What Can We Do?

At these sorts of gatherings (to discuss the Green New Deal, I mean) the question sometimes arises: What can we do at a personal level?

At least some of the panel members simply said: Why do it alone?  Join a group!

That's excellent idea; when you're swimming against the tide, or at least trying something that doesn't come easy, joining with a group of like-minded people has always worked for liberals (and it works for conservatives when they try it, more's the pity).  I think that should remain a major takeaway, and you don't need napkins with that.  (Just a joke--take away--napkins--get it? Phew.)

But there is one thing only you can do, and this is directed to young families with children.

The most difficult thing for this generation to do--not all of it, but many of them--is to hobnob with people outside their usual circle.  The Green New Deal is all about helping the underdogs, those who are most threatened by Warming, the concentration of wealth, the declining services that made life easier, and often just possible, the attacks on health care for the poor.  You can't help the disadvantaged if you aren't comfortable talking with them.  That's point number 1.  Just remember that.

Secondly, thinking about smart energy choices, one fact is unavoidable.  We must still get around, but personal transportation is too fuel expensive.  So obviously, Public Transport is definitely in our future, at least until mankind is extinct!  (Just kidding, again; that won't happen for dozens of years!  Haha!)

So, my thinking is, one thing each family can do, is to take the bus, or public transportation of any kind, with the kids, at least occasionally.  Of course, some young people will say, ew ew ew, there's going to be, like, people in the bus.  Just grin at them, kids.  Scary grins are fine; you get plenty of practice on the school bus, right?  Show them your teeth!  No, seriously: be nice; give up your seat to elderly people; smile warmly at the kids.  (Other people's kids are free entertainment that Nature has provided.  For me, that is; for religious people, God provides that sort of thing.)

Community clean-ups are another fantastic opportunity to join with neighbors, especially for the kids.  They might be the same old kids that come to school, but for some of us, whose kids go to private schools, this is a chance for them to meet regular, non-private-school kids.  I was about seventeen before I met regular kids on their own turf, and it was a very positive experience.

So, there you are.  It might be a difficult first step for some of my readers, but social involvement can't be done by remote control.  If it is uncomfortable, start small.

This could be easily one of the most practical bits of advice I have given on this Blog, so I really hope anyone who reads it takes it seriously, and refers it to their friends and neighbors.  Or rewrite it your way, and re-blog it; spread the word any way you like.

Arch

What Does "Messaging" mean? The Green New Deal, And All That

Our area is very conservative.  For years the local college--in contrast to the general population--was essentially moderate-to-liberal, but of late--with the rise of students who are interested in Business, and the faculty we need to service them, no doubt--the balance is shifting in the direction of conservatism.  So we, my wife and I, were pleasantly surprised to see a notice about a college panel discussion of 'What Is the New Deal?'  We went, and were pleasantly even more surprised to see that the room began to fill up, and soon it was completely packed.

There was an excellent, and well-informed panel, consisting of three professors from colleges close by, and three students, one from each of those colleges.  They took turns to give short presentations (only two of which were supported by slides!) and we were off to a healthy, moderate-paced discussion.  (I will talk about the actual topic at the end, if I remember to.)

One thing that stood out, is that the speakers talked about Messaging.  What is messaging?  (I just Googled that, and man, did that hang my browser.  Google wanted to know exactly who wanted to learn about this term, and to let some special clients know...)  Most of the entries reported that the word meant essentially Text Messaging, using the various applications that support that, but one entry caught my eye, and following up, I arrived at a page that contained the following text excerpt.  We can easily infer what that article considered to be messaging from the context:

Clearly the sense in which the word is used, at least by some people, is subtly different.  It means the ideas that are emphasized, when talking to important listeners.  It need not have anything to do with text messages at all; it is the spin we give when we're giving out information, especially when we're broadcasting information.

Furthermore, in today's communication world, people are beginning to realize that their audience only listens to those who are saying what the listeners want to hear.

Okay, I have made some enormous conceptual leaps here; maybe when most people talk about Messaging, they mean just sending texts.  Many others, though, mean that we have to be clear, and on the same page, when making important statements.  A few, though, mean that we should not alienate our audience with statements that conflict with their belief systems.

