Guess Who

We have known for centuries now that religion has been used as a tool by both the religious and secular elites to control the great masses of the unwashed, that is people like you and me. And right now in the U.S. there are efforts right and left to dump the principle of church and state separation and establish the U.S. as a Christian Nation, that is a theocracy.

If these people succeed at that it will mark the end of the great experiment in self-government which began in 1789. We won’t have a king atop a throne but a King of Kings atop the org chart. And, of course, a whole troop of assholes claiming to know that (a) no one can know the mind of their god and (b) they know exactly what their god wants.

So, who is backing these “Christian nationhood movements”? As it turns out it is America’s oligarchs. Not all of the morbidly rich, but enough of them to give those people trying to destroy our government enough funding to have a fighting chance at it.

It is not at all shocking that the morbidly rich would be looking to put another weapon into their holsters to control the great masses of “ordinary” Americans, because as they know, they are special, which is why God made them rich . . . right. And, gosh, there are so many of those poor people and they could vote them out, so something needs to be done. Step 1: Build an apocalyptic bunker with all of the amenities, Check! Step 2: Establish the U.S. as a Christian nation and let the religious wars begin!

Which reminds me of an Alexander Pope quotation: “Ever wonder what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gives it to.”

Mitch McConnell: Use Once, Throw Away

If you don’t remember, it was Mitch McConnell who gave Donald Trump his most impactful political victory. Moscow Mitch it was who made up a bullshit policy that Supreme Court Justices should not be given consent by the Senate when the president is in the last year of his term of his office. We should wait for the election and “let the people decide,” he said, through our choice of the next president. So, McConnell blocked the nomination of Merrick Garland by President Obama for over a year and Trump got that appointment. But, when another seat on the Supreme Court became available in the last few months of Trump’s term in office, McConnell vacated his new rule and rushed Trump’s nominee through the process. This is how we got the “conservative” super majority on the current court, you know the court which just did The Donald a big favor in taking up his ridiculous immunity claim, thus giving him the trial delay he so dearly wanted. (Note I put conservative in quotes as a descriptor of the SCOTUS majority because it is hard to refer to them as “people who conserve” when they ride roughshod over settled precedents at their whim. Clearly they are not conservatives but radicals.)

Those two justices will give the GOP favorable rulings for decades.

So, to show how much Trump appreciated McConnell’s support, he viciously attacked him over legislation he was considering supporting (or did support in the form of the bill supporting aid to Ukraine).

To Mafia Don Trump, politicians are like toilet paper—use once, then throw away. Loyalty is “to” Trump, it doesn’t flow the other way.

Why Would SCOTUS Take Up Trump’s Phony Immunity Claim?

It is virtually impossible to winkle out the Justice’s motives, but since they have decided to be the most political court in U.S. history, and in politics appearances are more important than reality and politicians are judged on appearances, not facts.

And they have plausible deniability. After giving The Orange Terror the delay he so dearly wants, they can rule against his ridiculous absolute immunity claim and say that it was important for the SCOTUS to rule on such an important claim.

There is only one principle operative in the Republican Party, or rather the Party of Trump, the Republican Party no longer exists, and that is Loyalty to the Trump. That is one way loyalty, to Donald Trump, you should expect none coming back the other way.

So, all of the Justices who are beholden to The Donald can express their loyalty, with the delay, but also uphold some semblance of the Rule of Law.

There are no fine points to “settle” here. These justices are not the best legal minds in the country. Those minds have already spoken. Trump’s immunity claim should be thrown out of the courts it got in, refused to be considered by courts which can do that, and Trump’s lawyers admonished, if not sanctioned, for wasting the courts’ time and abusing their patience with clearly ridiculous claims.

But all that Mafia Don wants is a delay, not approval. His plan is to delay, delay, and delay, until he is elected and he can then have his minions pull those cases against him back.

And, of course, one thing he has in abundance is gall. He will claim that the delays he is responsible for will have pushed his trials too close to the election and will declare them as election interference, so they should be delayed until he is out of office.

