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YOU’RE FIRED!

The words “You’re fired!” are among the most painful I’ve ever heard.

I’ve lost a lot of jobs during my life, so the pain has accumulated to the point where I would rather die than re-live my life—unless I could arrange things so that no person would ever have the power to drive a stake into my heart, because that’s what being “let go” feels like.

I never followed Trump‘s television show The Apprentice because hearing the punch line “You’re Fired!” always felt like a hard slap to the face. Watching young men and women suck up to a powerful boss who gut-punches all but one was never harmless entertainment. Not for me, anyway.

The number of people fired during the Trump administration is staggering. How many of these 24 high-power individuals can anyone identify? They are the tip of a mammoth iceberg of graft, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and suffering. Who disagrees?

I’ve fired people. I understand why our president won’t do it in real life. He always assigns the task to an underling, right? The White House employment line churns like a stormy ocean but the president stays above the froth.

Firing someone is more painful than being fired because it stays with you forever. It’s not something you can overcome by getting a better job, for example. You can’t take it back. I’ve always wondered whether I might have found a kinder way to address the problems I thought firing others solved.

Those who read my essays might remember that I managed some restaurants when I was in college. Back then finding good help was hard, because everyone worked.

I needed a cook really bad. A roly-poly guy with a sweet face applied for the job. He explained that he was a slow learner, but he would try to become the best cook he could.

After three days, I realized that he was slow, like he said. He would never be able to keep up; he lacked the intelligence to memorize the menu and prepare the food properly.

I called him into my office.

“Ruby,” I said. “I don’t see how we’re going to be able to make this work. I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”

He said, “Mr. Lee, I understand. Uh, you gave me a chance. Uh… uh, it didn’t work out. It’s happened before. It’s not your fault.  Uh, don’t feel bad. I’m to blame. I’m slow, uh… that’s all.”

He offered his hand, pivoted, and walked out. He had obviously memorized his exit speech. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.

It was clear that Ruby suffered from a disability of some kind. My need for a cook blinded me. Until he recited his sentences, I didn’t see it. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to make it in a world that demanded quick wits and fast problem solving.

What made me cry was that he wasn’t going to give up. It seemed like no reversal mattered. Success would forever elude him, but he had just enough resources and determination to pick himself up, give his speech, shake hands, and strive to find the next opportunity.

Ruby was willing to fight against the odds to become a hamburger cook. He took great pains not to traumatize managers, including me, who inevitably would be forced to fire him to protect their bottom line. In his effort to spare my feelings he failed—like he probably failed at everything he tried.

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt remorse. Ruby gave everything he had. Nothing worked. Something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could do.

It’s been decades. My heart aches. I wonder if by some miracle Ruby ever made his dream come true. I’ll never know.

At the time, I managed two restaurants. Because I was a student at the university, assistant managers and other responsible employees helped me to keep operations running smooth.

At the second store a couple of waitresses complained that a busboy I hired was stealing tips.

I called the kid into my office. “Are you stealing?” I asked. The boy immediately began emptying his pockets. His pockets were deep. He dumped big handfuls of quarters and dimes on my desk. I didn’t say a word. When the last dime dropped, he ran out of the store. We never saw him again.

It felt good. The waitresses didn’t seem to mind either.

I hired a rather attractive waitress at the first store. She had the annoying habit of talking too much to other waitresses. She was loud, and it irritated me. After a couple of months, I started to hate her because she didn’t seem to feel an urgency to follow through on the things I asked. I felt disrespected.

One day she said something that rubbed me the wrong way. I called her back to my office and fired her in almost the same way Trump would years later on his TV show. I was cold and matter of fact. “You talk too much and don’t do what you’re told,” I said. “You’re fired!”

The girl broke down and began wailing. “How will I get money for my trip to Europe this summer?” she begged.

I would be in Italy that summer myself to visit family living in Naples at the time. I had no idea until that moment that her job was a means to an admirable end.

A wave of nausea swept over me. I was making a terrible mistake. It seemed somehow impossible to backtrack. I’d played my hand. From now on things could never be good between us. “It’s time to leave,” I told her.

She went to court over it, but the owners of the restaurant knew the judge, so nothing happened. I feel like a worm when I remember this act of needless cruelty.

Big Boy Restaurants were among the first in a wave of fast-food chains to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of a public too busy to cook home meals in the 1960s. The Big Boy Slim Jim sandwich remains one of my all-time favorites.

I hired a cook who caught on fast. “I’ve been been vacationing in Florida,” he answered when I asked about his tan.

After a few weeks the owner approached to tell me the cook had pulled him aside to explain that I was a terrible manager who should be fired. The cook expressed his belief that he was the best choice to replace me.

I said to the owner, “That’s interesting. He is a good cook and smart enough probably. Maybe he could help out at another store.”

The owner looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “This guy is trying to get you fired so he can take your job in this store—a store you manage!  What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe I can start training him in other parts of the job and someday he will know enough to help us.”

“No!” the owner said. “You are going to fire that back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. When I come in here next week, he’s gone, understand?”

When the new cook came in for his shift, I asked him to walk outside with me. I said, “The owner tells me you think I’m incompetent.”  The guy threw up his hands like he was being arrested for something and said, “I screwed up. You’re right. Fire me! No hard feelings, OK?” He wheeled around and disappeared down the street.

I felt surprise and relief. I didn’t fire him. He fired himself.  I think I remember someone telling me he hitchhiked back to Florida.

Well, this essay is supposed to be about me being fired, not me firing others so let’s get on with it.

I was an athlete in high school. I played football and baseball. I was an All Star third baseman. In football I played tight end. Because my dad was the commander of a Navy jet-helicopter squadron in Key West, we lived on the Florida island during my eighth-grade year and the first half of ninth grade.

Key West High School had a good reputation, because it graduated several big-time athletes back then—George Mira and Boog Powell are the two I remember because they had younger brothers who were close to me in age. We called Boog’s brother “Boob.” He took the joke with grace and good humor. Athletics was a big deal.

Toward the end of the fall season, our freshman football team lost an important game. In the locker room the coach dressed down the team to the point of being profane and abusive.

He was more than unfair. I felt degraded. We played our hearts out. I piped up to defend my friends, “Maybe if you knew how to coach, we would have won!”

The coach turned purple. “Billy Lee, you will never play sports again at Key West High School. You are done.”

I cried on the bus ride home. I reminded the coach about how good I was at baseball. He had seen me play during an All-Star contest between the civilian and Navy leagues. He knew I was good.

He remained stoic and unmoved. Fortunately for me, the Navy promoted my dad and we moved to Arlington, Virginia where he led some group at the Pentagon not known to the public. I would play sports again, after all.

More is under the Pentagon than above. It’s a big place, which I was fortunate to visit and tour—under supervision, of course. My dad worked several years within a labyrinth whose mission was to protect and defend the United States of America.

Unfortunately for me I missed out on a season of baseball. Ninth graders went to junior-high; my new school didn’t field a baseball team. When high school try-outs finally came, a year later, I made the JV team.

The suburban schools outside Washington DC were big.  A thousand tenth grade boys tried out. Eighteen made the cut. I thought, This is great. I’m back on track.

Then, disaster. It got cold in northern Virginia. I was used to playing in the heat of the deep south. My legs and arms seemed to stiffen-up in the frigid temperature, and I endured a terrible scrimmage. I made costly errors and went hitless. The coaches announced after practice that they had agreed to bring three varsity players down to JV to give them more playing time. Three JV players would be cut.

The names of the final “final roster” would be posted in the gym. Anyone whose name wasn’t on the list was cut. The decisions were final. There would be no discussions, no negotiations.

I must have looked at the roster a dozen times before I could accept that my name wasn’t on it. I told my dad on the ride home from practice. Visibly shaken, all he could manage was a barely audible, “oh.”

I experienced my first nervous breakdown. It lasted a few months. I told my mother that I was terrified all the time. It never stopped. She confessed that she had a breakdown when she was younger, but in time she got through it.

In ninth grade I lived in Key West, where my dad defended America against Soviet subs with a squadron of jet-helicopters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother stands next to me. When my athletic dreams unraveled the following year, I had a nervous breakdown. Mom led me safely through to the other side of hell. After aging she suffered memory loss, but she remained a happy, optimistic person to the end of her life.

It made me feel good to know that my mother understood. I waited for healing. Eventually, I got better.

Dad was promoted again. The president sent him to Paris to represent the United States Navy at NATO.  The French planned to withdraw.  Dad tried but was unable to change their minds. A year later he would lead war games in the Mediterranean Sea for an ineffective coalition of nations called SEATO (now disbanded), and the family would follow him to Naples, Italy.

But my senior year would be spent in France. It would be a welcome change from the Washington DC suburbs, which to this day I associate with “fear and loathing“—bad mental health.

It’s hard to believe, but I did get fired from high school—in Paris of all places.

My girlfriend’s dad was Secretary of the Embassy in Paris. Sandy attended a French high school and spoke fluent French. It made getting around easy because not only was she connected and accepted everywhere, but she also made a gifted translator. I had no communication problems when we explored the twenty or so arrondissements together.

Because I went to the school for military-dependents (populated mostly by Army kids) I couldn’t invite Sandy to our senior prom. It was a school rule, a stupid rule, but that was the Army way in those days.

Someone got the bright idea to hook me up with the ranking General’s daughter—a sweet girl, but I didn’t know her. Because I already had a girlfriend who I sort of loved, I had no interest in the arrangement with the General’s daughter.