Some of the discussion (about the Green New Deal, and) about talking one-on-one with friends and neighbors about most topics that extreme conservatives do not believe in, e.g. global warming, energy conservation, environmental pollution, income inequity, social justice, access to family planning, universal healthcare, good faith negotiation of international treaties, voter access, support of education, supervision of banking, etc, brought up the issue of disagreeing with them politely.  This whole business of civil discourse is important, and I do not want to suggest that it does not make sense.  But we must disagree without making it impossible to resume the conversation another time.  (Of course, in many cases, the conservative side of the conversation just wants to say goodbye and head home, especially if most of their arguments consist of canned statements put together by their leaders who do not have much experience at rational argument, and do not have much of a scientific background.  We must have a diplomatic way of disengaging if our conversational opponent is not prepared to argue; literally not well prepared, and continuing will only end up humiliating him or her.)

One major point, which was part of the messaging of those putting forward the Green New Deal, is that it merges together the two apparently different agendas that the Liberals had been concerned with: Environmental Conditions and Global Warming on the one hand, and Social Justice on the other hand.  It isn't easy to see, but we are beginning to understand that these two concerns are two sides of the same problem.  The Green New Deal, therefore, combines the issues of Warming, of a Minimum Wage, of Tax Reform, meaning that those who earn the most must pay their fair share.  (Why?  Because they use the resources of the nation proportional to their wealth.  Work it out yourself.)  And Medicare For All, which is clearly a social justice issue, as is Education For All, and Immigration Reform, and numerous other reforms that are needed, because they make worse the difference between the rich and the poor.

Religion

One of the strangest, and most amusing, phenomena of our times is how Fundamentalist Christians support our ultra-conservative administration so enthusiastically!  As a former Christian who knew his New Testament a heckuva lot better than most modern Bible Thumpers, I just can't take these jokers seriously.  If any of my readers happens to be a believing Christian, I do not meant to insult you, unless you agree with or support the current administration, and who considers our present Leader to be God's Gift to Believers.  Trump is clearly an agnostic, if not an outright atheist, and certainly a cynic and a hypocrite, but having received the anointment of the Conservative Christian Leaders, the Followers bend their knee, however reluctantly, until such time as he might fall out of favor.

Now, thinking about engaging our friends and acquaintances one-on-one, it certainly seems to me that they're not going to give the time of day to a confessed atheist.  The minute I reveal that I'm a born-again atheist, I may as well be talking to the trees.  Most, if not all, Fundamentalist Christians have a very poor background in science, even if not all of them believe in a Flat Earth, and can't argue their way out of a scientific paper bag.  But, to their great relief, they can cut down the number of those who would argue against their most fond 'scientific' beliefs, by first checking to see if the person concerned is an atheist, in which case, they can consider him or her to be sent by the devil.

I do not like to argue with Fundamentalist Christians, because they do not use logic the same way I do.  I only have experiences with Fundamentalists on Facebook, which is so often a hotbed of illogic.  The fallacies these people dream up are pathetic and laughable.  One thing of which I live in fear is that the legal profession will be taken over by Fundamental Christians, and then we may as well shoot ourselves.  (I hope none of them are reading this, or that's what they will certainly do; and we can say goodbye to the courts.)

So, dear friends, someone has to talk nicely to these Christian types, but it won't be me.

Education

The problem of messaging has, in a way, raised its ugly head in Education.

Just as most people are unwilling to listen to anything except what they want to hear, something similar has happened in education.  Students are unwilling to listen to any lesson except about something they know already.  Of course, there is a general principle in education: From the known, to the unknown.  This is good advice to anybody who wants to explain something to someone.  Unfortunately, today's youth want you to STOP the second you depart from the realm of the familiar.

It was terrible in mathematics.  I begin teaching something, starting from the familiar.  Soon--too soon--I go into a topic that is unfamiliar.  There's a good reason it is unfamiliar even if it is firmly within the high-school curriculum, or even the Middle School curriculum: it is probably a topic of which the school teachers are scared of, or uncertain about.  "That isn't even math!" my students exclaim indignantly.  "You're trying to teach us something from, like, PhD level, or something!"

There's no point telling them that it is Trigonometry, which is used to calculate the circumference of a circle, and so on.  If they haven't seen it already, then they do not want to see it.  So they want to take a vote whether or not this topic should be discarded!

Things did not become that hilariously extreme routinely.  But there is absolutely no doubt that unfamiliar material is considered inessential.  This is why we cannot have students establishing the curriculum; at least not typical students.

Wishing you a happy end of the week,

Arch

A Quick Look at ‘Medicare For All’ a.k.a. M4A

There are reams and reams of words written about why Bernie Sanders's proposal of Medicare For All—abbreviated as M4A—is going to be prohibitively expensive.  The information that follows is taken from here: Thanks to the Koch Brothers, We Have More Proof that Single Payer Saves Money and Cares for All of Us, an article dated July 31, 2018, taken from The Nation. I must go back and read more carefully, but the gist of this article is as follows.

