November 1, 2019:Since this essay was first published 17 months ago, things have changed. We have a new attorney general who believes his job is to protect the president.
Democrats control the House of Representatives. The new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is methodically unfolding what will soon become articles of impeachment.
Michael Cohen, the president’s fixer, is in prison. Felix Sater, Cohen’s childhood friend, has disappeared off media radar screens.
Despite the rapid rate of change, Billy Lee’s essay has never been more timely. America is in a race against the clock. Trump and his allies are unraveling America at a frenetic pace. The clock is ticking, and time is running out.
The Editorial Board
Our president seems to be working against our country, not for it.
He started a trade war. He’s bullying our trading partners.
He insults our allies. He breaks treaties. He threatens fire and fury, then coddles our enemies.
Get out of the stock market ASAP, I’m thinking. Trump is going to trash the country and mess up the world for freedom lovers. Not much time before all illusions shatter, it feels like.
Don’t do denial. Don’t go there. It will do no one any harm to protect cash and property from those billionaires who are going to steal it anyway from anyone stupid enough to give them a vehicle.
Trade warscan and do work for business owners but no one else. They wipe out the little people by driving up prices and reducing goods and services. Don’t be a little person Billy Lee; not this time.
Greed-hogs root-snouted America’s financial institutions in 2008 and took a big chunk of the 401K money intended for ordinary people’s retirement.
Does anyone remember when the GOP spent vast sums on wars and drugs to help their friends in weapons manufacturing and pharmaceuticals? The GOP added fuel to the fire by reducing revenues too — they created tax loopholes for the wealthy. When markets went south, they emptied the nation’s retirement piggy-banks (called 401Ks) to cover their losses.
They did!
They crashed the United States of America like a plane into a skyscraper. The USA was hours away from becoming a third-world country when Congress approved a rescue that involved a massive transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthiest families in America. It was called the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Who says it can’t happen again?
Interest rates are sure to rise; the GOP will empty social security and Medicare. They have no choice, because the USA won’t have the tax revenues to cover high rates on the national debt. The Republicans passed another tax cut for oligarchs a few months ago.
Surely, someone remembers.
It’s not about making America great again. It’s about making America break again.
Why? Because they can.
Billionaires don’t really care about us. They never will. Michael Jackson wrote a song about it. They killed him.
Americans have to push the GOP (who are the defenders of billionaires) out of government ASAP. Everything about the future depends on it.
Republicans are afraid of Russian oligarchs — the ultimate mob bosses. Russian oligarchs are the richest men on the planet. They are intelligence agents who carved up the Russian corpse after Reagan drove their empire into bankruptcy.
Republicans are paralyzed by the fear of foreign mob bosses with Boris Yeltzin accents. They seem incapable of doing the heroic things that need doing to defend and save our country.
It’s true.
GOP leaders are holding onto hope that they can get their families through this takeover; things will be set right someday, somehow, by somebody. They are dead wrong.
If not them, who? If not now, when?
Remember Germany and World War II? The silent ones ended up cooked, eventually — poisoned by gas and shot in trenches, their bodies burned in ovens to hide the evidence.
This is no time for cowards. The time has arrived when everyone must let go of fear and act like the heroes we must become to protect everything and everyone we care about.
If they take away our right to vote by subverting it, we will deal with it then.
For now, it seems like we are able to vote and have our votes counted, at least somewhat accurately. Yes, the last national election showed evidence of voter suppression — and tampering with vote counts around the edges in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
The GOP stopped all the investigations into irregularities and statistical anomalies. No one seemed to care much.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA hero who exposed widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is being held without bail. NOTE by Editors: July 4, 2018 – Reality Winner has agreed to plead guilty. Her trial was scheduled for October, before the mid-term elections. She will accept a 5 year sentence plus 3 years strict probation. No electronic devices or communication with media is allowed. The NSA contractor revealed that certain voting-machine companies were compromised — raising the possibility that the 2016 outcome was rigged. Bad people who care nothing about democracy have silenced Reality Winner and driven her into anonymity.
Nevertheless, voting is what we have to do until we no longer can. It’s the only recourse. Everyone must pray for Reality Winner, the NSA heroine, who is rotting in jail with no prospect for bail, because she tried to alert Americans to the terrors that are coming with the sabotage of our elections and the loss of our freedoms.
If the day comes when America can’t save itself by voting, it will be impossible to avoid Civil War. The last war didn’t go well for anyone on either side. The difference this time is that foreign agents are crawling all over our institutions and media.
These agents don’t like us much. They want civil unrest. They want violence. Many play the role of patriots. They quote Bible passages — like Two Corinthians.
Don’t be fooled.
We have a lot to attend to, but the State Department and most other parts of government are being systematically dismantled. Here are three things among hundreds that must be looked after:
1 — China, Russia, and their allies are working furiously to overturn the global financial system. The plan is to leave the USA (and the EU and Israel) in the cold. It’s what bit-coin schemes, among other systems, are all about. Think about it. USA financial clout is scary. Certain state-actors want to make it impossible for the USA to extort their leaders financially through sanctions and trading bans.
2 — Japan is accumulating the world’s largest inventory of bomb-grade plutonium. It has the infra-structure to weaponize it. It has the modern missile systems to deliver it. Focusing on Korea’s nuclear weapons means next to nothing. Are Koreans buying fissile material from Japan? It takes ten pounds to make a bomb. Japan has forty-seven tons already and is adding eight tons per year. Does anyone know for sure what the hell is going on? Some samurai cult is making a killing.
3 — Russia has developed a new generation of high speed multiple-warhead missiles that no one can see or shoot down. They bragged about it on TV. What happens if we attack North Korea and Russia comes to their defense like they did the last time during the first Korean War? What if China joins in, like the last time? Read T. R. Fehrenbach’s book, This Kind of War. It could become a war where we get our pants handed to us — like last time.
The problems Russia presents go far beyond Korea; they extend to the Middle East certainly but also to the Americas where Russians have bases in Cuba and Venezuela. Our state and national elections are drowning in Russian interference according to every one of our intelligence agencies.
The media does not know how to protect our country. We cannot expect to look to the media, whether right or left, for guidance. The takedown is not going to be televised. Our military is led in many instances by good-ole-boys from the states of the Confederacy, like Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s not an ideal situation that is necessarily going to lead to unity.
Our leaders have proved to almost everyone but the hopelessly naive that they are haters. Many are white supremacists. The attorney general isn’t the only cabinet member with a reputation for racial bias. Many members of the current administration act like wolves in sheep’s clothing who hide their intentions between the covers of a Bible and the American flag.
Does it have to be this way?
Over the years, the USA has killed millions of Koreans, millions of Japanese, millions of Arabs, millions of south-east Asians, millions of Germans, Native Americans, and Africans. People around the world aren’t blind. They see our love affair with guns; the mass shootings of pre-schoolers; the extra-judicial executions of civilians by a militarized police force.
Rabid people like NRA gun nuts say the dead had it coming. Gun lovers have a duty to kill certain people to protect the world and our values. The way to stop a bad person with a gun is to give a good person a bigger gun. Some say the number of executions by USA military gun-toters exceeds sixty-five million souls during the modern era alone. The carnage that flows back to the eras of slavery and the Indian Wars is incalculable.
People fear our leaders, and they should. America is a handful of countries short of conquering the entire world. Under our new leadership the chances are good that every country will fall under our power sooner, not later.
Like ancient Rome, the United States has blood on its hands. We incarcerate millions of our own citizens in ratty prisons; tens-of-thousands rot in solitary confinement.
We have a moral obligation in victory to become better people as we rule the world and force our values on people who do not necessarily share all of them one-hundred percent.
We have unmatched power; America is on the cusp of living out its destiny in total victory, even as it dominates a world divided against itself, which is a road to ruin according to Christ Jesus — who all our political leaders say they worship — some at Congressional prayer breakfasts.
Yes, the president tried to get Speaker Ryan to fire the congressional chaplain. Yes, he canceled traditional Easter services at the White House. Well, they weren’t traditional. That black Muslim Obama started them. So it’s all good, right? Can we get an amen from the White House press corps? Why not!
Because the USA has unmatched power, the stable genius who leads may take it into World War III. The writer of his masterwork, Art of the Deal, said that if anyone starts a nuclear war, it will be the Donald.
Is anyone completely certain that when that war ends, it will be the USA who counts the bodies of the dead and writes their history? What if the other side counts our dead and writes our history? What then?
One thing about war is certain. The outcome is never certain. That chilling line from the screen play No Country for Old Men echoes in my head. In the contest between man and beast, the outcome is never certain. A rancher shot a cow with his rifle. The bullet ricocheted off its head and killed the rancher. The cow was fine.
In the end and over time, no one ever really wins at war. If history teaches anything, it teaches that war solves nothing. Yes the victor gets first dibs on the spoils, but in the war to come the spoils will be irradiated — poisoned by heavy metals.
Short of nuclear war, what can break America?
We have men on our side who are among the most powerful and dangerous who have ever walked on planet Earth. Imagine the scariest ISIS terrorist. We have men on our side who are scarier.
Felix Sater speaks fluent Russian, because he was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. He says that he and Michael Cohen became best friends after his sister and him were able to emigrate to America from Moscow via Israel when he was eight. During the process of switching countries Felix changed his Russian family name to Sater. Who knows why? Michael Cohen, by the way, is the president’s fixer and attorney, correct?
Felix Sater and the president are friends.
Felix changed his last name as a kind of joke, at least to my way of thinking. In the Kabbalah tradition, the Hebrew letters that spell Sater add to the number “666”. It’s the only Hebrew root word that adds to 666, so it’s easy to identify and remember.