I made some stupid decisions that involved selling sleeping pills that were freely available (at nominal cost without a prescription) in the French drugstores (les pharmacies) near our house. I sold the pills to friends to raise money for Paris prom expenses, which I expected to be, well, excessive. It turned out that the pills were illegal on American military property, which included the high school.

A big kid I didn’t know bought three and started running around the campus yelling to everybody that he was high on LSD—a kind of joke, I guess. Anyway, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) locked down the school, did a sweep, and found discarded pill wrappers.

After a number of interrogations, they got to the truth and had to decide how to handle me and two other kids who had nothing to do with anything except that they “confessed” to buying one pill each.

One of the kids was the only black at the school. It didn’t help at all that his dad was an enlisted man—his dad was not, sadly, the highest-ranking Naval officer in Paris, like mine. He and his family were put on the first flight out of Paris. His family was uprooted over a sleeping pill. 

The verdict was that I would not attend the last week of classes but would receive a diploma and be allowed to go to the graduation ceremonies—including the after-party.

The senior prom was off-limits. It was my punishment. The Army would send a West Point cadet (from the academy famous for its overlook of the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City) to accompany the General’s daughter.

For me, the punishment was a reward. Yes, I was expelled from high school, but I was going to graduate, and I didn’t have to hang around during the last week of classes. I was free.

Sandy’s civilian high school reserved the Eiffel Tower for their prom. No one had a problem with me being her guest. Yes, the tower was amazing.  After the celebration, we club-hopped through Paris night spots with the money I had made, which the DIA didn’t bother to confiscate.

As for my own high school graduation party, school-rules didn’t permit Sandy to be there.  It took place on a large estate, which was romantically lit and well-attended.

A beautiful girl I had seen at school but not yet met walked-up to introduce herself, and somehow, we found a way to make love behind a grove of trees in the backyard. Until then, I hadn’t understood how much comfort some women are able to provide to a man who seeks reassurance.

Sometimes I wish I’d run off with the girl like she said she wanted, but her dad was an enlisted man. I couldn’t see a way to make things work. In those days officer families and enlisted families didn’t mix. It was like segregation of the races, kind of.

Speaking of race, as I told readers, the Army sent the black kid who had nothin’ to do with nothin’ and his whole family back to the states on the first plane out of Paris. They forbade him to graduate or visit parties. I thought his punishment was outlandishly unfair, but it was the 1960s.  Most high-powered white people hated black people at the time. It’s the way things were back then.

It wasn’t possible for me to set things right.

This essay is getting kind of long, isn’t it?  Maybe I should write a Section-Deux someday to cover the horrors I suffered as an adult working at a dozen companies for 35 years.

No?

Ok.

Here is a summary, then:

After returning to the states and entering University I got myself fired from the Army Officer program (ROTC) a few weeks before I was scheduled to receive an officer’s commission.

My mistake was to speak a few lines over a microphone and loudspeakers to about 15,000 fellow college students who were protesting against the Vietnam War. Although I received a wild ovation (people jumped up and down, screamed in my ears, and hugged me) it didn’t go over well at headquarters. It ended my military career.

The Lieutenant Colonel who fired me was a good enough guy. He gave me a failing grade in Foreign Relations—the last class requirement for an officer’s commission. As a result, my military record was spotless. I was too dumb to be an infantry officer. That’s all.

After being released by the Army—like every other civilian guy—I became subject to the military draft.  It was a lottery system designed to determine who would be inducted.

I drew a low number, which the colonel must have known, because it was based on date-of-birth— information in my personnel file he possessed. A low draft number meant that I had no way out. A grunt tour in the agent-orange saturated undergrowth of Vietnam was certain.

Unknown to the colonel, a friend of mine sat on the draft board. By the grace of God and help from my friend (he was an uncle, actually), the Army never called.

After he retired the colonel became a player in township politics. By all accounts he did good things for his community. Years later I ran into him from time to time when shopping. He always smiled and asked how things were going. He seemed surprised to learn that things were going well.

I did get fired from my first three jobs out of college. One company told me to my face that they couldn’t retain employees who opposed the military, which is what a four week long investigation into my background by their crack investigators had uncovered.

Fortune 500 companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world: the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lost every battle and suffered millions of casualties. They won the war. Who can argue with success?  I often wonder how much better-off America and Vietnam would be if the people who were smart enough to resist a cruel and senseless war had been allowed to take their place in leadership when the fighting ended. No one will ever know. 

After three investigations and three firings by Fortune 500 companies over a short period of two years, I suffered catastrophic depression. I couldn’t muster the energy to look for work. I decided to return to the University to upgrade my skills, while I underwent counseling.

I took a part time job as a busboy for an upscale restaurant. The tips were fantastic. At a company Christmas party, my beautiful (and fearless) wife acted “inappropriately” according to a complaint by the owner’s wife; when I returned to work her husband fired me. In those days, men were responsible for the behavior of their wives.

I got a better job, and life went on.  I sharpened my skills, started a family, and garnered engineering-design experience. After several years, a packaging-machine builder hired me to investigate cost overruns on their flagship machine line.  I discovered a kick-back scheme by top execs that involved powerful suppliers. The CEO quit to avoid arrest, and I was fired to provide cover for those who had no intention of quitting.

The upside was that I received the most lucrative severance package of my career.

I don’t feel good about it, because justice wasn’t served. It rarely is, right?  I wanted to stay alive, protect my family, and not get blacklisted in my profession (engineering), which would render me unable to earn a living. My only option was cowardice, and that’s what I chose.

Life would continue, but I learned how power and fear twist justice in the world of plundering by civilians. It was an eye-opener, for sure.

The highest paid job I ever held required that I work seven days a week. I made a ridiculous amount of money, but under the pressure of too many hours and unreasonable demands from our biggest client, General Motors, my supervisor started drinking more than usual. I told him he was an alcoholic. We argued, and he fired me. He told me he couldn’t work with someone who thought he was a drunk.

The lowest paid job was Bible-study leader at church. It paid exactly nothing. I sat on a planning council with other leaders where we discussed things. The “elders” revealed that they intended to sever their ties to the national denomination, because they didn’t think the denominational leaders had punished sufficiently a pastor who had presided over his daughter’s wedding to her girlfriend.

The elders seemed to possess a morbid hatred of Christian heretics who favored gay people. They intended to join another, more conservative denomination to set things right.

I told the leaders they were stupid; it was a bad move that would have bad consequences. I was right, but the bad consequences were directed at me—personally. They disbanded my Bible group, barred me from leadership, and forced me to shut down my website for six weeks.

Eventually, many shunned me. I got a lucky opportunity to resign my membership without the misfortune of being excommunicated. It’s complicated, but the part of the story that I can repeat is told on this site. Click the link or look it up. I was able to leave in good standing, which was an answered prayer—in my grateful opinion.

The week after we decided to leave, my wife and I found a church with lovely people who were, many of them, crazy conservative, but we didn’t care. They talked to us and treated us nice. Nice goes a long way with us both. My wife made and continues to make a lot of new friends.

God does only good things, I learned.

It’s true.

My work experiences weren’t always negative. I cooperated with the FBI on some important investigations involving national security.  I invented or helped to invent products used by everyone everywhere—including the first tear-spout coffee lids and tamper-resistant caps for juice cartons (for which I received $1,000 and a patent).

I also helped design and tool the first generation of run-flat wheels used on Hummer combat vehicles. I kind of got trapped on that one. I vowed I would never apply my talents to warfare but I did—I was a single parent raising a family of kids at the time. For their sake I couldn’t quit. 

As the highest paid union worker at the factory, my career would be toast if I wasn’t on board.  I used state-of the-art design software to solve many production problems. Everything that anyone designed went through me for corrections and approvals.

Company executives invited the press and directed me to appear on a television news show to demonstrate an important production technique that made the wheels possible. The execs were soon in deep trouble with the FBI over what turned out to be a national security screw-up; the program was, after all, classified.

The damage was done, but the FBI didn’t interview me. The FBI didn’t want certain people to know, because I happened to be working with them on another more important investigation that they wanted to keep secret.

I was able to retire at age 60, which to my way of thinking wasn’t soon enough. In all the years I worked, I never spent more than five-and-a-half years at any one company.

I get called frequently with job offers, but I turn them down.  A few years ago a company I worked for early in my career called to offer a lucrative three-month assignment, which I accepted.

Once rehired they kept extending my quit date. I put my foot down and gave them a date certain. The company put a person near my office to facilitate my every move to make sure they got the last ounce of production from me before I returned to retired life.

On the last day, they honored me with a luncheon party.

I bought a lot of things with the money they paid me including a stair-climber for my wife, a new car, a garage rebuild, a new concrete driveway and sidewalks front and back, and landscaping. What my wife and I didn’t spend went in the bank. It is amazing what five months of work can buy, I thought when everything was finished.

I was glad I went back to work but decided I would never do it again. The time to pontificate would never be more right.

What is the lesson from all this self-disclosure?

As my hero Doug Flutie once said, “Each person makes their own way in this world.”  Who disagrees?

Anyone who can think understands that no life can be explained within an encyclopedia, nor a book—even a long one. People who think know that accomplished people are complex, but so are the less accomplished.

Even a simple dog or cat—a pet—has a complicated life, which becomes apparent to anyone who takes the time to write it all down. Try it, any skeptic who doubts the truth about the complexity of living beings.