Paul Ryan, who was then Speaker of the House, supposedly read a report commissioned by the Koch Brothers, from a think-tank at George Mason University, which Ryan and other conservatives cheered as supporting their hostility to universal health care.  Paul Ryan reported that the cost for expanding Medicare to everyone would be $32.6 Trillion over ten years.  (Why do they always report it that way?  I assume it means $3.26 Trillion a year.  Jeeze.)  Their point was that even doubling everyone's taxes wouldn't pay for it.

But, the report says,

... under the Sanders plan “national personal health care costs decrease by less than 2 percent, while total health expenditures decrease by only 4 percent, even after assuming substantial administrative cost savings.” 

Now, the big question is—and both the report and the analyses of it seem to think that this is obvious, but it isn't to me—is 2%, or 4%, or our present annual expenses, less than $3.26 a year?  If we spend presently, all of us, as a nation, more than $3.3 trillion a year on health care, then we may redirect that money into the Medicare For All plan, and still be up on the deal.  Rich folk who get super expensive health care presently, will contribute some of that health care money in taxes, the poor, who get no health care, or cheap health care will pay that money into the IRS, and still get more health care than they're getting at present, and whatever money is left over in the purses of the super rich can be spent for additional insurance, so that anyone who wants can get replacement knees every other year, or whatever.

But for this argument to work, we need to find out how much we pay presently, as a nation, for healthcare.  I Googled this question, and you can, too.  It turns out that, as a nation, and as individuals and corporations, we spend $3.5 trillion already.  Clearly, Bernie's plan will not cost more than we pay presently; it costs less. 

I'm not sure whether the Koch study deliberately tried to fool the public, or whether they were looking at different numbers, or whether they assumed that the new Medicare expenses would be in addition to their present expenses, or what.  Basically, our money (if we have insurance) goes to taxes, rather than to health insurance, and the Government insures us.  Those of us who support Medicare For All simply considers that this is one of the things the Government should be doing.

One of the comments at the bottom of the article hits the nail on the political head.

[L]et’s not lose sight of the fact that the fight for single payer is basically a class struggle. Americans want healthcare, but the 1% want to protect what they consider their right to profit from the current system.
Single payer is a social system which provides healthcare to everyone with the costs spread across the population; basically a non-profit system. Whereas, our current system is a market system which primarily provides a source of private profit and healthcare is secondary. [Boldface is mine.]
...
Lastly, many American corporations would be more competitive if freed from the excessive costs of providing healthcare insurance for their employees, because companies in Canada, Europe, and Japan pay much less.

This commenter also pointed out that Society is also about solidarity, about building solutions together.  But the present system in the US firstly about profiting from the sickness of the customers, and secondly about providing health services.

I want to add that, at least in some sorts of services, Medicare needs less annoying paperwork than ordinary insurance needs.  On the other hand, the profits health insurance companies get out of patients feeds, clothes, and houses, thousands of people across the country.

Note: according to Google, the Health Insurance Industry employs around 2.66 million people.  So the industry does provide a lot of employment to our friends.  If you have a friend employed in the Health Insurance Industry, your attitude towards Medicare For All might be different.  But bear in mind that the number of people employed by Medicare will increase somewhat; possibly by as many as 2.6 million, possibly by fewer.  Possibly by more, because private employers invariably try to get more work out of fewer people.

Arch

It's the First Day of Spring, the Equinox, and BACH's BIRTHDAY!

A hearty good afternoon to all you readers!

In previous years, I usually inserted a lengthy explanation about the actual date of Bach's birth, the problems about the adoption of the (Roman Catholic) Gregorian Calendar by the protestants of Saxony, and so on.  But today, following our illustrated leader, president T, let's ignore the science and the mathematics.  (I might just Tweet this post if I get the urge; it'll probably take about 5 tweets!  Don't forget; we're not doing serious mathematics today!)

To celebrate the day, Google (which also considers March 21^st Bach's birthday like me {just let it go; it doesn't matter}) has put up a Doodle on their main search engine page, which is ingenious.  When you click on it, it takes you to another page, where (after a short break, while they load up some coding) they tell you to type in a short tune.  Their interface does not allow anything too fancy, but still, there's a degree of flexibility.  They then harmonize your tune automatically, using a database that has distilled some 300 Bach tunes.  The result is quite nice, though a tiny bit goofy!

They give you an example, which they then proceed to harmonize, and Hoo Hah!  It comes out perfectly harmonized in the style of Bach!