It’s a word that means contrary, disheveled, or chaotic. It is a number made famous by the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. Chaos is a sign of the anti-Christ.
666 Fifth Avenue is a property owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. He made the buy in 2007.
The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bought the building “666 Fifth Avenue.” He and Sater thought it was funny, apparently. Maybe it is.
God doesn’t scare them. They’re bad boys, and they’ll mess up anyone who crosses them. It’s what they want everyone to think, anyway. When they hurt the little people, God looks the other way. They are sure of it.
Felix smashed a piece of cut glass into someone’s face during a bar-fight. He spent a year in prison for it. So yes, he is scary. He bilked investors out of forty-million dollars in Wall Street scams. I watched him apologize on national television to all those he ruined while insisting that today he loves and serves America. He is a changed man.
He might be. I’m not saying that he’s a liar, but when I listened to his explanation I was reminded of Michael Corleone in the movie, God Father Part Two, when he testified before a congressional committee.
Michael, some viewers might recall, was a Marine combat veteran, a defender of everything American, he told investigators. His reputation meant everything. Then again, he was a fictional character invented by the writer, Mario Puzo.
Sater is a close friend of the president. It’s true. The president has many powerful friends; some are family. His sister is a judge who sits on the second highest court in America — second only to the Supreme Court. His late uncle was an MIT professor.
NOTE BY EDITORS: In April 2019, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her position as a federal appellate judge for the state of New York.
In the 1960s and 1970s the government waged war against the Mafia in America. People got hurt. Many switched sides and made deals with the government to stay out of prison.
This cooperation started after Castro came to power in Cuba in the 1960s. The CIA teamed up with those Sicilian families who had lost their casinos in Cuba. The idea was to overthrow and assassinate Castro and the leaders of the Cuban revolution. The group had some successes.
The revolutionaries who were murdered are not known to most Americans, so I won’t identify any here. Readers can click on links at the end of this essay to learn more.
The CIA didn’t need the mafia to kill Che Guevara. They and the 1,800 special forces they trained in Guatemala were able to carry out that particular hit-job all by themselves with only the tiniest bit of encouragement from Rene Barrientos, the president of Bolivia where Che was found.
I’m not picking on Felix Sater. He didn’t start cooperating with the FBI until long after the war against the Sicilian mafia was mostly won. He has proved that he is untouchable and that he can engage and influence any power player anywhere on the world stage. But in a fight for the survival of our republic and the freedom that it promises ordinary people, are folks who seem to have no limits the best we have to defend us?
Are we truly defended, truly, for real, or are we undercut and subverted? Does right make might, or is it the other way around? I honestly don’t know. No one tells the truth about anything anymore, it seems.
Rome was an empire unchallenged for a thousand years. It’s in the history books, right? The empire fought its wars on its frontiers to protect its heart, as does the USA. In the end it fell, because a mob of barbarians walked into the capitol city with clubs and broom handles and the population hailed them as liberators.
The wealthy, most of them, lost everything, because the army that defended them ran like frightened rabbits from the conquering heroes who scared them with their hairy bodies, bad skin, and missing teeth. It took hundreds of years for the world to recover from that ancient catastrophe. Who knows if it’s true?
A catastrophe in the modern world with its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons will be harder to endure. Does anyone agree?
I’m taking a knee, hands folded, head down. I’m believing that in the gut of every thinking person is the fear that no weapon in this world can protect any of us from what’s coming next.
Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it’s moving fast. It’s strong. It’s scary. It makes the birds in the Sand Cherry trees outside the window chirp like monkeys.
It’s morning already. Bevy Mae is at the open window, She says the sun is shining. It was supposed to rain, according to Siri and Alexa.
How is it I haven’t slept and the time for sleeping is past?
Did you stay up all night again? Bevy Mae asks.
I feel good. I’m not tired. I reach for my wife. She pushes me away then tousles my hair. I see her Mona Lisa smile.
People are trapped by delusional thinking. No argument or facts are going to change any minds. The United States has invested too much treasure on a captive population that has no way to grasp that everything they think they know for sure is fabrication.
It’s all lies.
Everything.
I’m going to tell the truth for the sake of history. What happens next will vindicate me, said the late Fidel Castro.
Of course, it isn’t about vindicating me or even about vanquishing sociopaths when at last they self-identify so that everyone knows for sure — much like Joseph McCarthy, who identified himself decades ago on national television.
Is anyone old enough to remember? Has it occurred to anyone that McCarthy was right? The Russians are coming, he warned; Communists are at the gates; the trickle has become a flood.
Nikita Khrushchev bragged before the United Nations that Russians would bury us, even as McCarthy insisted that they already had; agents and sympathizers were infiltrating the State Department and the media in droves.
Why do I suddenly feel like the chances are good that most folks reading this essay have never heard of any person I’ve mentioned so far? Am I talking (writing) (spitting) into the wind? Is it only the old and discredited who enjoy the privilege to remember and learn from history?
Who knows anything for sure?
It can’t be all about justifying or humiliating anyone, because everyone on all sides is flawed. Everyone has short memories. Everyone hears what they want to hear and disregards the rest. Right?
It’s an earworm from yesteryear that plays in the heads of everyone who is engaged and old enough to remember. The Boxer song by Roy Halee and friends means so much, even today, especially today. Does anyone agree?
I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles,
such are promises All lies and jest,
still a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest, hmmmmm
In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade And he carries the reminders Of every glove that laid him down or cut him ‘Til he cried out in his anger and his shame
”I am leaving, I am leaving,” but the fighter still remains…
No one gets it right in this world. The leaders of nations — isolated in bubbles of every hue — seem the most flawed. Nothing any of them does ever works. Leaders are isolated; pampered; entitled. Most are proud; all are cruel, because they are human beings; humans have a dark side. It’s how they roll.
Everyone knows it’s true.
It’s been this way forever and always will be. It’s why we have religion — to dampen the desire in every heart to run toward darkness; to obliterate entirety; to destroy Earth and everything the hating person loves and holds dear.
The rage fascinates and enthralls. No news stories are more watched than those that show young men going berserk and shooting up a school; or of suicidal fanatics smashing airplanes into buildings.
It all comes from the same place deep inside the hearts of the humiliated and the despised. It’s a way of getting even that drives those ruined by the evil they endured to strike back hard.
The common people want kings, and they want them to simplify things. Make it all about good and evil; them verses us; religion against ideology; stupidity verses ignorance.
People want kings (not queens) who they will someday learn to hate. Yes, it’s counter-intuitive. Do folks ignore insults? Do they overlook humiliations and move on? Some do. Most dream of revolution and the day they hear the words, I’m sorry.
The Queen is naked! a peasant lad screams at the passing royal parade. Burn her train! another shouts.
Suddenly, it’s a mob. Everyone yells. They stamp their feet and shake their fists. Lock her up! Lock her up!USA! USA!! USA!!!
Men love to fight. They love to kill. They love to weep. They love to spiral into self-loathing depressions. They love to jump out of airplanes and climb mountains.
Boring is always fatal to a yearning soul. But so is tempting fate and doing bad things for fun. In the end, everyone — good or bad — dies.
Believing in death makes killing easier. Does it not?
What if everyone lives?
The idea seems absurd to those who are doused in the gasoline of evil. It seems paradoxical to those who admire themselves for their lack of faith. It’s why as a species, homo sapiens are doomed.
Even the most righteous are scum who hurt people on grand scales.
Many are heroes who Americans, men and women alike, look up to as paragons of virtue and honor.
So what about #MKWA? By now some readers must have figured out the title, right?
How can anyone who can’t figure out an initialism (acronym) as easy as this one have any chance at all to anticipate and survive catastrophes? They can’t. Make Korea Whole Again. MKWA. It’s what this essay is about.
This is the flag of a United Korea. Japan seized control of Korea in 1910 and ran it like a vassal state until the USSR and the USA liberated it in 1945 and divided it North and South. Attempts by the North to unite the country and secure sources of fresh water for everyone started the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate and the death of three million Koreans — two million burned alive by napalm during relentless USA aerial bombardments.
Who understands that Korea is one country?
The USA and Russia divided it in half after World War II.
Curtis LeMay spent two years bombing North Korea back into the Stone Age during the Korean War. Air Force historians say he killed twenty percent of the population — about two million people, General LeMay bragged years later to Air Force historians. One of his aides said under oath that the bombing was the cruelest use of military force in the history of the world. It was worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
LeMay expressed no regrets.
In Japan it was his pilots, too, after all. He destroyed 67 cities in Japan. He burnt them to the ground with a fire-jelly called napalm. By the time he started on Korea, he was a bonafide expert.
Think about it.
Let the facts sink in. It will do you no harm.
I said facts weren’t going to matter. My purpose isn’t to rehash the history of Korea. Yes, the USA used bio-terrorism against the Chinese who rushed in to save North Korea from certain genocide. We “anthraxed” them.
Everyone in the world knows about it except Americans. Our leaders thought anthrax was more humane than radioactive bombs.
Yes, top generals in the USA advocated for nuclear strikes — as they did during the Vietnam War, as well. The history of every conflict turns on the capacity for barbarity by the parties who fight. I don’t want to make that argument. I don’t want to go into that dark forest. Not now.
I want to imagine the present and the future. We have two men, Trump and Kim Jong-un, who have found religion. They are, apparently, Christians looking for a way to do what’s right. Christ has changed their hearts. Both are puppets of countries run by bureaucracies entrenched by powerful elites. The president’s backers call the USA a “deep state.” Kim calls his system the “generals.”
Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in celebrating the possibility for a United Korea.
Moon Jae-in is the South Korean president who replaced Park Geun-hye, the first female president in East Asia and a conservative — impeached by the National Assembly and removed from office last year. She is currently serving a 24-year prison sentence — incarcerated after her family ruled South Korea since 1961.
Forbes Magazine voted Park the most powerful woman in Asia more than once. Look it up.
Our president wants a Nobel Prize so that Obama will not one-up him.
What difference does it make what his reasons are, as long as they are sincere and strongly held?
Kim wants to create a perfect society, presumably, where people have fun and nothing but fun. No arguing allowed.
Ok… It sounds like Woodstock — or maybe the pro basketball finals where Kim plays point guard for the champions of the world.
Does it really matter?
Of course not.
I know that most Americans will not accept this notion, but our billionaires fear the idea that the communist way of producing wealth cooperatively and then sharing it equally might actually outperform a capitalist (slave) system; they fear the success of communism more than they fear nuclear war.
It’s true.
Who cares if no one believes it?
Read Ted Kennedy’s book True Compass. He says plainly that men like his billionaire father feared the success of communism; they were obsessed by it.
Most people can understand why, right?
Can anyone name a billionaire who wants to forfeit their power and wealth so that a few guttersnipes can eat and go to school — or a few old-fogies can pay their own way and not beg their kids in old age?
Bill Gates, you say? His primary residence alone cost a half-billion dollars. And he’s the best billionaire we’ve got. He got his start through an under-the-table deal his mother struck with a fellow IBM board member and personal friend. The deal was not beneficial to IBM.
So Gate’s wealth came easier than for others who lied, murdered, and robbed to get theirs. Would anyone give up their advantages, if they were rich? I don’t think so.
Voting patterns would be much different if people truly valued equality, right?
What’s the point?
Our billionaires don’t want Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or Brazil or any communist-flirting countries to succeed. The United States is at war 24/7 with both countries and leaders to lock down communism to a reputation for failure.
So far, so good.
North and South Korea want to unify. Families in both countries want to reunite before they are too old; before they die, frankly.
Click pic to enlarge in new window. SE direction on map is up.
Korea must have nuclear weapons to deter Japan — which has the world’s largest stockpile of plutonium and the missiles to deliver it — and China who is already a nuclear and naval superpower.
Isn’t it obvious?
Korea, to survive, must have the means to deter the United States, which is smothering the Far East with its Navy of nuclear subs and aircraft super-carriers.
No one who possesses nuclear weapons uses them. After the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki no one ever will. The Koreans will never use their weapons, nor will we. It’s a non-issue except in the minds of the paranoid and the delusional and the lovers of genocidal war.
A unified nuclear-armed Korea will be a deterrent to nuclear war, at least in the short run. In the long run, people understand that every country must sequester and dismantle their nuclear arsenals. I don’t think it is technically possible, though — even if every country wants it. Pandora’s box has been opened and the demons of mass-suicide are loose and unstoppable, at least from my vantage point.
I pray that I’m wrong.
The tragedy is that smart humans have manufactured and sequestered vast tonnages of PU239, an isotope of plutonium that went extinct among the stars billions of years ago.
PU239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. The missiles and containment structures designed to hold this toxic element are going to rot. Earth will soak up this life-destroying poison like vinegar to a sponge, someday.
The sad reality that no one will admit is that humans have already destroyed the earth. Homo sapiens may go extinct in the next 500 years. It’s more than possible. Certain extinction is what risk modelers all say. But plutonium will live on until it erupts to kill every chipmunk, bunny, cat, dog, bird, and butterfly that people leave behind.
Earth is going dark whether humans survive or not. Most experts put the odds of extending human survival to a thousand years or more at absolute zero.
Since the planet is going to die, why not do something nice for once and leave the Koreans alone to work out their destiny? If the United States gets out of the way and lets nature take its course, who knows what wonderful things might happen on the Korean peninsula? Who knows how many lives will be saved should everyone avoid war and set aside their fears and prejudices?
And truthfully, what is it that Korea has that we Americans want? The answer is: absolutely nothing. Except friendship.
Despite the dark picture drawn in this essay, people can change.
People do forgive. People do help. People do love.
It’s a fact of human nature that altruism and empathy are hard-wired into the human soul alongside its reptilian origins.
Why not be friends?
Why not organize an airlift led by the United States Air Force and Navy Marines to drop food and medicine to the starving innocents of North Korea who some say are eating bark and tree leaves to survive the blockade?
Why not send in French and Cuban doctors to administer to the sick and dying; to administer antibiotics and anti-parasitic medicines?
Both groups would rush to join such an effort. Everyone knows they would help desperate Koreans in a heartbeat.
Someone once said that the way to lose an enemy is to make a friend.
All writers know the column, By the Book, published every Sunday in the New York Times Book Review section. Each week the editors pick a popular writer and ask him or her a fairly standard set of questions that would be impossible for normal people to answer off the top of their heads.
The authors rattle off the names of all kinds of titles and writers and say smart things designed to dazzle the little people who are always starved for an entertaining read.
I’m a pontificator who has never sold a book and never will, most likely. Authors sell their souls to write for money; they do exhausting tours where they answer stupid questions asked by stupid people day after stupid day. From these gatherings of stupidity they hope to sell a few books. It’s stupid.
Through books and other media, the public is exposed to a version of truth filtered by the most powerful people on Earth — to paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winner, Ronan Farrow.
Yes, it’s sickening. People are reading crap; they are immersed literarily in fibs and fabrications, which are shaped to make the world seem less evil, more friendly.
The truth that no wants to hear — I’m screaming it from cell towers to swarming people who seem to lack ears — billionaires have enslaved us. We are living in a gilded prison.
Totalitarianism has already won — not through governments but by supremely advantaged individuals who have no limits on the money they can make and keep — no limits on their power or their reach.
It’s true.
The rest of this essay is a parody of By the Book. The imagined interviewee is Billy Lee, the Pontificator. That’s me.
Billy Lee, the Pontificator
What books are on your nightstand?
I honestly don’t know. Can you give me a minute to run upstairs and look on the floor and my wife’s dresser? I keep current reads close to bed where I do most of my reading. It won’t take long… …
Ok. Thanks for waiting.
“The Periodic Table in Minutes,” by Dan Green; “Genetics in Minutes,” by Tom Jackson; “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Any favorites?
“The Poky Little Puppy,” by Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren was my all time favorite. Mother read it hundreds of times.
I remember being amazed to learn that anyone can dig a hole under a fence to open a world of naughty possibilities. It cost a serving of strawberry shortcake to get caught; it seemed worth it to my little mind.
Your nightstand doesn’t seem to include fiction. What genres do you avoid and which are you drawn to?
I’ve read a lot of good fiction, but most are classics like “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy and “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I would say that Fyodor ruined my interest in fiction. His book was a nightmare that threw me into depression.
War and Peace was different; it taught me how the world works; Leo laid bare the fallacy of the great man theory of history.
But yes, I avoid fiction. As a teenager I read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand a couple times. The book ruined my life more than any other work of fiction, because it claimed to be truth. Living life proved it wrong, but its view of the nature of humans derailed me for decades.
I am drawn to books about science and math. Enough said, I hope.
I enjoy history.
“Retribution” by Max Hastings is a block buster about World War II — as is “Devil’s Voyage” by Jack L. Chalker. “This Kind of War” by T. R. Ferenbach is a history of the Korean War that knocked my socks off.
You like history. Is there any history you learned from reading that isn’t taught in school? Anything you learned that’s shocking?
During the 150 years before America became a constitutional republic, two-thirds of all white people immigrated as slaves, who in those former times were called indentured servants. Amazing, right?
They came unchained on boats voluntarily, because life was brutal in Europe for poor people. Their term of slavery lasted seven years and ended with emancipation.
Africans came in chains. They served until they became too frail to work; they were set free to die of starvation. The term used was manumission. Ten percent of African slaves were set free this way by the time America became a republic in the late 1700s.
From before the beginning, America was a slave state. The privileges of freedom were extended to white men who owned property. Only they could vote, but not for Senators. State legislators with approval from their Governors appointed Senators.
The founders enshrined slavery in the constitution. Eighty-five years after its signing, half of all Americans went to war against the other half to preserve slavery, but they lost.
After the Civil War, it took the Confederates twenty-five years to terrorize blacks back into submission. At the same time, northern whites committed a genocide against the native peoples they called redskins.
In the 1900s, slavery was renamed capitalism by industry titans to help them make a more appealing counter argument against a system that was catching fire in Europe called communism.
Communists believed wealth should be produced cooperatively and then shared. The idea of sharing was anathema to slave holders (business owners) who referred to their slaves as workers.
Owners abrogated their obligation to care for their slaves by forcing them to provide for their own food, housing, and medical care out of a tiny stipend they bestowed, which today people refer to as a minimumwage. The owners somewhat derisively called the new rules freedom.
After WWII, the wealthy created what they liked to call a middle class (which included about ten percent of the population) to reward the mostly poor farm boys who had risked their lives to protect them.
After 1980, the entitled kids and grandkids of the aristocracy began to disassemble the system their fathers and grandfathers had built, because they felt that the little people weren’t grateful enough. They called it the Reagan Revolution.
Today, leaders promise to make America great again. No more Negro presidents. No more subsidized health care. No more regulations to protect the disadvantaged. Everyone will stand on their own two feet or perish.
It’s the way it’s always been. The escape to America, it turned out, was an escape from freedom.