The GOP Version of “Right to Life”

In Florida, you know “The State Where Woke Went to Die,” the real GOP Right to Life is being made more and more clear every day.

To bolster their ideology they made sure to acquire a state Surgeon General who hues to their ideology. Recently said General apparently forgot to tell school children parents to get them immunized against measles. But he did tell them it was their decision whether to send them to school unvaccinated and in the midst of a resurgence of measles.

Apparently, according to the GOP ideology, vaccinations are a liberal plot to groom Florida’s children to vote Democrat when they grow up.

And making Florida’s children vulnerable to a potentially lethal disease and then giving the parents the right to hold their children out of the nasty public schools where diseases run rampant, is also part of their war on public, that is government, schools.

So, all babies, viable or not must be carried to term, and then  as far as the GOP is concerned they are on their own. All of the affordable health care, school nutrition programs, medical protections, stuff, etc. is just too expensive.

Someone might want to point out to the GOP how inexpensive children who were aborted are. Maybe then they might support abortion.

Can you spell “hidden agendas,” boys and girls . . . poorly hidden agendas in this case?

Is Free Will An Illusion?: One Argument

Last night I ran across a cogent argument that free will was illusory. This argument was written by Jonathan Pearce in a chapter in “Christianity in the Light of Science” edited by John W. Loftus. I hope to show you how this argument doesn’t hold water.

Pearce begins with a definition of free will that he will use as there is no universally agreed upon definition:

Free will is the real, rational, and conscious ability to do otherwise in any given scenario, all things remaining equal.

I like this definition, even though I would amend it as I will explain below.

His argument is centered on an example. In his example, a woman encounters a beggar and gives him $5. Then he runs time in reverse to see if she could have done anything differently and then how and why.

He begins his argument by listing causal circumstances that could affect her decision. Here is a partial list for any given person:
a) Being born.
b) Their genetic inheritance.
c) Their life in the womb, shaping their genetic self.
d) Their time and place of birth.
e) Their parents, relatives, race, and gender; their nurture and experiences in infancy and childhood.
f) The mutations in their brain and body throughout life, and other purely random events.
g) Their natural physical stature, looks, smile, and voice; their intelligence; their sexual drive and proclivities; their personality and wit; and their natural ability in sports, music, and dance.
h) Their religious training, economic circumstances, cultural influences, political and civil rights, and the prevailing customs of their times.
i) The blizzard of experiences throughout life, not chosen by them but that happened to them. All the molecules, particles, forces, and wave functions (i.e., the environment).

The list is partial because he includes “everything in the universe at that ‘snapshot’ (in time).” This I think is ludicrous as nothing going on in the galaxy next door or even the solar system next door could conceivable have anything to do with her decision to give or not give. Plus, in decision making only a very few variables can be considered (I will explain why).

But, whatever the causes of her initial decision if we do a rewind, the entire set of causal circumstances is exactly the same. What could possibly cause a different decision?

This is a coherent and logical conclusion. Now I will show you why it is wrong.

Conscious v. Unconscious Decision Making My quibble with his original definition is the inclusion of the word “conscious.” Most decisions are not made consciously, they are made unconsciously. (Note I will use the terms unconscious and subconscious interchangeably because for the sake of this argument there is no important difference.) There is a reason for this. We have discovered that we can train ourselves to have truly prodigious memories. But if we try to keep more than one or two things in mind simultaneously we find we cannot. So, we cannot include a list of variable causes like the one above . . . consciously. Apparently we can juggle many, many variables simultaneously subconsciously, however.

Consider how you might decide which new car to buy if you did the entire process consciously. You would need paper or electronic record keeping because it cannot be done in mind per the above. You would need to list all of the important attributes this car needed to have: made by a reputable automaker, model has good reviews, gets good gas mileage, has air-conditioning, has lower insurance rates, and on and on. Then you would need to create a systems that allowed you to credit each make and model you consider on each of these aspects. Maybe one has comfy seats (needed because you make long trips) but doesn’t have air conditioning; the other has the air conditioning but doesn’t have comfy seats. So, you create a points system by which you can rate each candidate for your car buying dollars.