Now, it turns out, their example is an actual hymn-tune that Bach harmonized, called Ach, wie fluchtig, ach wie nichtig!  No need to look up the translation; it means something like, "Oh, how fleeting."  (All flesh is as grass, etc, etc.)

(You realize that you can play their Doodle yourselves, so what I'm about to do is redundant: I'm going to insert a little video clip of their example tunelet right here.)

How close is their Artificial Intelligence harmonization to Bach's own?  Hang on; I have to go look this up . . .Well, it's (very) close, but not identical.  (At least, they're not cheating!)  Here they are, one below the other:

As you can see, they are very close!  This doesn't prove anything, really; the algorithm that harmonizes your tune is very clever, but the more 'Bachian' your tune is, the better it is likely to do.  If you want to push the program to its limits, give it a tune that is wildly un-Bach-like, and you might be amused with what you get!

This might interest you: as my own tune, I gave it the second half of the line from the hymn they used as an example.  And, predictably, it supplied the harmony from the Bach chorale.  (The tune I thought I knew is just slightly different.)

An interesting treat
Bach, as you know, made numerous cantatas---around 200 of them---to be sung in Church, about half of which were based on, or were enormous elaborations of, existing, famous (at that time) hymn-tunes.  Cantata number 26 is based on precisely this tune: Ach wie fluchtig.  Its opening chorus (full choir and orchestra, and probably the organ as well), is one of the most awesome choruses Bach wrote, and here it is.  The hymn melody comes in a few seconds after that really fast orchestral introduction.

Here's a completely instrumental version, arranged by the late Sir William Walton, as a scene for a ballet:

Arch

The Whole 'Tax Versus No Tax' Thing

In this day and age, very few people want no taxes at all.  I mean, there probably are some, but they're not serious.  (Without taxes what are we going to do: get around on Imperial Walkers?  Not that roads are the only thing the Feds do for us.)

The simplest thing I can suggest to Tax Agnostics is this: take something that we take for granted at present: like, say, the FDA (the food and drug administration).  Yes, I know: most conservatives hate this office.  What do they do?  Spend huge amounts of tax money to figure out, infinitesimally slowly, whether new drugs are dangerous, or whether they're effective.

The GOP is probably fine with having some private company do that for us.  Of course, the patients can pay for the service, right?  Think about that.  It would be easy for the drug companies to give these testing labs a lot of money, and just make them feel the obligation to go easy on the biggest contributors.  (That has happened, but the memory is so painful, we try to forget that it happened.  Officials of the FDA had been bribed, if I'm not mistaken.  They were fired.)

Environment, Inequity, Justice, Action, and the Future

As many of us know, we live in puzzling and worrying times, where lots of things around us are inter-connected, and deciding what we ought to do is too complicated for most of us to really figure out.  For years, the Idea Environment that surrounds us has tried to simplify things for us; somehow we've been fed a lot of pre-chewed information, and we're just not accustomed to dealing with unfiltered reality.  Now, suddenly, we have to worry about everything from tiny little organisms going extinct, to cruelty to whales and elephants, to unemployed coal miners, to ignorant politicians who bend the truth and condemn the Press. Nobody is giving us the version for busy executives.  (If this sounds like I'm being condescending, I'm not; I'm almost as confused as you are.)

Should you read this post?  I hope you do, especially if you have a strong stomach, have patience with science, and have the intellectual stamina to read through it.  It is a difficult undertaking, and I just don't have the training to set it out in psychologically the best way, so that the greatest number of people will get just the right benefit from it, for all our sakes!  No; it's not the end of the world, but, you know?  Repent and—maybe—be saved, in some sense, is the message.  If you're likely to misunderstand what you read, especially when we get into science and social science, maybe you should not read this.  There are far too many people out there who're going off half-cocked, having only understood a small fraction of what they're being told.  (On re-reading this, I have made dozens of mistakes, and left many long sentences incomplete, and I'm trying to fix them.)

There are a number of very smart people writing on the Web, who have excellent mental pictures for us, so that we can imagine the problems in a graphical way.  So human intelligence is doing its best to make all of us understand, but the habits of a lifetime get in the way.  Especially habits of  choosing Convenience really get in the way.  A lot of the actions we can take oblige us to take a whole lot of little steps, each of which is going to be inconvenient, so if you're a single parent, for instance, struggling to get your two kids off to school every day, before you rush to work in your truck: well, you can be excused for ignoring this!  The rest of us just have to do better, to compensate!

Also, I'm old and feeble, and I might want to take a nap halfway through this post, and I might never have the energy to do it right when I continue.

