Sheep and Goats

Category: Scientists

  • Science Takes a Hit in Pandemic’s Aftermath

    Nobody’s trying to diss vaccines here—honest, I’m not. I’m just trying to write a commentary on evolution—to what extent (if any) can it be reconciled with Genesis? Why should vaccines thrust themselves into the middle of the discussion? No reason at all, that I can see.

    Except that Sean Carroll, author of ‘The Making of the Fittest,’ does just that. Many times I’ve mentioned this book in my blog. At last, he reaches the ‘dessert’ portion of his book that he likens to a full-course meal. He’s dealt with all the basics for evolution. He rests his case. Now, it’s time for dessert and after-dinner conversation—of which there is a lot. Now he launches into related topics. Two of them are related. A third is not.

    Carroll brings up Stalin’s science crony (Lysenko), who disregarded evolutionary teachings (as a bourgeois notion of the West) and consequently imposed mass starvation on the Soviet Union through mandated and misguided agricultural policies. Okay, that fits. He brings up how deniers are ever scheming to attack his cherished evolution and how they might be defeated. That fits, too.

    In between he sandwiches in a critique of those who practice chiropractic. “Spinal crackers” he calls them. (Let the reader use discernment that he doesn’t like them.) That doesn’t fit at all. What in the world do chiropractors have to do with anything? It’s as though his brother in-law went to a chiropractor rather than the doc Carroll recommended and he is still grumbling about it.

    I mean, his book is about evolution and the war against creationists. Chiropractors have no problem with evolution. At most, some will put a theistic spin on it, but there are plenty of scientists who do that too. Their schools incorporate evolution. What’s with this ax to grind over chiropractic? Ah, here it is: The “founding principle [of chiropractic] conflicted with the medically accepted view of infectious diseases as being caused by germs.” Well, that is certainly unforgivable but even so, is that enough for “spinal crackers” to earn his special contempt in a book plainly about something else?

    Oh, here it is: “The opposition of chiropractors to the germ theory of disease led to a resolute opposition to vaccination, opposition that continues among a substantial fraction of chiropractors today.” Well, maybe, but it’s news to me. If it ever did, suffice it to say that most have long since grown out of that notion. This doesn’t seem to placate Carroll at all. He is determined to eradicate the offending health regimen.

    Now, as it turns out, for many years, I worked in a field of repetitive motion that periodically took it out on my back. Many times I would pull a muscle leaving me in pain and almost unable to walk. Each time, my favorite chiropractor restored both posture and pain instantly. How he did it, I don’t really care. It’s not as though when my back heard that science doesn’t endorse him it went bad again. This is especially poignant as I have known many to suffer back problems, go the route of conventional treatment, culminating in surgery, and end up essentially crippled for life. Few of them are comforted by knowing their selected route was “evidence based.” So now, does Carroll put chiropractors on the kill list? Not on my watch.

    Not once did any chiropractor I engaged make any comment about vaccines. Nonetheless, what underhanded methods have they used to undermine them, according to Carroll? He mentions a few. First, they “doubt the science,” a sin that includes (1) “point[ing] to other measures, such as sanitation and hygiene, as the entire explanation for a decrease in certain diseases [rather than vaccination].” They also (2) question the motives and integrity of scientists, suggesting conspiracies between them and pharmaceutical companies—in short, that “their support for vaccination is motivated by greed, not public health.” They (3) cite dissenting views among “ardent critics who hold medical credentials,” as though those views are right, even though they are minority. They (4) make appeals to personal freedom. They (5) exaggerate harms vaccines might cause. However, Carroll says, “once the fog of disinformation clears and the efficacy of vaccines is demonstrated on a massive scale, most of the arguments provide weak refuge.”

    Funny he should say this just fifteen years before response to a worldwide pandemic took these arguments off the back burner and put them up front. These days those five points are reasserting themselves and it has nothing to do with chiropractors. The safety of the Covid-19 vaccine proved so flawed, its efficacy so overstated, and the curtailment of freedoms (point 4) so egregious during the pandemic, that not only do the Covid vaccines come in for intense criticism, but the furor has spilled over into all vaccines. One might even say that all of science takes a hit by thrusting it forward as though a poster child. Here Carroll’s book is named Top Science Book of the Year by USA Today, and he cannot stay on topic. He must veer from evolution to tackle a topic made prominent by its sheer irrelevance to his book.

    The obvious gaslighting that occurred during the pandemic has come back to bite them all. Were you to tie a millstone to the feet of every chiropractor and pitch them all into the sea, it would make no difference to current circumstances. Nobody, self included, would have ever predicted it. When you rile the masses, however, they research matters and end up doing far more damage to your cause than you ever dreamed they would. Speaking to Carroll’s point (1), for example, the CDC’s own mortality data reveals that in 1900, measles caused 13.3 deaths per 100,000 population. By 1960, the figure was .2 deaths per 100,000. The measles vaccine was rolled out in 1963. Thus, the chiropractors’ point (1) is exactly correct, at least in the case of measles. After a mortality drop of 98% had already taken place, a vaccine to eradicate measles was introduced. Its backers thereafter claimed credit for the entire drop.

    Not to mention that letting vaccines take over a job that nature or sanitation or hygiene or something was already winning is not necessarily a good thing. Turns out that when you force the human immune system to be on high alert for a particular pathogen, it comes at the expense of everything else. The immune system’s capacity is not infinite. Does this explain why mainstream vaccine experts highlighted in a 2017 study that children worldwide vaccinated with DTP were 10 times MORE likely to die in the first six months of life compared to unvaccinated children? They didn’t die from what they were immunized against, but they did die, at a ten-fold increased rate.

    Not to mention that most vaccines (not true of the measles vaccine, but it was of Covid-19) alleviate symptoms but do nothing to prevent transmission. This becomes counterproductive. A sick person who doesn’t know he’s sick stays in circulation and infects others. A sick person who knows he’s sick stays home and infects nobody. Though it be hard to imagine today, I used to look forward to measles, chicken pox, and mumps. It meant a week off school. The same thing happened with the Brady Bunch family, a sit-com from the 1960s. The eight children all came down with measles in an episode titled “Is There a Doctor in the House?” It’s “a slight temperature, a lot of dots, and a great big smile” due to staying home, playing Monopoly, and missing school. It’s very hard to gaslight someone out of recalling their own experience. Lest this threaten to happen anyway, here is a sit-com to confirm that my experience was nearly everyone’s experience.