You reduce the candidates down to two and they have similar point scores, but one is better than the other,  so . . . you buy the other because the color is really striking and it is good enough.

You see humans are fickle, humans are inconsistent. We can approach the exact same set of conditions and decide differently upon a whim. We may look at both rated as having good gas mileage but one is 26 mpg and the other 24 mpg. If we are looking for a reason to decide one way or the other we decide that 26 is really special, or meh-2 mpg doesn’t matter, no matter what the points system said. In other words, we fudge the data.

The list above is clearly something a philosopher might come up with, leaving out all of the pragmatic issues. But humans aren’t theoretical, they are more mundane. So, if the woman above decides to open her wallet for the beggar, she might do so and find she doesn’t have $5 in cash, only $1 and doesn’t want to insult the person with such a paltry gift, so she passes on the whole thing. Cash availability trumped her “determined decision.” What happened to all of the high falutin’ causal conditions listed above?

Or maybe she opens her wallet and surveys all of the cash she has and she starts to think “If I give this person $5 I know I am going to feel guilty not giving the next person $5, too and I could easily empty my wallet and not have enough money to pay for the purchases I came out to make, so she passes again.

Or she could empty her wallet because she knows there is an ATM nearby she could use to refill it. Or she could borrow $5 from her friend accompanying her on this shopping trip until she could get to an ATM, or . . . do you see my point? We don’t make decisions based upon the status of the universe at any particular point, we make decisions by choosing the parameters by which we will make decisions and those parameters are always a short list, often the choice is from what pops into our heads at the moment.

Consistent Decision-Making It is clear that most decisions we make only have flitting echoes in our conscious minds, while our subconscious minds are processing tons of information. Back when stereo systems were in vogue, I used to collect brochures, accumulate data, and dream of the ideal system I would one day assemble. Did I set up a point system? No. Did I even list all of the criteria my optimal system must meet? No. So, what was the primary causal trigger for the actual acquisition? It was that a really “cool” system was on sale for a really good price.

And because the vast majority of our decision data crunching occurs subconsciously we are not aware of what data are getting crunched, but also important how they are getting crunched. The argument above assumes that our decision making processes are consistent. Feed the same data in with the same initial conditions and you will get the same answer. Sounds like a computer to me. Are humans at all close to that behavior? Human beings are never consistent, we always chase wild hares, we always are impulsive, otherwise why do supermarkets load up their checkout lines with more stuff to buy, which they refer to as “impulse buying”? They are counting on us to buy things that were not on our shopping lists when we went to their store!

I remember a joke told by Richard Pryor about an encounter he had with a fellow prisoner who was in jail for murder. He asked the guy “Why’d you kill those people?” and the answer was “Well they was home.” That actually got a laugh (RP made appropriate faces and the follow-up line was “Thank God for prisons.”). We respond to such things because we know that the decision-making powers of human beings is far from being consistent or even very understandable.

Conclusion So, the argument that free will is an illusion is valid but based upon flawed premises. It is based upon conscious free will and we make most of our decisions subconsciously. And because those decisions are unconscious we have no idea what the data or processes are in making those conclusions. So, humans are not consistent and not deciding most things consciously, so the argument reduces to “conscious free will is an illusion” which I am comfortable with. It has no bearing at all on whether or not we ever have free will to decide things.

My personal opinion is that sometimes our decisions are caused directly by external events, a form of determinism and sometimes they are not. A good example of determinism was the now outlawed “subliminal advertising” I referred to in a recent post. The example I could remember was theaters flashing the words “Drink Coke” on the movie screen at a theater, but so quickly as to not be noticed by patrons. And Coke sales soared. In another instance, a less than noticeable amount of scent was wafted through a store (I can’t remember which, so I will use the example of the scent of fresh strawberries) and the sales of the things with that scent soared.

So, examples of determined decision making are in evidence. But so, I suggest are examples of free will being exercised.

