sensible people tweak the system, even in a time of drought, to make it more productive. It is counter-intuitive to think that, in a time of drought, allowing any water to escape the “efficiency” of the upstream system would be a good thing, yet the level of Lake Mohave was lowered and water was allowed to escape irrigation and flow down the dry Colorado to the sea, and the benefits were, if not immediately obvious, obvious enough to vindicate the daring thinkers who dared challenge the “efficient”.

The simple fact of the matter is that the marshes and wetlands of a delta are swarming with life and feed the nearby fish to a degree where there is a population explosion, if the dry Colorado Delta is allowed to again be wet. An increase in the catch of fish becomes an economic fact practical people notice. Making money with fish must be weighed with making money with irrigation. And this can lead to further thought, such as “Can we irrigate without the Colorado?” Which in turn has Mexicans considering something perhaps California should consider: The economic feasibility of desalinization plants.

Desalinization is a topic one needs to keep abreast upon. Back when I originally researched the topic in 1970 it was not feasible except in extreme cases, such as on desert islands where it almost never rains, or ships at sea for long periods of time. But that is fifty years ago, and a lot has been learned, especially in very arid Arab lands, where they had lots of oil money to pour into research, or in Israel, where their very survival depended on water. The US Navy has also researched the subject. Both the subjects of distilling and osmosis have evolved to a degree where desalinization is only a tenth as expensive as it once was. To be an old hippy who researched the subject in 1970, and who therefore thinks they know all about it, is to be a fool.

Unfortunately, there is a certain mindset which made up its mind in 1969, concerning environmental issues, and hasn’t grown. (This failure to grow may well be an insidious side effect of seemingly harmless “recreational” drugs.) (People like to say, “There is no sign the drug changed me.” What they fail to see is that you are supposed to change. If Beethoven didn’t change, his ninth symphony would sound the same as his first.)

A more mature mindset sees Desalinization is important for a reason people failed to foresee, in the past. And what is that? It is that the irrigation of deserts has a habit of making soil more and more salty, for there is a little salt in the “fresh” water of the Colorado River, and when that water evaporates the residue of salt is left behind, until the salt in soil can reach a level where it kills the very plants you are attempting to irrigate. In other words, irrigation results in the “salinization” of soil, and flushing the salt from that soil with fresh water makes “desalinization” important, even miles from the sea.

So which mindset talks about blowing up Hoover Dam, and which mindset investigates desalinization? California’s or Mexico’s? Or even, California’s or Arizona’s?

What a joke it would be if Arizona, which doesn’t even have a coastline, invested in desalinization when California didn’t!

If it was Mexico that made choices that led to prosperity, as California made choices that led to poverty, a tide could turn, and people could be seen sneaking across the border in a southerly direction. After all, the grass is always greener….

Actually I’m perfectly fine with Mexico becoming prosperous. I cheer the successes of other people. What bugs me is the failures of my own people. And there is something prone to failure about the obstinate attitude of an American media which can’t budge beyond its fixation on Global Warming.

To me our American problem, to some degree, seems to involve semantics. We lack the words that adequately describe why it is spiritually true that unselfish behavior is far better than selfish behavior. I resort to clumsy images of people going “Yippie” and then getting their snouts whacked with a rolled-up newspaper. Why? Because I lack the words that properly define an important distinction.

For example, consider the word “compromise.” Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it is very necessary in any negotiations, but that it tends to be burdened by the baggage of selfishness. People tend to see “compromise” as a sort of surrender, but only for a while. It is like a “cease fire” in the heat of battle; it is not a true peace, but just a pause in a fight which will resume at a later date. Maybe you will agree not to blow up Hoover Dam this year, but reducing Hoover Dam to rubble remains on your agenda.

Now consider he word “integration”. Is it a negative or positive word? I would like to suggest it takes opposing parties which apparently are at loggerheads, and instead puts them on the same page. Rather than seeing things in either-or terms, things are seen in terms involving the benefit of all. For example, in Mexico farmers did not need to “compromise” with fishermen, because they both wanted the other to succeed, because they wanted Mexico to succeed. What’s more, they have succeeded (so far).

To conclude this digression, the distinction I am attempting to make would put the word “compromise” on the selfish side as the word “integrate” would be on the unselfish side. And why is this distinction important?

It is because the mentality of communists, globalists, elitists and other dictators and tyrants seem incapable of anything other than the most degrading sort of selfishness. They do not value any view other than their own myopia. They cannot see the value of other views. They are so certain their views are superior that they inevitably fall into the repression of other views, which is a sickness like cancer that always seeks a “final solution” which involves actually killing those who differ. The fishermen must kill the farmers, or the farmers must kill the fishermen. I have even heard some go so far as to suggest it would be a good thing to kill 95% of the earth’s population, because “over population” is “the problem”.

Over population is not the problem. The more the merrier. The more we have the more minds we have working on true solutions to the problems we are faced by. In fact, if you take the time to bother with actually studying history, it is amazing to see the problems mankind has overcome, and amazing to see where the saviors have sprung from. Sadly, however, some think they already know it all, and they can’t be bothered with the elders of our past. They would rather rewrite history to affirm what they think they already know, even if they are dead wrong. Such souls are not mankind’s saviors, but rather mankind’s nemesis.

Such devils actually have little interest in what actually matters, in terms of the infrastructure which millions of lives are dependent upon in the American Southwest. They live in a far-away swamp they think is not low, but a high Elysium of god-like power and privilege. Dams and canals? Fishermen and farmers? Such low-brow considerations are delegated to the riffraff, to those boring mechanics and engineers who do not comprehend the intricacies of Washington power-politics.

Personally, I prefer the low-brow stuff, because in my humble opinions the high-brows make no real sense. Their heads exploded at some point, (perhaps during an LSD trip in 1969), and they are now convinced they are aboard the Jefferson Starship, which they have highjacked and are now confidently steering out into a lifeless void. I prefer more sane brows. So let us look at what is actually happening, in the American Southwest.

After the mountain snows are done melting, (they actually keep melting, but the majority of the snow is melted by late June,) the next best source of water is the so-called “monsoon.” These are summer thunderstorms which vary greatly in their intensity and coverage.

I think the variation reminded some of the variation in India between drought and flood. Because that variation hinges upon the strength of the Asian monsoon, it was assumed our variation must also be a “monsoon”. However our variation is different, and, if you want the honest truth, I think more research is needed, for I think a degree of mystery is involved concerning why it sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t, in the American Southwest. It involves factors different from Asia’s, which leads some to argue about the definition of “monsoon”.

Pretty pointless, if you ask me. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet. If you define monsoon as strictly the situation created by prevailing winds in Asia, our monsoon is not a monsoon. We must invent our own word for some-years-wet-and-some-year-dry. Call it a “monseen” if you insist. But then get down to the business of describing what is actually happening.

And it is here the wonder sets in. For the fact of the matter is that there is still much to be learned and incorporated into our understanding. The science is not settled. There are some excellent theories floating around, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of predicting whether it will rain or be dry, flip a coin.

Here is my layman’s understanding of the American “monseen”.

The Southwest lacks trees in many areas, and bakes under a summer sun that creates temperatures over 110 ( 44 Celsius) at the surface, and that hot air rises, which creates less air at the surface, which is a partial vacuum, so the barometric pressure falls. Nature abhors a vacuum, so air must come from somewhere to replace the air that has risen. Where does this air come from? And is it’s composition the same as the air that was lifted?

At this point you have to start to attend to the “partial pressure” of some air molecules compared to the “partial pressure” of other air molecules. And most important is water. Of course.

It turns out that, to a degree, when molecules of oxygen and nitrogen rise, their space can be taken by molecules of H2O. From where, in a desert? Well, from the surface of Lake Mead and Lake Powell and the 34 reservoirs upstream, of course. Vast amounts of water are available which were not available when the Hohoham scientists tried to figure things out.

But, if those lakes did not exist, the landscape would still be likely to find water, because the easiest route for air to replace the rising air is up the the river valleys. It is far harder to replace the air by pulling it up and over high mountain passes. Therefore, air is sometimes drawn from the humid Gulf of Mexico up the Rio Grande valley, or from the humid Sea of Cortez up the Colorado valley.

But you will notice I said, “sometimes.” On other occasions the air up the river valleys remains bone dry. Despite evaporation from reservoirs and from irrigated farmland, it remains a drought. Any rain that does fall makes long and beautiful purple streamers from the cumulus which fade, falling into the hot and dry air, and never reach the ground.

Although the rain does not reach the ground, the downdrafts associated with the wind do. As a young bum, attempting to write the Great American Novel on a portable typewriter in desert campgrounds, I had to keep an eye on the cumulus, for a calm, mild morning tended to be hit by a blast of wind around lunchtime, and such wind has no respect for piles of typing paper sitting on picnic tables without heavy rocks holding them down. A sign such a downdraft was imminent was the purple streamers appearing on the bottom of clouds.

These streamers, called “virga” by meteorologists, were called a word that meant “lady rain” by the Navajo sheep herders. When the clouds grew especially purple, lightning bolts could travel down the edge of the virga, hitting ground never wet by rain and igniting forest fires. These fires were so much a part of western ecology that some pinecones evolved to only drop their seeds when scorched by forest fires.

When the virga grew thick enough to actually reach the ground the situation could become dramatically different. Rather than “lady rain” it became “manly rain”, which the ranchers called “gully washers”. Dry gulches which had gone years never seeing more than a trickle of water abruptly became raging torrents.

At one campground I frequented I watched, during a 36 month period between 1984 and 1988, a sand dune be slowly extended across a gully by the persistent winds. This worried me, for I imagined the dune-dam might, in some future flash-flood, redirect the gully’s water right through the campground and wash away my tent. But I needn’t have worried. The dune was gone in five minutes, when the raging waters came down that gully.It made me understand the “flash” in flash-flood. The torrent was over in forty-five minutes, yet undid the work of three years of sand-drifting.

Spending so much time outdoors did seem to awake some sort of ability in me to forecast, but it seemed to be more like intuition than any intellectual science I could compile facts and figures about, and could use to produce a paper to be peer reviewed. Also the intuitive talent seemed to involve the immediate future more than the long range. I would never pretend to be able to forecast whether the summer would be droughty or not. The shepherds and ranchers might be willing to speculate, but some felt speculating might “hex” the weather; one might irk the gods if one pretended to understand them.

Meteorologists seem to be on better relations with the angels God charges controlling weather with; (either that or they just get used to being put to shame by the pranks of such “lesser” gods, zephyrs, and tricksters). They do make an effort to understand what makes some so-called “monsoons” wet and others be dry. The dynamics are different from Asia’s monsoons, and as far as I can tell there’s much more work to do before we understand them, and therefore the forecasts are often wrong.

To me there seems a great distinction between those who comprehend the magnitude of the work that needs to be done, and the fools who say “the science is settled” and who blame “Global Warming” for all the variety weather amazes us with.

My own experience with western weather was based upon the fact that, because I wrote nothing I could sell, and also because I found it very hard to write and also hold a job, I needed to find the lowest rent possible, if I intended to write. Cheapest was to sleep in my car, but the extreme discomfort (and the fact it often was illegal) tended to discourage that option except when absolutely necessary. Next cheapest was to sleep at a campground, which in those days only cost $25.00/week. However, I learned firsthand one was unwise to attempt this too early in the spring or too late in the fall. In mid-October one should seek a camper or a $60.00/week motel unit, and hide indoors from Blue Northers and cold and wet weather until mid-May. It was in mid-May that the winter storm track seemed to retreat north. Then the “monsoon” started to develop, with dry “lady rains” at first, and the thundering “manly rains” later. June tended to be hot and dry and July saw the heat build a better chance of gully-washers.

Weather radars were often unhelpful, as they could show rain without indicating whether it was lady or manly. But they did show peculiar systems that I called “ghost-fronts”. Though fronts did not appear on maps, they seemed to be faint remnants of storms that traveled along the winter storm track during the summer, after they pushed south and became extremely weak. At times they formed small hooks of clouds, or even spirals, as they drifted across the desert from the Pacific. Not much rain reached the ground from them, but they did prove that moisture could make it over the mountains. This moisture, basically riding the weakest and southernmost westerlies, met the weakest and northernmost trade winds, basically coming up the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico, which also had to transcend mountain blockage to enter the Colorado Valley. The easiest route was up the Colorado River itself, though neither westerlies nor trade winds tended to go that way. I therefore decided to do a bit of b.s.ing, and proclaimed the south wind was created by the suction caused by so much air rising over the blazing hot deserts. Often there is low pressure just sitting over the Southwest for weeks on end, not due to any storm, but rather because it is so very hot.

A final factor meteorologists, mechanics and engineers need to consider seems unlikely in a desert: It is the remnants of tropical storms.

Atlantic hurricanes can head up the Rio Grande at Brownsville, and Pacific hurricanes can curve north and head up the coast of Baja California or the Sea of Cortez, eventually funneling moisture up the Colorado River valley, and , while these systems are weakened by the time they reach the deserts, they give surprising amounts of rain to areas that usually see little. When you read that blazingly hot desert communities such as Salton Sea or Palm Springs receive average of four inches of rain a year, you need to understand the average is lifted by such events; in fact they usually receive less, but occasionally receive far more.

Such events may be rare, but they are common enough to have a page in Wikipedia devoted to a “List of California Hurricanes”, though in fact it is largely a list of remnants. The very cold waters off California is death to hurricanes, and they fall apart with amazing speed as they approach from the south. Even so, the remnants are something engineers need to be aware of, for history warns us that a sequence of such remnants can afflict the Southwest. For example, in 1939 four occurred in four weeks:

• September 4–7, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane brought over a year’s worth of rain to parts of southern California.
• September 11–12, 1939: The remnants of a hurricane from the Gulf of California brought rain to parts of California.
• September 19–21, 1939: The remnants of a tropical cyclone brought rain to California.
• September 25, 1939: The 1939 tropical storm made landfall n ear Long Beach.  Winds were near 80 km/h (50 mph) and rain was near 12 inches (300 mm). At sea, 48 people were killed. On land, 45 were killed in flooding as an intense thunderstorm immediately preceded the tropical storm. This is the only tropical storm recorded to make landfall in California during the 20th century.

Considering we have such clear records of past events, it would be difficult to call a current event “Unprecedented”. My ten-year-old granddaughter could find the above picture, if my elderly internet abilities were weak. One could even find examples of “close calls”, where massive force five hurricanes threatened California. (Although such hurricanes always weaken greatly as they cross over cold waters, if they crossed quickly enough, a force five hurricane might still retain the strength of a strong force one, or weak force two.)

Such a storm would be truly “unprecedented” in terms of the brief historical record, but there is also a recent geological record which clearly shows such rare events have occurred in the recent past, and therefore meteorologists are always wary of massive hurricanes that blow up in the warm waters south of California ‘s cold waters.