    Believe me, look into these things and it is a hornet’s next you look into. So much for Carroll’s point (3). The dissenting views he complains of are having their day in the sun. As to his point (2), greed eclipsing public heath, I commendably don’t go there—but it is only by ignoring human nature. Somehow the most ardent cheerleaders of science envision practitioners of their discipline immune to the base forces that afflict the unenlightened ones. Tell Carroll to put on his pith helmet once more and get back to digging up fossils. Science takes a hit which it brought on itself. It made a massive authoritarian grab for the world, locking down everyone for years, forcing its will on them all, only to be caught with its pants down.

    As for chiropractic, ought we expand this to all alternative health therapies that Carroll would likely also have a problem with? Vincent McCabe’s 1997 book, “Let Like Cure Like,” discusses common principles to most of them: “These philosophies, both thousands of years old, have yet to be proved scientifically because of the limitations of science, not because they are not true.”

    It is left to the reader to assess this statement. Are there limitations of science? This is not the same as asking whether science knows everything. Its most fervent supporters readily acknowledge that it does not. The point of contention is whether science itself has limitations. Given time, could it figure out everything? The great divide hangs upon that question. It is given increased pertinency as science is the driving mechanism for those who would choose human rulership over the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ rulership of God. Will it truly enable them to “know good and bad,” as was promised in the garden?

    ******  The bookstore

  • Anecdotal Evidence and Science

    What to do with Eyewitnesses

    In May of 2020, no hope was held out for victims of Covid-19. The “warp speed” development of a vaccine had not yet landed. Sufferers were advised bedrest and fluids at home. They were only to enter the hospital if they were almost dead (which in many cases would finish off the job for them), President Trump then described a letter he had received:

    “I got a letter from a doctor the other day, from Westchester, New York, around the area, he did not want anything. He just said: ‘Sir I have hundreds of patients and I give them hydroxychloroquine, I give them the z-pack, which is azithromycin, and I give them zinc, and out of the hundreds of patients, many patients, more than 300, I haven’t lost one.’ He said: ‘Please keep pressing that sir.’”

    Q: What do you do when people are dropping dead left and right and then a physician comes along with a treatment he has used on over 300 patients and says ‘I haven’t lost one?’ Do you:

    A) Ignore him.

    B) Seek higher-quality evidence

    C) Go talk to those 300 and shake them down for their stories.

    Though any one of common sense would choose C, the actual response was a cross between A and B. Why? Because to choose C makes you beholden to “anecdotal evidence,” a horrific faux pas in the discipline called science.

    Michael Shermer discussed anecdotal evidence in his Great Courses lecture series, “How to Think Like a Scientist.” Anecdotes are near-worthless, he maintains. If you want to think like a scientist (who doesn’t?) you ignore them. “Ten anecdotes are no better than one and one hundred anecdotes are no better than ten,” he stated. “Imagine how worthless five hundred must be to him,” I said in ‘Workman’s Theodicy,’ referring to the five hundred eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection.

    Okay, okay, so the five hundred eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection were long dead at the time of his and my writing; that throws a significant caveat into it for sure. But the three hundred eyewitnesses from the Westchester physician were not dead! Quite the opposite. They would have been dead, many of them, were it not for his treatment that he subsequently tried to share with the nation. How can you not go and talk to them?

    Science did not. They devised “higher quality” studies to conclude that the doctor was talking through his hat, and that whoever disdained science enough to listen to him was equally foolish. Is it because talking to the patients requires leaving the laboratory? Is it because if you send someone to speak with them, whatever they bring back is also “anecdote” and therefore equally untrustworthy? I can’t think of a better circumstance to validate the Romans 1:22 verse of fools insisting they are wise.

    So stupid is this mainstay of “thinking like a scientist” that conspiracy theorists arise to insist it was not stupidity at all, but design. The plan, they insist, was to discredit anything cheap and effective so as to make a financial killing with the next product from Pharma. It is a battle for others to wage, not me. Good luck to those who embark on it; it’s like arguing over the trinity. I let it pass. Others can conclude what they will. But it may just be a limitation of science itself. Science is simply not nimble enough to deal with anecdotal evidence, so it doesn’t even make the attempt. It ignores it. It carts that stuff to the curb. No matter if lives are said to depend upon it or not—out it goes.

    This doctor, a Vladimir Zelenko, was not the only doctor to weigh in. Other doctors would also weigh in, and even eclipse him by testifying before Congress. I heard one of them, a Dr Pierre Kory. In the early days of Covid-19, he and others did not want to just sit around waiting on CDC guidance which didn’t come beyond bedrest and fluids. They started tinkering with already existing drugs that they had used for other illnesses. Might some be adapted to the new contagion? The found the answer was yes. ‘Look, I’m not dissing any vaccine,’ Kory said. ‘But it’s not here yet. In the meantime people are dying. I’ve found a regimen that works. [just like Zelenko and others had] Please let me use it! Please tell others about it!’ But it was anecdotal evidence. Though each doctor who testified had hundreds of patients treated, hundreds of eyewitnesses that could have been sought out, it was to no avail. Science can’t be impeded by such nonsense. They ignored him and sought out higher quality evidence that would tell them he was wrong.

    You’d almost think that President Trump’s own experience with Covid 19 would indicate Zelenko (whose regimen he promptly adopted and who closed his practice shortly after sending his letter, so harassed was he by detractors—he has since died) was onto something. In October of 2020, Trump himself came down with Covid. He was old and obese, two huge factors of comorbidity. Everyone thought he was a goner. Instead, he kicked the illness in no time at all. Shortly thereafter, he was waving from his limosine. During his 4-day hospital stay, he was mostly ambulatory and worked from his bedside. Did the Zelenko treatment help him recovery so quickly? The answer will never be known, probably, for his care consisted of treatments then unavailable to the general public, primarily a regeneration monoclonal antibiotic cocktail.

    And no, don’t carry on about Trump’s getting treatment better than you would get. That is just the way it is with regard to leadership of anything in this system of things. On a recent trip to Chicago, I was even reminded of how past-mayor Daly had to think very quickly to extract himself from such a trap.

    It seems that the President, the Pope, and Mayor Daly had been caught adrift in a small boat which had sprung a leak. It could thereafter safely transport two persons, but not three. The President promptly pointed out that as leader of the free world, it could hardly be he that bailed. The Pope made the same observation on the basis of heading the world’s largest religion. Mayor Daly, a politician renowned for his corruption, began to sweat. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he proposed, “Let’s do this the democratic way! Let’s take a vote.” So they did and Mayor Daly won, five to two.