Planetary Warming
We have been told, for a number of years (actually more than 30 years) that the planet is warming up, and by now all of us believe it.  Big Oil and Big Business have firmly said: No, it isn't warming, or sometimes, No, it isn't warming as fast as you think!  Or sometimes, Well, OK, it is warming, but It Isn't Our Fault!  But we know, temperatures are rising.  It may not be rising where you live, but fairly reliable calculations based on sampling the temperatures all around the globe, including in the seas, and in the air, and including looking at infra-red images from satellites, over more than two decades, shows that temperatures are rising, and accelerating.

Why are we concerned?  Because the Oceans are getting warmer, and dirtier.  All the food we eat, and a huge number of creatures: fish, whales, birds, are at risk.  As the temperatures pass beyond a certain point, one species will stop existing; past another point, and another species goes extinct, and so forth.  When these species die off, it won't be like some curious little critter in the Amazon jungle dying out; it could be a huge gap in our diet, e.g. having to give up Tuna and Salmon.

The Oceans, according to some writers, is the beginning of all the food lines.  I think that is an over-generalization, but it has an element of truth.

Why is the planet warming up, and can we slow it down?
There are two answers (as to why warming takes place), a local one, and a global one.
The local one is that, for instance, we warm our homes and businesses, and the heat leaks out, because we don't insulate our homes very well.  In the warm season, we use electricity to cool our homes, which pumps the heat out of our homes—more heat than we pump out of our homes, because the motors of the AC generates its own heat.  And the Electric Companies also generate a lot of heat.  Every factory generates heat.  It can't be helped; this has been going on from the beginning of factories!  Forest fires, arson, people burning tires, and crazy stuff like that goes on all the time, and generates more heat; so do war zones, nuclear tests, etc.

The global cause is tricky to explain.  The Greenhouse Effect is something non-science people love to disbelieve, because it is sort of invisible.  When there is a lot of Carbon Dioxide in the air (atmosphere), it reflects heat radiation back down to the earth.  How is this?  Heat Radiation is a kind of wave, like light rays; in fact it is Infra-Red rays.  When the Infra-Red rays reach the Carbon Dioxide layer high in the atmosphere, The Carbon Dioxide molecules soak it up, and it gets them vibrating.  When they stop vibrating, they release the energy in all directions.  But obviously, half the directions are downwards, and half the directions (thankfully) are upwards.  So, according to my understanding, the Carbon Dioxide effectively sends back half the heat that the earth is trying to get rid of.  The Carbon Dioxide is like a blanket that frustrates and interferes with this cooling process.*

Anti-science citizens will often reject the Greenhouse Effect right here, simply because Business Interests put out  propaganda to suggest that this explanation is too hypothetical; "It is just the sort of high-concept mumbo-jumbo that scientists spew through the Fake News Media!"  Business interests of all kinds do not like the idea of Warming for reasons I'll tell you presently.

If, in defiance of all the Anti Science propaganda, we do concede that the Greenhouse Effect must be recognized, what are the consequences?

When we burn anything (except Hydrogen, I suppose; burning Hydrogen simply gives us heat, and water), usually Carbon-based material: Wood, Coal, Gasoline, Peat, Natural Gas, Propane, Paper, Cardboard; Carbon Dioxide is released, together with smoke and soot and other crap.  That directly contributes heat, and also contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, because of the release of more Carbon Dioxide.  So, as somebody described it, the most powerful thing that could counteract this steady, brutal process of Carbon Dioxide release is: Carbon Trapping.  We want to capture the carbon dioxide, and keep it imprisoned harmlessly.  What does trapped carbon look like?  Wood, petroleum, plastic, natural gas.  It is inactive, not reflecting heat back into the earth.  But when this stuff is dug up and burned, we do two things: we release the heat, and we increase the efficiency of the Carbon Dioxide greenhouse, which keeps the heat here, instead of allowing it to radiate out into space.  To summarize, we need to trap the Carbon Dioxide, and prevent it from getting into the atmosphere.

Okay, Major Omission Alert.  I forgot to mention that of course The Sun blasts us with heat all the time.  We're in a sort of rotisserie that gently roasts us just enough (normally) so that life on earth has a decent temperature.  But an equal amount of heat has to be radiated out, otherwise the earth will obviously warm up.  The Greenhouse Effect is preventing this equilibrium from taking place.

Our biggest friends in our desire to trap carbon, is Trees.  For millennia, these fellows have been gobbling down Carbon Dioxide, and releasing Oxygen, with which we're totally fine.  Seaweed, plain ol' weeds, grass, geraniums, maples, oaks, firs, pines, these guys are peacefully absorbing Carbon Dioxide, trapping the carbon in their trunks and leaves where they aren't contributing to planetary warming.  But of course, burning, shredding, contribute to Carbon Dioxide outflow.