By the way, the storm shown above was Linda, in 1997. In the warm waters south of California it exploded to a power that scared meteorologists, for it had a central pressure down around 26.64 inches (902 mb) and sustained winds of 185 mph. Lord knows how high the gusts were, but the winds were higher than many tornadoes, and even if it weakened and was only half as strong when it hit hit California it would have caused havoc. However it did not follow the path shown on the lower right of the above picture. Rather than slicing right it hooked left, and dwindled to a depression as swiftly as it as it had exploded to a force five hurricane. Despite the fact its core completely missed California, its outer rain bands caused mudslides east of San Diego, and its enormous waves washed away a house and killed a surfer.

Before you laugh at the way the meteorologists worried about Linda, be aware that, even before Linda faded, a new storm, Nora, was spinning up to its south, and Nora did slice right rather than hook left. Nora avoided much of the Cold water off California and used warm water in the Sea of Cortez and, though it did weaken greatly, retained enough strength to come north through Arizona as an actual tropical storm , with tropical force winds. Considering tropical storms need warm oceans to be created and to sustain themselves, to have one over a desert is a bit bizarre, yet Nora was a weirdo. One mountain in southwest Arizona saw a foot of rain, and, considering the landscape is officially “desert” and gets around three to four inches per year, the gully-washers produced by Nora there must have been surreal.

In any case, I only bring these examples up to demonstrate such unusual rainfalls are by no means “unprecedented”. They may be flukes, but they are a reality, and meteorologists deal with such strange realities. One thing they have noticed is such flukes seem to always happen when an El Nino is building in the Pacific.

And guess what? This past summer an El Nino was building in the Pacific. So it seems only natural that meteorologists would keep an eye out for tropical storms that might effect the desert Southwest. Even an amateur like myself did. But the media? It was still pounding its flabby drum and promoting panic about mega-drought, or maybe it was mega-floods, but in any case was mega-something.

Enter a tropical wave from stage right. Even before it crossed Mexico one of my favorite hurricane forecasters, Joe Bastardi, casually mentioned this wave might become a storm like Nora in 1997.

Bastardi is a peculiar mix of bombast and humbleness, and he can’t figure himself out, so I don’t try. I just am amazed by his insights. For example, one time a tropical wave was just coming off Africa and he published, “Houston, we have a problem.” Roughly ten days later that wave was a hurricane (Rita?) hitting Houston, but rather than gloating Bastardi was berating himself because he missed some detail and the storm’s landfall was the wrong side of Houston. Or, for another example, another hurricane carved from the gulf across the American southeast, weakening to a tropical storm, and was heading out to sea off Cape Hattaras, where 99% of all hurricanes head for Europe, but Bastardi said this storm was different. He said it would loop a clockwise loop and hit Florida and enter the Gulf of Mexico and then perhaps hit New Orleans. Initially such a zany forecast seemed preposterous, but that is exactly what this storm (Ivan?) did. But Bastardi did not give himself time to gloat over such an unbelievable forecast, but rather castigated himself intensely because he was incorrect about the storm’s intensity. Apparently he thirsts more for correction and improvement than for flattery, which I agree is a good thing, but I take this time to praise him because he deserves it, and also to explain why I listen to him when he has intuitions.

If you look back at posts from that time on his blog at Weatherbell, you will see that even as Hilary was forming Bastardi was posting the track of Nora in 1997. Therefore, as Hilary quickly strengthened just as many storms have strengthened over those warm waters, and then headed north towards California, there was no reason to call the storm “unprecedented.”

So why do they do it?

Next the weather bureau caught on, and predicted Hilary would strengthen greatly and then weaken greatly, as west coast storms always do, but that, if it came north fast enough, it might retain hurricane strength as a minimal hurricane . It stated no hurricane had hit California since they had west coast offices (which wasn’t until 1940, after the Long Beach Tropical Storm surprised everyone in 1939.)

So what did the media then report? They certainly didn’t bother to report that the storm would weaken greatly coming north, but did report it was strengthening to force 4. This created the panic the storm was strengthening as it neared, when the weather bureau was quite clear it would weaken. Then the press also reported this was “unprecedented”, as no hurricane had ever hit California. Then they added this was likely due to climate change or Global Warming or your vehicle, unless it was electric.

Why do they do it?

The media wound up looking like a cat with lots of feathers but no bird, as Hilary was a bit of a dud. It was not far enough west to be like the 1939 Long Beach storm, or far enough east to drench Arizona like Nora in 1997. It split the difference, was too slow to retain hurricane winds, and lost some moisture over the mountains of Baja California. It did drench some desert communities, and was a greater gullywasher than a desert thunderstorm is, but was nowhere nearly as bad as the weather bureau worried it might be. This actually pleased the weather bureau, which would (for the most part,) far rather err on the side of caution than to see people put in danger by a storm which surprises forecasters.

There were some cellars flooded, and some cars had engines ruined when foolish drivers drove in waters too deep. The media, meanwhile, did its best to get dramatic pictures and promote panic about Global Warming.

Perhaps the most dramatic video I saw portrayed the moment a stream which had been dry for decades abruptly faced waters charging down from the mountains, and those waters picked up every twig, stick and log that had fallen for decades, and flushed it all downstream. As the waters progressed, they picked up more and more wood, until you could not see water at all. All one saw was a tremendous amount of wood, coming around the corner of a canyon in the distance and bearing down on the cameraman, who wisely moved off the bridge he stood upon.

At this point one tends to hear a lot of second-guessing about the mechanics and engineers who designed the flood-control channels, (only budgeted enough to handle once-every-fifty-year storms), who perhaps did not foresee such amazing masses of driftwood, nor such wood’s ability to plug up even large culverts as swiftly as beavers. In any case the desert received a years worth of rain in six hours, and bridge abutments were washed away, but more annoying was what was brought in, which was mud. Yet this was expected, especially below areas where the soil was destabilized by forest fires, (and there were even road signs warming of such mud, weeks before Hilary arrived).

And the mud did mess up golf courses which were constructed on flood plains where it would have been unwise to build houses, (though perhaps such messes could be called a water hazard and sand trap all in one, by dedicated golfers.)

And some are tempted, of course, to test limits, and do build on flood plains.

However it wasn’t as bad as the media seemingly hoped. No one died, and in many places, though the media screamed they had received a year’s worth of rain, it amounted to only three inches. (It is a desert, after all.)

In places like Palm Springs there were actually far more people out and about, as Hilary passed through. Usually, the streets are deserted in the heat of the day, with temperatures often up as high as 115 degrees (46 Celsius). But the deluge dropped temperatures to a balmy 86, (30 Celsius), and the breezy rain didn’t stop people, who actually seemed to find the conditions refreshing.

Many went out in the rain simply to frolic in the delightful refreshment, which returns me to my original subject, which is why the media feels it must horrify everyone. Why can’t people focus on the technical details which interest mechanics and engineers. Why get so distracted…

…oh….yes…blonds.

If you look back to the third paragraph of this post you will see that I stated that when a scientist was feeling sorry for himself, he may be susceptible to bribes. I stated, “Money may not slake his (or her) thirst for Truth, but may gratify his (or her) hankering for blonds.”

This is true for humanity as a whole. We tend to pervert our healthy instincts. It is healthy to nourish our bodies, but we can turn that into gluttony. Rest is good for the weary, but we can create sloth. Even breathing can be turned, by certain forms of yoga, into euphoria so addictive it makes heroin look like chump change. And reproducing our bodies perhaps leads to the wildest perversions of our healthy instincts.

Considering we all tend to be tempted off course in this manner, one way or another, the smartest response is to, “confess sin and receive an assurance of pardon,” and the stupidest thing is to be “given to sin.”

I like that word “given.” If you are given away, some hand is letting go of you. What is that hand? I think it is the hand of Truth.

Truth is the most agreeable of agreeable things, and this is especially true when you are frank, and confess you lost your train of thought because a beautiful blond walked by just then. Truth pardons that because it is truthful. It may not be high minded, and in fact may be lustful, but it is the truth. Maybe you blush to the roots of your hair, but Truth embraces you. You have stood by Truth, so Truth stands by you. Truth also helps you get back on track, and remember where the rails led, before you lost your train of thought.

If you are scornful of honesty the derailing becomes serious. You are “given to your sin”, which is a way of saying you have lost hold of what separates men from beasts. If your sin is sloth, you can’t overcome your laziness. And so on. Until you can’t even tell if you are a man or a woman.

Becoming lost in this manner tends to be a gradual process of degradation, full of self-delusion. We imagine we are making progress when we are actually pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. This seems to occur because there is something in the human spirit which craves freedom, and which knows when it is enslaved by some sort of addiction, and therefore we tend to alternate by being repelled by our addiction and being seduced by it. We make New Year’s resolutions and then fail to keep them. Back and forth; back and forth; restlessly going nowhere like pacing tigers.

The savior is Truth, which has been there all along, but we have failed to grasp it. Ambiguously, control comes through giving up control, but the ego craves power. Once the ego thinks Truth can be disregarded the ego becomes lost and the craziness of the power-mad appears.

A simplistic escape from the debauchery of the craziness is to enlist in some discipline. It does not matter much if it is a religion or a branch of the military, it is helpful to have some sort of drill sergeant bellowing at you, making you do what you don’t want to do. However, this tends to be the tiger walking one way in the cage, and the repression is accompanied by a longing for freedom. As soon as the soldier goes on leave or the sailor’s on “liberty”, the debauchery reappears with a vengeance. The fifty weeks of work leads to the wild two-week vacation, after which you’re wasted. This is the tiger walking the other way in the cage.

This is all avoided if one clings to Truth like a small child clinging to a father’s leg in a crowd, but people can’t believe it can be so simple. Also it offends their pride to be so small, so much like a little child. They’d much rather swagger. So off they go, either to boot-stepping discipline or to a wild party.

In the desert southwest the biggest party is the “Burning Man” gathering, held on a playa in Nevada. Originally this was a celebration of artists who simply wanted to be artists, rather than being burdened by the discipline of dishwashing, (or whatever other job they did to get by). It was an escape from the discipline that responsibly pays the bills. Originally it was held on a beach by San Francisco, but fires were made illegal on that beach, so they moved to a playa in Nevada, which has a certain irony, as “playa” is a Spanish word for “beach”.

In the American Southwest the word “playa” has evolved to mean the bed of a dry lake, an area which is usually very flat, and paved by a crust of dried minerals like a pavement, perfect for campers and RV’s to drive over. All sorts of artists would arrive and become “artistic”, which involved some genuinely inspired genius, (and discipline), but also a fair amount of promiscuous decadence. To be free of the chains of breadwinner discipline involves what people call “cutting loose”, and this tends to mix heaven with hell.

Then there came an infusion of amazing amounts of money. The people of Silicon Valley also wanted a break from the dreary discipline of “writing code” and from figuring out how to cram ever larger amounts of memory onto ever smaller chips. Some of these people were so rich they could blow a million dollars on a party. Some money went for drugs. (“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you make too much money.”) But some went for sheer fun; for huge and silly artworks, for preposterous costumes and excellent music; and for dancing like mad. The parties became events one needed to attend; a sort of proof one was a fashionable person who went where the “in crowd” goes.

However a playa, as a dry lake bed, may, when the climate reverts to a wet phase, revert to being a lake. If it so much as starts this process, the pavement-like surface reverts to mud, which slows the party down. This was a known hazard of the “Burning Man” celebration. Here is a picture of the situation in 2014:

If such a damper could happen before, it cannot be called “unprecedented” if it happens again. In fact, as former-Hurricane Hilary had brought so much moisture north, and dumped it in the deserts, it followed that the so-called “monsoon” would have more moisture to work with, when it came to building thunderstorms. One might have even forecast a greater than average “probability” that the Burning Man would be afflicted by a damper, and even a swamp.

Which is what happened.

My granddaughter could likely find better pictures, but the above is from a decent post about the debacle, found here:

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/burning-man-2023-descends-into-chaos-after-rains-leave-73000-campers-stranded-2276495/

The media went wild over the prospect of doom and gloom. Just think! 73,000 people stuck in the mud, miles from safety! Surely this was a Global Warming disaster! To their apparent disappointment, the media only could report a single person died, (when they stepped in front of a bus). There was nothing to report in the way of starving and thirsty people, miles from food and water, resorting to desperate deeds. In fact there was little negativity at all. But there was also very little reporting of the positive way people actually responded to the challenge.

I did a bit of digging, and to me it seemed the situation was an example of the American selfishness going “Yippee”, but being smacked in the nose by a rolled-up newspaper, whereupon an unexpected resourcefulness and self-reliance appeared, and things worked out better than any could have expected. In fact many delighted in the challenges, and some even felt the party was improved by mud.

Undoubtedly the situation involved a degree of danger. Initially even Fraudulent Biden was alerted to the potential of a national disaster. But there was no disaster. I find this a little bit wonderful. I like to hear the tales of individuals who disentangle and extract themselves from disasters, but this was not a few individuals. This was 73,000. It was as if the Titantic sunk and everyone survived.

Surely there is a tale here that would be good to be told, but the media does not want to tell it. They cannot free themselves from pacing like the tiger in its cage. They can see only one response, when those who “party hearty” get in trouble, and that is to bring back the drill sergeant. The government must step in and clout its discipline left and right. That is the only way the 73,000 can be saved. So, you can imagine how offended such a government is, when the 73,000 can’t be bothered filling out the applications for government assistance, and simply save themselves.

History seldom shows such escapes from the tiresome to-and-fro pacing of the tiger. For one sad example, when German faith was shattered by their defeat in World War One, their society fell into despair, deep debt, depression, hyperinflation that wiped out lifetime’s savings, and an abandonment of hope that led to the faithless immorality enacted on the stages of Berlin, (where part of one stripper’s grossly pornographic act was to publicly inject herself with heroin). Yet this decadent backlash only prompted the opposite backlash of Hitler’s extreme discipline, an insanity worse than the worst seen on the sick stages of Berlin. The tiger paced from insanity to insanity, from boot-camp to shore-leave to boot-camp, without escape. There were the ninety-seven bad ideas without ever the three good ones. What made the “Burning Man” different? How did they avoid repeating history?

Witnessing this, I again felt something was missing in my vocabulary. My mind went back to my misspent youth, when I would have been in a hurry to be “in with the in-crowd”, and to say, “I go where the in-crowd goes.” I wanted “to be a nonconformist like everyone else.” It is in many ways embarrassing to look back at old diaries and see what a copy-cat I was. However, after too long working the dullness of a Real Job, I wanted to cut loose and be free. (To be honest, sometimes “too long” was one day.)

Now that I’m a tiresome old coot, I tend to skim through the artworks on display at an event like the Burning Man, and silently check off the copy-cats. For example, there are only so many ways to portray sad polar bears regarding burning oil rigs, before the politically-correct sameness overwhelms the best surrealist efforts, and the revolution seems less than revolutionary. In fact to be truly revolutionary might gain a disapproving glance at “Burning Man”, for it might portray Polar Bears savagely killing and devouring cute baby seals, or oil rigs saving millions from freezing and starving.

However the spirit of “Burning Man” is largely accepting of any and all, and even so-called right wing conformists are welcome, as long as they don’t mind it if they never get central stage.

One thing I noticed about conformists was that they want to look like they are not conforming. They like the idea of being first, at the forefront, and revolutionary, but under examination much of what they do is not new; it is merely opposite. If short hair is in fashion they move towards longer hair, and if long hair is in fashion they move towards shorter hair.