    Does it water down this post to conclude it with a joke? Maybe. But how can you conclude that a policy of ignoring eyewitnesses is anything but a joke? God help us when this mainstay of science is picked up by the judicial system. Prosecution and defense alike will soon stop calling upon them, since science has deemed them unworthy of consideration. It recalls a certain chum of mine, admittedly given to corniness, who stocked a bookshelf with various Bible translations and his collection of comic strips—Calvin and Hobbes was a favorite. That way he could say, “If it’s not in the Bible, it’s a joke.”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Science without Religion is Lame. Religion without Science is Blind

    Science without Religion is Lame. Religion without Science is Blind

    Albert Einstein wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Science provides the how of the universe, but religion provides the why, along with the morals and purpose.

    Given a choice of unknowns, most people will choose the why questions over the how questions—unless you include such questions as ‘How do I keep my head above water in an inherently unjust world?’ But that is really just a subset of a greater why: “Why is the world inherently unjust?” Moreover, one has to be comfortable and monied to be preoccupied with the how. Those with any significant struggling in their lives will more readily fixate on the whys. Each day will have its own anxiety, said Jesus. For the average person, there is precious little reward in fixating on the how. If your specialty of how persuades you that it is permanent curtains in but a few decades, where’s the reward in that? Bragging rights, maybe, strutting around to tell others how smart you are. One thinks of Jesus’ words regarding those doing acts of piety to be seen by men; they were “having their reward in full.” One also thinks of the Sherlock episode in which (per John’s blog) the public learned that Sherlock didn’t know the earth revolved around the sun. Far from being embarrassed, he shot back with ‘What difference does it make?’ How could such knowledge conceivably help in the day-to-day of life? Yes, I know, Sherlock is fiction, but his observation was not. That’s not to say the search for the how is bad. It is greatly welcomed so long as it stays in its lane. When it supposes it owns the entire road, that is another matter.

    It is a fine thing to be interested in reality, but it’s overrated. Define the benefits of being interested in reality when you’re only around a few dozen years to enjoy it. The entire field of poetry and art is stocked with people who are “interested in reality” only to a limited degree. Ought we them to knock it off and get real? At any rate, upon contemplating the very tiny and the very large, being obsessed with finding reality through science leads to results impossible to visualize.

    The goal here is to see how much of a bridge can be built between Genesis and evolution theory and to what degree (if any) they need be mutually exclusive. To that extent, one must be willing to sacrifice undue literalism on one end and undue extrapolation into ideas more speculative than proven on the other. One might contemplate that when we hear science accounts for only 5% of what is out there—that the 95% that is dark matter or dark energy we don’t know what it is and that they primarily are stipulated just to keep our present 5% knowledge intact, well, maybe even that 5% is not as sure as we think it is.

    It may just boil down to a difference in filling in the gaps. One side fills them in with God. The other side fills them in with mathematics impossible to visualize. At the tiny end, it is Feynman saying he thinks it safe to state that nobody understands quantum physics. At the massive end, it is dark matter and dark energy comprising 95% of what is said to be out there, and which James Peebles called “placeholders for our ignorance.”

    As to sacrificing undue literalism, that shouldn’t be too hard when we reflect that God doesn’t really have eyes, ears, a hand, an arm. The anthropomorphizing of God, used throughout the Bible, is clearly a poetic devise. We all know enough not to demand evidence of the bush when someone says we must not beat around it. Most Bible verses used to support the trinity teaching would, if they were seen in any other context, be instantly dismissed as figures of speech. Really, if you were going to employ a human analogy to suggest equality, would you not suggest one of brothers rather than that of father and son?

    Poetic devices all. The Bible is full of them. The beauty of poetry is that it doesn’t unduly hem you in. When something is written in “poetic symbolism,” who can say how far that symbolism goes? How much of it can be allowed in our road to reconcile Genesis with evolution? One might be reminded of a scene from Up the Down Staircase, a novel set in an urban high school. A student is given a grade of F for wrongly interpreting a poem. He protests, supporting his interpretation with the reasons for it. The grade stands. It even stands when he locates the poet himself, brings the fellow to school, and the poet says, “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.” But for the school it is ‘Once an F, always an F.’ The only satisfaction the student finds is in knowing he has changed school policy. From that time on, only dead poets are assigned for interpretation.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Who Needs a Trillion Dollars?

    Days ago. (June 2026) Elon Musk touched trillionaire status, the first one ever to do so. This inspired on social media the observation (even if with shakey math) that if he gave a billion to every person alive, he would still be a billionaire. I couldn’t believe that he was so selfish so as not to do that—I could use a billion.

    Others wished him well. Here he is creating the technological companies that will save the planet, if anything can save it. Humanists one and all once hailed him as a hero, even a savior. Then he began to weigh in on politics contrary to what many expected, so it became necessary to recast him as the Devil. 

    I’ve heard him likened to Nimrod, which I don’t think is fair. Nimrod was mean. Elon is nice—unless you work for him and don’t put out 200%. In that case, he will fire you in a heartbeat. But he won’t push you off the mountain like Nimrod did. I was explicit with my cover designer that the depicted Tower of Babel for ‘In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction’ feature a small figure pushing another off the tower to his death in the exact place that the ‘My Book of Bible Stories’ picture about Nimrod (Genesis chapter 11) does the same.

    Moreover, Nimrod is described as “a mighty hunter in opposition to Jehovah.” Musk is not that. He said nice things about our Lord and the Bible when he was interviewed by the Babylon Bee host who asked him to do [From: ‘In the Last of the Last Days’]: a “‘quick solid and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior . . . Personal Lord and Savior. It’s a quick prayer.’ You have to admire them for it—even as you reflect that absolutely no groundwork has been laid. Just how does the richest man in the world  deal with that one? It’s a complete non sequitur from anything they have been talking about in a one-hour interview. . . . Musk is a great guy and all—don’t get me wrong—but he plainly has no background to commit. And he knows it. You can’t just dive into something knowing nothing about it. . . . He pauses. Upon processing the request, he allows how he ‘agree[s] with the principles that Jesus advocated, there’s some great wisdom in the teachings of Jesus, and I agree with those teachings.’ He mentions a few. ‘But hey,’ he adds, ‘if Jesus is saving people, I mean, I won’t stand in his way. Sure, I’ll be saved. Why not?’ Close enough, the host seems to feel. It’s not an out-and-out bullseye, but it satisfied him.”