The example I use is a decision between your two favorite ice creams at Baskin-Robbins (or one of its ilk). You really love both Butter Brickle and Chocolate Mint Chip and when your turn to be served comes up you can’t decide (we even have a term for this “on the horns of a dilemma”). Committed determinists will say whatever you decide that there was a determining cause, one that was just a shade more powerful that the other. But they are just guessing and this is more like religious thinking than scientific thinking. To believe that is to believe that our decision making powers, conscious ones at that, can detect fine shades of difference between causes. Proof of that I will need to see.

And, of course, as I taught my students, there is a proverb that says “when faced with just two choices, always take the third.” The example I was told (that has stuck with me all of these years) was of a penurious old lady shopping for groceries who asks the greengrocer “How much are the eggplants?” And he answers: “Two for 99 cents.” The lady continues “How much for just one?” The answer: “50 cents.” The lady continues: “I’ll have the other one.”

So, in the ice cream shop: “I’ll have a scoop of each in a cup please.”

When we struggle with decisions we often invent new options on the spot. (See, inconsistent!)

If Your Grip is Slipping . . .

Christian nationalists are trying to drag ordinary Christians into their mire. When people like me attack Christian nationalists, those folk say that it is an attack upon Christianity and scream “Rally around the Cross, boys!” which it is not. They are attacks upon a movement to force people to adopt a religion not of their choosing, which separates them from Muslim extremists not at all.

Ex-President Trump spoke to the National Religious Broadcasters convention recently and promised the audience filled with Christian nationalists that if he returns to the White House, they’ll have political power “at a level that you’ve never used it before.”

So, the Christian nationalists want the power to make this a Christian nation, which would make all other religions unwelcome, and there are politicians who will suck up to them to acquire the voting power to get into a position to do such things. This is hardly surprising (see Jefferson on the topic below).

Clearly Christian power mongers are losing their grip. Church attendance is declining. Those saying they adhere to no particular religion are increasing, now to a level of almost 30% of people polled. Rather than roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of proselytizing, they would rather curry favor among the powerful elites and get them to do the hard work for them.

Can you spell corruption, boys and girls?

“. . . in every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the Despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them.”– Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 17 March 1814

Misreading Schrödinger’s Cat

You probably have heard of Schrödinger’s Cat, the object of a thought experiment. If you haven’t, here is quick summary. In Schrödinger’s original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal radiation monitor (like a Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat.

So, is the cat alive or dead? According to quantum mechanics (which Schrödinger knew didn’t apply to cats) the two “states,” i.e. the cat is alive and the cat is dead are equally probably and so constitute a state of superposition. The wave function describing the two states are equivalent. When the box is opened, the wave function “collapses” and the actual state of the cat is discovered.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

Is Schrödinger’s cat neither alive nor dead until the box is opened? There is a New Yorker cartoon where a veterinary nurse is breaking the news to a pet owner: “About your cat, Mr. Schrödinger: I have good news and bad news.” (See below.)

This thought experiment was offered as both a joke and a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. But the real problem lies in interpreting what the wave functions are. If you think they are descriptions of real states, you are wrong. If you think they are predictions of real states, then you are on the right track. In the latter case, there is no confusion. Either the cat is alive or the cat is dead. The probabilities of each state are the same: 50%. When the box is opened, one of the probabilities shifts from 50% to 100% and the other from 50% to 0%. This process happens myriad times per second in Las Vegas casinos.

Those who believe it is conscious observation that collapses the wave functions, are just thinking way too much of their own powers.

Think about it: the cat is either dead or alive. (We are going with the flow here, realistically, the poison would take some time to act, so there is the possibility of opening the box and finding the cat dying.) The prediction, however was based upon the initial conditions and is unchanged, even though the reality has coalesced around one of the two states, so the predictions only collapse when the box is opened. Note that the collapses are not necessarily caused by the opening of the box, aka the observation. Although this is common among interactions of subatomic particles.

There is no inherent reason that quantum mechanics be interpretable. But we have interpreted all other scientific findings, so finding one that is either very bloody difficult or impossible to interpret is shocking. Possibly the lack of a coherent interpretation of quantum mechanics says more about our reasoning capabilities than it does about nature. This also might explain why so many cockamamie ideas abound in this area. (Yes, I am talking about you, Deepak Chopra.)