The USA is now the most merciless police state in world history. The country is demoralized by a military occupation punctuated by non-judicial executions and excessive displays of military force against civilians.
The occupation of America is undergirded by a nightmarish penal system that locks up millions in high-tech prisons where tens-of-thousands are tortured with solitary confinement.
What is the worst part? The USA is building a wall to lock people in. Soon everyone in the USA will be a prisoner unable to leave. That’s the future.
America is going to create a society that reflects the values of its billionaires and the cartel of foreign oligarchs they call friends.
Guess what? There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Take the pills they give you and pretend life is great.
Try hard to cope, and you just might.
Wow, Billy Lee. Glad you got that off your chest. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The Bible.
Does he have time? It’s close to 800,000 words — twenty novels. It’s a lot of reading for a man in his seventies who golfs and is known for not reading much.
Who knows how much time any of us have? I don’t.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville. I own the book and have read through the first half at least twice. It’s going to sound strange, but I honestly think the book is about homosexuality. There is a scene in one of the first chapters where two men sleep together in the bowels of a boat. They seem to have an affection for each other that, frankly, I find touching.
The title is a little suspicious. Try screaming it three times in a church without offending anyone. Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! It’s hard. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister to boot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which of three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Well, first, I have to get a buy-in from my wife, Bevy Mae. Beverly isn’t going to throw a dinner party just because I say so. But assuming she agrees, I’d invite Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, and Richard Rhodes.
All three lived on the edge of knowledge where uncertainty rages; where fear can overwhelm the unprepared. Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle is one of the best science books about candle flames that I’ve ever read. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is a joy that anyone can imbibe in a few short hours if they skip the math and physics. And Richard Rhodes proves in his tomes that any idiot can build and store thermonuclear bombs in their basement.
If you would be gracious enough to permit me a fourth invitee, it would be Che Guevara — probably the best read and most informed writer of all time according to declassified CIA assessments. John Kennedy organized the original Green Berets based on one of his books.
Much of Che’s work is unpublished. His published work is under a suppression protocol inside the USA. Expect releases now that new leadership has risen in Cuba and the United States.
Who would you want to write your life story?
Jesus of Nazareth. People say that he never wrote anything, but he was literate and knew things most folks can only wonder about. Of all public figures past and present, Jesus seems to be the one who understood people best and loved enough to be tender. I don’t think he would humiliate me.
Paul Newman. (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)
What do you plan to read next?
Something I’ve written, probably. I’m the greatest pontificator there’s ever been. Why go out for hamburger when there’s steak at home?
Paul Newman said the same when someone asked why he stayed faithful to his wife, Joanne Woodward. For those who understand what love is, no explanation is necessary.
A lot of people have been poisoned recently, mostly in Europe by Russians, if overseas media is believed.
Mark Rowley, Britain’s chief police official for counterterrorism and international security, told media that the former British agent and Russian citizen Sergei V. Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33, “were targeted specifically,” — poisoned on 7 March 2018 by a nerve agent.
People familiar with nerve poisons have said that the poison used in this attack is impossible for a “non-state” actor to produce, let alone store and deploy to kill others. The statement by Britain’s top terrorism cop doesn’t leave room for many suspects.
Sergei and his daughter endured the mysterious deaths of several family members over the past many years. Now both lie in hospital in intensive care with Sergei remaining in critical condition as this essay is written. The killers seem to have targeted not only Sergei, but his entire family.
This essay isn’t about intentional assassinations by twisted power-trippers with appetites for terror.
The assassinations by poison in England and elsewhere set the context for something far more pervasive and debilitating — the unleashing of toxins on billions of humans and virtually every animal and plant on the earth and sea by uncaring people motivated not by revenge but by the desire to sequester money for themselves, their families, and their businesses.
A lot of money can be made by people who don’t care who or what they poison. There is no limit to how much money they can keep, either. Read Capitalism and Income Inequality.
In this essay I’m going to write about a dozen or so poisons that people are ingesting in ignorance which destroy their kidneys, their brains, their hearts, their nerves, their stomachs, their muscles, their finger and toenails, and their long beautiful hair. Who will warn people about the dangers if I don’t?
This chart is likely the best interactive periodic table on the web. The Royal Society of Chemistry (in London) provides it free to anyone who wants to use it. Click chart or this link to open it in a new window — and have fun!
Television tells us nothing except that the current president and his thugs are rolling back decades of protections against all kinds of dangerous products; nothing in popular media warns anyone that they are floating in a fog of toxins that is making them sick and killing them unawares. Without regulations, it’s going to get worse.
Dozens of people have dropped dead while using paint-strippers that contain the toxin methylene chloride, according to CBS News. (Click link for video.) Manufacturers say that millions use their products safely. Why ban a substance that only kills a few people per year? Life is cheap in unregulated America. It seems like life is going to get a lot cheaper.
Methylene chloride is used to decaffeinate coffee and tea. No one in authority seems to care. A California judge is ruling whether a law that compels coffee retailers to warn customers about cancer risks can be enforced. The chemical in this case is acrylamide, a known carcinogen, which is produced when coffee is brewed.
Acrylamide contaminates French fries, potato chips, bread, and other foodstuffs. The current leadership at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is laughing at California. EPA execs continue to push for deregulation while they strive to keep the population ignorant about the risks of the products they use and ingest.
What would people think if they learned that only one person in three dies of old age? The two other unfortunates are dying from preventable accidents and diseases caused primarily by the toxins they ingest daily. Think about it.
Does anyone believe it? The punks who seized power last year after a tampered election are planning to deconstruct the United States and its agencies, whose mission was once to make life safer and easier for ordinary people.
The danger is not only inside the USA. Anyone who disagrees that homo sapiens are in danger ought to look to the plant and animal kingdoms around the world. Diversity is collapsing; the health of adult animals is deteriorating; fish and other sea-life contain high levels of toxins that make them unsafe to eat.
Were it not for short life spans, the suffering of animals and plants would be obvious to all but the most willfully ignorant. Testing of animals shows that all adult animals are suffering from contamination by heavy metals and other toxins placed into the environment by guess who? — humans, mostly.
What is manganism, anyway? Yes, it’s the title of my essay, but it’s also a matrix of symptoms induced by the deadly neurotoxin, manganese. Like most of the poisons in this article, it is a fundamental element of the periodic table. I am arguing that a position in the periodic table does not entitle entrepreneurs to extract and market elements in the table that are poisons.
Humans need 5 milligrams of manganese daily to power up the enzymes used in cell catalysis. Double the dose to 10, however, and they develop psychosis — manganese madness. The difference between survival and suffering is razor thin.
Symptoms start as irritability, mood swings, and compulsiveness, which progress to full-fledged Parkinson disease-like pathologies that are often misdiagnosed. Manganism lowers IQ and increases aggression — a dangerous juxtaposition.
With the advent of industrialization and the follow-on of high-technology, manganese has been poured into the environment like rain-water. It’s used everywhere in industry to prevent corrosion in metals.
Most steel contains manganese; some steels have as much as 15%. Construction helmets and military headgear are fabricated from them.
Manganese is a major component of alkaline batteries. It’s found in ground water, gasoline, and fertilizers — it’s used on the plants people eat. It’s concentrated by water-heaters that feed hot water to showers, of all places. Never swish water in your mouth from a shower-head while bathing.
Chronic exposure to air contaminated by manganese dioxide particles can cause manganism. MnO2 is classed as a cumulative neurotoxin according to the MSDS for manganese dioxide. The black powder is used in ”salt water” car batteries, now under development to replace lithium batteries. David Pogue ate the powder during a NOVΛ television broadcast to demonstrate its ”safety.” Don’t do it, Billy Lee advises. He recommends that scientists who plan to remain capable of adding together more than two numbers avoid inhaling manganese dioxide dust. The Editorial Board
The sodium-ion battery (some call it a salt-water battery) is, at this moment, coming on line. It uses manganese-dioxide electrodes. The plan is to use these batteries to power cars by 2020, mainly because the batteries don’t catch fire. The introduction of these batteries into electric cars will add another flood of manganese into the environment where it will — eventually — be ingested by plants, animals, and humans.
Brain damage by manganese is irreversible.
People once wondered why the people of ancient Rome went crazy. Edward Gibbon and other historians attributed it to moral decay and corruption. But the people of ancient Rome added lead to their wine to kill pathogens (like mold and fungus) and to sweeten it. Even on a good day adding highly toxic lead to wine is a bad idea.
Americans — like the ancient Romans — are weird, too. Maybe someday historians and pathologists will note the high levels of manganese in our exhumed bodies and conclude that we also unwittingly destroyed ourselves from a single chemical no one really needed and that no one took the time to forbid.
Amethyst. Natural and manufactured contain manganese, which gives it a purple color.
It takes a lot of effort to isolate manganese. People take the time to produce it for one reason and one reason only — to make money. Manganese is an iron-like metal used to impart the color purple to the gemstone, amethyst. Producers of manganese pay lobbyists to convince congress-people to go easy on them, so they can continue to enrich their families while the planet dies beneath their shuffling feet.
Breathing manganese vapors is the most direct path to poisoning, but manganese is also imbibed by eating too many of the wrong vegetables and not eating enough other vegetables that counter-act the toxin. The balance between enough and too much is that fragile.
Modern technology is tipping the balance into the way-too-much zone. Soon people will be too far gone to notice or care. They will be weak and shaky — unable to save themselves; unable to find refuge from poisons they can’t see, smell, or taste.
Steels rust and corrode. Manganese dust worms its way into soils and floats in the air, carried by the wind. Folks spread manganese-rich fertilizers on their lawns and crops. Inhaling small amounts of dust induces neurological injury.