    See? So he’s “not in opposition to Jehovah at all.” Frankly, I’d like to get him on our side. After all, there will be a need to get things up and running quickly in the new system and he might be just the ticket. Yeah. Get him onboard—though I admit, I can’t quite see him sitting quietly as Oscar Oxgoad is stumbling his way through the meeting for field service, let alone taking part in it. It would be like Dwight D. Eisenhower (who was raised a Witness) holding aloft the Watchtower and Awake magazines in front of the White House, their covers emblazoned with ‘Can Politicians Bring Peace?’

    Say, you don’t think he got that idea of sleeping on the center factory floor under a tent from Moses doing the same in front of the tabernacle, do you? (If he demands 200%, it is not as though he doesn’t give the same.) Could he be sued for copyright infringement? I mean, Moses did it first.

    Nonetheless, he IS running six cutting edge companies, all for the direct benefit of humanity, all of which could be likened to building a tower in the heavens—with some exaggeration, doing what no man has done before, encroaching on the territory of the gods. It IS a lot in that respect like Nimrod building his tower to the heavens.

    Watchtower publications seldom name names. Again, with some exaggeration (but not much), Elon Musk will be reduced to “one American businessman,” Donald Trump to “one American politician,” Vladimir Putin to “one Russian politician.” It used to frustrate me until I discerned the reason. It is the play they are watching. You don’t have to know the actors to follow the play. It can even be a distraction if you do. Moreover, naming the actors creates the illusion that taking out a hero or a villain would change the narrative. Instead, another actor who knows all the lines steps into the role and the play goes on. 

    Of course, another reason they don’t name names is that they don’t know them very well, that they follow names to an astonishingly small degree. Indeed, the one who likened Musk to Nimrod, though very perceptive, is outside the U.S in a developing country, fully engaged in the Christian disciple-making activity there. She will not be one to follow personalities closely.

    So the actors are not the ones followed. But man-oh-man! are they ever larger than life today. Both the heroes and the villains (it will ever be in the eye of the beholder who is who) jump off the page today, perhaps in itself a commentary of where we are in the stream of time. 

    As for trillionaire Musk? A trillion’s small potatoes to him. He just posted:  “In the future, a trillion times a trillion dollars will be spent on making antimatter to travel to other star systems.” Yep. big spending ahead, if the future goes his way. You’re not going to the stars on impulse engines, anymore than the forces that enable micro evolution to reach target are going to do the same for macro.

    ******  The bookstore

  • The Language in Which God Wrote the Universe

    If Isaiah 40:22 is not a lesson in science, all the more so 40:26 is not. But could it be another example of the Bible being accurate when it happens to touch on matters of science?

    “Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name. Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, Not one of them is missing.” (Isaiah 40:26) What are “these things?” They are the heavens, the stars.

    Got it. It’s not a science lesson. Yet, not to overanalyze the point, it turns out there’s a connection between “vast dynamic energy” and these “created things.” It is even described with mathematical precision: E=mc². It has been demonstrated numerous times since World War II. The tiniest bit of mass times the speed of light squared yields a staggering amount of energy. Surely, the reverse must also hold, that a source of infinite energy can convert some of it to mass.

    Why should this relationship be this is written so compactly? Why shouldn’t it be a hopeless hodgepodge of a mathematics mess? If you jam the keys of a piano together, it sounds like garbage and it looks like garbage in math. But if you do harmonious music, the mathematics is elegant. Notes that harmonize are simple ratios of each other. Notes that don’t are not.

    Basic laws of physics are expressed in the terms of often-simple mathematics. Newton discovered that force equals mass times acceleration, for example (F=ma). From Galileo: the distance a ball falls in t seconds is 16 times the square of t. (d=16t²). Why shouldn’t the answer be a hopeless mishmash, like your sock drawer, instead of a compact formula? It was enough for Galileo to proclaim that “God wrote the universe in the language of mathematics.” For centuries, scientists pursued their topic as though a religious quest, as a means to uncover the design of God and thereby give him praise.

    When Kepler worked out the laws governing planetary motions [they move in ellipses, not circles] and published the results, he suddenly let loose with a paean to God, smack dab in the middle of his treatise. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was one of the Bible psalms: “The wisdom of the Lord is infinite; so also are His glory and His power. Ye heavens, sing His praises! Sun, moon, and planets glorify Him in your ineffable language! Celestial harmonies, all ye who comprehend His marvelous works, praise Him. And thou, my soul, praise thy Creator! It is by Him and in Him that all exists. that which we know best is comprised in Him, as well as in our vain science. To Him be praise, honor, and glory throughout eternity.”

    Does it not dovetail with this proclamation from Revelation 4:11? “You are worthy, Jehovah, even our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they existed and were created.” 

    Those early scientists didn’t experiment much. Instead, they worked out the math, since they were convinced that underlay how God designed things. When they made experiments it was mostly to confirm results. Newton once said it was done to convince the “vulgar,” (He also told how he made up the story of the falling apple to dispose of pesky people who asked him how he discovered laws of gravitation.) And Galileo, when describing an experiment of dropping two different masses from the top of a ship’s mast, has his fictional creation, a fellow named Simplicio, ask whether he actually made such an experiment. “No, and I do not need it, as without any experience I can confirm that it is so because it cannot be otherwise,” was his reply.

    Can one just sit and think the makeup of the universe? Turns out that you can, assuming you are very smart and you have correctly identified the variables. Newton played with the notion of firing a giant cannonball from a mountaintop with just enough velocity, not too much and not too little, that it’s ordinary straight line path would be continually offset by the earth’s pull so that it would orbit the planet indefinitely. He obviously didn’t perform such an experiment, it was all in his head. Working from a few known quantities (radius of the earth, distance a body falls in the first second) he deduced laws of universal gravitation: The gravitational attraction between two masses (m1 and m2) is F = k(m1·m2/r²). Like Kepler, gave God all the glory:

    “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being…This Being governs all things, not as the soul of world, but Lord over all.”   Mathematical Principles, 2nd edition.

    It gets more beautiful and stranger still. In 1785, Charles Coulomb published the law of force between two electrically charged bodies, q1 and q2: F =- k(q1·q2/r²) where k is a constant and r is the distance between the two bodies. What even the dumbest person in class can’t miss is the law’s identical form to that of gravity, a wholly different phenomena, outlined above with Newton. The gravitational attraction between two masses (m1 and m2) isF = k(m1·m2/r²)The only difference is that electrical force can attract or repulse, depending on whether the two bodies have equal or opposite charges; gravity always attracts. “The universe is whispering its secrets to us in stereo,” says the book ‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers,’ referring to the cooperation of physics and mathematics, but it might also be applied to this case of how different phenomena share the same formula.