When young I was forced into seeing the absurdity of fashion for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was a year younger than my classmates, and still a boy as they all became deranged teenyboppers. In my eyes they went mad, as they abruptly didn’t want to go fishing. They developed an aversion to mud when I still wallowed.

The second reason was due a family downfall, and the fact that we became poor and my mother had to revert to Great Depression strategies to get by, and this included hand-me-down clothes. Patches were not in fashion back then, nor were pants so worn that once a month I suffered the indignity of having the seat split right down the fanny-crack. It has been over forty years since I have suffered such embarrassment, but back then it’s regularity made it hard to be fashionable.

One tends to lose interest in a game one has no hope of ever winning, and for me this seemed true of the fashion game. I suppose I gravitated in the direction of being a slob. However back then there was something called “the dress code” which kept one from slipping too far from conformity.

Some “dress code” rules made no sense to me; blue jeans were not allowed while “school pants” were allowed, even when the “school pants” had patches and the blue jeans had none. However, for the most part the parameters of fashion were a given I didn’t question, even when I ridiculed them. One could poke fun at the parameters without actually stepping over the line. (“Mad” magazine was good at this.)

To a certain degree fashion was ludicrous, and appeared to have little connection with Truth. I saw this one winter when my family was at its poorest, and I was hunching about in a fashionable but threadbare coat shivering, and then my mother did some wheeling and dealing at a place called “The Children’s Exchange” and traded in three old coats for a single old coat I absolutely adored. It was a couple sizes too large, and utterly out of style, but well designed. Called a “Mighty Max”, it related to a simple truth. The truth was: It was winter and I was cold. But as soon as I put my Mighty Max on I wasn’t cold anymore. It was like being inside a warm pillow, or being hugged, and felt so good I could easily say to hell with fashion.

The fact that fashion was ludicrous was to a degree common knowledge, even to the degree that “status symbol” was a commonly used phrase, employed to poke fun at certain things, yet at the same time it could not be denied that some fashions simply attracted people. For example, one fashion of that time made cars heavier, more expensive, and supplied little aerodynamic lift, and yet there was something undeniable “cool” about cars with fins, so the fins got larger and larger for a while.

It is a bit of a sidetrack, but the fashion of big, bulky cars seems a typical example of the American “yippee” experience heading off through mingled greed and a spirit of fun towards the inevitable whack across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. The whack took the form of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the resultant Arab Oil Embargo. Some of the lumbering American cars got as little as five miles per gallon, (and included a new trickery called “planned obsolescence”), while Japanese cars got over twenty miles a gallon and were wonderfully durable. As the price of gasoline doubled the American automobile industry crashed into deep trouble, and greedy people abruptly found themselves with empty pockets, and there was a fair amount of rending garments and gnashing of teeth, and 97 bad ideas for every 3 good ones. But…

…But in the end the American auto-industry came bouncing back. Somewhere in the background, behind all the frenzy and hysteria, the common sense of mechanics, engineers and scientists quietly faced the Truth, and Truth provided answers.

What I lack-vocabulary-for is words that describe the capacity Truth has to provide an escape for people who have landed themselves in trouble. Humanity usually has no one but itself to blame for the messes it gets itself into, and the blame-game only furthers the mess. The rich justify their greed as the poor justify their envy, and the situation tends to spiral downwards, unless the escape appears like mercy from the blue.

This mercy always comes as something as a surprise to those who have turned away from Truth, and accept the pessimistic cynicism that surrounds being “given to sin.” Yet over and over history demonstrates Dark Ages giving way to a Renaissance. What is the difference in thought that separates darkness from such dawning of light?

In my mind the difference is perhaps illustrated by a quick comparison of Paul Ehrlich and Norman Borlaug in the year 1970.

Paul grew up in a sterile suburb while Norman grew up on a working farm. Paul’s father was a shirt salesman, skilled at making people buy what they often didn’t need, while Norman’s father, as a farmer, produced a necessity. Paul went to college and studied obscure butterflies, while Norman studied how to continue a process that mankind had followed for a thousand generations: Choosing the best seeds to plant for the next year’s crops. (Neither corn nor wheat, as they now grow, exist in nature, and both involve seed-selections other than natural selection.) Paul’s study of butterflies attracted few investors, and he needed to grovel for funding and grants, while Norman’s study bore immediate results, and not only attracted investors by increasing crops, but attracted conservationists by making it less necessary to chop down wilderness to increase farmland, because old farmland became more productive.

At this point it might seem Paul was destined to be poor and Norman to be rich, but Paul was interested in fame and fortune more than butterflies, while Norman was interested in improving the productivity of crops, and only cared for fame and fortune when it involved getting funding to further his study.

At this point Paul, perhaps using salesman-charm learned from his father, pulled off a remarkable career-switch. He switched from butterflies to being a prophet of doom and gloom. For some reason he had the charisma to make pessimism exciting, and abruptly made very good money basically stating most of mankind was going to starve while choking in its own pollution, within twenty years. He appeared on the most popular late night TV show of those times (Johnie Carson) roughly twenty times, and likely wasn’t asked once about butterflies.

Meanwhile Norman was making sure most of mankind stayed fed. As Paul appeared on Johnie Carson and enchanted the public with what was tantamount to a scientific-sounding sensationalism, (sort of like a good teller-of-ghost-stories by a campfire), Norman was at the center of the “Green Revolution”. The very nations Paul stated were hopeless became self-sustaining and even exported food.

At this point one discerns a difference, and draws a distinction. Even if one gives Paul the benefit of the doubt and states he was warning people of a worst-case-scenario, what he proposed seems brutal for a man once enamored by butterflies. He proposed foreign aid be cut off to “hopeless” countries, and that their people be “allowed” to starve. He proposed the males of India and Pakistan be castrated, to prevent population growth. He proposed that, even in the wealthy west, people who chose to have large families be penalized, even if their children were well-fed, happy, and well-educated. He himself chose to have a single child, but then did not chose to be castrated. (He chose a vasectomy, I suppose so he could continue enjoy sex, without the inherent responsibility.) And he made this behavior pay, even to a point where a University sought him out, as a “famous person”, and offered him a cushy position which had nothing to do with butterflies, (which he knew a thing nor two about), but rather about “sustainability”, (even though time proved he was an ignoramus on the subject).

Meanwhile Norman was so consumed by his work that, when his wife informed him that he had won a Noble Peace prize in 1970, he thought she was joking and went on with his work.

And how about me, in 1970? Who did I hear about? Sadly, Paul got all the press, and Norman little. I was so convinced we would run out of oil by 1980 that I changed my life in accordance, and even convinced my mother to invest in solar panels. (In my own defense, it was to heat hot water, which makes far more sense than using solar panels to generate electricity. I think something like 90% of Israel now uses solar power to heat their water.)

Then, of course, we did not run out of oil in 1980, and I felt like I had been a fool. The changes I had made to my life were changes that I needed to reverse, and, because admitting I am wrong is not easy for me, reversing course was not an easy process. But Truth demanded I do it, so I did it.

Did Paul do it? Did he set a good example and make my life easier by admitting his gifts as a prophet were nil? Paul was so wrong that he qualified as a false prophet, and in ancient Israel he would have been led to the edge of town and stoned to death, but fortunately he was in America, and all you get here is a rolled up newspaper whacked across your nose.

What truly amazed me most was that Paul refused to admit he was wrong. How was that even possible? He predicted a billion would have starved by 1990, and worse. None of it happened. How can a person be so wrong and not admit it?

He had various excuses, which basically boiled down to “My ideas are right, but it is taking longer than I thought for them to manifest.” Meanwhile he kept his position as a famous person at his university, and continued to make decent money giving talks as a famous person.

To me it looked like he was stuck on stupid. I was reminded of a line in a hit song of those times, “Every form of refuge has its price.” If he had stayed with his study of butterflies he would have been like a honorable starving artist, but he blundered into a cozy situation and became addicted to it. Dishonorable. (But I notice that, in his old age, he has returned to studying butterflies.) (But not for profit.) But back at that time Paul seemed to me like a sort of sell-out. His dumb ideas had made a mess of my life, and I had suffered through following his bad advice, but he was too weak to suffer, and instead stayed cozy. He was living the good life as I endured The School Of Hard Knocks. I suppose some envy was involved, but he lost any respect I had for him.

But how about Norman? Did I switch sides, and become a follower of Norman? No, because I never heard of Norman, despite the fact he’d won the Noble Peace Prize. The media didn’t salivate over him the way it did over Paul. There was little sensationalism involved in cross-breeding strains of wheat, and yet Norman may have quite literally saved a billion people from starving to death. That should generate a sensationalist headline or two, but the media prefers a Paul, saying a billion would die. And that is the difference.

I brought up Paul and Normon because they exemplify the difference between dishonor and honor, between being “given to sin” and being “given to Truth,” and between being basically harmful and being basically helpful. It boils down to difference between lies and the Truth.

Thinking about this difference is no small matter. It currently involves the whole world. World War Three (so far) is occurring on an intellectual level, and involves the differences which I’ve brought up, sort of as a sub-topic while discussing droughts and floods in the American Southwest. But this “difference” can’t be dismissed as a mere sub-topic when it infuses, invades and in some ways poisons even topics as innocent as talking about the weather in the American Southwest.

When I began this post I thought it would consist of a pithy comment about how some sensationalism had been refuted by the “mega-drought” becoming a “mega-flood”, but the post, (and my life), have not gone as I intended. Events have occurred which give one pause. Such pauses tend to elongate my posts. My posts become repositories of my thought, as I am forced to stop and think. Hopefully readers will have forgiven me as this post became long winded, but there is much to think about.

I also am arrogant enough to think some ideas in this post are worth sharing, and, though I am far from finished thinking-about-things, now seems a good time to cut this post short and tie up lose ends.

At one point I describe my granddaughter as a nine-year-old and another as a ten-year-old. This is not an inaccuracy, but rather is evidence of how long it has taken me to write this post. This post was started as snows started to melt, and now they are starting to fall again in the mountains of the American Southwest. The “monsoon” (or “monseen”) has past, and we now watch the winter systems.

If you are rooting for a mega-drought, you will be disappointed to learn a weak low did manage to kick some significant moisture into southern California.

This rain approached 3 inches in some locals. In most areas it was less. However the sensationalist media reported it as “once every thousand year rains.” People seemingly said, “Ho hum”, and went about their business, as the media showed flooding in low places,and rains moved from California to Arizona.

Why does the media insist on making such a big deal of what is a very wet day, but not really that great a problem? Are they stuck on stupid?

This immediately embarks my mind on two long-winded sidetracks, right when I stated I was going to cut this long post short. In a nutshell they would describe:

1.) How people get trapped by a situation they find cozy, and learn that “every form of refuge has its price.” It is up to the individual to decide if the price is worth paying.

2.) How such a trap can become an addiction which compromises ideals, and creates a hypocrisy which mingles lies with Truth, until the worsening dependence results in morality so muddied people don’t know what Truth is any more. Describing this would lead to further sidetracking, and involve many pages describing how a perverted form of Islam came to form an unholy alliance with communism, based upon the legitimacy of lying.

(Hint: The Byzantine’s were so corrupt and so cruel that, in specific situations involving imprisonment and torture, Islam allowed lying, however this narrow window, basically an exception-to-the-rule, has been expanded grotesquely into what seems to be a general strategy, making the word of some Mohammedans worthless; if their lying is allowed their treaties are worthless. However accepting deceit as a political strategy has allowed their worst to ally with communists, even when communists are mistreating Mohammedans.) (I think both sides are well aware their alliance is an expediency, and that as soon as they are done exterminating everyone else they will turn on each other.)

I was struck by an awful irony, for, it was while contemplating the fact 73,000 escaped calamity at the “Burning Man” festival, other young people, singing and dancing and rejoicing at another festival, were utterly unaware of another calamity approaching them in para-gliders. Though many escaped the atrocities enacted by Hamas, many did not. The vileness was so pronounced that the “difference” gouges the page and obliterates the paper; to even mention “hitting a dog on its snout with a rolled up newspaper” seems wrong.

However the same principles apply, albeit in a warlike setting. Humanity creates a problem that demands a response, and one prays for leaders like Churchill, able to weed through the 97 bad responses for the 3 good ones.

Finding the three good responses is not possible if one uses cancel culture to disallow second opinions. Instead one stays stuck on stupid, and something about such stagnation gnaws away at the human spirit. When solutions based on Truth are prevented, bad festers in the manner hatred festered in Gaza, until, like a boil, the pus bursts forth, at which point the headache and discouragement of psychological warfare becomes the horror of actual, physical wars and genocides.

The founders of the United States were not unaware of the evil mankind is capable of, and it was to avoid that evil that the American Constitution was devised to prevent any one person gaining the power to silence others. Freedom of Speech was vital, and resulted in amazing progress. To cancel Freedom of Speech is to cancel progress, which makes it absurd that those who are most interested in censorship call themselves “progressive.”

The problems of the progressive movement are that progressiveness was one of 97 bad ideas that sprang out of a crisis the world faced 175 years ago. At that time the agrarian system was facing challenges, and people were going hungry due to the potato famine and other woes, but Truth provided answers, one of which involved the start of the industrial revolution, which involved home industry being replaced by factories, people moving to cities, and eventually new crises. This became a general upheaval all over Europe, called the generic term “The revolution of 1848”, though in fact it involved many different situations in many different places, motivating all sorts of deep thinking and attempts to find Truth. This is a continual process, in essence a revolution which has continued to this day, except for one particular stagnation that refused to change. That is communism, which calls itself a revolution, though I don’t see how, considering they’ve gone 175 years without changing.

How can they prevent change? This is how: They call changing a “counterrevolution”, and do everything possible to prevent it from occurring, including lying. They call any idea that differs from their own a weed they must remove from their garden, but their gardens are barren, and are proof that the worst weed of all is communism itself. They are the antithesis of progress, for, I repeat, by calling any who differ a “counterrevolution” they have gone 175 years stuck on stupid, and are the epitome of sameness, and are about as opposed to revolution as you can get. Revolutionary? One does not change things for the better simply by wearing a Che Guevara hat; that is merely a fashion and an example of a tiger pacing in a cage. Nor does one change things for the better by being a so-called militant, and, (though praised by propaganda in the mainstream media that calls you “a peaceful protester”), revealing your true colors by burning the storefronts of hard working entrepreneurs, attacking the police that protect you, or even paragliding into “raves” to commit atrocities. Such behavior only proves one is an useful idiot foolish enough to serve as cannon fodder for equally idiotic people who are older and a few brain-cells wiser; wise enough to work behind the scenes where they won’t get shot, or won’t get shot until things really get out of hand and they face what Nicolae Ceaușescu faced on Christmas 1989.

In conclusion, one does not change things for the better, in any way, shape or form, by warping or denying the Truth.

The founders of the United States wrote its constitution based on the premise people respected Truth and would not lie. However communism extols lying. Therefore a communist can place their hand on the Bible and pledge to uphold the constitution of the United States, and their word means nothing. Their intent, if true communists, may be to destroy the United States, and yet they can say with dewy eyes how they respect the Founding Fathers, and also the Father of all, which is Truth. Afterwards they can laugh up their sleeves, “Heh, heh, heh! What suckers and chumps these losers all are!”