Introducing tens-of-thousands of tons of manganese into the power plants of electric cars is only going to add to the problems of maintaining a healthy Earth.
There is a good reason why tycoons want to make manganese a staple of the world’s diet of toxins. The supply is inexhaustible. The floors of the Earth’s oceans are covered by 500 billion tons of baseball sized nodules of manganese. When the land-based stuff is gone, profiteers plan to scoop manganese nodules off the ocean floors.
At least 500 billion tons of baseball sized manganese nodules lay on the floor of the world’s oceans. Entrapped within are other elements like the neurotoxin, thallium.
Here’s the problem: these nodules contain an additional neurotoxin called thallium, which was used as a rodent poison in the United States until it was banned in 1972 — accidents killed too many pesticide technicians.
Enough said.
I don’t want to depress or scare anyone, so I’m only going to go into detail on a couple of other poisons that are ruining lives. Then I will list a number of toxins that everyone is ingesting everyday — with links added for anyone who wants to learn more.
To any reader who has read this far — congratulations. You have courage and a high bummer tolerance.
Wall-Mart sold to “juniors” hundreds-of-thousands of Miley Cyrus jewelry accessories coated with high levels of cadmiumin 2010. According to press accounts, they refused to stop selling these poison trinkets for months, because they claimed they lacked the tools to test their products for safety. Cadmium is toxic, even in the smallest amounts. There is no safe level.
Artists discovered cadmium’s toxic effects, when first they mixed it into paints to make vibrant orange, yellow, and red colors during the early 1800s. It’s a heavy metal that when ingested instantly attacks the kidneys (which it eventually destroys), lungs, and bones. It causes cancer. Smoking, welding, painting, metals production, galvanizing, and fertilizers are common sources of human contamination.
Ni-Cad (nickel-cadmium) rechargeable batteries are one of the most pervasive consumer products — used in every kind of electronic gadget, including computers and even children’s toys until banned by many countries a few years ago.
Did anyone properly dispose these batteries when they came to the end of their useful lives? I don’t think so. Most folks tossed them in the trash where over the decades they have been corroding in land-fills to poison everything they touch. There is no safe-level for human exposure.
Ni-Cad batteries are banned for general use by the EU (European Union), but are freely available in the United States and other countries. In the current climate of deregulation, toxins like cadmium are going to be unloaded on our unsuspecting populations for one reason and one reason only; we all know why: money.
Billionaires rule, and none live in the toxic wastelands of ordinary America. Greed thrives on greed while it drives out compassion, common sense, and consumer safety.
Cadmium is pervasive in zinc deposits and is embedded in every galvanized piece of metal you have ever handled. In Japan rice grown in cadmium contaminated irrigation water causes itai-itai disease. It makes bones so weak they fracture spontaneously. Click the link to learn more.
People who work to galvanize steel can develop metal fume fever, a flu-like disease that renders them unconscious should they breathe in the cadmium that always contaminates zinc, which is the galvanizing metal. When ingested in fumes, zinc will by itself make workers sick.
Gun enthusiasts sometimes fall victim to metal fume fever, because bullets can tear away microscopic layers of gun-barrel bores; metal-toxins become an invisible mist they inhale unaware.
Zinc-oxide is the major component of sunscreens. Do sunbathers trust the manufacturers of sunscreen around the world to decontaminate zinc from the cadmium in its ores? There is no safe dose for cadmium. Smearing cadmium into the pores of sweating skin is a bad idea.
Zinc is 97.5% of every U.S. penny minted since the 1980s. The copper cladding is less than three percent. It is impossible to remove all traces of cadmium from zinc. Pennies are poisonous. There is no safe level for cadmium. Handling old pennies with sweaty hands (or swallowing one accidentally) is another bad idea.
To say again: I have compiled a list of about a dozen or so poisons that people are ingesting in ignorance that destroy their kidneys, their brains, their hearts, their nerves, their stomachs, their muscles, their finger and toenails, and their long beautiful hair. Who is going to tell them about the dangers if I don’t?
I see nothing on television; I read nothing in print media that warns the public that they are living in a poison glen of toxins where billionaires make them sick and yes, murder them.
Do these greedy monsters care? If they did, they would provide health care to the miserable people they hurt. The truth is, they could care less. The consensus among billionaires is to ruin health care in the United States and let victims fend for themselves.
The wealthy intend to privatize every government program designed to defend the helpless. Their puppets advocate for privatization and an end to regulations on conservative talk shows all the time, and I for one believe they mean it.
It must be asked again: Does anyone know that only one person in three dies of old age? The two other unfortunates are dying from preventable accidents and diseases caused primarily by the toxins they ingest daily.
Anyone who disagrees that humans are at risk ought to look to the plant and animal kingdoms. As I wrote earlier, diversity is collapsing; the health of adult animals is in a terrible state; sea-creatures are irradiated by the run-off from ruined nuclear power generators like those at Fukushima in Japan and those on sea-going vessels that have sunk like the Thresher and Scorpion submarines; sea-life is radio-active and unsafe to eat. Were it not for short life spans, the suffering of animals and plants would be obvious to all but the most willfully ignorant.
Like manganese, selenium is another element in the periodic table that is required in trace amounts for cell catalysis but is toxic in slightly higher amounts. It is produced by burning coal, among other processes.
Selenium causes garlic breath, intestinal distress, hair loss, fingernail fall-out, and neurological damage. It smells like horse-radish. Who wouldn’t eat horse radish if they smelled it in their food? Cirrhosis of the liver, pulmonary edema, and death are not uncommon.
Selenium is a major component of lithium batteries, photo-copiers, and solar cells. Brazil nuts and peaches, especially those grown in certain soils, are sometimes loaded with selenium.
So far I have mentioned three toxic elements: manganese, cadmium, and selenium. It’s the tip of a ginormous iceberg of poisons.
Does anyone understand that catalytic converters — the five inch diameter by two foot long tubes in exhaust pipes under all cars — have a useful life of only 100,000 miles? A lot of things can wreck converters before a hundred-thousand miles — unburned fuel and leaks of coolant and oil can clog and render useless the pollution reducing power of any converter.
Whether wrecked early or not, a large percentage of cars in cities rely on catalytic converters that are ineffective, because many are old, for one thing. They are supposed to prevent pollutants that induce ADHD, autism, and Alzheimer’s in old folks, babies, children, and the vulnerable — which is everyone who doesn’t wear a face mask.
People in China and Japan wear white face masks. When they blacken, they throw them out and put on new. Who wears face masks in the USA? No one.
Catalytic converters arenot working! Look along the curbs of city streets a few days after a heavy snow. It’s a grey-black mess of God knows what. When the snow melts where do the contaminants go that the innocents trusted catalytic converters to soak up?
Isn’t it obvious? The sludge dries to become dust; it blows in the wind; people and animals breathe it in. Animals eat it, because they don’t wash their food.
Environmental contaminants measure in the millions of tons. Workers produce them in factories where they spend their careers trying to avoid the accidents that will poison them and ruin perhaps the rest of their lives.
Few coal miners avoid the miseries of coal toxins — an example that should by now be obvious to anyone who is paying attention. All the old-timers are sick. Visit coal country. Meet these unfortunates.
Go to farms where the run-off from fertilizers contaminates the wells. Only farmers who drink bottled water avoid disease. Go to farm country and look for old men. Ask them about their health issues, if you can find them.
Undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) people who are sick from toxins do not understand why they suffer from delusional thinking, mood swings, and PTSD-type symptoms. No general tells his battle-hardened soldiers that poison impregnates their ammunition; it’s loaded with spent uranium to make it heavier and more lethal.
Few soldiers on today’s killing fields escape poisoning by the highly toxic materials in their ammunition and the weapons-exhaust that spreads a smoke of poisons on friendly positions during war.
Some soldiers come home terrorized by a fear whose source is unknown to them. Irrational behavior, aggression, spousal abuse, persistent nightmares, even mass shootings are all behaviors that can sometimes be traced back to battlefield poisons, should anyone be brave enough to do the studies that would confirm what anyone with common sense knows is true.
Now might be the time to admit that I’ve found it best to keep essays from becoming overly long; it would take many books to cover the subject of commercial toxins comprehensively.
What follows is a simple list of a few of the elements from the periodic table that are in common use today which are toxic and will kill or debilitate anyone who ingests them. Click on the links to learn more.
Heavy metals – coal is the biggest source, as well as waste from the mining of less-toxic metals. Toxic heavy metals include lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and chromium. Heavy metals help to populate the list of elements below.
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Beryllium – no safe level. Used in all kinds of spark-proof tools and in the alloyed metals of outer-space and under-sea vehicles.
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Chlorine – once used in trench warfare, because it is heavy and clings to the ground. Highly poisonous.
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Bromine – until recently unregulated, it eats the ozone layer. It can cause psychosis in humans and has other toxic effects. People put it in their swimming pools — and in pesticides, which farmers spray on plants people eat.
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Cobalt – can be used to safely house “dirty” bombs. During an explosion cobalt debris converts into a deadly isotope that poisons land for decades.
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Arsenic – a poison unable to be detected until the mid eighteen-hundreds. Referred to in times past as “inheritance powder.”
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Thallium – another “inheritance powder” that is tasteless and odorless. Before government banned its use in 1972, folks used thallium to poison rats and ants. It contaminates many ores, including zinc. It is a pollutant of cement and coal processing. The skin sucks it into the body like a sponge. Low doses cause hair loss.