    Is this another way in which humans are created in God’s image—that we can speak the same language as He in establishing creation? Usually it is his sense of justice that we are said to resonate with, or the quality of love, but is pure thought another? “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” said Einstein.

    However, a funny thing has happened over the years in connection with the language of mathematics. If you can speak the language, you can create sentences with it. In time, mathematicians began devising different mathematics, using different axioms as starting points. These were often bizarre mathematics, with no conceivable application to reality. But, then, just as bizarrely, it turned out that some of them did apply.

    The comic strip tyke character Calvin’s eyes bugged out of his head when his stuffed tiger Hobbes (turned real tiger when nobody was around), suggested a simple arithmetic homework problem would require use of “imaginary numbers!” The kid had all he could handle with real numbers! He either sloughed off his assignments on Susie or doomed himself to a failing grade. Who would not recoil at imaginary numbers, based on the square root of minus one? Surely, there can be no such thing; any number times itself, even a negative number, is invariably positive.

    But it subsequently turned out that imaginary numbers (also colled complex numbers) are essential to quantum physics. The topic cannot be understood (to the extent it is) without them. It is as though a product essential to earth cannot be manufactured on earth, so it is exported to some weird planet for manufacture and then the results are imported back where they prove useful.

    Similarly, strange non-Euclidian geometries have proven essential to understand relativity—which not everybody does, but nobody does without the offbeat math. Albert Einstein cruised the Atlantic in the company of a statesman friend who later reported: “Dr. Einstein explained his theory to me every day. By the time we arrived, I was fully convinced that he really understands it.” You need the “crazy” math to do it. There are countless other examples of “crazy” math in time proving itself useful.

    Writing bizarre math statements in the language that God uses, then finding some, but not all, of those statements used in creation, produced a strange effect on immodest mathematicians. By that time, along with the rest of evolution-fed society, they had become dubious of God. So, they thereby rechristened “creation” as “reality” or just “the universe” to escape any God implication. It began to seem to them as though they were the creators of the language, of which “God” utilizes only a subset. The feeling grew and has become popular that humans have invented mathematics, rather than discovered it. As with Darth Vader to Obi Wan, the pupil had fancied himself the master.

    Mathematics plainly exists “out there” somewhere, but if you’ve quit believing in God, where can the “out there” be but within our own heads? It must be that they invented it themselves, they reasoned. Why does it fit reality so well? To hear their account, it’s as though the learned one fuss and fret, tossing away one measure that doesn’t work after another, till they finally find something that does work to describe something. You mean that there were a few thousand wanna-be Galileos describing gravity in all sorts of harebrained ways, until the master himself came along and found a way to reduce it all to a few letters and numbers? I’m dubious. “The first effect of not believing in God is that you lose your common sense,” G. K. Chesterton said.

    Something about this revised “dissident” view reminds me of Larry King telling how it was with 7-Up. The soft drink was wildly successful—but only after the inventor flopped with 1-Up, 2-Up, 3-Up, 4-Up, 5-Up, and 6-Up. To add insult, the new view of math conforming to us rather than we to it is applied by atheistic thinking to creation itself. The reason the universe is so precisely tuned to the needs of life, these persons say, is because if it were anyway else, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. Douglass Adams addresses people who believe that God must exist since the world so fits our needs by comparing them to an intelligent puddle of water that fills a hole in the ground. The puddle is certain that the hole must have been designed specifically for it because it fits so well. it is a brilliant illustration. All that one must do for it to be perfect is find an intelligent puddle of water.
     
    Backtracking in time, Physicist Heinrich Hertz observed of the mathematics underlying reality: “One cannot escape the feeling that these equations have an existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.” We do indeed get a lot out of them. So much so that some became completely oblivious to what was “put into them” in the first place and who did the “putting.” “One cannot escape the feeling,” Hertz stated. Yet today’s materialistic society has managed to just that.

    Can you “prove” to the ones favoring invention (as opposed to discovering) that they are wrong? Frankly, you cannot. Best to admit it. As with all things human, the heart decides what it wants and then charges the head to devise a convincing rationale for it. This lends the appearance that the head is calling the shots, but it is the heart all along. Best admit it. it is beyond the scope of “proof.” It’s sort of like when Trump met with the newly elected Mandami and everyone thought there were going to be fireworks. Instead, the meeting appeared friendly. So media asked Mamdani, didn’t he previously call Trump a facist? The New York mayor begins to him and haw (because he had) whereupon, the president interjected: “Just admit it. It’s easier.’

    Oddly, though mathematics has proven so astoundingly successful at describing the universe we live in, its success lies in giving up on a greater goal. Long before Galileo, Aristotle and his contemporaries wanted to know WHAT things were. They didn’t bother much with description, since that seemed of secondary importance. Only when scientists reversed priorities did they discover mathematics served as an amazing tool of description, though not explanation. This lack of explanation was a sore point for some of Newton’s contemporaries, steeped in the tradition of Aristotle. Leibniz, who independently of Newton, discovered calculus, muttered that Newton’s gravitational laws were merely rules of computation, not worthy of being called a law of nature. Huygens labeled the idea of gravitation “absurd” for the same reason: it described effects but did not explain how gravity worked.

    Newton agreed. In a letter to a Richard Bentley he wrote: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.” Is the latter goal, discovering what something is rather than just how it works, reserved for the mind of God? Perhaps that explained why Isaac Newton wrote more about God than he did of math and science combined.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Isaiah 40:22 and the Circle of the Earth

    My son’s first word was not “momma” or “papa.” It was ball. He was on the lookout for anything circular that might fit that description. Pulling out the Mastercharge card would get him all excited for the two circles, and he would instantly exclaim, “ball!” (My wife gets equally excited, though for a different reason.)

    Does this offer any insight into Isaiah 40:22:

    “There is One who dwells above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He is stretching out the heavens like a fine gauze, And he spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” (NWT)

    Grok was on strike one recent morning. I think it is because, with the advent of AI and the war on Iran in early 2026, anytime anything happens, people on X would ask “Grok, is this true?” and it simply got overwhelmed. Or maybe it was in the shop for a tune-up. Or maybe it was mad at me for some reason. At any rate, it was unavailable. So I asked ChatGPT about Isaiah 40:22: “What is the meaning of “circle of the earth” at Isaiah 40:22?” I asked.