History seems to show us that, whatever short term gains such scoundrels may gain by denying Truth, in the long term the result is downfall. Sometimes it is merely the downfall of that particular individual, a Macbeth at his tragic end, but other times it involves the downfall of entire empires. No matter what glories of God they may have shone with in their past, the rot of corruption can crumble their knees, and they fall. The United States is not above such an end. Past glories do not guarantee a future that is spared being ignoble.

History also shows such downfalls do not create a worldwide Dark Age, for if Truth is suppressed in one place another place benefits from the first place’s insistence upon staying stuck on stupid, for the second place allows Truth to lead them, and they spring up as a surprising new power in the world. In fact our very word “renaissance” is historically closely associated with the final downfall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In like manner, the fall of the United States can’t make Truth be untrue. Truth will simply burst forth someplace the power-mongering politicians never suspected it would. As they suspiciously regard Hungary, Poland, and India as hotbeds of counterrevolutionary dogma (IE: Truth) the next center of a new nation which astonishes the world might be Window Rock, Arizona.

Personally I hope I don’t live to see the downfall of the United States, although the behavior of many politicians in Washington D.C. does reek with a disgraceful, ignoble stench. To call them “The Swamp” is apt. They are shameful, but my hope is that this merely represents the entire nation getting whacked in the nose by a rolled up newspaper, after going “Yippie” too long (in many ways, but don’t ask me to go there, for I am concluding this post.) My further hope is that my nation retains its capacity to utilize Liberty and seek out the three good solutions from the ninety-seven less-good suggestions.

I’m still waiting.

The agony I feel is shared by fellow Americans, and was expressed so well by an unknown who called himself “Oliver Anthony” that his YouTube post became an overnight sensation. After two days it was well past a million “views” on YouTube, and past six million a few days later. People made a big deal of these numbers, and the people who like to think they control Truth because they attempt to control the media (and Free Speech) were wonderfully disconcerted, for they had not given this young man permission to speak.

The people perturbed by six million views can only be more perturbed by the fact that after four months this low-budget production now has over a hundred million views. (To be precise, 105,602,279 at 11:30 PM EST on December 23, 2023.)

Admittedly such a song is largely heart, and, while pointing out the head-oriented reality of certain problems, offers little in the way of solutions. However it does express a lack of faith in the solutions offered by “rich men north of Richmond”. (IE: Politicians in “The Swamp” of Washington D.C.). In essence it states the ordinary person is aware the liars are lying, and it is causing them anguish.

Although I do love music and think the power of the heart is superior to the power of the head, I am dissatisfied with merely moaning and groaning about the idiocy of the “progressives”. I want to meet them on the low level of intellect, and clash horns like the goats they resemble. (Meaning no offense to my goat Lydia).

However the liars increasingly seem to avoid any actual intellectual discussions. Why not? Because that might allow Free Speech, which might allow a “counterrevolution”, which they dread. This proves they are afraid of Truth. Why? Because they are addicts. They would sell their grandmother’s false teeth for their next fix, but they are not addicted to heroin, but rather power and all its perks. They so enjoy the cushy privilege which power has seduced them with that they fawn and bleat and bow to a king other than the King who is called Truth.

Over and over this has led to the fall of great empires originally uplifted by Truth. The fall can be prolonged agony; the fall of the Byzantine empire saw the rise of the Ottomans, and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but after a time the Ottomans too suffered the increasing rot of corruption until they were called “The sick old man of Europe” and were nearly wiped from the map, at the end of World War One. Only “The Young Turks” saved them from becoming a people with no nation, (like the Kurds). And in the American southwest the charcoal in the ruins of the Hohokan city of “Snaketown” in the year 1100 suggest how the mighty can fall even here.

And so it goes, and an individual feels small and ineffectual in the face of such prolonged downfalls. What can a lone man do?

Stand by the Truth. We may be small, mere motes of dust in the sunlight of millenniums, but it is not our job to be the Truth in its entirety. Truth can take care of itself. We need to take care to be truthful in the small spaces allotted to us, and that is enough. Maybe we will see our small efforts in some backwater had the power of a pebble to start an avalanche, and simply by cross-breeding strains of wheat on farms, far from the mainstream, we will start a “Green Revolution” and save a billion lives, or maybe not. In any case, it is not the individual who actually saves the billion lives. It is the compassionate side of Truth.

In the darkest winter night
Look for unexpected Light.

Merry Christmas!

MORE WILDFIRE SMOKE—UNANSWERED QUESTIONS—

A plume of Canadian wildfire smoke has come south again, and has been afflicting cities as far south as Saint Louis in the middle of the United States. Many of these fires have been occurring in Ontario, which was spared the earlier fires. The southern ones have been handled well, apparently, by the fire fighters, but in northern areas, to some degree in uninhabited taiga, hard-to-reach fires are burning out of control.

The first thing investigators do, in the case of such fires, is to determine what caused each fire to start. Oddly, the media has no interest in how fires started. They already have their answer: Global Warming; AKA Climate Change.

The Canadian media then proceeded to the next step, which is to figure out how to hush the people who want to investigate how the fires actually started, and why there are so many, and why they are apparently hotter-burning. Formerly such investigation was done by the press, but now the media increasingly are but paid spokespeople. Of who? I surmise this: Of powers who like to remain in the background.

In any case, the Canadian media produced a remarkable news show, telling the Canadian Public how they were to handle “disinformation” about the cause of wildfires. And for an “authority” they had the audacity to invite Michael Mann on as a so-called expert.

In case you don’t know, Michael Mann created the “hockey stick” graph which climate Alarmists loved and which some Alarmists use to this day, but which swiftly, years ago, was proven to have been created from incomplete data, and at times the data from a single tree, and to have ignored much other data. The science behind the “hockey stick” was so atrocious not even the IPCC would use the graph in its next report.

Canadians should dislike Mann for this alone. Think of it: He gave hockey sticks a bad name!

Meanwhile Canada produced an older and wiser scientist by the name of Dr. Tim Ball. He studied geology geography, but became interested in the recent past, and what eventually was called “historical climatology”. He had a Canadian’s concern regarding how geology geography wipes Canada off the map, in an ice age, and did a very careful and meticulous study of the northern part of Canada, which formerly was called Rupert’s Land. He examined every record he could find, including the records of the Hudson Bay Company going back centuries. He spent twenty-five years at the University of Winnipeg, honing his expertise, and was such a wealth of information that he in some ways represents an opposite to Michael Mann, who could be so flippant as to base his research on a single tree. Perhaps it was inevitable they eventually collided.

Dr. Tim Ball saw problems with the “hockey stick” right away, and right away he was slandered as being a “denier”. Michael Mann was notorious for his hot-headed slander, and said things about how he was a “climatologist” while Dr. Ball was only a “geographer.” Dr. Ball’s repartee was that, in terms of telling the truth, Michael Mann should not be in Penn State but should be in the State Pen.

Michael Mann clutched his bosom and staggered about with the back of one hand on his forehead, so devastated by Tim’s comment that the only recourse possible was to silence the Canadian with the crushing expense of “Lawfare”. The fatcat American, with copious funds coming from mysterious sources, conducted a prolonged lawsuit against a Canadian with limited funds. And the result was?

Dr. Tim Ball kicked Michael Mann’s butt.

Think of that, as this sad specimen of a scientist appears on Canadian TV to explain to Canadians why they shouldn’t wonder how so many fires got set all at once, for such inquiring is “disinformation”, because “the science is settled”, and we already know what set the fires: Global Warming, AKA Climate Change.

Don’t be scared to watch this. Initially I gritted my teeth and did not want to watch at all, but, if you know even a little about the various causes of wildfires, and what makes some worse than others, Michael Mann comes across as such a complete goober it is as if you dreaded a lion and instead faced a kitten (or perhaps a toothless rat.)

As is becoming all to common, the media is failing to inquire in the manner the press is suppose to inquire. The papers and networks are bankrupt, and sell their souls to the highest bidder. The owners are so poor they can barely afford their private jets, and have no extra money left to pay a reporter to go out to the fires and be “on the scene”. Therefore, as I tried to investigate the recent smoke using the media, I kept noticing ways they save money. (For example, to show a smokey city on June 27 Yahoo used a photograph from June 8.)

Don’t get me wrong. I know it is uncomfortable to put up with such smog, though it will all be rinsed away by the blooming thundershowers of the next weather pattern, over the next three days. I myself ruined my lungs with cigarettes, and don’t like days when air quality is low. However that has nothing to do with what is actually causing the air quality to be low; IE: What started the fires?

There is something sublimely pathetic about blaming Global Warming for the fires. It defies the common sense that knows that in the past forests have survived prolonged droughts without burning down, because no fires were started. Something started the fires, even if drought made the situation ripe forconflagration. Can’t we focus our minds, and blame Mrs. O’leary’s Cow?

Apparently modern reporters are more interested in parroting the propaganda of whoever it is who is paying for the bilge they produce, than in using the gray matter God gifted them with between their ears. Some of the stuff written indicates a failure to utilize even the most basic research. I read one report suggesting we should wear masks again to avoid breathing poisonous particles “such as carbon monoxide”. Where was the editor? Anyone with a slight education knows carbon monoxide is a gas, and can’t be stopped by a mask.

Apparently one plume of smoke avoided being washed down to earth, and made it across the Atlantic to Europe, and there the story is the same. “Global warming has caused this terrible event.”

No, wildfires caused this event. And what caused those fires to start?

Until we know what started the fires, any conspiracy theory is alive and well. Did the Chinese float over another balloon, shooting down laser beams? Did Globalist billionaires hire float planes with arsonists to light fires by northern lakes?

Well, let’s go look. Let’s see if the fires only started by lakes which float planes can reach. Or did they start in odd places where lightning is unlikely to strike, far from where cars or float planes can reach, but, at the site the fire started, rock was strangely melted, as if by a laser beam. What’s the harm of looking?

I confess I personally suspect arson is involved. Why?

Well, first, we had a bad drought here last summer. Look back a year in my posts and you’ll see I was worried. But, thank God, no fire got going on a windy day. This proves that Global Warming AKA Climate Change doesn’t incinerate the suburbs of Boston. Why should it prefer Canada?

Second, innocent people do not go to great lengths to keep you from looking at where the fires started.

Third, in the past there have been equally dry and hot northern springs and summers, but not so many fires. What is causing more to spring up?

Fourth, the powers funding the parrot media, and the parrot scientists such as Michael Mann, have been all too willing to resort to falsehood in the past, in order to make their master’s desire appear like it is inevitable, (and therefore the Truth, when it is not the Truth.) Therefore it has become difficult, if not impossible, to trust the parrots at all. They seem capable of disgusting duplicity. Therefore I do not put it past them to go so far as to start all these fires, hoping to scare the public into believing Global Warming is a real threat.

Hopefully I’m wrong, but until the fires are investigated, (and the government has the guts to release the investigation’s results), how can I know if I am wrong?

What say you?

THE STRESS OF AVOIDING STRESS; PART ONE

While being rolled down a hospital corridor in a gurney on a Thursday evening early last February, it occurred to me that sometimes avoiding stress can be a stress in and of itself.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and would try not to think of my tongue. The more I tried not to think of my tongue, the more I noticed it. The more I tried to position my tongue in a place where I wouldn’t feel it, the more I felt it. It would just about drive me mad, and it took a supreme act of distraction to break my mind free.

The same sort of thing can happen at my Childcare, when I get some children’s-song stuck in my head: “Good morning! Good morning! And how do you do? Good morning! Good morning! I’m fine. How are you?” To an advanced poet of vast learning like myself, having such drivel repeating over and over and over again in my brain blotched my sense of dignity. It required a serious antidote. Whisky got expensive, so I tended to resort to a sort of spider-solitaire on my computer that allowed one to reverse moves when losing became apparent, and to attempt a different course of action, and to eventually “win” the game, though on a few occasions I’d have to back up and try over again a hundred times, and “winning” took over a week. The intense concentration involved got my mind off everything. I called it “zoning out” and it had its benefits, but my wife could become exasperated when I “zoned out” too much. Eventually I decided “zoning out” had the traits of an addiction, and was as bad as whisky, and I erased the game from my computer.

Ever since I’ve been in a sort of withdrawal. I work too much. I can’t get my mind off what needs to be done next, and on a farm, especially an old rundown farm, the work is endless. A thing I call “the list” gets stuck in my head, like a song. The struggle then becomes to avoid burnout.

That is the point when “relax” starts to appear on “the list”. However, it is like writing down, “Don’t think of your tongue.” You can’t relax when you are uptight about relaxing.

This issue gets exacerbated by aging. On one hand you can’t work as fast, while on the other you are running out of time. When younger, “running out of time” meant I’d work faster, but when you get older there is no such thing as “faster”. When younger I would drive myself and chain smoke, but now I’m paying the price for all the smoking I did when younger. Due to compromised lungs, it takes little to make me huff-and-puff, and I’m forced to pause. I don’t want to sit down though. Another attribute of aging is that limbs stiffen up swiftly, and if you sit down, you may find it hard to get up again. Therefore, the trick is to “pace yourself”, and to simply stand and wait until you catch your breath, and then work until the huffing-and-puffing begins again. In other words, it is still possible to drive yourself. You’re just a lot slower about it. What this means is that, even when it looks like you are relaxing, you are not.

The thing you have to do, as you reach-your-limit at a point where less work is accomplished, is to do a wonderful thing called “delegate”. I always found delegating hard to do, as I am a do-it-yourself type of person. I found it hard to ask for help, (or even to ask girls to dance, many years ago.) (The only “asking” I managed when young was the now nearly-forgotten art of hitchhiking.) However, over the years I slowly learned how to ask for help, and to reward the good people who helped me, until (with much help from my wife) I became a small businessman with an actual “staff” of helpers.

But then a madness hit our nation, which is in some ways a fierce war everyone is pretending isn’t happening. I see it as a war between Globalists and those who believe in what the United States stands for.

If one bothers to read the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the United States is very clear about what it stands for. Globalists, not so much. But, as best as I can tell, Globalists feel there would be no war if there was only a single government, and even that there would be no disagreement, if there was only a single government. Preposterous, I think. It is like saying marriage wouldn’t have any arguments if there was only a single spouse. It might be intellectually true, but it is stupid all the same.

The stupidity of Globalism strikes me as similar to the stupidity of communism, which has brought great misery to beautiful people and beautiful lands, wherever it has been tried. I’ve studied those disasters, and I notice a great difference between the way the Founding Fathers of the United States and Communists regarded small businessmen like myself. Thomas Jefferson stressed the importance of what he called “independent small farmers and artisans”, while communists loathe such people and deem them a “counter-revolutionary petite bourgeoise” which must be purged to make society healthy.

To me it has seemed that the ridiculous pandemonium called the “coronavirus” has in some ways been aimed at ruining small businesses (as well as small churches and small schools). Nothing about the “lock-downs” made the virus less lethal, but it did bankrupt many businesses (and prevent worship and learning.) The intent of the “lock-downs” increasingly seems malevolent, and people who say so out loud no longer sound so much like crazy people lost in conspiracy theories, (which may be why the censorship of such voices is increasingly desperate).