Even after decades of blunders, any bloke who is able to hide beneath their thick skull an undamaged and flexible brain should be able—if they reflect on their experiences and are lucky, as I was—to make sense enough sometimes to pass on to others what they’ve learned, both good and bad.

My process is called PONTIFICATION. 

It’s what I do.  

The people I most want to rescue are the ones I love. True to those who pursue authentic lives passionately lived, these are the kind of folks who generally resist pontificators.

Oh, well.

My life unfolded for whatever reasons the way it did, and I’m OK with it.

What choices did I have? 

I ask those I’ve hurt to forgive me.

No one wants to die evil. With the help of Jesus, people can be forgiven, can’t they? Who believes it?

Despite all evidence to the contrary—may God help me—I always have.

In another life someone said, YOU’RE FIRED!  over and over. It gave me nightmares.

PTSD.

Hell, it was me who said it, sometimes.

…forgive them. They are clueless…  is what Christ said before they killed him. He held no grudges. He defended those who hurt him most. 

Billy Lee

NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: 

Billy Lee’s account, You’re Fired! contains omissions of events, some of which are included in other essays on this site. A few details are arranged in non-sequential order.

The full story about Billy Lee’s separation from the army is known only to the author and the army; Billy Lee simplified the narrative. (No harm to truth intended or done.)

We advise readers to refer to other essays on this website to fill in gaps and resolve contradictions.

WE THE EDITORS changed some of the names to protect anonymity.

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MYSTERIES

People ask a lot of questions, don’t they?

Some are simple to answer, but people who have missed their opportunity to be broadly educated sometimes can’t separate the simple queries from the hard.  I’m in that group, more times than not.

I rummaged through an old safe the other day.  I found its key tucked away and forgotten in the back of a drawer in an antique desk. I asked myself: what might be in that old safe?  Why not take a look?  What harm could there be in searching a dusty safe for forgotten objects?

I found old papers and school reports. I found Christmas and birthday greetings and expired credit cards.  I found a rectangular tin-foil-wrapped object pressed flat and smooth and a quarter-inch thick — a pamphlet of some kind, perhaps.

I would unwrap it later.

I reviewed a report card from the seventh grade. It held up well during the past 58 years. My geography teacher wrote a comment that caught me by surprise. “Billy Lee is a thinker,” he wrote next to the “A” he gave me.

I remembered back.  Mr. Holden drove a taxi-cab nights to make ends meet. Memories flooded in.

He complained that teachers weren’t paid enough. Between taxi fares, he read books. He recited titles and authors, but I knew I would never read them. The writers’ names were unfamiliar — foreign, some of them, which I couldn’t remember or pronounce; the titles? — incomprehensible.

How could anyone read books whose content was unconnected to anything they knew or were able to understand?  I couldn’t. I was sure of it.

I found a letter from a girl I once loved.  She explained why we could no longer be together.  Despite all my wonderful qualities, I was needy, she explained. I needed to turn my needs into wants by finding others to fill in the gaps she couldn’t.

It was odd, I thought. I didn’t realize how technically expert was her craft the first time I read her note. Who knows? Maybe today she is a famous author who writes under a pen-name. Stranger things have happened in the history of literature, right?

The writer of Jane Eyre comes to mind. Charlotte Brontë published her novel under the name of Currer Bell.  I always thought a writer of her depth might have come up with a better name.  I did, and I’m not half the writer Charlotte was. People have to admit, Billy Lee has a nice ring, no?

Lately, I’ve been writing answers to questions on Quora to which no one can possibly know the answers.  I call them mystery questions.

Many of the questions remind me of the sailor’s dilemma where a seaman finds himself stranded and adrift on a raft in a vast ocean of swells during a raging monsoon. The man clings to a few pieces of wood and prays to God for deliverance.

He asks God why was he born when it is clear that his life is going to end in terror, alone on a raft in a bottomless sea with no chance of rescue. If God by some miracle answers his prayer; if God saves him and the storm clears, the sun will bake him alive; eventually the sharks will eat him.

Why? Why? Why?

What sin did he commit that drove him to his fate? What decisions did he make that were ill-advised and unwise?

What might he have done differently to avoid the horrid end he knows will befall him in the few moments that remain before his strength is sapped and he loses his grip on the last piece of wood, which will disintegrate once he’s sucked beneath the churn.

Well, one answer that comes to mind is this: he didn’t plan for his birth; once born he didn’t plan for his death. He never really believed that he was doomed to a lonely, fearful death — the destiny of all living creatures; humans are no exception.

The answer to his cry for answers is that there are no answers. No one avoids losing everything they love. It is every person’s fate. No scheme, no matter how cleverly constructed, avoids it.

And yet the sailor begs God. He shakes his fist and screams against the gale: God, why did you forget me?  Why my pointless life?  Why did I suffer to the very end? 

Amen.

Here are six mysteries I will struggle to explain.

Mystery 1 — What caused or initiated the Big Bang, if there was nothing before it?

95% of the mass and energy of the universe that theories and observations say must be “out there”, no one has been able to find, right?

Does anyone anywhere know anything at all about what the universe is or how it works?

The big bang is a verbal “analogy” used to help folks visualize what a few theorists have worked out mathematically to explain a lot of observations that otherwise make no sense.

Here is the hard part: the mathematics is also an analogy; it isn’t real; it’s just numbers. Mathematics cannot make a model that reflects fundamental realities without simplifying a lot of important stuff — and no one as yet knows what the missing stuff is that human speculation and observation is overlooking.

We all know it’s true.

Mathematics is a way of reasoning — like language but minus its ambiguities and textures. An argument can be made that mathematics and language are not adequate to the challenge of describing reality.

Humans seem to be lost in a mystery of existence from which they will never be rescued. They lack certain fundamental tools that they must someday discover and develop to give them any chance at all to climb out of a very dark hole of ignorance.

It might be possible to understand the cosmos — if the secrets of consciousness are unraveled. Consciousness is the magic-water in the desert of ignorance which — when found, understood, and imbibed — could quench the thirst-to-know that every thinking person suffers. That is my hope, anyway.

Consciousness might be fundamental and foundational. Most people won’t accept it, but almost every brilliant person who has thought the problem through seems to have written that it must be so.

Start with this: Why Something, Not Nothing?

Then this:

Sensing the Universe

Then this:

Conscious-Life

Mystery 2 — Assuming we can completely separate religion and faith from pure science and fact, then speaking from a purely scientific point-of-view, what form would life after death take?

The consciousness that people experience today is the consciousness they will experience after death if consciousness is the fundamental foundation of all reality.

Conscious life-forms plug into universal consciousness like televisions plug into the cable network. TVs come and go, but the cable network is forever broadcasting. The conscious experience it creates appears in the televisions that are connected to it and can be observed on their screens by independent observers.

The reality of television comes from its fundamental foundation, which is a broadcasting system — in this analogy. As long as a television is plugged in and turned on somewhere, the reality of the cable network will continue.

Consciousness does not belong to the TV, but is experienced by it. When the TV “dies”, this consciousness will continue to be experienced by other TVs. The unplugged television will never miss it, and the consciousness it shared with other televisions will never die.

This view of reality has been described in analogous ways by Erwin Schrödinger, John Von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and other brilliant physicists.

Conscious-Life

Mystery 3 — How is DNA a natural code?

DNA is a reservoir of bases that RNA draws from to build sequences that are processed in RNA-built structures called ribosomes. From them polypeptide “necklaces” are fashioned which are folded by Golgi structures into proteins. Proteins become the tissues of the body and the catalysts of cell metabolism, right?

In humans, 10% of DNA is used to make the templates of proteins (2%) and catalysts called polymerases (8%). The rest (90%) is not used as far as anyone knows today.

A lot of extraneous chemical structures play at the edges of DNA to influence what is expressed and what is suppressed. It’s called epigenetics and is an active field of research.

DNA is neither a code nor a cipher. It’s not that simple. A lot more is going on that scientists know about and which scientists know nothing about. For example, proteins exist in the body for which no DNA sequencing has been found in the genome. It’s called dark DNA.

NO CODE

Mystery 4 — If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, won’t it reach infinite speeds?  What does an expanding universe mean after the heat death of the universe?

The universe is expanding like a balloon that is being inflated by the force of something that exists inside it, which no one understands. I’ve heard mainstream physicists say that they believe this expansion is uniform and accelerating; it will lead to a “Big Rip.”

The Big Rip will tear apart everything — including atoms and parts of atoms. Energy will dissipate and the universe will flat-line and disappear. It will be as if the universe never existed when the process is complete. Space, time, energy, and matter ripped to shreds will leave nothing behind.

I’ve always thought that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by the gravitational tug of trillions of parallel universes that surround our own like a swarm of fireflies. Accelerated expansion is evidence for massive parallel universes, it seems to me.

As seductive as this idea is, no one is proposing it as a serious explanation for the observations of expansion. I don’t know why, but suspect that many of the smartest people don’t think the parallel worlds model clears up enough of the mysteries in the cosmos to be worth pursuing.

Neither does the Big Rip model. It can be argued that the “rip” model explains nothing. It describes what happens when everything is driven apart by an unknown force to its logical conclusion. Somehow, the description doesn’t seem helpful. It doesn’t answer the biggest question of all: how did everything start in the first place?