“I Voted for Trump Because It Was So Much Better When He was President . . .

. . . compared to the last three years,” said a voter in the South Carolina primary election. The reporter was polite and didn’t ask him “What planet are you from, sir?”

Apparently this guy didn’t notice his neighbors, friends, and family dying in the thousands, or the economy going to mush because of the pandemic. Apparently he didn’t notice Trump’s GOP friends dumped the strategic supply of N95 masks as being unnecessary and “to save money.”

And he kept his promise to replace Obamacare with a much better system . . , oh, wait (Trump “accidentally poured billions of extra dollars subsidizing American’s coverage). Uh, he kept his promise to build a wall along the entire Mexican border . . .oh, wait. Trump kept his promise to pass a sweeping school choice policy . . . oh, wait.

Trump followed through on his administration’s anti marijuana stance by  standing to the side as 18 states liberalized their marijuana laws from 2016 to 2020, including staunchly conservative states like Mississippi and South Dakota.

Trump also made sure that for-profit private colleges who defraud their students don’t have to pay all the money they took illegally back.

Trump made sure that the Takers weren’t cut any slack by cutting back on food stamps, kicking 755,000 Americans access to food aid under the SNAP program.

While the rest of the world was cracking down on methane emissions (from natural gas wells, transport of LNG, etc.), the Trump administration rolled back environmental regulations to make it easier to leak the potent greenhouse gas with no penalties.

Trump banned the government from using Chinese-made drones . . . wow! He kept us safe!

On the plus side, Trump audited the Defense Depart, which as expected failed the audit.

Trump slashed taxes on mostly rich corporations and rich individuals, and the much smaller tax cuts on non-rich people expire after ten years, the others get to keep theirs.

Trump stifled communications on climate change. Maybe we should call this the Head in the Sand Policy, and his Agriculture Department transferred many of the climate scientists to Kansas City, resulting in many leaving the department, thus reducing the number of climate scientists and leaving the department short-handed.

Trump confused auto makers who had asked for some regulatory relief on emissions by completely scrambling the regulatory scheme, making it much less effective. So instead of having to achieve a 5% increase in fuel efficiency per year, it is now 1.5%.

Trump actually helped in the anti-monopoly area. Whether Google or Facebook will ever say anything besides “we are working on it” remains to be seen.

Trump cracked down on legal immigration, even on the high-skilled workers he said he wanted.

Trump’s EPA essentially blew up a bipartisan deal to more strictly regulate toxic chemicals that Americans are exposed to daily and instead tapped a group of chemicals industry experts to run and advise the program. Trump officials muzzled scientists and civil servants at the agency and crafted narrow approaches to assessing chemicals’ dangers that have massive loopholes. Do you feel safer? Why?

Ever the socialist (at least when it comes to government support for the oligarchs, in this case Big Ag), Donald J. Trump’s USDA steered billions in subsidies to farmers suffering from tariffs imposed by foreign countries as a consequence of the president’s trade wars, an amount that far outpaced the massive auto bailout in 2008.

Trump rolled back rules on banks designed to prevent another financial crisis. Trump doing favors for banks that did his favors for so many years? Makes sense to me.

Trump rolled back rules on racially segregated housing, keeping those darkies in their place.

In 2016, the EPA’s scientists concluded that the agency should ban chlorpyrifos after finding unsafe levels of the chemical on apples, peaches, oranges, strawberries, and other fruits. Dow Chemical, one of the largest producers of products using this chemical, gave $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration committee and leads a presidential advisory committee on manufacturing. Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rejected the findings of the agency’s scientists, denied a petition to ban the chemical, and delayed further action until 2022. Ah, more toxic chemicals on our food, better, right?

Economically, during the Trump administration  the federal budget deficit increased by almost 50%, to nearly $1 trillion (~$1.13 trillion in 2022) in 2019. Under Trump, the U.S. national debt increased by 39%, reaching $27.75 trillion by the end of his term; the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio also hit a post-World War II high.

Trump rolled back a rule on mortgage insurance premiums that would have saved home buyers about $500. Of course, Trump told us we would all be rich if we elected him, rich bigly.