I like to think I am one of the “small, independent farmers and artisans” that Thomas Jefferson liked, and also one of the “Kulaks” whom Stalin despised. This blog describes one man’s view of enduring (and hopefully surviving) what seems like an effort to irradicate individual effort and replace it with a sort of “collective” mentality. One element of this attack seems to be aimed at making it harder for small businesses to find help.

One frightening attack on the supply of labor is the problem of Fentanyl. Even when the Coronavirus closed churches I was part of a small group which went right on meeting, (sort of under the radar), and the purpose of this group was to be a sort of AA for the addicted, and at one these meetings a young man told me a story that shocked me. He said he had to comfort his mother, because she was upset when she had to attend her first funeral of a classmate, and she, in the blindness of her grief, had moaned, “You don’t know what it is like when the person who has died is not an old-timer but instead is your own age.” He responded, “Mom, I do know what it feels like, for I’ve been to thirty-two funerals for people my age.” This opened my eyes to the fact we are midst an actual war, with our youth actually dying.

Another attack on the supply of labor was to offer coronavirus “benefits” which made it more lucrative to be unemployed than to work. I’m glad such seductions weren’t around when I was young and loved leisure, for I found it hard enough to push myself to work as it was; (asking for a job was as hard as asking a girl to dance.) I don’t blame any young person for taking the higher-paying “job”. Why should a young person work a job that pays $300/week when the government pays $600/week for sloth? In a sense the young were being bribed from the world of “small farmers and artisans” to join the “collective”, and the Swamp could afford such a non-productive strategy by simply printing money, with all the inflationary dangers that entailed.

In any case, right when I needed help, help was harder to find. Right when aging increased my limitations, and I could do less, I had to do more myself. My wife and I, on a regular basis, talked about simply closing our Childcare, but we couldn’t really afford to. Also, I felt like I was in a war, and closing my small business would be letting the bad guys win. I had the desire to go down fighting. And so, during the two years we’ve been fighting the coronavirus war, this blog has inadvertently been a recorded history of how free people respond to tyranny.

For me the response of free people has been to find a way to keep right on doing what free people do, in a way under the radar (and under the table) of new rules and regulations. If school is outlawed, homeschool. If church is outlawed, hold many “small groups”. If church suppers are outlawed, hold smaller suppers. If restaurants are closed, find a way to order special food and tip highly. If choir practice is banned, record an online choir of a hundred, separate, “socially distanced” voices, and use virtual technology to combine all the voices and blast a mighty chorus, bigger and better than before. (Some of these “virtual choirs” are utterly amazing, and also represent a spiritual form of counterattack.)

The war we are within is a bizzarre war. It is an invisible war. It is a war that small businesses like my own may be winning. The communist mentality never expected such a pushback. They expected that when they shut schools, I would close my Childcare. My militant counterattack was to tell them “Go f— yourself” and remain open, without masks or vaccination mandates. I was very warlike, but why? Because I was and am kind to small children. (And they are not.)

However, some do die in a war. It is what makes war be war. Though people sung “When Johnnie comes marching home again” as soldiers marched off to our last Civil War, every graveyard in New England attests to the fact many Johnnies never came marching home. Their bodies are not in the graveyard. Their bodies are buried far away. But monuments covered in lichen attest to their sacrifices. Not only the bad guys die, in a war.

Usually, it is the young who are the cannon fodder, but in this bizarre Civil War it may also be the old. I thought of this when, rather than protecting the elderly, New York’s Governor Cuomo imported coronavirus patients into elderly housing, even when Trump made hospital ships available. The infected victims did not need to enter assisted-living facilities. The elderly should have been protected, but Swamp did the exact opposite of what should have been done.

This stupid choice shortened the lives of tens of thousands of senior citizens who deserved better. Some of these elders may have been senile and might have had little wisdom left to offer, but even these deserved better than they got. Other elders had many years left to live and were as sharp as tacks yet were banned from even seeing their own family. Meanwhile the Swamp saved a lot of money, because treating such goodly elders in the kindly manner (which elders had worked long and hard to pay for [and had in fact earned]) cost the Swamp at least $100,000/year. If you have 10,000 elders die of the coronavirus you therefore have saved the Swamp a billion dollars. When money talks, compassion walks.

Money has never been able to talk to me in that manner. I grew up in a wealthy town and know how hollow the core of wealth can be, and how marrowless is the bone. Not that money is evil, but love of money is evil. It takes the “love of money” to think that killing 10,000 of our smartest citizens (and depriving them contact with their loved ones even as they die), results in any societal “good”. It only “makes” a billion dollars from murder. What could be eviler? What could be more an “act of war”?

It wasn’t merely New York that “accidentally” imported coronavirus into the very places which should have been most protected. Massachusetts made a billion, New Jersy made a billion, and you could go on from there. Call it genocide or senior-ocide, I call it disgusting and an act of war.

What a joke it is that, in such cases, rather than the young being cannon fodder, it is the old geezers like myself who may go down, in this idiotic war. But there have been days I confess I don’t get the joke anymore and fear I myself may become a casualty. I’ll be just one more closed small-business. Just like the little, nearby restaurant run by a grandmother. Another empty store-front, killed by the Swamp. I’ve read that 40% of all restaurants in New England have closed, to prevent the spread of a virus by using a strategy which scientists knew from the start wouldn’t work, as the virus kept right on spreading.

My hope is that, with so many restaurants closing, there must be a lot of waitresses who might be inclined to work at a place like mine. I’ve always liked waitresses because they work for less than minimum wage, with the expectation “tips” will make up the difference. They believe if they are kind others will be kind in return. That is so much nicer than communism, and indeed is more Christian than some Christians I know, though many waitresses profess to being Atheists or at least Agnostics. In any case, I do have hope.

But in the meantime, I have to work with a depleted staff though I’m getting too old to be working so hard. And I confess I may not have what it takes. I do like the idea of dying with my boots on, and if it happens, I figure I’ll just be a battlefield casualty. Just a statistic in this invisible war.

Winters are hard this far north, and the past one tested me a lot with frozen pipes and failing heating systems and gloppy, heavy snows I had to remove from driveways and fire-entrances. With January past and the maples feeling the first stirrings of sap, I felt I’d done a decent job, for an old geezer, and gave myself a pat on the back. As February began, I thought I had, at long last, arrived at a morning where I could sit back and write poetry. All was ordinary at first, until I went to use the toilet and noticed the water in the bowl was not clear, but gray. I questioned my wife, “Why is the water gray?” She said, “I don’t know, but the toilet made a funny sound.”

I was very annoyed, and griped, “What the heck did you do?” As if it was her fault. When I turned on the bathroom sink faucet the water shot out like a firehose and shifted from clear to jet black to clear to jet black again. Foolishly I repeated, “What did you do?”

As I headed to the cellar she got in my way, inquiring “Why must you always blame me?”

I gently removed her from my path, apologizing, and saying “Something’s gone wrong.”

In the basement I brushed the spiderwebs from the pressure dial, and saw it pegged out at 120 psi, when the system is supposed to run between 40 and 60 psi. I hurried to the circuit breaker and shut off the well-pump. Then I went upstairs and ran the faucets until the pressure resumed normal levels. I decided the black water was because the extreme pressure cleaned the inside of the pipes, for it stopped happening when the pressure dropped. Then I went down to the cellar to look at the pressure switch, and saw it was burned out. Fried. Lucky the house didn’t burn down. It had melted into an “open” position, so the well pump didn’t stop pumping, and the pressure kept rising and rising.

Fortunately, pressure switches are easy to replace. You basically disconnect a couple wires, screw out the old switch from the pipe, screw in a new switch, and reconnect the wires. You can call a plumber, who will charge you $360.00 to do a ten-minute job, replacing a $20.00 part. Or you can do it yourself. As much as I would have liked to “delegate” the job to a plumber, it seemed once again I should “do it myself.”

This was not the stress-free morning composing-a-sonnet I had planned, However, as “relax” was on “the list”, I relaxed driving twenty minutes to the hardware store to buy the $20.00-part, relaxed chatting with an old friend at the store, and then relaxed driving twenty minutes back.

There are worse things to be stuck with doing than driving through snowy New England woods. I kept the car radio off, to avoid disturbing news, and instead had a private talk with God, involving some intimate things which are nobody’s business, but some things I feel free to make public. Namely, “Why, Lord, do you make Your creation so beautiful, and winter woods so full of poetic images, and yet never give me time to write poems?”

Back in the cellar, though the PSI gauge read zero, I shut the valve on the pipe leading upstairs to keep water in the pipes from flowing down to the cellar. Only then did I remove the pressure gauge. The instant it was removed a jet of water spurted into my face, and I struggled to screw it back in, which stopped the spurting. Then I had to think how there could be pressure when the well was shut off and no water could flow from upstairs. Coffee time.

My wife looked at me hopefully as I emerged from the dirty old cellar, and her face registered the fact I looked a little like a drowned rat. She wisely said nothing, and I didn’t look at her, because even a hint of a smile at the corner of her lips might have set me off. (Not that I failed to see the humor in the situation. I just wasn’t ready to laugh.)

I slumped morosely by the woodstove and sadly glanced at my open notebook. Not so long ago I’d been starting a sonnet, and at that time could see the entire thing even as I began. It was loaded with internal rhymes, and I had all the rhymes at my fingertips, as well as the rhythm. It began:

Lord, put Your foot down. But just not on me.
I think it is best that You manifest
And halt this world's insanity. Set free
......

You’ll have to trust me. There was more. However, the sonnet now was like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. Coleridge saw the entire poem in a dream and arose to write it, but some bothersome interruption knocked at his front door, and when he extracted himself from the chitchat and returned to his writing, the vision was gone. Utterly. He couldn’t even pretend he could write another line. All we have is the fragment; a great start to a poem which is but a might-have-been. And the above is the start to a great sonnet which is but a might-have-been. Only in my case it was not an unwelcome visitor knocking at my door. It was a malfunctioning pressure valve, and water spurting in my face.

It is hard to concentrate on poetry when you get hit in the face by a jet of water. It is even harder when your wife can’t even use her kitchen sink. It should be obvious why I forgot the rhyme to “manifest.”

In any case, I did enjoy licking the wounds of irony. I’d asked the Almighty to put His foot down. I did request “not on me” but scripture states, “Those God loveth, He abuseth.” Therefore the foot apparently came down on me. Ha ha.

Irony didn’t solve anything. I took a deep breath and focused my mind onto the mundane. How could water spurt from pipes with no pressure? The pressure must come from uphill, where the well was. There was no way to stop water from running downhill, so I would have to devise some plug for the pipe when I removed the pressure switch. After considering how to make a quick plug, (whittling wood seemed like it would take too long), I asked my wife if she had a stub of a used candle. She provided one in a twinkling. I carved a plug of wax, and I headed downstairs to face getting water shot in my face a second time. Lots of water shot in my face, but the plug worked. Then I could work in leisure, but I knew that one final episode of getting water shot into my face lay ahead, when I removed the wax plug and put in the new pressure switch. Sobeit. I put in the new switch and my wife had a kitchen sink again. I was a wet rat crawling ashore, bedraggled and yet victorious.

However, I was seriously behind schedule. Not only did I have to rush off to work a shift at the Childcare, (because the staff has problems of their own, which I won’t go into), but also the forecast was for yet another storm of glop and freezing slush. I had to stock up the woodboxes at home, and also deal with my wife’s anti-Swamp activities.

Where the Swamp seems to want to ban people from visiting elders in old-age-homes, and to ban people from the schooling of their own children, my wife insists on “staying involved”. She is a grandmother who reads stories to grandchildren in Brazil, via computer magic, and who refuses to allow the family’s matriarch (her mother) to enter the hellish “retirement communities” the Swamp offers. And in this particular situation she didn’t want to face the fact the coming storm made travel seem inadvisable. By hook or krook, we were going drive to Maine for a flash-visit of three granddaughters. (A two-year-old and twins-aged-six-months.) But we couldn’t leave until after attending a middle-school-aged grandchild’s quarter-finals basketball game.

At the risk of sounding like a heartless cynic, at times it occurs to me that all this family-stuff does not help me write sonnets. Perhaps that is why many poets live alone. But I have to admit warm and fuzzy family-stuff is a counterattack, in the weird war we are midst. Therefore, I sometimes go along with her sentimental nonsense, figuring her feminine intuition is smarter than my masculine willpower. That is why I might be seen at a grandchild’s basketball game which barely resembles basketball, when I’d much rather be writing a sonnet which does resemble a sonnet.

However, there are times I must draw the line. Driving to Maine is a bad idea if you never arrive. I needed to heed the fine details of the forecast, even while preparing for the storm. But I had no time to sit at my computer to look at the details.

For an old geezer, driving to Maine or even attending a basketball game is stress. It was one more stressful thing on “the list” even though “avoid stress” was on the list. I found myself thinking it might be too much. I might fail to be as tough as I want to be. I might be a battlefield casualty.

My mind slumped into morbidity: Just as the above sonnet is unfinished, much that I have wanted to do in my life will never be done. Life is too short. But this is no different from what happened to my peers in the 1960’s and 1970’s when they became cannon fodder. In the Vietnam war, each young person who died sacrificed their “promise”. Each death was a promise unfulfilled. What might have been would never be. In like manner, the death of every old geezer in the current war is a half-century of wisdom lost, and its promise unfulfilled. War is hell.

As I had these morbid thoughts, I had no time to play my violins of self-pity and compose sorrowful sonnets. I had to gulp down some chili and hurry up and down the front steps, filling the wood boxes. Then I felt a burning in my chest.

I figured it was just heartburn, because I’d hurried to work after gulping chili. I think your suppose to siesta after chili. However, I was pushing myself, carrying a few more logs than was wise, and pulled an obscure muscle I’d never pulled before which must string between the chest and the middle of the back, and likely has to do with lifting shoulders to gasp for breath when the diaphragm isn’t enough. Yet it occurred to me it might be something other than heartburn and a pulled muscle. My heart might be quitting. And as I thought this I was bathed with sweat, which was likely due to collapsing in an armchair by a hot stove to catch my breath, yet such sweating also may be a symptom of a heart attack. Stress.

The stress-relieving thing to do in such a situation is to do what I did in California thirty-eight years ago: Drive to a hospital, explain that you are having chest pains, and have them run a quick ECG. (ElectroCardioGraph). Back in 1984 they’d tell you your heart was fine, and that the chest-pain was due to a binge, you moron, and your stomach was protesting the fact you had drunk something like two cases of beer in two days. In 1984 the diagnosis took thirty minutes and cost $110.00. But hospitals are different now, during this invisible war.

I have a unique perspective, when it comes to hospitals, for my father was a surgeon at the MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital) in Boston back in the 1940’s, 1950’s and early 1960’s, back when doctors actually ran the hospitals, and before lawyers and insurance companies ruined everything. Those were glory days, as antibiotics had just been discovered, people stopped dying of staff infections after operations, and people dying of things like syphilis and tuberculosis were learning they wouldn’t die after all. Doctors and nurses walked with a real spring in their step. (How far we have fallen.)

