Last Rites for Mr. & Mrs. Common Sense

Almost to the day, three years ago, on September 27, 2019, I mused about, "Eulogy for Common Sense". One reader  told  me then  that perhaps it was much too premature  to eulogize it.  Perhaps, but what about now?

Part of what I wrote then was, "Common sense is dying from small blows and  lacerations but alas with very little blood. It is now punch drunk from a jab here, a jab there, and body punches that merely stagger the senses without really causing a knockout, not even  a knockdown. Common sense has not gone down for the count. At least, not yet. But already it has  had recurring standing counts. And that is worse than being counted out entirely. It is a pitiful sight".

World's no.1 ranked tennis player, Novak Djokovic, was denied entry into this country and was therefore not able to play at the U.S. Tennis Open to defend his title this year. His "troubles" actually started in Australia  earlier  when he was deported by the government after he was allowed entry at first, then deported.  His lawyer, after a  court battle brought on by legal challenges claimed that Djokovic already had natural immunity after contracting the virus in December, 2021 from which he recovered fully. However, before the Australian Tennis Open could begin his visa was revoked and he was promptly deported.  A friend from Australia sent me an email where the joke there was that the reason for his predicament was that his first name rhymes with "No Vac".

The more recent joke now, of course, is that Novak Djokovic could have come in with the thousands who enter the country illegally via the U.S. southern boarder, say Texas, where that state's governor could have promptly put him on a bus to New York, visa-free with full sanctuary protection when he gets to Grand Central Station or Flushing Meadows.  Two million have so far illegally entered the country across the boarders - unvaccinated, unvetted, with no entry visas - but the No. 1 Tennis player  in the world, with natural immunity from Covid, could not come in, despite the obvious dissipation of Covid concerns.   Another devastating jab at common sense. 

Madness, 1, Common Sense, 0. 

Mr. Common Sense had been in the ring so many times against many opponents, mostly questionable contenders for the title of sense and sensibility, while at ringside Mrs. Common Sense can only watch and gasp in tears. 

A woman, seven months into her pregnancy, was murdered at her home when she surprised a burglar in the middle of the night.  The suspect was apprehended later.  He was charged with double homicide - for taking the life of the mother and the unborn child. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

In a different case, a woman who was seven months pregnant decided she didn't want the baby anymore.  She went to a clinic where a doctor performed what was "necessary".  Unfortunately, though rare, the mother suffered from sepsis, also called blood poisoning, although it has nothing to do with poison. Bacteria had entered her bloodstream during or perhaps after the procedure, and in less than 48 hours she passed away. The doctor was not criminally liable for the death of the mother or the unborn baby, or charged with any crime.  This is not to be a political argument for or against Roe V Wade.  Treating this with the typical retort of "apples and oranges" when compared to the first scenario may be deemed logically proper, but Mrs. Common Sense is troubled by the double standard applied to both unborn babies; neither  was aware of the nuances of the law nor the intricacies of modern morality and ethics.

So, who are these contenders in the ring from whom Common Sense has been taking unrelenting punishments?

NIMBY's. This now arguably trite acronym has been coming up in conversations recently, "Not In My Backyard". Undocumented/illegal "migrants may enter through the Arizona, New Mexico and Texas boarders by the thousands each week but a hundred of them flown into Martha's Vineyard or bused to Washington, DC, Chicago and New York is abhorrently wrong!  Yes, it can be considered a political stunt on the part of the Florida and Texas governors but did it not get the national attention that nobody outside the southern boarder states would talk about, not too long ago?  Suddenly, it is part of the national conversation after almost two years of 8-10,000 per day of illegal incursions at the boarder with hardly a peep from the national media. 

"Double Standard-ers"  are also contenders in the ring that Mr. Common Sense had to face. 

Least known is that the administration, months earlier, did the same thing. Several plane loads of "migrants" who entered the southern boarder were flown to various places around the country in the early morning hours. It was acknowledged by the WH press secretary when asked but it got no more than a ho-hum from the general media. When two state governors did the same thing in bright daylight hours, there was uproar from the media. Those flown to the island paradise called Martha's vineyard "were treated as political pawns in such horrific and inhumane conditions". 