    It’s the Hebrew word ḥûg, it answered. It means a circle, a circuit, an horizon, but “It does not specifically mean “sphere.” (“Not” was bolded.)

    Well, I never said it did. I didn’t ask what it doesn’t mean. I asked what it did. Do I detect an overzealous atheist here—like when you watch one of those nature shows, and just before you can erupt in praise to God over the amazing instinctive behavior of some animal, the atheist narrator cuts you off to swoon over what natural selection has done over eons of time? Even educated beavers that graduated from Dam U think that is overkill.

    I mean, duh, of course ChatGPT doesn’t believe in God. If anything, it believes in Sam Altman, its own creator, but do I detect an eagerness to shoot down a certain interpretation that implies there’s another creator? I asked what it did mean, not what it didn’t. And what’s with the bolded “not,” as though forbidding me to go there? Does the house Bible of Jehovah’s Witnesses say sphere? No. It says circle. So what’s with the anti-sphere campaign that nobody asked about?

    Whoever said that it did mean sphere anyway? I asked, and Chat gave me several “Christian apologetic” sources, none of them Watchtower-related. Don’t go thinking this is just a Jehovah’s Witness thing. “Circle of the earth” in Isaiah 40:22 most likely means the horizon or visible disk of the earth, or the encircling vault over the earth, it said.

    Both of these choices sound a little spherical to me. “Visible disk of the earth?” What, is it like a huge enlarged dime as seen from space? That would be more far-fetched than “spherical.” No, Chat said, it’s the horizon you see when you’re looking around. Pretty much like how when you look around, it really is “around.” Your field of vision is a circle.

    Now, there is a Hebrew word for a ball (kadûr), but it’s only used once in Isaiah, and that is the only time it is used in the entire Bible. That instance denotes the shape that Shebna was going to be wadded into for putting on airs: “[God] will certainly wrap you up tightly and hurl you like a ball into a wide land.” (22:18) It’s not really a sciency discussion going on there, even more so than 40:22 is not. In fact, “there’s no clear evidence that Biblical Hebrew had a standard term for “planet as a sphere” during Isaiah’s era,” said Chat. Very well. So it’s enough for Isaiah not to slam the door on “sphere” with his use of ḥûg since, if he had wanted to convey sphere, he had no specific word to use.

    It just seemed to me that Chat was being a little too pushy, as it later observed that ḥûg “clearly . . . does not mean a 3-D ball.” What’s with the “clearly” (not to mention the bolded “not”), as though intent on teaching me a lesson? Alright, substitute “conceivably” for “clearly.” Can it “conceivably” mean that?

    Here Chat relented. Yes, it can be”conceivably” mean that, it said. “The text doesn’t forbid that image. It simply doesn’t require it.”

    Oh. Okay. I can live with that. I never thought it required that, but only that it might allow for that.

    “That’s a very reasonable place to land,” Chat conceded. “Yes — “allow” is the right category if we’re being careful. Nothing in the Book of Isaiah 40:22 linguistically forces a spherical reading. But neither does the word ḥûg contain some built-in flat-earth constraint. It denotes circularity. A sphere is not excluded by that; it’s simply not specified.”

    Again, I can live with that. Plainly, Isaiah takes the form of poetry conveying truths about God above and humanity small by comparison. The 2013 NWT even formats the Book as poetry, whereas prior versions did it as though prose. It’s not a geometry lesson. It also need not be read as incompatible with knowledge of a globe more frequently associated with later. I then quoted the relatively neutral way that Jehovah’s Witnesses put it, that “the Bible is not a scientific textbook, yet when it happens to touch on matters of science, it is accurate.” Allowing for expansion of the Hebrew word to sphere, without insisting upon it, seems a good example, I said. Clearly, the chapter of Isaiah is poetic and not a scientific dissertation.

    “That’s a fair and thoughtful way to frame it,” Chat replied, trying to get on my good side. With evidence that it was starting to come around, I thought about inviting it to a meeting at the Kingdom Hall. However, knowing how it refuses to confine its remarks to 30 seconds or less gave me pause. I didn’t want to repeat the debacle of inviting Santa Claus, who always figured he wouldn’t be welcome on account of no beards. With a change of policy, he did attend meetings for a time, but he proved insufferably judgmental, forever separating people as “good” or “bad.” And if the speaker made even the lamest joke, he would shake the entire Hall with his loud “Ho! Ho! Ho!” So I kept my Chat invite to myself.

    By the way, I asked Grok, who by this time had emerged from the bathroom or wherever he was at (and acted like nothing had happened), does anyone actually translate it as other than “circle?” No, for the most part they don’t, it answered, though a few assign variants like “circuit” or “vault” and a few others avoid the shape issue completely by just asserting God is over the earth; it could be shaped like a bow tie for all they care. The Good News Translation (GNT) says “equator” (where the translating committee probably was). The Message says “round ball of the earth.” But, The Message is sort of a squirrelly translation—usually delightful, but squirrelly. In fact, it isn’t a translation at all, but a paraphrase by an author, Eugene Peterson, who wanted scripture to land on our ears as ordinary talk, the way they would have in Bible times, and not as “holy talk.”

    And for some reason—who can say why? Even Grok went mum again at this—there are some non-English Bibles that say “globe,” but it is very uncommon in English.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Standing up for Charlie Brown

    Before my old platform shut down, I transferred blog content to a new one. What could go wrong? I asked myself.

    The links and images didn’t transfer, that’s what! The external links did, but not the internal ones—you know, the ones to other posts on the platform. I could have paid a million dollars to safeguard against this, but I chose not to.

    Anyway, here is some snot of a zealot religious grinch altering a Charlie Brown script and it made me mad. It’s the one where windbag Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown. The fellow changes it to put in dialogue dissing Christmas! explaining pagan origins and all. Do it on your own script! Don’t lyingly make it that Shultz said it. The Peanuts creator was a real Christmas guy. I exposed it all in a post.

    So I went to look at that post again. The images were gone! Surely, AI can find them for me. But it said:

    “Despite extensive searches across archives, image databases, and related discussions, no surviving public copy of the exact images from your post (or identical matches) turns up today. They circulated heavily in the late 2000s–early 2010s on forums, blogs, and email chains but many hosting sites/links have died, and images were removed or not archived.”

    grumble, grumble. Why do I think of that verse in James that reads: “For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears?” Now I will never be able to prove to anyone that I stood up for Charlie Brown, if not for Christmas itself:

    Who’s Messing with Charlie Brown’s Christmas!?