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Strontium – bones and teeth suck up radio-active strontium like vinegar to a sponge. It bursts into flame when exposed to air, which is one reason it’s used in fireworks and roadside flares.
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Antimony – used by the ancients to make them vomit. They believed purging was a pathway to better health.
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Tellurium – contact with even the smallest amounts will make a person smell bad for weeks. Miners try to avoid it, often without success.
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Barium – makes rat poison that is fatal in doses as small as one gram.
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Cerium – used in the walls of self-cleaning ovens, in cigarette lighters, and in camping lanterns. Commercial grade cerium always contains radioactive thorium. Civilians have been prosecuted for isolating thorium from cerium in vain attempts (thus far) to make atomic bombs.
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Osmium – an extremely toxic metal that is easily absorbed through the skin when touched. It shreds the lungs and ruins the eyes.
OK. I think this is a list that is sufficient to show that not every naturally occurring element is as safe as, say, nitrogen; probably no element is as safe as nitrogen, which is 78% of the air folks breathe. Of course, anyone who breathes nitrogen without oxygen dies of suffocation in minutes.
Are there other elements in the periodic table that are dangerous to human health? Unfortunately, yes. Most of them are refined in labs and used by the military.
This essay is about elements that the public might encounter at work or from products they buy or use to simply live their lives — like foods or building materials in homes, for example.
The problem is this: thousands of toxic materials are produced from combinations of elements that are sold everywhere to do almost everything. Unless these materials are ruthlessly regulated, pigs who produce and profit by them have proven time and again that they are willing to hurt people — sometime kill them — to get rich.
Whoever heard of a CEO going to prison for poisoning someone? It doesn’t happen.
Some people, after reading an essay like this one, might decide that living is fraught with too many dangers. Life is no longer worth living. Some might ask themselves: is it better to just die and get it over with?
Well, one way that works, I’m told, is to ingest 37 bananas. It’s important to eat the peels as well as the meat. Thirty-seven is apparently the right dose.
Bananas are naturally radioactive; they contain potassium; a lot of people don’t know. Who will tell them? Not only radioactivity, but pesticides like chlorpyrifos coat the peels so that people are less likely to get bit by venomous spiders, which most assuredly would otherwise be hiding in bunches of untreated fruit.
Bananas contain substantial amounts of hydroxytryptamine, a serotonin-like chemical that if improperly dosed or taken with other substances can induce either euphoria or adverse reactions up to and including death.
People hell-bent on successful self-immolation might try eating 38 bananas — one more than necessary — just to be on the safe side.
The practice of blowing oneself up by eating one more banana than necessary is called, bananism. I almost used the term to title this essay.
Billy Lee
Warning by the Editorial Board: Billy Lee recommends that anyone who eats more than twenty bananas a day seek medical attention and psychological counseling. Never eat the peels.
A few months ago, I published 25 Answers to questions readers of Quora.com took time to ask me, because they trusted I knew what I was writing about. Yes, the world is easily fooled by pontificators posing as experts. I confess, I am one of them.
I am a bona-fide pontificator and intend to continue pontificating until I can no longer remember my name. For me, it’s art. My promise is truth, accuracy, and to fix screw-ups when someone points them out.
The response to my blog-bag of answers was underwhelming to the point where I wondered whether I should ever inflict another anthology of eclectic curiosities on any group of readers anywhere in the world.
Yes! I decided. Of course, I will. I love to read what I write!
When I forget what I once knew, I read the posts and remember how smart I was when I could remember stuff. It’s a good feeling. Someday I hope my grandchildren will understand why I don’t remember their names or how old they are. Someday I hope they will get what I’m talking about.
Brain-dead and happy is a wonderful combination, and I have it. Yes, I do. It is wonderful. I feel happy and content most of the time.
My mother had Alzheimer’s for years. It was a peculiar variation where she could remember twenty-five quips and jokes, which she repeated to anyone who would listen. Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her. She asked about it, sometimes.
She always forgot the answer, but to the end she never forgot her repertoire of sure-fire laugh lines. Mom delighted us to the very end of her life, God bless her.
Anyway, I know stuff, and I’m no longer afraid to share. I would say I am becoming fearless.
This essay is a collection of 25 more questions that people from around the world have asked, and I have dared answer. My last Quora compilation was mostly math and physics. Not this time. Here answers focus more on politics, philosophy, religion, and other esotery.
Oh, I might slip a science or math question in here or there for nerds I know are out there who read my stuff and cling to every word.
Here goes.
1 – How is it “just” for jails to be privately owned in the U.S.?
Allowing private citizens to own the means-of-incarceration is as insane as it is unjust and undemocratic.
Since 1984, America has allowed people to sequester as much wealth as they can manage. The looting, cheating, and chicanery that followed has turned America into one of the most corrupt, cruel, and unfair countries the world has ever known.
The result is that now we have an associate of a powerful Russian cartel serving as our president. Are we really going to allow his friends to own our prisons?
Are we out of our minds?
The situation is far worse than you can imagine.
Billionaires run the media. You aren’t going to hear about ways of organizing our country that are in opposition to their consensus about how things should be done. What passes as “dissent” on shows like Rachel Maddow, for example, has the backing of some billionaire somewhere.
We don’t know the names of the people who run our country. They don’t run for office. They do buy the services of office holders on both sides of the aisle — GOP and Democrat. It’s disturbing, especially when people finally realize that they are at bottom mere slaves with no real power. If voting made a difference, would billionaires allow it? Would you, if you were rich? I don’t think so.
Even now, confidence in our electoral system is being undermined. Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who exposed Russian tampering with our election results, rots in jail; she can’t obtain bail. The media doesn’t cover her. They want us to forget all about her.
Keeping Reality incarcerated undermines confidence, because it makes it seem like the government has something to hide about our election process.
Elon believes (correctly) that the risk of a future human extinction event approaches certainty over a very short period of time that can be estimated to be in the hundreds of years or less.
Elon believes we are in a race against catastrophe; humans are special and must be protected; one way to reduce extinction probabilities for humans is to establish populations on other planets and moons.
There are 165 or so rocky (solid) bodies in the solar system with enough gravity that humans can walk on them. Places where large populations can survive are fewer than five and could be as few as absolute zero.
Mars has special problems for human survival which must be solved. It has no protection from high energy radiation and cosmic rays. It lacks a magnetosphere and the atmospheric gases like nitrogen and oxygen that are opaque to harmful rays and particles. Elon believes these problems will be solved and that risk of extinction can be reduced if we establish vigorous colonies there.
He has hope where most informed people do not. My hope is that we can avoid extinction on Earth, but volatile climate and frequent ice ages are difficult to overcome.
We also have new and unusual risks associated with our technologies —biological, nuclear, AI, totalitarianism, resource depletion, and runaway climate change.
Natural risks include asteroid strikes, super nova irradiation, and volcanism. These natural risks are likely to be the same (or larger) on other bodies in the solar system as they are on Earth.
Two human-like species are known to have gone extinct in the geological record. (Some anthropologists say it’s three.) Human populations experienced a near extinction event 70,000 years ago when the total population collapsed to less than 4,000.
I do not know what Elon Musk thinks about organized religion.
I see religion as a brake on the tendency of humans to kill each other, which history teaches has sometimes been effective and at other times not. Sometimes, strongly held religious beliefs lead to war.
On one thing humans agree: they love to fight.
3 – What is the greatest achievement in human history?
Blaise Pascal said that civilization advanced when people finally understood that being the son of a Queen did not qualify someone to be a King.
Nepotism kills civilizations and impedes human progress. An example is the president bringing in his family to manage the United States, presumably because loyalty trumps ability.
The cascading catastrophe that is enveloping us will soon teach anyone who is teachable that placing loyalty to a “king” above the ability to serve our country is one of the many roads that leads nations to ruin.
4 – Why is there a lot of woo-woo surrounding the double slit experiment?
If you shot a BB gun once every five minutes for two weeks at a steel plate that had cut into it two quarter-inch slits, you wouldn’t expect to find 25 or so tidy columns of holes in the wall behind when you were done. People who have done this experiment with atomic scale particles always say “woo” after, because the phenomenon makes no sense.
The mathematics to describe the phenomenon is the same as that used to explain wave-behavior. The problem is this: even if you shoot one wave packet at a time (using photons) instead of solid BB-like particles (like Buckyballs), no one expects that over a few weeks tidy columns will form on the back wall that look like wave interference. The reason for the pattern is a total mystery.
5 – What is the origin of geometric shapes (triangle, circle, cube, etc.)? If the universe was governed by different laws, would it be possible that these concepts would also be different?
People speculate about the origins of idealized shapes that don’t occur in nature (except approximately). People seem to crave symmetry. They don’t like cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, or ambiguity.
People who are dissonant-intolerant are easy to manipulate. Politicians prey on people’s discomfort by offering simple solutions in return for votes. The result is always disillusionment, because nothing involving people is simple.
Nothing in nature is simple, either.
Triangles, circles, and cubes seem simple because of their symmetries. They appeal to the simple-minded among us — which is 99% of the population, right? It might be 100% if mathematics and language are insufficient to understand ultimate reality.
Einstein had this theory that only mass and energy exist. They are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. Space and time are a consequence, not a cause.
Space-time was described by tensor-metrics, and the metrics show that space-time does not have to be flat.
Lines can be thought of as geodesics, which are “straight” only when the metrics of space-time are “flat”. When the metrics “curve” space-time (as they do near massive objects) parallel lines might be parallel in one place only, as lines of longitude on Earth are parallel in one place only — at the equator.