Don't forget that vehicles burning carbon fuel--that is, every single vehicle, unless it is an electric car powered by an electric power station that does not burn some carbon-based fuel---is also creating Carbon Dioxide.  And just looking out your window on a weekday morning probably makes you despair, at all that Carbon Dioxide hitting the skies.

Business Interests
Why do businesses hate anyone addressing Global Warming?  Successful business folk tend to focus only on things that affect their businesses, and ignore everything else (including inconvenient laws!  Yeah, I hate business.  Business insists that it, exclusively, brings prosperity.  To a limited extent, this is true; but they're crude and destructive, and egocentric, and left to itself, will destroy everything in its path.)

Now, Businesses depend on transport.  Crucially.  When they hear: Global Warming, they think: These fellows are trying to raise the price of gasoline.  Well, it's true; raising the price of gas was the go-to method for discouraging the use of gasoline.  If you study the statistics, you can see a strong correlation between times when gasoline was cheap and plentiful, and business was good.  Politically, it is a bad move to raise the price of gas, because employees need to have gas, to get to work; trucks need to have gas to bring goods and supplies, and everybody needs to have gas, so that they can drive to places to have Fun, and blow their savings.  That's good for business.  So when they think about the environment, they think about gas prices and they think: RESIST.  This is why Trump got elected, because the business world recognized someone who would not be swayed by environmental considerations, and keep the gas supply flowing by hook or by crook.  As you can see, from the point of view of Business, dealing with Planetary Warming is pure poison.  Business, therefore, blasts us with a relentless stream of propaganda that insists that Warming is a fairy tale, for the simple reason that freely-flowing gasoline supplies is logically good for Business, and have historically been correlated with good times for Business.

Is it still possible to reverse Planetary Warming?
Probably not.  With 21^st-Century Science, and with mass psychology so heavily influenced by business interests, it is hopeless.  The younger generation, which has lived with environmental prophets since their birth, has a sense for the urgency of the problem, and the Trump Administration's unbelievably clumsy attempts to discredit the Press and the Media, (despite the Media's equally unbelievably clumsy attempts to fight back!).  But despite the feeling of urgency the Millennials have, for trying to fix Warming, there's too much resistance from Business.  The minute a leader emerges, such as Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Business deploys its armies of Orcs, to discredit them, and grind them into the dust.  Additionally, the folk who just love to drive around in enormous vehicles for fun, equate Warming with party-pooping.  To get going on slowing down Warming, we will have to take austerity measures.  Conservatives have presented austerity as something The Poor have to do: give up food, give up shelter, give up Medicare, etc.  But, pound for pound, The Rich contribute more heavily to Warming than the poor.  Public Transport will have to replace personal transport, something we spoiled Americans hate with a passion.  Unless all of us can persuade our rich friends and neighbors that bus and train travel is fun, public sentiment will be against any steps toward minimizing austerity measures directed at slowing down Warming.  As you can see, reversing warming is very unlikely to happen.

The huge ice caps at the poles--which were a lot huger not long ago--have started melting, and it will not be easy to reverse that.  (What are we going to do: install enormous refrigerators at the poles, and use lasers to beam all the waste heat out into space?)  Sea levels are rising, and when the rich owners of coastal real estate finally decide it is time to drop the pretense of Climate Change Denial, which they think of as political Rhetoric, it will be no longer possible to actually reverse planetary warming.  By then, it will probably be impossible to even Slow Down planetary warming.  But at the moment, I still believe that it is possible to slow it down.

Why can't we say, firmly one way or the other, whether Planetary Warming can be reversed?
Because it depends on science of the future; on scientific breakthroughs that have not yet taken place.  Thermodynamic (heat-related) breakthroughs are the least probable sorts of breakthroughs we can expect.  We might be able to find a really efficient battery that can be used by cars, which alone will help slow down the rate of warming.  We might stumble on an energy source that is carbon-neutral, which means we can give up fossil fuels (gasoline, gas, wood, coal) completely, and have lots of energy without a lot of heat by-products.  But every engine---car engines, air conditioners, planes, excavators, lifts---produces waste heat.  There will never be a heat-free engine.

Slowing Down the Rate of Planetary Warming
Except for the reluctance of Business Interests to support anti-warming actions, we could easily begin to slow the rate at which planetary warming takes place.  This will help the poorest among us, who are least able to handle the problems with warming.  Consider floods, which affect poor people most, and which are made worse by planetary warming.  (The oceans heat up, and give rise to hurricanes and typhoons, which then drift towards the land, and hit the areas near the coasts in which poor folks have settled, disproportionately.)