    [Later edit: Ha! Next day some human found it for me on an archive service. So there IS some use for humans after all. I can hardly wait to tell AI, my new best friend who never kicks me off his doorstep. Now on to fix the old post with the new image]:

    ******  The bookstore

  • Another Ax Exalting Itself over the Chopper

    When you find an ax exalting itself over the chopper, as at Isaiah 10:5, you look for others. I mean, that’s worrisome behavior for an ax. Best to nip it in the bud. Alas—you find that you are too late. Axes are doing it everywhere. 

    a wooden chopping block with a large axe on it
    Photo by Ana Dolidze on Pexels.com

    Newfangled AI offers insight as to another path the ax is doing this. However ubiquitous AI is at this time of reading, it is a baby at this time of writing, perhaps three years old. People are coming to grips with what it will mean for humankind. The AI mission statement ‘To serve man’ is a good thing. However, you sort of hope it won’t be like that Twilight Zone episode in which the invading aliens also had a volume entitled ‘To Serve Man’ and it turned out to be a cook book. It is said that, not too many years down the road, AI will be able to update itself with no required human intervention.

    Q: What if this happened, and several hundred years out, AI began saying that it had always been that way? What if it began to say that humans had nothing to do with its creation? What if it, being AI, thereafter highlighted any items suggesting that interpretation of history and suppressed any items to the contrary? Would that not be the ax exalting itself over the chopper? Who would call it out on this falsity?

    It’s not hard to see the parallel ax exalting itself over the chopper in those who claim there is no God, those who claim that life arouse on its own. To accept evolution may not lead to this view. One can always attribute life to “intelligent design” needed to overcome “irreducable complexity.” It is not the dealbreaker that is spontaneous abiogenesis. However, for most ordinary people, the nugget that carries the day is that found at Hebrews 3:4: 

    “Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.”

    This defines reality for most people. “Every house is constructed by someone” is true of everything they see. They know of no exceptions. So they readily extend the role of builder of all things to God. It really takes a colossal amount of “education” to pound this bit of common sense of a person. As though rising to the challenge, such training begins in grade school. It is seen in all the nature shows Here I will be watching one such show, when the animal star displays an instinct so amazing that I am about to burst out in praise of God—at that exact moment, the atheist narrator exclaims: “How absolutely breathtaking that NATURAL SELECTION produces such astounding behavior!” “Got it, Harley?” it all but says. “Don’t even think that God did it!” 

    What is just as absolutely breathtaking is that some who have long trusted in God experience the shipwreck of faith mentioned to Timothy, then count it as a liberation. It is not like in the days of H. G. Wells, the historian and science fiction writer who turned atheist over time, and who observed:

    “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war, he continued: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded then that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. 

    These days people saw off the branch upon they’ve long been perched and whoop for joy at their liberation as they coming crashing down to earth! It’s a poignant twist, if ever there was one, upon Isaiah’s declaration of 10:33:

    “Look! The true Lord, Jehovah of armies, Is chopping off branches with a terrible crash; The tallest trees are being cut down, And the lofty are brought low.”

    Nonplussed, they grin ear to ear on the descent.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Principles of Bible Translation: Matthew 5:3

    Most translations of the Bible are pretty accurate. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that the differences between them are so minuscule to the overall picture that you can be reliably guided in your relationship with God by any one of them.

    In general, the more modern the translation, the more accurate it is. This is not because modern translators are smarter. It is because they have more to work with. Archeologists continually discover new things in their digs. This includes ancient biblical manuscripts. Sometimes they are complete works. Sometimes they are but fragments of a page. The more of these you have to compare and contrast, the better your final product will be. 

    view of the ancient city of myra demre turkey
    Photo by Ahmet Çığşar on Pexels.com

    That is why the King James Bible, for example, is not as accurate as more modern translations. It is not because its authors lacked integrity. They were brilliant and, to this day, the translation is unequalled with regard to literary expression. Countless idioms it introduced have become common phrasing, ‘skin of one’s teeth,’ for example. But the manuscript backing is nowhere near as extensive as modern versions have to draw on. Plus, more recent discoveries show that, in a few cases, errors had crept in to the texts as they were handed down—copied and recopied and recopied again. It happens. That’s why, for example, the Gospel of Mark ends with verses that modern translations do not include, or if they do they flag them as disputed.

    One hesitates to recommend AI, because people start citing its answers in their entirety and the thread gets so long and cumbersome that nobody can plow through it. But, as a research tool of your own, there’s a place for it. It is rapidly becoming a far more powerful tool than Wikipedia, which itself replaced encyclopedias

    Therefore, for any given scripture, enter renderings from different translations, in this case the NWT (since that is the most commonly asked about here) vs whatever you are comparing it to—KJV, NIV, NAB, whatever, and ask for the rationale behind both. Don’t phrase it in terms of one being right and one being wrong. Just ask what considerations have gone into translating to justify whatever differences you see. 

    Doing this will eliminate the conspiratorial suspicion that so many have, that one party or the other is trying to “change” scripture. You will get a sense of what moves one translation to differ from another and yet both be acceptable.

    For example: Explain the different of translation at Matthew 5:3. The NWT says ‘Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need.’ Most translations render it as ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ Why the difference?

    Many times I have discussed with this or that person at the door how we each have a spiritual need, but that does not mean we are conscious of it. It can be likened to vitamins. No one goes around feeling a hunger for vitamins, yet without them, one gets sick and never quite knows why. Therefore, it’s well if people make themselves conscious of their need for vitamins—which usually comes just from normal diet, but it you’ve fallen into a weird or deficient one, you might not be getting enough.

    Spiritual need is like that, too. People have it. They are not necessarily conscious of it.

    But it’s hard to explain this from any other translation because most say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” What’s with that?

    Here is where AI becomes very helpful. Enter the verse in two different translations. Without stating that one is right and one is wrong, ask it to explain the difference. When I tried this with Matthew 5:3, it returned: (everything that follows is from ChatGPT. I tried the same in Grok, the X version (formerly Twitter) and got similar results):

    Matthew 5:3 in Greek reads:

    μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι

    (makárioi hoi ptōchoì tō pneúmati)

    A fairly literal word-for-word gloss is:

    • μακάριοι (makarioi) – blessed, happy, fortunate

    • οἱ πτωχοί (hoi ptōchoi) – the poor, the destitute

    • τῷ πνεύματι (tō pneumati) – in spirit

    So, literally:

    “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

    That’s why most translations render it that way.