I figured I was probably being a hypochondriac, but I’ve known good fellows who died because they didn’t want to make a big fuss about why their chest hurt. So I figured I should make sure it wasn’t anything serious. I was 95% sure it was nothing, but 5% is stress, and I wanted to avoid stress. Of course there would be some stress because of the coronavirus nonsense. They might object to the fact I was not vaccinated. But what happened might be interesting. It might make a good blog post.

I put off deciding, choosing to instead go close down the Childcare, thinking maybe the chest pains would ebb and I could forget my worry, but, if anything, they grew sharper. I still was thinking it was a pulled muscle, but the worry was there. I then had to face the stress of telling my wife.

She wanted to call an ambulance and I said by the time an ambulance arrived we could already be at the hospital. She said she couldn’t do CPR while driving and I said she could do CPR on me as I drove. She said she’d drive. As she drove, she called ahead to the emergency entrance using her voice-activated car phone, and she answered a slew of questions including my date-of-birth, and then we continued our discussion alone as we drove through the darkness of late twilight.

I was attempting to remain calm and stress-free, saying I was 95% sure I was just being a worry wart, but, if the 5% was true, then, if I was about to die, a good wife would not want to have the last thing her husband heard be criticism. Criticism could exacerbate stress, which contributed to heart attacks, so likely the best thing was praise. I should be praised for remaining so calm when there was a 5% chance I was about to croak. And then we laughed, which is about the most stress-free thing there is.

We arrived at the emergency entrance, which seemed an unnaturally bright pool of yellow light in the darkness of evening, and I hopped out as my wife drove off to park the car. I walked in and introduced myself as the man who had called ahead with chest pains. The lady told me to put on a mask and asked me my date-of-birth and whether I’d been vaccinated. Obviously, the woman did not deserve to be called a nurse.

I have a unique perspective towards nursing, as my mother was a registered nurse at Children’s Hospital in Boston in the 1940’s, and at Brandais College in the mid-1960’s, and as a hospice nurse in the late-1960’s, and then an EMT in Maine in the late 1970’s, through the 1980’s, into the early 1990’s. My mom could remain cool in the face of blood, and boys in my boyhood neighborhood would go to her with a gory cut, because they knew their own mothers would freak-out and perhaps faint. My mom knew freaking and fainting wasn’t any good, so she would tend to the gore. (If I had a complaint as a child, it was that my mother was too cool and too detached and that she didn’t gush enough.)

The woman I was dealing with was not tending to me, the patient, but rather tending to the paperwork. It was likely a good thing I put on a mask, for it hid my expression, which was likely an odd mix between pity and sheer contempt.

For one thing, it took me about two hours of on-line research right at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to understand cheap masks were a dumb idea. As I recall, there were at least three peer-reviewed studies in the “New England Journal of Medicine”, and two more in the English journal “Lancet”, which stated ordinary masks were more or less useless when it came to preventing the spread of virus. At least one study ventured masks were harmful, because of problems other than the transmission of virus. In other words, “science”, as it was defined before the coronavirus, stated masks (other than expensive ones), were useless. However, “science” acquired a bizarre, new definition, once the war on Truth was declared.

In its new incarnation, “science” became whatever furthers a political goal. It doesn’t matter if the goal is low lusts, greed, and desires for power. Science must bow, must disregard its former affinity to Truth, and must be “politically correct”. In essence, science must agree to be false. It is for some “higher good.”

To me this claptrap is such a complete denial of the original definition of “science” that it cannot be borne. Science is supposed to be a study of Truth, just as poetry is a study of Truth. And, when I have studied history to seek examples of at least a single occasion when lies led to some “higher good”, what I see are examples of times such lies led to societal disasters. The ultimate lies were Lysenko’s, who had the distinction of precipitating terrible famines in both Russia and China, “for their own good.”

To put it mildly, I have thought using masks is a deed of rank stupidity for over two years now. Therefore, when I enter a hospital’s emergency entrance and a lady asks me to put a mask on it strikes me as a sure sign that she is ignorant. I pity her, because I know she is just doing her job, but her job is not a nurse’s, and she cannot claim to be one. She is in fact a bureaucrat in a white uniform.

I have an unspiritual inclination to rear back and give such people an uppercut to the snoot, but that would hardly help matters, even in an invisible war. Pity is better. And, as a man who runs a Childcare, I often watch small children struggle to put together simple puzzles, and know it is often better to allow them to figure things out for themselves. To be simply given an answer often involves no true learning, which may be why God, in His compassion, allows people to bungle along learning things. If people prefer falsehood to Truth for some queer reason, well, they will learn the hard way. Only if one, with all their might and main, seeks Truth midst all the fluff and balderdash, is one likely to see the Light.

I looked away from the bureaucrat clicking away at her keyboard to see if there was anyone else around. The news always makes it sound like hospitals are overcrowded with wheezing and gasping coronavirus patients, but this particular emergency entrance seemed downright serene, and understaffed. Even as I thought this a strong, young man dressed in white walked briskly around a corner and approached me. “Hi!” he said, “Are you the fellow with chest pains?” He held out a palm and we shook hands as I nodded, and then he continued, “My name is Zack and I’m your nurse. Follow me.”

As we walked further into the bright depths of the emergency entrance, I explained I was 95% sure I just pulled a muscle in my chest, and that I was just playing it safe, and Zack agreed it was better to be safe than sorry. I like agreeable people, and I took an immediate liking to him. We chattered away as if it was an everyday thing for me to strip down bare-chested and for him to start sticking small plastic sensors to various parts of my chest. For example, I stated there were a lot more sensors than there were in 1984, and he asked what happened in 1984, and I gave him the short version. When I mentioned the two cases of beer he laughed and stated that he had also learned two cases of beer in two days was not a wise idea, when he was younger.

My cellphone beeped and it was my wife texting. She said the hospital wouldn’t let her wait inside. She wondered if she should wait in the parking lot. I asked Zack how long the ECG would take, and he said besides the EKG there would be blood tests, and it would take at least an hour for the results to come in. I texted my wife it was going to take longer than I thought; over an hour; she texted back she’d wait in the parking lot until I had more news.

Zack clipped a thing onto my finger to measure my oxygen levels, and then stood back and regarded a computer display above the bed in satisfaction. It made efficient-sounding beeping noises, and besides a graph of my ECG had around ten other numbers. Then Zack hurried off, and swiftly returned, telling me the doctor said the EKG looked good, but that the doctor wanted to do other tests, including a cat scan. I asked how long it would take, and he said likely at least two hours, and maybe five. I texted my wife my ECG looked good, but there would be other tests, and she probably should wait at home. She sent an emoji of a relieved face.

Zack was swabbing the inside of my elbow, but rather than just drawing blood samples he was inserting an IV with a Y junction to allow saline in as well as to draw blood out. I asked why they had to do other tests if the ECG looked good, and Zack said an EKG wasn’t enough to prevent malpractice suits; if I had a heart attack in the next month the doctor could expect to have his socks sued off. Therefore, insurance companies required a whole slew of tests, to cover the doctor’s butts. I said it was all about money, and that lawyers and insurance companies were driving up prices, and Zack diplomatically shrugged.

From there we moved on and had a chat about why I said ECG and he said EKG. They mean the same thing, and I told him that as a writer I preferred English, and “cardio” began with a “C”. I wondered if EKG meant the machine was made in Germany, and Zack laughed. Then I asked him how long he’d been a nurse.

It turned out he’d worked eight years for a crew laying concrete foundations. The money was better than he made nursing, especially with all the cement-work overtime, but he was getting worn down. I told him cement work was rough on backs, and that I knew cement-workers who’d turned to Fentanyl to escape the pain. He adroitly avoided the subject of Fentanyl, but stated he indeed had worried about his back. I said nurses had to be careful not to hurt their backs as well; some patients could be pretty fat. Zack laughed and said this was true, but cement was heavier.

By this time I was all wired and tubed-up like a person at death’s door, and Zack hurried off to bring a couple blood samples to a lab, and a very tired-looking doctor came trudging in.

I’ll call him Dr. Robe because he struck me as being like a robot. He asked a long string of questions in a monotone yet hurried voice, as if he was asking them by rote and wasn’t interested in many of the answers. The questions seemed very much like the checklist of questions you have to answer on forms as you enter a doctor’s office, questions more aimed at malpractice lawyers than your health, questions that hold the echoes of some past court proceedings: “But did you inquire as to whether the patient was a pathological liar?”

Right off the bat Dr. Robe struck me as the sort of doctor my father would have railed should be disqualified. Doctors were not supposed to look so tired and bored and discouraged; they were supposed to radiate faith and hope and to activate the placebo-effect with their complete confidence. Their confidence was supposed to be reassuring and infectious; Dr. Robe looked infected by gloom; he had no spring in his step; he trudged.

I resisted the urge to rail at him as my father might have done, and instead prodded my slouching sense of pity. (Patients aren’t supposed to pity the doctors; it is supposed to be the other way around; but the weird war we’re within has things upside-down and backwards.)

It occurred to me it must be humiliating to be a doctor these days. Gone is the respect people once had. Where once doctors gave their opinions from a sort of pedestal, now they are told to keep their opinions to themselves. They receive orders from the Swamp, and if they beg to differ, they could lose their jobs. Rather than being treated like professionals they are treated like lackeys and flunkies. All their experience, all that they have learned over the years through actual contact with the hurting, all their success and failure, is disregarded, in favor of some Swamp commandment. Worst is the fact that the Swamp’s new definition of “science” is looking increasingly stupid, as it is confronted by its failures to be like true “science”, and to honor true Truth.

The Swamp is confronted by the failures of its “promises” to come true. Masks were supposed to stop-the-spread but failed. Social distancing was supposed to stop-the-spread but failed. Vaccines were supposed to stop-the-spread but failed. Those who trusted the Swamp, and complied, now can’t help but to increasingly feel disappointed and even betrayed. Me? My faith was trampled very early on, and I’ve been a Skeptic for nearly two years now.

I think what originally set off alarms in my head was my perception the Swamp did not like second opinions. My father was very big on getting second opinions. I could recall that, back in the glory days when doctors ran their own hospitals, doctors were always sharing what they had discovered, or asking if the other doctors had ever come across an unexpected complication they were confronted by. They were well aware every patient is different, “what is good for the goose may be bad for the gander”, and they had open minds that sought the insights of others. As a small boy I liked to hang about the periphery as they talked over drinks after work, for they all seemed excited to hear each other’s latest discovery.

The Swamp now seems utterly different. They seemed to epitomize the Globalist view that there should only be one view. And this sense was verified when the first news about hydroxychloroquine surfaced. To me it seemed very good news, and I was appalled when the doctors who sought to publicize the beneficial possibilities were censored on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. At that time there was no vaccine, so why repress a potentially good treatment?

And so it has continued, through numerous other helpful treatments including ivermectin. Second opinions are not allowed. Only vaccines and masks are allowed, even though they aren’t working. (Who doesn’t know at least one person who wore masks religiously and had both the vaccination and the booster yet still got the coronavirus?)

Despite the censorship of Free Speech, (and even of the last president of the United States), people still do communicate, and the second opinions of those doctors who dare speak out are disseminated from obscure websites across the globe. And sick people always have a propensity to try even the most crackpot cures, when their first doctor fails. And, when the supposedly crackpot cure works, though the Globalists scoff, the word spreads despite Globalists best efforts to quash the word. People simply want to be better, and no amount of malarky can deny that the impulse to be better is a truly good impulse in the mortal soul. If you repress the urge to get better, you are basically a complete jerk.

This returns me to my earlier point that Globalists feel this world would be a better place if there was only one view allowed. I asserted their idea is like saying marriage would involve less disagreement if there was only one spouse. True, but then it wouldn’t be marriage. And the fact of the matter is that the Creator created us different. We share our fingerprints with no other soul among the nearly eight billion currently alive on earth. This might make us feel alone, if it were not for the wonder of understanding.

That is what I remember most from the glory days of medicine. Doctors had no fear of second opinions, because their interest was understanding. They did not see a second opinion as a threatening disagreement, but rather as the wonder of another view. As impossible as it may seem to some, disagreement wasn’t disagreeable. It was the opening of a window to a new sky.

How far we have fallen. When I looked at Dr. Robe I did not see a brave doctor of the sort who would be banned from YouTube and Twitter, but rather a compliant yes-man, subservient to the Swamp. He feared losing his job, craving dollars. Yet as much as he makes, it is never enough. He must pay back three times what I make in a year just to pay for the “insurance”.

Back in the glory days, when doctors ran hospitals, my Dad didn’t worry about being sued. When he saved a fellow’s life, we’d get a “grateful patient” gift from where the fellow reclined in Florida, a big cardboard box filled with oranges, tangerines, and juicy grapefruit. Now? Now doctors spend $150,000 a year for malpractice insurance. You have pay for the “privilege” of saving some goofball’s life. How far we have fallen.

Actually, it isn’t so hard to pity Dr. Robe. For a third of what he pays just to avoid the vengeance of ungrateful patients, I happily subsist. I pay my bills and live a good life with children and grandchildren. I am not rich but feel blessed in many other ways. But maybe I too will face the vengeance. I may face the vengeance of a sort of Stalin, who loathed the Kulak, who I am sort of like.

To be blunt, I feel the Globalists are narrow-minded, and that they find it offensive that so many live outside their myopia. Where they are consumed by a lust for power, the powerless simply get by. The Globalists ask, “What right have the powerless to be happier?” (For indeed we are.)

The answer, (which they don’t want to hear), is that we simple bumpkins deal with Truth, which is Beauty, yet which they seek to deny. They think they have their reasons to deny the Truth about cures for the coronavirus other than their vaccine, but when their vaccine fails and other cures work, the “cure” is something called the Truth. At this point, they can either confess their error, or they can deny Truth.

At which point one wonders what low craving they are blinded by. They must know on some level that their so-called “science” has been made to look foolish. Why do they insist on stating they are not fools when, it is increasingly obvious, they are fools?

There are various theories about what motivates them, ranging from the simple pride of a person who doesn’t want to admit a mistake, to more elaborate conspiracy theories.

One theory states that the profits from vaccines are gigantic, as much as twenty dollars back for each dollar put in, and Globalists are deeply invested, and don’t want to face a crash. Another theory states all sorts of wicked results are the real intent of jabbing every person on earth. Some even state they want to reduce the world population to half a billion.

All I know is that vaccines don’t work. People get vaccinated and still get the corona virus. Back in the old days, this disqualified the jab from being even called a “vaccine.” But the new “science” decrees that the jab results in “milder cases”. How can they compare a case with what never happened? The question should be, “Have vaccinated people died?” Because some have, the vaccination failed to vaccinate. So why push it? And why push it on small children, who almost never suffer complications from the coronavirus? Especially as the vaccination has some side effects which have killed some people. This may be a “small” risk, but why expose a child to such risk at all? Simple question. Just answer the blasted question! Instead, they change the subject. For example, am I a racist?