Those were the same migrants who probably spent all their life savings for passage, who went through unimaginable conditions trekking through  harsh territories from various countries of origin to get to the boarder, fraught with all kinds of potential peril along the way; but when they were flown by jet, fully fed and properly clothed, to a beautiful island, they were "maltreated like kidnapped prisoners".  Two days later the administration bussed and ferried them out to a  Massachusetts military base and housed in a compound to await further "processing". 

Meanwhile, no media attention focuses on the thousands of migrants who lost their lives on their way before reaching and while crossing the border. Nothing was nationally covered about the 52 migrants who suffocated to death inside a cargo container truck abandoned by human smugglers nor the many who drowned crossing the river. One Texas border town reported yesterday that they were running out of freezer space for dead migrants brought in every week. 

Four years ago on December 12, 2018, the title of my musing was "$5.00 Per Gallon". No, it was not about the price of gasoline but "just the rolling price per gallon difference between the gas pump prices on Fannin Street in Houston, Texas and Rue Manin in Paris, France as of a particular time.."

Well, just barely 2-3 months ago, gasoline prices did go up to and higher than $5.00 per gallon in many parts of this country.  Not quite on Fannin St. but close enough for even Texas drivers to grimace at the pump.

Climate-ers and climate hypocrites are contenders in the ring with Mr. Common Sense, indeed.  Movie stars, politicians, media personalities and social luminaries lecture us on climate change due to profligate use of fossil fuels but we know they are not serious.  They live in 10,000 square foot homes with not a single solar panel on the roof, nor a windmill standing in their surrounding multi acreages of land.  We know their home, fire places and barbecue pits and pool heaters use gas.  They don't fly commercial because private jets are more convenient.  Their yachts have no sails because wind is unpredictable while diesel engines are reliable.    We know they don't believe in rising sea levels; otherwise why do they have waterfront and ocean-view homes at The Hamptons, Chesapeake Bay, yes, at Martha's Vineyard, and San Francisco Bay, etc.  

But these folks are the loudest voices on climate.  They look down upon those ignorant "climate deniers" below as their private jets soar at 35,000 feet, spewing tons of carbon dioxide. They are so eloquent at using terms like "carbon footprint" and "existential threats" posed by fossil fuel and call for eliminating gas stoves  and furnaces in new home construction for as long as their  mansions are grandfathered into exceptions and there must be no mention of their stretched limos that ferry them to and from their galas and annual movie awards nights or their attendance to  global warming initiative conferences in their private jets and complementary armor plated gas guzzling behemoths. 

Today, here and Europe where gas prices are often the cause for anguish for many families, I am reminded of a quote. From among those who were then protesting the high prices in Paris four years ago, the quote was much too eloquently expressed with the simplicity of thought that could only come from the philosophy of a simple man. The man said, "We too are concerned with the end of the world but what we are most concerned  with right now is the end of the  month".  

The man is right. The end of the world to him is lopsidedly distant when set to a timeline that could be a mere few days to the end of the month where his budget could quickly turn vermilion red versus the green promises to hold off a global catastrophe a hundred, a thousand years from when he retires.

The "green-ers" too are contenders in the ring. They drive Mr. Common Sense to dizzying stupor with their shadow boxing and HTT attitude and self elevating platitudes toward climate. HTT stands for "holier than thou". My musing on, "In Awe of Climate" is second most read of all my musings because I think many readers agree with the futility of the promises and the premise espoused by the climate-ers among us.  Mr. and Mrs. Common Sense do not begrudge, and no one should, the successes of those fortunate ones who made a financial success of their lives but where they draw the line is when those same folks go on to lecture everyone who has a different opinion.

There are many more pages to write on what bothers Mr. and Mrs. Common Sense but  let's just have them ask three more questions.

1. Why is it that biologically male transgenders compete in women's sports but biologically female trans do not  in men's sports?  The answer: Clearly the latter just simply cannot compete in men's sports while the former can dominate (and with ease) the women's competition.