How did we get here? Where are we? Is anyone in charge? Will the universe live and die without the benefit of any living thing — any conscious life, including itself — understanding the why and how of it all?

How can something on the scale of a universe exist and then cease to exist whose mysteries were forever out of reach — impossible for conscious-life to grasp or comprehend?

Mystery 5 — How could the precursors to the origin of life move or assemble with intent? At what point would this intent become actual life?

Anyone who says they understand how the precursors of life assemble is telling fibs, because no one has any idea how life started. I’ve heard convoluted conjectures about how clays, for example, might have got life started, but they are unconvincing and not reproducible, at least to my way of thinking.

Based on evidence in ancient rocks it seems more likely that comets and asteroids carried prokaryotic cells to Earth. These cells are thousands of times smaller than the eukaryotic cells that are the building blocks of all animals and plants.

Because these cells are small and are, internally, a disorganized mess (no organelles, no nuclei, tiny amounts of RNA & DNA mixed together like scrambled eggs along with everything else they contain),  it seems reasonable that prokaryotes could be abundant in the universe and have existed since the first generation of stars and planets.

These cell types were firmly established on Earth (a third generation star) by Earth-Year one-billion. Oxygen didn’t exist, nor did oceans. Some geologists believe Earth was bone-dry at its start.

Now comes the really hard part to understand. It took two-billion years for these tiny cells to branch-off into the much larger and more tightly organized cells called eukaryotes. During that time an onslaught of ice-balls from the outer reaches of the solar-system created a deluge of water on both Mars and Earth. 

Earth — having 2.65 times the gravity of Mars and a magnetosphere (which Mars lost when its iron-nickel core froze) — was able to hold onto both its atmosphere and its oceans.

Oceans are probably the incubators where highly unlikely events occurred that made humans possible. Cells grew in size and complexity. Some engulfed prokaryotic granules that became the mitochondria that every eukaryotic cell uses like mechanical batteries to add the energy necessary for big cells to survive.

Somehow these big cells learned how to use sunlight for power. Photosynthesis released oxygen, which poisoned almost every other kind of living cell on the planet. The survivors, the remnant, took another billion-and-a-half years to become space-exploring civilizations of highly intelligent animals who call themselves humans.

It’s a process that, because of its duration and a number of sporadic near-extinctions, seems unlikely to have happened at all, but here everyone is on Earth to prove that the impossible is possible.

Although I agree with Freeman Dyson that prokaryotic life is going to be found to be pervasive in the hundreds-of-thousands of methane-and-water ice-balls in the outer reaches of the solar system (called the Kuiper Belt), it seems unlikely that the much larger eukaryotic cells (or the animals and plants that evolved from them) will ever be found anywhere else but on mother Earth.

It’s possible that intelligent life has evolved in some other place, but the odds are small enough that by the time humans suffer their inevitable extinction it seems unlikely that they will have found and identified beyond Earth any non-prokaryotic life at all.

FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

And now, at last, the final mystery. Mystery number six.

Who forgot what it is?

Remember the foil wrapped object found in the old safe?  What was inside, anyway?

Any guesses?

I took the shiny object to my wife, Bevy Mae, and we carefully peeled away the foil to reveal the contents within.

And of course, dear reader, you guessed right.  A stack of money is a wonder to behold.  It makes living feel real good, at least for a while. A sufficiently large amount provides the freedom to buy any old thing at all.

Will we buy a sailboat and take our thrills from a roiling ocean?

We don’t know.

Billy Lee

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EMERGENCY

Talking heads on MSNBC are calling the latest political developments involving the president a national emergency.

What’s going on?

The president nominated and the GOP is about to confirm a young conservative judge to sit on the Supreme Court who will make abortion illegal in all fifty states.

Everyone knows it’s coming.

The man’s name is Brett Kavanaugh. He seems to be a partisan hack — an ideologue who lacks common sense — but he’s smart and highly educated in conservative jurisprudence. Everybody says so, right?

He worked hard for Kenneth Starr to impeach President Clinton for lying to Congress about what at the time seemed to be a consensual extra-marital affair. Does anyone remember?

Ok, so what?

Well, the president who nominated him is a nut-job himself who can’t tell the truth, because he doesn’t know right from wrong; he has a mental disorder that renders him delusional, paranoid, and vindictive.

It’s in all the latest books, right?  Trump’s First Year,  Fire and Fury,  Unhinged,  Fear,  The Truth About Trump,  etc. etc. — a bunch of best sellers published during the Donald’s first 595 days as president.

Trump sold folks a fiction that Barry Obama somehow misplaced his birth certificate — if found, it would prove he was a Kenyan usurper.  As a candidate for president, Donny said that he had hired investigators to find the missing piece of paper. To this day, the president suspects that the document found was a forgery.

But he’s moved on, he says. Why don’t we?

Ok. So what?

[Note from the Editorial Board: On 6 October 2018, Donald Trump signed-off on the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.]

Trump introduced and elevated to super-stardom a very young man, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He enabled the kid to keep his atomic toys and to more effectively work to reunite his country with the south. The process of reunification is going on behind the scenes as I write.

Ok. So what?

A former CIA chief called the Korean summit, treasonous. The CIA chief no longer appears on TV. The president stripped his security clearance. He slapped him, somehow, off the public radar.

Ok. So what?

Some in the president’s inner circle have been indicted and pled guilty to more charges than anyone can name or count. The president replaces the unfaithful; turnover churns; life goes on.

Ok. So what?

A rotten, no-good coward — OK, someday they might make him/her a hero like they did John McCain — wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Times. The Times turned it into an “editorial”.  The mole (or lion) works with a cabal of fellow travelers (or saviors of the Republic) inside the White House to unravel the president and disable his agenda.

Who wants to bet it was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly?  Not me.

Ok. So what?

Christians meet daily to pray with the president to give him victory over his enemies, presumably. If the president falls, the vice-president Mike Pence will hold him up; he’ll carry-on the fight.

Ok. So what?

Tweeters, like myself, are being overrun by hoards of follower-bots.  They aren’t real.

I look at who they follow  — to make sure they are fake — then block them. (They seem to follow each other and a few other souls who actually are real — like me.)  If I didn’t block, I’d have thousands of fake followers.

Note from the Editorial Board:  No, the @BillyLeePontif on Twitter is not a hybrid form of artificial intelligence;  Billy Lee is not an “AI BOT”, nor was he created by us. He was never sort-of-fake nor will he ever be. The Editors

“They” plan to make me and others like me unwilling and unsuspecting nodes in a huge network, which will light-up like a wildfire of California Christmas trees before the midterms to sway public voting through intimidation, threats, false tweets, and fake activity orchestrated by who? — public relations firms?  — foreign governments?  — trumpletonian hate groups? — Christian evangelists?  — or all four groups working together (with Israel, of course) to finally conquer the world and secure the Holy Land for the Jewish refugees who still live there? 

Is there anyone in Hell who knows what is going on and wants to tell someone?

Does anyone care?

Ok. So what?

I can’t be rambling. I don’t want to sound like a badly coded bot . I’ll lose my audience, correct?

Let’s get to it.

What is this emergency I am writing about, anyway?

It’s abortion. Only white supremacists, sycophants. and clowns in the president’s follower-base will stay behind to give him the time of day if he turns his heels to support a woman’s right to end her pregnancy.  It’s that simple.

Can anyone make an argument for the president should he change his mind as he sometimes does to support the right of women to secure abortions?  — because legal, free, and safe abortion was his position for years. Does anyone remember?

Does his head of yellow straw lose its luster if he betrays his pledge to capture and kill pregnancy-options in the USA?

Who knows?

Ok. Probably not.

Time to move on.

My hunch is that most people reading this essay do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young.

I remember.

I remember the first time the word “abortion” appeared in a nationally syndicated magazine. I was in seventh grade. The word, which snuck its way into an issue of LIFE Magazine, created a sensation. Flood gates opened. Every news-outlet covered the story. For months, it was the only subject sophisticated people talked about.

I didn’t learn what the word meant until I was older and found an unabridged dictionary that defined it. After reading the definition, I still didn’t understand the word. In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, many subjects remained off-limits and off-airways. When it came to sex and abortion, they were mysteries to children, certainly, but also to adults.

After the cultural revolution of the 1960s (which changed everything), it seems impossible for young people to believe that their country could be as naive as the USA once was. Young folks can’t imagine that the United States was a nation of mostly sheep who believed everything they read in books and magazines and everything they heard on the radio and watched on television.

It was a country with a vigorous right-wing press, but progressive views were scrupulously suppressed. No one explained what communism or socialism was, except to say that they were bad systems which existed in countries that wanted to destroy us. It was a time when citizens took everything their leaders said as absolute truth.

Believe it.

In 1968,  I was a college sophomore who owned a convertible and a lot of spending money. At a party one night in early spring a beautiful girl I had met a few times came onto me. She boldly asked if I wanted to go upstairs and have sex with her.

I thought, I can’t make it with this beautiful girl unless I’m clean. I have to go back to the dorm and take a shower first. I told her, and she agreed to wait. After returning we went upstairs and made love.

I was slightly drunk and kind of scared — it seemed unnatural to be pursued by a pretty girl who had never shown interest in me before — but I went ahead and then it was over.  I drove home and forgot about it.

The next weekend Alexa (not her real name, of course) called on the phone to tell me she was pregnant. I thought, wow! — now I can marry a beautiful woman. That’s a good outcome!