The laws of physics seem unlikely, because twenty or so constants in nature have been discovered that can’t be derived and seem to make no sense. All these constants have been revealed by experiments and seem to be irrational. One example is the constant “α” (alpha), which is discussed in the first link that follows this answer.
Stephen Hawking says that the odds of a universe configured like ours are 1E500 against, which is close to an infinity. But Stephen Wolfram says that at the heart of the universe is a simple algorithm. In his view the algorithm, should anyone ever discover it, will prove that our universe is the only configuration possible.
6 – What salary in the United States puts you in the top 10%, top 5%, top 2%, and top 1% in terms of salary?
All anyone needs to know about train-wreck America is that half of all black families live on less than $40K per year; half of all non-black families live on less than $75K per year. It’s hard to imagine that families can survive, let alone prevail, on so little income.
The USA is segregated by income and race. Poor people have no idea how easy life is for the wealthy; the wealthy don’t believe America has poverty.
I have five sons and one daughter. Only two of the six are in the top 1%. The most talented one, an assistant professor of kinetic art at a major university, is in the bottom half. His brothers give him money so he can get by.
7 – Modern humans appeared 200,000; civilization 10,000; and advanced technology 500 years ago. Why no advancement for something like 190,000 years?
Technology advances when survival demands it. Wars involving large populations did not become possible until about 3,000 years ago, because human populations were small.
Technology (to wage war) began to advance when population size increased; war technology percolated into the general population during peacetime.
70,000 years ago the human population collapsed to what some anthropologists believe was fewer than 4,000 individuals. The climb back took a long time because the world was in an ice age until 15,000 years ago or so. It has taken time to reach seven billion individuals.
The good news is that advances in technology and science are no longer driven by war, but by the preparation for war. Entertainment, comfort, convenience, and other factors drive inventors to bring clever technologies to peacetime populations.
Avoidance of war should become the highest priority of humankind from here on out, or we might suffer a catastrophic population collapse that would most certainly set back human development for hundreds of thousands of years.
Extinction is another possibility. At least two intelligent hominid species are known to have gone extinct during the past 200,000 years. There may be others.
Sorry for the short answer. The list of technologies and natural catastrophes that can annihilate homo sapiens is long. Click the following link to read about most of them.
8 – Should the USA build a competing Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System (Doomsday) Nuclear warhead?
Enough Pu239 has already been produced in weapons and processed from nuclear fuel rods to sterilize planet Earth of all life.
One country, Japan, has isolated 47 tons of Pu239 from fuel rods, is adding 8 tons per year, and has complained on NHK television that they don’t know what to do with it. Ten pounds is enough to make one atomic bomb.
Plutonium 239 is bomb making material. Japan has 94,000 pounds. It is producing 16,000 pounds per year. Twelve pounds makes one high-yield bomb.
The level of toxicity of Pu239 dust has recently become controversial. My understanding is the traditional one: the speck of brown dust that kills you, you will never see.
The half-life of Pu239 is 24,000 years. Risk studies (which include about a dozen hazards not related to plutonium) have shown that the chance that homo sapiens will survive a catastrophic population collapse during the next 24,000 years is less than one-in-a-million.
Humans cannot baby-sit all the plutonium that exists in facilities on every continent and keep life on earth safe from annihilation by contamination. The warheads and storage facilities are going to rot over time, and the earth will soak up the poisons left behind like vinegar in a sponge.
Doomsday is not a question of whether-or-not but of fast-or-slow. There is no upper limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, so fast is doable. A rogue group with enough resources could construct a bomb powerful enough to obliterate Earth.
No one can undo the poisons that now exist, so slow is inevitable.
9 – What is the evolutionary reason that human beings are superficial and attracted to external appearances more than towards intrinsic qualities such as intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity?
My reading and life experience tell me that humans are attracted to symmetry.
There could be any number of reasons, but it is easy to argue that symmetry seems to create less stress in those who encounter it, which may make them more receptive (and less reluctant) to mate with those who have it.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance is a major driver of conscious-life; symmetry seems to reduce dissonance in sentient beings like humans.
Interest by humans in mathematics and art seems to confirm, at least to my mind, that folks are driven to imbibe “harmonies” and “patterns” in nature; these symmetries provide them with reassurance that the world is not hostile and that happiness and reduction of stress is possible in the face of accidents, disease, and predators.
Intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity are qualities that are not easily perceived and can even be illusory. People are good at feigning all these qualities to manipulate others to satisfy their needs — especially their sexual appetites and their desire for power over others.
Symmetry is not easily disguised (or the lack of it, even with good grooming) and can be an indicator of good mental and physical health, because symmetrical (attractive) people tend to have higher status and are in general less traumatized by mistreatment (on average) than people who do not have this physical quality.
People may mate with high symmetry individuals and later discover than the intangible moral qualities that they value in a life-partner are missing. Such a discovery can lead to separation, but meanwhile offspring have been spawned who have high levels of symmetry, and the process of selection for this quality continues unabated into future generations.
Yes, I have no evidence that this conjecture is correct; it’s not my field, but it seems to be a factor in the world I find myself.
10 – How does Russia stay on par with the USA in many high-tech military systems when their GDP and military budget is so small by comparison? Shouldn’t we be light-years ahead of them by now?
USA military spending is deceptive and classified.
The United States has 800 bases inside 70 countries. It is at war with every country that doesn’t do what it’s told.
Since the end of WW2, the USA has attacked one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth. Depending on who counts, the USA has killed between 10 and 65 million people, most of them civilians. Injured people are uncountable.
The high casualty rates are due to the way it fights. The USA bombs the enemy to rubble, then moves in a few troops supported by large numbers of indigenous mercenaries to deny the rubble to the enemy.
Take two countries the size of the USA and put them side by side. The land area is less than Russia. Russia is huge. Its entire population is technically literate.
In the USA, only elites are educated. The vast majority of Americans are poorly trained, because public education is underfunded and neglected. Under the American system, education doesn’t generate profits for the wealthy, so they won’t support it.
Because America is segregated by race and income, it is difficult for visitors to get a sense of how poor the general population is. Wealthy Americans are in complete denial of the simple truth that their country is a train wreck for 75% of the people who live in it.
People with the money to travel don’t explore urban ghettos or rural wastelands. They don’t know things, nor do they want to know.
The USA has the world’s biggest and cruelest prison system for a reason.
Think about it.
Every country in the world, including Russia, is trying to avoid the wrath of the United States. They say nice things to us, so we won’t hurt them. They build as much deterrence as they can to avoid being attacked or embargoed.
11 – Has anyone considered leaving the USA because of the gun laws?
Anyone who has to carry a gun to feel safe is living in the wrong place. My recommendation is to move to safety ASAP.
The guns that many civilians own today inflict shattering injuries that no one who is shot can recover from. The slugs are high velocity and tumble. They are designed in non-conformance with the Geneva accords and are diabolical workarounds.
I would rather die myself than fire one of these weapons at another human being, no matter what they’ve done.
We have police and soldiers who are trained to inflict mayhem when necessary to protect civilians from human predation. Why not let them do their jobs while we civilians throw our war guns away?
Carrying a high-powered weapon into a wild area that is rife with people-eating predators might be a good idea under some circumstances. I don’t have a problem with defense-by-gun against wild animals who might be trying to kill for food or fun.
My recommendation is to travel in wild areas in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily encourage attack by dumb and innocent animals — because, can we face facts? — they don’t know any better.
Animals have a right to live in a natural way and not be provoked. People are smart enough to travel in the wild and avoid unnecessary contacts with carnivores.
12- What would happen to Hitler if he was captured today?
Well, I believe he would be released and featured in the next GOP presidential debates, win the Republican nomination, lose the popular vote by millions in the general election but win the electoral college, and become president.
As a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, he might do very well indeed.
I don’t think he would kill nearly a hundred million people like he did the last time around. It is more likely closer to two billion. But hey, that leaves five billion humans to abase themselves before him, so it would be worth it, right?
13 –Would you consider the USA a noble superpower when compared to other superpowers like Russia and China?
The billionaires who run the USA believe that private ownership is noble and that public ownership is ignoble. They are in a war against any form of socialism or collectivism.
Since the end of WW2, the wealthy have used the military power of the United States to attack one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth to prevent a cascade of civilizations into communism. This war has, with a few exceptions, been enormously successful.
Today, they are fighting to consolidate their power. The billionaires of Russia, China, Israel, and the USA are dividing up the world like the New York City crime families of a few generations ago (watch the Godfather Trilogy or read the book by Mario Puzo).
Private ownership (called Capitalism) is a permutation of slavery that can be corrupting to democratic governance — as is obvious to any observer of U.S. history.
14 – How do you interpret human consciousness? Are you the center of the universe?
Consciousness is the fundamental and foundational principle of the universe. Conscious life plugs into this foundational consciousness in a way analogous to televisions plugging into a cable outlet. A television can be unplugged and replaced. But the cable programming continues. It is eternal. Consciousness is at the center of the universe. Conscious life is at the periphery.
15 – How would slavery have evolved in society if it was not seen as morally wrong?
“Capitalism” is the modern term for slavery. Owners of plantations, factories, and other businesses accrue the benefits of the plantation owners of former times.
Instead of providing slave quarters and food to their slaves, they pay a tiny stipend (called a minimum wage) to their laborers, which frees owners from the additional responsibility of caring for and protecting workers.
Putting the burden of housing, food, health care, and transportation on the backs of low-paid workers is called “freedom.”
The legal system disciplines unruly workers, while the state unemployment system helps dissatisfied owners replace those workers they believe are unfit.
For a small percentage of Americans, it’s a beautiful system.