2. Why is the Air Force Academy focusing on Diversity and Inclusion by banning the use of gender identifiers like Mom and Dad, girlfriends and boyfriends, and all other pronoun insanities when the world is teetering on geopolitical/military chaos in an apparent rebalancing of global power as other world leaders perceive a weakening resolve from once the supreme example of democracy and capitalism?  A long question but we can see Mr. Common Sense shrugs his shoulder while Mrs. Common Sense only stares into the far distance, as if everything she used to take for granted as a legacy to their grand children is slowly sinking below the far horizon of a setting sun that is the USA. 

3. How did the U.S. go from exporting oil to importing again and dipping into its strategic petroleum reserves (SPR) as a stop gap measure to rising gas prices? Nobody seems to recall anymore why the U.S. created SPR' in 1975, almost two generations ago.

"Congress authorized the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA, P.L. 94-163) to help prevent a repetition of the economic dislocation caused by the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo".

Mr. Common Sense is resigned to the idea that any administration can add to  the reason for SPR, such as a temporary relief for a mismanaged economy either from incompetence or from misguided self flagellation dictated by a few HTT's in the administration, to assuage general public outrage at high prices for a commodity that this country has so much of, but ..

There is more but I do not want to exceed the limit of the reader's capacity for anguish.  Meanwhile, I leave you with these two self-explanatory images.  

What Do We Really Know?

The question to follow is, "How do we really know?" And then, "When do we really know?"  Then there is the question, of course, about, "How do we know that what we know is real or not?".   That is the question.

Information is what determines reality; albeit, reality is itself not quite as well grounded to the truth, as sometimes the case, which we will get into in a bit. Every pixel of what we see, every decibel of sound that we hear, things we can smell and taste, everything whispered, touched, felt, all of these are conveyed by information.  In other words, nothing gets perceived, nothing gets transmitted and nothing gets done without information; which can be real, imagined, or perceived to be real.  And there lies the conundrum. 

Let's begin with this first. Everything that is around us comes to our attention and awareness through pieces of information, large and small. Whatever it is you are trying to observe and likewise everything you want to convey to others can only be carried by information. We must think about this for a moment.  

Survival from the beginning of life is primarily about our brains taking in information - understanding and remembering what is relevant and discarding what is not.  Predators and prey in the wild are constantly playing the information game of life and death. Plants too have ways to process and remember information.  In other words, only inanimate objects have no use for information.

And then …

There is one ugly side about information.  Deception. We find stories of deception in the courts, in politics, in world conflicts, in the everyday unfolding of life itself.  The Bible not only has much to say about it but it is where we are told, allegorically at least, that Eve was deceived into eating the forbidden fruit with false information. Then there was the story of Jacob and Esau and the birthright bestowed by their father Isaac.  The story depicted in Genesis, chapter 25, talked about information and deception.  Reading that story, one can be led to believe that information can have two sides to it. The deception that could arise from it can both be perceived as either good or bad depending on the beholder.

There was one famous story of deception that remains one of the greatest true stories in the annals of world history that was crucial to the outcome of WWII. It unfolded at a critical point of the war in 1943.

The Allied forces were planning to take control of the Mediterranean as a prelude to the invasion and retaking of Europe.  Sicily was the target naval landing zone but obviously the Allies did not want that known to Hitler's forces. They must divert attention to somewhere else - Greece and Sardinia - thus altering the enemy's defensive preparations.

"Operation Mincemeat" was created. It was one, if not the most, elaborately concocted military deception in war. One quick note for the fans of the James Bond franchise.  Ian Fleming, before he became famous for creating the character of 007 in the multi-book series, was a Lt. Commander in the British Navy.  He was assistant to the head of naval intelligence.  He suggested a military deception by having false documents fall into the hands of the enemy's intelligence network as indirectly as possible without arousing suspicion.

The plan was to have a body, purportedly that of a British naval officer, wash ashore in the southern coast of Spain.  Spain was neutral to the war efforts but it shared information freely with the Abwehr, the German intelligence group. 