I asked her not to be afraid. I would take care of everything. Of course I would marry her and we would raise the child together. She could finish her education; I’d pay for it, and then I’d finish school after — while she took her turn caring for our child.

Suddenly she started crying. ”Oh Billy Lee” she sobbed. ”You are so honest and so kind. I can’t lie to you — I just can’t.” 

”What are you talking about, Alexa?”

”The guy who made me pregnant is the drummer in the band at the club where I work. He hates me now and won’t speak to me.” 

”You work at a club? What club?”

Well, enough voyeurism. The short version is she worked at a strip club where she was a go-go dancer employed by the band.

Ok. So what?

Well, the reason I’m writing this essay is to give people a picture of what getting an abortion was like fifty years ago when terminating a pregnancy was a crime in every state. It’s not clear that abortions will work in exactly the same way next year when the country circles back to once again make abortions illegal.

Drugs are available today that weren’t before. For less than twenty dollars a pregnant girl can purchase pills on the internet that will end her pregnancy. She can use bit-coin or other underground currencies to completely hide the transaction forever behind the most sophisticated encryption that organized-crime can devise.

She can ask her boyfriend to watch certain videos on the dark web. Voila!  After an hour of viewing and the purchase of a few implements, he’s an abortion doctor.

When he’s ready, the termination of his girlfriend’s pregnancy will start its eternal journey down that rutted road to distant and forgotten memories.

In the 1960s, it was more difficult. Alexa set up a meeting with three doctors in an old house somewhere. She asked, and I tagged along. They signed some forms, which claimed that her life would be in danger if she carried her pregnancy to term.  I drove Alexa to Maryland where we spent a week at the house of one of my dad’s friends who was in Europe at the time.

Alexa made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was known to be a safe place where the doctors performed the procedure for women whose lives were in danger. Yes, it was expensive.

Her friends chipped in $600 — about $3,000 in today’s money. Though the hospital accepted her as a patient, the problem was that they wanted Alexa to return in three months. The abortion scheduling was crowded — booked solid.  Alexa would be six months pregnant before it became her turn on the schedule.

Alexa and I decided to spend the week we had set aside for the hospital visit to go out each night to party in the Georgetown clubs in Washington DC — we ended up dancing and drinking away every dime of the money we had collected from her friends. Nightly, we returned to our borrowed house to make love with no worries about pregnancy.

It was liberating to love a beautiful woman unafraid of consequences.

I learned later that some in the neighborhood noticed the young couple coming and going at late hours from the house of their friend; they complained, but nothing came of it.

At week’s end we returned to our university where Alexa went to work on her friends to gather the money she needed for the final appointment. The school year would be over by then. Summer break was on its way.  When she left on her second trip to DC three months later, she took the bus.

She knew what to do. She no longer needed me. The dress rehearsal was over. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to accompany her, she said.

I guess I don’t blame her.

As it happened, I became one of eighteen young men at the university who the government accepted into the army-officer training program that year. Over five-thousand applied in a futile effort to stay in school after the government ended draft deferments for college students — to better supply warm bodies to the killing fields in southeast Asia.

The army scheduled my training to start that summer in Georgia at Fort Benning.  I couldn’t have been with Alexa, even if she wanted me, which she didn’t. In training, recruits were isolated in those days. Even a telephone call was impossible.

It turned out that it would be three-and-a-half years before I saw Alexa again. We ran into each other outside a steak house. She invited me to go inside and have something to eat.

She told me she owned a successful dance studio in Detroit. She looked amazing. She really did. She was happy. A good life lay ahead of her that would be full of all the good things that money from her business would buy.

I was dirty and unkempt. Again, I needed a shower, except worse. My clothes were rags, really.  I explained that my military training didn’t end well.  I became an anti-war protestor who spent maybe way too much time in the streets and the city parks. Someone put my car on blocks one night and stripped it of its MAG wheels and everything else of value.

I had no car.

I helped my friends organize demonstrations; I wrote unpaid copy for an anti-war newspaper.  After resigning a pending officer’s commission (with the full support and encouragement of the Army) I dropped out of the university to fight the good fight against the Vietnam war and racism. I bussed tables a few hours a week in the same restaurant I once managed. Financially, I wasn’t doing well.

Alexa interrupted; she touched me on the arm and leaned-in to thank me for helping her that one time years ago when she needed a friend she could trust.

I felt unworthy. I felt shame. She was too good for me. This time in her expensive clothes and me in my filthy jeans, it was obvious to us both.

She paid for my meal and said good-by for the last time.

My wonderful life would come later.

Billy Lee

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BALANCE

I grew up in a Navy family. Maybe it makes me a “Navy brat” to some.  I really don’t care. Military families pay a high price. They move frequently, for one thing. 

Dad was a naval aviator who, among other assignments, commanded in succession two squadrons of anti-submarine jet-helicopters — one squadron in Rhode Island, one in Key West. People who know me or who have read certain essays on this blog are aware.

Dad fought within and alongside the National Security Agency to defend our country. The United States created the NSA after World War II to monitor international shipping. The global fleet of tankers and cargo boats has grown to nearly 52,000. The USA is fortunate to possess high-tech sensors that can see nuclear bombs aboard ships. It’s one of many capabilities that keeps our country safe.

The NSA has been led by a succession of Navy Admirals, and Army and Air Force Generals. Today, the NSA is led by an Army General of Japanese descent. While others were interned, his dad worked for US intelligence during the last world war, it seems, so the president trusts him. He trusts him enough that in May 2018, he assigned him to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service and the U.S. Cyber Command.

Now might be a good time to inform readers that I don’t now nor have I ever had a security clearance. I am a civilian pontificator who resigned (with a little help from an Army Lieutenant Colonel) a pending infantry officer’s commission decades ago, because I believed the Vietnam War was an atrocity. I had no appetite for the killing I would be ordered to perform to successfully engage in a war that for me at least made no sense.

What I have now is the experience of living with and around military and civilian intelligence officers during the first twenty-two years of my life. I lived near and was friends with the daughter of the man who discovered the missiles on Cuba that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My dad became a significant player in that crisis. So I’m providing a unique perspective that other civilians might not have.

I suggested in a recent essay (47 TONS) that Japan is well on its way to becoming a threat to human survival should their chain of 6,852 remote islands fall into the hands of a cabal of wrong-headed leaders. The Japanese have accumulated 47 tons of bomb-grade plutonium from their fast-reactor programs. They are producing an additional eight tons per year.

A softball sized clump of about fourteen pounds is more than enough to make one unsophisticated atomic bomb. A state-of-the-art bomb can be made from a baseball sized clump weighing nine pounds.

Do the math.

The Japanese have other capabilities that should terrify anyone who might make the mistake to oppose them. They have a complex of labs they call RIKEN that span the islands. A deputy director hung himself at work a few years ago. The signs that something might be wrong at these labs are in plain view for anyone who bothers to look.

They have sophisticated missile and space programs called JAXA.  

To their credit, NHK television has complained to the American public about the challenges Japan suffers from possessing and producing too much plutonium. Right now the USA seems to be preoccupied with Russia, Korea, and China. Russia says they have stealthy, multi-warhead nuclear missiles that can hurtle through the atmosphere at almost three miles per second.

Moscow is about 5,000 miles from Washington DC, or 2,000 seconds away — 33 minutes. Thirty-three minutes seems like a long time, but some are forgetting about the 300,000 Russians who live in Cuba, most assigned to the submarine and air bases Russia built and maintains there.

Cuba is 1,100 miles from Washington DC, which is a seven minute trip should Russia position their missiles inside Cuba’s jungled mountains. Again, seven minutes seems like a lot of time. The problem is, the missiles are stealthy; we can’t see them; even if we could, the United States has nothing that can shoot them down. They fly too fast.

News reports are currently downplaying the importance and extent of Russian progress in missile technology. The expression on Trump’s face after he came out of his two hour meeting with Vladimir Putin spoke volumes. Our sophisticated media can’t conceal for long that our country is in a deep hole. The situation for our side isn’t good.

Hillary Clinton mentioned another threat from Russia during the 2016 presidential debates. Her revelation was a national security screw-up of ginormous proportions, which the press let slide.

Everyone remembers Clinton calling DT,  Putin’s Puppet. No one seems to remember her warning that unmanned Russian drones were sitting in the sands off our coasts.

US intelligence believes these drone submarines carry poisons — possibly plutonium, which will be released during a conflict.

I was living in Key West during the Cuban missile-crisis. My dad chased a nuclear-armed sub out of waters near Cuba. He almost started a war, but he spoke Russian and was able to make himself understood —  the USA meant business.

He thought, as did everyone at the time, that we had caught Russia in the middle of its first installation of nuclear missiles on the island. The missiles weren’t yet armed; they posed no immediate threat.

Years later the Russians revealed that the missiles seen in the CIA photo-shoot were second generation. The first generation stood already buried — locked and loaded. Had an incident ignited an exchange of fire, Florida and Cuba would be distant memories to this day.

The incident involving my dad is retold, with a few perhaps intentional mistakes to protect national security, by Oliver Stone in his remarkable book, The Untold History of the United States. Oliver Stone was a warrior — a veteran of the Vietnam war. He has credentials that go beyond his opus of award-winning films, screen-plays, and books.

I’m not going to name names, but USA companies have milked the defense department for decades. They’ve dragged their feet to keep projects funded and on-going — why don’t we all figure this out together? — to maximize profits and bonuses for executives who in turn give money to senators and congress-folks who …  well … only dummies are unable to figure it out, right?