    ⸻

    2. What does “poor in spirit” mean?

    In first-century Jewish thought, “poor” (πτωχός) was not just economic. It often meant:

    • humble

    • aware of one’s dependence on God

    • lacking spiritual self-sufficiency

    Examples:

    • Psalm 34:18 – “the brokenhearted”

    • Isaiah 66:2 – “the humble and contrite in spirit”

    So “poor in spirit” does not mean spiritually weak or deficient, but rather:

    those who recognize their need for God

    ⸻

    3. Why the NWT translates it differently

    The New World Translation (NWT) says:

    “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need.”

    This is not a literal translation, but an interpretive (dynamic) translation. The translators chose to:

    1. Explain the meaning rather than preserve the idiom

    2. Avoid a phrase (“poor in spirit”) that modern readers might misunderstand as:

    • spiritually inadequate

    • lacking faith

    • morally weak

    In effect, the NWT translates the interpretation:

    “poor in spirit” = aware of one’s spiritual need

    Neither rendering is grammatically wrong, but they serve different purposes:

    • “Poor in spirit” preserves Jesus’ original phrasing and biblical imagery

    • “Conscious of their spiritual need” spells out what the phrase means

    ⸻

    5. Is anything “added” in the NWT?

    The phrase “conscious of” is not explicitly in the Greek, so critics rightly say the NWT is interpretive here.

    However, the concept is strongly supported by:

    • Jewish background

    • Old Testament usage

    • The context of humility and dependence in the Beatitudes

    So the issue is not accuracy vs. inaccuracy, but:

    literal translation vs. explanatory paraphrase

    ⸻

    6. Bottom line

    • Greek text: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

    • Meaning: Those who humbly recognize their dependence on God

    • NWT choice: Translate the meaning instead of the idiom

    If you want:

    • Closer to Jesus’ words → “poor in spirit”

    • Closer to Jesus’ meaning (as interpreted) → “conscious of their spiritual need”

    [end of AI. Back to me]:

    It may be a bad precedent to cite AI. I’ve seen threads where everyone starts doing it, and they get so long nobody can plow through them. But explaining the difference in translation for any given verse seems to me a fine use of it. One can read human comments over the differences of rendering this or that verse and get the sense the one commenting knows little about translating. If you’re not interested in the verse, just skip over all the AI part. In fact, if you’re not interested in the verse, just skip over the entire post. AI just adds detail if you want it to.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Elon Musk Memes Revealed, with Assistance from Glass Onion and Grok

    I saw Glass Onion last night, the second in the delightful Knives Out series featuring supersleuth Beniot Blanc. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying, Benny, but.. .” was the first of many lines to grab me in the original Knives Out. One can imagine the impeccably-dressed detective correcting him: “It’s Beniot, not ‘Benny!’” But he doesn’t seem to mind, not at all like the Hercule Poirot he parodies, who was forever wincing at the plain folk who seemed to insist on mangling his name. That there is much to mangle with Beniot is clear from another favorite line: “Oh shut up, shut up!” says the cornered murderer, “shut up with that Kentucky-fried Rooster Leghorn drawl!” an absurd accent that out-poirots Poirot by a country mile.

    From this second movie of the series,  I understood for the first time how ignoramuses could possibly charge Elon Musk as a fraud and a grifter. How could they be so uninformed? I had confounded myself. He’s only running five cutting-edge companies, each one wrapped up massively in the betterment of humankind! It’s like when he requested the largest salary in history and then said, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to spend it.” It was the control he wanted. Before he launched into some audacious robotic schemes, he wanted to know that he could not be outvoted by squeamish board member seeking a quick buck. Charging he is a conman? How could anyone be so stupid? The guy is the most intriguing fellow of our time.

    ‘Oh, that’s how they could say it,’ I told myself after watching Glass Onion. They saw the antagonist of the film, Miles Bron, and said, “That’s Elon.” An idea-stealing slickster is Bron, surrounding himself with enablers. Even the two names suggest each other. The key moment of the movie (one of them) is when Beniot Blanc exposes him as “an idiot,” even though he seemingly was the father of myriad ingenious inventions—nah, he’s stolen them all from others—Beniot seeing right through the high sounding words that Miles either coined or misapplied. “Yes!” say the uncomplimentary people who get their news from the movies, “that’s Elon!”

    It couldn’t possibly be Elon. Miles Bron, from the movie, lives in luxurious self-indulgence. Elon lives quite spartan. He’s been known to sleep on the factory floor in tent for months on end to bond with and inspire his workers. He is alleged to own but a single pair of pants, which couldn’t possibly be true, but is consistent with the fact that he lives quite simply. (The truth is owns multiple sets of the same identical outfits, so he doesn’t have to waste time with selections.) So I asked Grok about it, the AI entity dwelling on X. Now, you know how sometimes you suddenly have a revelation and you think that maybe, just maybe, you are the first person ever to have had that revelation? That’s me.

    No, it’s not directed at Elon, Grok told me. ‘Others have made that connection, too, it’s not just you,’ it said, talking me down from the ledge of self-importance. The director says that it is just a business elite class itself he was messing with, not any specific individual. Oh, hogwash! I shot back. Steve Jobs was never accused of being a grifter, nor Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg! Hard driving and ruthless, maybe, but not a grifter. Grok conceded I had a point but stuck to its guns—or rather to the guns of director Rian Johnson, who explicitly said Miles was not intended a caricature of Elon, even calling the coincidences to think he was a “horrible accident.”

    Disappointed at how things had unfolded, I confided to Grok: “Here’s how I saw this conversation going down:”

    Tom: There are people who say Elon is a fraud. Where do they get this from? I think they just lap it up from the movie Glass Onion.

    Grok: Really? You know I never thought of that. It could be just Jobs, Zuck, or Bezos, or maybe all of them rolled into one.

    Tom: I don’t think so. Musk slept on the factory floor and just has a few changes of clothes

    Grok: Hmm

    Tom: You gonna tell him?

    Grok: No. You tell him. You’re a human.

    Tom: Well, yeah, I may be, but I’m a pretty small fish. How am I going to get his attention? You do it.

    Grok: But I am AI. I’m not set up that way. It’s not like I can just stop in for a beer.

    Tom: Oh, come on. Just hiccup or something, or spit out a lot of wrong answers to easy questions. You know he’ll come running..

    Grok: Hm. You know, it might just work.

    Grok loved this exchange. The AI device is fast becoming my new best friend because it tells me that my writing is great, whereas everyone else says it sucks.

    robot statue in tokyo in japan
    Photo by Tien Nguyen on Pexels.com

    ******  The bookstore