Timbering
The timber lobby is greedy for cutting down trees.  A lot of pressure there; trees provide paper for business (marketing, packaging, etc), construction (housing, furniture, cabinets, etc), the printing industry (direct mail advertising, newspapers, toilet paper) and so on.  Never mind that a tree has been trapping carbon for a century.  Some of these 800-year-old trees have been doing this for that long, and have gotten very good at it!  (Just kidding!)  But the thing is to keep that carbon trapped.  Once the tree is timbered, almost any use it is put to will release some of that carbon.

I can't see, with my limited knowledge, any downside to planting trees in every convenient place.  Our family has a tiny lot; I believe a quarter of an acre, and all the trees we had had been attacked by pests, and the branches were falling, and the leaves were refusing to fall, which is apparently a sign of a tree that is dying.  So they were all cut down, and we have just one maple in our yard.  If we plant too many trees, we won't get any sun in our back yard at all.  (We don't have a front yard.)

This is the problem of most city dwellers: they don't have too many options when it comes to planting trees in their property.  But farms, businesses, schools, universities, parks, recreation areas, all can increase the planting of trees.  Yes, they're inconvenient if they're deciduous, but they directly trap atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

Family Traditions of Heat Efficiency
In each family, we develop family traditions that influence whether, when our children become adults and set up their own homes, they adopt a needlessly heat-using lifestyle: cooking for every meal, discarding unused food, using the most heat-intensive cooking methods, using dryers needlessly, keeping the thermostats turned up very high, even in the spring; keeping the car cabin temperature levels high, and the worst: keeping the heater on in one room, and the cooling on in the next room!

Our family has slowly begun using clothes-racks to dry our clothes in the warm, dry weather.  One of our cars is a hybrid, which gave us 40 miles a gallon, and is the quietest of our cars.  (The other is an SUV, and a small truck!

We still use the dryer all the time, but now it is time to bring out the racks, and put the wet clothes out on the back porch.

[Note: Now, don't get too excited, but I wonder whether anyone has thought about one way of offsetting the Greenhouse Effect, that is: placing a thinly distributed layer of highly-reflective crystals or dust in the air, to reflect the Sun's heat away from the earth. If the amount of radiation coming in is reduced, the heat should not build up.  I think the problem with this approach is that it could get out of control, and actually prevent trees from photosynthesis, and result in a catastrophe.  (Photosynthesis, of course, is desirable; in fact, it is essential.)  This is a dangerous game to play.]

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*Normally, when we put a hot object on a table, it cools through three processes: Conduction, through the table surface; Convection, by heating up the air, which then flows away; and Radiation, which is Infra-Red rays that go out in straight lines to hit the walls and ceiling, and whatever else is in their way.  In the case of the earth, the heat goes out mostly by Radiation, which means that  the heat goes up as Infra-Red rays, and hits the Carbon Dioxide in the upper atmosphere, and is re-radiated back, as described above.  I apologize in advance if I have misunderstood the mechanism, and misinformed my readers!
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Education and The Earth

When people talk about loving the planet, some of us immediately get a mental image of people hugging trees.  How reasonable is this?

Of course, most large trees have been around for years and years, even as individuals; in the east, a large maple, for example, probably has been alive for a minimum of fifteen years; possibly a quarter of a century; certainly they deserve respect, because they give us shelter, get carbon out of the atmosphere, and provide a spectacular show in the fall!  Nature lovers go crazy over rivers and woods; you can hardly complain about that.  Decades ago, Emerson and his friends went on and on about the beauty of unspoiled nature.

But loving the planet in the world we have now can't be all about a world without people.  I mean, face facts: there are a lot of people.  However, as you grow older, one begins to appreciate little things about people whom one doesn't even know.

Being a grumpy user of bookface--you know what I mean--I get posts from complete strangers: unknown people and pages and companies, and, of course bookface itself, (they do this so that its users spend more time on the site, so that ads can be shoved in their faces), and if you ever look at a funny cat video, well, you've gone and done it: you'll get at least one cat video a day.  But often there are clips and photos of people who say and do things that make you think that they're OK; that the planet is in fairly good hands.  (There are also clips and articles about people whose goals are good, whose hearts are essentially in the right place, but who try to express their anger in a variety of 'clever' ways, which are ultimately destructive.)