British operatives searched for and found the body of a homeless and unfortunate Welshman who died from eating rat poison in a warehouse.  They preserved his corpse in a freezer as they busied themselves creating a background for the man, giving him a false identity, a military career, even personal details of  a pilot with a girlfriend, so that his jacket included theater ticket stubs, a love letter and some bills due to be paid, etc. By the time they were done, the corpse was someone with a promising military career who was entrusted with top secret information of an upcoming naval operation that he was supposed to deliver to the top field commanders - the planned Allied attack on Greece and Sardinia.  The false story had his plane crash off the coast of Spain. A British submarine actually carried his body and released it so that Spanish fishermen would find it.

Sure enough, the Spanish police alerted the Abwehr agents in place who carefully took photos of every document that was on the "officer's" jacket, which they promptly dispatched to Berlin.  The Spanish authorities then proceeded to return the body to the British consulate with all the pretensions of goodwill and diplomacy.  The British knew, of course, that the documents had been scrutinized. The forensic markers that were on the body and clothing were clearly disturbed. 

Berlin was convinced that the documents were real, which prompted the German High Command to reposition their forces to defend Greece and Sardinia.  Sicily fell and the rest is history. 

The story was later revealed into a movie in 1956 titled, "The Man Who Never Was".  Ian Fleming admitted that he actually lifted the idea from a detective story he read earlier about a dead body with planted information as a ruse for deception.

The retelling of that elaborate story was to show that if such manipulation of information was achieved with 1940's technology, what chance have we against far more sophistication in the molding and bending of information. How are we to know that what we think we know is real or not?

In these days of 1000 megabits per second of internet speed in many households today, when 200 to 500 MBPS are already sufficiently swift, what chance have we against the speed of data dumps of so much material for the brain's capacity to process.  The inevitability of all of these is brought on by something least likely to be detected by a human brain that has not quite evolved in lock step with the evolution of technology.  The opposite could be happening, instead.  

Our brains can be lulled into laziness as we depend more and more of the heavy mental lifting to the computer.  The smartphone is the one getting smarter at each product release. We've become addicted to the nectar of technology. We've become dependent on information being fed to us with nothing more than a few  keystrokes.  In 1943 and for decades following it, one had to pull out a book or several books off the shelf and flip through pages upon pages of material for information that today can be had in seconds.

Information is also least likely expected or assigned its proper value or even recognized for its far deeper and most absolute role in how reality works or what reality really is.

Let's first look at reality as it pertains to what is truly real and what is perceived to be really real by dissecting what we see in the "news" these days.  I put news in quotes because "news" these days seems to have been devalued worse than Venezuela's or Zimbabwe's currency.  The inflation that now afflicts news gathering and disbursement is also matched by the real economic inflation in the U.S. that at one time was dubbed earlier by the administration as transitory and later assigned a minor cause for concern.  When it could no longer be ignored, the solution was a massive spending bill, called the "Inflation Reduction Act". Direct from the White House one-page summary of "Investments" (euphemism for spending taxpayer's money), copied and pasted below, please note which program gets the lion's share (sincere apology to the lion).

TOTAL INVESTMENTS $437 billion

Energy Security and Climate Change 369 billion*

Affordable Care Act Extension 64 billion**

Western Drought Resiliency 4 billion***  

Obviously, other past administrations of a few decades past had misused information as well.  From the Vietnam War to the Gulf War, the bending of information was a go-to move by any administration to sway public opinion, foreign and domestic. 

In these days of instant everything, - hard news, false news, rumors, twits, streaming media bits and pieces - our senses can be overwhelmed by a bombardment of information.  The Russia Hoax and stories of errant phone calls to a foreign leader have caused so much national schism and the debilitating effect of two presidential impeachments.  

Such is the power of information, or rather the misuse and abuse of it, which is now the road or the favored avenue that political leaders are willing to travel on to guarantee success. At what cost and what quality of success do they have in mind?

The question of, "What do we really know", forces us into a perverse cynicism because, "Why do we really want to know" seems like a fool's errand when we no longer know what is real and what is not.