Because the USA segregates workers both by race and income, most poor people don’t interact with the wealthy. This lack of contact between rich and poor reduces conflict and promotes peaceful living.
17 – Which among these countries is the best to live? Canada, USA or Australia? Why?
My question is, which country is the best place to live if you are poor? Most people are born poor.
If people go on living by being born again after they die, the odds that they will be born impoverished is high regardless of how well they lived in their prior life. That’s why its important to make the world a good place to live for impoverished people.
Does anyone seriously believe that they only live once? Consciousness continues somewhere, and it’s all there is, right? Absent conscious-life the universe can have no meaning.
I believe Cuba is the best place to live if you are poor, because it has a good climate and the government tries to provide services to ordinary people that are available only to the well-to-do in places like Canada, Australia, and the USA.
People might want to go to Cuba to find out how the poor live on that island. Then come back and observe how the poor live in their own countries.
The United States is segregated by income and wealth, so it’s hard to find poor people if you are rich, and if you are poor it is impossible to meet rich people.
18 – Trump wants to develop a lot of smaller, “tactical” nukes. Should the US use these against North Korea?
The USA bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War.
It killed an estimated two million civilians. The bombing was led by General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who later partnered with George Wallace when he ran for president back in the 1960s and carried several states including Michigan (if I remember it right).
Wallace was a white supremacist. The Air Force’s own official historians have called LeMay’s bombing of North Korea the cruelest use of military power in world history.
This is the same General who destroyed 67 Japanese cities and burned their populations alive with napalm (fire-jelly) during WW2.
North Korea has done nothing to justify a military strike against its territory.
Nuclear weapons of any size or type should never be used in war, especially when there is nothing to be gained but the reputation for being a monster.
What does Korea have that we could possibly want? The answer is, nothing.
We have a choice to make: are we good or evil? Our destiny depends on how we answer that question.
19 – I am terrified of single-payer systems as implemented in socialist countries. Can this happen in the US? Was Obama trying to give everyone healthcare all along?
The USA is based on a slave system (now referred to as capitalism or free-market) where the owners of the plantations have doctors, which they share with their favorite house slaves. The field hands get nothing. The plantation owners are terrified that they might have to share their doctors with “unworthy” people should a slave revolt occur, so they have built the world’s most massive prison system to isolate slaves who might dare challenge the status quo.
In other words, people have to work for the right company and have the right job to get access to free health care. Very few do.
The system is so simple, a child can understand it.
Obama threw a wrench into the system by making it possible for people who work for the wrong companies (or who don’t work at all, for whatever reason) to buy access to health care for a reduced fee. Care is still expensive, but it’s not totally out of reach anymore for about three-quarters of the population.
In Cuba (for example) every neighborhood and apartment complex has a doctor assigned to it. What could be more effective than walking down the hall or across the street to be evaluated? If necessary folks are referred for further treatment to a hospital. Otherwise they get the meds they need, and that’s as complicated and inconvenient as it gets.
I grew up in a Navy family. We had free health care. If you got sick, you just drove to the base hospital and the doctors evaluated you. No paper work, no fees. It was a “single-payer” socialized system of medicine. It was better than what we have today as civilians except that protocols, equipment, and medicines are more effective today than they were sixty years ago when I was in that Navy system.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is a serious question by a serious person, but clueless people in the USA are subject to sophisticated behavioral modification protocols due to the immense amount of money that is involved in medicine and drugs, as well as guns, entertainment, food, and transportation.
So it isn’t surprising that people fear a lot of things that aren’t dangerous and are oblivious to dangers that are serious. It’s all about helping a relatively few families and cartels sequester the lion’s share of our nation’s resources.
Someday, maybe things will become more fair than they are now. I hope so.
20 – Why is it assumed that America invented slavery when slavery has been around for much of human history?
America practiced one of the cruelest forms of slavery. It is the only country in the western hemisphere where slave revolts were successfully suppressed.
Today, slavery has been renamed; it is called capitalism. In the USA, slaves are called workers and are free to live outside the gated communities of the wealthy. Workers are segregated by income to minimize the possibility of unrest.
The USA continues to prevent a successful slave revolt by maintaining the largest prison system by far that the world has ever known.
Two-thirds of white people came to America as slaves, called indentured servants. This practice started 150 years before the country became a constitutional republic and continued for many decades after. Indentured servitude was a seven year term of slavery that ended in freedom.
For Africans slavery was permanent. 100% of Africans came to America as slaves for life. There were notable exceptions. Billy Lee, George Washington’s slave and best friend, was set free when George Washington died; Billy Lee continued to live on GW’s Mount Vernon estate as a free man until his death.
22 – Is it true that until humans become one nation, we will never go further than Mars?
Organizing a human mission to Mars is expensive and dangerous. A coalition of nations might be able to manage the expense and risk.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is planning a Mars mission. I haven’t heard how the company plans to finance it.
Mars has an iron-nickel core like the earth, but it froze solid many millions of years ago. The magnetic field collapsed, which permitted the solar wind to blow away most of the planet’s atmosphere.
Any biological life forms on or near its surface will have to withstand the stress of continuous, high-energy radiation and the bombardment by cosmic particles with the energy of baseballs.
Travel to planets or moons as far as Jupiter and beyond will take many years.
Unless humans are heavily sedated, it is doubtful that they will be able to endure a journey of several years in a cramped space vehicle. They will lose muscle mass and possibly their sanity — certainly their perspectives that help them maintain a sense of normalcy.
Successful functioning by humans on an alien moon or planet after a journey of several years might not be possible no matter who organizes the trip or what precautions are taken.
23 – To Christians: Which scientific claims are incompatible with your faith, and why?
Science confirms my faith, because it seems to be saying that reality is mind-boggling; the odds against a universe constructed like ours with its unusual forces and constants seems to be infinite.
Jesus came to save the ignorant and the despised of the world, which is pretty much everyone. He avoided the subject of science altogether, for good reason.
No reasonable person can believe that the universe started with the big bang of a singularity that then inflated rapidly to create the conditions for conscious life with enough intelligence to understand its origins. That’s cray-cray, but it’s how some astronomers explain the universe.
Even with all we know, the underlying reality of existence remains a complete mystery. If Jesus came to Earth today, would he talk science to humanity?
I seriously doubt it. I don’t believe humans are hard-wired to understand how the universe works or what reality is. We evolved in an unusually safe place and time in the universe and carry with us all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that accompany our unlikely presence.
The Bible says plainly that one day people who have ridiculed God will be asked why they didn’t look up at the night sky and wonder why it is that they are so small and dark while the night sky is so large and bright.
How could serious people have missed such an important clue? How could anyone misunderstand their predicament and not concede the possibility that one day they might realize their hopes and dreams through the love of God who created, cares for, and protects them?
24 – Keeping the knowledge you have today, would you rather travel a thousand years into the future, or a thousand years into the past?
The risks to survival that faced individuals a thousand years ago far exceed the risks that people will face a thousand years from now—if humans survive another thousand years.
The counter-intuitive statistical reality is that the odds against species survival are actually higher than odds against survival of any individual human, should individual humans achieve viability during the next thousand years.
Most analysts of risk are suggesting that homo sapiens do not have much time left before extinction overwhelms them.
The geological record shows that at least two human-like species have already gone extinct. The particular species that thrives today (us) faces risks brought on by its technological expertise, which is certain to destroy it eventually.
I would choose to go forward in time, but I would do so with a great deal of fear knowing the old adage that curiosity kills the cat.
If everything turns out all right, the big question would be, how do uneducated, stupid people do in this new world?
Because uneducated and stupid is exactly what anyone will become who dares travel into a future one-thousand years more advanced than today.
25 – What are ways one can approach a complex idea that we don’t understand?
Complex ideas are of two kinds: ideas that one or more people understand but others don’t; and ideas which no one understands.
In the case where certain humans exist who understand a complex idea, the objective should be to learn what they know either by talking to them or reading what they have published. By this process, maybe folks can gather enough clues to guide them to further inquiries, which will lead eventually to understanding.
Many complex ideas require skills in certain subsets of knowledge like mathematics, languages, logic, philosophy, and the technical arts (such as metallurgy or whatnot) to make progress.
In the case where a complex idea can be demonstrated and stated but no one understands it (an example is “entanglement” in quantum physics), the approach is different. In these cases, it may not be possible to create a model of any kind in anyone’s mind to reduce the annoying dissonance that comes from not understanding.
People waste a lot of time — some go mad — trying to understand ideas no one understands or will ever understand. Most people seem to believe (in error, it seems to me) that everything can be understood if smart people work hard and are clever.
The idea, which I believe, is that complete understanding is not possible; it is a complex idea that no one understands, including me.
BONUS QUESTION 1 – In history, humans have fought and killed each other for every piece of land on the Earth. Why has the massive continent of Antarctica always been out of that conflict?
This absence of conflict may be coming to an end. A National Geographic reporter has been reporting on alarming developments in Antarctica over the past several years that the fake news has all but ignored.
BONUS QUESTION 2 – Why did mankind invent religion?
As far as I can tell, no records of an ancient civilization without religion have been discovered. I think that it is very scary to be suddenly aware that you exist and not know why — especially at night when wild animals roam freely, and the sky is full of lights that should not be there.
Editorial Board Recommendation: We are encouraging readers to visit Quora.com to read responses by Billy Lee (and others) to hundreds of questions asked by curious people from around the globe.
God doesn’t scare them. They’re bad boys, and they’ll mess up anyone who crosses them. It’s what they want everyone to think, anyway. When they hurt the little people, God looks the other way. They are sure of it.