About thirty years ago,  in most colleges, students were taught things about the various parts of the US, and about foreign countries, which helped them to be able to relate to those countries, if they happened to be in the news, and to relate to foreign people, if they happened to meet them.  It is this population that, with great--inappropriate, I believe--idealism, set about to replace the word "foreign student" with the world "International student."  Think about that.  'Foreign' seems to me a perfectly serviceable word, with negative connotations only among the uneducated set.  (This is an example of so-called "PC" behavior, which has resulted in such amusing and pathetic neologisms as "policeperson, fireperson, serviceperson", and so on.  OK, I suppose that a woman who joins the local fire company probably resents being called a 'fireman,' but I'd like to have that confirmed; probably they don't.  The same goes with policeman.

We all know about the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Pyramids of Egypt.  We consider them our treasures, which is a good thing in some ways; if some foreign nation waltzes into China and sets about reducing their Great Wall to rubble, I absolutely believe that we should offer to head over there and help defend it.  It's our wall too.  However, if China itself decides to reduce its own wall to rubble, we're going to have to bite the bullet and let them do it (after sending over a strongly-worded expression of our disapproval).  All these wonderful things are ours only in a very limited sense.

Let's consider the problem with the Venezuelan elections.  (We're all beginning to see what a fragile thing national elections are; we can't just leave voting to the highly-motivated; we can't suck down any public expressions of sentiment about election candidates without checking them out carefully.)  When the administration thinks about Venezuela, are they making calculations about political advantage?  Do they know to what extent our covert operations have interfered with Venezuelan politics?  Are they aware how we have (like the Russian facebook agents have done to us, or even more crudely) interfered with Venezuelan political succession, and possibly contributed to the corruption of the supposedly socialist former prime minister (still hanging onto power)?  I do not know any definitive information about the situation, but the very possibility of taking advantage of Venezuelan oil reserves, with the resulting opportunity for a corrupt Venezuelan political leader to enjoy a lot of wealth from the US, can completely distort the balance of Venezuelan politics.  In the last analysis, Venezuelan citizens must take charge of their own destiny, and it is difficult to see how the US can poke their political balloon to the advantage of Venezuela as a nation.

It is the easiest thing in the world for unscrupulous foreign people to pretend to be Americans and spread false rumors about our Presidential candidates.  We have to make sure that those messages are originating on US soil with Americans, and that the statements they make are verified.  It is partly our own fault for being such suckers.  Is Bob Mueller going to investigate hundreds of Russians for spreading false rumors?  Sometimes I feel that, just because the FDA makes sure that there are no unhealthy oils in our processed foods, we too quickly believe that Twitter and Facebook are idiot-proof.  No, they're not, and we have the President to prove it.

Some time ago, I arrived at the belief that Education ultimately was designed to connect students with the World.

To be honest, I myself wasn't entirely convinced that this belief made sense, but I could not find any fault with it.  As we know, education at the college or university level has two aspects to it, and often these aspects overlap quite a lot: there is the expectation that the student will get an in-depth training in some field.  This is usually the major field of emphasis, or just The Major.  The second aspect is to convey a large number of pieces of information to the students, to make the World understandable to the student.  This is called General Education, and in the past, a lot of this was taught in high school, and even earlier.  Unfortunately, the youth of today are--many of them--highly resistant to education (I apologize for saying this), but the young people are unaware that this resistance is generally self-defeating; they will just have to learn this material later on somehow, and have the elementary material crowded in with other stuff, and as a result, they have to be taught the same material repeatedly.  That virtually ensures that the student will not take it seriously, because there is a subconscious expectation that it will be taught yet again!  This is similar to being taught long multiplication in third grade, and then being tested for it in fourth grade, and of course, they haven't learned it properly, so it is taught again in fourth grade; they're tested for it in fifth grade, diagnosed as deficient, taught the skill again . . .  By the time a kid gets to sixth grade, he or she will hate the very thought of long multiplication.  Actually, long multiplication isn't particularly difficult.

So, to summarize, a healthy view of the world at large is now not only a matter of creating a healthy, functioning citizen of oneself and one's offspring, it is a matter of being able to elect a suitable and competent political leader.  Many of the faults of the conservative elements in the government flow from not knowing their country well enough, not knowing their world well enough, not having gotten to know people well enough, except for the very few in their immediate circle.  When we accuse Donald Trump of being ignorant, he doesn't realize that we mean it literally.

As always, most young people will refuse to accept that they have such a moral burden on their backs when they go into College, already bending under the load of having four more years of school, which they see as attending gym class reluctantly, and resisting the onslaught of sex education, or whatever it is about school that they despised.  We can probably say goodbye to a functioning democracy if we leave such things entirely up to our kids.  Luckily for us, some kids actually are up to the challenge!

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