Corruption is called corruption because it corrodes; what corrodes destroys. That’s the pickle-barrel the USA is in, and it could be the reason DT is kissing the behinds of the folks who developed high-speed, stealth missile technology, first.

Donald Trump might be trying to buy time for our side. In the meantime our leaders are playing parts in a charade of good cops / bad cops to de-escalate an existential threat to our country until balance can be restored.

To write it so a child can understand: the balance of power has shifted away from the United States. Our enemies are saying that the USA no longer holds the advantages we once enjoyed. If we mess-up, and even if we don’t, we could wake up one morning — those of us who survive — to see our country reduced to a smoking ruin of radioactive waste.

OK. That’s one view of what’s going on. It’s my personal view — at least today. No one else has said it, so that’s why I published. It’s something to consider. Maybe tomorrow, more information will come out. I’ll change my mind. Who knows?

There are other explanations for why DT  behaved in Singapore and Helsinki like a traitor according to one of our recent CIA chiefs, John O. Brennan.  By the way, I’m 70 years old — two years younger than DT.  I’ve never heard a CIA director call any president a traitor.

EDITORS NOTE: On August 15, 2018 the president announced that he had stripped Brennan of his security clearance on July 26. Like FBI Director Comey before him, Brennan learned his bad news from television reports. The man who served six presidents and gathered the intelligence to conduct the raid that took down Osama Bin Laden wasn’t offered the courtesy of an e-mail or phone call. Instead, DT called him ”erratic”and slandered him by insisting that he couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s secrets.  

Meanwhile, former senior advisor Omarosa Manigault called Donald Trump ”unhinged” and a ”racist.” Omarosa is married to Pastor John Allen Newman of Jacksonville, Florida and is herself a Baptist minister who served as a chaplain in the California State Military Reserve before joining the Trump Administration. 

I’m not sure, but I think I once witnessed a cartel of intelligence officers assassinate one of our presidents. They sat on the Warren Commission, if anyone is curious about who they were.

One of the members was a fired CIA chief with a grudge. I was a teenager then. What did I know? — only what the commission spoon-fed me and every other American. Enough said.

We’ll never know the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Most people in the intelligence community disliked him, but so did a lot of other people including Cubans, Russians, and organized crime. All the people who know the truth or think they do are now dead or dying.

So, to get back to other explanations:  Some think DT was groomed over decades by Russian oligarchs allied with Russia and Israel. To keep him in line they provided him with a wife who was born when he was a 24-year-old skirt-chaser. He had to wait, but the wait was worth it, for him at least.

She was the daughter of a member of the communist party from a region of Yugoslavia that would later be renamed, Slovenia. She was a model unafraid to pose nude. Who doesn’t know the story?

She Germanized her name to be more in line with DT, who came from a powerful family headed by a German billionaire. His dad was once reported by some in media to be the wealthiest American — at least for a few years. He’s notorious for building segregated housing in Queens with government money during the second world war. Enough said.

Is DT’s wife a Russian sleeper agent?  Of course not.  The thought alone is preposterous, right?

Another theory some have put forward to explain DT is that he is a racist and delusional old man in the beginning stages of bona-fide dementia; perhaps Alzheimer’s disease.  It’s a little early for dementia, but I knew a woman who was diagnosed in her thirties. It took two years for Alzheimer’s to claim her.

DT’s White House physician said no; the president will live to be 200 years old if he adjusts his eating habits a little. He’s as sharp as they come — a stable genius.

DT attended a private military academy during high school.  There were two reasons young men went to military academies in those days; I remember well. One was because they were either in trouble with the law or unmanageable at home. A private academy kept them out of the house and helped maintain a peaceful lifestyle for the parents. The other reason was to avoid going to integrated schools where blacks were beginning to be introduced into mainstream civilian life. 

A college suite-mate of mine bragged that he avoided school with Negroes by attending a private military academy. He also thought Martin Luther King was a communist. I’m sure readers know the type. He graduated in criminal justice and went on to become the head of a police department in a northern state.

We’ve all met people like him, whether we know it or don’t — tall, good-looking, and bad to the bone. The war-resisters, the fighters for racial justice, the men and women of conscience who cared about right and wrong were systematically identified by conservative corporate leaders and kept away from both power and the best jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

A major company in Milwaukee hired me after I graduated. They investigated and learned that I had resigned my officer’s commission to protest the Vietnam War. The background investigation took four weeks. When it was complete, their top investigator fired me.

It was my first job in industry. I learned quick to omit any mention about my anti-war past and to avoid companies that employed investigators. It seemed obvious to me that I would be unable to make a good living otherwise.

The hammer that hit me hits everyone who resists the bad people. It’s the price the poor sometimes pay for standing against the wealthy and speaking truth to power. It’s capitalism’s unseen collateral damage.

I fear for the young people starting their careers today. A trail of internet evidence exposes every free thinking American to the prejudices of the corporate elites who want docile employees who shut up and do what they’re told, no questions asked.

My regret is that, looking back, it seems like I might have had a lot to give, but nobody wanted it; no one felt they needed it.  If the truth is told, everyone is expendable and replaceable, right? How many times have the powerful said so to the powerless? 

The lives that matter are the lives of the billionaires who rule over us all and call it freedom. I learned that white supremacists (racists) in America can achieve the highest levels of success and be admired by almost everyone who knows them.

It’s true.

But back to the intelligence assessments: Today a Russian woman was arrested who is accused of having established a channel of communication with the GOP through the NRA (National Rifle Association). The Russians planned to launder money through the NRA, according to the allegation.

The Russian agent, Mariia Butina, is now being held without bond, because she is a flight risk. She was having an “affair” with  “U.S. Person 1” to gain access “to an extensive network of U.S. persons in positions to influence political activities in the United States” according to her indictment.

Why?

Well, it gets worse in the indictment, but I don’t want my essay to go off into the weeds. People will hear all about it soon enough. Take my word. It’s bad. Who knows what else the Russians planned to better enable them to manipulate hundreds-of-thousands of paranoid, Hillary-hating-Rambos who practice their shooting skills every week at firing ranges across America?

Use imagination for a moment.  Imagine that instead of Trump, it was Clinton who won the election. The “deplorables” were ready for revolution, weren’t they?  Remember how they attacked vote-counting centers after Al Gore carried Florida in the year 2000?

The GOP intimidated the Supreme Court to halt a constitutionally mandated recount of state voting that was beginning to turn against them. The Constitution of the United States makes voting the exclusive province of state governments, does it not? Look it up. The Supreme Court had no constitutional standing. It’s why the majority opinion took care to restrict its ruling; it was not to be used as precedent for any future rulings from any bench in America, ever.  Right?

Who knows better how to incite and fund revolutions than the KGB agents who took down the Russian state and now own and run it as a personal fiefdom?

Lock her up! Lock her up! GOP delegates screamed as they voted to make Donald Trump their standard bearer in 2016.

The citizens of the United States would have been in a second civil war right now, because the DT confederates were planning to insist that Hillary stole a rigged election, right?  Does anyone remember? DT was preparing to lead a revolution against America with Russian help. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Maybe Russia planned only to destabilize America. Like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor they didn’t plan for a lopsided victory. The Japanese had no plan to occupy Hawaii. They ran like frightened sharks and hoped we wouldn’t catch them. It took four years, but eventually we came, we saw their lovely islands, and we conquered.

Veni, vidi, vici.

Japan will remain in our vise-grip until the end of time. That was the plan, anyway, when their leaders signed the terms of unconditional surrender in 1945.

Some say that DT harbors a secret desire to become a dictator. He admires strong men and wants to be one. He owned a professional wrestling league and a football team for a reason, maybe.

It’s counter-intuitive, but we might have lost our country to destabilization and revolution had Hillary won the Electoral College.  We have now a chance to save ourselves. We have to take that chance.

( Editors’ Note: Hillary garnered 65,853,516 popular votes to Trump’s 62,984,825.  ”Third party” candidates took  close to 8 million.  Ms. Clinton’s margin over Trump in the popular vote was 2,868,691. Hillary won the most votes of any candidate; Trump lost the popular contest by almost eleven million votes. He received 46% of the popular vote. Hillary and the third party candidates received 54% — a margin of 8%. )

People who played ball with the Russians (like the NRA) to take down the “deep state” might want to consider that they risk being arrested someday for treason, because they aided and abetted our enemies who attacked and continue to attack our elections, a foundation stone of American liberty.

The deplorables sometimes behave like fascist bullies, don’t they? They have pretty much proved who they are over the past two years, haven’t they? Read their twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

They claim to be Christians who love military assault rifles. How’s that for crazy? No one who survives being shot by an AR-15 ever fully recovers.

According to polls, deplorables seem to be about forty-percent of the voting population. It’s disgraceful what they post on social media. They’ve brought the USA into a bad place.

To any Trumpletonians who might be reading this essay, here are some things to learn and remember. There is no “deep state.” White supremacy is a lie. Muslims, Negros, Mexicans, gay men and women, and progressives are people who are owed respect, because they are made in the image of God, if for no other reason. They mean you no harm.

Walls make the best prisons.

Be kind to strangers, even on Twitter. You might be tweeting to angels, unawares.

DT will not be president forever.

It’s true.