The effectiveness of various cures are topics which, back in the glory days when doctors ruled their own hospitals, would have been freely and openly discussed after work while sipping an Old-Fashioned. Now you hear cures discussed behind the magazine rack at the local market, or on obscure uncensored sites on the internet. However, as I looked at Dr. Robe, it did not even occur to me to bring up the topic of alternative cures. He was not a brave doctor. He was just a poor man, poorer than me, striving to pay off fabulous college loans and incredible insurance costs, cursing whoever told him that being a doctor would make him respected and rich. Increasingly he is neither. Rather than respected, doctors are increasingly a laughingstock. Surely this must eat away at them. Some pity must be felt, (unless, of course, doctors seek revenge on the public.)

These may seem like odd thoughts to be drifting about my head when I had a 5% chance of meeting my Maker. But they say your whole life flashes before you, as you die, and the downfall of hospitals has been a part of my life. Also, I must say this about Dr. Robe: He did reduce my 5% worry I was dying to around 0.1%, simply by stating my ECG looked normal. This relaxed me greatly, and from then on, I was just going along for the ride, enjoying the views of how hospitals look now, compared to how they looked when I ran about the MGH in Boston as a little boy.

After asking me a robotic checklist of questions Dr. Robe droned that he wanted to be absolutely sure enzymes in my blood didn’t change in three hours, and also to make sure I didn’t have a blood clot in my lungs, by having me go through a cat scan.

I hadn’t seen the bill. ($6,402.77). I hoped insurance covered a lot, but knew somebody somewhere was making money from the nonsense. Should it cost so much to learn nothing is wrong?

In any case, Dr. Robe vanished, and I never saw him again. It was the end of his shift, and hopefully he went home to a nice wife and good backrub. But I could not go home, and texted my wife that things still looked good, but I couldn’t go to the basketball game or Bible study, because it would be at least three hours before they were done checking me over from top to bottom.

Right at this point a tiny, masked woman dressed as a nurse came to roll me off for a cat scan. This struck me as a little absurd, for it seemed a big, strong nurse like Zack should have done the rolling. But back in my boyhood men weren’t nurses. Zack would have been called an “orderly”, which may now be a sexist term. Who knows? All I knew was a tiny woman began detaching plasma bottles and saline bottles I didn’t need from a height she could barely reach on tiptoes and putting the bottles above my head on another rack she also could barely reach, attached to a bed she barely looked strong enough to roll.

Above her mask she looked a little stressed to me, and in a hurry, so I tried to think of some way to relax her. After all, as one approaches age seventy, scrawny young women one wouldn’t have looked twice at, when aged twenty, have a surprising beauty, even when you can only see their eyes and foreheads. And I know life is hard at hospitals, midst this invisible war. I evaluated her.

The little nurse seemed disinterested in conversation, only stating, “I’m taking you for your cat scan” before becoming very efficient, so it was up to me to break the ice. Something impish in me had me state, “I think I am going to like this. Will you mind it much if I squeal, ‘wheeee!’ as you roll me?”

She looked at me with severe surprise above her mask, and said, “Please don’t.”

I laughed and said, “OK I won’t, but, you see, I run a Childcare, and I am forever pulling wagons or dragging sleds full of children, and they say, “wheeee!” as I pull them, but they never pull me. So, this is a new experience for me. I think I will enjoy it very much.”

She met my eye, and the severity of the young face above the mask went through a lovely transformation. She laughed, and said, “I push strollers at home and gurneys at work.”

I replied, “Gosh! You never get a break! Well, I suppose my old age does have its advantages…” Her forehead vanished as she lowered her shoulders to push me, but I did hear a chuckle.

I must admit she pushed well, achieving speeds faster than I thought wise, and she also had an amazing ability to navigate through automatically opening doors even when she had to show some sort of badge to make them open. I didn’t say “wheeee” even once, but did at one point inquire, “National Guard?”

This was because, down from the emergency entrance, we passed the non-emergency entrance, which is not the “main entrance”, (which has been closed a long time due to the coronavirus). The non-emergency entrance is where they take your temperature and ask a slew of questions and make you put on a mask before you go to an appointment about a hangnail. And as we passed through a crossroads and I looked down towards that entrance, I saw not the usual nurses but big men in combat boots and camouflaged uniforms.

The nurse pushing me simply explained, “Yes. We’re understaffed.”

I said, “Those big fellows should be pushing the gurneys. You should be swiping the foreheads.”

“Maybe, but they can’t run the cat scan.”

“You do that too?”

“Yes.”

“You must have to do a lot when you’re understaffed.”

“Yes”

“I know some nurses who quit.”

“So do I.”

“Strange times.” There seemed little else to say about the nurses who quit when ordered to have the vaccine or the booster, (or even other vaccinated nurses, who quit when ordered to order the unvaccinated to vaccinate). It was just part of the war. I suppose, given more time, we might have discussed the various reasons which the media never talks about, but we had arrived at the cat scan, and she had a job to do.

The cat scan was a futurist looking plastic donut covered with green lights and digital readouts, and a few red lights, with a table that shifted in and out of the donut. I had to shift my old carcass to the table, which involved rearranging various wires and tubes, and also the nurse had to add a “tracer” in my blood, which involved my answering a whole slew of questions, including my date-of-birth again. (I was patient with this stuff because both my mother and father had told me of outrageous mistakes made by hospitals that weren’t careful, such as amputating the wrong leg, or the right leg from the wrong person.) I did wonder a bit what the “tracer” was, and what side-effects it might have, and why they asked so many questions about allergies. The nurse mentioned I should tell her of various side effects, including heat in my crotch or anus. I was about to ask further questions, in a hopefully disarming voice, but just then I was hit in the face by a jet of water.

In order to inject the tracer, the nurse had to loosen the saline drip, and the little tube had jumped from her fingers. “Oh! I’m so, so sorry!” she exclaimed.

“Don’t worry. I’m getting used to it. It’s the fourth time today I’ve been squirted in the face.”

Her eyebrows raised above her mask as she dabbed my face with a white towel, which I found enjoyable. When was the last time a young woman dabbed my face with a towel? My mother? Sixty years ago? She brought me back to earth by asking, “What squirted you the other times?”

I gave her the short version of replacing the pressure switch in the cellar, and by the time I was done the “tracer” was in me, so I dismissed asking about side effects. Whatever will be will be. The ‘tracer” might cause cancer (or even have been the vaccine), but there are only so many conspiracy theories a man can handle at once, and these days I’m overwhelmed.

The nurse was shifting all the tubes and wires so they wouldn’t get hung up in the donut, and we were ready to roll. I rolled in, and the machine’s robotic voice (feminine) told me to hold a deep breath, and I did, and things clicked and whirred, and the machine said “exhale”, and things whirred and clicked, and then I rolled back, and there were more clicks and whirrs and a beep, without me needing to hold my breath, but then I rolled in again and had to hold my breath again.

As I rolled in and out of this “hole” I chuckled. It occurred to me the situation could have Freudian implications. It had some similarity to sex, or perhaps birth. But that idea was so utterly absurd that it made me think that all the time I spent fifty years ago, studying thought and psychology based on Freud, and even the thought and philosophy of those who rejected Freud by fighting Freud, such as Yung and Pearls (gestalt) and Lang, was a complete waste of my time. Fifty years ago, I thought I was seeking Truth, peering deep into the subconscious, but the fact of the matter is that, when you are rolling in and out of a hole, the Truth is that you are rolling and out of a hole. Psychologists make Truth complex when it is in fact simple.

The way this idea crossed my mind made me chuckle to myself, which made the masked face of the tiny nurse pop up and regard me studiously, even as the cat scan was completed. I’m glad she didn’t ask why I chuckled. It would have taken several hours to explain Freud, Jung, Pearls and Lang, (let alone Timothy Leary). Rather than asking me any questions she (I suppose) looked for “symptoms” and became satisfied my chuckle wasn’t a symptom. After this swift appraisal of my mental state, (especially swift when compared to Freud), the little nurse vanished as she bowed her shoulders and trundled me at great speed back to where I began by the emergency entrance. When we got there, I thanked her for the ride, just as I always thanked drivers who gave me rides when I hitchhiked fifty years ago, and, just as drivers then vanished and I never saw them again, she vanished.

So there I was, back where I started, when I arrived with the simple question, “Am I having a heart attack?” Maybe now they would let me go home? Not so fast.

No sooner had the little nurse completed the task of shifting various tubes and wires from my mobile and rolling situation to my static situation, when the new Doctor came ambling in. In fact, I’ll call him Doctor Amble, because he had the ease of a refreshed man just starting his shift, which was different from Dr. Robe, at the end of his shift. This difference alone should highlight the importance of second opinions. After all, our own opinions shift, from first thing in the morning to when we go to bed weary. However, the difference in opinion between Dr. Robe and Dr. Amble was more than that, and I found it interesting to see it manifest.

Not that Dr. Amble actually said Dr. Robe was wrong. He was in fact just telling me what Dr. Robe had prescribed. Much that was prescribed I already knew, (such as the cat scan), for I had already endured it. Yet, as Dr. Amble spoke of Dr. Robe’s prescriptions, he made telling noises. He never actually said, “Pshaw”, like an old time Yankee, but made odd noises that meant the same thing. For example, he seemed to feel the cat scan was a waste of time, for he made the slightest “puh” noise as he read that prescription. He also seemed to feel a sort of scorn for the first blood test and the second one three hours later. He had a better test. Not that he said a thing to me, but I am a surgeon’s son who grew up in a hospital, and I know a second opinion when I see one. I wondered what his second opinion was, but he just told me I seemed well, but they’d need to make sure with a few more tests. Then Dr. Amble ambled off, likely unaware I was scrutinizing him more carefully than he scrutinized me, and coming up with diagnoses all my own.

For one thing, I sensed his relaxed attitude was an act. An emergency ward is a stressful place to work even during peacetime, and he was working midst an invisible war, where political pressures had doctors forced to bite their tongues and keep their second opinions to themselves. Once again, I felt I, as a patient, should pity the doctor more than the doctor pitied me, especially as I’d already learned I was well.

Apparently Dr. Amble’s second opinion involved his own way of finding out if a chest pain was due to the heart. His way was to have the patient put a tiny pellet of nitroglycerine under their tongue. If the pain vanished, there might be a problem with the heart. If the pain failed to vanish, the problem might be a pulled muscle, or heartburn due to the sort of diet which invites an ulcer.

A nitroglycerine tablet costs less than a dollar, so you can see Dr. Amble’s approach might get him in trouble with those who see medicine as a way to make big money. For example, suppose Dr. Amble’s approach was more effective than a cat scan, which involves a machine which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and an entire staff of technicians. It might seem obvious a diagnostic tool that cost a dollar would be more attractive than a tool that cost a million, but that is not how the Swamp works.

The male nurse Zack came hurrying back to where I lay, holding a tiny paper cup and a tiny bottle of tiny nitroglycerine tablets. After asking me a few questions including my date-of-birth he very carefully shook a single pill from the bottle to the paper cup and told me to put it under my tongue and allow it to dissolve, and to quickly tell him if I felt any dizziness. I did put the pill under my tongue, and then asked him if it might cause a migraine headache.

Zack looked surprised asked me why I asked that, and I told him I once was watching a crew blast granite in Maine and they told me not to stand downwind of the blast, because even a whiff of nitroglycerine might cause an instant migraine headache. He said he had never seen that, but my blood pressure had already fallen ten points. Then he asked me if my chest still hurt. I shifted about and said, yes, it still hurt the same. He shook out a second tiny pill into the cup, and after I dissolved that one under my tongue, he shook out a third.

I noticed Zack was taking great care not to touch a pill, and asked him why, and he laughed. Still keeping his eyes on the electronic display above my bed, he told me that even without touching the pills his body was absorbing enough nitroglycerine to, if he went to the airport the next day, set off alarms. He would be pulled aside as a suspected terrorist. I said it was amazing airport sensors were that sensitive and Zack agreed. Then he asked me again if the pills lessened my levels of pain, and I said not a jot, and he nodded, and left.

Soon Dr. Amble came sauntering back into the room, shuffling through a sheaf of papers in a scornful sort of way, and he said I was likely fit as a fiddle and right as rain, and that my blood tests showed no unusual enzymes, but they’d have to give me another test in an hour to see if there were any changes, and then he heaved a sigh, as if he himself thought it was a big waste of time. Then he turned and ambled out, but I thought I detected a slight slouching, as if he was under a burden.

Then I had to sit for about for an hour, which can be a little stressful for a person like me. I entertained myself by holding my breath and seeing if I could make my O2 levels drop to where it made a little light blink, but that got old, and then I drummed my fingers and fidgeted. Even though I don’t smoke any more, I’m still addicted to an occasional nicotine lozenge, but they were in my shirt on a chair six feet from the bed. Reaching that chair without unplugging various tubes and wires became an interesting challenge. I thought I had succeeded and was sucking a lozenge and back to making my O2 levels drop, when Zack came hurrying in. I asked him if he came because my O2 levels had dropped, he replied no, he came because I was dead. Apparently, I had disconnected some wire that measured my pulse. After he reconnected me, he stated it was time to take my second blood sample. As he took the tubes of blood, I asked him how long it would take the results to come in, because I wanted to tell my wife when she could pick me up. He said around an hour, so that is what I texted my wife.

Then I had to endure one of those slow hours which remind me of math class in high school. (Math was my last class of the day. Waiting for the minute hand to reach twelve was like seeing time come to a complete halt.)

Actually, it is not a bad thing to have time slow down, at this stage of my life. Usually, it feels like things happen too fast and I can’t keep up with the craziness, and I’m left gasping for time to collect my thoughts. Now I had time. Strange that the place for such peace was an emergency ward.

I made good use of the time, thinking deeply about hospitals, doctors and nurses, and what I’ve seen in sixty years. For some reason my mind kept returning to Dr. Amble, and what I might say to him to uplift him. I had a clever insight I thought I might share, a witty and pithy statement which might be short, like a sonnet, but which he might find worth mulling over afterwards. Sadly, like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, it was not completely delivered.

Not that I didn’t try. The moment Dr. Amble reappeared I lifted an index finger and flashed a witty smile, but he never looked up from the papers he shuffled. He came in one door and ambled in a seemingly relaxed way through the room, and out the other door, shuffling papers all the way and never looking up once. I followed him the entire way with index finger raised and witty smile, but he never noticed.

In conclusion, I heard his conclusions, but he never heard mine. He said I was fine and could go home.

A young woman I’d never seen before entered after him and detached me from all the tubes and wires, I put my shirt back on, and then she looked scandalized when I put on my jacket and was about to leave. “Where is your mask? You can’t leave without your mask!”

I had forgotten all about masks. After searching we found it, crushed on the sheets I’d spent hours laying upon. Once it was back on my face, the nurse seemed very relieved, and I was allowed to walk out to the emergency entrance.

I was uncertain which door to exit by. The same woman who was there when I entered was still there, clicking at the same keyboard, and she was able to tell me what door was acceptable. Then, five hours after I entered, I walked back out into a pattering of raindrops, and towards my wife’s car I could see idling out in the parking lot.

Did this experience lower my level of stress? Yes, in terms of worry about my chest pains. But in terms of my levels of worry about hospitals? I’m not so sure. It’s not that the people who actually work there are bad, but rather that the absentee landlords who oversee hospitals are…. Deranged?

