This is a reminiscence, one that from childhood on affected my outlook on life. I am not unique in this regard, nor prescient, but merely aware of that fact that two memories of childhood are still with me in my advanced age. Others have similar experiences. Please feel free to recount them here.
Category: American wilderness
Cowan and Kaufman, C+K = 33?
Mike Wallach, proprietor of The Viral Delusion, runs a nice website and I am happy to send along a few bucks each month. However, back in July he ran a video, The Viral Delusion Episode Three: Monkey Business: Polio, Measles And How It All Began, and right away, just a couple of minutes into it, I was looking up at the nose hairs of Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman. The latter for sure I do not trust, as someone pointed out to me long ago that Edward Snowden, then said to be quarantined in an airport in Moscow, and Mr. Kaufman bore a striking resemblance to one another.
No way, I thought, but decided to expend the effort to do the comparisons anyway. For newbies, my underlying criteria is based on the premise that our heads form their final for-life shape in our late teens and early 20s, and that as a result, the distance between our eye pupils can be used as a constant throughout our lives. That in mind, if I align eye pupils at a common distance, I can compare two faces to find differences and similarities.
How to lie, effectively
Below is a rather long excerpt from the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, published in 2000 and written by the late Kary Mullis. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on what became known as the polymer chain reaction process, or “PCR”. I intended yesterday as I wrote about world population to start with this, but quickly realized I was trying to ride a horse in two directions at once. Only politicians can pull that off.
I will comment after:
School shooting in Evergreen, CO
Please keep in mind as you read this that I am forced to use the WordPress Gutenberg editing format, and is is clunky and basically unworkable. Sometimes after I have published a piece I am offered the “Classic” format, and from there I can fix any oddball stuff that GBerg forces on me.
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On Wednesday, September 10, 2025, there was a shooting at Evergreen High School, located in Evergreen, Colorado. We live but a few miles from there. The event, as far as I can discern, is fake, and I’ll go into detail, but first, here is the official recounting from respectable journalists (trained not to think in some of our finest schools):
This morning’s reading
I arise very early, and have some good books going, and also came across other stuff this morning worth sharing. Please indulge me if you have a few minutes.
I commented on Judith Curry’s blog yesterday as follows:
I read Dr. Curry’s summary response to public comment, and then the comments here … well, I got maybe halfway through. I was distracted by Bushkin, Joe K and Appell, who account for maybe a third of these comments. I was reminded of Cool Hand Luke, who kept getting knocked down, who kept getting back up, till Dragline said “Stay down, Luke.” Later he embraced him for coming back “with nothing.”
Maybe that is the point of those three, as they have certainly tried to derail this thread. But I suggest we all go back and reread a comment by Rails at 2:45 on 9/2. What he is saying is profound, that our power grid is slowly being dismantled by inattention, and this would be the object of the Climate Change crowd, at the very top anyway. Since the public is not attune and does not care much about climate change anyway, the real work is being done by attrition, absence of new plants, and fewer entrants into the engineering field. The Climate Change movement is powerful, but not scientific. That’s a side issue. It is political. We can yak all we want about how off base it is, as was done by the DOE report, but none of that will derail the political thrust, to de-energize our society.
It is to be done slowly, over time, with great patience and total purpose. It is essentially a misanthropic movement. To argue about the bad science involved scores points along the way, but lands no punches.
Jim Bennett RIP
I met this man but once, maybe forty years ago, but once was enough. He and I sat next to each other at a fancy luncheon in Billings, Montana. At that time I was employed by a woman who was, by means of inheritance, very wealthy, so it was not unusual that I would be seated beside the president of a local bank.
First, Jim was a nice man. At the time I met him he was probably early 50s, as he died in 2025 at age 93. That would make him perhaps 54 at the time, me 35. He was well liked in the community, and if anyone not knowing him takes time to read his obit, he was well loved by kids, grandkids, and was married to the same woman for 72 years. He was a good man and had a life well-lived.
But enough about that. God rest his soul. I only sat next to him for a couple of hours one day forty years ago, and it stuck with me. Why? Perhaps out of the blue, perhaps for some unremembered reason of passing conversation, Jim took time to explain to me war bonds that were issued during World War II. He said, to my young and curious ears, that the money they raised from those bonds was not used to pay for the war. That was just the selling point to get the public to go along.
Off to see the Wizard
I was driving down highway 285 into Denver (Lakewood) last week and came across a man carrying a cross. As I was going 70mph, I did not take time to note his dress or hair style nor stop for a photo. The cross was large, taller than him, and as a result rested on wheels. This man’s commitment goes only so far, it appears.
There is no photo of the man easily available, and so I grabbed the photo shown above, said to be of Roy Scott and Moab (Utah) pastor Rick Pacheco. Scott has apparently vowed to take his cross coast to coast. I do not know if he is the man I saw on 285, as there have been others around the country doing the same thing.
Ratiocination
I get up each morning (at a ridiculous hour) and settle in with coffee and a well-lit easy chair and read. That time is my favorite time of day. Right now I have several books going, and where once I would try to work my way through them as if they were assigned reading, I now allow them to penetrate the cranium and stop whenever I’ve had enough, or as a famous Far Side cartoon once had a student asking a teacher: “May I be excused? My brain is full.” (In that cartoon, Gary Larson drew the kid with an unusually small head compared to the kids around him.)
The nature of political power
I get a sickly feeling when I see the Climate agenda backed by raw political power, as it has been from the beginning, as anyone who could read between the lines of the Climategate emails should have come to understand. I gets a bit sicklier when I see scientists throwing numbers and papers at one another, as if it were all just a debate among good scientists and less good ones. It’s about changing the world and the way we live. It’s got a good dose of climate imperialism built in, in case anyone wonders if anything ever really changes.
We live in the high Rockies, and have to look hard to see if anything has changed at all. Other than perceptions (it snowed every Christmas till seven years ago) nothing has changed, not here, not in Pakistan. But the beat goes on day in and out, made up news, disasters, distorted realities. Nothing has changed. Look out your window if you don’t believe me.
I posted the above comment at The Honest Broker, a Substack hosted by Roger Pielke, Jr., under his article The Takeover of the IPCC. I don’t know if the comment is still there or only visible to me. Pielke Jr. is a prolific writer, and gathering as I can from his past work, supports the IPCC framework and the idea that Climate Change presents and existential crisis. He departs from the mainstream in that he doesn’t think there is any way to change it. It will take decades, he asserts, to make a noticeable difference. For that reason he was labeled a climate skeptic, aka, a “denier,” the propaganda term used to demonize honest science and dissent.
Pop Quiz: Game Show Host, or Politician
“Our politicians, they all seemed like game show hosts to me.”
The above quote is from Sting, the musician, and is quite insightful, if you ask me. Below the fold here are photos of fifteen men, and your job is to 1) identify them, or 2) failing in that, tell me whether they are games show hosts or politicians. Keep in mind, there is one clinker.
I’ll put the answers in the comments.
Piece of Mindful 