Billy Lee

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12 ASSERTIONS

I have hope that someday readers will visit Quora.com to look up me — Billy Lee — to read my answers to hundreds — perhaps one day thousands — of questions asked by every kind of curious person from every part of the world.

I love to read and think about questions from unmet others — to encounter oddities that have never occurred to me to ask or answer.

It’s humbling to be confronted by the knowledge that not only do I not know the answers to thousands of questions, but I lack the breadth of mind to even imagine such questions; I am convicted by my own lack of curiosity and inability to think deeply about an almost infinite number of mysteries that other people of all types and backgrounds wonder about and seek to understand.

Hundreds of years ago, polymaths — the smartest and most energetic of them, anyway — could know and understand all that humankind ever dreamed. Today, the world is too complex; the depth of knowledge required to understand a narrow subject — like juice-carton safety-caps (I hold a patent) — takes years, maybe decades, to acquire.

Is it any wonder that smart people give up and go stupid?

No matter how much a Doctor of Philosophy knows about the rules of logic, he’s a dummy to every certified automobile mechanic he will ever meet — and vice-versa, right?

A way out of the dilemma is to practice the art of pontification. I pontificate based on a lifetime of experience; and reading; and wandering the world; and poking around in my backyard — to ponder why things are the way they seem to be.

Je connais beaucoup de merde, and I know a lot of nothing. When I write it down, well, magic happens. Resonate rings of truth rise which when later read render me reeling.

I’m unsure where-from the magic comes. It seems to fall from heaven to light the world. I’m driven to share with souls known only to God, because I have no way to know who reads my blog. I know only that some folks make the time, because WordPress stats say it’s so.

One of the things on Quora.com that seems to confuse a lot of people is the difference between momentum — a measure of the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity in a particular direction — and kinetic energy, which is a measure of the energy of an object that has been accelerated for a period of time in a particular direction, which enables it to do work.

Momentum is an object’s mass times its velocity; it is a measure of its inertia along a defined direction. It is measured in newton-seconds.

Kinetic energy is released by an object in units of acceleration that were initially induced by newtons of force. It is equal to half the quantity that is calculated by multiplying an object’s mass by its velocity squared. It is measured in units called joules, which are newton-meters.

Of course, spinning objects that aren’t moving in any direction have momentum and kinetic energy, too. The two are wrapped together in a concept called, torque.

Dear God, help me.

Now, I’m confused. Somebody, please, explain to me. I thought I understood until I started writing.  I did.  Really.

Another source of confusion concerns the nature of photons, which are tiny packets of oscillating electric and magnetic energy — from which light is made, right?

Photons seem to have no mass in the vacuum of space. When they pass through a material like glass, they leave a wake of disrupted electrons in the glass which belch out polaritons. These particles add mass to the photons and slow them down by as much as forty percent.

Polaritons can be described as light-matter waves. 

Does anyone believe it?

It’s God’s honest truth.

When photons exit the glass and enter the vacuum of space they leave the polaritons behind, lose their acquired mass, and jump to light speed, instantaneously.

Who knows for sure that it’s true?

Who understands why?

Here is an interesting thought:  if humans — limited in understanding by language and mathematics  — are unable to ever know why photons exist and behave as they appear to do, then who can? Who does understand?

Is all the complexity of the universe understood by no one? Is it possible that an unlikely universe can exist forever whose fundamentals cannot be articulated and which lies outside the experience and ability to comprehend of any sentient life-form whatever, whenever, wherever?

What kind of place do we live in, anyway?

Calm down. Take a breath.

Reality may not be as hopelessly inaccessible as it seems. Can it?

Here are some questions, which I’ve answered as truthfully as I know how. The answers are assertions of truth.

1 – How did a single cell organism eventually lead to complex life on earth, and does that mean that all life has a common ancestor (the single cell)?

This one is the 64-million-dollar question that no one has ever answered convincingly. Prokaryotic cells were established 3.5 billion years ago on the early Earth. They evolved to become the bacteria and archaea branches in the tree of life that exist to this day.

Here is the amazing part, at least for me:  Eukaryotic cells, which are the much larger and more tightly organized cells of all animals and plants, did not emerge until two billion years after prokaryotes. It took a long time to evolve cells capable of conjugating into more complex life.

For the past 1.5 billion years eukaryotic cells have evolved into life forms capable of civilization and space exploration. The time frame is amazingly long.

The thought that a lunatic could in a moment of bad judgment start a cascade of events that extinguishes all life is troubling.

When astronomers look into space they see no signatures of life as advanced as ours. Again, this is troubling, because it might be an indicator that the knowledge possessed by advanced life-forms may approach some asymptotic limit where self-annihilation becomes inevitable.

NO CODE

RISK

2 -What evidence would falsify the theory of evolution?

No one knows all the myriad ways that life evolves, only that it does. That life evolved from cells that were fully functional 3.5 billion years ago is an established fact, because of evidence found in rocks.

Scientists know that it took two billion years for these ancient cells to evolve into the much larger and more tightly organized eukaryotic cells that today are the foundational structures of all animals and plants.

No one knows how life as complex as cells was established on a hostile planet like the early Earth, but everyone has an opinion; these opinions are called conjectures and theories.

One scientist might say that life started on Mars and was transferred to Earth on space debris uplifted by a cataclysm on Mars. Another says no; all the stuff necessary to make prokaryotic (primitive) cells existed in abundance on a young Earth — perhaps near hot vents in the ocean floor. Other geologists say the earth was bone dry at one billion years. Oceans came later, so just what the heck does anyone know for sure, anyway?

Many conjectures purport to explain how life changed from unicellular eukaryotic forms 1.5 billion years ago into the space-exploring civilizations of today. Every conjecture thus far has already been falsified either by evidence or by competing conjectures that make as much sense but are different.

For example: some say mutations in DNA drive evolution. The problem is that mutations are too rare. Some say an eco-sphere of processes driven by a halo of molecules that cling to DNA drives evolution. They call it epigenetics. Others say, no. RNA drives evolution like colonies of intelligent ants who build hives. There are other explanations.

None are verifiable or generally accepted due to an insufficient body of proof that is able to overcome alternative ideas that are equally compelling.

Another problem is that no one knows if DNA life is all there is. DNA is a molecule that cannot be seen or worked with until it is amplified into a viewable goo.

Are there other undiscovered molecules no one knows how to amplify?

Understanding of the parameters and limits of life is incomplete and may perhaps mislead researchers. Humans might not yet know enough to figure out the dynamics of genomes. More needs to be discovered and understood.

Is there a shadow biosphere that is in a symbiotic relationship with DNA? Where is the dark DNA that biologists can’t find that is necessary to code for many of the proteins they know exist?

How were cells themselves established so quickly on Earth? It’s a question whose answer is discussed by countless experts and non-experts; no answer fully satisfies.

Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and survival of the fittest have their place. But he was just getting started, and he died a long time ago. Scientists have a lot of work left to do.

NO CODE

3 – Which Bible story is most objectionable when looked at in the context of modern morality?

All Scripture is God-breathed. To love and be loved by both God and people is why we were born; it’s what makes life precious and worth living. No one wants to die; no one wants to be hated.

The sad part is that everyone suffers; everyone is hated by someone; everyone hates someone; everyone dies after a life of blunders and sin. Christ Jesus came to save the lost, which by the looks of this thread is pretty much everyone.

We have hope. It’s something to hold onto as we grow weak and find ourselves ruined at the end of our minutes in the sun on our beloved Earth.

Jesus made a path for us. It cost him everything a human can pay. He somehow survived the Roman crucifixion that killed him to show the poor and overly burdened that in his power is the way, the truth, and the life.

There is a path to paradise; we — everyone of us — can find it by surrendering to the God who loved us, gave us life, and suffered to set right what we put wrong.

JESUS, THE CHRIST

4 – People say Newton’s third law, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” is not accurate. Is it true?

Einstein said that only mass and energy exist; they are in fact equivalent; they are the same thing; two sides of the same coin. Energy gives rise to all other phenomenon and forces that scientists observe.

Stephen Hawking said that when mass (or energy) comes into existence a negative energy must emerge to balance it so that when added up everything in the universe sums to zero. It appears that Newton’s third law, equal and opposite, is not only accurate — it is a fundamental balancing principle that undergirds existence.

Mass is matter, which can be positive or negative and is referred to as matter or anti-matter.

The Billy Lee Conjecture claims that mass is pixelated (quantized) such that in the contest of emergence within the smallest spherical volume, matter or anti-matter (one or the other) will prevail due to a natural truncation of π in the putative spherical volume of the creation space.

An evenly divided ratio of matter and anti-matter within a spherical creation-space is physically impossible if π is truncated by pixelization. Matter and anti-matter will annihilate until a single piece of either matter or anti-matter remains after the creation event.

To maintain a zero-sum, balancing counter-energy will emerge according to speculation by the late Stephen Hawking.

Over long periods it seems that an extraordinary amount of matter has accumulated inside our own universe by surviving the natural annihilation of matter by anti-matter. This matter seems to have generated an enormous amount of counter-balancing energy — some of which Newton called gravity. Most of the energy remains undiscovered and is referred to as “dark.”

In our own universe, π seems to “round-off” near the precision of the Planck constant.

In universes outside our own — some of which seem to be pulling our universe apart in an accelerating expansion caused, perhaps, by their own gravitational forces — π may truncate to different values to generate in some cases a prevailing anti-matter and opposing energies that manifest qualities different from the energies found in our own universe.