As my wife drove me home though the inky dark, I apologized for the fact my hypochondria had cost us five hours. I said my chest still hurt, and, if I hadn’t been reassured, I likely would have worried all night and all the next day, but at least now I knew I was OK. But it should have taken 45 minutes, like it did in California in 1984. She was very nice about it, simply saying her prayers had been answered. Then she promptly discussed driving to Maine.

This had the potential to immediately increase my level of stress, partially because it involved forecasting New England weather, which is inherently stressful if the outcome matters to you. The potential for being wrong is likely greater in New England than it is for most of the rest of the world. I avoided stress by exhaling slowly and deeply, and also by avoiding making a forecast. Often it is best to simply say, “We will see in the morning.”

The trip to Maine is another story, and this one has gone on long enough. Hopefully the trip to Maine will be “Part Two” of this description of how stressful it can be to avoid stress. However, I think it is good to stop “Part One”, at this point, for it is a sort of happy ending, and I do like happy endings. What can be happier, and more stress-relieving, than to find out your chest pains do not mean you are about to die?

But gosh! It sure can be hard getting that answer! Downright stressful!

THE BATTLE BETWEEN BITTER AND SWEET

All wars have one thing in common. People stop attempting to compromise. They cease trying to understand, and instead enforce their own understanding in a sort of, “Understand this, buckaroo,” manner.

The odd war the United States now finds itself plunged into is no different. The current war may be a war like no other, but it holds the same unwillingness to talk. The people attempting to create a new order, a new “reset”, have their minds made up and have no desire to hear how they may be mistaken, nor how there may be a far Better Way. They are convinced their solution is best, just as Hitler was convinced his “final solution” was best, and they are utterly and completely committed to their cause. They may pretend to be non-violent and intellectual, but their behavior is in fact as insane as that of a Viking berserker, with eyes rolling and tongue out and spittle flecking beards (or mascara.)

Such behavior always comes as something of a surprise to spiritual societies. The attack always is a sort of Pearl Harbor. Spiritual people understand peace is far better, and therefore the idea of ending-peace is such a stupidity they can’t imagine any would be stupid enough to pursue it. Yet some do. Peace threatens them in some way. So, they imagine there is no alternative but war.

How could peace be threatening? Well, peace is not a static thing. Peace is not, as some believe, a sort of stagnation. Rather it is rich, and full of newness, like sunrise or springtime or healing. After a long night, few greet the dawn by saying, “it’s the same old dawn.” After a long winter, few are so cynical that they greet the spring by saying, “it’s the same old spring.” And, after time at death’s door, few are so ungrateful that they greet healing by saying, “it’s the same old healing.” And in like manner, peace is so full of creativity that you can’t say, “it’s the same old peace.”

Peace is threatening to those whose idea of progress is to have more and more of the same. Some so-called progressives are stuck in the mud. For example, in 1860 the owner of a plantation’s idea of progress might be to own more and more slaves, in which case he would be threatened if peace ventured the idea that slaves should be freed. He would claim he was progressive, and peace threatened progress, and would declare war on peace. Which is what happened, in 1861, and in some ways is happening, now.

The weapons in the weird war we are within are not bombs but brains. I could (and perhaps should) go on at great length about the ideas involved, but for now I’ll leave that to others. It seems enough, for this post, to simply outline the parameters, to begin with. And then?

And then to simply confess it really sucks to find myself in the midst of a sort of Pearl Harbor I did not expect, or want, and certainly don’t approve of. Not that I didn’t see it coming, in some ways, but I always held out the hope that the people with foolish thoughts could be talked out of their foolishness.

In terms of the Global Warming debate, I felt that if we simply talked about the facts, we would see that much of the worry was needless. And shouldn’t people be happy to see they didn’t need to worry so much? What I did not see was that the worry was a weapon, and necessary for those who itch for conflict and are unfriendly towards peace.

Well, they have had their way, and now the conflict is upon us. In many ways their foolishness is emphasized and exaggerated to such a degree that their weapons are shooting their own feet, which are in their mouths. It is painful to be American, these days, with so many so-called “elite” people behaving like jackasses, especially when it includes our president, the so-called “Leader of The Free World.”

It is also hard to be American because the bomb-blasts of the weird weaponry have hit home. They’ve made our lives hard. Who could imagine schools and churches and local pubs would be closed? The economy is reeling, and it is hard to pay bills, or to hire help. Yet equally amazing is the resiliency of the average American. Those who wished to hurt America must be unpleasantly surprised. When they closed schools, home-schooling surged. When they closed churches, the number of “small groups” exploded. And when they closed pubs, friends quietly met friends, and on-line cooking-classes got many more “hits”. To those who wished to hurt, each of these non-hurtful responses was a counterpunch., even a devastating uppercut. In terms of the weird war, the offensive attackers were sent reeling backwards.

(How odd. To simply be a peaceful people can deliver such an uppercut.)

And so it goes. We are in the middle of a war many pretend isn’t even happening. But I am under no illusions. I recognize bad people have thrown down the gauntlet and are playing for keeps. They are making fools of themselves by doing so. But we have a way to go before they surrender.

Now winter gets mean. Holidays are past
And trashed, and the business of bitterness
Sinks needle claws like a cat who's cast
Affection to white-fanged craziness.
Cold winds roar through evening's hilltop pines
And twilight's orange with no flame; "The cold
grows stronger though days grow longer;" (designs
Long known, but ever new as I grow old).
Winter's test gets crueler. No Florida
pensions for men like me: Face the last stand
Without hope, and don't call it horrid,
A bad deal, for it is noble. It is grand
To be good when your reward is but death
For your warmth defies cold, until your last breath.

Once I had no crimes to confess. I was
Pre-traumatic-stress, yet life was lonely.
My people were starchy, were Yankees whose flaws
Were made of correctness. I asked only
For closeness, for warmth, but they stood apart,
Needing their space, friends from a distance.
A child needs love's hugs pressed to their heart.
Detachment can't deny this insistence.
Freedom can't deny the free will
Be free with affection. We may need space
To be centered, but egos are evil
When they separate us from Love's saving grace.
Once, as a child, I stood in the sun
And caught a brief glimpse of how we are all One.

LOCAL VIEW –Flower Snow–

I’ve waited a long time to play the part, so I sort of like being a grumpy, yet wise, old farmer. Not that I didn’t try it when younger.

One of my favorite stories involves a time I was a younger gardener in 1990, and advised a spring-feverish older and wiser lady (from Virginia) that it might be unwise, even though early-April temperatures set records and hit ninety, to plant tomatoes in April in New Hampshire. A week later she called me in, to serve me hot tea on a heated porch full of hothouse blooms, from where I worked out drenched in her rose garden in a cold rain mixed with wet snow. The kindly old woman bleakly looked out the window as she handed me my wonderful tea, and said three wonderful words: “You were right.”

But that small victory lacked the quality of grumpiness necessary to play the part of an elder. After all, she was my elder. I had to keep my eyebrows up and smile, and not call her a durned fool, and only “suggest” it was unwise to plant tomatoes. It lacked the full joy of unleashed grumpiness.

Old age may limit me in other respects, but it allows me great freedom in terms of grumpiness. It is sort of fun to scare younger people who are in fact bigger and stronger, or even smaller and stronger, but the smallest see right through my grouchiness to the twinkle in my eyes. When I grump they often laugh. At my Childcare I often grumble something like, “Do I look like some sort of couch? My mother didn’t raise me to be a couch!” This doesn’t phase the kids a bit, as they crowd around to view pictures in a book during story-time, pressing in from all sides and even perching on my shoulders like a pirate’s parrots.

I really think it is wrong to expect children to pass any sort of pre-kindergarten “tests”, or to try to grade them and place them on “levels of development”. They are what they are. Many great men were amazingly “slow” in certain respects. Thomas Edison couldn’t talk until he was four. One American president was still illiterate at age twelve. And Winston Churchill never did learn to be respectful. With children aged three I think it is best to simply expose them to lots, and allow them to absorb what absorbs.

My “curriculum”, if it can be called that, is merely whatever strikes me as noteworthy in our landscape, or whatever work I am doing to operate our toy farm. In early April one “subject” of my “curriculum” is the first flowers, which appear on the hardiest trees. Some are just dull colors from a distance, but intricate beauty, up close.

For example, the short, shrub-like willow called “glaucous willow”, (a real pain if it grows near your drains or leech field due to its webbing, clogging roots, but perhaps useful as a substitute for aspirin), has a moment of glory in the early spring when it forms catkins that look like small, gray, furry tail-tips, or perhaps rabbit’s feet, called “pussy willows”. As a small boy in the 1950’s I recall teachers bringing these fur-tipped twigs into classroom as proof winter wouldn’t last forever, in early March (in Massachusetts). However the true beauty and glory often goes unnoticed, and occurs when the male catkins produce their pollen. The beauty is something to sneeze at:

I like to show such things to small children, simply to see if they are the slightest bit fascinated. Some find dinosaurs far more interesting, even though dinosaurs are extinct and pussy willows are not.

OK. Maybe boys aren’t interested in pussy willows. How about the intricate, tiny blooms of swamp maples?

I guess not, in the case of this small boy.

OK then, how about a small girl?

If we were allowed to be scientific any more, we might hypothesize that the above suggests that small girls are different from small boys. However that would be sexist, so I will not suggest such a hypothesis. I certainly will never suggest small girls are superior. Nor will I suggest they are more English than French, for it is the English gentlemen who fussed about flower-gardens and poetry, as the French fussed about wine, women and gluttony (back in Victorian times.) God forbid!

Back in Victorian times the French and English were allowed to differ, without it being seen as proof they were fascists, and hated the bland conformity of Globalism. The English allowed their children to run around naked on beaches even in the 1940’s, which the French found barbaric, as their children wore suits. The French also considered African woman barbaric, and asked African women not to go topless in sweltering African heat, and instead to wear blouses. The Africans complied, but then noticed the French women promptly started going topless on the French Riviera. It is little wonder to me Africans decided enough was enough, and all the French colonies insisted they be allowed to differ, which involved declaring independence at the same time (1960).

Globalists seem to feel all people in all places should march the same way in lockstep, but to me history seems to show nations and states and neighborhoods and families and even individuals are unique and each have a fingerprint unlike any other. God made people different for reasons all His own, and I prefer to avoid challenging God. I’ll make a lousy Globalist. I certainly don’t attempt to make the children at my Childcare walk in lockstep.

In any case, I’ve lived long enough to know the white things that fall in the spring in April in New Hampshire are unlikely to be cherry blossom petals. If I was ridiculous, and demanded all the small children pay attention, and focus on blossoms, blossoms, and nothing but blossoms, they would not have to rebel and declare their independence from blossoms, for the weather would be anti-blossom for them.

At this point the the Globalists will raise a predictable hue and cry about unpredictable weather an old grouch like me predicted. I still have a boyhood diary, (I think from 1964), describing an April snowstorm south of here, just west of Boston. Yet the Fake News states recent snow is proof Global Warming is upon us, (though snow is not warming). If I suggest otherwise, I get banned from Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Is it any wonder I am grumpy? These young High-tech whippersnappers are suppose to respect their elders, not censor them. But younger kids are kinder. They remembered I grouched we shouldn’t plant tomatoes and should only plant peas. One five-year-old looked at me after the late snow and wondered, “How’d you know it would snow again?” I grouched, “I didn’t know it. Some years it doesn’t. But most years it does.” But it did seem nice that, even if Globalists don’t respect me, a certain five-year-old does.

But the snow was murder to remove from the entrance of the Childcare. Mid April sunshine is as powerful as late August sunshine, when people sunbathe on beaches, and snow turns into slush which is too heavy for snow blowers to handle. I faced resorting to a primitive thing called “a shovel”, because some young mothers have removed their snow tires from their cars and boots from their feet, and arrive in optimistic ankle-high sneakers.

I only shoveled the lead-like snow from a few strategic places, but that was enough to cripple me. I figured it was an opportunity to die with my boots on, but I was unfortunate and didn’t drop dead, and instead lived on to creak groaning from my bed the next day. I was so grumpy I needed an aspirin, coffee, and the cure called “composing”.

I stir first coffee, hoping it will stir
My sense of humor, as I look outside
At a tangerine sunrise and say, “Brr.”
A half-foot of ermine is draped to hide
The slender shoulders of spring. The snow lies
Like white lies. It will fade like last night’s dreams.
The spring birds know it, and fill the dawn’s skies
With an unsnowy chorus. To me it seems
They sing to a One Spring that is lasting.
All else is passing. Nothing gold can stay.
Dawn sinks down to day. Prayer and fasting
Understands we gain by taking away.
These brief April snows are like all our woes:
Shadows that pass as a Lasting Light grows. 

My boyhood diary from 1964 marvels how swiftly the eight inches of snow vanished, with very brief entries: “Sunny, only four inches left;” “Sunny, only two inches left;” and “Warm; snow all gone but a few places.” I hope this legalizes my telling the kids at the Childcare, “It will all be gone in a twinkling”, although I’m sure certain Globalists would disapprove. Officially, in 1964 snow melted swiftly because it was April and the sun was as high as it is in August, but now it melts swiftly due to Carbon Footprints.

Still, as it all melted I found reason to be grumpy. I pity the poor devastated daffodils. They are native to the north shore of the Mediterranean, where they are born to spring up and wave in warm breezes, perpetually perky (until they become perky seedpods).

It is cruel to transplant such southern bulbs to New Hampshire, where they spring up and and are allowed to be perky for a day or two or three or four, before being buried by heavy, wet snow. Year after year the snow melts to reveal devastated Daffodils discouraged and drooping. And this year was no different.

At this point I likely should write a sonnet about how outsiders need to adapt and evolve when they are aliens to the environment they are transplanted into. Englishmen need to adapt to France and Frenchmen to England. Globalists need to adapt to everybody, rather than asking everyone to adapt to them. But I’ve been there and done that. Check out my sonnet on daffodils, from a couple of years back. (I leave it up to you to conduct the search; it would be vain of me to link to my own sonnet.)

Now I am older and wiser, and basically what I have learned is ancient and not new. It is why we should respect our elders, and why it was wrong for my generation to adopt the motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” (I think Timothy Leary yammered that idiotic motto when he was forty-four.)

As the the snow melted I saw something besides the depressingly drooping daffodils. It was hopeful. Can you see it in these pictures? (Hint: As the snow first fell the turf was burned brown by last fall’s drought, January’s snowless flash-freeze’s wind-burn, and this spring’s drought.)

We waited long for the iron sod to thaw,
And so it seems a cruel joke that cold snow
Buries the softened pasture, yet the crow’s caw
Sounds happy; not the croak of weighted woe
You’d expect. A drenched dove softly coos
Love’s questions. A wet robin rejoices.
Not a single bird is singing the blues.
From whence comes the joy in all these voices?
Even the gruff old farmer smiles, with eyes
Full of mischief. He growls, “Why the long face?
Don’t you know this snow wears blessing’s disguise?
Beneath white, brown grass greens. It is a case
Where snow gets called, “Poor Man’s Fertilizer.”
Spring’s here, even if fools can’t recognize her.