Trump rolled back protections for drinking water in coal country (remember the sludge ponds overflowing into natural waterways?). And those coal country people still vote Republican, curious. (See statistics on coal-related jobs below.)

And if you are wondering why there are so many more mass shootings now, Trump Signed a law that weakens the firearms background check system and undermines enforcement of the current law that prohibits certain individuals with a serious mental illness from gun possession. Oh, and he made sure more fugitives from the law were allowed to buy guns.

Here is a final summary by factcheck.org of Trump’s administration:

The statistics for the entirety of Donald Trump’s time in office are nearly all compiled. As we did for his predecessor four years ago, we present a final look at the numbers.
• The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%.
• Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.7% after inflation.
• After-tax corporate profits went up, and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.
• The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.
• The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.
• The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.
• Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.
• Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.
• Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%. Carbon emissions from energy consumption dropped 11.5%.
• Handgun production rose 12.5% last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.
• The murder rate last year rose to the highest level since 1997.
• Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appellate court seats and a quarter of District Court seats.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which parts are “better” and which “worse.”

Actions Have Consequences, Part XYZ

And it is rare that the pin-heads in the GOP consider any repercussions before acting, which results in some bizarre steps politically. The latest raping of reason is the Alabama Supreme Court declaring that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children.” Obsious, despite the fact that all children are born and thus “extrauterine,” this decision has consequences, vast consequences. So, how can we take advantage of that?

Since Trump and the rest of his GOP gangsters indicate they would like to take that definition nationwide, here is how to benefit.

Once that ruling is in effect, a couple should harvest ova and sperm and make as many fertilized embryos as possible and put them in the freezer. Declare each one as a dependent child on their taxes next time around. Repeat this process until hundreds of dependent children are under liquid nitrogen and you will never pay a cent of income taxes again. The cost of the medical part will be easily paid for by the many thousands saved on your taxes. Kaching! This is like being admitted into the morbidly rich class, you know the ones who don’t pay taxes now.

“The idea that embryos the size of pinheads that need subzero temperatures to survive are human beings is religious fanaticism grounded in magic, not science.” (John DeVore on Medium)

PS Maybe it is a consequence of their Christian faith—it makes them Stupid Crazy for Jesus™ or maybe just plain stupid.

Another Crisis I Don’t Get

I saw this morning yet another article on the “crisis” of disappearing languages. There seem to be about 7000 languages in use around the world at this point and many are sliding into disuse and into history.

I don’t see how this is a “crisis,” no more than the fact that artifacts from the past are no longer made, like buggy whips and push mowers for your lawn and remember men’s hats and the universal wrist watch? You can still find these things but it is much harder to find them and they are way more expensive due to their markets being so small.

In the Bible it holds that we all used to speak one language but God confounded us with many languages because we got too uppity. So, the Bible says . . . (look, I played the Bible Card!).

Languages are an important element of culture, and in warfare, conquerors often tried to eliminate languages to subdue the conquered (Hello, Normans!), but this is not some enforced language obliteration, this is death by natural causes.

If languages dying at a fairly fast pace is a crisis, what about the cultures that are being ground into dust by modernity? Should we not be bemoaning the demise of various cultures, too?

It seems that much of the demise of languages has natural causes. Imagine a culture which still had a hieroglyphic written language trying to use a computer. Do, you think Chinese computer trolls are using keyboards suitable for the Chinese language?

It seems that the homogenization of cultures and languages is based upon a desire to communicate, through words, through songs, through visual images with global audiences. Comedians now tour foreign countries, as do rock stars (Taylor Swift in Japan!).

All languages are man-made. All languages have strengths and weakness. No one language is perfect for all modes of communication, but two people can communicate far, far better when they share a language that when they do not. Europeans are often proud that they can communicate in multiple languages (I was served in Switzerland by a young lady who was fluent in both British English and American English!) but what if all that mental effort learning multiple languages was put into making politics or medicine better?

I understand old people bemoaning the demise of their language but it seems that the language dying is just a manifestation of the people using it dying.

I believe the operative proverb is “use it or lose it.”