If parallel universes disrupt the zero-sum strategy of our own, it may still be true that the principle of zero-sum or equal but opposite is operational, but humans are too small and the distances are too far for anyone to ever know for sure that it is true.

CONSCIOUS LIFE

5 – What are the major foreign policy issues that the United States of America is working on in 2018?

I’m writing this answer just after the meeting in Singapore between North Korea and the United States involving the Korean nuclear arsenal.

The Secretary of State, Pompeo, said yesterday that NK has two years to de-nuke. This delay might tempt the Japanese to convert their stockpile of 47 tons of plutonium into bombs. Japan and North Korea have issues related to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.

It takes ten pounds to make one bomb. The Japanese can make as many bombs as they want in as little as 24 hours.

A Japan armed with 10,000 nuclear bombs (they already have the missiles to launch them) is a clear and present danger to China, Russia, and Korea — not to mention the United States with whom Japan has a beef that goes all the way back to World War Two when the USA destroyed 67 of their cities with napalm; two cities by atomic bombs.

The USA has occupied Japan ever since. Some of the Japanese probably hate us — who knows for sure?

47 TONS

MKWA

6 – Can a photon’s speed be slowed down? I have heard that it can be slowed by a medium, but I have also heard that it is just the velocity being slowed as it “bounces” from particle to particle? I am not talking about Bose-Einstein condensation.

The current thinking is this: when a photon leaves the vacuum to enter a material object, it leaves a wake in its path that vibrates electrons in the medium. These oscillating (or disturbed) electrons generate polaritons, which are photon-like objects that can catch and add mass to the photon. With mass added, the photon slows down — as much as 40% in glass, for example, which enables more polaritons to pile on.

When the photon exits into the vacuum of space, it disentangles from the polaritons, and instantly resumes light speed.

I didn’t make this up.

It’s what some physicists are saying, and it explains a lot and leaves a lot unexplained — like all things physics when folks go just a little deeper into the abyss of understanding.

7 – What is the relation between light and darkness? Can one exist without the other?

Light is the action of certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation on structures in the eye, which trigger hallucinations in the brain that humans report as “light.”

An infinite range of frequencies are “out there.” Humans are blind to almost all of them. People who are unable to trigger hallucinations induced by electromagnetic radiation say that they are experiencing “darkness.”

Some frequencies of light are experienced as “heat.” Because the sensation is not accompanied by visual cues, people in hot rooms with no windows believe they are experiencing “darkness.”

The experience of heat is caused by the same electromagnetic waves that induce visual experience, but they are a tiny bit longer in length than those which induce the experience of the color “red” in humans.

The longer waves carry less energy and are invisible to people unless they view the ”infra-red” light through high-tech sensors. Local fire-departments use these sensors to identify ”hotspots” where fires might reignite.

SENSING THE UNIVERSE

WHY SOMETHING, NOT NOTHING?

8 – Given an opportunity to pass through one or two slits with no detection, will a quantum object always pass through both?

If the slits are in the right position and are cut to the right size and are at the right distance from the source, a pattern on a detector screen will evolve over time to look as if waves are passing through the slits and interfering in a predictable way with each other.

Of course, it’s not true, because the particles are shot one at a time and the duration of the experiment can be hours to weeks long. The shots land one dot at a time. After thousands of shots, a pattern that resembles what one would expect of waves interfering is formed by the particles as they accumulate on the detector backstop.

No one knows why. The phenomenon is inexplicable.

BELL’S INEQUALITY

9 – Is Jesus a hoax? Jesus has not walked on Earth in 2,000 years. How can a man 2,000 years ago save anyone?

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,
I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

The righteous will say, ‘Lord when did we do these things?’

My answer will be, ‘Everything you did to help suffering people, you did for me.’

The preceding is a paraphrase of part of Matthew 25, a book in the Bible.

Read it. Why not?

The answer is in the sense that it is not a hoax that the “least of these” walk the earth when we do. How we treat unfortunates is, in the view of Jesus, the way we treat him. He will return to us the same courtesies when finally we give GOD an account of our lives.

JESUS, THE CHRIST

10 – Can RNA or DNA think?

RNA, in its many forms, behaves like ant colonies which swarm over the DNA pile to do a number of tasks that seem to involve a lot of decision making.

RNA selects out of billions of bases a few thousand which it strings together to make “genes” that it transfers to ribosomes — which are made almost entirely of RNA and are among the oldest structures in cells.

At a ribosome, the genes are coupled to RNA that carries amino acids; the amino acids are then ejected from the ribosome to be strung together like necklace beads; they are transported to Golgi structures where they are folded into proteins.

A process this complex — and it’s actually far more complex than this summary implies — can be orchestrated without intelligence; it’s possible, but without intelligence of some form, the process seems, at least to me, to border on the miraculous.

After all, what is the result?

It is a conscious thinking life-form who can, in cooperation with others, figure out its own origins.

It’s amazing, right?

NO CODE

11 – How do Quantum spins get affected by Quantum entanglement?

All atoms with electron shells that are home to more than one electron have entangled electrons. The spins tend to oppose each other. With bosonic particles, down conversion techniques produce photons that have opposite polarization.

Most physicists think that spin is induced during measurement; the spin is transmitted oppositely to the entangled partner instantly — no matter how far separated.

For this reason, a pair of entangled particles can be envisioned as a single particle that behaves as if one of its dimensions (the distance between its endpoints) is missing.

The distance between the entangled pair behaves as if it is zero — when it is known to be non-zero.

BELL’S INEQUALITY

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

12 – What is the viability of colonies on other planets?

The two planets closest to Earth are the most viable places for colonies simply because they are the easiest to resupply. They are Mars and Venus.

Neither can sustain colonies, because they lack magnetospheres, which are essential for deflecting high energy particles emitted by the Sun (called the solar wind). These particles are deadly to life. The molten iron-nickel cores of Mars and Venus froze millions of years ago on both planets, which collapsed their magnetospheres.

Venus has a highly toxic atmosphere, which is another reason to rule out colonization there.

Beyond Mars are gas giants. Only their rocky moons are candidates for human colonies. All the moons appear to be too cold to operate the machinery necessary to sustain human life. Most lack protection from the solar wind.

FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

Bonus Assertion – Does a photon consist of (f) quantized energy packets each of (h) joules?

A photon seems to be a packet of vibrating electric and magnetic energy, each part of which exerts its energy at a right angle to the other. The energy in the packet is proportional to vibrational frequency alone. A photon has no mass or acceleration. It travels along at a constant speed in space-time. The electric portion of the energy is about seven times the energy of the magnetic portion.

Photons can become more intense (that is, brighter) when they pile up. Pile ups don’t happen to electrons, protons, and neutrons because they obey an exclusion principle that forbids them from occupying the same space at the same time.

Photons can pile up, but their intensity (or energy) can only be transferred into electrons that are in an energy state that resonates with the frequency of the incoming photons. Non-resonate electrons ignore un-matched photons, so photons pass through non-resonate electrons unimpeded.

The energy of an individual photon can be expressed as its kinetic energy and  shown to equal Planck’s constant times the photon’s frequency, which always results in a very small number.

When expressed in terms of its wavelength (λ), photon energy equals the Planck constant (h) times the speed of light (c) divided by the wavelength (λ) of the photon. Notice that the mass term is missing due to a simple manipulation of the relevant equations — which anyone who is interested can find in the following link.

PHOTON

Momentum might not be an appropriate metric for a force carrying boson like a photon, because momentum is based on mass, which many physicists say photons in a vacuum don’t possess.

Another reason momentum could be an inappropriate metric is that the velocity of photons in a vacuum is independent of any reference frame, right? Momentum is a vector quantity that is always measured in relationship to a particular reference frame or the momentum of another particle.

There is a theory that claims that photons pick up mass when they pass through materials like glass. They seem to leave a wake that shakes up electrons in the material. The vibrating electrons release polaritons, which by a mechanism analogous to superposition add mass to the photon and slow it down. When the photon exits and returns to vacuum, it sheds the polaritons, becomes massless, and returns to light speed instantly.

Perhaps photons in the vacuum of space acquire mass by interacting with virtual particles that emit virtual polaritons.  Notions about the nature of the universe would be changed radically if such a notion were confirmed by evidence.

Because h and c are constants, they can be multiplied together to give a constant that is very close to 2E-25. Dividing 2E-25 by the wavelength of a photon will give its energy in joules. Of course, all units are SI, which stands for standard international units, correct?

Since E = hf or (hc / λ) , the energy is always a multiple of h, which is the Planck constant. The word “multiple” is a simple way to say “quantized”.

So, the energy of a photon bunch or pile can be expressed as a multiple of the number of photons of a certain wavelength in that bunch. The energy in each individual photon is its wavelength (or frequency, if you like) multiplied by the Planck number — a constant equal to 6.626E-34.

It takes a pile-up — or bunch — of about 7 photons with wavelengths close to 2.5 one-hundred-thousandths of an inch long (635 nanometers) to carry enough energy to light up the sensors in a human eye.

How much energy is in those seven photons? It is seven times 2E-25 / 635E-9 —  in joules, right?

It’s 2.2E-18 joules. Converted to an easier metric befitting its scale, the energy is nearly 14 electron volts, which is equivalent to the energy held in 14 electrons.

People say that photons with wavelengths that measure 635 nanometers create the color yellow-orange in their minds.

SENSING THE UNIVERSE

Billy Lee

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